Immediately, he called Willem for a mass spectrometer and a technician to run it.
We were all very tired but elated at this new direction. We decided to take a few days off. Elsa, Helmut, and I went for a trip into the mountains.
Birkenau opened in March of 1942. Weber and I stopped work on the subjects, except to keep an incubating strain alive, and took the month to pack up the laboratory for the move. In May, we moved the equipment, materials, and tote Männer to Birkenau. Once the planning for the move was complete, Weber supervised the staff and aides Willem had supplied. Elsa and Helmut traveled down to Krakow by train and took up residence in the apartment I had leased for them. As for myself, I left Buchenwald and returned to Berlin for meetings with representatives of Daimler-Benz and I. G. Farben. The delivery mechanism for the tote Männer still had to be devised.
The mood in Berlin that spring was jubilant. The army was driving towards Rostov and trying for Stalingrad. Sevastopol was about to fall to Germany. The use of the tote Männer could only be necessary as a last resort. A doomsday scenario. The Reich would never need it.
Personally, I felt the same. Still, I had no wish to help in cancelling the project unless I could find better work. So I met with the Daimler-Benz mechanical engineers and utilized the I. G. Farben labs. I had brought with me a pair of tote Männer for testing purposes.
Not being a mechanical engineer, the problem of deployment was more difficult than I had initially imagined. Tote Männer were a curious mixture of toughness and fragility. You could shoot a toter Mann until he was merely chopped meat and he might continue to advance. Blowing apart his brain would kill the worms and stop him. But the tote Männer were so resilient and resistant to anoxia that they could still advance with their hearts shattered and their sluggish black blood pooled beneath their feet.
However, their flesh was soft enough and loosely enough attached to their bones that heavy acceleration, such as dropping them with parachutes, would cause them to come apart. Clearly, they had to be preserved long enough to reach their target.
The Daimler-Benz engineers were the best. On a chalk board, they drew up several ways of conveying them to enemy lines. The simplest idea was a cushioned cage dropped with a parachute. An impact charge would blow the doors off the cage and the tote Männer would be free. The engineers didn’t like the idea. They said it lacked elegance and style.
I pointed out the tote Männer could tolerate significant time without ambient oxygen, operating as they did largely on a lactic acid metabolism. They tossed the cage idea with abandon and attacked the problem again, coming up with a sphere containing carefully restrained tote Männer. A compressed-air charge would open the doors and break loose the restraints. This had the advantage of being quiet.
I only donated a little knowledge here and there as needed, letting their minds fly unfettered. It is a grand thing to watch engineers create works of imagination with only the germ of a requirement, a bit of chalk, and some board to write on. When they found I had brought a couple of tote Männer for experiments, they were overjoyed. I tried to explain the danger but they did not listen until one of their own number, Hans Braun, was bitten. He and his friends laughed but stilled when I came over. Wearing surgical gloves and a mask I carefully examined the wound but I already knew what I would find.
“You are an idiot,” I said as I sat back.
“It is a small bite-”
“It is a fatal wound.” I gave him a pack of cigarettes. “You have been killed by that thing out there.”
“But-”
“Shut up.” I couldn’t look at him: tall, healthy, brown hair and a face in the habit of smiling. “You have been infected. By tomorrow, you will feel wonderful. You will want to kiss and fondle your friends out of love for them. Then, after a few days, you will-still enormously happy-feel an overpowering urge to sleep. Sleep will turn to coma. Then, after three days, you will be one of those things out there.”
His hands trembled. “I didn’t realize-”
“No.”
Hans steadied himself. “There is no hope?”
“None.”
He nodded and for a moment he stood straighter. Stronger. I was proud of him.
“Do you have a gun?”
“I do. Is there a furnace where we can dispose of the body?”
He nodded, shakily. “Will you accompany me?”
“I would be honored.” And I was.
After the funeral, realizing the power and speed of the tote Männer and the infection they harbored, the Daimler-Benz engineers were more careful.
In a couple of weeks, my part was done and I took the train to Krakow to have a long weekend reunion with my Elsa and Helmut. The following Monday, I drove to Birkenau to address the problem of tote Männer production.
Elsa had mixed feelings about the rental. While she liked the apartment itself and the proximity of Park Jordana, she found the leftover debris and detritus disturbing. These were obviously Jewish artifacts and Elsa’s excitement might have come from a mixture of womanly wariness of another female’s territory combined with an aversion to having anything Jewish in the house. I assured her that the original owners would not be returning and she relaxed somewhat.
Helmut had no reservations about his new environment. Finding small objects of indeterminate origin covered with unfamiliar characters fastened in unexpected places gave mystery to the place. No doubt he observed I was more inclined to answer questions about this or that artifact than I was about the American bombers or air raid drills or what Father did at work. I protected my family as best I could from such things.
For the next several months we were collecting the breath and sweat of subjects into vials, injecting the vial contents into the mass spectrometer, and determining what was there. Then we concentrated the effluvia and tried it on the tote Männer themselves. Immediately, we found that the tote Männer were not attracted to merely any object smeared with the test substances, only when those attractants were applied to a possible host. Weber thought this quite exciting. It suggested that the tote Männer had a means of detecting a host other than smell.
In October of 1942, we hit on a combination of aldehydes and ketones the tote Männer found especially attractive. I synthesized it in the growing chemistry laboratory we had been using and applied it to a collection of test subjects. Control subjects who had no application of the test attractant were also present in the experiment and were ignored until the test subjects had been thoroughly mauled. At that point, the controls were attacked. We made careful note of this as it would strongly influence how troops would recover an infected area after the enemy succumbed.
We had proved our attractant in the laboratory by the end of October of 1942. But the war appeared to us to be going so well, our little military experiment would never be needed. We would win the Battle of Stalingrad in a month and concentrate on the western front.
That changed in November.
The Battle of Stalingrad evolved into what I had feared: a siege over a Russian winter. The Red Army began their counter-offensive along with the winter. Like Napoleon, the German army was stuck.
The Germans lost ground in other places. Willem suggested if I could hurry up the program, I should.
We were in part saved by problems encountered by the Daimler-Benz engineering team. Developing a deployment methodology had been proved harder than the engineers had foreseen. They had broken the problem into three parts. The first, and most easily solved, was how to restrain and cushion the tote Männer until they could be released. The remaining two issues revolved around deploying on an advance and deploying on a retreat. In both cases, they resolved into two kinds of scenarios: how to deploy the first time and how to deploy after the first time. If secrecy was kept (and Willem assured us the enemy did not know what we were working on), then the first deployment would be relatively easy. Deploying on a retreat could be as simple as leaving sealed containers transported by trucks to the target zone to be opened pyrotechnically by remote control. Similar containers, with additional cushioning, could be released by parachute.