Hasso shrugged and squelched on. Maybe he’d got shot the moment he plopped his can down on the Omphalos. Maybe this was nothing but a mad hallucination before the lights went out for good. But he had to act as if it was real. He’d spent too many years fighting to quit now. He’d been wounded three times. He was damned if he’d throw in the sponge for no good reason.

“Maybe I’m damned anyway,” he muttered. He shrugged again. If he was, he couldn’t do anything about that, either.

He hauled himself up onto dry land. As he did, he realized it was artificial, not a natural feature of the swamp at all. It was a causeway, long and straight and not very wide, with a well – kept dirt road atop it. Somebody needed to go from Here to There in a hurry, and the swamp happened to lie athwart the shortest way.

Somebody badly needed to get from Here to There in a hurry. This causeway would have taken a devil of a lot of work to build.

He stooped to examine the road. The long shadows the sun cast (it was setting, definitely setting) showed no trace of tire tracks or tread marks from panzers or assault guns. They did show footprints and hoofprints, some shod, others not. And there were unmistakable lumps of horse dung.

Hand tools, then, almost certainly. Which meant…

Hasso Pemsel shrugged one more time. He had no idea what the hell it meant. It meant he wasn’t in Kansas anymore. He’d seen The Wizard of Oz when it got to Germany, just before the war started.

A flash of motion on the road, off to the east. Before Hasso consciously realized he needed to do it, he slid into cover, sprawling on the steeply sloping side of the causeway. All the time he’d spent fighting the Ivans had driven one lesson home, down at a level far below thought: unexpected motion spelled trouble, big trouble.

Ever so cautiously, Schmeisser at the ready, he raised his head for a better look. As he did, he wondered how many magazines for the machine pistol he had left. Four or five, he thought. And what would he do once he used them up? He grunted out a syllable’s worth of mirthless laughter. He’d damn well do without, that was what.