Chilled and frostbit, I woke in a snow drift while intermittent gusts swirled bits of ice masquerading as snow past my face. Sitting up, I saw a dark pine forrest surrounding me. It was poorly visible in the night, but at the moment my concern was heat.



I fumbled in my back pack for my campfire lighter which had come with me the whole distance from Earth, and still survived unhurt. An axe made of memory metal first appeared as a belt, and then after bending it in the appropriate fashion to trigger the transformation, it curved itself into a serviceable, even if not great hatchet. My shoes were used to kick clear a spot on the ground not underneath a pine tree laden with snow ready to fall on my life-saving fire.



A quick shaking to release snow, and a follow-up attack on the tree cut me down several branches. The drier, and browner needles near the center were my kindling. My backpack served as I did in the function of a wind shield.



Soon, I was warm enough to start feeling tingles in my fingers. It was that cold out here. In the few minutes after I landed in this reality, and lay in that snow bank, and sorted my brain out, I had contracted a mild case of frostbite.



I rose to get more branches, for I was still fearfully cold. And then I saw him, mounted on a huge wolf, maybe a dire wolf. The gray trenchcoat, and the helmet, and the upright line past his shoulder, and the instinctive caution mixed with resolve spelled ’soldier’ to me. He seemed bipedal, and so I called out a welcome.



Like water flowing down a hill, the wolf and rider came toward me. Not wanting to stand there because I had a warm fire, I turned back to it.



He called out from thirty feet away a word or two which sounded questioning. I replied, and he stopped, and seemed to be talking to himself. He seemed human, so I relaxed. The man seemed to be conducting a trial by error conversation with himself as he tried to figure out what I was.



Then he kicked his dire wolf in the side, and drew a stick from over his shoulder.



“Die Jew Sorcerer!” He shouted at me in German. Well. I try to be kind to the first people I meet in a verse. You never know what might be normal around here. I still remember killing that poor sentient who thought he was saving my life by stopping me from opening a bottle of water. But anyone with a black cross on their helmet, and such sentiments as he expressed “needs killin’ ” as country folk would have it.



I reached out psionically to create an invisible ramp between me and him that curved off to the left so as to do a kind of psionic judo. It would convert his momentum into a splash into a tree twenty feet off the ground. Or not, I decided as nothing happened.



I scrambled back around the tree for my life with little hope of saving it. The wolf would be upon me in seconds. But nothing happened. So I recklessly almost levitated, or swam up into the snow full tree by sheer main enthusiasm.



Once high enough, I looked down to see him chanting. Hands of stone and rot lifted out of the ground as he sang a dirge to the trolls promising them a chance to drink a sorceror’s blood. All through this he held his rod high above his head. Occasionally, he reached out and touched the tree’s needles. I could feel the tree shrinking back from the unclean touch which drained its life from it.



So, magic worked, but no psionics. Well, I could show him magic. In this very strange and cosmopolitan city named Waterdeep(r), I remember learning a most useful spell. So I dug in my pocket of my parachute pants, and came up with a bag of holding(r) full of items needed for these useful spells.



The sulphur came first. Soon I chanted while he screamed threats at me, and his trolls, eight to ten feet tall monstrosities pulled themselves loose of the soil. He told me it was too late for me to summon a golem, his good, clean, German monsters would kill me first.



I laughed after I unleashed the small ball of flame toward him. It was about the size of a walnut. But that would soon change.



Monster summoning and creation is a fairly common sort of magic, but there are others.



The ball raced past him, and he laughed. Then if expanded in a brilliant burst of flame accompanied by a thunderclap. The fireball maxed out at twenty yards across, and utterly consumed my opponent and his trolls.



I had a second to close my eyes as the snow on the ground and the nearby trees sublimated straight into super-heated steam and raced like a wall of doom straight at me. Now I know how broccoli feels.



Falling out of the tree and hitting the ground hard enough to drive myself unconscious was a mercy. I fully expected in the minor part of my brain that was operating to wake up in the next world. Instead, I woke up surrounded by a half-dozen concerned faces inside a dark hut.



“You are safe, friend.” A man said in Russian while a Gypsy woman tended to my wounds with some soothing cream. I groaned anyways because I knew where and when I was. The soldier’s leader raised his hand to punch the Gypsy for her clumsiness, but I protested, and he relented.



“The Germans invade Mother Russia led by Hitler, eh?” I asked for confirmation feigning clumsily at knowledge of something everyone knows.

