by Anthology
The view-screen drifted upward and he saw the lever-banks. Thin, boneless fingers reached out, pushed one down in its short slot. In the view-screen the crowded platform shot down.
“I have it!” Stratton shouted, and leaped to the bow of the stratocar. He glimpsed the real view-screen, glimpsed a steel-capped Viking rushing in through it, a crowd of others behind him. His shaking hand found a lever, pushed it down.
The uprush of the stratocar flung him down on Talus, crushing the future-man as Stratton had crushed Flaton in his irate onslaught. But the flier was rising. The crater was dwindling in the television screen, was once more a pit in the plain’s boundary-less surface.
Ronald Stratton struggled back to the control levers. “I’ve got to stop this or we’ll keep on going up forever.” Talus was dead, could not help him any longer. He pushed the tiny handle back into the central point of its slot. The precipitate rise stopped; the stratocar hovered, motionless in the air.
Stratton stared at the control board. He saw now that the switch lifting the stratocar was the topmost of a vertical row of three, that to left and right of the central lever there were two more.
“It looks simple enough,” he muttered, “Now that I’ve got a starting point. Top—up. Bottom—down. Middle—forward. Left—left. Right—right. Let’s try it. I’ll push down the middle one. Here goes!”
The craft leaped forward. The problem was solved! He could fly the stratocar. But where? Where in this terrible place was safety for him? For Elaise?
“Look, Ronny!” the girl exclaimed. “It waxeth light again. The night here is indeed very short.”
The strange red glow that passed here for day was growing in the screen. “It’s just some kind of fluctuation of the light, sweetheart,” Stratton thought aloud. “You see, there could not really be any day or night here because there isn’t any Time.”
Below, the eerily colored plain was visible once more, stretching undisturbed to a featureless horizon. No. There, straight ahead, something bulked against the lurid sky, a familiar, grateful green margining its upper edge.
“How would you like to come home with me, Elaise?” Stratton whispered. “Home to England?”
“Ronny!” She was wordless, but her arms around his neck, her kiss on his cheek, was enough.
“All right,” he said. “Here goes.”
The stratocar came down in the clearing, where Flaton had captured them. Stratton stepped out of it, helped Elaise to descend. They turned shuddering away from the gruesome remnants of the last of the future-men.
“We came from that direction,” Stratton Said. “Maybe if we go back there we’ll find the eddy once again.”
“Whither thou goest I will go,” Elaine murmured. “I am thine, my knight, soul and body?”
“Not more than I’m yours, honey. Remember that when we get back to 1936. Come on.”
The underbrush rustled against their knees, the trees whispered overhead. They passed the still body of the Neanderthal Man. Then—a wall confronted them, a wall of hazy, swirling nothingness.
“Here goes! Together does it, Elaise, One—two—three!” His arm around her warm waist, Ronald Stratton stepped into the haze.
CHAPTER VI
THROUGH THE EDDY
It was as if he had walked over the brink of an abyss, save that he did not fall. He was standing on the gentle slope of Silbury Hill. A great monolith loomed above him, black and gaunt against a dusk sky grey and haunting with the death of day. Not a minute, not a second had elapsed since he had taken the fateful step in the other direction.
“Look, Elaine.” Ronald Stratton said. “Look down there. See the spire of Avebury Church? We can find a minister there, to wed us.” She didn’t answer.
“Elaise!” he said sharply, turning to her. She wasn’t there beside him. She wasn’t anywhere?
“Elaise!”
But she had walked into the eddy, close against him. She must have walked into it. What had happened? Where was she, the girl he had found in the Timeless Zone, who had fought so bravely by his side? The girl he had learned to love, the blue-eyed, fair-haired girl from the days of King Arthur?
From the days? Abruptly he understood. He remembered his first explanation of their strange adventure. “We’ve shot along the year-spokes of that great wheel, each from our own time, and met here at the center?” The reverse, too, was true. Returning, they had each gone back along his own year-spoke, he to 1936, she to A. D. 520. Some vibration of their cosmos, some esoteric, unknown quality, had provided for that. They were fourteen centuries apart.
Ronald Stratton started slowly down the hill, descending toward the valley whose moor was already dark with the gloom of night. Little stars sprinkled it, lights in the homes of people like himself. Of people of the twentieth century. Above them, the red and green winglights of an airplane drifted across the dusk.
“I don’t care how advanced your era is; if you haven’t got love, I pity you.” He had said that to Flaton. “It’s the greatest thing in life.”
Stratton halted, turned back to the monumental double-ring the Druids had built to warn their people of the terrible thing that lay within. Abruptly he was running back to the high stone that marked the boundary of the eddy. He stopped on its very edge.
“Elaise!” he cried into that dread maelstrom of haze. “Elaise!”
Mad! He would be mad to plunge back into it. She wouldn’t be there, in the forest. She was hastening down Silbury Hill, fourteen hundred years ago so as not to be late for evening prayers. She—
“Ronny!”
Her voice came out of the mists. He hadn’t heard it, couldn’t have heard it, across fourteen centuries. He was mad!
“Ronny!”
“I’m coming, Elaise. Wait for me! I’m coming!”
