First appeared in

Thrilling Wonder Stories December 1941

YEARS ago Science Fiction was considered escapist literature of the most violent sort, creeping into the realm of the written word as a lusty successor to the Yellow-back Novel and the Penny Dreadful. Today that classification not only would be unjust; it isn’t so considered in the general attitude of the reading public.

Nowadays folks escape with detective or western or love stories. Science has moved so rapidly to the fore that Science Fiction barely manages to stay far enough ahead to be considered prophetic.

In this year of disgrace particularly, 1941, when the world is being subjected to shocking news of daily bombardments, and is changing so rapidly that newspaper headlines become in twenty four hours as passe as the Mauve Decade, to write Science Fiction with any attempt at prognostication is to invite disaster, especially when it deals with present world situations.

Such a story is Time Column, by Malcolm Jameson. By the time you read these lines international situations may have changed so radically that certain bits of this splendid yarn may read like yesterday’s newspaper.

Nonetheless, this is a timely story and is worthy of being remembered long after many political aspects have faded. Here’s what Malcolm Jameson has to say about Time Column:

‘In common with other decent minded people, I have been outraged at the spread of International gangsterism throughout the world. I can’t hang the men responsible for it actually, but I can in effigy, so to speak. So in Time Column, instead of inventing a villain, I borrowed the arch-villain of all history—Adolf Hitler. The problem was how to overthrow him.

‘Now, Science Fiction is so full of instances where clever scientists have smashed brutal tyrants that It was hard to find a method that was new. Time travel has always had an appeal for me, so I explored Its possibilities as a means of waging war. I found that a flanking movement, carried out through the dimension of Time, was the answer. But since all existing time machines operate only in one dimension, a problem at once arose.

‘To attack a place from the rear (in the time sense) the army must be moved to the spot at some prior time and in a way that its movement would not be recorded In history. That Involved going back to prehistoric times, which In turn produced a new set of problems dealing with food, supplies, transportation, etc. It was evident at once that the attacking army would have been self-supporting from the moment it was launched. It was also evident that such an army could be quite vulnerable to sabotage.

‘By pouring all these factors together and stirring vigorously, the answer came out the way it did. The stuff jelled into the Time Column. Near the end there was one last hitch, and I lost a lot of time thinking up appropriate ways to dispose of the masterminds of villainy. Eventually I sidestepped the issue by adopting the simple expedient of turning the whole gang loose with no one to prey upon but each other. After that, nature presumably took its course—’

CHAPTER I

Amazing Project

HE felt in his change pocket but all he could find were two coins. The sixpence was too small, so he gave the taxi driver the other—a shilling. Then he bounded up the steps of the War Ministry, resplendent in his new uniform of a major of the British Special Engineering Corps.

Major Jack Winter flashed his appointment card on the bobby at the door and passed on in. In a few minutes more he was fidgeting in a chair across the desk from a stodgy major-general. But there was nothing stodgy about the general’s mind.

“Ah, quite so,” he was saying, “your papers are in perfect order. Moreover, we have many letters from trustworthy sources, including the American Embassy, as to your special abilities. That explains why we have commissioned you in the Special Engineering Corps. Although your country is not wholly at war, a number of your immediate companions will be adventurous Americans like yourself.” The old gentleman cleared his throat and resumed. “You are perhaps wondering at the secrecy thus far preserved. It is now time to tell you. Your corps has been assigned to a very daring undertaking. It is no less a project than the immediate invasion of Germany and the capture of Berlin!”

Major Winter blinked. It was early fall of 1941, and England was still girding herself to resist her own invasion, an event that might occur any day—as soon as Hitler finished his detour through Russia. Such a bold counter-stroke seemed impossible. But all Winter said was:

“Good sir. Count me in.”

“You are not stunned—dismayed?” asked the general.

Winter fingered a spot just over his heart. A small gold locket lay there, out of sight beneath his uniform. It contained a picture worthy sources, including the American Embassy, as to your special abilities. That explains why we have commissioned you in the Special Engineering Corps. Although your country is not wholly at war, a number of your immediate companions will be adventurous Americans like yourself.” The old gentleman cleared his throat, resumed.

“You are perhaps wondering at the secrecy thus far preserved. It is now time to tell you. Your corps has been assigned to a very daring undertaking. It is no less a project than the immediate invasion of Germany and the capture of Berlin!”

Major Winter blinked. It was early fall of 1941, and England was still girding herself to resist her own invasion, an event that might occur any day—as soon as Hitler finished his detour through Russia. Such a bold counter-stroke seemed impossible. But all Winter said was:

“Good sir. Count me in.”

“You are not stunned—dismayed?” asked the general.

JACK WINTER fingered a spot just over his heart. A small gold locket lay there, out of sight beneath his uniform. It contained a picture of a lovely girl, fair-haired and blue-eyed, looking out at the beholder with frank, brave smiling eyes. Frieda Blenheim had been his fiancee. Two months ago she had died under the axe of a top-hatted headsman in Leipsic.

She had been a music student there when the frontiers were closed against her. Her offense was that of being caught by Gestapo agents in the act of feeding two miserable Polish refugees cowering in her cellar. Treason, they called it, though she was American to the core, despite her heritage of German blood.

“I would go through hell,” Jack Winter said harshly, his fierce intensity making the words more like a prophecy than the expression of an idle wish, “to get to Berlin. Before I die I intend to find that arch-devil Himmler and wring his scrawny throat with my own two hands.”

“Ah,” said the stodgy general, a trifle startled at the other’s vehemence, “so much the better. Here is a pass which will admit you to the conference now in progress on the floor above. They are discussing the expedition. You have been appointed as special aide to the commander. Your duty will be to look after supply.”

“Supply?” echoed Major Winter blankly. “I asked particularly for a fighting job.”

“Don’t quibble,” admonished the old man calmly. “You will find fighting enough where you are going. Take the second door to your left. The meeting has already begun.”

Major Jack Winter entered the conference room and stood for a moment in the background, silent. A heated argument was in progress.

“Preposterous, I say!” bellowed an old warhorse, thumping on the table. A bristling white mustache accentuated the redness of his face. Winter recognized him instantly as General Sir Stanley Formley-Higgs, K.C.B., V.C., D.S.O., etc., veteran of many campaigns. He had fought with the Zulus and the Afghans, had seen service in Burma, China and the Sudan. Just now he was nearly choking with indignation. “It is absurd! Fantastic! Idiotic! I want nothing to do with it! A detour of ten thousand years in time, indeed! What crackpot advanced that idea?”

“I did, Sir Stanley,” asserted, a crisp, cold voice quietly, and Winter noted that the speaker was tall and spare and aquiline, with jet-black eyes. His head was square as a die and topped with a stiff pompadour. He wore civilian clothes, and in his hands was a sheaf of papers.

“Within a few months Germany will be an empty shell, attacked from every side,” he went on. “She is already spread out perilously thin over occupied territories, and Hitler’s troubles in Russia are just beginning, despite his seeming triumph in Greece and the Balkans. If you could appear suddenly in the heart of Germany with an army, you could roam over it at will, just as Xenophon did in ancient Persia.”

“Granted,” snapped the general. “If we could only get there.”

“I have perfected the machine that will enable you to do it.”

“Yes, a time machine!” snorted the florid general. “Harrumph!”

Winter could not repress a start. This kind of talk was crazy. But was it? In the throes of war the British Empire would not go to the time and expense of assembling a special engineering corps of military experts and squander millions on supplies just to talk about a fantastic dream.

What a stupendous conception! What a staggering idea! If possible, it could revolutionize warfare. It could turn the world topsy-turvy. It was as far beyond Hitler’s fifth column tactics as these were beyond the old espionage system. A Fifth Column—through time!

MAJOR WINTER let his imagination roam freely for a moment, envisaging regiments of troops being fed into some sort of hopper or contrivance which would carry them back through the centuries to a time where there would be no opposition—before even recorded history began. He saw these troops making their way across sea and forest and marsh into the heart of wild, primeval Germany, setting up their machinery, and coming back through the centuries to burst forth in the very heart of the enemy’s citadel. A detour through time! A Trojan Horse, indeed! A surprise attack that had no precedent in history!

Major Winter leaned forward and touched a fellow listener on the shoulder.

“Who is that man?” he asked in a terse whisper.

The other glanced curiously at his lean, drawn face which still had the marks of recent grief. “Hugh Snyder,” he whispered back. “A mathematical genius and inventor. You must be Jack Winter. My name’s Kelly, Intelligence.”

They shook hands briefly, and turned back to listen. Winter reflected on what little he knew of the man who bore the name of Hugh Snyder.

Hugh Snyder was a shadowy and almost legendary figure who for several years had been whispered about in the highest governmental circles as being engaged in developing a secret weapon that would astonish the world. Until today no one other than a few cabinet officers and the small and select group of technicians who worked with him in his hidden laboratory in Cornwall had actually seen him. Winter looked at him with a new interest. This venture promised opportunities in warfare that he had never thought of before.

“Since our mathematicians have at last found the great fundamental formula which binds energy, matter, space and time together,” Snyder was saying, untroubled by the skeptical looks on the faces of some about him, “we are able to state that we can now manipulate matter so as to make it go backward in time and then bring it forward to the present again.

“Time may be regarded as a sort of rut or groove down which matter has already passed. It seems to be continuous to the past, but non-existent as to the future—as the furrow behind a plow. By the use of special solenoids formed of alloys of rare metals we can convert electric current into a curious negative gravitational force which cuts the barriers of past time with ease. Matter placed in its field can be projected at the rate of about a thousand years a second. Even living organisms suffer nothing by it. The only objections are—”

“Yes, yes,” interrupted Sir Stanley, testily. “Let’s come to those.”

“First, the metals needed are scarce and expensive. Besides iridium and tungsten, we must employ several of the rare Earth metals, and their isolation is notoriously difficult. The machines we have just built or which are under construction are all that we can possibly build. Hence the need for their most economical use. Secondly, we have not been able to penetrate the future. Thirdly, owing to the very high speed of travel, a fine control of time movement is impossible. I find that the smallest practicable unit is five thousand years.”

“Due to?” queried a member of the General Staff.

“Due to Time Inertia. Enough current to jolt the subject into movement at all will kick it fifty centuries on the same impulse. That may seem to be too coarse a unit, but it really doesn’t matter. Our controls are so delicate that by a reversal of the current, the time traversed on the back track will be equal to the other. In jumps of five thousand years or so into the past it is immaterial whether there are a dozen more or less years’ error. If the two legs of the journey are equal, the discrepancies cancel out.”

There was a rustle of papers as Snyder finished. Winter seated himself, exhilarated at the prospect of participating in this daring adventure whose route lay in the uncharted depths of prehistoric time.

The plan was astounding in its boldness and yet so simple! Walls of fortifications meant nothing any longer, such a Time Column could bypass them and come up inside. Moreover, as an offensive weapon it had no peer. Even should the enemy learn that there were such time traveling vehicles, they would not know where and when they would materialize and begin spouting men and guns.

Winter listened with keen interest as the details were discussed. He learned that a small test machine had been tried out with experimental flight to the Cornwall of 3,000 B.C. and successfully returned. The country was reported to be bleak and desolate and without inhabitants, but astronomical observations made by the explorers checked the time range exactly.

They emerged from their return trip unharmed, having been gone exactly the amount of time they had spent in ancient Cornwall plus the dozen seconds needed for the flight. It was then that GHQ had decided to gamble on the expedition. They authorized the building of as many machines as possible and the detail of picked divisions for the fighting job.

Winter’s Engineering Corps was to handle transport, and that he learned quickly was to be an important job. He began taking notes feverishly, in a glow of burning ambition.

The council went on to talk of fuel and ration problems, since nothing was known definitely about the Britain of fifty centuries before.

An auxiliary army of artisans must be provided to assemble the ships that would be needed in 3000 B.C. to move trucks and tanks and field-guns across the North Sea. Power for the time machines must be provided at both ends, and there were thousands of other items. Last of all, they close the site for the take-off—a spot in a forest of Scotland, not far from Glasgow. Callandar was the name of the place.

Winter gathered up his notes and got up from the table in high spirits. At last he was about to get somewhere. In America he had raged and denounced as one small nation after another had been tricked or bulldozed into subjection by the Nazis. He had watched the brutal tactics with high indignation.

But when they cruelly murdered his sweetheart, Frieda, he could contain himself no longer. He had thrown up his engineering job and hastened to Canada, begging to be sent to the Front.

Well, here he was, and in what a Front—the Time Column!

He dreamed that night of the occupation of Berlin, of the sudden eruption in its center of an army of angry veterans, of their quick seizure of the nerve centers of the Reich.

That would be enough. The universal wave of uprising among the enslaved peoples of Europe could be counted on to do the rest. It was breath-taking, colossal. And he was part of it!

CHAPTER II

Probing Time

BEYOND Callandar the woods were teeming with activity. Major Winter walked through them, accompanied by Captain Kelly, the brigade’s intelligence officer. Everywhere there were shops and factories or assembly plants, carefully camouflaged by bough-decorated low roofs. Gasoline storage tanks abounded, and the finishing touches were just being put to an electric generating plant for the Snyder Time-Shuttle.

Hugh Snyder himself, the dark and taciturn inventor who had spoken so forcefully at the conference in London, joined them. He was a queer and cold sort of codger, Winter thought, somehow not as friendly as the major had figured at the conference.

“These are the propulsion rings for the Class-B machines,” he said, pointing to a long row of metallic hoops laid on brick piers.

A bank of transformers stood close by and electricians were completing the hookup. Alongside the first of them a gang of welders were busily assembling a huge steel sphere from orange-peel-shaped plates. When finished, the sphere would have a diameter of about fifty feet.

“The rings are expensive, containing as they do many pounds of rare and costly metals, but at that they are far more efficient than the other system for transporting large quantities of material,” explained Snyder.

“What other system?” asked Kelly.

“The use of Class-A machines, the self-propelled ones,” the inventor replied. “So far I have built only one of those, though there is one other under construction. They are the same size as these spheres, but have less carrying capacity, owing to the necessity of having to carry their own generating plant. Moreover, their cruising range is only some fifty thousand years. After that the elements have to be renewed, and since those are chiefly platinum and iridium, we can afford to build only a few. We must use these sparingly.

“On the other hand, the Class-B units are inert. They proceed through time much as a batted ball does through space. We place them within those rings, load them, then throw an impulse of power through the rings. They at once disappear and rematerialize thousands of years in the past. To send them back to the present, of course, it is necessary to have another set of sending rings at the other end. On such an expedition as this, such a complementary station at the other end is perfectly practicable.”

“Yes,” commented Winter. “I remember the general plan. But when do we start, and for where? Where is that completed Class-A machine?”

“I am taking you to it now. We will get in and take a run back to prehistoric times to pick the site for the other base.”

They went on in silence. Winter noted that a number of tanks had already arrived and were parked in groups of three and four, awaiting loading into the time transports. In another place he saw stacks of steel plates, nicely curved and punched for rivets, which was to be sent back in time and erected to serve as storage tanks for the immense amounts of gasoline to be needed by the army.

There were machine tools, too, and small blacksmith’s forges, field kitchens, mountains of cases of canned goods, and much else. It was a little awesome to see assembled in one spot just a fraction of the stuff required to maintain a considerable army in the field for half a year or more. And he was responsible for a big part of this.

The Class-A time machine was a silvery sphere with no ports and but a single circular door which, however, was wide enough to admit a ten-ton truck or the fuselage of a small fighter airplane. Winter’s quick eye took in at once that such a plane was already loaded inside the machine, its detached wings neatly laid alongside it. Its pilot stood beside the door, talking with the several men who were to go along to reassemble it.

“All set Miller?” inquired Snyder sharply.

“Yes, sir,” replied the aviator. “Everything is ready.”

Snyder inspected the interior of the sphere, testing a tube there and a connection in another place. Then he closed the door.

“You will experience a few queer sensations, but there is nothing about them that will hurt you. Time velocity is impalpable. What you will feel will be a sort of earthquakish vibration as the ship adjusts herself to the rise and fall of the ground level through the ages.”

Major Winter watched him closely as he set the starting lever. A gauge above the power bank calibrated to 50,000 years registered full. The speedometer over the operating desk registered zero. Snyder put the lever in the first notch and pressed a button.

Winter and Kelly felt a slight surge, followed by a trembling that sent electric thrills through their frames. There was a moment of nausea, an instant’s blindness, then a sharp jolt.

“Not bad, eh?” And the ordinarily scowling and silent Snyder allowed himself a wry smile. “We’re there.”

“Where?’ chorused several shaky voices.

“On the same spot in Scotland, only five thousand years ago,” answered Snyder. “Get out and have a look at three thousand years before Christ.”

They clambered solemnly out, looked and gasped. The forest was gone. Everything was gone. All about them was only a grassy plain. The mountains in the distance were no longer familiar of shape, being harsher—more rugged. A frightened doe rose from the grass and scampered away. A bevy of startled birds fluttered upward with raucous cries and joined her flight. Of human habitation there was no sign.

“Looks okay,” said Major Winter, taking over and affecting a calm that he was far from feeling. “But it would certainly be a devil of a spot in which to have a breakdown. Trot out the plane boys, and put it together. We’ll take a short hop and look around.”

Queer thrills were making his spine tingle. It was uncanny to be assembling a super-modern airplane in the Bronze Age. He found it hard to believe this was real or himself more than a figment in a weird dream.

Yet a few hours later he and Kelly squeezed themselves beside the pilot in the tiny two-seater. He was beginning to like Kelly very much. The plane was a special job by Grumman with low speed and no armament, but having a goodly cruising radius. They set her motor humming and shortly were over the highlands to the north of them. The country below appeared to be virgin country. There was neither a crude man-made shelter nor a wisp of smoke to be seen.

“Take a turn in the opposite direction, Miller,” ordered Winter.

The pilot obediently headed south. They crossed the Clyde, circled northern England and came back north along the east coast. It seemed to them that the east coast was farther east than it should have been, and much less indented. The Firth of Forth had narrowed to a rivulet.

It was not until they were nearly back to their starting point that they saw the first vestige of humanity. Atop Stirling Rock they spotted rectangular designs, and swooping low, they saw that these were the crumbling ruins of a habitation of some sort, gone to ruin untold centuries before.

Then, about ten miles beyond, they sighted a solitary human figure sitting on a stone and idly watching a flock of some dozen sheep.

“A man!” yelled Winter. “Set her down Miller.”

IT was an old man, haggard, long-bearded, and almost naked. His only garment was a brief skirt of plaited strips of fur, faintly suggestive of the kilts of plaid that were to follow four thousand years later. When the plane grounded a few hundred feet away from where he sat, he only lifted his head. He looked on apathetically as the three men approached him, showing neither surprise, fear nor pleasure. He simply sat, staring at them woodenly.

“Hard-headed Scot,” commented Kelly. “He isn’t human.”

Kelly, who was a linguist, addressed the ancient Breton in several languages, but got only a sullen silence for a reply. He plied him with pure Gaelic, and finally elicited a couple of sour grunts. The three officers sat down in a semi-circle while Kelly persisted in his attempts at communication.

After fifteen minutes the intelligence captain managed to get somewhere, dragging coarse guttural sounds in bursts of two or three words from the old man’s throat. Then the conversation began to proceed a bit more smoothly. At last Kelly sat back and reported what he had elicited from the incurious old man.

