My childhood home is now under Nazi occupation. But the guard assigned to patrol it is a giant baby. Half a ton of "Gooh!" He waddles around our family room in diapers, trolling for Allied submarines, which sail under the floor. Well, not exactly--it's a solid cement slab. The subs are really in a parallel continuum, but the effect is that they surface here as if the cement slab were a sea and the subs were barely a foot long--or Nazi Toddler's the size of King Kong.

King Kong in diapers, with a portable sonar in his chubby little hands. Sweep sweep, beep beep...

I hide in a bedroom, peering round the corner at him. So far he hasn't noticed me, intent on his sonar.

It creeps toward him. His whirling green screen detects something, but fuzzily and too late. I keep it moving--straight at his head. Bonk him! He looks around puzzled. But because it's "underwater", in the other world, it's invisible to his naked eyes. I ram his head again. He scowls and pouts, but big boys don't cry. He squints at the sonar, trying to get a clear fix. I ram him again--and at last the charge goes off.

His head explodes. The fireball fills the room. For a terrible instant at the cloud clears, I see straight down his neck and throat, concentric rings of meat, gristle and bone, before his scorched body falls to the floor.

And I wake, shaking in horror.

But in cold anger too--think "He deserved it! And he'd have done it to me, and all those sub crews, if he'd caught me first!"

Or am I feeling guilty?

NOTES

• Beheaded: I just read Desmond Bagley's The Snow Tiger, about a catastrophic avalanche. Seven victims get trapped deep under the snow; only one tries to dig a tunnel out--but it's 60 feet up! He digs 59--and a rescuer steps on the spot, falls through, kicking the man in the head. He falls back down his own tunnel, breaking his neck. The six victims who didn't help him are all saved. This perverse parable stuck in my head all day, nagging me like a bad pop song.
• The Wabbler's from an old Theodore Sturgeon story: an experimental device, it blew up a ship and started a war. The first robot's-eye view narrative I know of--no human characters--just the machine blindly hunting a hull, unaware of the consequences of its success--among them, its own destruction. I suspect it means blind habit, here. I'm using some habit for an underhanded purpose...
• Fuzzy, delayed image of a slow-moving thing: in The Snow Tiger, a home video catches the grainy image of a man deliberately triggering the fatal avalanche. He was a malicious, possibly paranoid guy--the echoes hint that my attack on the Big Baby may be paranoid too.
• Kid hunts subs on a grid of tiles = I played "Battleship" a lot as a kid. Each player hides a flotilla of ships (including subs) on a grid, and guesses where your opponents' ships are. They tell you where you got hits, but you have to deduce the ships' size, orientation, etc. If you ignored the frame story and treated it as a pure guessing-game, it was fun--for it rewarded both logic and intuition. So despite my horror in the dream, this grisly war I'm fighting may be just a big game!
• Trolling for subs: Lately I've been dreaming of archeology/therapy. Digging up buried "subconscious" memories? But here the archeologist is a Nazi! And I'd expect images of an adult uncovering an inner child, not the other way round--a giant baby hunting for tiny adult selves... in order to KILL them!

No matter how I look at it, something's very, very very wrong here. And I better not do anything drastic till I know who inside to trust. Or more to the point, mistrust.

Starting with me.

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