Chapter VI

The captain of the _Siegfried_ squinted at the tables the navigator had handed him, mentally translating their figures into acceleration units. The ship was only an hour from the assigned point in space, and it was necessary to make a final, ultimately correct alignment, in which seconds of arc meant miles of displacement in the dispersion of the dust on Earth's surface.

The captain's concentration was disturbed by the nagging conviction that something was amiss--or had been amiss a minute or so earlier--about his familiar control room. For a moment he had fancied that the door to the sternward-descending stairshaft was standing open; but it was obviously closed....

He put the doubts angrily out of his mind, frowned at the papers, and ordered the expectant pilot: "_Funf Minuten sechsunddreissig Sekunden dritter Geschwindigkeit dem Backbordgetriebe!_"

They were not very inspired last words, but he had no chance to make additions, for in the next instant Kane's sharp knife sank between his ribs. The captain gurgled in an oddly muffled fashion and would have fallen, save that invisible hands caught and lowered him.

The navigator, looking straight at him, finally realized something had happened. He opened his mouth to cry out, but his throat was cut from ear to ear and no sound emerged.

The pilot, about to press the buttons that would wake the portside rocket bank, was stupefied to see that his hand hung over the controls and refused to move as if paralyzed. Enveloped in the mind-numbing field of an invisibility unit at full power, he did not feel the grip that held him or the knife-thrust that killed him.

The four Americans switched off their units and indulged in the luxury of removing the metal-stiffened hoods. They had no more to fear aboard the _Siegfried_; two other members of the crew had already been disposed of in the cabins below, and now even if all Germany had known of their presence aboard the dust ship--no method had ever been devised for attacking a ship in space.

But they did not exchange many words. There was work that desperately had to be done as the _Siegfried_ drove toward its rendezvous. Kane flung himself into the navigator's seat, and glancing ever and anon at the figures for the original course, began to punch keys on the calculator. Manning hunched over the controls, continuing an intensive study that had begun over the German pilot's shoulder. And Vzryvov stationed himself before a black box fixed to the wall beneath a large clock and conspicuously sealed with a _Hakenkreuz_.

Dugan was left without a job; but he was content to slump into an unused seat and think queasily of Earth thousands of miles below. He was out of his element here--but so were the others. None of them had ever been into space before; only Kane had a theoretical acquaintance with rocket navigation.

So they worked like men inspired to alter the course of the ship. It would have been utterly impossible to make all the needful calculations from the beginning; but Kane was able to work from the course already laid out and the dead navigator's correction tables, making small changes, which would mean life for millions of people and death for other millions.

Five minutes before the revised zero-time, Manning, his face like iron, shut off the engines. There must be no expanding rocket gases to interfere with the dust's dispersion. The sudden silence and weightlessness were like a bad dream. Dugan gulped, floated into a corner and was sick. Even Kane's face looked green under the unchanged light of the control room. But Vzryvov had broken the swastika seal on the black box and eyed the switch inside it greedily, between frequent glances at the clock.

* * * * *

With the second-hand sweeping into the last minute, he grasped the plastic handle, and at forty-five seconds pulled down. Instantly the stifling silence of the ship was broken by a muffled roar. The dust--not dust really, but exceedingly fine shot, heavy enough that it would not be carried away by winds in Earth's atmosphere--was being flung into space through many nozzles in the _Siegfried's_ hull.

"That's that," said Kane in a flat voice.

Vzryvov swung about in his seat, facing the others, but he did not look at them. His eyes were far away and his teeth bared in a ferocious grin as he listened to the escaping storm of death.

"_Dostalos' sukinym synam_," he muttered to himself. "_Za Ameriku i za Rossiyu!_"

Manning said nothing.

They suffered through ten minutes of weightlessness while the dust was discharging, and waited another ten before they dared start the engines again and swing the ship--careless now of fine points of navigation--on a great arc toward Earth.

"It'll be forty hours, plus or minus, before the stuff hits the atmosphere," said Kane. "The Germans are going to realize something is wrong before then--pretty soon, I imagine, because every observatory will be watching the cloud. We'll do better to stay out here."

