But once the secret was out and the Allies were looking for tote Männer delivery devices, we would need a means to overcome their resistance. This had stalled the Daimler-Benz engineers. I saw presentations of stealth night drops, blitzkrieg raids with tanks carrying large transport carts-one enterprising young man demonstrated a quarter-scale model trebuchet that could catapult a scale model container holding six tote Männer as much as three kilometers behind enemy lines. Not to be outdone, his work partner showed how bracing a toter Mann could enable it to be fired from a cannon like a circus performer.
These issues so dwarfed our own minor problems that we were given, for the moment, no close scrutiny and I had the opportunity to address shortcomings in our own production.
In February 1943, Russia won the Battle of Stalingrad. Willem warned us that we would have to expect to send tote Männer against Russian troops before long. I argued against it. It would be foolish to waste surprise in an attack that could not work. At least, it would not work until summer.
I went home and spent a week with Elsa and Helmut. Each morning I sat down and drew up production schedules, scrapped them, smoked cigarettes, and tried again. In the afternoon, I played with my son. It was cold in Krakow and with the war not going very well, heating fuel was hard to come by. I was able to requisition what we needed due to my position but even I couldn’t get coal for the theater or the restaurants. Often, we spent intimate evenings together with just ourselves for company. I didn’t mind. Elsa and Helmut were company enough.
All that spring Willem told us of defeat after defeat-I don’t think we were supposed to know what he told us. I think we served as people in whom he could confide as his world crumbled. Germany retreated in Africa. The Warsaw Uprising. The Russian advance.
I buried myself in my work. I resolved that if there were to be a failure in the program, it would not be where I had control. Production was, in my opinion, our weak point. Weber’s approach to creating tote Männer was haphazard and labor intensive. I wanted something more robust and reliable. Something more industrial.
I came to the conclusion that our production schedule had to revolve around the progression of the disease. For three days there was a strong euphoria. Often, the new hosts tried to kiss anyone who came near them, presaging the biting activity of the fully infected toter Mann. Sometime on the third day, the host fell into a sleep that progressed rapidly into coma. Breathing decreased to almost nothing. The heartbeat reduced to a slow fraction of the uninfected. Body temperature dropped to nearly ambient though the infected were able to keep some warmth above room temperature.
The coma period lasted as long as five days, though we saw it end as soon as three. Arousal was sudden, so often precipitated by a nearby possible victim that I came to the conclusion that after three days, the toter Mann was ready to strike and merely waiting for the opportunity.
After that, a toter Mann was mobile for as much as ten weeks, though during the last weeks of infection the toter Mann showed significant deterioration.
Therefore, we required an incubation period of six days, minimum. Effectiveness could not be counted upon after eight weeks. This gave us a target window. If we wanted, for example, to deploy on June first we had to have infected our tote Männer no later than May twenty-fifth. This was the time domain of our military supply chain.
The first order of business was to synchronize the incubation period. I performed a series of experiments that showed that, as I suspected, once the coma period had been entered the toter Mann was ready to be used. However, there was unacceptable variation in the time between exposure and coma. We couldn’t reliably produce tote Männer in six days.
The new Chief Medical Officer, Mengele, delivered the necessary insight. Zyklon B was the answer. Though the standard Zyklon B dose would kill the subject quickly, a reduced dose weakened the subject sufficiently to allow infection almost instantly. Commander Hoess was able to supply me with enough experimental data that I could proceed with my own tests. We introduced the gas, waited for ten minutes, then sprayed the subjects with an infecting agent. The remaining three days were sufficient for subjects to recover from the gas just in time to provide healthy hosts for the organisms. This method had the added bonus that the same production chambers could serve two purposes.
By November, when the march up Italy by the Allies had begun and Germany seemed to be losing on all fronts, we could incubate as many as a thousand at a time, six days after exposure. The trains supplying the rest of the camp came in full and left empty so by using the empty trains for transport, we could send tote Männer anywhere in Germany or Poland. Delivery to the deployment launch point would have to be by truck. We were ready. Now, it was up to the Daimler-Benz engineers to deliver our tote Männer the last kilometer to the enemy.
Christmas 1943 was uneventful. Weber and I worked on various refinements to an already prepared system without damaging it too badly. My teachers back in Berlin had taught me the idea of schlimmbesserung: an improvement that makes things worse. At that point, the natural tendency of idle minds and hands to improve a working system into uselessness was our only real enemy.
Given that, we resolutely turned our attention away from the weapons system we had devised to a different problem we had discussed a year before: Why deliver tote Männer at all? The worm and virus were perfectly able to create tote Männer for us. Why did we have to supply the raw material?
Delivering a disease substance was perilously close to delivering a poison gas-something forbidden us from the previous war. However, we had already made some excursions into the territory with the production and delivery of tote Männer attractant-a colloid I had developed that would evaporate into the proper aldehyde and ketone mix the tote Männer found so irresistible. We had also attempted to deliver an infecting gas along with the Zyklon B but the attempt had failed. The worm succumbed to the Zyklon B before the subjects.
Creating an inhalant that carried both the worm and virus proved to be an interesting problem. The virus was stable when dry and the worm could be induced to encyst itself. However, it took time for the worm to de-cyst and by the time it did, the subject was fully infected with an undirected virus. Rabid humans made a poor host.
We went back to the colloid I devised for the attractant. Colloids are neither liquid nor solid but partake of the traits of both. Gelatin is a colloid. By adding nutrients to the colloid so that the worm could stay alive and not encyst, the virus could be delivered along with the worm when both were at their most infective stage. It was interesting work for a couple of months. Weber was quite elated with it. He called it the Todesluft.
In May of 1944, Willem paid us another visit. This time, he took both Weber and myself aside and spoke to us privately.
“It is clear the Allies are preparing a counter-invasion. The likely location is somewhere across from England on the coast of France.” He held the cigarette to his lips thoughtfully.