Norman Spinrad - The Iron Dream

Zind tanks surged forward, firing their cannon straight through the bodies of their own troops to blast Helder tanks to pieces. Still firing his blazing machine gun into the solid press of protoplasmic robots that surrounded his tank, Feric issued terse orders to his tank commanders:

“Fire cannon at point-blank range! Knock out the enemy tanks at all cost!”

The Helder tank cannon roared defiance; shells ripped through the riot of flesh, smashing Zind tanks to atoms.

Apparently, these tanks held the Dominators, for as they were destroyed, great formations of front-line Warriors suddenly became drooling, undisciplined animals, running amok in the very forefront of the battle and adding to the incredible chaos.

Feric found himself isolated with Best in a timeless universe of fiery battle, a world filled with foul Warriors surging forward, firing their machine guns, tearing their bare fingers to pieces against the steel armor plate, bursting into flame, ground to a thick red gruel beneath the treads of the tanks. His nostrils were filled with the aroma of roasted flesh mingled with the heady stench of gunpowder. His ears were deafened by a continuous surf-pounding of machine guns, cannon, engines, shrieks, grunts, groans, and squeaks. His flesh was a direct extenf sion of the machine gun he fired; the bullets seemed to emerge in a fiery stream from the depth of his own being, he could all but feel them ripping into the flesh of the Warriors who went down before his spurting weapon.

Through the tremors of the onrushing tank, he could feel the bodies being crushed beneath the treads.

He chanced to look at Best; the young hero was married to the controls of the tank and to his machine gun.

His face was set in a steel grimace of determination; in his blue eyes was a fierce and iron ecstasy. For an instant their eyes met and they were united in the comradely communion of battle, transfigured together in a red mist beyond time or fatigue. Through the metal of the tank, the common weapon which they shared, their souls seemed to touch and merge for an instant in the greater communion that was the racial will. All this took place in the blink of an eye; their beings were not for an instant distracted from the sacred task.

The individual acts of heroism of thousands upon thousands of Helder soldiers merged into a racial epic of superhuman fanaticism, and transcendent glory. Motorcycle SS in sleek black leather plunged straight into the guns of the enemy, smashing reeking hairy legs and crushing Warriors with their machines, dispatching dozens of the monsters with th^ir truncheons even as bullets tore their flesh asunder. Helder tanks rammed their Zind counterparts, overturned them, then set them ablaze with flamethrowers. Dive-bombers dropped death on the enemy from above; crippled planes deliberately dove straight into Zind tanks and war-wagons, going out in a bright blaze of glory. The motorized infantry left their trucks and dashed straight into the battle in wave after wave, perish’ns; in great numbers, but taking thousands upon thousands of Warriors with them down to final destruction.

The mystic merger between Peric, his heroic troops, and the racial will of Heldon was total; the Helder army fought as one unified organism with the will of Peric Jaggar at its heart. Not a man paid the slightest heed to his own life or personal safety; fear and fatigue were unknown.

Slowly, foot by foot, the Helder army pushed its way forward against the full weight of the gargantuan Zind horde. The forward ranks of the horde were reduced to an enormous herd of puking, gibbering, spitting, defecating, brainless red-eyed monstrosities running totally amok, hurling their huge naked bulks straight at the steel tanks, dashing directly into the muzzles of the Helder guns, slaying Helder and their own comrades with equal abandon. Flames were everywhere and the air was one great cloud of reeking smoke. Every Helder tank, each individual true human hero, was covered with a thick coating of enemy blood. Feric felt the racial will course into his body, through his muscles, and out the red-hot muzzle of his roaring machine gun. He himself was naught but a weapon fired by something beyond himself. The hundreds of tanks and hundreds of thousands of men ripping the enemy to bloody fragments were extensions of his own being, fingers, arms, pseudopods, as he himself was in turn the highest expression of the racial will of his people. Together, this vast organism was Heldon, the hope of the world, the master race of destiny, chewing its way into the vitals of the foul racial enemy.

Through the night and into the next day, the incredible carnage wore on. Merged as he was into the communal organism that was his army, Feric could viscerally sense that the Helder forces were pushing their way north and east toward Bora. Like sense organs of his own body, the aerial scouts reported that the far east and west flanks of the great Zind horde were flowing around either end of the Helder line like the enveloping pseudopods of a great amoeba.

“It’s hard to say whether we’re being enveloped or whether we’re cutting the horde in half,” Feric observed to Best.

“My Commander, I’ve got Waning on the radio!”

“Let me hear him on the tank circuit.”

Waffing’s hearty voice filled the tank; in the background, Feric could make out the sounds of battle. “My Commander, we’ve reached the oil fields and are engaging the enemy. I hope to be able to report the capture of our objective by tonight at the latest.”

“Good work. Waning!” Feric said. “I must sign off now: as you can hear, we’ve got some action of our own here!”

Waffing’s call gave Feric pause. Perhaps the Zind flanking maneuvers were nothing less than an attempt to go around the obstacle that the Helder armv imposed so as to reinforce their small battered forces holding the key oil fields. In this case, thev must be thwarted at all cost!

Flying in the face of his own battle instincts, Feric went on the radio and ordered the redeployment of his forces into defensive positions; a line must be established and held south of the Zind horde that could be neither outflanked nor broken. The horde must be pinned down until Waffing had completed his mission and linked up with the main Helder army.

Therefore, behind a screen of tanks and motorcycles, the Helder infantry dug in along a broad front a mile to the south, setting up machine guns, cannon, howitzers, and mortars, digging trenches and foxholes, and anchoring either end of the line with a division of the most fanatic SS troops. Once this had been accomplished, the front-line motorcycle troops disengaged and retreated behind the fortifications, shielded by the tanks, which were the last to withdraw, behind a wall of fire created by their own cannon and machine guns.

Only when these maneuvers had been completed and his own tank secured behind an earthen embankment, did Feric pause to make an overall assessment of the strategic situation. Peering up through the open hatch of the tank, he saw that the Zind horde had not followed on the heels of the retreating Helder army, for its entire front line was a chaotic disaster area. Even at this distance, he could still see the solid dike of bloody mangled corpses that clogged the front to the north all along the line of battle to a depth of several miles. Hardly any Zind tanks were still in action and the Helder dive-bombers were dispatching these. Behind the great front of dead Warriors was a boiling chaos of uncontrolled Warriors, appearing at this distance for all the world like a vast swarm of crazed killer ants. Far behind this riot of brainless muscle was an endless sea of more disciplined forces. As for the Zind artillery, it had been entirely silenced by the Helder air force, and these same sleek black dreadnaughts had also swept the sky clear of Zind vermin.