Final impact

“What the hell is that?” the lieutenant demanded.

Muller coughed up a thick blood clot.

“That is the end of the world,” he said, rolling on top of the flexipad with the last of his energy and triggering the explosive weave vest he routinely wore under whatever disguise his mission required.

Everyone within thirty meters was atomized by the blast.

“What the hell was that?” Oberg asked as the rumble shook the crystalware on their table at Maxim’s.

Brasch had no idea, but he instantly assumed something had gone wrong with Muller. There was no reason to think so, really. Bombs were constantly going off in Paris. The Resistance had been tutored by instructors familiar with insurgencies from the far future that had paralyzed much more formidable opponents than the Nazis. It might be a truck bomb twenty-five kilometers away, or a suitcase bomb in a cafй or bistro favored by the Germans. It might even be one of the Existentialists, seeking vengeance for the murder of Sartre and de Beauvoir by blowing himself up in a brothel favored by the occupying forces. Everybody feared being caught up in one of their mad attacks. It was said that the last thing you ever heard was the crazed existentialist screaming “To do is to be!” before he triggered his suicide device.

Brasch stood up and pushed aside the drapes that covered the window nearest their table. He had to press his face right up to the glass, but in doing so he could make out the telltale signs of a detonation a few blocks away.

His stomach turned over.

“An existentialist,” he sighed, not believing it for a second.

Something had gone wrong. He could sense it down in his core.

“Madmen,” Oberg hissed. “Cowards, all of them. If only there were some way to stop them. To detect them before they set themselves off,” he complained.

“As I understand it, no foolproof solution was ever found in the future,” Brasch commented. “When a man is willing to die to harm his enemies, there is always a good chance of taking some of them with him.”

“Pah!” spat the SS commandant. “When will these bastards accept that they are beaten? You know the most frustrating thing about this, Brasch. It’s that we cannot identify the bombers postmortem. Believe me, if that were possible we’d thin out the ranks of their recruits. Execute every last one of their friends and relatives. Then they mightn’t be so enthusiastic about blowing themselves up.”

Brasch returned to his seat, itching with the desire to take out his flexipad and see whether his data burst had come through. He pushed at an unfinished plate of boeuf bourguignon with his heavy gilded fork. “A lot of money is going into DNA research.” He shrugged. “Eventually it will help, and then we will have the ability to trace back to the culprits and take the appropriate measures.”

“Yes, yes, so I have heard!” Oberg said approvingly. He had returned to his own meal without missing a beat. “It is a very exciting field, this genetic science. I understand you have been instrumental in pushing it forward.”

Brasch smiled abashedly. “It’s not really my field. I am a combat engineer. But any good German could see the importance of investing in such a thing. For starters, it will mean there is no hiding for the Jews. And the weaklings-the infirm, the cripples, and the mentally defective-will be detected before they have a chance to be born. Although I do not understand the science, I understand the opportunities for the Reich-”

“As do we all!” Oberg interrupted. “For me, personally, it is one of the most exciting developments to come from the Emergence.”

“Reichsfuhrer Himmler shares your enthusiasm,” Brasch remarked, suppressing the death head grin that wanted to crawl over his face.

He had championed the cause of genetic research because it was an exact fit with the worst of the Nazis’ paranoid fantasies, and because it was the perfect sinkhole into which he could pour billions of Reichsmarks. Every pfennig spent on a wild goose chase-like the search for a homosexual gene-was money lost to the development of lighter body armor or improved jet turbines. Brasch had never received any explicit instructions from Muller’s controllers to sabotage the Nazi war effort in this way but, quietly, it was the work of which he most proud.

“There are, of course, those chattering fools who do not see the historic importance of such research,” he continued. “Admittedly, atomics are a more pressing concern at the moment, but even that research cannot be allowed to detract from our advances in the genetic realm.”

Oberg nodded sagely, like the fat, bigoted fruit seller he was, trying to prove himself the intellectual equal of his esteemed dinner guest. “Yes, yes, I understand,” he replied. “I’ve even heard that the atomic bomb itself will cause terrible damage to the breeding line of anyone who is exposed to it.”