The guard nodded. “Yessss.” His voice could have been coming from a ghost.
For MacCready, it all seemed to make perfect sense. Vampire bat saliva contained chemicals that kept victims bleeding as the bats fed, and for hours afterward. Even normal-size vampire bats left behind particularly gory scenes, long after abandoning their unsuspecting prey. Big fucking vampire bats equals big fucking bleed-out, he reasoned. Thorne had been right. The Germans had either awakened the draculae or provoked them. And now, whatever Wolff’s mission was (and evidently, it was a doozy), it had become bogged down in some deep and serious bat guano. Apparently though, and this was the important thing: These guys have no idea what they’re dealing with, at least not yet.
Who killed my men? Wolff had asked again and again.
“Well, I’ll tell you a secret, Kaiser,” MacCready said, with as much nonchalance as he could muster. “I’ve seen them, too.”
“You’re lying!” Kessler shouted, kicking at the base of the bars. “You said yourself it was only native bullsh—”
“Yeah, I know what I said. But I have seen them.” MacCready’s voice was soothing now. “I’ve heard them, too.”
Before the corporal could respond, MacCready decided to reel him in. “I was wondering . . . by any chance did you hear them singing to each other? Singing to you?”
“Singing,” Kessler said, his voice a desperate whisper. He almost pressed his face against the bars, then thought better of bringing himself within bait-and-strike range of the prisoner, and stepped back.
“Well . . . I know what they are,” MacCready whispered back.
The corporal straightened up. “That’s imposs— How could you—?”
“I’m a zoologist,” MacCready said. “And what do you think zoologists do?”
Kessler said nothing, but he seemed to have added “offended” to the haunted expression he’d worn previously.
“I just thought that maybe your Colonel Wolff would be interested in knowing what these blut kinder really are,” MacCready said, gingerly lowering himself to the floor and turning his back to the wide-eyed corporal. “Maybe not, though. He does seem kinda busy.”
MacCready closed his eyes and waited. Moments later he heard the outer door slam shut.
He says he knows what these creatures are, sir. He says he’s seen them.”
Colonel Wolff shook his head. “Yes, Corporal Kessler. And did he also tell you how you might end the war and return home a hero?”
“Sir?”
“This American considers himself rather clever. But he is no different from anyone else. He knows he is going to die soon, and to buy himself some time, he will tell you anything you want to hear.”
“But he knows things, sir. Things he could not—”
“That will be all, Corporal,” Wolff said, with a dismissive wave of his own. “Please go to your bunk.”
At the far side of Nostromo Base stood the chemical preparations shed. Voorhees had moved his operations there for the night, during what Wolff promised would now become forty-eight- and even seventy-two-hour shifts.
Voorhees knew that, having made Wolff’s scheisse list, Schr?dinger should have snapped him in two by now, if not for the fact that S?nger’s Silverbirds needed at least one more stage of thrust beyond the sleds. Thus the old man was able to buy Voorhees at least a brief respite against death, by convincing Wolff that the young engineer was still necessary.
“You must have been mad to tell him about nuclear rockets going to other planets,” S?nger had said, neglecting to mention that he had been the one who first mentioned it to the colonel. That, and a fear that Voorhees might be losing his focus on this mission. “Heisenberg’s atom bomb program has failed and with that failure we have rockets but no payload. How much faith do you think our colonel has that Kimura’s pathogens will prove to be an effective weapon? Personally, I have doubts. And then there you go, just like von Braun and the other dreamer, Heisenberg, talking about voyages to worlds other than our own.
“Madness!” S?nger cried, throwing his hands up in the air as he walked away. “How can I save you from your own madness?”
How, indeed, could anything be saved, anywhere, at this stage in the war? Voorhees knew that each Silverbird was an increasingly perfected marvel of scientific achievement, its full potential nearly indistinguishable from magic. And what is the very first thing we human creatures think to do with it? Voorhees thought. We figure out new ways of blowing ourselves up! S?nger himself had begun calling his Silverbirds “antipodal bombers.”