A matter of time

• • •

The night was pitch. The air moaning through the hatch was chilly. Kubis shivered so much his teeth rattled. But that had nothing to do with cold. He had been doing it since takeoff.

For the first few hours he had worried aloud, constantly, about the Luftwaffe, but the endless silence and absolute confidence of his companion, the man who called himself Josef Gabiek, had compelled him to retreat into a fear-filled shell.

How could Gabiek be so certain? So sure that he had been able to sell the British and the government-in-exile?

Gabiek was not certain. This time around he had moved the operation up five days in hopes of taking Fian Groloch by surprise. Also, there was the fact that the real Josef Gabiek, in the operation of his own past, hadn't survived.

The light came on. The RAF men shoved the equipment bundle to the hatchway.

"Time to go," said Kubis, more to himself than to his companion.

Gabiek rose slowly, tightened his chute harness. "It's changing, Jan," he muttered. "I can feel the difference now."

A minute later the soil of their homeland was rushing toward them from the darkness. Gabiek tracked the equipment chute. Kubis searched the upsurging forest for a sign of the SS men he knew would be waiting…

Gabiek was right, just as he had been all along. It went perfectly.

Morning. May 29, 1942. The open-topped green Mercedes sports car and escort were right on time.

Couldn't Gabiek miss?

The older man jumped out and began firing. Without effect.

Kubis threw the bomb.

The Mercedes disintegrated.

But Heydrich clambered out and came toward them, blazing away with his pistol.

Reinhard "Hangman" Heydrich, "protector" of Bohemia and Moravia, had been whipped about like a rat in a terrier's mouth. Pieces of seat-back spring protruded from his back. His spine had been shattered.

Yet he stood there and fought back.

It wasn't his appointed time to die.

As they fled through their smokescreen, with Heydrich's slugs hunting them, Gabiek said over and over, "I can't change it. But it's different."

To effect their escape they were supposed to place themselves in the hands of a priest at Karl Borromaeus Church in Prague. There, among scores of Resistance fighters hiding from the insanity of the security police, Gabiek encountered another time traveler.

The nun was so aged and feeble that she had to perform her limited duties from a wheelchair.

"Dunajcik!" Gabiek gasped.

He didn't know how he knew, but he did. It hit him like a thunderclap. There remained not a shred of doubt.

Kubis gave him a strange look.

"I'll wait here." Gabiek slid behind a pillar, afraid Dunajcik might react as he had. The old woman seemed popular. She might send someone after him…

The conviction grew more absolute. Inside that crone was the man who had caused all this by his treachery at the programming theater…

Gabiek backed from the church, his head shaking. It was a mystery. How could he be so positive? And how could the lieutenant have become a priestess? The man had always been weak and effeminate, and a bit too mystically oriented-but this vast a failure in one educated by the State?

He, as Neulist, had failed, he realized. He had not extinguished the spark of Uprising. It persevered, and had thrust its insidious evil into his own office…

The idiot was so happy he almost glowed. Was do devoted that he had done nothing to apply twenty-first century common knowledge to the retardation of the aging process in the body he wore.

Was the fool in such a hurry to get to Heaven?

Or had that ugly body been too old when he had arrived?

At least some laws of chronological conservation appeared to be in effect.

The Hangman, despite his ruined spine, would not die till the historically appointed moment. He lingered till the fourth of June.

Meanwhile, the Protectorate (and Reich) rapidly deteriorated toward chaos. Gabiek, ignored in all his efforts to betray the Resistance fighters in the church, and to link Lidice with the assassination attempt, suffered frustrations equaling those of his dealings with the Zumstegs. Damn it, the security police had to move. Fian Groloch was bound to remember his history soon. This fuss had to alert him.

But the timetable continued rectifying itself back toward historically established precedent.

Heydrich finally died.

Something clicked. The engine of history ceased sputtering, began to hum.

The security police closed in on Karl Borromaeus Church.

There were no survivors when they finished.

But this time there was no one named Josef Gabiek among the dead.

Next morning, carrying papers identifying himself as Dr. Hans-Otto Schmidt of the SS-Reich Economic Administration Main Office (the incongruously named bureau responsible for the death camps), in transit from Theriesenstadt to Mathausen, Neulist-Hodzв-Gabiek was on the move, destination Ostmark, the Austrian province of the Greater German Reich. In the false bottom of his physician's bag lay stamps massing less than half a kilo, yet worth millions of Reichsmarks. They would be his means till he could reach his Swiss deposits.

There was no easier way to move a fortune.

He was in Linz, preparing yet another identity, when the sword of this vengeance finally touched a Zumsteg.

That was the morning of June 9, 1942.

The massacre at Karl Borromaeus Church hadn't seen enough blood spilled to satiate Heydrich's avengers. For days all the Protectorate had been waiting, treading a razor's edge of fear, not knowing where the inevitable blow would fall.

Early that morning ten trucks rolled to the outskirts of Lidice. Captain Rostock ordered his troops to surround the village. They were hard-faced men, Totenkopf men, ready for murder.

Their first victim was a twelve-year-old boy, shot down as he ran to warn his father, who worked in the mines at Kladno.

The next was an old peasant woman, shot in the back repeatedly as she fled across a plowed field.

The men they drove into Mayor Horak's cellar…

And the killing began in earnest.

One thousand three hundred thirty-one people died at Lidice, including 201 women. And it wasn't over then. More would perish in the camps. The babies of pregnant women would be murdered at birth.

Among the 1331 was Fian Groloch, who didn't realize what was happening till far too late. His final remark, to Horak, was, "Ignorance can be a capital offense too," which puzzled the mayor for the few minutes he remained alive.

Groloch spent his last minutes trying to reason out why the Heydrich-Lidice scenario differed from what he vaguely remembered. In the absence of knowledge about Neulist, he erroneously concluded that his own presence had affected the changes. He made admonitory notes in his diary, buried it in a box beneath Horak's cellar floor. The construction crew excavating the foundations of the agency building might find it.

He tried to compose himself.

But he died terrified for the State.

Then Rostock burned the village, dynamited the ruins, and leveled the site. The surviving women went to the camps. Their younger children went to racial experts for determination of which were worthy of adoption into good National Socialist families.

And for three and a half years, in Vienna, a Dr. Schramm smiled, awaited the Russians, and considered how he would pick up his mission in America after the war.

XXI. On the Y Axis;