Lasers and satellites… they could be just part of it. There might be a silver bullet… a sprig of mistletoe, still.
Chains rattled to his right. He heard a voice cursing in Portuguese and footsteps dragging the latest prisoner off.
Chris looked up at the sky, and a thought suddenly occurred to him, as if out of nowhere.
Legends begin in strange ways, he realized.
Someday—even if there was no silver bullet—the horror would have to ebb at last, when humans grew scarce, perhaps, and the Aesir were less plump and well-fed on the death manna they supped from charnel houses.
Then there would come a time when human heroes would count for something again. Perhaps in secret laboratories, or in exile on the Moon, or at the bottom of the sea, free men and women would work and toil to build the armor, the weapons, maybe the heroes themselves…
This time the scream was choked, as if the Brazillian ranger was trying to defy his enemies, and only broke to show his agony at the last.
Footsteps approached. To his amazement, Chris felt feather-light, as if gravity were barely enough to keep him on the ground.
“So long, O’Leary,” he said, distantly.
“Yeah, man. Stay cool.”
Chris nodded. He offered the black and silver-clad SS his wrists as they unchained him, and said to them softly, in a friendly tone of voice, “You know, you look pretty silly for grown men.”
They blinked at him in surprise. Chris smiled and stepped between them, leading the way toward the altar and the waiting Aesir.
Someday men will challenge these monsters, he thought, knowing that the numb, lightheaded feeling meant that he would not scream… that nothing they could do would make him take more than casual notice.
Loki had made certain of this. This was why the Trickster had spent so much time with Chris, this last year… why he had insisted that Chris come along on this mission.
Our day will come. Revenge will drive our descendants. Science will armor them. But those heroes will need one more thing, he realized. Heroes need inspiration. They need legends.
On their way toward the humming Aesir, they passed before a row of human “dignitaries” from the Reich, a few with faces glazed in excitement, but others sitting numbly, as if lost. He felt he could almost read the despair in those darkened, mad eyes. They were aware that something they had wrought had gone long, long, out of their control.
Thor frowned as Chris flashed him a smile. “Hi, how’ya doin’?” he said to the Aesir, interrupting their rumbling music in a mutter of surprise. Where curses and screams had only resonated with the chant, his good-natured sarcasm broke up the ritual.
“Move, swine!” An SS guard pushed Chris, or tried to, but stumbled instead on empty air where the American had been. Chris ducked underneath the jangling, cumbersome uniform, between the nazi’s legs, and swatted the fellow’s behind with the flat of his hand, sending him sprawling.
The other guard reached for him, but crumpled openmouthed as Chris bent his fingers back and snapped them. The third guard he lifted by the belt buckle and tossed into the bonfire, to bellow in sudden horror and pain.
Hysterical strength, of course, Chris realized, knowing what Loki had done to him. Four onrushing underpriests went down with snapped necks. No human could do these things without being used up, Chris knew, distantly, but what did it matter? This was far more fun than he had expected to be
A golden flash out of the corner of his eye warned him… Chris whirled and ducked, catching Odin’s spear with one sudden snatch.
“Coward,” he whispered at the hot-faced “father of the gods.” He flipped the heavy, gleaming weapon about and held it in two hands before him.
God, help me…
With a cry he broke the legendary spear over his knee. The pieces fell to the sand.
Nobody moved, Even Thor’s whirling hammer slowed and then dropped. In the sudden silence, Chris was distantly aware of the fact that his femur was shattered—along with most of the bones in his hands—leaving him perched precariously on one leg.
But Chris’s only regret was that he could not emulate an aged Jew he had heard of, from one of the concentration camp survivors. Standing in front of the grave he had been forced to dig for himself, the old man had not begged, or tried to reason with the SS, or slumped in despair. Instead, the prisoner had turned away from his murderers, dropped his pants, and said aloud in Yiddish as he bent over, “Kish mir im toches…”
“Kiss my ass,” Chris told Thor as more guards finally ran up and grabbed his arms. As they dragged him to the altar, he kept his gaze on the red-bearded “god”. The priests tied him down, but Chris met the Aesir’s gray eyes.
“I don’t believe in you,” he said.
Thor blinked, and the giant suddenly turned
Chris laughed out loud then, knowing that nothing in the world would suppress this story. It would spread. There would be no stopping it.
Loki, you bastard. You used me, and I suppose I should thank you.
But rest assured, Loki, someday we’ll get you, too.
He laughed again as he watched the dismayed High Priest fumble with the knife, and found it terrifically funny. A wide-eyed assistant jiggled and dropped his swastika banner. Chris roared.
Behind him, he heard O’Leary’s high pitched giggle. Then, another of the prisoners barked, and another. It was unstoppable.
Across the chilly Baltic, an uncertain wind blew. And overhead, a recent star sailed swiftly where the old ones merely drifted across the sky.
AUTHOR’S NOTES
The parallel-world story is another mainstay of SF. It explores the old question: “What would have happened if…?”
If a fly buzzing above a bowl of soup had dipped too low, getting caught, disgusting a Roman centurion, who took his wrath out on an underling, sending him out on an extra patrol, which detected Hannibal’s army in the Alps early enough to catch it far from Rome… You see the point.
Sometimes we like to frighten ourselves. The most frequent “what if” seems to deal with alternate realities in which the Nazis won World War II. Something about that loathsome possibility just invites a horror story.
Trouble is, I never could believe it.
Mind you, Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle is a classic, a great work. But its premise—that an early assassination of Franklin Roosevelt would have led to an inevitable Axis victory —is hard to swallow.
They were just such schmucks!
I mean, it’s hard to think of any way a single altered event would have let the Nazis win their war. They would have needed an entire chain of flukes even to have a chance. In fact, it took quite a few lucky breaks for them to last as long as they did, and to have the time to commit such atrocities.
I said as much to Gregory Benford when he invited me to write a piece for his upcoming anthology of parallel world stories, Hitler Victorious. Greg’s reply? A dare.
“I’ll bet you could think of some premise that’d work, David.”
“How unlikely can it be?”
“It can be preposterous, as long as it sings.”
Greg was my collaborator on a far larger large novel. I trusted him. But once the story was started, it took off in directions I never expected. I don’t know if the story “sings,” but it does tie together several curious things about the Nazi cult.