Tell her husband the same thing, and he probably wouldn't get it, but Mrs. Wirth nodded immediately. When Joe was turning away from the front desk, he saw the kid crossing the other side of the lobby.

"Kurt, would you grab a couple of these bags for me?"

We got over it. We spent a few days at our winter house 40 miles away while Dad got the insurance and repair stuff taken care of, and the investigation went the usual path of least resistance. An accident is an accident, there was no question of gain in the case. And we went back, and had a good season. The new generator was a beauty and actually saved money.

My grandfather never went back to his workshop. When he died a couple of years later, some people came in and took away his equipment, and my parents just let the empty building rot. As was always the case in my family, when there was no need to talk about something, we didn't.

I've learned a lot about McCarthy since then, and it's hard to find anything in it that I like. I think he grew up at a time and in a place where he learned that if you didn't beat up the other guy, he'd beat up you, and he lived accordingly. I know what it's like to grow up feeling alone. When I heard a year or so later that McCarthy had died in a hospital, that he was an alcoholic and had struggled with all kinds of health issues, I thought it was a very sad end to an important life. Later, after I got to know more about him, I came to think that it was just a sad end to a life. He was not a likeable man, but I have to say that I kind of liked him at the time.

My father died of a heart attack a few years later. My mother had to sell Sommerwynd. For a long time nothing much happened out there, but there are a lot of very expensive summer homes on that lake now.

The frogs? The state killed them off, as an invasive species. At least, I think they killed them all off. I don't live there anymore. I'm in sales, in Madison. No wife, no kids, not sure how I ended up here. But I'm doing okay.

Still a long drive ahead. Joe decided to kill it now. He pulled into a place called The Valley Inn while the sun was still visible in the sky. A string of bungalows in the middle of nowhere, on the road to nowhere. Let's say nothing about the room, but that it had a television and got two snowy channels. He poured a couple of fingers of Jim Beam into a plastic cup, and lit a Pall Mall.

Might as well have done this in the first place.

Benediction.

By Tom Piccirilli.

The Gestapo headquarters at Prinz-Albrecht-Stra.s.se 8 looked like a cross between a foreboding Gothic castle and another foreboding Gothic castle. In a secret subterranean chamber Reichsfuhrer Heinrich Himmler thumbed through his grimmoires, searching for the proper spell. The United States had entered the war, the Fuhrer seemed not to understand the importance of that, and Himmler realized that it was up to him to secure the Third Reich's victory.

The Fuhrer was interested in the supernatural, gave it lip service, and encouraged his underlings to learn what they could about it-but he didn't really believe in it. At best, he admitted there might be something to it, and he funded research on it, but when push came to shove, he refused to trust in its power. And that left it to Himmler, who did believe, who knew it worked, to unlock the awesome force of the supernatural and harness its use for the Fatherland.

And he knew he was under the gun, because word had reached him that America's premier sorcerer had agreed to enter the fray against Germany. It galled him that the sorcerer was actually German by birth and now chose to battle against his homeland, but he knew how formidable the turncoat was.

Himmler thumbed through the texts, trying to find the single spell that would produce the results he required. When he thought he'd located it, he lit five black candles and placed them on the five points of a pentagram that he had drawn on the floor.

"Dark Messiah," he intoned, "I implore you to come to the aid of your most faithful servant. Give me the wherewithal to withstand this new enemy and its turncoat sorcerer, and I pledge that you shall be worshipped throughout the Third Reich for all eternity."

He then uttered three complex spells, spells that had never been combined before.

Finally, he reached into a cage that he kept next to the grimmoires, pulled out a newt, walked to the center of the pentagram, withdrew a knife, and slit the little amphibian's throat, placing the newt on the floor and watching its death throes.

When it expired, he uttered one more prayer, and concluded the obscene ritual with a cry of "Shemhamforash!"

