None of them believed I could change a thing. They weren’t afraid that they would be erased from existence, their world line snuffed out like a candle flame. No, in their blind ignorance they insisted that an attempt at time translation would consume so much energy that we would be left defenseless against the besieging savages outside our walls.
“The savages will no longer exist,” I told them. “None of this world line will exist, once I’ve made the proper change in the world line.”
They voted me down. They would rather face the barbarians than give up their existence, even if it meant a better world would replace the one they knew.
I accepted their judgment outwardly. Inwardly I became the most passionate student of history of all time. Feverishly I searched the books and tapes, seeking the nexus, the turning point, the place where I could make the world change for the better. I knew I had only a few months; the savage horde below our mountaintop was growing and stirring. I could hear their murmuring dirge of hate even through the walls of my laboratory, like the growls of a pack of wild beasts. Every day it grew louder, more insistent.
It was the war in the middle of the twentieth century that started the world’s descent into madness. A man called Adolph Hitler escalated the horror of war to new levels of inhumanity. Not only did he deliberately murder millions of civilian men, women and children; he destroyed his own country, screaming with his last breath that the Aryan race deserved to be wiped out if they could not conquer the world.
When I first realized the enormity of Hitler’s rage I sat stunned for an entire day. Here was the model, the prototype, for the brutal, cruel, ruthless, sadistic monsters who ranged my world seeking blood.
Before Hitler, war was a senseless affront to civilized men and women. Soldiers were tolerated, at best; often despised. They were usually shunned in polite society. After Hitler, war was commonplace, genocide routine, nuclear weapons valued for the megadeaths they could generate.
Hitler and all he stood for was the edge of the precipice, the first terrible step into the abyss that my world had plunged into. If I could prevent Hitler from coming to power, perhaps prevent him from ever being born, I might save my world — or at least erase it and replace it with a better one.
For days on end I thought of how I might translate back in time to kill this madman or even prevent his birth. Slowly, however, I began to realize that this single man was not the cause of it all. If Hitler had never been born, someone else would have arisen in Germany after the Great War, someone else would have unified the German people in a lust for revenge against those who had betrayed and defeated them, someone else would have preached Aryan purity and hatred of all other races, someone else would have plunged civilization into World War II.
To solve the problem of Hitler I had to go to the root causes of the Nazi program: Germany’s defeat in the first world war, the war that was called the Great War by those who lived through it. I had to make Germany win that war.
If Germany had won World War I, there would have been no humiliation of the German people, no thirst for revenge, no economic collapse. Hitler would still exist, but he would be a retired soldier, perhaps a peaceful painter or even a minor functionary in the Kaiser’s government. There would be no World War II.
And so I set my plans to make Germany the victor in the Great War, with the reluctant help of my dear wife.
“You would defy the council?” she asked me, shocked when I revealed my determination to her.
“Only if you help me,” I said. “I won’t go unless you go with me.”
She fully understood that we would never be able to return to our own world. To do so, we would have to bring the components for a translator with us and then assemble it in the early twentieth century. Even if we could do that, where would we find a power source in those primitive years? They were still using horses then.