“He says he thinks he is the last man alive. It has been twenty years or more since he saw another human being, and that was when his wife and sons were taken by the terrible sickness—obviously a plague which swept across Europe. He does not know what the ruins on top the rock represent—perhaps a castle of the giants who ruled this country thousands of winters before his own race began.

“Legend has it that they were a fierce and warlike people and built houses that floated on the water. They preyed on other people who lived in a vast land on the other side of the sea, out of which the sun rises, bringing back many captives and other booty.”

“What became of them?” asked Winter.

There was more painful interrogation. The old shepherd had not used his meager vocabulary in years.

“He says no one knows. There was an old tale about a sickness that killed ninety-nine out of every hundred. The gods, as he calls them, then fled to the northland where it is always ice. He thought our plane had been sent by them to take him to Valhalla. That is his story.”

“Hmmm,” mused Winter. “I guess it’s lucky in a way we stopped where we did. It would complicate things for us enormously if we had to fight our way through pre-Norsemen, and look out for an unknown plague to boot. Let’s leave the old guy alone and report back to Snyder. He’ll be anxious to get his machines started on this time shuttle.”

They returned to their starting place to become panic-stricken. There was no Snyder, and more alarming, no time machine. There was only an indentation in the grass where it had been, and a small mound of stuff beside it. The three officers left the plane and ran over to the pile. It proved to be a pup-tent, a few cooking utensils and two cases of assorted grub. There were three hunting rifles, too, and ammunition for them. That was all.

“Marooned, by Jupiter, in Time!” yelled Miller.

Winter looked at Kelly, and Kelly looked at Winter.

“Hold it, chappie,” said Kelly quickly, his own lips white.

“What do you think of this fellow Snyder?” asked Winter bluntly.

Kelly shook his head.

“Personally, I haven’t doped him out yet. Intelligence has combed his pedigree from A to Z and they say he’s regular, but somehow the more I see of him the less I like him. Take the malevolent way he stares at you. Take this …”

“Yes, this,” thought Winter, with an involuntary shudder. Three men and a few supplies alone in a depopulated country, five thousand years away from their own era and kind. Far off, beyond the forests of primeval Europe and the Mediterranean, there was an alien civilization in Egypt under the first pharoahs and in the valley of the Tigris. Those crude peoples, he recalled, were not hospitable to strangers. They made slaves of them, or sacrificed them to their gods.

Why had Snyder abandoned them?

“I agree with you,” he said aloud, making an effort to pull himself together. “When I heard him explain his machines in London that day, I was fairly well impressed, but somehow since—”

The sound of a distant shot caused him to quit speaking. All three of them wheeled and looked toward the quarter from which it came, hope stirring in their hearts. For an ancient gunshot was impossible. The Chinese hadn’t invented gunpowder yet.

Then they saw the crew who had assembled the plane coming through the high grass. One had a doe on his shoulder. Apparently they had been hunting to while the time away. When the mechanics arrived, they brought the explanation of Snyder’s abrupt disappearance.

“Oh,” said one of them, “Colonel Snyder said the site looked okay, so he took off alone. Said it would save hours getting the expedition started. The Class-B machines ought to start coming pretty soon.

“Hmmph!” snorted Winter suspiciously, glancing at Kelly. “I still don’t like it. That was a report we were supposed to make.”

That night he tossed on his cot and tried to think it through, but somehow he could not put his finger on the source of his suspicions. It was only that there had seemed to enter Snyder’s attitude toward the expedition a subtle change for the worse. That was the incomprehensible thing about it.

He had invented the means and had fathered the idea, yet lately, when watched at moments when he was off guard, he seemed contemptuous of it, almost sneering. It was that sly change of manner that was so baffling.

In the morning, though, the fleeting uneasiness of the little pioneer group seemed silly. They were awakened by the sound of howling Klaxons, and sprang from their blankets to see a number of the Class-B machines dotting the field about them, with others materializing every moment. Several were disgorging their passengers. Men in uniform or dungarees were swarming out, and presently a captain came up and saluted.

“Reporting with the first consignment,” he said. “Inside is a duplicate set of the propulsion rings in sections ready to be hooked up. We brought along a knocked down power-plant to run ’em so we can shoot the empty spheres back home. Where do you want ’em, Major?”

“Five hundred yards to the left of where the containers lie,” directed Winter, putting last night’s doubts out of his mind.

Inventors were queer people. The explanation might lie there. In any case, his own job was not intelligence, but transport, and no man in the Time Column was more anxious to get to Berlin than he. There was still a sea to cross and miles of forest to traverse before another set-up was made.

He walked over to show the engineering squad where to set up the generating unit. Kelly followed him, grinning.

“The Time Column is on the march,” said the Irishman. “Think of it. Jack—ping-pong across the centuries, with fifty-foot spheres for balls!”

“I am thinking of it,” said Winter grimly.

But he was thinking of Leipsic in 1941—and Frieda Blenheim.

CHAPTER III

Treachery?

IT took three days to erect the plant and get it working. Major Winter had occasion to pat himself on the back many times for the completeness with which he had worked out his supply schedule. He had made few errors of calculation.

The first of the spheres held a donkey boiler, a pair of electric generators, a transformer, and all the tools and accessories needed to put them into operating condition. The next group was loaded with the nested arcs of the projector hoops that needed only coupling together and being put on suitable foundations. After the second group, more of the Class-B machines kept popping into sight every few hours—as fast as the receiving area was cleared—bringing bricks and mortar, more workmen, galvanized iron and studding for the shacks to be built; and more important to the men on the ground, food supplies and a first-class camp cook.

It was Winter himself who fired up the boiler, using fuel oil from the drums that had come with it. A score of the empty time travel spheres were already in place on their propulsion rings. As soon as his generators were up to speed, he cut in the circuits one by one and watched the steel globes vanish, bound back to the year 1941.

“Hold everything Jack,” said Kelly, after seeing the fifth one make its shimmering disappearance. “Shoot me back in the next one. Any message for the folks up there?”

“Yeah,” grunted Winters. “Send down my mail, and a batch of late newspapers. This business of fighting a war at five thousand years’ range is duller than I thought. And tell that bird Snyder to leave me a note next time he does a quick fade-out. That first night here was a nightmare.”

Kelly grinned, nodded and stepped into the machine. Five seconds later, according to the watch on his wrist, he was walking out of it into the Twentieth Century. A sentry saluted him and called his attention to a sign nailed to a nearby tree.

WARNING! KEEP CLEAR OF THE PROJECTORS, AS TIME SHUTTLES MAY MATERIALIZE AT ANY MOMENT.

He pulled aside to allow a file of troops to pass him. They marched straight into the machine he had just vacated until the officer with them called “Enough!” There was a flicker, and the machine disappeared. The expedition was beginning to move in earnest!

“Down below,” as everyone was beginning to call it. Major Winter and his gang worked ceaselessly throughout the daylight hours. When nightfall came they would throw themselves on the grass, exhausted, while a night shift took over. These men tended the two propulsion rings that handled the gas transport.

Every hour a sphere filled with high test gasoline materialized and had to be connected to one of the two pipelines that led down the slope to where the great storage tank had been promptly erected. The motorized equipment already in use required great quantities of fuel, above which consumption it was necessary to build vast reserves.

Meanwhile, Lieutenant Miller in his plane scouted the eastern shore-line and found a suitable harbor in which they were to launch the motor-driven barges then being prepared in sections at what would some day be Clydebank. Those would be the last things to come down.

Pine forests had first to be located, trees cut and dragged by tractors to the harbor. A gang of workmen had already established an advanced camp there and was building several sets of pile-driver leads against the day when the pines should arrive and they could construct the docks.

Back at the main base. Winter’s growing crew had built storehouses, into which carloads of hams, barrels of salt meat, flour, beans, coffee and sugar were being carted daily. Cigarettes were regarded as a necessity, and those came in large quantity. Another storage tank was being erected at the harbor and a pipeline between it and the one at Main Base laid.

GENERAL WORREL, the rather fatuous commander of the entire expedition, marveled at the efforts of the indefatigable young American. He, like the overseas young man, nursed a private grievance against the Nazis, as well as cherishing the universal indignation caused by Hitler’s arrogance toward the rest of the world.

His home in London had been gutted by fire and half the members of his family killed. He was not sure where the others were. All members of the British Time Column took joy in their work, knowing that every hour was bringing them closer to the day of reckoning. Overtime spent in greasing the skids for Messrs. Hitler, Himmler, Goebels, and their gang was a positive pleasure.

“This is a remarkable maneuver, all right,” said Winter one day, “and magnificent in its simplicity.

“The only thing that troubles me is that for a time we will be cut off from two-way communication with ‘up there’. It is a pity we haven’t one of the Class-A type machines back here.”

“Yes,” agreed General Worrel thoughtfully, “but they are very expensive. The partly finished one is all we are going to get. There is no more material. But why do we have to be cut off?”

“Because the shuttles require rings and power at both ends,” explained Winter. “As soon as all our stores are accumulated and we are ready to cross the sea, they will ship down the remainder of the rings for us to take them with us. After we have moved our expedition to the site of Twentieth Century Berlin we will need every one of them for the sort of surprise mass attack we have in mind. The tanks, infantry, and the propaganda experts who are to take over the Axis radios and spread the news must be sent up promptly. After the victory we can send back for the technicians and laborers.”

Worrel nodded. He could see the difficulty of keeping in touch with GHQ.

“The final plan will be sent down by the second Class-A machine,” he commented. “After it comes, we will leave Scotland altogether. From then on we will have to move blind on a strict time schedule.”

Yes, time was the essence of it. The Battle of the Atlantic was growing critical; the night bombings were making a wasteland of England. Speed was everything.

It was for that reason that when the order came an hour later, via Captain Kelly, from General Sir Stanley Formley-Higgs with orders for Major Winter to come ‘up there’ on the first morning shift of shuttles and enjoy a week’s leave. Winter raised his eyebrows in astonishment. He was not only surprised but angry. He had too much to do to take leave.

“What the devil does this mean?” he growled.

“Oh, that,” said Kelly mysteriously. “That is my doing. I took a long shot and hit. I signed your name to the application.”

“What!” stormed Winter, “at a time like this?”

“Take it easy and listen.” Kelly dropped his voice and took the precaution to go outside and take a turn around the tent to be sure there were no eavesdroppers.

“I have just now been sent down here to stay. But friend Snyder is still ‘up there’, ostensibly seeing to the final touches on the number two machine. Every day he says he goes off to Clydebank, where it is being built, but I had my men tail him repeatedly. Often, he doesn’t go to Clydebank. Usually it is to Edinburgh where invariably he has shaken his trailers.

“He knew he was being followed and squawked to GHQ—said it was a slur on his honor. So they telegraphed me to lay off and sent me down here. I don’t like it. I tell you, there is something about Snyder that smells.”

“What has that got to do with my taking leave?” demanded Winter. “I’m no sleuth. If your men couldn’t tail the guy, how—”

He broke off questioningly.

“He knows I’m off the case,” said Kelly, and Winter was impressed by his earnestness, “and he is not so likely to be suspicious if he bumps into you. You can go and come with a freedom I never had. Maybe the brass-hats know all the answers, but I won’t be easy about this show of ours until I know why Snyder goes to Edinburgh when he says he goes down the Clyde.”

“I see. What else have you got on him?”

“I went into his room one day and noticed he suddenly clamped his left palm shut. I got him excited and he began gesticulating. I finally had a glimpse. His palm was plastered inside with lampblack and tiny specks of unburned paper.”

“Oh,” said Winter, comprehending. “He’d just burned a secret message.”

“Exactly. I tried to trace that but all I could learn was that a porter had brought it from a dirty tavern called ‘Jock o’ the Heather’ in Edinburgh. You’ll find it in a twisty lane in that run-down district behind the Castle. It’s a dive, the sort of dump you wear old clothes to and leave all but your silver money at home. Now, if a fellow with nothing to do, like a soldier or sailor on leave, should decide to go there and hang out …”

“I get you,” said Winter slowly. “You want me to spend my week’s leave haunting this joint, trying to get the lowdown on Snyder.”

“Yeah.” yawned Kelly. “And a week’s fling after this grind won’t hurt you, either.”

“Done,” said Winter, because he had never ceased to wonder over the subtle change that had come over Snyder since that first day in London.

FINDING the “Jock o’ The Heather” was not such a tough assignment. Winter simply prowled the district, exploring the maze of lanes and alleys, until he stumbled upon the tavern, and a miserable, dirty place it proved to be.

A slatternly barmaid was presiding when he entered. She regarded him with obvious disapproval, spilling half his ale when she served it. But he pretended to be half-tipsy, appeared not to notice, and wavered off to a nearby dark booth to consume the bitter stuff.

He stayed all afternoon, even feigned sleep for awhile, holding his head down on the stained, black old table. Later he appeared to revive and had a drink of whiskey. After a little jollying and some mild flirtation, the bar girl relaxed her hostile attitude a little, and a couple of bluejackets from a cruiser laid up at Rosyth joined him in his booth. Thus, he became accepted as a respectable barfly.

It was not until the fourth night of his leave that he saw or heard anything of interest. By that time the habitues of the place had pegged him as an U.S. sailor from whom they could cadge occasional drinks. His speech was so broadly American, and his habit free but not lavish of spending, that he was unmistakably stamped as a friendly outlander. Whatever the occupations of those who frequented the place, they had come to feel that he was a stray of no consequence to them.

By the time that fourth night rolled around. Winter was moodily doing nothing but sitting in a black corner, guzzling booze and thinking of Frieda behind his newspaper.

Then his vigil was at last rewarded, and the hand that held the edge of the evening paper trembled just a little.

On the other side of the room, in another booth, sat Snyder. With him was a rough-looking civilian Winter had never seen before. Snyder himself was in civilian clothes, despite regulations to the contrary. He had been granted a colonel’s commission, out of gratitude for his marvelous invention.

They were talking earnestly in low tones.

Winter noticed that though the place was fairly crowded and many drinkers were standing, none of the usual hangers-out made any effort to occupy the two other empty seats in Snyder’s booth.

Winter shifted his position so he could peek between the chairs and see beneath the table, taking good care at the same time to keep his own face partly shielded by his newspaper. His neck was stiff and his patience threadbare by the time he saw what he waited for. Two hands stole forward, met on touching knees. Fingers wriggled and something white and flimsy passed from Snyder to his companion. That was all.

Shortly thereafter Snyder got up, stretched and yawned elaborately, and left the place.

Winter waited a discreet ten minutes, then called the girl to settle his reckoning. Snyder’s companion seemed to have the same idea and at the same time. But Winter got the worst of it.

The barmaid was maddeningly deliberate, and the other man beat him out the door by a full minute. When Winter got out into the black street there was no one to be seen in any direction.

A swift run to each of the adjacent corners revealed nothing. In a darkened city and in the rough, cobble-paved alleyways that twisted and intertwined like the snakes on the Laocobn group, finding a man with a minute’s start was a sheer impossibility.

Jack Winter sighed and gave up the chase.

THE next morning he stayed at the base at Callandar. In the afternoon he strolled through the forest and watched idly as the workmen loaded machine-guns and ammunition into the shuttle spheres. A few of the motor-barge engines were beginning to go down.

Within another two weeks, the expedition could begin its trek to primeval Germany.

He encountered Colonel Snyder, standing near the Number One Class-A machine, which had been used for the single trip to the year 3,000 B.C. The inventor was scowling at it. as in deep meditation, the outcome of which he did not like.

“Big night in town last night. Colonel?” asked Winter casually.

Snyder wheeled, still scowling. Then he smiled in an oilish fashion.

“On the contrary,” he replied, with a remarkable show of good will for him. “I wish I had. But I was held up the whole day long by those dumm-kopf—those dumb-bells at Clydebank. They are taking an insufferable time to assemble my other machine. Claim that tungsten is hard to get now, and that the government has shut down on iridium. It may be weeks before they deliver it. I was so tired when I left that I took a room in a Glasgow hotel and spent the night there.”

“Too bad,” commiserated Winter. “I had better luck, myself.” The other leered understandingly, then stalked away. Major Jack Winter looked after him, and his lip curled.

“You dirty liar,” he was thinking. “Now I know you smell!”

CHAPTER IV

Cut Off!

JACK WINTER turned in that night, still debating just what further steps he could or should take. Officially his hands were tied. He finally dropped off to sleep with the problem unsolved.

It was well past midnight when the air raid siren sounded. But it was too late to drive the raiders off, for the Nazi pilots had a perfect picture and understanding of their objective. A steady droning roar furnished an awful obligato to the detonation of bursting bombs and the hammering of ack-acks. The bombs fell like rain, and the effect was devastating, soul-shattering—and deadly in the uncanny accuracy.

Great trees were uprooted, splintered to fine shreds and flung about like match sticks. Buildings were ignited by incendiaries, springing into full flame as though they had been previously soaked with oil. Fires lit simultaneously at a hundred places. Terrific, blinding, destroying concussions swept the camouflaged forest area in every direction. Bugles blared, men ran for bomb shelters, the anti-aircraft guns hammered away. But it was futile. This base had depended more on secrecy and camouflage than armament and RAF units for safety. The accuracy of the raiders was uncanny; the havoc and carnage were awful.

Jack Winters staggered awake, blinking. Callandar Base was being blasted into ruins around him. If the attack kept up another ten minutes nothing would be left of this vital surface base. But how? Then Jack Winter had a wild thought. Could this bombing raid be the result of that paper he had seen Snyder slip to the ruffian in that Edinburgh tavern? But that didn’t make sense. Snyder was here, too. Would he have risked his life in such a mad scheme?

The idea was preposterous. It didn’t fit at all with Snyder’s original plans to enable England to execute a huge military maneuver by way of a Time Column.

Hastily Winter pulled on his clothes and ran out into the lurid night. One place was as safe as another, and he had to see what damage was being done. In a minute there was respite, as the second wave of bombers passed over. Then Winter managed to get on into the forest.

Already the damage was immense. It was easy to see. Even the power house was burning brilliantly. In another area the flaming general storehouse gave a terrible illumination. A crescendo of noise overhead warned of the coming of the third and final flight of destroyers.

Winter ran past the site of the propulsion rings where the source of the shuttles had been in the process of loading. The spot was hardly recognizable. The rings had been hopelessly warped or torn apart and flung in every direction. Only shapeless, twisted metal and yawning, smoking craters marked the place from which Main Base had been fed. Groaning aloud in his anguish, Winter found temporary shelter under an overturned tank body.

As he cowered there, stopping his ears against the deafening crash of the bursting, rending bombs, the full enormity of the catastrophe came to him. This meant that all the assembled equipment here was lost, and to figure the correct inventory and await its replacement would mean all sorts of delay. And to Winter delay was maddening.

He wanted to drive ahead, to get to Germany—to avenge Frieda Blenheim and all of suffering humanity that had felt the blight of that same withering hand of the demon.

Nor was this all. The rate of the invasion of the Time Column into modern Germany had been cut in half. For the rings were practically irreplaceable. Worst of all was the fact that the enemy had smelled out this base. This raid was of the magnitude of that one over Coventry—and on an innocent looking forest. The Nazis knew. And there would be other raids.

He caught sight of a figure skulking in the trees ahead, darting occasionally from one to another. The figure was tall and spare and wore the jacket of a colonel. It was Snyder, and the man was sobbing in his rage.

Winter sprinted after him and was almost on him when he saw him step out from under the deceptive shelter of a tree and shake his fist angrily at the planes in the roaring heavens. Then he ran on, never seeing Winter.

