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The camp, set in the middle of the fields that might otherwise have raised a good crop of beans, was as big as a fair-sized city. The stink of its night soil came sharp on the breeze. “A lot of shit there that’s not going into the fields for fertilizer as it should,” Hsia Shou-Tao said. He thought like a peasant, too.
“True,” Nieh said, his voice abstracted. As casually as he could, he peered across the fields toward the perimeter of the camp: razor wire, with sentry posts and little forts all around. Liberating it would be suicidally expensive, however grand to contemplate.
Down the road, swiftly drawing nearer, came a rising cloud of dust. Its speed meant motor vehicles were kicking it up, and motor vehicles, in these days, meant little scaly devils. Nieh did not break his stride. His submachine gun was hidden in the blanket roll he carried slung over one shoulder. He could get at it in a hurry if he had to, but hoped the occasion would not arise. Motor vehicles were usually armored against weapons like his.
Hsia walked along as nonchalantly as he did. They stepped off the road into the field beside it when the vehicle-a troop carrier-sped past. Had they not moved, Nieh thought, the driver would have run them down: what were peasants to an imperialist aggressor, especially one of alien race?
“What we ought to have,” Hsia said thoughtfully, “is more land mines. The little devils would lose some of their arrogance if they had to worry about blowing up as they barreled down the road.”
“We have people manufacturing some of them,” Nieh answered. “If we want to get them fast and in quantity, though, we’d do best to dicker with the Japanese. They don’t have many vehicles of their own left in this part of China, so they shouldn’t mind trading us some mines. I wonder what we’d have to give in exchange. Food, probably. They’re always hungry.”
“As if we aren’t.” But Hsia nodded. After a few seconds, he nodded again, for a different reason: “You’re right, Comrade-thisis a complicated war.”
Heinrich Jager felt like a soccer ball, with the continent of Europe his pitch. Since the war started in 1939, he’d been to just about every corner of it: Poland, France, the Soviet Union, France again, back to Germany, Croatia, France one more time… and now Germany again.
He turned to Kurt Diebner, who stood beside him on the walls of Schloss Hohentubingen. “Professor, I tell you again that I am not needed for this recovery operation. I would be of far more use to theVaterland leading panzer troops against the Lizards.”
Diebner shook his head. “It has to be you, Colonel,” the physicist said, running a hand through his greasy, dark brown hair. “We need someone with a military background to supervise those engaged in recovering the material from the failed pile down in Hechingen, and you also have the required security clearances. We prefer you to anyone from theSchutzstaffel, and the SS itself has no objection to your employment. So you see-” He beamed at Jager through thick, black-rimmed spectacles and spread his hands, as if he’d just proved some abstruse piece of math relating to quantum mechanics.
The explanation made sense to Jager, which did not mean he liked it. He wondered how he’d got a good character from the SS: Otto Skorzeny’s doing, most likely. Skorzeny no doubt thought he was doing him a favor. Jager supposed itwas a favor, but having Himmler’s approval, however useful it might be, was also slightly chilling.
Jager also noted the bloodless language Diebner used: the “failed pile” twenty kilometers south in Hechingen had poisoned a good stretch of the local landscape, and would have poisoned Tubingen, too, had the wind been blowing out of the south rather than from the north and west after the accident. Soldiers talked the same way; they spoke of “maintaining fire discipline” when they meant not shooting until the enemy was right on top of you.
A Geiger counter sat on the wall between Jager and Diebner. It rattled away, a good deal more quickly than it would have had everything gone right in Hechingen. Diebner insisted the level of radiation they were getting wasn’t dangerous. Jager hoped he knew what he was talking about. Of course, nobody had thought the pile would go berserk before it did, either.
Diebner glanced down at the Geiger counter. “It’s good enough,” he said. Maybe he needed to reassure himself every so often, too.
“Good enough for us, yes,” Jager said. “What about the poor devils who’re getting that stuff out of there?” Getting pulled away from the front line was one reason he hated the assignment here. Having to deal with the men who went into Hechingen to recover uranium from the pile was another.
