and eagle's eye whom you can see in the picture there) was simultaneously and treacherously invaded by the misguided French, the sub-human Slavs, and the perfidious British. The attack, for which the shocked Germans coined the name blitzkrieg, was timed to coincide with an internal eruption of sabotage, well-poisoning, and assassination by the Zigeunerjuden, or Jewpsies, of whom little is now known; there seem to be none left.
By Nature's ineluctable law, the Germans had necessarily to be tested to the utmost so that they might fully respond. Therefore Germany was overrun from East and West, and Holy Berlin itself was taken; but Goebbels and his court withdrew like Barbarossa into the mountain fastnesses to await their day. It came unexpectedly soon. The deluded Americans launched a million-man amphibious attack on the homeland of the Japanese in 1945. The Japanese resisted with almost Teutonic courage. Not one American in twenty reached shore alive, and not one in a hundred got a mile inland. Particularly lethal were the women and children, who lay in camouflaged pits hugging artillery shells and aircraft bombs, which they detonated when enough invaders drew near to make it worthwhile.
The second invasion attempt, a month later, was made up of second-line troops scraped up from everywhere, including occupation duty in Germany.
'Literally,' Piqueron said, 'the Japanese did not know how to surrender, so they did not. They could not conquer, but they could and did continue suicidal resistance, consuming manpower of the allies and their own womanpower and childpower—a shrewd bargain for the Japanese! The Russians refused to become involved in the Japanese war; they watched with apish delight while two future enemies, as they supposed, were engaged in mutual destruction.
'A third assault wave broke on Kyushu and gained the island at last.
What lay ahead? Only another assault on Honshu, the main island, home of the Emperor and the principal shrines. It was 1946; the volatile, child-like Americans were war-weary and mutinous; the best of them were gone by then. In desperation the Anglo-American leaders offered the Russians an economic sphere embracing the China coast and Japan as the price of participation.'
The Russians grinned and assented; they would take that—at least that.
They mounted a huge assault for the spring of 1947; they would take Korea and leap off from there for northern Honshu while the Anglo-American forces struck in the south. Surely this would provide at last a symbol before which the Japanese might without shame bow down and admit defeat!
And then, from the mountain fastnesses, came the radio voice:
'Germans! Your Leader calls upon you again!' Followed the Hundred Days of Glory during which the German Army reconstituted itself and expelled the occupation troops—by then, children without combat experience, and leavened by not-quite-disabled veterans. Followed the seizure of the airfields; the Luftwaffe in business again. Followed the drive, almost a dress parade, to the Channel Coast, gobbling up immense munition dumps awaiting shipment to the Pacific Theater, millions of warm uniforms, good boots, mountains of rations, piles of shells and explosives that lined the French roads for, scores of miles, thousands of two-and-a-half-ton trucks, and lakes of gasoline to fuel them. The shipyards of Europe, from Hamburg to Toulon, had been turning out, furiously, invasion barges for the Pacific. In April of 1947
they sailed against England in their thousands.
Halfway around the world, the British Navy was pounding Tokyo, Nagasaki, Kobe, Hiroshima, Nara. Three quarters of the way across Asia the Russian Army marched stolidly on; let the decadent British pickle their own fish; the glorious motherland at last was gaining her long-sought, long-denied, warm-water seacoast. The British, tired women without their men, children fatherless these eight years, old folks deathly weary, deathly worried about their sons, were brave but they were not insane. They accepted honorable peace terms; they capitulated.
With the Western front secure for the first time in history, the ancient Drive to the East was resumed; the immemorial struggle of Teuton against Slav went on.
His spectacles glittering with rapture, Dr. Piqueron said: 'We were worthy in those days of the Teutonic Knights who seized Prussia from the sub-men! On the ever-glorious Twenty-first of May, Moscow was ours!'