Winter, puzzling over this queer act, followed the inventor. He stumbled and fell. He scrambled to his knees and saw that Snyder was making for the Class-A Time-Traveler, which by some miracle had thus far escaped destruction. Winter grabbed up the bar of iron that had tripped him and ran after him.

He was not quick enough to overtake his man before Snyder reached the machine. Snyder climbed in and began closing the door behind him. Winter thrust the iron bar forward and inside far enough to prevent its being shut. Snyder tugged and swore, but the door would not close.

“Not so fast,” shouted Winter. “I’m going with you.”

Snyder recognized him and surlily opened the door. He looked not only angry but frightened as he closed the door and set the travel lever in a notch. Then he reached for the starting button.

“No you don’t,” snarled Winter, and his fist landed clean on Snyder’s jaw.

The thin man went down, out cold. Winter glanced again at the travel lever. It was in the third notch, not the first, which would have stopped them at Main Base.

He changed the setting, and then, as the inferno of explosions recommenced outside and successive concussions rocked the ship. Winter pressed the button himself. The machine vibrated sickeningly, and then all was quiet. Nineteen Forty-one was five thousand years in the future.

Snyder was coming to. He dragged himself groggily up onto an elbow, then sat up and began to rub his jaw.

“Fool!” he growled, “I was trying to save the machine, and you struck me—your superior officer!”

“Yeah?” was the answer. “It may interest you to know that I was in the ‘Jock o’ the Heather’ last night.”

“So?” said Snyder, regaining his customary calm and speaking quite smoothly. “Are you intimating that I was there, too? That, my friend, is something you cannot prove.”

“Neither can you prove I struck you,” was Winter’s quiet rejoinder. “Just what is your game, Snyder? You are of German ancestry, I know. But you voluntarily contributed your invention to Great Britain.”

“They why do you question me?” said Snyder haughtily.

And Winter had not the answer to that one.

There was a bitter and hostile silence between them as they walked across the field at Main Base toward the General’s quarters. It was near dawn when they got there, but they woke him up. He received them sleepily, sitting on the side of his bunk and running his hands through his tousled hair as they talked.

Snyder, as his rank permitted, made the first report. He stated simply that there seemed to have been an unexpected chance air raid and that his only thought was to save the invaluable Class-A machine from a bomb hit.

“That is a lie,” blurted out Winter, furious at the casual manner of the other’s report. “It was a devastating, planned raid, with hundreds of planes coming over in at least three waves. As nearly as I can make out there is nothing left ‘up there’. There has been treachery, sir, but I am not prepared to say from what quarter.”

“Ah, well,” said the general, yawning, “those things happen in wartime. We cannot always have smooth going. There is nothing we can do about it tonight. Tomorrow we will take it up in council.”

WORREL lay back on his bunk and pulled up the blanket, signifying the interview was at an end. Winter bit his lip. There seemed nothing to do but withdraw. Snyder saluted stiffly as if to follow. But when Winter got outside and looked around, the inventor was not with him. Winter glared at the door venomously, shocking awake the drowsy orderly who stood before it.

“The senile old fool!” he said to himself. “Why did they have to drag a man out of retirement to head a jam-up expedition like this? He’s the uncle of some Lord Something-or-other on the distaff side, I suppose.”

He listened for a moment, but all he could hear was the faint mumble of voices. He could not guess at what Snyder was telling now and he had no pretext to re-enter the place. He turned dejectedly and went to his own quarters where he related to Kelly all that had taken place.

“It’s tough, agreed Kelly, “but Snyder’s position seems as impregnable as his actions seem impossible. My fingers have been slapped, and so will yours be if you have nothing more positive to offer than this. We have a couple of bits of uncorroborated circumstantial evidence and a flock of vague suspicions. GHQ believes in the man, so does Sir Stanley, and reason says we ought to. So unless we can pin him down with cold facts we’re licked before we start.”

Winter wearily pulled off his blouse and made ready for bed.

“We’ve got odds enough to fight on this stunt without having to deal with sabotage and favoritism,” he complained bitterly. For two cents I’d—”

“Skip the two cents and come to bed,” advised Kelly. “One stink is enough, and tomorrow is another day. We’ve got the guy with us back here now. All we have to do is stay on his trail and not tip our hands any more than we have. Sooner or later we’ll trip him up if he is guilty.”

THE morning’s conference was a stormy one. The more the problem was discussed the more acute it appeared. Most of those present agreed that the intensity of the raid was proof that the Nazis is knew of the existence of the base. They could be expected to follow it up with others at definite and regular intervals. As long as these persisted, it was a reckless waste to send up units of the time traveling equipment. For the shuttles would be useless without propulsion rings to send them back, and all those left in 1941 had been destroyed. Even if the B.T.C. should send up some of their own sorely needed units to replace them, a topside power plant would have to be rebuilt.

“I can take the Class-A machine and go up to reconnoiter damages,” offered Snyder.

“No,” objected Winter, speaking out hotly despite his relatively junior rank. “It’s time capacity was only fifty thousand years and we have already used up fifteen. If we use another ten now, and ten later, we will have only enough to make a single reconnaissance to Berlin when we get there. The extra trip you propose would use up our margin of safety. As much as we dislike it, we must wait—or otherwise go on as we are.”

Several of the senior officers nodded in agreement with him. He listened with grim satisfaction as the vote was taken and it was decided to wait at least a few days for a possible contact from ‘up there’. Perhaps not all the rings or power lines had been destroyed. Perhaps the second Class-A machine would be finished soon. Meantime he watched the sour visage of Snyder, who clearly did not relish having his proposition turned down.

MAJOR Winter by that time realized keenly how silly and baseless his and Kelly’s suspicions of Snyder must seem to those in authority, but he was still convinced that the man was doing everything he could to wreck the B.T.C. He did not mean to let him slip away until he had solved the mystery. Winter leaned over and whispered to Kelly that hereafter they must keep a sharp watch over the parked Time-Traveler, and the intelligence officer nodded grimly.

The council went into a discussion as to ways and means if it were found they were cut off indefinitely. Winter sat staring at the table, and a tumult of questions kept plaguing him.

Snyder had invented the machine. Snyder had sold the War Office on using it. Snyder had been commissioned and sent along with the expedition. Then he had subtly changed his attitude. He went off on strange, secret trips to dark rendevous. He sent and received notes that had to be burned. Winter was convinced that he had prior knowledge of the air raid and had tried to escape it by jumping back in time—not to Main base, but beyond. Now he was trying to duck again. Why?

If he had been loyal in the beginning, which was obvious, what had brought about the change? Threats? Bribes? The Gestapo was skillful in the use of both. Yet if he had been a Fifth Columnist, why had he given Britain so unique and valuable a weapon of war?

Was it simply to divert and waste the rare metals so sorely needed elsewhere, not to mention the other stores and equipment and men employed? That did not make much sense either. It was too cheap a price for so epoch-making an invention.

A deep frown furrowed Winter’s brow. His mind began to play with a new theory. Supposing Snyder was really a Nazi agent, could it be that the invention was a German one which had been thoroughly tested and found to contain secret defects that would prove fatal in the end? It might appear workable and pass all superficial tests, and the British could be expected to snap at it as a golden opportunity. They would squander men and invaluable material on it only to lose them. This was a plausible theory, another example of the diabolical cunning employed by the Nazis in international intrigue. Yet Winter knew he could not prove a single item in his indictment.

“Why do we have to sit here and twiddle our fingers?” General Worrel was demanding. “If they have smelled out the topside base and blasted it once, they will do it again. We can send up half our rings and reestablish the shuttle, but if they blast those, where are we? With a quarter of our Time equipment left, I say forget our losses and go ahead with what we’ve got. We have all our men, our guns, ammunition, and the bulk of our supplies. There are trucks and tanks and gasoline to run them.”

“Can tanks swim, or thousands of tons of food fly?” asked the Naval aide caustically. “Where are our ships and the engines for them? They were next to come down. Now they are gone.”

“We can build ships,” shouted Worrel, “like the Vikings did!”

“Out of what?” snapped the Naval man. “The only trees in this country are scrubs. We found that out when we went to build our docks.”

There was a dead silence. Then: “We’ll wait for one week for orders from ‘up there’,” ruled Worrel. “Then we make our own plans.”

CHAPTER V

Another Step Backward

IT was just after four in the morning when Kelly shook Winter into wakefulness.

“You take over now, so I can grab a little shut-eye before breakfast,” said Kelly softly.

Winter sprang to his feet and put on his coat and cap. He checked his automatic and saw it held a full clip. That he dropped into its holster and then slid out into the still black night. As he groped his way to the Time-Traveler he became aware of a ruddy flickering reflection from the curved hulls of some nearby shuttles.

Just then he heard distant voices yelling, and the clanging of an iron bar against a metal plate. Fire! As he rounded the Time-Traveler he saw where it was—the main storehouse had flames belching from one end of it. As he stared in sick horror it seemed to burst into blaze all over, and five seconds later was enveloped in raging fire from sill to ridgepole.

His first instinct was to rush toward it, but he checked it. For an instant he was torn between his obvious duty —to take charge of the fire-fighting party first to arrive—and his self-imposed task of guarding the time machine. It was a hard choice, especially as he saw the grass catch fire and waves of flames run along the ground toward other buildings and sheds. But the alarm had already been given and men by the thousands were pouring out of the barracks and onto the scene.

Winter heard running foot-steps behind him. He turned to see a slender form leap in through the door of the Traveler. Without an instant’s hesitation Winter made two tremendous leaps and dived through the door after him. He stumbled and struck the slick deck face down and slid entirely across the cab until he brought up against one of the power units.

Stunned, he heard the door clang shut and experienced the momentary nausea and uncertainty as the machine launched itself through time. By the end of the five seconds Winter was on his feet and facing Snyder. His automatic was out and covering the inventor.

“Well,” he said harshly, and his trigger finger itched to squeeze the steel under it, “you didn’t get away with it.”

Two tremendous explosions outside rocked the Traveler, and debris pelted its hull. Six or eight others followed in close succession, but farther away. Winter knew without being told what was happening. They were back at the old base in 1941, and it was being bombed again.

“General Worrel sent me to report the fire and ask for orders,” snarled Snyder.

“Quick work,” was Winter’s sarcastic answer. “I’ll deliver that report and get the orders. Then you and I will go back together.”

He bound Snyder to a steel frame, taking no special care to be gentle as he twisted the heavy wire about his ankles, and wrists. He lifted Snyder’s keys and snapped the lock on the control lever. Ignoring his captive’s angry protests, Winter pulled the port open and looked out on an almost unbelievable scene of desolation.

Where once a sheltering forest had stood was only a churned waste of torn earth and blasted rock. What had been a bustling military base was no more than a welter of bomb-craters. Except for shapeless bits of metal and scattered human fragments, there was no sign that the place had ever been visited by man. It was full dawn by now, and as far as Winter could see the harried area stretched for miles. But the sky was clear of planes. That last stick of bombs must have been the parting gift.

Suddenly, as if materializing from thin air, a steel-helmeted figure rose from the ground close by. At first he scanned the heavens, then looked at the waste about him. His eye lit on the time machine, and he trudged through the loose earth toward it. Winter saw he wore a Lt. Colonel’s uniform and the special badge of the GHQ.

“Thank God, you’ve come. Major,” exclaimed the officer as he approached. “They thought you would, sooner or later, so they’ve kept me here in this dug-out waiting for you. We’re the third on this detail—all the others were wiped out. The Huns come over every four hours, day and night. It has been hell.”

He plucked a sealed envelope from an inner pocket.

“For your general. You fellows are to make your way to Berlin as per plan with what you’ve got. Under no circumstances try to come back, as we cannot maintain this place any longer. Later we will send you the final plan. By the time you are set and ready, the number two machine will be done. Good luck and goodbye.”

The colonel stuck out his hand, but Winter spoke rapidly for two minutes, sketching out what he knew and suspected about the inventor Snyder, concluding with the story of the fire, now raging “down below.”

“Looks bad, I must admit,” acknowledged the colonel. “I’ll report it, and no doubt Intelligence will have another look.”

“Thanks.” said Winter laconically, and gripped the hand in farewell.

In a matter of seconds he was back on the plains of prehistoric Scotland, but the total elapsed time since his departure had been close to an hour. In that time much had happened. Winter opened the door and was aghast at the size of the conflagration. The rows of storehouses had already been consumed and were piles of glowing coals.

Now the big storage tanks were afire—fuel oil. lubricating oil, and gasoline. Heavy clouds of dense black smoke obliterated half the sky. There were acres and acres of black stubble where grass had been. Ten thousand sweating and grimy men were busy fighting the blaze, but the huge reserves of the Time Column had been wiped out.

Winter started away from the machine, still leaving his prisoner behind him. He saw Kelly staggering toward him, and he did not recognize the captain at first, for his face was covered with soot and his uniform resembled nothing but old rags.

“Good Lord!” groaned Winter.

“Let me break it to you gently,” said Kelly panting. “As you see, everything—or almost everything—is wiped out. The old man is hopping up and down like a pea on a hot griddle. He’s yelling for your blood. You weren’t in your quarters and you weren’t at the fire. Snyder has been filling him full of stuff.”

“Snyder!” said Winter contemptuously, jerking a thumb toward the Traveler door. “Go in and have a look. We’ve got him. He set the fire, and I nabbed him in the act of making a getaway. Come on. Help me untie him and we’ll take him straight to the old boy. This thing is going to be settled now.”

Kelly looked at him in blank astonishment.

“Don’t you understand. Jack Winter?” he pleaded. “Snyder is the fair-haired lad. He’s got a prearranged alibi for everything.”

“Come on,” said Winter grimly. “My colors are nailed to the masthead.”

Kelly shrugged, and complied.

With their sullen prisoner they strode over to where the angry old general was pacing back and forth and cursing a blue-streak at the general incompetence of every man in his division. When he finally paused to look up at the three approaching officers, one marching with hands up-raised and a pistol at his back, he was purple.

“Stop that nonsense!” he bellowed. “Winter, hand that gun to my adjutant. Snyder, come here and tell me what all this is about.”

The general almost choked with rage. Snyder dropped his arms to his side. When he spoke it was quietly and with restraint, as if in sorrow, not anger.

“As you remember. General, I called on you late last night and told you the peculiar circumstances about my relations with Mrs.— our mutual friend, let us say—in Edinburgh, which I believed explained fully the absurd suspicions of Kelly and Winter.” He coughed discreetly and shot an exulting sidelong glance toward Winter, who was boiling.

“Oh, quite,” grunted the general. “The confounded asses!”

“After that, I warned you of the extremely vulnerable position we would find ourselves in if by any chance our stores should be lost by theft, storm or fire, and recommended the issuance of orders today for redoubling the sentries?”

“Yes, yes,” said the general impatiently. “Of course, I remember. We talked most of the night.”

“I also informed you that these two officious young men had set themselves as custodians of my time machine, which, in the event of any such catastrophe might prevent me from going immediately back to our old base and reporting the matter.”

“You did,” assented the general, glaring at Winter and Kelly. “And I told you to ride over them roughshod and go. It was then the fire broke out.”

“Exactly,” said Snyder with perfect suavity. “I went, but Winter followed and held me up at the point of a gun, making me a prisoner. Now he has the effrontery to charge me with starting this fire.”

“Did you ever hear of those cigar-size, delayed-action incendiary bombs. General?” burst out Winter, unable to restrain himself longer. “He could have sprinkled them about yesterday and still have spent the night—”

“Silence!” roared the general. “I’ll have no more of this. Winter, you are relieved from all duties. You are under arrest.”

“No, General,” protested Snyder, as if the matter were no more than a trifling annoyance, “I am not vindictive. I think perhaps Winter has too big a job for him and that he and Kelly suffer delusions, but I see no point in persecuting him. I think he has orders for you.”

Winter, in the excitement, had forgotten about those. Now he presented them in stony silence. The general tore them open and read them hurriedly.

“Damnation,” he growled, “what a pass!” He scowled about at the still raging fires and the tired, baffled men fighting them. To Winter and Kelly he gave the curt order, “Get down there and help. I’ll take this mess up later.”

THE next council of war was less stormy. They could not go back. Not only did their orders flatly forbid it, but if the Germans kept up their bombing it meant suicide. They could not stay where they were, for there were no trees for timber. There was no local population to press into service.

To scatter over Britain—and that is what they would have to do to survive—meant they would soon degenerate into a race of savages. They might exist as isolated and widely separated small groups of hunters, but in the end they would surely die. Moreover, most of them were itching to get on to Berlin.

Someone remembered the Winter-Kelly report of a previous race. Those two officers, being out of grace, had been excluded from the conference. Now they were sent for. Winter did the speaking, confident and unregenerate despite the rough official handling he had .

“Yes. We were told that in former ages this land was inhabited by giants and gods and that there were castles and towns. That means people, flocks, perhaps farms. They had ships. I have looked over the salvage from the fire and I find that our stock of flour is little damaged and that we have several hundred tons of ham and bacon left. Some of it is charred, but most of it is edible.

“Hundreds of drums of gasoline were recovered from the tanks of trucks, tanks and tractors. We can abandon most of those and use the gasoline to propel the few trucks we need to carry our guns and ammunition. In that other age we may find horses or oxen to haul the trucks when the fuel gives out. Let’s quite wasting time here and jump back another five thousand years into the past.”

A babble of voices arose. Some approved, others not. The daring proposition was argued pro and con. In the end the pros had it. They would go back. A deeper detour into the past seemed to be the only feasible course open. They would split their supply of repulsion rings and set up a new shuttle, this time to the year 8,000 B.C.

Worrel objected it would be a shot in the dark. Someone should go ahead and scout. That brought the thing back fairly into Winter’s and Kelly’s laps. They had interviewed the solitary shepherd of this age; hence, they were the only men competent to deal with the antique languages. They were chosen to lead the punitive expedition deeper into the past.

CHAPTER VI

The Giants

EIGHT thousand, B.C.! When Kelly and Winter stepped out of the machine it was into the midst of what seemed to be a duel of giants. Two tremendous, red-bearded men stood facing one another on a spot about a hundred feet from the Time-Traveler, each raining blows on his adversary with a long double-handed sword.

Their only garments were kilts of pelts and rough sandals. Despite their eight feet of height and immense bulk, they danced about like fencers, parrying the blows that were falling upon them with a swiftness and dexterity that was amazing. A group of their kind stood beyond them, looking on.

There was a shout of amazement and the battle stopped abruptly. Both men turned to stare at the strange globe that had materialized out of thin air. Both bellowed like bulls and fearlessly charged forward, waving their ruddy bronze weapons in circles above their heads.

Kelly tried in vain to indicate their mission was peaceful, but the giants continued their charge. The lust for murder was in their red eyes. Major Winter did not hesitate a moment. His face stern and cold, he whipped out his pistol and fired two shots point-blank. The human behemoths pitched headlong forward, their broadswords flying from their hands and clanging against the hull of the Time-Traveler.

Winter stepped over the bodies and, still holding the pistol ready, regarded the awestruck group of giants. They had started to follow the charge, but had stopped and were gazing open-mouthed at the sight before them. Their two greatest champions had been slain by this pale wraith of a pygmy who had appeared from nowhere with no more formidable weapon than a black stone held in his hand! It was magic!

“Now talk to them,” ordered Winter grimly. “They will listen. But don’t try to sell them the idea of time travel. You’d better just say we are wizards from beyond the western sea who have come to call on their king. Find out where he hangs out. While you are palavering. I’ll have Miller and the boys put our little scout plane together.”

