* * * * *
[Excerpt from the personal journal of Dr. Gustave Liebenkraft.*]
"2 Jan. 1930:
The New Year has been kind to me. It has re-united me with Klaus Kraus; my former under-graduate roommate at Leipzig! He is a professor of biochemistry, now. With cross-training in pharmacological botany. And after several hours of beer-fueled reminiscing,..."
"...he took me back to his house, where he showed me something astounding in the laboratory he has created for himself, in his proportionately modified basement."
"First, he filled an hypodermic needle with a clear solution of some kind. Then, he took one of the white mice he breeds for his experiments...and injected it with the solution."
"In ninety seconds, it had grown to the size of a rat!"
" 'Gott in Himmel!" I exclaimed: 'How...?' "
" 'Distilled water containing microscopic spores," he replied: 'Spores I extracted from several mushrooms I found growing at the base of a first-generation regrowth conifer near Lake Cheko. In the Tunguska River region of Siberia!' "
Colonel Robert Phillips looked up from the classified microfilm he had been reading in the sub-basement archives of Fort Holabird. He knew his memory had not been playing tricks on him! He then resumed reading Liebenkraft's narrative about the Thule Society sending a scientific expedition to that part of Siberia on the twentieth anniversary of the Tunguska Event. And, of how they had encountered (among other things) reindeer the size of extinct Irish elk.
That discovery--as he later learned from reading the transcript of Vasco Gonsalves' G-2 debriefing, plus his own perusal of Kraus' confiscated papers--had led to the development of the Nazi giantess formula in 1943. A formula that the Soviets had now seemingly found a counter-active antidote for!
Perhaps the answer was to be found in the journals of Bernhard Heuvelmann. The German zoologist who had been part of the same 1929 expedition as Kraus. So, Colonel Phillips had his adjutant make some discrete inquiries on what had happened to Heuvelmann after the expedition. It turned out that he had fled to London, England, after the Nazi Party seized total power, in Germany, in 1933. From there, he had subsequently emigrated to the United States. Specifically; New Bern, North Carolina. And, much to the colonel's delighted surprise, the man was not only still alive. He was a member of the local Knights of Melion Lodge!
Consequently, the army intelligence veteran found himself shaking hands with Lodge President Elwood Atkins, two days later.
"How can I help you, colonel?" the latter promptly asked him, after they were both seated.
Phillips gave him as much confidental information as he could without violating all of G-2's protocols.
"Would you be able to arrange a meeting between the two of us? I really need to know what other...biological anomalies...he might have encountered at Tunguska."
Atkins pondered this request for a few seconds, then nodded. He then flicked a switch on his office intercom, and ordered his car to be brought around. Ten minutes later, the two men disembarked from it in front of a small house, behind which was a veterinary clinic.
Atkins knocked on the door, and was immediately recognized by the seventy-somethng woman who answered it.
"Elwood!" she exclaimed with a smile.
"Hello, Maxine. Is Barney available? I need to talk to him. Lodge business; very important!"
"I'll see if he's free. Come right in."
"Thank you. But, where are my manners? Colonel Phillips? This is Maxine Heuvelmann (nee Schmidt)."
"Oh, really!" replied Phillips (as he shook her hand): "Are you originally from Germany like your husband?"
"No," she laughed: "I'm merely descended from one of the original Schwyzerdeutsch families that first settled this area."
She then gestured for the two men to sit down while she went out back to see if her husband was between patients. Evidently, he was, for the couple returned within five minutes. And, when Phillips saw the wolf-headed ring of full Lodge Council membership, on Heuvelmann's right index finger, he uttered the eighty-two year-old recognition code of the Knights.
" 'O Death, where is thy sting?' "
The perplexed smile on Dr. Heuvelmann's face instantly disappeared.
tbc
Giantess World
Author's Chapter Notes:
BALTIMORE, MARYLAND
(NOVEMBER 15, 1962)
(NOVEMBER 15, 1962)
Chapter End Notes:
*See DIARY OF A NAZI ARCHEOLOGIST.