Moscow and the monolithic state machinery it controlled, and all the roads and rail lines and communication wires which led only to— and from—Moscow. Detroit-built tanks and trucks sped along those roads in the fine, bracing spring weather; the Red Army turned one hundred and eighty degrees at last and countermarched halfway across the Eurasian landmass, and at Kazan it broke exhausted against the Frederik Line.
Europe at last was One and German. Beyond Europe lay the dark and swarming masses of Asia, mysterious and repulsive folk whom it would be better to handle through the non-German, but chivalrous, Japanese.
The Japanese were reinforced with shipping from Birkenhead, artillery from the Putilov Works, jet fighters from Chateauroux, steel from the Ruhr, rice from the Po valley, herring from Norway, timber from Sweden, oil from Romania, laborers from India. The American forces were driven from Kyushu in the winter of 1948, and bloodily back across their chain of island steppingstones that followed.
Surrender they would not; it was a monstrous affront that shield-shaped North America dared to lie there between the German Atlantic and the Japanese Pacific threatening both. The affront was wiped out in 1955.
For one hundred and fifty years now the Germans and the Japanese had uneasily eyed each other across the banks of the Mississippi. Their orators were fond of referring to that river as a vast frontier unblemished by a single fortification. There was even some interpenetration; a Japanese colony fished out of Nova Scotia on the very rim of German America; a sulfur mine which was part of the Farben system lay in New Mexico, the very heart of Japanese America—
this was where Dr. Edward Royland found himself, being lectured to by Dr. Piqueron, Dr. Gaston Pierre Piqueron, true-blue German.
'Here, of course,' Dr. Piqueron said gloomily, 'we are so damned provincial. Little ceremony and less manners. Well, it would be too much to expect them to assign German Germans to this dreary outpost, so we French Germans must endure it somehow.'
'You're all French?' Royland asked, startled.
'French Germans,' Piqueron stiffly corrected him. 'Colonel Biederman happens to be a French German also; Major Kappel is—hrrmph—an Italian German.' He sniffed to show what he thought of that.
The Italian German entered at that point, not in time to shut off the question: 'And you all come from Europe?'
They looked at him in bafflement. 'My grandfather did,' Dr. Piqueron said. Royland remembered; so Roman legions used to guard their empire—Romans born and raised in Britain, or on the Danube, Romans who would never in their lives see Italy or Rome.
Major Kappel said affably: 'Well, this needn't concern us. I'm afraid, my dear fellow, that your little hoax has not succeeded.' He clapped Royland merrily on the back. 'I admit you've tricked us all nicely; now may we have the facts?'
Piqueron said, surprised: 'His story is false? The shoes? The missing geburtsnummer? And he appears to understand some chemistry!'
'Ah-h-h—but he said his specialty was physics, doctor! Suspicious in itself!'
'Quite so. A discrepancy. But the rest—?'
'As to his birth number, who knows? As to his shoes, who cares? I took some inconspicuous notes while he was entertaining us and have checked thoroughly. There was no Manhattan Engineering District.
There was no Dr. Oppenheimer, or Fermi, or Bohr. There is no theory of relativity, or equivalence of mass and energy. Uranium has one use only—coloring glass a pretty orange. There is such a thing as an isotope but it has nothing to do with chemistry; it is the name used in Race Science for a permissible variation within a subrace. And what have you to say to that, my dear fellow?'
Royland wondered first, such was the positiveness with which Major Kappel spoke, whether he had slipped into a universe of different physical properties and history entirely, one in which Julius Caesar discovered Peru and the oxygen molecule was lighter than the hydrogen atom. He managed to speak. 'How did you find all that out, major?'
'Oh, don't think I did a skimpy job,' Kappel smiled. 'I looked it all up in the big encyclopedia.'
Dr. Piqueron, chemist, nodded grave approval of the major's diligence and thorough grasp of the scientific method.
'You still don't want to tell us?' Major Kappel asked coaxingly.
'I can only stand by what I said.'
