As Stefan expressed his gratitude to the prime minister and got up to leave, Churchill pointed to the books on the table and said, “I wouldn’t want you to forget those. If you left them behind—what a temptation to plagiarize myself!”
“It’s a mark of your character,” Stefan said, “that you haven’t importuned me to leave them with you for that very purpose.”
“Nonsense.” Churchill put his cigar in an ashtray and rose from his chair. “If I possessed those books now, all written, I’d not be content to have them published just as they are. Undoubtedly I would find things needing improvement, and I’d spend the years immediately after the war tinkering endlessly with them—only to find, upon completion and publication, that I had destroyed the very elements of them that in your future have made them classics.”
Stefan laughed.
“I’m quite serious,” Churchill said. “You’ve told me that my history will be the definitive one. That’s enough foreknowledge to suit me. I’ll write them as I wrote them, so to speak, and not risk second-guessing myself.”
“Perhaps that’s wise,” Stefan agreed.
As Stefan packed the six books in the rucksack, Churchill stood with his hands behind his back, rocking slightly on his feet. “There are so many things I’d like to ask you about the future that I’m helping to shape. Things that are of more interest to me than whether I will write successful books or not.”
“I really must be going, sir, but—”
“I know, yes,” the prime minister said. “I won’t detain you. But tell me at least one thing. Curiosity’s killing me. Let’s see … well, for instance, what of the Soviets after the war?”
Stefan hesitated, closed the rucksack, and said, “Prime Minister, I’m sorry to tell you that the Soviets will become far more powerful than Britain, rivaled only by the United States.”
Churchill looked surprised for the first time. “That abominable system of theirs will actually produce economic success, abundance?”
“No, no. Their system will produce economic ruin—but tremendous military power. The Soviets will relentlessly militarize their entire society and eliminate all dissidents. Some say their concentration camps rival those of the Reich.”
The expression on the prime minister’s face remained inscrutable, but he could not conceal the troubled look in his eyes. “Yet they are allies of ours now.”
“Yes, sir. And without them perhaps the war against the Reich wouldn’t have been won.”
“Oh, it would be won,” Churchill said confidently, “just not as quickly.” He sighed. “They say politics makes strange bedfellows, but the alliances necessitated by war make stranger ones yet.”
Stefan was ready to depart.
They shook hands.
“Your institute shall be reduced to pebbles, splinters, dust, and ashes,” the prime minister said. “You’ve my word on that.”
“That’s all the assurance I need,” Stefan said.
He reached beneath his shirt and pushed three times on the button that activated the homing belt’s link with the gate.
In what seemed like the same instant, he was in the institute in Berlin. He stepped out of the barrel-like gate and returned to the programming board. Exactly eleven minutes had elapsed on the clock since he had departed for those bombproof rooms below London.
His shoulder still ached, but the pain had not increased. The relentless throbbing, however, was gradually taking a toll on him, and he sat in the programmer’s chair for a while, resting.
Then, using more numbers provided by the IBM computer in 1989, he programmed the gate for his next-to-last jaunt. This time he would go five days into the future, arriving at eleven o’clock at night, March 21, in other bombproof, underground quarters—not in London but in his own city of Berlin.
When the gate was ready, he entered it, taking no weapons. This time he did not take the six volumes of Churchill’s history, either.
When he crossed the point of transmission inside the gate, the familiar unpleasant tingle passed inward from his skin, through his flesh, into his marrow, then instantly back out again from marrow to flesh to skin.
The windowless, subterranean room in which Stefan arrived was lit by a single lamp on the corner desk and briefly by the crackling light he brought with him. In that weird glow Hitler was clearly revealed.