Manning shrugged. Kane looked at him with understanding and sympathy. "There's still work for us. By now the general uprising will have started in America, and maybe spread to other countries; it was to be our organization's last effort, in case we couldn't stop the dust ship. And the ship took off.... Let's see if we can pick up some broadcasts."

They did, after accelerating the ship and throwing it into a low, hastily-calculated orbit. At first the destroyers had no word of their work. The news was all about the fierce flare of rebellion in America; though they didn't say so, it must have caught the few Germans there in the throes of departure before the coming doom. An attack on the Long Island colony was in progress, the bridges blown and the East River aflame with burning oil. Then the insanely desperate rebels had found their way onto the island and overwhelmed the settlement. The air crackled with eye-witness accounts of atrocities against the master race. The German leaders were turning the insurrection to account, using it to prepare the minds of their own people to accept the fait accompli of America's extermination.

Then came a pause in the news broadcasts. A German station played music....

Somewhere a group of rulers must be sitting in hasty council, staring unbelievably at the astronomers' reports. Having to believe, and trying to make a decision where there was no more deciding to do, because their future was as immutable as the velocity and direction of the dust cloud in space.

They had to make it public, of course, so that there could be an attempt at evacuation. Twenty-first century Germany was a nation of motors, wheels, and wings, and a day and a half might yet be time for a large part of the population to flee beyond the limits of the dust-fall which would cover Greater Germany from the Rhineland to the Volga. If the exodus was orderly, the radio emphasized again and again....

* * * * *

For the first few hours it was both orderly and successful, according to report. But the announcement of Germany's catastrophe had carried to hidden ears beyond its boundaries, and the word had passed like lightning around the world, telling all nations that the moment of deliverance had come. Four hours afterward, and American station went on the air; and the listeners in the space ship tensed as they heard the English words.

"Three or four thousand air-borne refugees are reported landing on the Florida coast. The local revolutionary authorities have taken steps for their reception.... A dispatch from France states that a refugee column of about twenty thousand Germans was overwhelmed and wiped out, despite defense by armored vehicles, in the vicinity of Lyons.... Similarly we hear from Italy...."

The transmission was weak and the voice faded out, but it went on, counting up with unholy glee the victories and the massacres. All over Earth, people were digging up the guns that had laid buried for a hundred years, and when those were lacking, seizing scythes and axes, sticks and stones, and going out to meet the fleeing Germans. The German military retaliated by unloading its whole arsenal of atomic and other weapons against the rebelling peoples. But the world was mad with blood and liberty. What if for every German ten of their ex-slaves died? Soon there would be no more Germans....

Other radio stations began to be heard, babbling in strange tongues that had not been spoken over the air for a century, but all reciting the same burden of hate and holocaust, glorying in the tales of carnage that they called to each other across the Earth.

Marshaled by leaders who rose to power on the wings of a shout, or with no leaders at all, the hordes poured even across the borders of the Reich, into the doomed area. Such German radio stations as were still operating showed by their frantic and contradictory efforts to direct the evacuation the hopeless panic and confusion that had fallen on the _Herrenvolk_ in its last hour. Perhaps they had once been a people of blood and iron, but if so they were that no longer after a century of security and peaceful prosperity behind their impregnable bulwarks; and the refugees, fleeing those defenses now, were like fat tame rabbits escaping a burning hutch and falling victim, terrified and uncomprehending, to the claws and fangs and primeval savagery of the wild. Germany had sowed the wind for a hundred years, and the storm that had arisen would not soon abate....

From time to time during the vigil in the space ship, Kane turned thin-lipped from the broadcasts to attempt contact with a secret transmitter in the New York area. Finally, thirty hours after the dust had started on its way, he got through and talked with an underground leader he knew.

"It's out of our hands," the man on Earth reported tersely. "At first we made some headway in organizing the revolt. We're still trying to influence the mobs in the direction of elementary caution, but it's thankless work and even dangerous. The people are following demagogues sprung from nowhere, following whatever voice promises the most killing. I think they're even fighting each other in some places...."

