“When do you come from?” Chris asked, intensely interested, oblivious of the droplets of bathwater that tracked out of his damp hair and down his face. “When?”
“Honey,” Laura said, “he’s very weak, and I don’t think we should bother him with too many questions just yet.”
“He can tell us that much, anyway, Mom.” To the wounded man, Chris said, “When do you come from?” He stared at Chris, then at Laura, and the haunted look was in his eyes again.
“When do you come from? Huh? The year 2100? 3000?”
In his paper-dry voice, her guardian said, “Nineteen forty-four.
The little bit of activity had clearly tired him already, for his eyelids looked heavy, and his voice was fainter than it had been, so Laura was certain that he had lapsed into delirium again.
“When?” Chris repeated, baffled by the answer he had been given.
“Nineteen forty-four.”
“That’s impossible,” Chris said.
“Berlin,” her guardian said.
“He’s delirious,” Laura told Chris.
His voice was slurred now as weariness dragged him down, but what he said was unmistakable: “Berlin.”
“Berlin?” Chris said. “You mean—Berlin, Germany?” Sleep claimed the wounded man, not the unnatural sleep of a coma but restful sleep that was immediately marked by soft snoring, though in the moment before he slipped away, “Nazi Germany.” he said,
One Life to Live was on the television, but neither she nor Chris was paying any attention to the soap opera. They had drawn the two chairs closer to the bed, where they could watch the sleeping man. Chris was dressed, and his hair was mostly dry, though it remained damp at the nape of his neck. Laura felt grimy and longed for a shower, but she was not going to leave her guardian in case he woke again and was able to talk. She and the boy spoke in whispers:
“Chris, it just occurred to me, if these people were from the future, why wouldn’t they have been carrying laser guns or something futuristic when they came for us?”
“They wouldn’t want everyone to know they were from the future,” Chris said. “They’d bring weapons and wear clothes that wouldn’t be out of place here. But, Mom, he said he was from—”
“I know what he said. But it doesn’t make sense, does it? If they had time travel in 1944, we’d know about it by now, wouldn’t we?”
At one-thirty her guardian woke and seemed briefly confused as to his whereabouts. He asked for more water, and Laura helped him drink. He said he was feeling a little better, though very weak and still surprisingly sleepy. He asked to be propped up higher. Chris got the two spare pillows from the closet and helped his mother raise the wounded man.
“What is your name?” Laura asked. “Stefan. Stefan Krieger.”
She repeated the name softly, and it was all right, not melodic but solid, a masculine-sounding name. It was just not the name of a guardian angel, and she was mildly amused to realize that after so many years, including two decades during which she had professed to have no belief in him. she still expected his name to be musical and unearthly.
“And you really come from—”
“Nineteen forty-four,” he repeated. Just the effort required to move to a sitting position had wrung fine beads of perspiration from his brow—or perhaps the sweat resulted in part from thoughts of the time and place where his long journey had begun. “Berlin, Germany. There was a brilliant Polish scientist, Vladimir Penlovski, considered a madman by some, and very likely mad in fact — very mad, I think — but also a genius. He was in Warsaw, working on certain theories about the nature of time for more than twenty-five years before Germany and Russia collaborated to invade Poland in 1939…”
Penlovski, according to Stefan Krieger, was a Nazi sympathizer and welcomed Hitler’s forces. Perhaps he knew that from Hitler he would receive the kind of financial backing for his researches that he could not get from sources more rational. Under the personal patronage of Hitler himself, Penlovski and his closest assistant, Wladyslaw Januskaya, went to Berlin to establish an institute for temporal research, which was so secret that it was given no name. It was simply called the institute. There, in association with German scientists no less committed and no less farsighted than he, financed by a seemingly inexhaustible river of funds from the Third Reich, Penlovski had found a way to pierce the artery of time and move at will through that bloodstream of days and months and years.”