Lightning

“I was one of the first members of the Hitler Youth in 1926, when I was seventeen,” he said. “Less than a year later I joined the Sturmabteilung or the SA, the brown shirts, the enforcement arm of the party, virtually a private army. By 1928, however, I was a member of the Schutzstaffel—”

“The SS!” Chris said, speaking in the same tone of horror mixed with strange attraction that he would have used if he had been talking of vampires or werewolves. “You were a member of the SS? You wore the black uniform and the silver death’s-head, carried the dagger?”

“I’m not proud of it,” Stefan Krieger said. “Oh, at the time I was proud, of course. I was a fool. My father’s fool. In the early days the SS vas a small group- the essence of elitism, and our purpose was to protect der Furer with our own lives if that was necessary. We were all eighteen to twenty-two, young and ignorant and hotheaded. In my own defense I’ll say that I was not particularly hotheaded, not as committed as those around me. I was doing what my father wanted, but of ignorance I’ll admit to having more than my fair share.*”

Windblown rain rattled against the window and gurgled noisily in a downspout beyond the outside wall against which the bed stood.

Since awakening from his nap. Stefan had looked healthier, and he had perked up even more with the hot soup. But now, as he recalled a youth spent in a cauldron of hatred and death, he paled again, and his eyes seemed to sink deeper into the darkness under his brow. ‘ ‘I never left the SS because it was such a desired position and there was no way to leave without arousing suspicion that I’d lost my faith in our revered leader. But year by year, month by month, then day by day I became sickened by what I saw, by the madness and murder and terror.”

Neither the brown-pepper shrimp nor the lemon chicken tasted too good any longer, and Laura’s mouth was so dry that the rice stuck to the roof of it. She pushed the food aside, sipped her Coke. “But if you never left the SS . . . when did you go to college, when did you get involved in scientific research?”

“Oh,” he said, “I wasn’t at the institute as a researcher. I’ve no university education. Except … for two years I received intensive instruction in English, trying to learn to speak with an acceptable American accent. I was part of a project that dropped hundreds of deep-cover agents into Britain and the United States. But I never could quite cast off the accent, so I was never sent overseas; besides, because my father was an early supporter of Hitler, they felt I was trustworthy, so they found other uses for me. I was on special assignment to der Fuhrer’s staff, where I was given sensitive jobs, usually as a liaison between squabbling factions of the government. It was an excellent position from which to obtain information useful to the British, which I did from 1938 on.”

“You were a spy?” Chris asked excitedly.

“Of a sort. I had to do what little I could to bring down the Reich, to make up for ever having been a willing part of it. I had to atone—though atoning seemed impossible. And then, in the autumn of 1943, when Penlovski began to have some success with his time gate, sending animals off to God-knew-where and bringing them back, I was assigned to the institute as an observer, as der Fuhrer’s personal representative. Also as a guinea pig, as the first human to be sent forward in time. You see, when they were ready to send a man into the future, they did not want to risk Penlovski or Januskaya or Helmut Volkaw or Mitter or Shenck or one of the other scientists whose loss would damage the project. No one knew if a man would come back as reliably as the animals did—or if he would come back sane and whole.”

Chris nodded solemnly. “It’s possible time travel might’ve been painful or mentally unbalancing or something, yeah. Who could know?”

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