"Anarchy," said Kane numbly. "A new Dark Age--"

"What else did you expect?" demanded Vzryvov scornfully. "Surely not that people enslaved so long would promptly proceed to set up orderly self-government as soon as they were free? The Dark Ages have been everywhere, except in Germany, for the last century; you don't imagine that because Germany falls, the rest of the world will become civilized again?"

"No.... But I must have hoped it; I think we all did. Guess you're the only realist I know, Igor." Kane straightened his shoulders. "We might as well land. Maybe there's still a chance to bring something decent out of this mess when the smoke clears. Anyway, I'd rather get into the thick of it than sit out here listening any longer. We shouldn't have anything more to fear from the Germans."

Manning, who had sat for long brooding silently over the controls, looked up sharply. "Before we start down," he said, "I'd like to ask a last favor."

* * * * *

Manning smiled grimly. "One way or another. I just want one of those emergency-escape gliders we saw when we were hiding down below. You mean to land in America, I guess, but before you do I wish you'd take a little swing out of your way and drop me off in one of those over Germany. I don't know whether Eddie will want to go with me--"

"Hell, what do you take me for?" asked Dugan aggrievedly. "Maybe you've cracked up--but I'll take a chance."

"I think you _have_ gone crazy," said Kane. "If the Germans didn't get you, the dust would."

"It's a chance, all right.... But I've been thinking about how Kahl's time machine disappeared, back there in the Black Forest. It was powered by ordinary storage cells, and when he turned it on and left it on it used them up in a hurry. But in rapid discharge polarization will stop the flow of current in a battery before the charge is all gone--and after it's rested a little, it'll give out some more. I think that's what happened. We left the switch closed, and when the batteries depolarized they gave another kick. So the time traveler went on--into the future again. Not very far, maybe. Maybe only a couple of days."

"So--you think it may be there now. And if it is?"

"Those gliders have a battery-powered auxiliary motor, don't they? If we land near the machine, we can get it going again and return to our own time, or a few years earlier."

"I don't blame you for wanting to, but--"

"It's not just that." Manning's eyes met Kane's and held them with odd intensity. He asked slowly: "Wouldn't it have been better, Kane, if the last hundred years of history had never happened?"

Kane stared at him, first blankly and then with dawning understanding. "But--that's impossible," he stammered. "A paradox."

"Paradoxes are an occupational disease of time travel, I guess.... I don't know just what we can do, if we do get back. We'd have to be careful or we might end up in a padded cell. We couldn't hope to prevent the development of atomic energy--that seems inevitable, with progress--but we might warn America in time to assure our beating the Germans to the punch."

Kane said quietly, "It's true that our world has taken a wrong turning. What you suggest, Manning, is quite unimaginable--but it's possible, all the same--an experimental destiny, perhaps. Anyway, I'll help you get the glider ready."

"Would you like to come with us?"

Kane shook his head. "Whether this world is real or not, I belong to it. And you'll be bucking enough paradoxes as it is."

* * * * *

The glider dropped at first like a stone from the great height; then its wings began to find support and it descended in vast looping turns that in the troposphere became at last a tightly circling glide over the Schwarzwald. The air over Germany was empty; now, short hours before the coming of the dust, everyone who could command aerial transportation had escaped from the country. But the roads, from the great _Autobahnen_ to the narrowest country lanes, were crawling with traffic, snarled and choked by the fear that drove it.

Manning strained his eyes for landmarks as they lost altitude; he wanted to spare the batteries in the glider.

"Say," remarked Dugan worriedly, "if we find the thing, how far do you figure on going back?"

"Mmm--say 1935. We'll need a few years to work if we're going to change history."

"We might meet ourselves!" Dugan voiced his fears.

Manning grinned. "We ought to be able to duck ourselves. We know where we were, don't we?"

Dugan digested that, then advanced another problem: "If we go back to 1935, I'll only be thirty when the war starts. What do they do when two of a guy try to enlist in the Army at once, especially if he's already missing four years later?"

"Maybe there won't be any war."

"Want to bet?"

"No," answered Manning soberly. But a moment later his face lit as he recognized, only a couple of miles away, the big clearing on the plateau where the time traveler had rested.