Kelly picked out the most important looking of the surviving giants, a big brute a head and a half taller than himself, and began talking. He found to his relief that he had less difficulty reaching a common tongue than he expected.

Languages change vastly in the course of a few thousand years, but this primitive one seemed nearly static. It resembled closely the jargon of mixed Gaelic, old German and early Norse that he had used on the shepherd met in 3000 B.C. By the time the plane was assembled he had learned a good deal.

“I think these fellows are forerunners of the Vikings,” he said to Winter, as the giants crowded around to gape at the plane. “You remember the shepherd said that his forefathers immigrated to the northland after that great plague a century or so before his time. And from the names they have, I take it they also represent the origins of the later Nurse mythology.

“This guy calls himself Thrym. The king’s name is Skrymer, and he lives in a castle called Yottenholm. That must be at Stirling, from his description of it. Legend eventually made them into fearsome giants, though you can see for yourself they are ordinary men—just big.”

“Yeah,” grunted Winter. “Well, let’s get going. Do you think you can coax your friend Thrym into the plane? It may save more fireworks when we get to Yottenholm. You and I can straddle the fuselage and hang on to struts.”

Thrym was delighted. He had admired the “chariot” in the early stages of its assembly and had offered to send for a team of oxen to draw it. When he saw how light and easily managed it was, he told a gang of his retainers to do the pulling instead. But the addition of the wings mystified him. He complained they would catch on bushes and trees.

They wedged him into the seat beside the pilot and strapped him in. He started violently at the first roar of the engine, and his minions scattered like frightened deer. The sudden jerk of the swift take-off run and the almost immediate soaring into the sky reduced him to speechlessness.

He stared in glassy-eyed silence as they circled Stirling Rock and watched with horror as the ground rose up to meet them.

“Now I know you are truly wizards,” he gasped when the little machine bumped to a stop on the plain in the shadow of the rock. He tore away his fastenings and got out, visibly shaken.

“I will go ahead and prepare the way,” he added, after a moment. “It is a long, hard climb. Skrymer will send down litters and bearers … unless it is your wish to ascend by some strange magic of your own.”

Winter glanced up at the sheer cliff. The place was an inland Gibralter, straight up on three sides, approachable only by a steep hogback ramp on the fourth. Kelly gave vent to a low whistle, and Miller groaned.

“We will await Skrymer’s hospitality,” Winter told the giant gravely.

Skrymer’s hospitality proved hard to take. His castle consisted of a single immense room. Its walls were of stacked field-stones and boulders chinked with mud. The roof was built of massive timbers piled across whole tree trunks used for beams. There was no opening anywhere except for the great door.

The gloomy interior was filled with the smoke of cooking, mingled with the stench of carrion, and flavored slightly by the aroma of dogs, horses, cattle, and unwashed human bodies. It was lit by burning wicks laid in seashells filled with melted fats. The floor was ankle-deep in rubbish—bones, ashes and refuse dominating. In one corner was a middenheap.

The banquet their host gave them was particularly revolting. The food was prepared before their eyes, beginning with the first step of driving eight oxen in and slitting their throats with bronze knives. They were then quartered and roasted on spits in pits alongside one wall.

The table was an elevated trough along which the diners stood, snatching at the meat with their hands or cutting off hunks of it with the bone daggers they wore stuck in their waists. They washed down the food with a frothy drink that looked and smelled like sour milk, but tasted like low-grade Ozark moonshine. There was neither bread nor vegetable, other than a bitter root that had some resemblance to a potato.

When the shepherd of 3,000 B.C. had described his predecessors as fierce and turbulent, he had been accurate. These men were all noisy braggarts, and fights broke out frequently. They fought in every conceivable way—with swinging ham-life fists, by grappling and clawing with bone-breaking wrestling holds, with their knives of stone or bone—even with their bronze broadswords.

Three times during the night the servitors had to bring rawhide ropes and drag corpses from the hall. Yet the other feeders at the trough scarcely seemed to notice. The boasting conversation went right on.

Winter and Kelly stood beside Skrymer and talked to him. They watched in wonder as he stuffed huge handfuls of dripping, sizzling meat into his rapacious mouth. His capacity as a drinker was incredible. He would toss off the vile mead a quart at a time and never turn a hair. Two sips of it made Winter’s head swim and he resolved to risk no more. Skrymer talked freely and boastfully.

Oh, yes, he knew the great land across the water to the East. There was much loot to be had there. He raided it every few years. That was where they obtained the rare bronze for their swords. They also got a mysterious substance that had certain limited uses—cloth, Winter discovered. It made better sails for the ships than skins.

Ships? Yes, he had ships. Many of them. As many as there were hands and toes on the three of them. His gillies were building more. The perils of the sea were great. On every foray they lost many of their boats. That was because of the serpents and great monsters that dwelt in the depths below.

Would he consider an alliance with the wizards and build additional ships for them? He would. He guffawed and said they looked like very puny men, but he had been told they could fly like birds. Skrymer had told moreover how one of them had slain his two best warriors merely by blowing his breath on them. A gift of magic like that ought to be helpful in getting past the sea monsters.

As for the Teutons over there—bah! He needed no help. Their men were small, weak and effeminate. They died like rats before his swordsmen. Now, the women, that was another thing.

Winter wanted to know everything. What about the women? He had not seen one yet, except for a glimpse of a hideous giantess who showed herself for a moment from behind a curtain that shut off one corner of the hall.

“Ah,” cried the colossus, licking his lips and reaching for another horn of mead. He rolled his eyes knowingly.

“Ah! Not big, you know, but nice. Too bad they are so weak and fragile. They rarely live a year here. That is why we have to go over every two or three years. Every one we caught in our last haul has died. It is time we had some more.”

Winter did not flinch, but there was something frightfully callous and brutal in the giant’s manner that made his blood feel like ice water. The boastful king of the giants picked up a stone hatchet that lay among the dogs at his feet. With one mighty crack he split the skull of the ox he was feeding upon. Then, scooping out the brains with a dirty, hairy paw, he plopped them into his mouth and bellowed on.

There was one special Teuton wench he had set his eye on, the present empress. Her name was Brunhilda, daughter to the Emperor Wotan, whom Skrymer had slain on the last excursion. She had been ripe for the taking then, but somehow she had slipped out of his fingers. He had contented himself with sacking her capital, Valhal, and decapitating the only worthwhile general she had—a fellow named Tjor. But this year—ah!

WINTER got away from the trough. Skrymer was showing signs of sleepiness. Abruptly he dropped in his tracks and sprawled where he lay, setting up a vigorous snoring. Elsewhere the riotous feasters had slumped down generally to sleep, their beds being wherever they happen to fall. The filthy floor was too uninviting to Winter. He jerked his head, and Kelly followed him out the door.

They threaded their way through a group of slumbering gillies, supposedly sentries, who lay about in all postures while their bone tipped spears stood idly against the rough stone outer wall. Winter heaved in a deep breath of the clean night air, then hunted for a soft spot on the rock.

“It looks as if we will have to suspend negotiations until tomorrow,” he said wearily, and coiled himself down for the night.

“Those Teutonic names Skrymer mentioned,” speculated Kelly. “Wotan—Tjor—Valhal. They have a familiar ring. Do you think it’s possible that these early Teutons can have formed the basis of the Nibelung legends which seem to have sprung up after that Terrible Sickness and been handed down as German mythology?”

“Why not?” replied Winter drowsily. “After what we’ve been through up to now, I believe anything’s possible.”

In a few minutes he was snoring gently.

He did not sleep well, though. His dreams were troubled by visions of the unhappy Teutons. He knew nothing about the prehistoric Germans yet, but somehow it went against his grain to sell an unknown race down the river, and that was what he would be doing in forming an alliance with the giant king Skrymer. So he tossed throughout the night and woke up red-eyed and sore in every bone and muscle.

He hardly touched breakfast, which was a repetition of the larger meal of the night before, except that sheep were substituted for cattle. Apparently the early Scots or Norse, were a strictly carnivorous people. He recalled now that he had seen no farms, nothing but herds, on his short flight from Callandar.

Winter tried to push his business to a conclusion as rapidly as possible, but Skrymer was a hard man to push. A sage had to be called and runes consulted. The bearded old medicine man finally was produced, and after a good deal of mumbo-jumbo, handed Winter a carved stick which he said was symbolic of the pact.

The self-styled wizards made their departure as rapidly as possible. Back at the time machine, they established a small camp and left the plane and all the other personnel in charge of Lieutenant Miller. Then Winter and Kelly disappeared into the future.

Winter’s report to the stuffy old general was terse and delivered coldly. Only by thinking of Frieda and modern Germany was he able to go through with it.

“We have an ally—a race of tough big men whose occupation is murder and pillage and who amuse themselves by getting drunk and fighting each other. They have cattle, draft animals, and ships of a sort. They know their way to Germany. They say come on.”

He saluted and stalked out.

CHAPTER VII

8,000 B.C.

REMOVAL of the base was carried out in orderly fashion, but with the utmost speed. Winter was restored to his post of transport director as there was no one else on the staff half as competent. Winter accepted the angry reprimand that went with his reappointment in silence, knowing there was nothing to be gained by struggling further with the slender evidence he had while the oily Snyder was still high in the hard-headed general’s favor.

He was not forgetting for a moment that the primary object of the expedition was to get into the heart of Germany and that as speedily as possible. There appeared little more damage that Snyder could now do. His exposure and punishment must be left to later.

Half the rings and a generator on an ex-searchlight truck were sent down first to Skrymer’s kingdom. Next the general and his staff, including Snyder, took off, with bedding and field kitchens. Worrel was anxious to meet the prehistoric Scottish king who was to be his ally.

Winter sent down half a dozen trucks, a few motorcycles and a pair of tractors. All the other motorized equipment he left to rust where it stood. Without fuel it was as useless as so many dead horses. The last shuttle to go carried in it all the remainder of the rings except the one it stood on. As soon as it disappeared. Winter had that final ring disassembled and loaded with the power unit into his Class-A machine.

He looked over the control board of the locomotive traveler ruefully. Its yearage meter stood at 35,000; its capacity meter at 15,000. His move to overtake the Time Column would require five thousand more, leaving a scant ten to go. And ten thousand years was the exact interval between their attacking point and modern Germany. The machine had the capacity for that one trip and no more. There could be no more reconnaissance trips either forward or backward.

Just before leaving he took one last look around. He found nothing worth the sacrifice of carrying it. But he did have one happy afterthought. Perhaps in time the GHQ “up there” might see its way clear to follow up with a relief expedition. He should leave word where they had gone.

He got a pot of paint and smeared the sides of a number of the standing vehicles with the sign:

Gone on to the year 8,000 B.C. Hope to make the rest of our way from there.

Then he got into the Time-Traveler, slammed its door shut, and put it into action.

By the time he arrived at the new base, everything was a hive of activity. Winter was surprised to see so little stuff on the ground. There were hordes of the peasant type giants, or gillies, about, and many teams of oxen. He saw nine of the giants form themselves into a three-deep column of threes and hitch themselves to one of the standing trucks. They started off at a fast walk, dragging it down to the sea. Ironically enough, it was loaded to capacity with drums of the precious gasoline.

They snaked out his donkey boiler and placed it on a drag, to which eight oxen were hitched. Everything was going down to the sea. Other giants would shoulder a segment of a shuttle ring and start off with it at a lope. Their strength was stupendous. Apparently the army had already marched away, as there was scarcely more than a battalion left to direct the final mopping up and transfer of the base.

Winter supervised the mounting of the precious Time-Traveler on heavy skids and started it on its first three-dimensional journey. Then, remembering the painted signs he had left behind, he repeated the process here, stating this time the expedition had left for Germany, via the Firth of Forth and the North Sea. This he painted on a board, which he nailed to a post set up at the very spot his machine had materialized, satisfied that any subsequent expedition would follow his exact trail this far.

He mounted a motorcycle which he had reserved for the purpose and started off after the column of toiling gillies. He marveled at the adaptability of man. These primitive people were already adjusted to the presence of motor vehicles that still killed human beings in the magical Twentieth Century.

He pulled up abreast of a forest of high pine trees where hundreds of the gillie giants were at labor. They were pecking at the trunks of the hundred-foot trees with their ridiculous stone axes. Among them were a dozen or more of his carpenters, armed with hand saws, who were trimming the trees whenever one fell, but the work was tedious in the extreme.

Winter regretted now that he had not foreseen this contingency, that he had brought along no heavy wood-working tools. But the steel ships that were to have been sent them required machinists rather than carpenters to assemble. Many teams of oxen stood about, trailing chains, waiting to drag the felled trees down to the ways.

Winter consoled himself that he had at least thought of bringing the chains. They were the tow chains of his trucks, linked together. His idea had been that they would make excellent anchor cables for the ships they were to build.

He watched for a moment, then rode on.

At Forthmouth, the name of the embarkation point, he found many ships under construction on slipways. They were open galleys of approximately a hundred feet in length, and he estimated that each could carry around fifty men when fully equipped for sea. But necessarily the work was slow, for the only dressing of the timber possible was with the stone and bronze axes used by the oversized natives. The roughness of the finished product made extensive and risky caulking necessary.

“Hey, listen!” shouted Winter, leaping off his motorcycle. “This will never do. At this rate you people will take all this year and next just to build the fleet. There are thousands of us. Here—grab a couple of those big trucks and strip the sidewalls and the tailgates off. Bring up one of those acetylene cutting torches, and some machinists with hacksaws and files.”

He stood by, waiting impatiently until the detailed soldiers came up. He beckoned to the boss carpenter to come to him.

“We’re going to make some saws,” he said. “Those truck bodies are thin, but they’re hard—built to resist bomb splinters. Lay out big cross-cut saws from the sideboards, and some circular saws from the tailgates. Do it in chalk and let the flame cutters rough it out. Then put in teeth by hand. After that, you can go back to the woods and cut down trees like nobody’s business.

“In a little while a donkey boiler will be here with a generator and some motors. Rig your buzz-saws with those, and your problem of getting planks will be in the bag. There is no more oil for the boiler, but you can fire it with wood. Shake a leg!”

He went on, indignant. It seemed to him that no one in the expedition had any notion of the need for speed. Hewing down trees and roughing out ship-planking with stone tools! At that rate they would never get to their destination, until long after the war was over.

He found the general brimming over with good humor, and scented the peculiar sour odor of the mead. King Skrymer was with him, as was also the silent and insolutable Snyder. Apparently they were in the midst of a pre-victory celebration, planning what they meant to do once they had maneuvered the tricky sands of the ancient Elbe and set foot on Teutonia.

“Nice work. Winter,” gurgled the purple-faced general, having not the slightest idea of what Winter had just done. “Have a good dinner—they know how to roast a beef here—and a good night’s rest. Then report to me in the morning. I have an important mission for you.”

“Excuse me. General,” said Snyder, smoothly, “but I’ve just thought of something I should do. It may expedite our plans for the major.”

Winter glanced at him sharply, wondering what the crack meant, but Snyder had already finished his clicking of heels and his absurd courtly bow, and was gliding from the room.

“Yes, General?” prompted Winter.

“We’ll discuss it in the morning,” said the old man, with a genial wave of the hand. “I can give you an idea though. We are making out splendidly here with the help of our good friend King Skrymer. In another month or so we can start. In the meantime it will be helpful if you and Miller take a hop across the North Sea and scout the coast where we are to land. You might even make a landing and give us an estimate of the amount of resistance we can expect. Skrymer tells me the people there speak much the same language as here, and you can make yourself understood in that.”

“Yes, sir,” said Major Winter, but it was a reluctant reply.

He was liking the expedition less and less. The leering, brutal attitude of the giant king went against his grain, though it was obvious that he was cooperating to the best of his ability. It hurt Winter to see a once famous general bloated and steeped in the vile Skrymerean mead. But above all it irked him that Snyder remained so high in the councils. And what was it that Snyder had to do that was going to expedite this proposed flight? Snyder’s help in anything was the last thing Winter wanted.

WHAT mileage can this flitter-bug do and get back?” Winter asked Miller the next morning. “I understand we are being sent to Germany.”

“About four hundred miles,” answered the aviator. “If there are only you and I, and we carry along a few extra tins of gas, I guess we could make it nearly to Berlin and back. Why?”

“We’re on our way,” said Winter, biting off his words. “But get your gas, and check your machine like you never checked a machine before. I smell something cooking. Just between you and me, I think were being sent—not taken—for a ride.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. So watch your step.”

Winter did not take off until he had a long talk with Kelly. At the end of it they shook hands, and Winter climbed into the plane.

“Be seeing you,” he said as a last word of farewell, and nodded to Miller to give her the gun.

The plane took off and soared out over the gray North Sea. The ocean was being whipped by a nasty easterly gale and its waves ran like the stripes of a brindled cat, alternately irregular rows of whitecaps and the dark troughs between. They ducked their heads against the fierce blast of the head wind they had to buck.

Two hours later they picked up the low Dutch coast, vague on the horizon to the right of them. A little later the green lowlands of Germany came up in front, and presently began to slide beneath. It was just then that the motor sputtered, missed a long series of explosions, caught again, then died.

“Well,” said Winter bitterly, “this is it. Land where you can.”

He set his jaw and looked out over the edge of the cockpit at the green terrain beneath. It was a well watered country, full of clearings and speckled with what appeared to be villages. Down there somewhere the next, and perhaps final, episode of this strange adventure into the far past awaited him.

He had done his best and failed. Chicanery and stupidity had done them in. It was a combination hard to beat by mere industry and good faith. The slimy, scheming Snyder had won. There was no one now but Kelly to stand up against him, and no doubt the saboteur would find a way shortly to clip the intelligence captain’s wings.

Then Winter’s mood changed. He shed his dejection as swiftly as he had fallen into it.

“I’ll be blasted if Snyder wins!” he thought to himself. He could not have said it out loud, for his teeth were ground together so tightly that it hurt, though he was unaware of it at the moment.

“There’s a good place—there!” he yelled, pointing to a field in which several people seemed to be plowing.

“I see it,” acknowledged Miller, already dipping the nose of the plane.

CHAPTER VIII

Teutonia

IT was a very dazed pair of American-born officers of the B.T.C. who went to bed that night in primeval Germany. Their mattress was a cloth-covered one, stuffed with clean goose feathers. And the room was spotless, even if it was in a log house and had an earthen floor.

Their reception had been kindly, and their supper had been a welcome relief from the strictly meat diet they had been living on for weeks, there was a great variety of vegetables, milk, dumplings, good gravy, and duck. The meal had been accompanied by an excellent beer and a mild white wine. It could not be denied, despite certain primitive methods, that Teutonia was a civilized country.

“What gets me,” said Miller, yawning contentedly and peeling off his shirt, “is that these ancients are so typically German.”

“Yes?” challenged Winter sourly. At the moment he was thinking of Germans in terms of the Himmlers, the Hesses, the Von Ribbentrops and the Von Papens and the other scum that inevitably rises to the top of a stagnant pool. For an instant he failed to understand Miller’s remark.

Then he recalled the other Germans he had known personally. There were the fine old plump, jovial and good-natured men and women he had met in the beer gardens of St. Louis and the rathskellers of New York. Those were people who assembled at night to bowl or to play chamber music or to sing lieder in choral groups. They were a hard-working, kind and helpful people.

But then all that had been before the days when the devilish theories of Nietzsche had come to their full power in the not too adroit but persistent lying of the unspeakable Goebbels. That was before Hitler and Hess had contaminated a nation.