“No, Rommel leads the invaders, and Kassel, the weakling puppet of his masters succeeds Der Fuhrer in his quest for domination of the world. Thank all the spirits, but Der Fuhrer finally went to his death from a drug overdose six weeks ago. Sorceror, you must have been out of contact for a long time. We shall probably have to have a political officer come by to recertify you as ‘politically reliable’.”



Right next to my fear of the SS would be to fall into the hands of them men from the KGB who practise the art of knocking on doors at night.



“Surely not, after all, I just killed a powerful soldier of the German Army.”

“True, that devil has mangled my squad for the last month with his troll sendings. The mudfaces and zombies we can summon are no match for him, but we know the woods, and the winter.”



The Gypsy muttered something which I just barely caught not being very fluent in the language.



“And you have me to heal you.”



I thought and decided to take a desperate chance.



“Look, Kapitan, I do not favor this invasion, after all I am an American…”

“What’s that?” One of the other squad said, and for a long moment I looked at them hoping for a joke or a stupid person to have said that remark.

“The New World, the Western Continent.”

“Oh, that, Brendansland, well the Brits and the Irish have that pretty thoroughly divided up. They hate each other, but they join in this one thing, they are willing to let us bleed ourselves against the Nazi’s as long as we Russians and Germans keep it off the seas.”



There was no America in this world to straighten things out or to show people a better way to live. I was well and truly in deep. Surrounded by barbarians for hundreds and even thousands of mile about me, the vast majority of people were either suffering peasants, or barbaric hordes. No matter that they dressed half-decent, at least some of them. In their hearts, where it counted, they were worse than Genghis Khan. At least he had the decency to accept surrenders when you surrendered quickly enough.



But in the moral scale of things, the Russians had a slight advantage or two. One they were the defenders, and two they were not so raveningly enthusiastic about Final Solutions for the Chosen People.



And I looked at the crowd of soldiers that filled the small hut, and found myself liking their rag clothed faithfulness to a very unfaithful country. Whether, I could support the vile leadership or not, I could support these guys. Which made it harder to do what I was doing.



“Kapitan, I can be your friend, or I can be your enemy. Do not turn me over to the Politicals. I’m sure they would be interested in hearing how you go to Gypsies for healing.” I made my threat calmly, even if I did not intend to carry it out.

“It is illegal after all.” The Gypsy woman said with a smile, and a wink of an eye only for me.

“I could kill you.” The captain said as suddenly weapons were in everyone’s hands all across the room.

“Probably, but how many of you do I get?” I said from my bed to the Kapitan who stood three feet from me with a magic rod held expertly in hand.

“This is ridiculous. You will go to the politicals.” He said.

“Remember, I killed a tough opponent of yours, I am not so easy as all that. Besides, I think you are pragmatic Kapitan, you want to win however you do it. I can help you.”



A soldier in the back of the cabin spoke up.

“Kapitan Fyodorov, perhaps we should listen. I keep coming up with the strangest numbers for him.”

The captain looked back in inquiry, and I saw past him, a dark-haired man expertly using an abbacus.

“He is less than a day old, and he will die within the year, but he will never die for as long as my numerology can figure, and worse, he was born in the future instead of now, in 1955.”



It was magic, Kabbalism I believed. Numbers have certain powers. I wondered if he could do a golem.



“Can you create a golem?”

“No, only a mudface which is like a golem, but they only last minutes and are hardly as strong.”

“But they do slow the trolls down, so that we can circle them with the zombies.” Another said loyally sticking up for his comrade in arms.



“How about some clothes?” I offered the captain.

“We already know you have some in your backpack.” The captain said, and I froze for a second realizing that I might well get “nationalized.”

I shrugged, and slowly started to cast a spell. A knife appeared at my throat, and I continued doing my best to make it obvious what I was doing.



A set of U.S. Army fatigues, with the words scripted on it changed to Soviet Army of Defense, appeared in my hands. Then I started again. By the time I was finished, they were outfitted in boots and fatigues, and I had a splitting headache. But I also had a set of friends, and I had joined the Red Army which was not something I would have ever thought possible.



Over the next two days, as I recovered from my steam-cleaning, I discovered something. This may be of note to the scholarly in this world, because no Americans existed here, but we Americans in my home world had prided ourselves on being friendly people. We used first names, and talked easily with others. But it is a shallow thing in many ways.



