exactly had Shiva’s simulation matched what I now saw. I was standing at the
entrance of a civil defence first-aid station, the one that research showed that
Father had worked in (would work in) tonight. It was hardly more than walls of
sandbags covered by canvas painted opaque to guard the black-out.
It had a jakes of sorts (Phew!), and an anteroom for the wounded, three pine tables,
some cupboards, and duck boards on a dirt floor. No running water – a tank with a
spigot. Gasoline lamps.
Greyfriars Green spread out around me, an untended park pocked with bomb cratera. I
could not see the monastery tower we had rented from Lady Godiva’s husband, Leofric,
Earl of Mercia, but I knew that it was north of me, off to my left. Field Agent
Hendrik Hudson Schultz, who had conducted the dicker with the Earl, reported that
Godiva’s hair really was surprisingly long and beautiful but that it was inadvisable
to be downwind from her, and she had apparently not bathed more than twice in her
life. Father Hendrick had spent a hard sixteen months learning eleventh century
Anglo-Saxon and customs and medieval church Latin in preparation for the assignment
– one he completed in ten days.
Tonight Father Hendrik was with Gretchen as her interpreter; it had not been judged
cost-effective to require the members of the military task force to learn an Anglic
language a century older than Chaucer, when their working language was not English
but Galacta, and their MOS involved shooting, not talking.
Northeast of me I could see the three spires that gave the city its nickname:
Greyfriars, Holy Trinity, and St Michael’s. St Michael’s and Greyfriar’s were gutted
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in earlier bombings and much of the centre of the city was destroyed. When I had
first heard of the bombing of Coventry, a century ago on my personal time line, I
had thought that the bombing of this historic town was an example of the sheer
viciousness of the Nazis. While it is not possible to exaggerate the viciousness of
that regime and the stench of its gas ovens, I now knew that the bombing of Coventry
was not simply Schreckdich, as this was an important industrial city, as important
to England as Pittsburgh was to the United States.
Coventry was not the bucolic town I had pictured in my mind. I could see that, if
fortune favoured us tonight, we might possibly not only destroy a major part of the
Luftwaffe’s biggest bombers but also save the lives of skilled craftsmen as
necessary to military victory as are brave soldiers.
Behind me I heard Gwen Hazel checking her communications: ‘Blood’s a Rover, this is
Lady Godiva’s Horse. Come in, Blood.’
I answered, ‘Blood to Horse, roger.’
We had a uniquely complex communication net tonight; one I did not even try to
understand (I’m a nappy engineer and a kitchen chemist – I’ve never seen an
electron), a system that parallelled an even more astounding temporary time) space
hook-up.
Like this – From outside, the west end of the aid station was a blank wall of
sandbags. From inside, that end was curtained off, a putative storage space. But
push aside the curtain and you would find mo time/space gates: one from Coventry
1941 to the medical school hospital, BIT, Tertius 4376 Gregorian, and the other
doing just the reverse, so that supplies, personnel, and patients could move either
way without traffic problems – and at the Tertius end was another double set of
gates to Beulahland, so that the worst cases could be shuttled to a different time
axis, there to be hospitalised for days or months – and returned to Coventry, fully
recovered, this same night.
(Tomorrow there would be miracles to be explained. But we would be long gone.)
A similar but not identical double-gate arrangement served Gretchen’s command. She
and her girls (and Father Schultz) were waiting in the eleventh century on the
monastery tower. The gate that would place them in the twentieth century would not
be activated until Gwen Hazel notified Gretchen that the sirens had sounded.
Gwen Hazel could talk to the twentieth century, the forty-fourth century, and the