Free The Man with the Iron Heart by Harry Turtledove Page A

meant, but he didn’t nod. He had to fight not to wince, in fact. British and French officers were amazed—and politely dismayed—at how many of their allies from across the Atlantic read comic books. Right this second, Lou understood how they felt.
    The major who hadn’t wanted to believe in atom bombs said, “We ought to bring some of those mothers over here. If the Jerries want to keep blowing themselves up, we can drop one on Munich and one on Frankfurt and one on this fucking place, too. That’d teach ’em not to screw around with us, by God!”
    He got even more nods than the guy who’d talked about
Superman.
“Uh, sir,” Lou said, “how do we make sure our own people are out of places like this before we blast ’em? Sounds like one of these things takes out about a mile’s worth a ground, maybe more, when it goes off.”
    “Hell, we’d do it. That kind of stuff is just details.” The major was in artillery, which meant he’d never needed to worry about “that kind of stuff.” Everything always looked easy to somebody who didn’t have to do it.
    “How many short rounds did your batteries fire?” somebody asked, not quite quietly enough.
    “Who said that, goddammit?” The major turned the color of molten bronze. He jumped to his feet. “Who said that? Whoever it is can step outside, if he isn’t too yellow.”
    “Oh, sit down, Major. Button your lip while you’re at it,” a gray-haired chicken colonel said. “I got a Purple Heart and a week in the hospital from a short round. That kind of thing happens more often than anybody wishes it did.”
    Instead of sitting, the major stormed out of the mess hall. Somebody snickered as he got to the door. That only made his back stiffer and his ears redder.
    Lou drained his coffee before he stood up. He couldn’t imagine the Japs staying in the war much longer, not after a right to the chin like this. Maybe the Nazis had bailed out at just the right time. If the USA had had an atom bomb while the fighting was still going on, it sure would have dropped one on Munich or Berlin.
    Now…This wasn’t a war any more, not officially. What it was was a running sore. Would we blow a city off the map because guerrillas bombed a barracks? Lou shook his head. It’d be like burning down a house with a flamethrower to kill a wasp.
    But if you didn’t kill the wasp, it would keep buzzing around. And it would keep stinging. So how were you supposed to get rid of it? There was a good question. So far, nobody’d found anything resembling a good answer.
             

    W HEN H ANS K LEIN FIRST HEARD REPORTS ABOUT THE A MERICAN atom bomb, he said two things. The first was
“Quatsch”
—rubbish. The second was
“Unmöglich”
—impossible.
    That also pretty much summed up Reinhard Heydrich’s reaction. He’d had much better connections than Klein’s. He knew German physicists had tried to make a uranium bomb. He also knew they hadn’t come close to succeeding. If German scientists couldn’t do it, odds were nobody else could, either.
    Odds were only odds, though. Sometimes snake eyes would come up four times in a row with honest dice. Not often, but sometimes. So maybe the Americans really had come up with something new. Maybe.
    Three days after they claimed to have destroyed Hiroshima, they claimed to have destroyed Nagasaki. And, less than a week after that, the Japanese Empire surrendered unconditionally. Well, not quite: the Japanese wanted to retain the Emperor. But close enough. Heydrich was astonished, to say nothing of appalled. He’d counted on the little yellow men to bloody the Americans who landed on their beaches to take their islands away from them. That would help make the occupiers sick of holding Germany down.
    Would have made. Now the German resistance would have to go it alone. Reluctantly, Klein said, “I guess the American pigdogs really do have these fancy bombs.”
    “I’d say so,” Heydrich agreed.
    “Can we get
our
hands