Here, in two days, I made bonds of friendship which might have taken two years or longer to make back home. The whole crew were effectively blood brothers.



This brings up issues about national stereotypes. There is something to them. They tended to do certain things, but there was often one or two dissenters who went the other way.



They drank like pigs eat slop. Part of their problem in battle was that they were often half-drunk when they went into it. true that they could hold their liquour, a potato vodka, to a surprising degree. Basically, they were all, except for Misha, alcoholics. Misha never touched the stuff.



And the level of sacrifice they were willng to put up with for their beloved country was really moving. The Rodina was their mother. Of course, it helped a lot that the Germans tended to think organized slaughter was the best way to deal with peasants.



Most of them were peasants, but we had a university professor, and a grand master in chess for a captain. And of course, the Jewish kabbalist was well educated.



Captain Fyodorov, Valentenin, Misha, Goldstein, Gregory, Vladimir were people I loved, and some of the happiest memories of that horrible time was sitting in Anya’s hut while they played chess with each other, and sipped tea hot from their samovar.



I got nicknamed “Big Gulp” for my habit of drinking too much tea, and drinking it too fast so as to burn my tongue.



Finally, at the end of a month’s operations against the Germans in the deep winter, we got word that we should be prepared to move forward. A glorious attack was on the way.



Captain Fyodorov did little to disguise his disproval. We were stronger on the defense, and the snow favored the defender, and time was on our side. He expressed his points in exasperation, and Val was impolitic enough to let some of this show through when the political officer came by for his followup checkup.



I was hidden nearby as was Anya. The overfed man in his black leather trenchcoat stood and examined my friends who stood in a line in the snow in front of him. He had a number of pointless criticisms to make. As far as I could tell, he made them to assert his own authority over these wolves. But they accepted it until Val said.



“Why this attack? Why now? Why us? This is a bad idea.”

“You want to tell Comrade Stalin this is a bad idea for he authorized it?”



Anya whispered a number of derogatory comments about the idiocy of the “Comrade”. She seemed to believe the kommissar’s statement. Then she started praying for Valentenin’s soul.



“It is you, because certain elements have determined that certain among you might not be completely loyal, and need a chance to prove your loyalty.” The kommissar continued while Fyodorov’s face turned red.



Then the kommissar almost tauntingly drew out his short rod which was edged with gold, and held it in front of Valentenin’s face.



“For state treason, I execute …”



I never heard the rest because I was standing, and shouting words of power. Electricity arced from hand to hand, and I thrust the lightning bolt at the kommissar with a deep sense of rightness. Justice and order were being returned to the universe.



He fell twitching, as cries of ‘get him’ and Fyodorov’s cursing sounded about the clearing.



They disarmed him, and then tied him up with his own necktie.



“Why?” Fyodorov shouted at me looking like he wanted to punch my lights out, and then beat me for a while afterward. But then he turned, and walked a few steps away.

“I know, Tadeusz, you are not Russian, you lack the sense of the tragic which would have helped you stay the course, and saved some of our lives. Instead you have killed us all.”

“Let’s just ice him, and dump his body in a bog. No one need know.”

“They will summon his spirit if need be.” The Kabbalist instructed me. Oops, was my feeling, but yet I would not take back my action.



A long pause held the clearing as Anya walked forward. The Valentenin asked his question again, this time with a knife gouging into the kommisar’s cheekbone.



“Ask your beloved captain.” The Kommisar said bitterly. The captain nodded with his shoulders slumped as we looked to him.

“My grandfather was a general in the White Russian Army that fought the Red Army. So I am considered suspicious.”

“And when you succeed as well as you have for this last year, but especially this last month, then you start to worry your commanders. You might be getting too popular, creating a cult of personality.”

“So if he had lost more troopers, made more mistakes, his superiors would like him better?” Goldstein the Kabbalist asked with a quiet clarity which made the real issue clear to all, but the nodding kommissar who was immune to anything but doing his job.





“If you let me go, and turn over this weird magician, ” The kommisar pointed at me, “And turn over your captain who betrayed you to the justice of the state, then I think I can save you.”



The captain and I looked at each other, and we knew that we would willingly go if the others suggested it. They looked at each other, and they made their decision without words. Valentenin shoved the knife through the base of the kommisar’s brain.



We were now officially ‘counterrevolutionary elements’, and probably ‘running dog lackeys of the bourgeise. What we really were was wolves who had slipped their leash. In many ways, at least to me, it was a relief.



Taduesz