“Yes,” admitted Winter, after a long pause. “So they are.”

He added nothing to that, but tumbled into bed, his mind a whirlwind of doubt and misgiving.

That afternoon they had landed in a field that was being plowed. It was true that the plow was no more than a crooked piece of wood, drawn by a team of old women. Nevertheless, this crude tillage of the soil was proof of a tremendous step in progress above the barbarous herd culture of the giants across the channel.

They had seen looms and spinning wheels in the other rooms of the house they were in. In fact, the existence of partitions within the house, allowing a degree of privacy and separating the domestic functions into several compartments, was more evidence of a civilized, cultured nation.

The truly marvelous thing about it that it was all done without metals. The beams of the house and the parts of the looms had been mortised or dowelled together, or bound with rawhide thongs. Winter worried about all that. Without knowing anything about these people who were so hard-working, mild and hospitable, he had arranged for their invasion.

But he slept some in spite of his restless thoughts. In the morning he and Miller made another and closer inspection of their plane. It took them a long time to find the cause of their trouble—the clogging of the gas feed line. All their gasoline, whether in tank or cans, was filled with small gelatinish globules. They filtered the tapioca-like substance out, but as fast as they did new formations of it occurred.

“Must be caused by a new chemical, perhaps a powder dropped in,” observed Miller. “I never knew gasoline to jell like this.”

“Nor I,” growled Winter, frowning darkly. “It is more of Snyder’s work. He has been sabotaging this expedition from the start. So far he has crippled us, but not topped us. Now he has the old general under his thumb and is in cahoots with Skrymer. He has got rid of us. Then he’ll do Kelly in. What next, I wonder?”

Miller shrugged. “Couldn’t say,” he grunted. “What do we do next?”

“Hah!” exclaimed Winter in disgust. “We can’t get back. So we are going on to the capital of this country and interview its rulers. We will warn them of what is coming. We will try to make an arrangement by which our Time Column will be permitted and aided to pass through the country to the site of the future Berlin, where it will disappear without molesting them further. Then we will come back to meet our forces when they land and try to talk them into living up to our pact.”

“It is a big order,” commented Miller.

“It is the only course open to us,” said Winter. “And it’s the least we can do.”

THE trip to Valhal was intensely interesting. The rate of travel was slow, because all the vehicles were animal drawn, and the local inhabitants of the villages through which they passed were insistent upon entertaining them. Winter’s eyes were opened still further.

There were many striking things about this early Teutonic culture. The third village they passed, for example, was surrounded for miles by nothing but flax fields, and every house in the village contained six or more looms at which the whole family worked. They produced far more cloth than they could ever hope to use. That indicated commerce, for something must be done with the surplus.

“It grows well here,” explained the headman, “and weaving suits us. But we do not lack for other things.”

He produced an earthen jar filled with olives which he said had been brought by caravan from south of the great white mountains. It was proof that intra-continental trade existed, and that the continentals had an advanced notion of the value of specialization and interchange of products. It was the age of barter.

There was no glassware or iron, but the carts used had spoked wheels, not solid ones. There were reasonably good roads, well graded and drained, and supplied with culverts and small bridges. The Chinese, a cultured people for three thousand years, never developed their communal sense to the degree that local people would work on roads that simply crossed their districts and appeared to be of no immediate use to them.

“The more I see of this country the better I like it,” said Miller admiringly after hearing some astonishingly good singing, accompanied by some instrumentalists, one night. The instruments were crude and the orchestration simple, but both were miles in advance of the savage tom-tom.

“Same here,” said Winter. He had been delighted by some lacework and embroidery he had been shown. “They have commerce, local law and order, and art. All they lack is science.”

“And soldiers,” added Miller thoughtfully. “I haven’t seen a man with a sword or spear since we landed. The only knives have been in the kitchens.”

“I’ve been thinking of that,” Winter agreed, “but they seem well organized otherwise. It is hard to believe they have no army of some kind. Perhaps it is organized as a militia and only called out when there is a foreign invasion.”

“Skrymfer said the Teuton men were pushovers,” reminded Miller pointedly.

“So he did,” said Winter, and his gloomy mood seized him again. The deeper he penetrated this peaceful, thriving country the more the boasting, sneering words of the brutal giants burned in his memory. They had said that the only risk in the expedition was the perils of the sea, that the men scattered like rabbits or died under their blades like sheep, that the women and the coarser grades of cloth were the only worthwhile booty. All else they burned and wasted.

It struck him as a strange and ironic twist in history that he should have delivered a peace-loving, frugal, merry people over to the sack of brutal tribes that produced nothing themselves, but lived by the robbery and slaughter of others. To deliver one civilization from the atavistic Nazis, he was sacrificing another to the coarse and ruthless pre-Norsemen.

“What does it matter?” Miller tried to comfort him one day, after Winter had unburdened himself of some of his sense of guilt. “Didn’t we learn the whole works was to be wiped out by a continent-wide plague?”

“Yes,” said Winter dismally. “But that will not occur for three or four thousand years from now—as long a period as all recorded history. That night when I agreed to help Skrymer if he would help us I laid the foundation for the first Dark Ages. We must undo that if we can.”

“Maybe this Empress Brunhilda will have something up her sleeve,” suggested Miller hopefully.

“Maybe.”

Winter urged the driver to whip up his horses. Valhal was said to be but one day’s journey ahead.

WINTER and Miller found the imperial palace anything but imposing. It was built of logs, too, and differed from an ordinary citizen’s house only in that it was larger. When they got inside they knew at once why that was. In the biggest of its rooms a number of delegations of foreigners were waiting. A Teuton—large for his race, being all of six feet high and adorned with a flowing red beard—was looking over the wares they displayed.

The first to approach him was a group of wizened, slant-eyed, yellow men, bearing bolts of brocaded silks, lumps of carved ivory and jade, and bags of tea. The Teuton examined the offerings appraisingly. For his part he showed them linens, wheat, and wood carvings. There was a long dickering. Then a bargain was struck.

“Gosh,” exclaimed Winter in Miller’s ear. “I thought he was buying baubles for the empress. Do you know what he just did? He arranged for two years’ import of the Chinese things for the entire empire, and provided exchange for it in the products the Chinese do not produce themselves. Now he’s dictating letters to the provincial government telling them how much extra wheat and flax they must plant next year in order to fulfill this contract for tea and silk. He turned down their bribe of jade. Can you beat that for a planned economy!”

The next up was a group of turbanned, swarthy men, apparently from the shores of the Indian Ocean, but whether Hindoos, Persians or something else Winter would not know. They, like the first, talked through interpreters. They had samples of spices with them, diamonds, slabs of ebony inlaid with ivory and mother-of-pearl, curious dried fruits, among them dates.

They also wanted linens, and amber as well. The deal was made. Then a black-headed Iberian stepped up with a slab of cork in his hands. He had olives, too, and a string of dried red-peppers.

The two misplaced Americans had to wait until all the commercial missions had been disposed of before the man who seemed to be the national purchasing agent took notice of them.

“Oh,” he said, frowning thoughtfully when they were presented. “What do you bring?”

“Destruction,” was Winter’s enigmatic answer. “I must see your ruler at once.”

For the first time since they had been watching him, the Teuton trader seemed taken aback. The single ominous word “destruction” was so belied by the calm and sad delivery of it that it was plain that he could not tell whether it was a threat, warning, or a feeble attempt at humor.

“The Empress Brunhilda is unavoidably late,” he apologized. “A number of our people have been dying lately in the eastern provinces from the black vomit. One of our sages thinks rats have something to do with it. She is conferring with him now. She will see you shortly.”

“Ah,” observed Winter. “They even have the beginnings of science. That must be the Bubonic plague, and there is at least one man among them smart enough to guess at its cause.”

At that moment the Empress Brunhilda pushed aside the curtains that covered the door to the adjoining room. Her entry was deliberately paced and dignified. She advanced four steps and stopped, looking inquiringly at these strange visitors who had been reported as dropping from the skies. She was tall, stately, and beautiful. Her golden hair hung down over her breasts in two wide braids.

“Frieda!” cried Winter, in a paroxysm of long-thwarted desire.

He started forward with out-flung arms.

CHAPTER IX

Reversal

For a moment the world stood still. Winter forgot the Time Column, forgot this was 8000 B.C., forgot the impending invasion by Worrel and Skrymer. Only one thing stood out in his memory—the words he had spoken to Captain Kelly that first night at Yottenholm. “After what we’ve been through up to now, I believe anything’s possible.”

Once again Major Jack Winter stood confronting his slain love. The Empress Brunhilda more than resembled Frieda Blenheim; she was her living double, even to the tiny brown mole just under the left eye—that tiny beauty blemish he had many times kissed so tenderly. This woman’s majestic bearing, the frank and outspoken gaze, her very expression, every gesture was the same.

Brunhilda was staring now in wide-eyed amazement at the lean-faced American who continued to advance upon her. There was no recognition in her gaze, but there was a startled expression of a dawning kinship, of a bond between them. It was such an attraction as that of a magnet for a fine piece of steel—even the sort of fire as that struck by flint and steel. Two strong personalities cast in complementary molds in Nature’s inexplicable furnace were being drawn to each other. A miracle was unfolding before Lieutenant Miller’s bulging eyes.

Then:

“Please,” said Brunhilda quietly, holding up a hand in a graceful gesture so dear and familiar to Winter that he ached to snatch that hand and impress a kiss upon it. “You have sought an audience with me. Why? We have never trafficked with peoples from the skies.”

This halted Winter. It brought him to a realization of his surroundings. Abashed, sick to his very soul, shaken to the very core of his being, he came to a stop and searched for fitting words.

“I do not come from the skies,” he said hesitantly. “That is but a mode of travel among my people. I belong to a race that is living ten thousand years after yours. I have been sent back into the past on a special mission. I—I—”

Words failed him for a moment.

“You talk in riddles,” she said calmly. “But go on. I have learned that there are many things in existence stranger than we imagine. Why have you demanded an audience with me?”

She was drawn up to full height and her breast was heaving in excitement. Her eyes were commanding.

“It … it is that I have come to warn you,” he floundered. “Your nation is in great danger, and it is my fault. I did not know. There are many fierce warriors following me. It is necessary that we cross part of your country.”

“There is no reason why you should not cross it,” she said, with great dignity. “It is a privilege I readily grant. We have many travelers.”

He hardly heard her words, still seeing and hearing Frieda in every tiny gesture and mannerism. Her rich, vibrant voice was the same; the illusion of her reincarnation was flawless. It was incredible that, spaced a hundred centuries apart. Nature should have duplicated her handiwork so exactly. Winter knew his face must be beet-colored with blushes, for he felt the surge of pounding pulses in his neck and temples.

“But,” he blurted out excitedly, “can’t you see? I thought you were savages. We were stranded in Scotland—the Western Islands as you call them—and had to get on here. Only a few of us can fly, and the machine we came in is wrecked. We had to have ships. That is why we entered into an agreement with King Skrymer.

“That animal!” she said, and her lip curled in scorn.

He paused, flustered. But he had to tell it.

“He agreed to help us, to furnish ships and manpower. He said he was familiar with this country and it was inhabited by a degenerated weakling race whose only merit was its women. His reward for his efforts is to be you—God forbid! Forgive me, if you can, I did not know.”

Winter stopped, red-faced. It was a hard confession to make, but he had made it. For a moment she stood in all her majesty, glaring at him. Then she seemed to melt. When she spoke next it was softly.

“You are a strange man,” she almost whispered. “You come in a seemingly friendly way to utter vague warnings and vile threats. How am I to know what to believe? Skrymer and his savages appear periodically on our coasts and ravage a few small towns. He is a menace, as the forest wolves are, but we have never seen fit to drop our peaceful pursuits and organize against him.

“It is wasteful to be forever preparing for war, for which we have no desire. It is better to let him come every third or fourth year, burn a town or two, and carry away a half a hundred peasant women, than to turn our nation into a race of brutes!”

“Hah!” snorted Winter in indignation. “Appeasement, huh? Well, I’ll tell you this, my lady, it won’t work. It was tried out thoroughly in my time. You cannot appease a blackmailer. They always come back for more. This Skrymer—”

“Don’t mention his name again!” she cried imperiously. “I hate him. He killed my father in the most barbarous fashion before my eyes. I shall send messengers at once to the coastal towns to warn them. I will have many bolts of the coarse cloth they seem to prize sent down. They will hold lotteries in the towns to provide the list of hostages for them.”

“Hostages!” cried Winter, horrified, “you mean slaves, victims?”

“It is better than war,” she answered. “They come but seldom and they do not stay long. It is better so. Should we attempt to meet them on their own bestial level it would mean that our farmers and our weavers and all the men of the west would have to quit useful work and waste their time in senseless athletic exercises and the making of cruel weapons.”

Winter stared at her aghast. Here again, in this dim distant age of the past he was hearing the all too familiar self-deception of the pacifist.

“Furthermore, we think it wrong to kill a fellow man, even an evil one, such as Skrymer,” she added in a reproachful tone.

He groaned. That, too, had a familiar ring. It was a noble thought, but futile. For he had banqueted with the carnal, brutal, boasting Skrymer. He knew how little the yielding of the mild Teutons would impress him. And there was the complication of the Time Column itself, twenty thousand men from the Twentieth Century.

“But, my lady,” insisted Winter imploringly, “can’t I make you understand? This is no ordinary raid, but an invasion. This time they are not coming in a few dozen ships, but in hundreds. They have weapons that kill at a great distance—as far as a man can be seen. They will not be content with your mild peace offerings, but will demand all. The giant Skrymer, I told you, has his heart set on no less prize than your own person.”

“Then,” she said proudly, drawing herself up to her full height, “he will be disappointed. If he should reach me, it will be to find me dead by my own hand. Perhaps the sight of me will soften even his stony heart and he will know he is unwanted and return no more.”

Winter regarded her pityingly. She was so beautiful, so magnificent—and so mistaken. It made him sick, as did all such noble but impracticable displays. He knew what she did not—that in ten thousand more years the Utopia in which the lamb could lie down beside the lion had not even been approached.

Winter liked the law of fang and claw as little as the next man, but history had taught him that in the main it prevailed and must be reckoned with. The sweetest idealist must have a certain hardness about him, or his ideals will be lost and have no more effect on the shaping of events than the fleeting odor of a violet of the woods.

“You have been warned. Queen Brunhilda,” he said slowly. “I can do no more. Tomorrow I shall go back to the shore and try my best to soften the blow, but I fear it will be a heavy one.”

It wrung his heart to say that. He longed to take her in his arms and hold her to him. Now that she had spoken, she was his martyred Frieda, restored to him after ten millenia. Yet she was the ruler of a continental empire and he was but a self-appointed ambassador without rank, bringing dire threats and warnings. He knew he must stifle the yearning the sight of her aroused.

Some glimmering of what was passing through his mind must have come to hers, for she seemed to soften. After thanking him formally, she dropped her imperial manner and said in addition:

“We have long dealt with the traders of the Far East, the Middle Sea to the South and the Hot Lands beyond, but never with the sky people or those beyond the Western Ocean. You will remain here tonight and your friend and you must sup with me. I am interested to know what your arts and industries are. But please do not talk about war. I abhor it.”

The supper was more evidence, if that were needed, as to the advanced state of this pre-Teutonic culture. Bread was served, and pastry, both baked goods. There were sweets and salads, showing that the pre-Germans knew the virtues of the beet. Savages and barbarians seldom learn the art of cookery beyond the boiling and barbecuing stage.

Brunhilda listened, rapt, to Winter’s account, abbreviated as it had to be, of the earth’s history from her time to his. She was dumbfounded to hear of ages of progress, interrupted by ages of retrogression. Of the painful and crude beginnings of the Renaissance and the climb upward to a new and more inclusive democracy, of the abolition of superstition and the establishment of science, and of the toppling over of thrones and the absolute rulers such as the Czar of the Russias, the Empress of China, and the cruel old Sultans of Turkey.

She heard of democracy and commerce and industry, of the abolition of slavery, and of the solemn pacts to renunciate war. He told her, too, of the rise of gangsterism in Europe and something of the methods of Mussolini and his much more competent disciple Hitler, and of the methods they had chosen to use.

“So you see,” he said, in concluding, “what we came back here for. The world is at the crossroads. It is a new Dark Ages that confronts us if they are permitted to conquer. It will not be. It cannot be. We must not allow it.”

He paused and looked at her. Their glances locked, and in that long mutual stare he knew that he had driven his point home. He knew, too, that there was something more than the clear logic of his tale that had caught her, for the slight flush that spread down her neck told him more than any number of words might have that she shared without understanding the personal bond that was between them.

“It is odd,” she said, quite irrelevantly, “but somehow everything you say is so real. It seems as if I had known you always, though as in a dream.”

“Yes,” he said, playing with the curious two-tined fork of bone—for the Teutons had invented forks, “I think you have. Longer than you know. Better than you know. Ten thousand years from now there was a girl, so like you she could impersonate you. We were to have been married. That butcher Hitler I told you of had her beheaded. You may understand now why I have gone to these extremes to get at him.”

“I think I understand,” she said gently, and her eyes were moist.

He rose, and she accompanied him to the doorway that led him to the apartment set apart for him.

“I think I understand,” she repeated, almost in a whisper, “and I forgive you for what you may have brought upon me and mine.”

He answered her squeeze of the hand with another, equally as fervent. Then, before he could restrain himself, he had her in his arms. The sheer ecstasy of the moment made him sob in his aching throat. She raised her face—and he kissed her. He held her to him for a long time while all his sensibilities swirled ecstatically in a golden mist of rapture. That which he had thought lost forever had been returned to him, revivified and more glorious than ever.

But the swift revelation of Paradise could not last forever. The idea burned in on him even in that moment of utter bliss that she and her people were in dire jeopardy, and that partly by his own acts. He knew that he now had a double allegiance—one to his cause, the other to his refound love. He held her at arms’ length and told her gently.

“At dawn I must leave. I must lighten the blow that is about to fall upon you. It will be hard, and I may fail. Have faith, dear Brunhilda, as you always had.”

He kissed away her puzzled look and strode from the room.

CHAPTER X

Double Crossed Again!

THE seven columns of white wood smoke rising on the northwestern horizon told Winter and Miller all they needed to know. The uplands of Bavaria and Valhal lay behind them and low, marshy plains of the Elbe River were but another day’s journey ahead. They knew now that they would not arrive on its banks in time to receive their army or to forestall the savage invasion. It was too late, as the smoke of the burning villages showed. The pre-Vikings were already at their work of rapine and destruction.

They hurried on, turning aside from time to time to let white-faced and frightened refugees go by them. After awhile they met no more of those, but came across the ruins of a still-smoldering village. It was a disgusting sight to see the lanes strewn with the torn and smashed fragments of household utensils which had been senselessly and wantonly ruined by the ignorant barbarians. A more angering sight was that of the hacked and mutilated bodies of the Teuton men. The spectacle would have been less horrible, Winter thought, irrational though the thought might seem, had there been more women among the dead. But he knew why there were not. They had been reserved for another and more terrible fate.

The only signs of what had become of the invaders were trails of beaten down crops in the adjoining fields. Apparently the giants had scattered through those in pursuit of their fleeing victims. A little farther along the road the two Americans came upon four of the big fellows, sitting in a ditch and singing in maudlin voices while each clutched sottishly at a pigskin half full of wine.

