The Empire of Time (12 page)

That evening he jumped forward to the world of 2999, and jumped back almost instantly.

He had jumped on to a platform, without walls, suspended in the darkness of space. Beneath him – a hundred miles below where he stood suspended – lay a planet.
Earth?
A lifeless world, anyway. A smooth, iced globe surrounded by a thin, rarefied atmosphere.

Afterwards, as he lay there on the floor of his tent, gasping for breath, his limbs trembled, remembering what he had seen. His throat was raw from the single breath he had taken, his eyes felt burned, and his skin seemed to prickle with an unnatural heat.

What had happened? What in Urd’s name had happened?

He had only moments to speculate. Even as he lay there two men came into the tent and stood over him. He knew them both – knew why they were there. Heinrich Himmler and Reinhard Heydrich. Each held a pistol.

He tried to speak, but the bitter cold had done something to his vocal chords. Instead, through stinging, watery eyes, Seydlitz looked up at them and smiled.

Tell Hitler this
, he thought. And jumped.

Hecht smiles then switches off the screen. Above him, the Tree of Worlds glows brightly in the shadowed room.

‘It goes well.’

‘But what he saw …’

‘Don’t worry, Otto. It isn’t finished yet. The days ahead …’ He falls silent, as if he’s said too much.

I meet his eyes. ‘I thought it might—’

‘Become reality? No, Otto. Look.’

I look. The great trunk of the World Tree glows a crystalline white, like a thick column of ice-cold water falling, perpetually falling from the dark into the dark. About that trunk, a cluster of smaller, finer threads branch off, like tiny colourful lightning bolts, snaking out then up, bending back upon themselves until they almost reach the crown. Almost … for about the great Tree’s crown is a tiny circle of darkness. Not a single thread crosses that dark ring, nor can it, for if one did …

I imagine it. Imagine reality becoming something other than itself.

‘But why?’

‘Be patient, Otto. All will come clear.’

He reaches over, hands me the latest report.

I smile. Seydlitz might think us all dead, but he has not forgotten his duty. He has not neglected his reports.

‘He’s still there, then?’

Hecht nods, but says no more. And so I stand and, leaving that place, return to my room, my head buzzing, wondering if, when the change finally comes, I will remember anything of this.

When the snows came they were ready. From the safety of a room in Heidelberg, Seydlitz read the reports in the newspapers. The counter-offensive by the Siberian divisions was turned back and routed at Kolomna, ninety kilometres south-east of Moscow. Hitler’s armies – warmly clothed, well-fed and housed, their tracked vehicles coping with the heavy snows – held the line and in many places extended it. Saratov, on the Volga, fell in the last week of December, Stalingrad a month later. When Gorki fell in the second week of February the war in the East was finally and irrevocably decided. The Russian generals capitulated at Kazan, ceding all of the land west of the Volga to Germany. Hitler was pictured on the newsreels, standing on the banks of the Volga, looking outwards and smiling. Behind him Goering and the generals looked on, smug, knowing they had achieved what Napoleon had only dreamed of doing.

That was the public face of things. Other events were already in motion. Garrisons were being built all along the Volga and throughout the conquered territory. Himmler’s extermination of the Slav intelligentsia and the Jews was under way. Already many divisions were heading back west, preparing for a new campaign.

Seydlitz’s small dream of ruling Russian Europe was dead. Nonetheless, he rejoiced that the bigger Dream lived on, applauding each triumph of the Reich. When Japan finally attacked the USA at Pearl Harbor on the last day of February 1942, he held his breath, but Hitler, true to his plan, held back from a declaration of war and surprised Roosevelt with an open letter of sympathy and friendship – a letter much quoted in the American press, who played down its hypocritical condemnation of his former allies. Audaciously, Hitler offered the Americans five of his best divisions to wage war against the Japanese. It was his own touch, and played cleverly upon the racial antagonisms newly awakened in the American nation. Roosevelt refused, but his refusal won him few friends, except in Britain.

For Seydlitz the winter was a hard one, not because he was materially uncomfortable – he had stashed clothes, papers, and sufficient money in a wood near Mosbach – but because of that glimpse he’d had of the world to come. Settling in Heidelberg, he quickly re-established contact with his men, meeting them at the buried
focus
– effectively a miniaturised platform – just outside the town. In the months that followed, while the Reich grew and prospered, they began their tentative exploration of the years ahead.

