Norman Spinrad

At length, Feric began to notice that fewer and fewer Warriors were coming at him with each minute mat passed. A half-dozen giants ripped aside the bodies of their comrades shrieking wordlessly; these Feric felled with almost foolish ease. Three more fell a few moments later. Then long moments passed during which nothing whatever happened. Feric was alone inside a great crater whose walls were the broken and bloody corpses of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of the enemy.

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With hefty strokes of the Steel Commander, Feric smashed a path through the dike of dead Warriors and drove his motorcycle through the gap.

As far as he could see, the earth was piled high with dead bodies; most of them Zind Warriors, but not a few gallant Helder heroes who had given their last full measure of devotion to the Swastika. Moving throughout this massive midden were tens of thousands of Helder motorcyclists polishing off the wounded Warriors with their submachine guns.

From several hundred yards off, Ludolf Best came roaring toward Peric on his motorcycle, gesticulating wildly and shouting with joy at the sight of his Supreme Commander, alive and triumphant. As Best sped toward Feric shouting and waving, he drew the attention of hundreds of Helder soldiers to Feric's person; these in turn began to cheer wildly and wave their truncheons in the air or fire their guns with sheer exuberance. In moments, the entire battlefield was aware both of the survival of their Supreme Commander and of his approximate location.

Over a hundred thousand triumphant Helder heroes shot their blood-caked truncheons skyward in the Party salute and roared "Hail Jaggar!" with a ferocity and fervor that thoroughly put to shame anything that Feric had thus far experienced.

As Feric leaned against the side of a tank beside Ludolf Best during a brief respite in the fighting, the Dominator strategy seemed all too clear. For two days now, the Doms had sent suicide waves of the new breed of Warriors against the Helder positions; each succeeding wave had been thoroughly annihilated, but at great cost to the Helder army in terms of life, ammunition, and especially petrol.

"They have no hope of matching us in mobility or firepower," he muttered. "Yet still they persist in the same tactic."

"I don't see why they don't try a flanking maneuver, my Commander," Best said. "Obviously, their goal must be to get around us and stop Waffing's troops from reaching us with petrol and ammunition, now that the oil fields have fallen."

Feric smiled at this naTvete. "No, Best," he said, "even the Doms know that the superior speed of our armor and our air power could cut off any serious flanking attempt 214

before it got properly under way. My guess is that they hope to overwhelm us before Waffing's forces arrive."

"What fools they must be to think that they can overrun the Helder army!" Best exclaimed.

Feric nodded agreement; there was no point in troubling the lad with the true situation. The Dominators had a limitless supply of twisted protoplasm at their command.

After two days of terrible carnage, the Helder losses were heavy indeed. Twenty thousand motorcycle troops and forty thousand infantry had made the supreme sacrifice.

Casualities among the fanatic heroes of the SS were particularly heavy, an irreplaceable loss to the gene pool which Feric deeply regretted. But the worst of it was that the unforseen magnitude and ferocity of the fighting had used up vast quantities of ammunition and had virtually exhausted the petrol supply. Another attack or two and the entire Helder army would be reduced to fighting with truncheons alone. Waffing had better arrive soon!

Still, the morale of the Helder army had never for an instant wavered. The higher the casualties, the greater the ferocity with which the true humans pounded the Warriors to pieces. After two days, it could still be said that not a Zind monstrosity had succeeded in fighting its way to the Helder trenches, nor had one of the creatures survived its suicidal assault on the Helder positions. Moreover, Waffing's troops were only hours away with vast quantities of ammunition and a limitless supply of petrol. The situation, after all, was hardly hopeless!

Best, Feric suddenly noted, had been studying his face with some concern during these musings. "Is something wrong, my Commander?"

"No, Best, nothing is wrong! Let's inspect the troops!"

As he drove his motorcycle up atop a small hummock after accepting the fervent salutes of a weary but inspired battalion of motorcycle SS, Feric noticed some great commotion going on in the body of the Zind horde a mile to the north. Best pulled up beside him and the two men stared across the desolation of no-man's land at the vast sea of naked mutated flesh which seemed to suddenly have been galvanized into frenetic mass motion, like a gigantic swarm of army ants.

"The entire horde is on the march!" Feric exclaimed.

"It's an all-out-win-or-lose climactic attack on our positions!"

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