Above a forest of tall and ancient oaks a lurid sky bent its eerie dome. A tiny horse, three-toed and knee-high to a full-grown man, peered through the underbrush at the couple walking, hand in hand, into the lowering, threatening future of the Land Where Time Stood Still. Hand in hand, heart to heart, the man of the twentieth century and the maid of the sixth went, together, into the Unknown.
THE LAST ARTICLE
Harry Turtledove
Nonviolence is the first article of my faith. It is also the last article of my creed.
—Mohandas Gandhi
The one means that wins the easiest victory over reason: terror and force.
—Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf
The tank rumbled down the Rajpath, past the ruins of the Memorial Arch toward the India Gate. The gateway arch was still standing, although it had taken a couple of shell hits in the fighting before New Delphi fell. The Union Jack fluttered above it.
British troops lined both sides of the Rajpath, watching silently as the tank rolled past them. Their Khaki uniforms were filthy and torn; many wore bandages. They had the weary, past-caring stares of beaten men, though the Army of India had fought until flesh and munitions gave out.
The India gate drew near. A military bank smartened up for the occasion began to play as the tank went past. The bagpipes sounded thin and lost in the hot, humid air.
A single man stood waiting in the shadow of the gate. Field Marshal Walther Model leaned down into the cupola of the Panzer IV. “No one can match the British ceremonies of this sort,” he said to his aide.
Major Dieter Lasch laughed, a bit unkindly. “They’ve had enough practice, sir,” he answered raising his voice to be heard over the flatulent roar of the tank’s engine.
“What is that tune?” the field marshal asked. “Does it have a meaning?”
“It’s called ‘The World Turned Upside Down,’ ” said Lasch, who had been involved with his British opposite number in planning the formal surrender. “Lord Conwallis’s army musicians played it when he yielded to the Americans at Yorktown.”
“Ah, the Americans.” Model was for a moment so lost in his own thoughts that his monocle threatened to slip from his right eye. He s
crewed it back in. The single lens was the only thing he shared with the clichéd image of a high German officer. He was no lean, hawk-faced Prussian. But his rounded features were unyielding, and his stocky body sustained the energy of his will better than the thin, dyspeptic frames of so many aristocrats. “The Americans,” he repeated. “Well, that will be the next step, won’t it? But enough. One thing at a time.”
The panzer stopped. The driver switched off the engine. The sudden quiet was startling. Model leaped nimbly down. He had been leaping down from tanks for eight years now, since his days as a staff officer for the IV Corps in the Polish campaign.
The man in the shadows stepped forward, saluted. Flashbulbs lit his long, tired face as German photographers recorded the moment for history. The Englishman ignored the cameras and cameramen alike. “Field Marshal Model,” he said politely. He might have been about to discuss the weather.
Model admired his sangfroid. “Field Marshal Auchinleck,” he replied, returned the salute and giving Auchinleck a last few seconds to remain his equal. Then he came back to the matter at hand. “Field Marshal, have you signed the instrument of surrender of the British Army of India to the forces of the Reich?”
“I have,” Auchinleck replied. He reached into the left pocket of his battle dress, removed a folded sheet of paper. Before handing it to Model, though, he said, “I should like to request your permission to make a brief statement at this time.”
“Of course, sir. You may say what you like, at whatever length you like.” In victory, Model could afford to be magnanimous. He had even granted Marshal Zhukov leave to speak in the Soviet capitulation at Kuibyshev, before the marshal was taken out and shot.
“I thank you.” Auchinleck stiffly dipped his head. “I will say,
then, that I find the terms I have been forced to accept to be cruelly hard on the brave men who have served under my command.”
“That is your privilege, sir.” But Model’s round face was no longer kindly, and his voice had iron in it as he replied, “I must remind you, however, that my treating with you at all under the rules of war is an act of mercy for which Berlin may yet reprimand me. When Britain surrendered in 1941, all Imperial forces were also ordered to lay down their arms. I daresay you did not expect us to come so far, but I would be within my rights in reckoning you no more than so many bandits.”
A slow flush darkened Auchinleck’s cheeks. “We gave you a bloody good run for bandits.”
“So you did.” Model remained polite. He did not say he would ten times rather fight straight-up battles than deal with the partisans who to this day harassed the Germans and their allies in occupied Russia. “Have you anything further to add?”
“No, sir, I do not.” Auchinleck gave the German the signed surrender, handed him his sidearm. Model put the pistol in the empty holster he wore for the occasion. It did not fit well; the holster was made for a Walther P-38, not this man-killing brute of a Webley and Scott. That mattered little, though—the ceremony was almost over.
Auchinleck and Model exchanged salutes for the last time. The British field marshal stepped away. A German lieutenant came up to lead him into captivity.
Major Lasch waved his left hand. The Union Jack came down from the flagpole on the India Gate. The swastika rose to replace it.
Lasch tapped discreetly on the door, stuck his head into the field marshal’s office. “That Indian politician is here for his appointment with you, sir.”
“Oh yes. Very well, Dieter, send him in.” Model had been dealing with Indian politicians even before the British surrender, and with hordes of them now that the resistance was over. He had no more liking for the breed than for Russian politicians, or even German ones. No matter what pious principles they spouted, his experience was that they were all out for their own good first.
