After that, a toter Mann was mobile for as much as ten weeks, though during the last weeks of infection the toter Mann showed significant deterioration.
Therefore, we required an incubation period of six days, minimum. Effectiveness could not be counted upon after eight weeks. This gave us a target window. If we wanted, for example, to deploy on June first we had to have infected our tote M?nner no later than May twenty-fifth. This was the time domain of our military supply chain.
The first order of business was to synchronize the incubation period. I performed a series of experiments that showed that, as I suspected, once the coma period had been entered the toter Mann was ready to be used. However, there was unacceptable variation in the time between exposure and coma. We couldn’t reliably produce tote M?nner in six days.
The new Chief Medical Officer, Mengele, delivered the necessary insight. Zyklon B was the answer. Though the standard Zyklon B dose would kill the subject quickly, a reduced dose weakened the subject sufficiently to allow infection almost instantly. Commander Hoess was able to supply me with enough experimental data that I could proceed with my own tests. We introduced the gas, waited for ten minutes, then sprayed the subjects with an infecting agent. The remaining three days were sufficient for subjects to recover from the gas just in time to provide healthy hosts for the organisms. This method had the added bonus that the same production chambers could serve two purposes.
By November, when the march up Italy by the Allies had begun and Germany seemed to be losing on all fronts, we could incubate as many as a thousand at a time, six days after exposure. The trains supplying the rest of the camp came in full and left empty so by using the empty trains for transport, we could send tote M?nner anywhere in Germany or Poland. Delivery to the deployment launch point would have to be by truck. We were ready. Now, it was up to the Daimler-Benz engineers to deliver our tote M?nner the last kilometer to the enemy.
Christmas 1943 was uneventful. Weber and I worked on various refinements to an already prepared system without damaging it too badly. My teachers back in Berlin had taught me the idea of schlimmbesserung: an improvement that makes things worse. At that point, the natural tendency of idle minds and hands to improve a working system into uselessness was our only real enemy.
Given that, we resolutely turned our attention away from the weapons system we had devised to a different problem we had discussed a year before: Why deliver tote M?nner at all? The worm and virus were perfectly able to create tote M?nner for us. Why did we have to supply the raw material?
Delivering a disease substance was perilously close to delivering a poison gas—something forbidden us from the previous war. However, we had already made some excursions into the territory with the production and delivery of tote M?nner attractant—a colloid I had developed that would evaporate into the proper aldehyde and ketone mix the tote M?nner found so irresistible. We had also attempted to deliver an infecting gas along with the Zyklon B but the attempt had failed. The worm succumbed to the Zyklon B before the subjects.
Creating an inhalant that carried both the worm and virus proved to be an interesting problem. The virus was stable when dry and the worm could be induced to encyst itself. However, it took time for the worm to de-cyst and by the time it did, the subject was fully infected with an undirected virus. Rabid humans made a poor host.
We went back to the colloid I devised for the attractant. Colloids are neither liquid nor solid but partake of the traits of both. Gelatin is a colloid. By adding nutrients to the colloid so that the worm could stay alive and not encyst, the virus could be delivered along with the worm when both were at their most infective stage. It was interesting work for a couple of months. Weber was quite elated with it. He called it the Todesluft.
In May of 1944, Willem paid us another visit. This time, he took both Weber and myself aside and spoke to us privately.
“It is clear the Allies are preparing a counter-invasion. The likely location is somewhere across from England on the coast of France.” He held the cigarette to his lips thoughtfully.
“We’re ready,” I said boldly. “We’ve been ready for months. What do the Daimler-Benz engineers say?”
Willem breathed out smoke. “They have made several methods available to us. Since this is to be the first deployment, we have chosen the retreat scenario. We will place the tote M?nner in a bunker in the path of the Allies and detonate it when they come.”
“Are we expecting to be overrun?”
Willem shook his head. “Of course not. The tote M?nner are a backup plan only. We will deploy them behind our own lines and only release them if we are forced past them. If the front line holds, we will not release them at all.”
I nodded. “How many?”
“We estimate six thousand.”