Winter felt the savage urge to shoot all four where they sprawled, but suppressed it. That would do no good, only jeopardize his own safety. After all, their presence here was his own doing. It was his reward for dabbling in statecraft without knowing all the facts.

Later they made detours to avoid other of the marauding bands. It was not hard to do, for the giants had already had a fair share of loot as was clearly shown by their condition. They marched staggeringly, arm in arm, bellowing out their foul drinking songs or venting their wolfish war cries.

Twilight was near at hand when Winter and Miller got their first glimpse of familiar khaki. It was the uniform of an officer leading a small file of the Time Column’s infantry.

“Kelly!” yelled Winter in delight as he recognized the captain.

“Winter!” was the equally happy cry of the intelligence officer. “Thank God, I found you. Maybe between us we can do something yet. Things have gone from bad to worse, but that is nothing to what they’re going to be.”

“I know,” said Winter hurriedly. “Where is General Worrel? Stupid and bullheaded as he is, I must see him at once.”

“You won’t see him—ever,” answered Kelly solemnly. “He is dead. Our supreme commander now is Hugh Snyder—General Snyder, if you please.”

“What!”

“Yes. The old general made him second in command the day before he died. The next morning Snyder read out the orders appointing him as successor, and at the same time lit the funeral pyre that had been built overnight for the general’s body. It was our first news of it.”

“What did the old man die of?” demanded Winter suspiciously.

Kelly shrugged. “The doctor was furious. He meant to hold an autopsy, but never had the chance. He thinks it was from a rare poison. He also thinks the drug had been administered for some time, an accumulative poison that gradually undermined the will and faculties of the general’s mind.”

“We must break this up,” said Winter grimly. “If there is no other way. I’ll find the traitor and shoot him.”

“If he doesn’t shoot you first,” were the ominous words of Kelly. “That is why I’m sticking my own neck out. I slipped off on this scouting expedition in hope of running into you and warning you. You are to be court martialed and shot for having failed to return with the plane, and for having abandoned it in good condition. That surly Dutchman who is Snyder’s number one mechanic was the one who found the plane. He examined it and said it was in perfect flying condition and with ample gasoline for the return flight.”

“That was more of Snyder’s dirty work,” said Winter glumly, dropping upon the turf beside Kelly.

The men of the detachment, including Miller, had scattered and were scouring the woods for firewood. They would shortly have supper, a brief rest, and then get on. The two sat for several hours, exchanging news and comparing notes. The situation was indeed bad.

“You know we worked everybody hard getting out those ships,” informed Kelly gloomily, poking at the grass with a bayonet as he talked. “There were hundreds of them in the water when I left, and more on the ways. The men began to grumble at the long hours and the bad food. Then subversive pamphlets began to show up.

“I don’t know where they came from, but they were of every type, and very cleverly gotten up. They warned the workers that no one knew what the postwar conditions would be, but that there was one thing certain. Whoever won, the common man would get it in the neck. They pointed out how swell everything was under the totalitarian system. You know the line.

“Well, a lot of ’em fell for it. They say they won’t go back to the Twentieth Century, that they’re better off where they are, what with their steel tools and all. They figure they can be the dominant people of this age and develop exactly the kind of civilization they want. They plan to establish a new race.”

“Without women?”

“Oh, that is all taken care of. They have made deals with the giants for part of their loot. Take the fellow who runs your home-made saw-mill, for example. He’s sitting pretty. And the blacksmiths plan to use the abandoned trucks, forging swords and knives from their parts. A good many of the artisans have deserted already and gone south toward the Tyne, looking for coal and iron mines.”

“What about the soldiers?”

“There was propaganda there, too, but it did not catch on so well. Very few of them have fallen for it, and they may have been planted all along. They are the ones who form Snyder’s bodyguard.”

“Oh, he has a bodyguard now, has he?”

“Yes. He only sees underlings when he sends for them. That is what makes our problem so tough. And to be sure he has his own way, he first got rid of you and Miller. Now he thinks he has rid himself of me. That is why he sent me with the first flotilla.”

Winter looked at Kelly inquiringly.

“Except for this detachment and a scow carrying the Class-A Time-Traveler and its special guard, all the first three hundred ships are loaded with giants. They are supposed to clear the way. Then the ships go back for our people. Snyder figures I’ll get killed or lost. I wouldn’t wonder Skrymer has orders to that effect.”

Winter’s stare was full of incredulous horror.

“Do you mean,” he asked, speaking slowly and distinctly, “that our infantry—our own fighting men—and the time rings are not to come until last? That we have to lose weeks and weeks more at the hands of that traitorous Snyder?”

“Just that,” affirmed Kelly. “Worse. Snyder tells ’em now that the rings are at the end of their capacity, or nearly so, but that it doesn’t matter. He has thought of an improvement on his method, and will build some substitutes here while the Time Column is catching up. The rings are not coming at all.”

Winter broke the stick of firewood in his hands in sudden fury and hurled the bits away from him. He strode up and down for several minutes, cursing Snyder and his works without pause. Nor did he spare himself.

“We should have killed him!” he cried. “No matter how stupid the others were, we should have killed the snake. We knew, you and I. He is a Nazi agent, there is no longer any doubt about it. He destroyed our link with our own time. He burned our stores. He demoralized our general and finally wormed himself into the command. And he is using that power now to wreck what is left of us.

“There is nothing wrong with those rings. But I see his scheme. Having done his worst and made sure no one can follow him for at least a month more, he plans to escape to his own time and country in the Class-A machine, leaving us stranded here in time. But we’ll fix that! Where is it?”

“The scow it’s on is tied up to a tree on the bank of the Elbe about ten miles from here.”

“Come on,” shouted Winter, “To the devil with supper! These boys can follow. You and I are going places right now!”

IT LACKED only two or three hours until the dawn when they came to the bank of the river. The barge, as Kelly had said, was secured by a line to an immense tree, her stern pushed upstream by the in-rushing, gurgling flood tide. Still high in the southwest sky a full moon rode, throwing down intermittent spot lights between the tall trees.

All on board the moored ship was quiet, except for a raucous snore as one or another of its crew rolled over in his drunken stupor. The limp and abandoned wineskins lying beside the embers of their campfires on the shore told the story plainly enough.

Winter’s hand detained Kelly.

“Wait,” he whispered.

He sought and found a small sapling and cut it down with his pocket-knife.

Then he whittled out a number of slender wooden wedges which he dropped into a side-pocket. After that he led the way to the mooring line.

“Help me haul her up so I can get aboard. You stay in the bow and keep a lookout. I won’t need other more help. I know that time machine as well as Snyder does.”

Winter made his way aft through the spotty moonlight, careful not to step on the sprawling carousers of the night before who littered the deck like corpses on a battlefield. The great silvery sphere stood before him. He opened its door with the key he still had—the only other not kept by Snyder himself. Once inside he closed the door and boldly snapped on the lights.

It did not take long for him to do what he had set out to do. He drove the slender wedges in to certain places on the control board. When he was finished they were invisible, yet he felt confident they would do what he meant them to do. Then he severed a number of the wire connections leading from the supply reservoirs to the time motivating elements. Following that up, he took a sledgehammer and battered down the terminals until they were no more than blobs of simmered copper. As a parting gesture he took away the master choke-coil, a spiral coil of flat band metal not unlike the mainspring of a watch. This was an alloy of such scarce metals that it could hardly be replaced even in the Twentieth Century. Without it, the Time-Traveler was useless junk.

He stepped back and surveyed the scene. It was as he had planned it. Its open sabotage was obvious, but without the spring he was taking with him, beyond repair. In addition there was his secret work, which he doubted anyone would suspect—even the inventor Snyder. He took off the puttee of his left leg, wound the spiral band of metal about his shin and then put his puttee back on.

The hard metal cut his leg and he knew walking was not going to be fun, but it was essential that he keep the piece with him if he was ever to activate the machine again. That done, he turned off the lights and glided out onto the barge deck.

CHAPTER XI

Confirmation!

WIINTER’S work had taken him longer than he thought. By the time he crossed the deck the moon was setting and the first pearl gray of dawn had come. He was about to climb the side to go ashore when he heard the sound of men’s voices coming from the river. The sounds were faint, and accompanied by the creaking of rough blocks and crude tackle. They indicated a galley. He nudged Kelly, and they crouched below the rail to look.

Three galleys were sweeping by, a half-mile away, apparently using what breeze there was and the last of the flood tide to get up the river with as little effort as possible. There were a few khaki-clad figures on their decks, and the center galley flaunted the standard of the senior general. That meant that Snyder and his staff of Fifth Columnists had arrived. This was another disappointment. Winter had been hoping against hope that adverse winds might have slowed those traitorous ships and let the vanguard of the loyal Time Column arrive first.

The galleys were making good time and did not pause to speak to the scow, but went on upriver. In half an hour they rounded a bend and were lost to view. By that time the scow had begun to swing outstream, and from that Winter knew the end of the flood had come. Slack water was about over, and the ebb beginning to run. That meant that if there were other galleys accompanying the perfidious commander, they would probably tie up or anchor down river and await for the next change of current.

It was an exasperating situation and one that put Winter into a quandary. He wanted fiercely to intercept the first of the loyal galleyloads to arrive and spread his warnings of Snyder among them. He also wanted equally to hurry back to Valhal and tell Brunhilda of the extent of the threatening peril. Skrymer and several thousand of his cruel giants were loose in her country, and her own person was the prize that Skrymer had selected for himself.

Once again Winter was torn between two conflicting loyalties. Since that unforgettable farewell kiss his yearning for the fair Brunhilda had grown until now it was almost unbearable. Yet he was a soldier and he had grim duties to perform in another Germany ten thousand years hence. On the one hand he wanted to get to her, on the other he knew he should go on down river and wait, for his comrades.

The hard decision he had to make was suddenly settled for him in an unexpected way. He was about to hop ashore when he heard yelling and the splashing of oars.

Another galley was coming up the river, rowing furiously with double banks of oars. As it loomed closer through the thin morning mists. Winter saw that was manned by khaki-clad soldiers of the B.T.C. There was not a giant among them. The official mail flag flew at the masthead, signifying that the vessel was bearing despatches. From the obvious effort it was making to overtake the flagship, he deduced that it had left the Scottish shores later and that the despatches were important.

“Those people have late news,” he said excitedly to Kelly. Let’s get this canoe over the side and find out what it is.”

The canoe was a flimsy sort of kyack made of skins and carried on the deck of the scow for ship to shore communication. It took but a moment to put it into the water. The two officers got into it cautiously and picked up the paddles. By dint of vigorous exertion they managed to intercept the galley in midstream. Winter hailed its commander and the rowing stopped. To avoid being swept downstream the galley dropped its anchor into the muddy waters.

The captain of the galley proved to be a lieutenant of the tank corps, one of the enthusiastic officers whose loyalty Winter did not question. Without preamble or apology, Winter, assisted where needful by Kelly, poured out the tangled story.

He charged Snyder bluntly with being a saboteur and recited the long series of adverse incidents that had dogged the expedition from its outset. It was too plain to miss that the Time Column had been double crossed from the beginning, and that unless some drastic steps were taken to avoid the danger, it was doomed to bog down just where it was—ten thousand long years in the past.

Seeing his torrent of words had made some impression on the young officer, Winter made a flat demand.

“What are those despatches you are carrying? Where from and to whom? Tear them open and let’s see what deviltry Snyder is up to now.”

“That would be dishonorable,” hesitated the lieutenant, still clinging to his traditions despite the damning story he had just heard. “They are official and marked ‘Very secret—for the commanding general only.’ They come direct from GHQ and are addressed to General Worrel or his successor in command. To break those seals would be treason.”

“Poppycock!” snapped Winter. “Did you say from GHQ? From 1941?”

The young officer nodded.

“How?”

“By the number two Class-A machine—the one they were building at Clydebank. A special messenger came just a week ago, saying it was most urgent. We set off at once.”

“Give me that message!” Winter’s gun was out, and so was Kelly’s.

They had been standing close to the lieutenant on the galley’s tiny poop and out of earshot of the tired rowers who had taken advantage of the stop to throw themselves down onto the deck to rest. No one saw the act.

“We hate to do this,” Winter added, a little less vehemently, “but we have leaned backward too long trying to deal honorably with people who have no honor. The time has come to fight fire with fire.”

The lieutenant reached inside his blouse and pulled out the many-sealed envelope. Silently he handed it over. Winter tore it open and with Kelly read avidly. Without a word he handed the first page to the galley commander, and the next and the next, as rapidly as he finished them.

“See?” he said in grim triumph, watching the other’s face change as fury succeeded doubt. “What disposition do you think our precious present general would have made of that document? Snyder, indeed! His true name is Schneider, We might have guessed that, too.”

Winter snatched the papers back and ran through them once more, gloatingly. The pages in his hand trembled as he quivered with excitement. The first document was a death warrant for one Hugo Schneider, alias Hugh Snyder, a German spy. It was a flat order to the commanding general to hang him summarily.

Owing to the peculiar circumstances of the case, he had been tried in absentia, convicted and sentenced to death. The order was supported by a transcript of the testimony produced at the court martial. Another paper was on the official blue of Military Intelligence, carrying a summary of their findings.

“Here’s the thing in a nutshell, boys,” exclaimed Winter gleefully. He read aloud:

“‘After Major Winter’s urgent warning, we reopened the case of Hugh Snyder. Certain go-betweens frequenting a cheap tavern in Edinburgh were trailed, which eventually led to the apprehension of the key men of a considerable enemy spy ring. From the stories told by them we pieced together facts that led us to further information, a great deal having to do with Hugh Snyder.

“‘As far as the real Hugh Snyder is concerned, nothing has been developed to cast discredit upon him. His father was a German of the older emigration, having been persecuted by the Hohenzollerns,and he held an undying hatred toward his fatherland which was shared by the son. Hugh Snyder was a legitimate and capable inventor who perfected a Time-Traveler, which he demonstrated and sold to our government. He was commissioned a colonel and employed to direct its use.

“‘This is as far as the record of Hugh Snyder goes. On May Twelfth, Nineteen Forty-one, Hugh Snyder was murdered by his cousin, Hugo Schneider, and his body cremated in the furnace of an old mill near Exeter. His bones and teeth have been recovered and identified.

“‘For a long time we had difficulty in learning much about Schneider, but in the end we did. He was a cousin of the naturalized Snyder and bore a close physical resemblance to him. He is also a scientist of sorts. In late Nineteen-Forty he wormed himself into the confidence of Snyder, begging a place of concealment. His story was that he was a refugee from Hitler’s Germany and hated Hitlerism, but could not convince our authorities of it. They had put him in a detention camp at the outbreak of the war, from which he had just escaped.

“‘Snyder sheltered him. His reward for this was to be brutally murdered. No one knew of Schneider’s presence in the house but one trusted servant who was murdered along with his master. We got these facts from the Nazi’s own files.

“‘He was watched too closely by Captain Kelly to send the details of Column’s plans, but he did manage to get the information over as to the location of an important base and suggest its persistent bombing. That was done at once and with devastating results. They have not failed since to bomb the spot at least once daily.

“‘As far as Schneider is concerned, he disappears from that point in the German records. They do not know what his fate was. Their last entry is that he failed to show up to an appointment with their head man in the North British area.

“‘We presume he is still with you, and that you will terminate his evil career at once. A list of known accomplices with him is attached.’”

Winter folded the paper and replaced it in the big envelope. His jaw was set, but there was a glint of victory in his eyes.

“That makes it simple,” said the galley captain. “Let’s push on and hang ’em.”

“‘Until the murder, which occurred a few days after the conference in London at which the Time Column was actually launched, the spy Schneider knew little about his cousin’s invention except that it was important and had been adopted by the army. As soon as he was able to examine Snyder’s notes he realized what a terrific weapon the Time-Traveler could be and did all in his power to undo what his cousin had done. By asserting to GHQ that he had recently rechecked his computations and had discovered grave errors, he hoped that the expedition would be delayed indefinitely.

“‘In the meantime, he tried strenuously to pick up his old contacts among the Nazi secret agents, but failing to find one sufficiently trustworthy to entrust the valuable data to, had to postpone the idea of informing the Nazi government the details of what was afoot. Then the GHQ refused to call a halt in their preparations and ordered him north to Callandar. It was here that he began his active impersonation of his slain cousin.

“‘Everything points to the fact that he first tried to unsell the British on the use of the machines and tip off his own people. He failed in both, which left him the only alternative of going along with the column and retarding its progress in every way possible.’”

He paused for breath. “Hah!” interjected Kelly triumphantly. “Just what I thought!”

“There’s a little more.” said Winter, and continued reading.

“Look at the list,” warned Winter. “Eighteen men, and some of them we thought the best men in the Time Column. They’re clever devils. They are with him as well as some additional dupes, and they have machine-guns. There are three galleys full of them, and an army of giants to back them up. They might kill us off, and if that happened the rest of the Column would never get the news. You must go back at once and tell them. Tell them to hurry, and by all means bring the rings. I’m staying here.”

Winter prepared to get into the canoe. “What about the messenger who brought this, and the number two traveler?”

“He is waiting for an answer.”

“Tell the commanding officer not to permit him to leave. I have ruined Schneider’s machine. Bring number two over as well. It is our only means of reconnoitering modern Germany. It may be the one way of saving the whole show.”

Kelly started to follow Winter into the canoe, but was waved off.

“No, you go back and help spread the news. I’ll send Miller and the men to the shore where you can pick them up. The army can’t get here for another week, and while you are gone I have a job here to do.”

“Ah,” grinned Kelly. “Something connected with the fabulously beautiful empress of Teutonia whom Miller mentioned last night?”

“It has,” admitted Winter. He sat down in the teetering kyack and shoved it away from the galley’s side with a push of the paddle. The two officers he was leaving were looking down at him as he dipped the blade in for the first stroke.

“Good luck,” called Kelly.

Winter grunted and dug for the shore. He felt that a great load had been taken off of him. Now they might really get a break.

CHAPTER XII

A Futile Flight

THE journey back to Valhal was painful and full of danger. It was hard to find anything to eat, for the giants had been thorough in their work. There was no shelter, since no house had been left unburned. Straggler giants had to be avoided constantly, as the woods were full of the brutes, just sobering up from the effects of the last skin of wine they had consumed.

The trip was rendered horrible by the presence of great numbers of corpses. But perhaps the most unpleasant feature of all was the chafing and cutting of Winter’s legs by that spiral of metal he wore. He shifted it from one leg to the other every day, with the result that both were soon a mass of raw spots and cuts.

As Winter neared Valhal he found signs of growing resistance on the part of the Teutons, proving that the meekest and most peace loving people will turn and fight if goaded enough. There were dead giants here and there, surrounded by windrows of dead and dismembered Teutons. The giant bodies usually contained plain spear shafts whose only head was a fire-hardened, whittled point. It was a tribute to the valor of the relatively puny people, for they had to fight men of greater stature who were better armed with massive stone clubs, bronze swords and battle-axes. Small wonder their own mortality had been so great.

Winter was surprised himself one morning when he awoke to find two immense giants hovering over him, one poised to bash out his brains with a monstrous club. He rolled over swiftly from the spot where he had lain sleeping, drawing his pistol as he did. He shot them both without compunction, got up and went on his way.

Late in the afternoon, when he was nearly to Valhal, he met another pair and dealt them out the same treatment. He had hardly left their sprawling bodies behind before he sighted a very extensive body of the huge raiders ahead of him, preparing to make camp for the night. He gave them a wide berth.