Kurt Diebner shrugged. “They are condemned by the state,” he said, as if he were Pilate washing his hands. “If this did not happen to them, something else would.”
Nothing like this,Jager started to say, but the words did not cross his lips. Some of the men who went into the underground chamber with shovels and lead boxes wore pink triangles on their striped uniforms; others wore six-pointed yellow stars. In theReich, anything was liable to happen to Jews and homosexuals.
“You have of course told them the sickness from which they are suffering is only temporary, and that they will make a full recovery,” Diebner said.
“Yes, I’ve told them?the first group, and then the ones who replaced them when they got too sick to work.” No one had argued with Jager when he spoke what he knew to be a lie. The thin, weary men just stared back at him. They didn’t believe a word he said. He didn’t blame them.
Diebner shifted uncomfortably. Like Jager, he was a fairly decent man in a nation whose regime did horrible things as a matter of course. If you weren’t directly involved in them, you could pretend they weren’t there. Even if you were directly involved, pretending not to see was one way of preserving in your own mind your sense of personal decency. Very fewWehrmacht officers admitted to knowing what the SS had done to Jews in Poland and Russia; Jager hadn’t admitted it to himself until a Russian Jew rubbed his nose in it.
Diebner said, “If we do not recover the nuclear material, Colonel Jager, we are all the more likely to lose the war against the Lizards, at which point all ethical arguments become irrelevant. Whatever we must do to get it back, we have to have it.”
Jager turned his back and walked several paces along the parapet. Arguments from military necessity were hard to refute, and losing the war against the Lizards would be disastrous not just for Germany but for mankind as a whole. And yet-Jager took the physicist by the arm. “When you say these things, Professor, you should know firsthand whereof you speak. Come along with me.”
Diebner was not a small man, nor a weak one. He hung back, protesting, “This is not my concern; it is why we had you brought here. My business is with the nuclear pile itself.”
Though a couple of centimeters shorter than the nuclear physicist, Jager was wider through the shoulders and better trained at wrestling. Not only that, his will burned hotter. He frog-marched the reluctant Diebner off the wall and down into the bowels of Schloss Hohentubingen.
The castle’s cellar was a different world from the light and fresh air of the wall. It was dank and gl
oomy; somewhere out of sight, water dripped continuously. A startled bat dropped from the roof and flew chittering between Jager and Diebner. The physicist jumped back with a startled oath. Jager wasn’t dragging him along any more, but he followed nonetheless; officers learned ways to get themselves obeyed.
In happier times, the cellar had contained a monster wine cask that held 300,000 liters of Burgundy. The cask was gone now, probably chopped into firewood. In its place were the miserable cots of the prisoners who got the uranium out of the pile at Hechingen.
“Faugh!” Diebner said, a noise of disgust.
Jager wrinkled his nose, too; the cellar stank, not least because the only sanitary arrangements were some buckets off in a corner. Not everything went into the buckets, either. Jager said, “One of the symptoms many of these people seem to have is diarrhea.”
“Yes, I knew of this in principle,” Diebner said in a small voice that suggested he was much more used to dealing with abstract principles than this reeking reality.
“Ah.” Jager clicked his heels in exquisite irony. “Are you also aware-in principle, of course-of the other symptoms this work brings with it?’
“Which ones do you mean?” the physicist asked. “The burns from actually handling the metal, the loss of hair, the bleeding gums and nausea? I am familiar with these, yes, and also with the cancer that is likely to result some years from now as a result of this exposure. I know these things, Colonel.”
“You know of them,” Jager said coldly. “Here-see what they do to real people who are not just abstracted principles.”
A man with a pink triangle on the front of his striped shirt was spooning cabbage soup into the mouth of a Jew who lay on a straw pallet, too sick to get up. When the Jew retched and coughed up the soup, the homosexual held his head so he would not foul himself too badly, then got a rag and put it on the patch of vomit. Then he started trying to feed the Jew again.
“It doesn’t have to be like this,” Jager insisted. “Maybe we do have to use condemned people, as you call them, for this work, but we don’t have to make their lot worse by treating them like beasts of burden.”