Minutes later, he set the glider bumpily down on the meadow. From on high the sun had been visible, but here only a gray dawn was breaking. Where the forest fire had passed the trees raised black desolate arms to the light, but those still green were greeting the morning with cool balsam scent and awakening bird song, oblivious of the rain of death falling through space to wipe out all life in this land.

They climbed out of the glider--and froze, for in the same moment both saw the two long black cars, one with an official swastika on its sleek flank, that were parked under the trees, and the uniformed men who were springing to their feet around the vehicles and lifting rifles.

"Turn on your invisibility unit and run for the woods!" hissed Manning. The soldiers gaped for seconds at the spot where the arrivals from the sky had vanished, then fired a useless volley at the glider and huddled together in panic.

Both of the Americans were wearing the units Kane had given them, but had tucked the hoods under their belts. Manning stumbled, unable to see his own feet as he ran, and paused on the edge of the woods to cram his hood down over his head. As he did so he saw Dugan a few yards away, doing likewise.

"Somebody's got the same idea as us!" called Manning. "Maybe Kahl convinced them, or--We'd better get there fast!"

They plunged through the fire-cleared woodland toward their goal. From behind a voice shrieked warning to someone ahead: "_Hutet euch! Zwei Unsichtbare!_"

Then they saw among the trees the cubical bulk of the time machine. Its door was open, and around it was a squad of soldiers who gripped their weapons with shaking hands and peered wild-eyed about them.

"Never mind them!" gasped Manning. "There's somebody inside--"

* * * * *

The words died on his lips. In the doorway of the traveler had appeared a big man in civilian clothes. His face was hidden beneath a hood exactly like their own, in his hands was a machine gun, and he was looking at them.

"Schwinzog!" Manning recognized the beefy figure.

"_Sie kennen mich? Aber naturlich_--you are the other two time travelers!" The gun's muzzle moved in a peremptory arc. "Remove those masks, please. I want to be sure that it is really you who have come to see me off."

Manning wavered, torn by a suicidal impulse to rush the machine gun and get it over with. But despair lamed him. He thought numbly, "Time is immutable after all, and something was sure to stop us from changing what's already happened. The fatalists are right." He bowed his head and slipped off the wired hood; then he could no longer see it or his own hands. He felt still more like a ghost, impotent to stir reality.

"Now the invisibility units," ordered Schwinzog. "Throw them in front of you." As Manning and Dugan became visible, the goggling soldiers that surrounded them snapped up their rifles to cover them.

Schwinzog pushed back his hood and eyed them with satisfaction. "It is good that you are accounted for--though I was not much worried about you, and I understand you do not know the principle of the _Zeitfahrer_. And you have brought me two more specimens of the invisibility device, which will be useful for study to the German scientists of four years ago--before they were invented in America." He chuckled at the thought. "You realize, the debacle of Germany, the frightful catastrophe engineered by American cunning--_will_--never take place. I will see to that--that this now shall be only the illusion of might have been.... As to what will become of you, that is an almost metaphysical problem--I think I will set the Herr Doktor Kahl to work on it, when more pressing affairs have been seen to."

"You will do what?" broke in a weakly querulous voice.

In the entrance of the time traveler had appeared the hunched figure of Kahl. He blinked at the light; his goatee was tattered and his face twitched. Behind him the massive shoulders of Wolfgang blocked the doorway; he wore a twenty-first century German uniform and an air of contentment that showed him, at least, to have found his niche in the world of the future.

Schwinzog half turned. "What I will do is my own business," he said curtly. "And you--will refrain from asking unnecessary questions. The _Zeitfahrer_ is ready?"

"It is ready for a displacement of four years, which you told me was to be only a test--before we return, as you promised, to the twentieth century, and use this era's knowledge to prevent Germany from conquering the world--"

"Of course," said Schwinzog smoothingly. "That is what we shall do."

"You are lying!" Kahl glared at him, his fists clenching. "I heard what you told the Americans."

Schwinzog shrugged. "All right, I am lying." He looked contemptuously down at the little physicist. "Do not bring on yourself again the consequences of stubbornness. You have earned the gratitude of the Reich, and I will see that you are rewarded _if_ you are sensible--"

The other had begun to tremble. "I want only one reward. That is to see Germany saved from the curse of world empire! From the hatred of the whole Earth, which almost destroyed our country in my time and has destroyed it in this! Better even that we Germans should be the oppressed, rather than reap the oppressor's harvest of hate...."

