Science fiction; Time travel -- Fiction; War stories; World War, 1939-1945 -- Fiction
The transmission was weak and the voice faded out, but it went on,
counting up with unholy glee the victories and the massacres. All over
Earth, people were digging up the guns that had laid buried for a
hundred years, and when those were lacking, seizing scythes and axes,
sticks and stones, and going out to meet the fleeing Germans. The
German military retaliated by unloading its whole arsenal of atomic
and other weapons against the rebelling peoples. But the world was mad
with blood and liberty. What if for every German ten of their ex-slaves
died? Soon there would be no more Germans....
Other radio stations began to be heard, babbling in strange tongues
that had not been spoken over the air for a century, but all reciting
the same burden of hate and holocaust, glorying in the tales of carnage
that they called to each other across the Earth.
Marshaled by leaders who rose to power on the wings of a shout, or
with no leaders at all, the hordes poured even across the borders of
the Reich, into the doomed area. Such German radio stations as were
still operating showed by their frantic and contradictory efforts to
direct the evacuation the hopeless panic and confusion that had fallen
on the _Herrenvolk_ in its last hour. Perhaps they had once been a
people of blood and iron, but if so they were that no longer after a
century of security and peaceful prosperity behind their impregnable
bulwarks; and the refugees, fleeing those defenses now, were like fat
tame rabbits escaping a burning hutch and falling victim, terrified and
uncomprehending, to the claws and fangs and primeval savagery of the
wild. Germany had sowed the wind for a hundred years, and the storm
that had arisen would not soon abate....
From time to time during the vigil in the space ship, Kane turned
thin-lipped from the broadcasts to attempt contact with a secret
transmitter in the New York area. Finally, thirty hours after the dust
had started on its way, he got through and talked with an underground
leader he knew.
"It's out of our hands," the man on Earth reported tersely. "At first
we made some headway in organizing the revolt. We're still trying to
influence the mobs in the direction of elementary caution, but it's
thankless work and even dangerous. The people are following demagogues
sprung from nowhere, following whatever voice promises the most
killing. I think they're even fighting each other in some places...."
"Anarchy," said Kane numbly. "A new Dark Age--"
"What else did you expect?" demanded Vzryvov scornfully. "Surely not
that people enslaved so long would promptly proceed to set up orderly
self-government as soon as they were free? The Dark Ages have been
everywhere, except in Germany, for the last century; you don't imagine
that because Germany falls, the rest of the world will become civilized
again?"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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