And an ocean away, the Allies' greatest sorcerer climbed down the cellar stairs of his unimpressive frame house at 112 Mercer Street in Princeton, New Jersey. (Well, unimpressive but for the billboard in the empty lot next door, with an arrow pointing to his house and a huge photo of him accepting his n.o.bel Prize next to the statement in foot-high Tempo Bold letters that the World's Greatest Genius lived here.) As for the World's Greatest Genius himself, he never knew what the word groupie meant until the village of Princeton built the billboard. Now he had two sets of bodyguards, one to ward off n.a.z.i and j.a.panese a.s.sa.s.sins, and the other to protect him from wildly pa.s.sionate women. More than anyone else, he knew that his adopted country was up against not only the awesome might of Hitler's armies, but also the corrupt evil power that the Fuhrer's mightiest sorcerer, Heinrich Himmler, had at his command.

Albert Einstein was soon pouring over his holy books, preparing his spells to appeal to Tekno, a deity totally unknown to his German counterpart.

When he was ready, he closed the books, dipped his forefinger in the holy ink, and began chanting: "The square of the hypotenuse equals the sum of the squares of the other two sides," he intoned. "Pi, carried to five decimal figures, is 3.14159. A circle has 360 degrees."

After another five minutes of chanting the spells, and a supplication to the Mathematical Trinity of Pythagoras, Euclid, and Fermat, he pulled a slide rule out of his pocket, held it over the books, and sacrificed it, breaking it and letting the two halves fall to the floor.

Then he uttered one last quadratic equation, and concluded the ritual with a triumphant cry of "Q.E.D.!"

"Mein Gott, you're big!" exclaimed Himmler as he looked at the army Satan had supplied.

There were thirteen of them, each blond and blue-eyed, each armed with a magical scimitar (which is kind of like a curved light-sabre, but effective rather than pretty), each ten feet tall, each wearing naught but a leather kilt.

"Ow!" cried the nearest as his head b.u.mped against the ceiling, an action and a cry that was repeated twelve more times up and down the line.

"Duck your heads, dumbkopfs!" snapped Himmler.

"We bow to no one!" thundered one of them. "We'll raise the ceiling!"

So saying, he lifted his magical scimitar and punched a hole in the ceiling.

"You see?" he said with a smile. "There is nothing to it."

Well, he tried to say, "There is nothing to it," but somewhere between "There" and "is" a huge wooden desk fell through the hole and crashed onto his head. He collapsed beneath it, shoved it off to a side, and got groggily to his feet.

"Maybe I should have sacrificed two newts," muttered Himmler.

The other twelve golden-haired warriors decided to lower their heads.

"Excuse me, Boss ..." began one of them.

"That's Herr Boss," Himmler corrected him.

"Excuse me, Herr Boss. But why have you summoned us from the very depths of h.e.l.l?"

"Not that we mind it," added another quickly.

"Actually, it's much more pleasant here," said a third.

"A lot cooler as well," noted a fourth.

"You are here to defeat the American armed forces," said Himmler.

"What are they?" asked the first speaker, a contemptuous smile on his proud Aryan face. "Thirty or forty little men armed with rocks?"

"More like two million men, armed with the latest in aircraft, ships, cannons, automatic weapons, radar, and sonar."

"Against thirteen of us-and none of us even wearing any pants?" said one incredulously.

"You're Aryans!" bellowed Himmler. "Aryans triumph over everything!"

"Well, actually, my mother was half-Spanish," said one of them.

"And my Uncle Saul was Jewish."

"They always told me that George Washington Carver was a cousin."

"I will hear no more of this!" screamed Himmler. "You are Aryans, and you will follow my orders and march to victory, or I will return you to the fiery pits!"

"Where's Victory?" asked the last one in line. "I mean, if all we have to do is march there, I say we give it a try."

"Idiots!" said Himmler.

"Hey," said the last one, "we're not the ones who are sending thirteen men with skirts and pituitary conditions off to fight a mechanized army of two million."

"You are invulnerable!" insisted Himmler.

"Then how come my head hurt when the desk fell on it?" asked the first one.