In the short term, all seemed well. The policy of pacifying America worked beautifully. While they trounced the Japanese in the Pacific arena, Hitler invaded Britain, and, after a bitter, frustrating campaign, finally took it. By the end of 1943, Italy, Romania, Hungary, Bulgaria and Sweden had all been assimilated peacefully into the Reich. Then, in the summer of 1944, Hitler attacked and conquered Spain in eight short weeks. Turkey followed before the year was out.

Europe was his. The Middle East was next. Then Africa. On 20 April 1949 – his sixtieth birthday – he proclaimed himself Emperor of Greater Germany, holding the coronation ceremony in his new capital of Linz, amid Wagnerian pageantry that made the old Nuremberg rallies look tame.

Then, somewhere in the middle of 1952, there was a hole in Space-Time itself. A vast, unfathomable maelstrom in the fabric of reality. And after? – nothing but darkness, ice, the falling snow.

They lost three men tracing the edges of the flaw, but estimated its epicentre at or around the middle of June 1952. Somewhere there it had happened, whatever it was, and its effects had distorted Time both on and back. There was no way to tell what had happened: no way to anticipate the immediate cause. Even so,
something
had caused it, and Seydlitz knew that if they looked hard enough they would find it.

At first he suspected treachery. Irrationally, Seydlitz believed it was the Russians, pre-empting them, outguessing them maybe in a game through Time. But when he calmed down, he realised how ridiculous that was. They had seen ahead – seen the total, irreversible defeat of Russia, even before Seydlitz’s experience at Kiev. It had to be Hitler.

They began their search at the end of 1944, gathering information from throughout the Reich. Slowly, painstakingly, they combed through 1945, looking for something that might provide an insight into what had happened in ’52. Seydlitz was looking particularly for developments in weaponry – for something big enough and advanced enough to cause what they had seen up ahead. Only later, when it grew clearer what it was, did he realise that he had been looking in the wrong direction.

It wasn’t Hitler after all. It was Roosevelt.

It was early morning – sometime after two – and Paul Joseph Goebbels was alone in his bedroom, seated before the dressing-table mirror, removing his tie. His evening jacket lay on the bed behind him and as his fingers reached to unfasten the stud at the back of his neck, he yawned.

Seydlitz appeared silently, into the shadows at the back of the long, high-ceilinged room. He stood there a while, out of sight, watching Goebbels, then stepped out into the light, and stood there directly behind Goebbels, where he could see him in the mirror.

Seydlitz watched his face, saw him start, his eyes widening further as he recognised who it was. That moment’s naked fear turned into something more complex, more calculated. Goebbels turned and faced Seydlitz, looking down at his hands, finding them empty.

‘Max?’

‘How are you, Paul?’

Goebbels lowered his eyes a moment, then looked back at him ‘Things go well enough, Max.’

He could sense Goebbels’ suspicion, his uncertainty. They were almost tangible. But behind them was something else. A warmth, a degree of respect that remained intact. Slowly he smiled. ‘Where did you go, Max? Where have you been?’

‘Here and there. Is the Führer well?’

The smile tightened. ‘In good health.’ He hesitated, then added, ‘I have orders to kill you if I see you. We all have.’

Seydlitz nodded. ‘I understand. There is only one Führer, eh?’

Goebbels looked at him sadly. ‘I liked you, Max. I suppose I still like you, but …’ He shrugged.

Goebbels was unarmed, but there were guards outside the door. He had only to call out. Even so, he waited, knowing that Seydlitz must have a good reason for coming to him.

‘You must warn the Führer. Tell him not to antagonise the Americans. He must wait before he presses them on the Jewish question.’

‘Why?’

The tie still hung loose about Goebbels’ neck. His dark hair, slicked back from the forehead, shone in the lamplight.

‘They have a secret weapon. Unimaginably powerful. Something we cannot fight. So powerful, in fact, that they do not know how harmful it is themselves.’

Seydlitz shuddered, thinking of the hole in Space-Time only three years in the future.

