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

on one, sir?” the
Oberscharführer
asked. “That’d teach the enemy a thing or three.”
    “I don’t think we can sneak one from America to here,” Heydrich said. Klein gave back a glum nod. Heydrich continued, “If we can find out where our own scientists were working and how far they got…”
    “Don’t you know?” Klein seemed astonished that Heydrich wouldn’t.
    But Heydrich had to shake his head. “No. I never found out much about the project—it was highly secret. And, of course, it came to nothing, so I thought it wasn’t important. It seems I was wrong.”
    Hans Klein had been through a lot with Heydrich. It took a lot, then, to surprise him. But his eyebrows leaped toward his hairline now. “Meaning no disrespect, sir, but I don’t think I ever heard you say that before.”
    “No, eh?” Heydrich smiled a thin smile: the only kind apt to fit on his long, lean face. “Well, maybe it’s because I don’t make mistakes very often. And maybe it’s because, when I do make one, I don’t talk about it afterwards—and neither does anybody else.”
    “Er—yes, sir,” Klein said hastily. Anyone in the
Reich
who talked about Heydrich’s mistakes—with the sole exception of Heinrich Himmler—would have counted himself lucky if he only ended up in a camp.
    “Now…” Heydrich pulled his attention back to the business at hand. “What can we do about this? Dammit, I really don’t know much about uranium or radioactivity. Can we get our hands on someone who does?”
    “Beats me, sir,” Klein said. “If you don’t know much about this business, well, me, I know less than nothing. But I do wonder about something.”
    “What’s that?” Heydrich snapped. Facing the blue glare of his attention was like standing up against a pair of lit Bunsen burners.
    Gulping, Klein said, “If we piss the Americans off enough, will they use one of these hellish things on us? One bomb, one city gone.” He shuddered.
    “Donnerwetter,”
Heydrich said softly. “The whole country is hostage to them.” His fingers drummed on the desktop. “This place is safe against any ordinary bombs, even the big British ones. But what would happen if one of those things blew up right on top of us?”
    “Beats me,” Klein said. “How would we go about finding out?” He glanced up uneasily at the ceiling—and at the many, many meters of rock above the ceiling. He’d never worried about ordinary bombs, either. But how could you help worrying about these atom bombs, especially when you didn’t know exactly what they could do?
    Dryly, Heydrich answered, “Well, I don’t want to make the experiment. Maybe we’d live even if they did it—we’re a devil of a long way underground. But if they dropped one of those things on us, that would mean they knew where we were. And the only way they could do that would be to squeeze it out of somebody who already knows.”
    “What will we do when they start capturing our people?” Klein asked. “They will, you know, if they haven’t by now. Things go wrong.”
    Heydrich’s fingers drummed some more. He didn’t worry about the laborers who’d expanded this redoubt—they’d all gone straight to camps after they did their work. But captured fighters were indeed another story. He sighed. “Things go wrong.
Ja.
If they didn’t, Stalin would be lurking somewhere in the Pripet Marshes, trying to keep his partisans fighting against us. We would’ve worked Churchill to death in a coal mine.” He barked laughter. “The British did some of that for us, when they threw the bastard out of office last month. And we’d be getting ready to fight the Amis on their side of the Atlantic. But…things went wrong.”
    “Yes, sir.” After a moment, Klein ventured, “Uh, sir—you didn’t answer my question.”
    “Oh. Prisoners.” Heydrich had to remind himself what his aide was talking about. “I don’t know what we can do, Klein, except make sure our people all have cyanide