"Wait a minute," said Himmler. He opened his grimmoire and thumbed through it. "Aha!" he said at last. "You are invulnerable to bullets, torpedoes, knives, swords, bombs, and certain social diseases that you're most likely to pick up in France, or perhaps North Hollywood, California. But I neglected to cast a spell to make you invulnerable either to stupidity or heavy objects falling on your heads. I will correct that oversight shortly."

"You'd better," sniffed the nearest one, rubbing the top of his head tenderly.

"I'll let you know the moment it's done," said Himmler. "What's your name?"

The huge supernatural Aryan looked blank. "I don't have one."

"Everyone has a name," insisted Himmler.

"Not me."

"Or me," said another.

"Me neither," said a third.

"You brought us here," said a fourth. "Probably you should be the one to name us."

"That seems reasonable," said Himmler. He walked up to the giant who was still rubbing his head. "You are Heinrich."

"Heinrich," repeated the Aryan. "Heinrich. Is there some reason for that?"

"It's my favorite name," answered Himmler. "It has a certain strength and n.o.bility and just a touch of je ne sais quoi to it."

"How about me?" asked the next giant in line.

"I will call you Heinrich," said Himmler.

"But you're calling him Heinrich," protested the giant.

"You think there's only one Heinrich in the world?" demanded Himmler. "There is enormous power and a certain gossamer gaiety to that name."

He went up and down the line, and when he was done he had a supernatural army composed of twelve Heinrichs and an Adolf (just in case he ever had to present one to the Fuhrer).

"Okay," said one of the Heinrichs. "We're here and we're named. Now what?"

"Now we wait to see what that scrawny little white-haired turncoat in America has planned for us, and then we meet his creatures in battle, cut out their hearts, tie them up with their own entrails, cut off their heads, spit down their necks, and-"

"Stop!" cried the nearest Heinrich, grabbing his stomach. "I'm going to be sick!"

Himmler sighed deeply. Maybe if he'd sacrificed an iguana....

"So what can your government do for you, Little Al?" said President Roosevelt, seated behind his desk in the Oval Office. "And make it snappy. I've got a war to fight."

"I am here to warn you of a dire threat to our troops," replied Einstein.

"What could be more dire than the German army?" said Roosevelt. "By the way, that's a h.e.l.l of goiter on your hip. You'd better have it looked at."

"Hips don't have goiters," answered Einstein, pulling a crystal ball out of his pocket and sitting it down on the desk in front of the President. "Take a look."

Roosevelt leaned forward and stared. "There's nothing there."

"The square root of one is one!" intoned Einstein. "Now look at it."

"My G.o.d, that's remarkable!" exclaimed Roosevelt.

"I thought you should see it," said Einstein.

"How does she twirl them in both directions at the same time?"

Einstein bent over the desk. "d.a.m.n!" he said. "I forgot to adjust the channel. Algebra kadabra!"

"What's this?" asked Roosevelt, frowning and staring into the crystal. "It looks like a men's basketball team."

"It's thirteen invulnerable Aryan supermen, called up from the deepest pits of h.e.l.l by none other than Heinrich Himmler," answered Einstein. "Defeating the German army will be a hard enough ch.o.r.e for General Eisenhower. We must destroy these super-Aryans before he has to face them."

"We?" said Roosevelt with a worried expression on his face. "You mean you and me?"

"No, sir," said Einstein. "We need you at the helm of State. What I've come for is Big El."

"Big El?"

"Your wife, Eleanor."

"She's yours, Little Al, and good luck to you," said Roosevelt with an unconcerned shrug. "Now to business: what do you need to defeat Himmler's horrendous horde from h.e.l.l?"

"I just told you."

"You did?"

"Big El," repeated Einstein.

"Oh," said Roosevelt. "I thought you meant ... never mind." He paused. "Are you quite sure she's what you need?"

"Absolutely," said Einstein. "She's spent the last few years fighting big business, and Southern bigots, and isolationists, and Republicans. She's in better fighting shape than any other American."

"But can she stand up to these super Aryans?" persisted Roosevelt.