It was evident that they were in no hurry to press their conquest. It had been an easy one, and they often delayed for days in a single spot. Winter knew that, for he had passed other accumulations of ashes, broken pottery and empty wine skins.

He did not look long, but shuddered and went on. If he had a machine-gun instead of his single pistol and its meager supply of ammunition, he would have made a shambles of the camp, but there were too many giants for him to tackle.

He passed three other groups like this and avoided them. After that the road into Valhal was clear. He went along it until he came to the Teuton outposts—a disorganized mob of indignant men armed only with long wooden poles, improvised slingshots and other crude weapons of the sort.

They buzzed angrily when they saw him, but he approached with his hands held open before him, soon making them understand what he had come for. He stopped long enough to tell them where the nearest encampment of the giants was, and suggested that the hour before dawn was a good time to slip in and do some discreet stabbing. The beasts would still be lying steeped in liquor. But the peasants shook their heads. That would be cold-blooded murder. They could not bring themselves to do it.

VALHAL was nearly empty. The women, for the most part, had fled over the mountains toward Austria. Only the queen and her familiars stayed behind. Winter went at once to the rambling log house which was her palace.

Brunhilda’s reception of him was cold and reserved.

“You have seen?” she asked.

“I have seen,” he admitted meekly, “and it is vile. I did not know that is all. I believed what I was told. I have come to make what amends I can. At least I can assure you my own people will take no part in it.”

There was a commotion in the hall back of him, the sound of scuffling.

“Who are these, then,” she demanded imperiously, “and why have you brought them here?”

Two shots rang out, and there were oaths shouted in modern German. Winter wheeled to see the room filling with khaki-clad Twentieth Century troops, slugging and shooting their way through the faithful guard of desperate men who had stayed behind to defend their queen. Snyder did not lead the raiders, but Winter could see him in the background, bawling out directions.

Winter drew his gun, but the intruders were too close upon him to use it. Bulky men tackled him from two sides simultaneously, and he went down in a flurry of legs and fists, beating helplessly against the bodies that penned him to the floor. Someone planted a heavy sock on his jaw, and someone else delivered a resounding kick into his ribs.

He made one last effort to heave the man off who lay on top of him, but it failed. Things blurred redly and he felt weak and sick. Booted feet were standing on his out-flung wrists, and heavy hands were about his throat. He went out, grateful in spite of himself for the soothing calm of total blackness.

“WHAT about this guy?” he heard a voice ask, after what seemed an eternity.

Someone kicked him vigorously, but in his condition it was hardly more than a tap, and oddly seemed to have been delivered to another body of which he was only vaguely conscious.

“Shall we cut his throat, hang him, or what?”

“Bring him along. I want to talk to him when he comes out of it. He had a pal with him—Miller. And we haven’t been able to find what became of Kelly and his detachment. Maybe he knows.”

That was Snyder’s voice, cold, calculated and controlled.

Winter’s first impulse was to open his eyes. Then he thought better of it. For Snyder continued talking, unaware that his victim had regained his senses sufficiently to understand what was being said.

“Is Queen Brunhilda safely bound? We must watch out for suicide. She is a proud and haughty creature.”

“She can’t hurt herself,” answered his henchman. “She’s tied hand and foot and spitting sparks.”

Winter heard him move away, chuckling.

“Ah, what a creature! What a find!” Murmured Snyder, talking to himself. “So Nordic, so perfectly Aryan! Der Fuehrer will be pleased—so pleased. And to think her name is Brunhilda and that her father was called Wotan! It proves the antiquity of our wonderful race. With Goebbel’s aid we can soon make her a living goddess for our new state religion. Surely I will get another decoration for this.” Winter nearly choked. His temples pounded. Mingled emotions of impotent fury, blasting contempt, and cold, implacable hatred surged through him. It was all he could do to feign unconsciousness. But he hung on. He had learned much. He might learn more.

“Franz!” called Snyder sharply. “You took this swine’s gun. Have you searched him? Has he another?” Snyder planted another kick in Winter’s ribs to indicate the object of his questions.

“Nein, Herr Schneider.”

“Speak English, you fool, until we are back in the Fatherland again,” came Schneider’s curt rebuke. “Search him thoroughly.”

Hands groped Winter’s prostrate form. They found little of consequence until they came to his lower legs.

“There is something curious here,” said a harsh voice, and Winter felt the puttee being stripped from his leg.

“The choke-coil from the Traveler!” cried Schneider, in a dismayed voice. “How did he come by that? Ach! If he has ruined that machine I will flay him alive. Throw water on him! Revive him! We must know.”

They brought water and doused Winter with it. The water felt good, but the rain of kicks that accompanied it did not. Winter pretended to regain consciousness, sputtered and opened his eyes. A ruffian jerked him to a sitting position.

To Schneider’s rapid fire of sharp questions he would only answer with a stupid “I don’t know,” or “I can’t remember,” and rub his head dazedly.

“Truss him up and throw him into a cart,” directed Schneider venomously. “We’ll take him back to camp and work on him at leisure there. I know a trick or two that will make him remember more than he ever forgot.”

The trip northward into the lowlands where Berlin was some day to be built was little less than a form of torture in itself. Winter spent the whole of it joggling about on the hard floor of a springless, primitive wagon. Once a day they gave him a little food and water, but otherwise they ignored him. At one stop he heard Brunhilda’s voice in indignant protest over something. From that he knew they had brought her along as a prisoner, too. He wondered grimly what King Skrymer’s reaction would be when he learned that Schneider had double crossed him, too.

Winter was fairly content with his situation, uncomfortable though it was. Despite Schneider’s recovery of the spiral piece, he felt his sabotage of the Time-Traveler had been successful. It would take even an expert a long time to find out the full damage, if ever. And Hugo Schneider was no Hugh Snyder.

In a week or so many galleys would be coming from Scotland filled with soldiers of the betrayed B.T.C. When they came this time they would have no delusions as to who Schneider was. But in the meantime what would Skrymer do? Bullheaded, fiery-tempered and with a great horde of his warriors, it was not likely he would accept meekly Schneider’s kidnapping of his main objective in this invasion.

EVENTUALLY, the bone-racking, bruising journey came to an end at a wooded camp near the river’s edge. The black ribs of three burned galleys rested on the sand. In the midst of the grove stood the silvery sphere of the Number One Time-Traveler. Two huskies picked Winter up roughly and propped him against the bole of a tree. Schneider and his head mechanic, Scholz, stepped out of the machine and came over toward him.

“I have good news for you, Major Winter,” said Schneider in a mocking voice. “It will be unnecessary for us to trouble you further for information. Your feeble efforts at sabotage have been uncovered and remedied. Like your not too astute former leader, Chamberlain, what you did was too late and too little. My helper and I rode on ahead two days ago and we have undone that little. As soon as your lady-love and her chattels are comfortably stowed within, my faithful fellow-workers and I will return to our beloved Fatherland. It may please you to know that your suspicions of me have been correct. I have wrecked your Time Column.

“I would like to say ‘auf wiedersehn,’ but that cannot be. Ten thousand years will separate us shortly and you cannot possibly live that long. I am not leaving you food, but I do not think you will starve. Skrymer should be along soon, hunting anybody in khaki. I think I can safely leave you to his mercies.”

Winter gritted his teeth, but he remained silent. What Schneider didn’t know wouldn’t hurt him.

He watched helplessly as Schneider climbed into the machine, pausing only long enough to throw a mocking kiss as he shut the door. For twenty intolerably long seconds Winter stared at the silent silvery sphere. It couldn’t take off. It mustn’t take off! Surely Schneider had not discovered the effect of the little wedges!

Then Winter gasped. He was looking through a vista of trees at the sparkling waters beyond. There was no time machine in his line of vision. It was gone. It had taken off! His adversary had triumphed, after all.

CHAPTER XIII

Desperate Venture

WINTER slumped backward, stunned by the unexpected turn of events. Now he regretted fiercely that he had not thrown the spiral connection into the swirling tide of the Elbe when he had the chance. For now not only had Schneider escaped, but Berlin would be warned.

The doom of the Time Column had been sealed. The element of surprise on which they had banked so heavily was gone. They might yet go forward in the shuttles, but it could only be into a trap.

At last he realized that grieving over spilt milk was useless self-torture. Perhaps later they could devise some way around—say, choose another point of attack, such as Munich or Vienna. Meanwhile he must rid himself of his bonds. He had no intention of being too easy a victim for the angry Skrymer.

That did not prove simple. After writhing and wriggling for hours, tugging and contracting muscles until they cramped, he found it impossible. He lay panting and exhausted, having slipped nothing free.

The gnawing method occurred to him, but his most elaborate contortions failed to bring his teeth within an inch of the tough withes that bound him. He rolled over and over on the soft ground, looking for an imbedded stone he could chafe them against. In that damp loam there was no such stone.

Night came. He tried to sleep, but insects deviled him and slimy things crawled over him, and his thoughts were not soothing. A miserable day of growing thirst and hunger followed, and another night even more painful than the first. He hoped vainly that a wandering Teuton might find him and release him, but none came. The depopulation of the country had been thorough. He almost wished the giants would come and end his agony.

It was on the third day that he heard the measured swish of many oars pulled in unison to the accompaniment of a rhythmic chant. Suddenly there were creakings, and human voices shouting. Someone had seen the charred ribs of Schneider’s abandoned galleys.

Winter began to make out the words. They were in English. These must be the advance guard of the B.E.F. He shouted until he was hoarse. In a few minutes he could see the galleys coming in and making ready to tie up at the shore. He passed out then from sheer exhaustion.

In half an hour he was being fed and told the latest news. The two vessels had left Scotland just behind the one which Winter had intercepted and turned back. The formation had been dispersed by a storm and these were late. They had not met the despatch boat on its return. They must have passed it in the night. They knew nothing of late developments and were expecting to find General Snyder and report to him for duty.

Winter told them of Schneider’s treachery and its discovery, adding only that he had gone “on.” taking his men and the Class-A machine with him. He did not see fit to tell them the worst. There was no need of spreading discouragement. He warned them of the probable approach of giants in a bloodthirsty and savage mood, and suggested measures to make surprise impossible. They might have to wait weeks before all the ships arrived.

They dug pits and planted heavy, pointed stakes in the bottom, covering the pits with woven tree branches and thin layers of sod—giant traps. They set up machine-gun nests and stationed sentries. It was well they did. Three days later a group of giants attacked. After that for a week the attacks were almost daily.

The battles were not exciting, any more than the slaughter in the pens of a packing house is. They were massacres. But they were tedious and wearing, and caused a great deal of labor, for every day the huge carcasses had to be dragged down to the water’s edge and set afloat on the ebbtide,

MORE and more galleys, all part of the flotilla that had left Scotland first, were arriving. Then one day came the galley carrying Brigadiar-general Forrester, the rightful military successor to General Worrel. He had received the GHQ’s communication and had assumed command.

He brought with him one-half the propulsion rings and one of the power plants. He said that the balance of the time equipment together with what residue of gasoline there was would follow shortly. Kelly would be the last to come, having been left behind to see that nothing useful was overlooked.

General Forrester listened gravely to Winter’s story.

“I agree with you that the bolder the stroke the better.” he decided when the major finished reporting. “If, as you fear, Schneider has reached Berlin, they will probably credit us with caution and expect us to move to another site for our attack. That will involve delay, maybe of months. If we attack promptly and from here, we may yet surprise them in spite of their warning.”

Winter went to work at once, setting up the rings and testing out the power plant.

It took three days more to set up the shuttle spheres and pack them ready for the take-off. They already contained the other rings, and had room besides for a thousand men. The single self-propelling one, the number two Class-A machine, stood ready.

Winter planned to make a reconnaissance in it, whatever the risks. If he failed to come back promptly, the others would know a deadly trap was set and take one of the other and slower routes. Instead of carrying along the plane, this time he was taking a company of men armed with submachine-guns and hand grenades. If the resistance was mild at first, these could hold off the Germans until the rings could be set and the shuttle system put into operation. Kelly was the officer he chose to lead them.

Winter took a last look around. Men stood by the generator, ready to throw in the switch at an instant’s notice. The shuttles, except those carrying the other rings and generator set, were packed to the guards with armed men, ready and anxious to go. The battalions told off for the second and later relays stood close by, grouped according to the order of their going. Once the invasion was actually begun, everything must proceed like clockwork. There would be no time then for planning or afterthoughts.

Winter shook hands with General Forrester.

“It’s a gamble, sir, but—”

“The whole infernal show has been a gamble,” said the general gruffly. “Thanks to you, it hasn’t been a shambles. Goodbye, and good luck. I’ll see you in Berlin—I hope.”

Winter went into the machine. He had taken the precaution to place it and the others some distance from the spot where Schneider had disappeared in his. There was the faint possibility that Schneider had not succeeded in getting all the way to 1941. If any of his damaged power units failed, he would have to stop short. Winter had not the slightest idea of what an inter-time collision would be like, but it was not an experiment to be made blindly.

He sized up Kelly’s handpicked company. There never was a fitter bunch of men. For many months they had been hardening themselves by hunting, hewing ship timbers and lately the hard row across the choppy waters of the North Sea.

Every one of them knew they might likely emerge in the midst of a mine field or to find themselves surrounded by a circle of cannon muzzles. But not a man flinched when Winter set the lever in the second notch forward for the ten-thousand-year jump and reached for the starting switch.

“Let’s go!” yelled a wag in a falsetto voice. “Dis iss der Tag!”

The lights flickered. They were on their way.

CHAPTER XIV

Invasion

BERLIN in 1941 Men tumbled out into the dark. For a moment they could not see their hands before their faces. Then a flickering like lightning afforded some inkling as to where they were—within some sort of a barn-like building. The place was enclosed but extremely roomy, apparently a shop of some sort, with a saw-toothed roof and many windows.

Strange, inert shapes stood about, and menacing objects seemed to hang overhead. Then the lightning-like light was supplemented by something very like moonlight, except that moonlight did not come on as suddenly as this had. There were thunderous noises all about—a steady, drumming roar, punctuated by both sharp barks and low additional rumbles.

“We’ve landed in a boiler-shop, by golly!” shouted Kelly above the din, “and there’s a night air raid going on.”

Winter grunted. He had been quick to identify the dark masses sitting about as locomotive boilers in various stages of assembly. The dangling objects overhead were the hooks of traveling cranes. His eyes were darting right and left, wondering when and from what quarter the first withering fire of the enemy would come.

It did not come.

He ran swiftly to a window and looked out. He could perceive the silhouettes of several nearby buildings—one a roundhouse, obviously—the others probably machine shops. The first contingent of the Time Column seemed to have landed somewhere in the railroad yards of Berlin.

“Okay, Kelly,” he signaled the intelligence captain. “Unload the boys and beat it back. The coast is clear now, but tell General Forrester to step on it!”

Kelly ran.

Winter had just twenty minutes to deploy his men and make his arrangements. He told off the machine-gunners to the doors and windows. Others were stationed around the spots the shuttles were expected to appear.

If there were any Nazi watchmen about, they must have been busy at the more inflammable of the buildings, fighting the fire-bombs being dropped. Outside, the rattle of anti-aircraft gun-fire went on, and the repeated dropping of flares by the raiders kept up the illusion of weird moonlight. The ruddy sky-glow of many blocks of burning buildings added to the fantastic illumination.

Winter snatched the opportunity to find a gaping firebox of a half-finished boiler and squatted down in it. Here it was safe to light his flash. By its beam he hastily read the large scale map he had brought along. It did not take him long to identify this spot and compute the shortest and quickest routes to their various objectives. He located the chancellery, the main radio stations, and the other points that the intelligence branch had mapped out.

His first intimation that the shuttles were arriving came with a resounding crash that echoed through the bays of the vast building. A boiler shell had suddenly been hurled yards by the sudden impact of an incoming time machine. It solved a question that had long troubled Winter—what happened when an object traveling in time collided with a static one?

The answer seemed to be that the moving one had the right of way. Perhaps its momentum did it. He could not know, but at any rate the shuttles were popping up all over the place, and if boilers or their parts happened to have been there first it was just tough on the boilers.

That flinging about of heavy metal objects scattered his reception crew somewhat, injuring several of them, but the rest rushed in and did the work they had been drilled to do. The power plant was snaked out and rapidly hooked up. The ring segments were assembled as fast as men working in semi-darkness could do it, being placed on the very spots where the shuttles had first landed.

The transport shuttles were quickly emptied of their men, and hauled aside until the rings could be set. Then they were shot back into the past for another load as rapidly as could be. In another half-hour there would be a constant stream of them coming and going.

GENERAL FORRESTER arrived with the next batch.

“What is the situation?” he asked anxiously.

“A pushover, apparently,” reported Winter jubilantly. “Not a soul knows we are here yet.” He led Forrester to the firebox and showed him the map. The general took it all in a few seconds of swift study.

“Nice work. Winter,” he said. “I’ll take a detail and grab the big shots. You manage the broadcasting end. Everybody else can scatter and do general strafing.”

“Yes, sir.” Winter tried to conceal his disappointment. He had hoped for the unique pleasure of trapping Herr Hitler in his lair, along with his bloody-minded accomplices, but rank always had its way and he knew it. He stuffed the map in his pocket and ran to the doorway where the special force of linguists had already assembled.

“Okay, men. We’re on our way,” he ordered. “Radio communications.”

Night air raids invariably throw a town into confusion, however methodically it may be run. To that rule Berlin is no exception. In the first place, the blackout was complete, except as modified by the now dying and intermittent flares and the fires of burning buildings. But where the light was best, the confusion was the greatest, due to the comings and goings of emergency fire fighters.

The Time Columnists had little difficulty in slipping down the various streets undetected. They left their wake strewn with the bodies of unfortunate Berlin policemen who had the hard luck to bump into them, but for the most part the policemen died silently, not knowing until bayonets actually slid between their ribs that their time had come, and never knowing that this was a visitation from the most startling Trojan Horse of history.

Major Winter led the way into the first of the big radio stations. He did not waver a hair’s breath from the plans previously decided upon. The Nazis were to be given a taste of their own ruthlessness, for the fate of all might well hang on this night’s operations. It was no time for squeamishness. As the invaders burst into the control room they promptly shot down every living thing in it. No operator survived long enough to put a warning message on the air.

Winter looked about him and sighed heavily. Then he found the official telephone and sat down by it to wait patiently. A quick glance told him his staff were all present and at their posts.

The Free-Frenchman was at a transmitter, as well as the Dane and the Norwegian. His Balkan linguist and an assistant, had taken over another. Elsewhere was a Dutchman with a bitter grievance, a Pole, a Belgian, an Italian, a Czech,—in fact, representatives or spokesman for all the overrun, enslaved and exploited victims of Nazidom. Every one of them burned with an ardent desire to begin sending his message of hope. There was not one who would flinch at the penalty, if their coup failed.

It seemed an eternity, but it was actually but a matter of a few minutes before the telephone rang and a cautious voice asked the coded question agreed upon.

“You can speak out,” was Winter’s answer. “It’s all over here but the fireworks.”

“Then let ’er go,” ordered Forrester over the wire. “The chancellery is ours, and we’ve rounded up the whole foul gang. They don’t like it.”

“To blazes with what they like and don’t like!” yelled Winter, hanging up with a bang. He turned.

“Shoot the works, boys.”

A clamor of calls went out on the instant. A moment later fervid, impassioned appeals were flooding the ether in every direction. Berlin had been taken by a British column!

Hitler was in captivity, as was all his mob, including the chiefs of the army and navy, who happened to be in conference at the time.

