Twenty minutes later, when Stefan had told only half of the condensed version of his story, the prime minister called for the sergeant in the corridor. “We’ll be here a while yet, Sergeant. I will have to delay the War Cabinet meeting by an hour, I’m afraid. Please see that everyone is informed—and with my apologies.”
Twenty-five minutes after that, Stefan finished.
The prime minister asked a few more questions—surprisingly few but well-thought and to the heart of the matter. Finally he sighed and said, “It’s terribly early for a cigar, I suppose, but I’m in the mood to have one. Will you join me?”
“No, thank you, sir.”
As he prepared the cigar for smoking, Churchill said, “Aside from your spectacular entrance—which really proves nothing but the existence of a revolutionary means of travel, which might or might not be time travel—what evidence do you have to convince a reasonable man that the particulars of your story are true?”
Stefan had expected such a test and was prepared for it. “Sir, because I have been to the future and read portions of your account of the war, I knew you would be in this room at this hour on this day. Furthermore I knew what you would be doing here in the hour before your meeting with the War Cabinet.”
Drawing on his cigar, the prime minister raised his eyebrows.
“You were dictating a message to General Alexander in Italy, expressing your concerns about the conduct of the battle for the town of Cassino, which has been dragging on at a terrible cost of life.”
Churchill remained inscrutable. He must have been surprised by Stefan’s knowledge, but he would not provide encouragement even with a nod or a narrowing of his eyes.
Stefan needed no encouragement because he knew that what he said was correct. “From the account of the war that you will eventually write, I memorized the opening of that message to General Alexander—which you had not even finished dictating to the sergeant when I arrived a short while ago: ‘I wish you would explain to me why this passage by Cassino Monastery Hill, et cetera, all on a front of two or three miles, is the only place which you must keep butting at.’ ”
The prime minister drew on his cigar again, blew out smoke, and studied Stefan intensely. Their chairs were only a few feet apart, and being the object of Churchill’s thoughtful scrutiny was more unnerving than Stefan would have expected.
At last the prime minister said, “And you got that information from something I will write in the future?”
Stefan rose from his chair, retrieved the six thick books that the guards had taken from his rucksack—Houghton Mifflin Company’s trade-paperback reprints published at $9.95 each—and spread them out on the end of the table in front of Winston Churchill. “This, sir, is your six-volume history of the Second World War, which will stand as the definitive account of that conflict and be hailed as both a great work of history and literature.” He was going to add that those books were largely responsible for Churchill’s being awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1953, but decided not to make that revelation. Life would be less interesting if robbed of such grand surprises.
The prime minister examined the covers of all six books, front and back, and permitted himself a smile when he read the three-line excerpt from the review that had appeared in the Times Literary Supplement. He opened one volume and swiftly riffled the pages, not pausing to read anything.
“They aren’t elaborate forgeries,” Stefan assured him. “If you will read any page at random, you’ll recognize your own unique and unmistakable voice. You will—”
“I’ve no need to read them. I believe you, Stefan Krieger.” He pushed the books away and leaned back in his chair. “And I believe I understand why you’ve come to me. You want me to arrange an aerial bombardment of Berlin, targeted tightly to the district in which this institute of yours is located.”
“Yes, Prime Minister, that’s exactly right. It must be done before the scientists working at the institute have finished studying the material on nuclear weapons that’s been brought back from the future, before they agree upon a means of introducing that information into the German scientific community at large—which they may do any day now. You must act before they come back from the future with something else that might turn the tide against the Allies. I’ll give you the precise location of the institute. .American and RAF bombers have been making both daylight and night runs on Berlin since the first of the year, after all—”