Goebbels looked away, then shook his head. ‘It may be so, Max, but I can’t help you.’

‘What do you mean? This is important, Paul. If they use it – and they will – it will mean the end not just of the Reich, but of mankind!’

Goebbels laughed. ‘Tell that to Hitler, Max. Germany
is
mankind, remember?’

There was a sourness in him Seydlitz had never seen before.

‘What’s happened, Paul?’

‘It’s nothing,’ he answered, but his expression said the opposite. ‘Just that Hitler wouldn’t listen even if I told him. He hears nothing I say these days. He—’ Goebbels looked away, as if in sudden pain at the thought of it, then continued. ‘He remains loyal. I am still, outwardly, Minister of Propaganda. But I have no influence with him. You understand, Max?’

‘Why?’

Goebbels looked at him and smiled sadly. ‘Because I liked you, Max. And because I was the one who brought you to him.’

Seydlitz went cold, understanding suddenly what he should have known before. He had been the great rival to Hitler, and all those that liked him were therefore traitors.

‘I’m only alive, I think, because he saw that film of me. At least, of my corpse. The thought that I had stayed with him when all the others were gone. That I was willing to die with him and for him.’

‘Then there’s no hope.’

Goebbels was silent for a time, staring down at his hands, then he looked up again. ‘You’ve seen this weapon used?’

‘Yes,’ he lied.

Strangely, Goebbels laughed. ‘You know, when we took Spain, Hitler had them scour the country for the other machine. The one we had – your one – never worked again after Kiev.’

‘It never worked anyway.’

‘What do you mean? The documents. The films – they were all false?’

‘No. They were real enough. But they didn’t come from the machine.’

Goebbels was looking at Seydlitz oddly now.

‘You see, I’ve not been looking at the future at all. I’ve been studying the past …’ And, putting his hand to his chest, Seydlitz disappeared.

If Hitler would not listen, then there was only one solution – they would destroy the weapon before it could be used. A direct assault was likely to be difficult and possibly dangerous; instead they made their investigations, then went back fifteen years and killed all of the scientists involved. The weapon would never be built.

They were celebrating when the first of their men came back from up ahead. ‘It’s still there,’ he said. ‘Unchanged.’

Seydlitz shook his head, for the first time conscious that this might not be as simple as he’d thought. When the second man didn’t return, they went back. The scientists were dead, but the weapon still existed, as if it was anchored to the epicentre, its existence guaranteed by that vast rupture in Space-Time up ahead.

‘It’s hopeless,’ one of his men – Ritter – said.

Seydlitz turned and struck him. ‘Nothing’s hopeless! Remember how we were in Four-Oh? Remember how hopeless
that
seemed? But we defeated them, didn’t we?’

Ritter touched his bloodied lip and nodded. There was no more talk of hopelessness.

There had to be a way out – some way of changing it all. For a time his mind refused to see it, and even when it did he shook his head. It was far too drastic.

Looking at his men Seydlitz knew this was something he would have to do alone. He could not ask one of them to do it for him. He would go back and kill Hitler. Kill him before he was ever born.

It was late in the season. An icy wind blew across the Waldviertel from Poland, a north-easterly that set up a fierce howling through the trees surrounding the village. Seydlitz had been walking most of the afternoon and it was growing dark as he came to the outskirts. It was a remote, uncultivated place, even for that year, and he shivered as he stood there, looking across at it in the twilight. Two dozen houses, a church, an inn, and at the back of all the forest, dark and primeval.

Few travellers chose to come this way.

He had been walking to the side of the track, avoiding the deeply rutted mud at the centre. Now, as he came into the broad, central street, he had to cross and recross, avoiding the huge puddles that had formed. The houses seemed well kept: sturdy, wooden buildings that served as barn and stable as well as home. On his left as he passed, in a space between two houses, a man was unharnessing a horse. He stared at Seydlitz openly as he passed – as if he were a thief – and watched him until the wall of the house obscured him. Even then he stepped out on to the street, clearly wanting to see where Seydlitz went. So it was here. Strangers were not welcome. The people here were simple, hard-working peasant stock, Czech in origin and suspicious by nature. They spoke a mixture of Czech and German, though neither with any grace, and talked of the capital, Vienna, as though it were in another country than their own.