The small, frail brown man the aide showed in made him wonder. The Indian’s emaciated frame and the plain white cotton loincloth that was his only garment contrasted starkly with the Victorian splendor of the Viceregal Palace from which Model was administering the Reich’s new conquest. “Sit down, Herr Gandi,” the field marshal urged.
“I thank you very much, sir.” As he took his seat, Gandhi seemed a child in an adult’s chair: it was much too wide for him, and its soft, overstuffed cushions hardly sagged under his meager weight. But his eyes, Model saw, were not child’s eyes. They peered with disconcerting keenness through his wire-framed spectacles as he said, “I have come to inquire when we may expect German troops to depart from our country.”
Model leaned forward, frowning. For a moment he thought he had misunderstood Gandhi’s Gujarati-flavored English. When he was sure he had not, he said, “Do you think perhaps we have come all this way as tourists?”
“Indeed I do not.” Gandhi’s voice was sharp with disapproval. “Tourists do not leave so many dead behind them.”
Model’s temper kindled. “No, tourists do not pay such a high price for the journey. Having come regardless of that cost, I assure you we shall stay.”
“I am very sorry, sir; I cannot permit it.”
“You cannot?” Again, Model had to concentrate to keep his monocle from falling out. He had heard arrogance from politicians before, but this scrawny old devil surpassed belief. “Do you forget I can call my aide and have you shot behind this building? You would not be the first, I assure you.”
“Yes, I know that,” Gandhi said sadly. “If you have that fate in mind for me, I am an old man. I will not run.”
Combat had taught Model a hard indifference to the prospect of injury or death. He saw the older man possessed something of the same sort, however he had acquired it. A moment later he realized his threat had not only failed to frighten Gandhi, but had actually amused him. Disconcerted, the field marshal said, “Have you any serious issues to address?”
“Only the one I named just now. We are a nation of more than 300 million; it is no more just for Germany to rule us than for the British.”
Model shrugged. “If we are able to, we will. We have the strength to hold what we have conquered, I assure you.”
“Where there is no right, there can be no strength,” Gandhi said. “We will not permit you to hold us in bondage.”
“Do you think to threaten me?” Model growled. In fact, though, the Indian’s audacity surprised him. Most of the locals had fallen over themselves, fawning on their new masters. Here, at least, was a man out of the ordinary.
Gandhi was still shaking his head, although Model saw he had still not frightened him (a man out of the ordinary indeed, thought the field marshal, who respected courage when he found it). “I make no threats, sir, but I will do what I believe to be right.”
“Most noble,” Model said, but to his annoyance the words came out sincere rather than with the sardonic edge he had intended. He had heard such canting phrases before, from Englishmen, from Russians, yes, and from Germans as well. Somehow, though, this Gandhi struck him as one who always meant exactly what he said. He rubbed his chin, considering how to handle such an intransigent.
A large green fly came buzzing into the office. Model’s air of detachment vanished the moment he heard that malignant whine. He sprang from his seat, swatted at the fly. He missed. The insect flew around awhile longer, then settled in the arm of Gandhi’s chair. “Kill it,” Model told him. “Last week one of those accursed things bit me on the neck, and I still have the lump to prove it.”
Gandhi brought his hand down, but several inches from the fly. Frightened, it took off. Gandhi rose. He was surprisingly nimble for a man nearing eighty. He chivvied the fly out of the office, ignoring Model, who watched his performance in openmouthed wonder.
“I hope it will not trouble you again,” Gandhi said, returning as calmly as if he had done nothing out of the ordinary. “I am one of those who practice ahimsa: I will do no injury to any living thing.”
Model remembered the fall of Moscow, and the smell of burning bodies filling the chilly autumn air. He remembered
machine guns knocking down cosack cavalry before they could close, and the screams of the wounded horses, more heartrending than any woman’s. He knew of other things, too, things he had not seen for himself and of which he had no desire to learn more.
“Herr Gandhi,” he said, “how do you propose to bend to your will someone who opposes you, if you will not use force for the purpose?”
“I have never said I will not use force, sir.” Gandhi’s smile invited the field marshal to enjoy with him the distinction he was making. “I will not use violence. If my people refuse to cooperate in any way with yours, how can you compel them? What choice will you have but to grant us leave to do as we will?”
Without the intelligence estimates he had read, Model would have dismissed the Indian as a madman. No madman, though, could have caused the British so much trouble. But perhaps the decadent Raj simply had not made them afraid enough. Model tried again. “You understand that what you have said is treason against the Reich,” he said harshly.
Gandhi bowed in his seat. “You may, of course, do what you will with me. My spirit will in any case survive among my people.” Model felt his face heat. Few men were immune to fear. Just his luck, he thought sourly, to have run into one of them. “I warn you, Herr Gandhi, to obey the authority of the officials of the Reich, or it will be the worse for you.”
“I will do what I believe to be right, and nothing else. If you Germans exert yourselves toward the freeing of India, joyfully will I work with you. If not, then I regret we must be foes.”