Schwinzog's lips curled. "The Herr Doktor has lost his mind. I will have to operate the _Zeitfahrer_ myself--_Muller_!"

The tall Wolfgang sidestepped and thrust out an arm, stopping Kahl's stumbling rush for the doorway and sending the old man staggering to sprawl at Schwinzog's feet.

"You would leave without us?" inquired the Gestapoleiter mockingly. "For that, it would be only just to leave you here--but do not fear. You will still be useful. And now we have no more time for--"

* * * * *

With a burst of strength that seemed in him incredible, Kahl surged to his feet and flung himself on Schwinzog with an animal scream. The big man, caught off balance in his negligent pose, was hurled backward and fell clutching; his head thudded solidly against the time traveler's metal sheathing. Kahl twisted free and swayed to his feet, and the machine gun was in his hands; it bucked and spat as he swung it in a jerky arc. Wolfgang, caught in mid-leap, crashed to the ground and rolled, and the German soldiers scattered wildly, firing a few shots that were aimed more away from Schwinzog than at Kahl. One man was too slow and dropped at the edge of the unburned thicket, and a couple of others yelped as they fled.

Dr. Kahl went on raining bullets into the bushes for seconds after there were no more targets; then he stood breathing hard and glaring about him at the bodies sprawled on the scorched turf.

One of the bodies got unhurriedly to its feet and faced Kahl. It was Manning. The fatalistic paralysis that had gripped him had passed off abruptly when he saw Schwinzog fall, and he had thrown himself flat under the sweeping bursts of machine gun fire.

He said coolly, "Good work, Herr Doktor. Now we can get back to our own century."

Kahl did not answer or seem to hear. The muzzle of the weapon he held was centered on Manning's chest, and the eyes above it were mad.

"We must return now, and carry out your plan," Manning urged softly. As he talked he was walking without haste toward the gun. He did not dare glance aside to see what had happened to Dugan, or let even his expression betray his terrible eagerness to seize the moment--before Kahl went completely off the deep end, or before the Germans back there in the bushes collected their wits.

"You are American," scowled Kahl. "One of those who hate us. What have I to do with you?"

"I will help you," said Manning. "Your plan is good. Germany and all the world will revere your name when they know." He halted, almost touching the gun muzzle. In a moment now he had to grab it.

"I do not know--" began Kahl, blinking. Then his eyes widened blankly; something had plucked at Manning's sleeve, and from somewhere in the thicket came a rifle's crack. The Herr Doktor crumpled to the ground.

From behind him appeared Dugan, straightening from a crouch; without a word he sprang for the door of the time traveler. Manning followed, ducking under another bullet from the woods. He slammed the door shut.

"What'd you take a chance like that for?" demanded Dugan bitterly. "I was sneaking round behind him all the time."

Manning didn't answer. He was surveying the apparatus-covered table, hesitating over its complexity.

Outside rifles began banging steadily. The metal shell of the machine rang and splinters flew from the wooden door as bullets came through to ricochet dangerously inside. Manning's mouth set and with a quick wrist-flip he closed the starting switch.

And there was silence.

* * * * *

Dugan peered cautiously through a shattered door-panel. "There hasn't been any fire," he said almost without wonder. "The trees are green."

Manning bent tensely over the table. "Four years backward," he nodded. "Now, if I can just find out how much power that took...."

Half an hour later for them, it was 1935, an evening with the first chill of fall in the air.

"Too bad we lost the invisibility units," grieved Manning. "There's nothing now to prove we ever travelled in time--except the traveler itself, and we can hardly carry that with us to America.... And Kahl and Wolfgang make another paradox we didn't think of. They died in a time that never will be."

"Hell, what's another paradox," said Dugan. "We've got our work cut out for us without worrying about them."

Regretfully they smashed the time traveler's mechanism--lest it fall into still other hands anxious to remodel history--and set out on foot with a good chance of making the Swiss border by dawn.