"That's right—and it was only one of several."
Kane grinned wryly. "The books don't even whisper that Germany was ever invaded in that war. They must have been a lot closer to defeat than they've ever admitted since. But—" he shrugged, "they won in the end, so what's the difference?"
"How could they win?" scowled Dugan. "Hell, we had them on the run!"
Kane gave him a pitying look. "You must have left some time before the Germans suddenly rose from the ashes and struck back at us. They attacked us with a new weapon—a radioactive dust, by-product of several big piles—atomic power plants—they had secretly got going by 1949. The occupation forces were wiped out—along with a million or so of their own people. In no time Western Europe was overrun again. The whole of Soviet Russia seems to have collapsed about the same time." He looked down at his hands, clasped on the table in front of him; his voice went on with the dispassionate recital of the dead past. "There was an attempt to defend England that folded up when London was dusted off the map. I haven't been able to find much information on the war in Asia, but I think they had a long tough fight putting down guerrilla resistance in Siberia and later on in China.
"Then came the attack on America, and for that they used the dust in combination with another ace in the hole—their own atomic bombs. The first one was dropped right here, on New York. It flattened five or six square miles and killed about half a million people. The defenses that we'd devised against the dust—inadequate as they must have been, because there isn't any real defense—were neutralized by the bomb. America fought for just one month, and after that there wasn't any United States—just a disorganized mob of survivors, dazed by the cities' destruction and the sterilization of big stretches of countryside.
"Germany proclaimed the New Order over the face of the whole Earth—humanity to submit to the leadership of the German Volk, its highest evolutionary type. Everywhere the nations surrendered without a fight.
"Since the Conquest there's been only one serious, organized rebellion in this country; that was in the year two thousand, fifty-one years ago. The Germans put it down with bombs and poison; a lot of innocent people were killed, and for a long time after that it was impossible to organize any resistance. Since our movement got started twenty years ago, we've been damn careful not to goad the Germans into making a wholesale slaughter. Now—" His face twisted in pain.
"They've decided to anyway?" asked Manning with studied calm.
"As a matter of policy, not revenge. You see, for a while after the Conquest they had a lot of use for slave labor, so the subject peoples were valuable to them; but now that they have plenty of atomic power, running nearly automatic factories and mechanized farms to supply all their needs and luxuries, the rest of the Earth's population looks to them like so much excess baggage. All they have use for is land, Lebensraum for their own growing people. They've calculated that the whole Earth could be covered by Germans by 2500 A.D. As far as they're concerned the rest of us can rot or starve—and we do; but we don't die out! So—they murdered Russia fifty years ago—that was what touched off the rising here—and we're next!"