Come on, everybody! Start your long delayed offensives. Slaves! Arise and throw off your masters! True Germans! Now is the time to rehabilitate the former good name of your country. Make it worthy of your great musicians, scientists, poets and mathematicians. Plaster all of Europe with your Vs for victory.

The flood of eloquent pleading rolled on—parallel messages in every language and dialect of polyglot Europe. Winter saw that it was going over big and relaxed a bit. Presently the phone at his elbow rang. It was Forrester.

“How are you doing?”

“According to Hoyle, sir. What’s the dope?”

“Haven’t missed a connection. The upside people have certainly done their part. Funny thing the Quislings and all the other Nazi stooges can’t believe we’ve cut the guts right out of the show. They keep phoning in and yelping about their troubles. If they’re right, there won’t be a live Nazi loose in either Denmark or Norway by daylight. Same thing in Holland—everywhere. The Balkans are seething. The Russians are advancing.

“What about Germany proper?”

“No different. We had no idea how many decent Germans there are. They are rioting everywhere. We have a rumor right now that the navy has mutinied, but we haven’t been able to confirm it yet. Keep on pumping out the good news.”

WINTER’S gang kept at it. From time to time he re-established contact with General Forester, but always the news was good, or better. Berlin, caught by surprise from within and with a half-starved and rebellious population, was a hundred percent in the Time Column’s hands. Armies from the outside were beginning to pour across the borders. Communication with Italy had been broken off minutes before, but the latest reports indicated chaos there. One seemingly accurate bulletin recounted the attempted flight and assassination of Mussolini.

Winter hung up, grinning like the cat who had just gotten outside a canary.

“At last, Frieda,” he murmured, “you are avenged!”

Instantly he jerked upright. Conscious mention of Frieda brought Brunhilda to his mind. What had happened to that fine, brave and intelligent woman ruler of prehistoric Teutonia?

Not a single word had been heard of Hugo Schneider and his villainous crew.

The Nazis had not been warned. This meant that Winter’s sabotage of the Number One Time-Traveler had been successful after all. The Nazi Fifth Columnist was trapped somewhere on the shores of the infinite sea of time.

Major Winter, his face white and set, staggered erect and groaned aloud. For Brunhilda, the fair, the gentle, the good, was trapped along with Schneider. Winter had won, only to lose. But how could he have foreseen that the Nazi spy and saboteur would abduct Brunhilda? Bitterly Winter smote his forehead with his clenched fist.

Then he was called back to the telephone to receive word that the Atlantic fleet of the United States was steaming eastward to assist in the policing of the now chaotic Europe. This information had to be correlated to go out over the air.

Winter had no time for personal despair.

The rest of the night went like that.

Dawn found a tired and haggard crew talking huskily into the mikes, but not a man present thought of quitting. Breakfast could go hang. Sleep could go hang. Their pounding pulses told them they ought to be outside fighting with the mop-up crews, but their better judgment reassured them. What they were doing was far more damaging than any amount of trigger pulling. Bulletins were coming in fast now, and were being broadcast to the world as fast as received.

The Allied victory was fast being turned into a landslide.

“Just what we figured on,” Winter managed, rubbing his bloodshot eyes and gulping down another cup of coffee. It was real coffee, too, sent over very thoughtfully, by Forrester from the confiscated private stocks of the big shots of Nazi gangsterdom. In fact, it was the very best of coffees—Herr Goering’s own private blend. “Yes, Germany was nothing but a shell, just like the time before. This time the lesson ought to stick.”

“Providing the so-called statesmen think up something better than they did at Versailles,” spoke up a linguist dryly.

“Yes,” agreed Winter thoughtfully. “We’ve still got the job of unscrambling eggs ahead. Some say it can’t be done.”

For a little while there was a lull. Winter sat tiredly where he was, thinking over the implications of that last remark and his own answer to it. Of a sudden a queer gleam came into his eye.

“I have it,” he said to himself, half out loud. “If—if only. …”

WINTER was itching to do things on his own, but things happened so swiftly and the official pressure on him was so great that he could not. It appeared that overnight he had become an international hero—not only on account of his handling the propaganda broadcasts that lurid night, but on account of the invaluable aid he had rendered the Time Column in general.

He was especially commended in inner circles for the important part he had played in the exposure of the spy and saboteur Schneider, and advanced to the rank of colonel. Incidentally, despite their ransacking of the files of the erstwhile Gestapo, nothing could be found about Schneider since his unplanned departure from the Twentieth Century in April, 1941. Wherever he had gone in the damaged time machine, it had not been back to modern Germany.

Winter wanted to take the serviceable number two class-A traveler and go back to search for him—and Brunhilda—for it still had 30,000 unused years in its power batteries. But he was kept busy at the Allied headquarters now set up in the Wilhelmstrasse. Moreover, the machine itself was inaccessible, having been moved to a spot near the Brandenburger Arch and enclosed in glass. A triple row of sentries kept the gaping crowds back, and no one, not even the Peace Commissioners themselves, were allowed to pass those lines. It was the one souvenir of the war that would be kept intact for the admiration of posterity—the single really potent “secret weapon” that had ever won a war.

CHAPTER XV

Reich-Empress

AS has been the custom from the remotest times, the peace conference opened with pomp and ceremony and stuffed shirts were as plentiful in attendance as genuine statesmen. Far more plentiful, for the hierarchy of statecraft has never assayed more than ten percent of statesmanship to the ton. Much of diplomacy is routine, better left to trained clerks, and some of it pure blah.

So the stuffed shirts shouted, some demanding impossible reparations, others prating of the necessity of dividing everything on linguistic grounds or religious, or racial (whatever that may mean), or according to whatever bug happened to dominate their shriveled, opportunistic minds. Others thought of economic consequences and tried to talk in regional, even continental terms.

Secret treaties were uncovered, only to be howled down. After three weeks of getting nowhere there was not a single proposal that had the endorsement of more than one or two members. The liberated German people were especially apprehensive, as were the more enlightened genuine statesmen present. All they could see was the old cycle of vindictive punishment, its consequent resentment and rebellion and armament races all over again. Before the century could expire, another World War would be inevitable.

Among the onlookers were Forrester, Kelly, Miller and Winter, heroes all, and privileged characters. They shared the misgivings of the more sober-minded men who were striving to put across reasonable, liveable terms in the face of the wave of implacable, vindictive fury. The peace conference threatened to bog down any day. A war amongst the former Allies seemed almost inevitable. The situation was perilous in the extreme. Then one night Winter unburdened himself to General Forrester. The older man listened to him gravely, nodding from time to time.

“It could be,” Winter was insisting fervently. “If so, she’d be a natural.” He blushed ruddily and added somewhat confusedly to his seemingly incoherent remark, “Besides, it means everything—do you understand—everything to me to find her if she is still alive.”

“I agree,” said the general without argument. “It will take some wrangling, but we will do it. It won’t be hard to have myself appointed as provisional governor of conquered Germany. If after that we cut a few corners I doubt if many people cry for our blood. I’ll back you, my boy. Your hunches have been good up to now.”

“What about Adolph?” inquired Winter. “You know perfectly well they will never actually try him. They threatened to do that with the Kaiser, but when the sticking point came they all got cold feet.”

“When I’m governor of occupied Germany, I may be a little careless about that, too.” The general folded his hands placidly across his bemedalled chest and smiled knowlingly. “It—er—certainly won’t be murder. You cannot even call it exile. Hop to it, Winter. In three days I guarantee you’ll have a free hand.”

“That’s all I want to know,” said Winter, and his look said more than words could have conveyed.

Exactly on the third night thereafter an astonished captain of the guard at the International Shrine saw a huge dray approaching, accompanied by a small army of laborers and drawn by several gigantic tractors. Colonel Winters hopped off the dray and presented a set of orders. They were from the temporary supreme boss of Germany. They were brief and to the point.

It is decreed that the appropriate place for the Time-Traveler Shrine is the spot where it emerged. Therefore it is ordered that the machine be at once removed to the Feurrot Boiler Works. Colonel Winter will have complete charge.

Signed: Forrester.

It was after midnight, but everything had been provided. The captain saluted and ordered his sentries aside. The workmen demolished the glass enclosure and transferred the silvery globe to the dray. Winter gave the tractors the signal to move, beckoning the guard to follow.

It did not take long to reinstall the machine in the very spot in the former boiler works where it had first materialized in modern Germany. The work had hardly been finished when an army truck rolled up. Winter checked off its contents with a sardonic smile. Three cases of hard-tack, two slabs of salt pork, a bag of ersatz coffee, and a gunny-sack bag that gave out a metallic rattle when shaken. The invoice tallied.

Winter personally carried the stuff into the machine, the laborers having already been dismissed.

The next queer proceeding of the night was the arrival of the Berlin equivalent of the Black Maria. The prison van chugged in and stopped in the middle of the floor. Captain Kelly was in charge. Winter, who had said little by way of explanation, now spoke.

“You guards take your stations outside the building and let no one come in until I have come out. That may be several days from now, but that is the order.”

The captain saluted and whistled to his men. Winter waited until the last of them had gone. Then he called Kelly to him, the only man still inside the vast empty plant, except the van-driver and its discreet guard of four men.

“Keep ’em covered,” whispered Winter, then gestured to the van escort to open the door.

It was a strange group that emerged, sputtering and indignant. There were a dozen prisoners—Hitler, Goering, Himmler, Goebbels, Von Ribbentrop. Von Papen—the whole of the topmost of the gang, in fact. Under the guns of two of the hard-faced guards they walked gingerly to the Time-Traveler and entered at Kelly’s order. They had dished it out themselves often enough. Now it was their turn to take it. Most of them took it philosophically, but one blubbered like a child.

“Take the van away,” ordered Winter abruptly.

He stood watching until it was through the door. Now the building was empty save for himself and Kelly and two trustworthy soldiers guarding the prisoners inside the machine.

“All clear,” he said to Kelly, and they followed their prisoners in.

Before he set his lever. Winter stripped the cover off the power units. A sidelong glance had told him his prisoners were safe. They were huddled stupidly in the offside of the machine under the watchful eyes of the two armed guards.

No one in the sphere could fail to note the twitching fingers that rested on the triggers of the machine-guns. Those boys hoped there would be an attempt at a break.

“Look, Kelly,” explained Winter. “I’ll show you what I did. You see, there are exactly ten power grids, separated by thin diaphragms. Since the machine is good for only fifty thousand years, each grid is powered for five thousand. That is why we progress in leaps of that length. I wasn’t sure whether the power was drawn proportionately from all, or one by one, but when I drove those little wedges in the control board of the other class-A machine I disconnected all of them from each other. My guess was that they are used up one by one. The first four of these are therefore dead.”

“Uh huh.” said Kelly.

“Okay. I split ’em up secretly that way, but to cover up, I also tore off all these topside interconnections as well as taking away the master coil. Do you follow?”

“I do,” said Kelly. “Mr. Schneider stepped aboard and replaced the obvious leads. With the coil he found on you he thought he had all of it. Only the last unit wouldn’t work.”

“Exactly. He knew that the first eight were dead, so he did not bother with them. He jumped them and was smart enough to hook on to the ninth, not knowing the tenth was disconnected. That left him only five thousand years available. You see, I wet those wedges after I drove them in, so they would swell and push the diaphragms out of alignment. Then I knocked them out and put them back into my pocket. The displacement is so small he would never notice, yet it kills the machine.”

“You think then,” queried Kelly, “that he stalled at the year 3,000 B. C., here in Germany?”

“I feel certain of it,” said Winter, and he set the lever at one notch.

There was the usual five-second period of burring, jarring, time travel. The machine halted. Winter flung open the door and he and Kelly stepped out.

Less than a hundred yards away, as Winter had hoped and expected, lay its mate—Machine Number One. The hour was dawn and no one was about except a solitary figure forlornly attempting to build a fire. At least that is what they supposed he was doing, for there was a pile of coarse grass assembled and the man was departing in the distance apparently looking for more.

There did not seem to be much likelihood of his early return. As far as the eye could see there was nothing about but a desolation of sand-dunes interspersed with hard clay patches covered with short, stubbly grass.

“Looks as if Germany was harder hit by the plague than Scotland,” remarked Kelly, pointing to the dry ravine that had once been a deep river. “They had drought here as well.”

“Uh huh,” said Winter absently. “Suppose we get out those boxes before we go into the other machine.” Somehow, now that he was here, he shrank from what he might find in Schneider’s Time-Traveler.

They brought out the dry provisions and set them down. Winter now ripped open the burlap bag and dumped out its contents. Glittering in the hot sun were ten old-fashioned bowie knives. He and Kelly picked them up by their points and hurled them as far away as they could throw, in every direction.

“Now,” said Winter, and started grimly for the Schneider machine.

There were but three people in it. Brunhilda and her one handmaid were huddled in one corner, fast asleep. Both looked pale and somewhat thinner than when he had last seen them, but nothing as compared to the emaciated, haggard condition of Schneider, who was also asleep on the other side.

The food had obviously run out, and most of his pirate crew deserted him. Dismantled machinery lay all about the place, showing the desperate efforts the spy had made to complete the last five-thousand-year leg of his trip.

Winter woke Brunhilda gently, holding a warning finger to his lips. There was no time for sentiment. He helped her and the maid from the Traveler and across to his own machine.

“Wait here,” he said, halting them at one side of it. “I’ll come for you shortly.”

He went back to Schneider’s machine and woke him by stirring him with his booted toe.

“Up you come!” he ordered crisply.

Schneider awoke with a start. Incredulity, dismay, and then burning hope leaped in mad succession across his haggard features.

“Winter!” he cried out in a hoarse croaking sound. “You escaped! You came here to rescue us?”

“Give me your key to this machine,” said Winter curtly.

The spy was trembling in his eagerness to obey. His nerve was completely gone. Winter silenced his babbling with an impatient gesture.

“Get outside and wait there—murderer! And while you wait, keep reaching for the sky.”

Captain Kelly passed the stumbling Schneider at the machine entrance. The intelligence officer had a paper-wrapped bundle under one arm. He smiled grimly at the befuddled spy.

“This is one job of sabotage I am going to enjoy,” he said with relish. “Okay,” said Winter. “Plant your bomb and set the clock for half an hour.”

Kelly deposited the time bomb and adjusted it. Together they left the interior of the Number One Class-A machine, and Winter locked the door behind them. Ignoring Schneider’s frantic questioning, they marched the captive over to the second Traveler. Here Winter stood so as to shield the two bewildered women while the two guards marched the squad of Nazi prisoners out onto the barren plain.

Schneider gaped in astonishment and then fell to his knees before his helpless and hapless leader. It was a sorry picture.

Assisting Brunhilda and her handmaiden to enter the number two traveler, Winter turned and beckoned the guards and Kelly to him.

“Just one word,” he said curtly, addressing the forlorn and dismal group of Nazis. “You scoundrels wanted to conquer a continent. Here is one. Help yourselves. I have provided food for a limited time—possibly a month, if you ration yourselves. There is more—if you can live to find it. Your stooge Schneider can tell you about that better than I. Your law is the law of the claw and fang, your philosophy that of the survival of the fittest. There is no better place anywhere than here to try it out. Beat it!”

“You didn’t tell ’em about the knives,” Kelly whispered to him.

“They’ll find ’em,” grunted Winter. He was wishing ardently he could stick around and see the finish, but there were more important things to do. He entered the Time-Traveler and closed the door.

In a moment the Number Two Traveler vanished.

“DO you understand now?” Winter said softly to Brunhilda, as they stepped off the platform and hurried through a side corridor back to the room where they had been waiting for that summons. Behind them applause shook the auditorium whence they had just quitted. The peace conference had gone mad with joy and relief. The deadlock was broken. A formula had been found.

Brunhilda did not reply at once, and Winter repeated his question.

“Not altogether,” she answered in her quaint, archaic Germanic tongue.

“The German problem appeared insoluble,” he explained. “Basically the people are not much different from the rest of us, but from the very beginning of their empire they have been steeped in the most hellish, inhuman doctrines until it is now almost part of them.

“Bismarck preached blood and iron. Nietzsche prated of the superman and exalted the ‘devil take the hindmost’ rule until it seemed divine. The Hohenzollerns were convinced of their superiority over the rest of mankind. Hitler carried all those philosophies to their absurd extreme. He transformed a race of frugal, industrious, family-loving people into automatons of a gigantic, cruel fighting machine that was feared and hated by all the world.”

“But why? Why, Yack?” She clasped his arm.

He smiled. For days he had been trying to teach her to say “Jack,” but somehow she could not manage it.

“Why? Because they had been taught that that was their proper function. They had been taught it from the cradle. They have been sadly mislead and warped. Once before they attempted world conquest. The outside nations united against them and beat them down. They imposed harsh terms, and instituted democracy.

“But it would not work. The Germans are unacquainted with the democratic method. They have a whole-hearted contempt for it. They are accustomed to be ordered to do things, to be regimented. They could not believe that any other people were as good as they are. So a new and worse Hohenzollern arose—Hitler. We had to do the job all over again.”

He paused for breath, and also because it was hard to keep on talking about world politics with her standing so close to him.

“You are the ideal answer,” he went on, deliberately moving away a few inches. “They worship the Nordic type—meaning by that tall, fair people. You are that. They worship the Teutonic tradition. You were one of the founders of it. To them you are close to being a goddess. They worship authority. You have wielded it gently, and over a similar people. As a ruler, you will satisfy them. That is why you have been chosen.”

She frowned slightly.

“Perhaps the Germans, yes. But why do their enemies receive me so joyously?”

“Because twenty thousand men have seen your own empire and know how well it was administered. We do not fear your control, because we know you are not filled with conceit and unbounded ambition. Because under you there is a chance of the Germans maintaining a place in the world and still not be a menace to the rest of it. Your own country is extinct. You cannot go back. You have no choice. You must accept.”

She wiped out the several inches of space between them with one impetuous movement. She clung to him like a fearfully frightened child.

“Oh, Yack,” she cried, “there are so many people, there are so many things, the houses are so big … I can’t do it alone!”

“You won’t have to do it alone,” he whispered, holding her tightly.

A moment later three frock-coated statesmen hesitated in the doorway, then stopped. They were a committee, consisting of eminent prime ministers. They exchanged quiet, knowing smiles with lifted eyebrows. Then they turned and gazed out into the corridor.

After an appropriate length of time one of them coughed discreetly. After all, they had their message to deliver. The German delegates had accepted Brunhilda as their Empress and were willing to treat on the revised terms offered.

Jack Winter was content. It is not every man’s lot to have to go ten thousand years before he finds his bride, but somehow it did not seem that long to him.

THE END

TRANSCRIBER'S NOTE

THIS e-book was resourced from a copy of the magazine it first appeared in from https://archive.org. Proofread and checked against the original. The illustrations have been digitally ‘dusted’.

Gunner54, 2020.

Table of Contents

THE STORY BEHIND THE STORY

CHAPTER I

Amazing Project

CHAPTER II

Probing Time

CHAPTER III

Treachery?

CHAPTER IV

Cut Off!

CHAPTER V

Another Step Backward

CHAPTER VI

The Giants

CHAPTER VII

8,000 B.C.

CHAPTER VIII

Teutonia

CHAPTER IX

Reversal

CHAPTER X

Double Crossed Again!

CHAPTER XI

Confirmation!

CHAPTER XII

A Futile Flight

CHAPTER XIII

Desperate Venture

CHAPTER XIV

Invasion

CHAPTER XV

Reich-Empress