Time Riders

CHAPTER 48

1956, command ship above Washington DC

Kramer dined alone. He wasn’t in the mood to celebrate the victory withReichsmarschall Karl Haas, the senior divisional commanders and their aides. Several dayssince the surrender, and despite a few minor skirmishes as several individual US states in thewest fought on bitterly, America was now a part of the Greater Reich.

His high command was celebrating right now, no doubt solemnly toasting their absentFuhrer in smart dress uniforms, then sitting down together in the White House’sstate hall to discuss the administrative business of running America. He trusted Karl to keepall those ambitious generals and Gauleiters in line; he suspected they feared him almost asmuch as they did their Fuhrer.

No, tonight he wanted to be alone. Things were troubling him.

That body, that damned body… the unsettling questions itraised. Despite what Karl had said, that was no corpse twisted by a mere incendiary grenade.He’d seen what a time portal could do to a human body once before. He’d neverforget the twisted flesh, organs turned inside out and still somehow managing tofunction… for a while.

‘Someone from the future’s after us,’ he muttered to himself.

He could almost feel that someone probing thepast, finding their way slowly towards him, stalking him. At any moment the air could shimmerbeside the table and an assassin appear, a gun raised and ready to execute him. It wassomething Kramer constantly feared. The recurring nightmare had troubled him almost everynight for the last fifteen years — awakening in his bed in the dark stillness of nightto see an assassin leaning over him and announcing his immediate execution for travellingthrough time.

The body… that body… had made his nightmares athousand-fold worse, and now he spent every waking hour fearing what might be out there. Itwas a struggle to keep this torment from Karl, to keep his composure in front of the man. Hewondered sometimes if there was an easier way out.

A soft voice whispered quietly in his head.

There is a way out for you, you know.

Suicide?

No, another way.

He looked out of the window at a dark city punctuated with sporadic smouldering fires andspeared with the sweeping, searching floodlights coming from his command ship.

Think on it.

His quiet voice. The voice that was always there, had always been with him as long as hecould remember. The voice of… ambition… daring him on, pushing him to do thosethings he wouldn’t normally have the resolve to do. As a child it had helped him achieveacademic success, as a young man driven him to earn a doctorate in quantum physics, to becomea research fellow at the Waldstein Institute. It had given him the confidence to finally puttogether his audacious plan to go back into history and make it his.

You could destroy this world, couldn’t you, Paul? After all,it’s your world now. All yours to do with as you wish.

‘That’s madness,’ he replied, putting down his forksuddenly. It clattered noisily on the plate, filling his large, stately quarters with adiminishing echo.

Madness, is it?

Since going through time, convincing Hitler to accept him into his inner circle and finallybecoming the Fuhrer himself, the voice had become quiet, unneeded by him. Like a childbrooding, sulking. But now — since that body, in fact — it seemed to have found anew energy.

Madness, is it? What would happen if a traveller from the future were toappear right here and put a bullet through your brain?

Kramer closed his eyes. The thought had him trembling. The answer was obvious. This historyhe had worked so hard to create would change.

And what if a traveller learned the exact time and place that youentered history? Those woods, 1941? And killed you there? Before you met Hitler?

‘The world would be as it was,’ he replied aloud. ‘The future would onceagain be the dark and dying one we left behind.’

That’s right. A dying world. Choking on toxic fumes. The seaspoisoned. People slowly starving. In a way, it would be kinder to end it now. Would itnot?

Kinder? Kramer hadn’t thought about the world they’d left behind in a long time.Global warming had become an uncontrollable force. By 2050 the ice-caps had finally vanished.The entire African continent was as sun-blasted and lifeless as the surface of Mars. Andpeople, nine billion of them, crowded into the few tolerable regions of the earth left, mostof them starving migrants living in dust-blown shanty towns outside the few mega-cities. Likealmost every other species on earth, Kramer wondered whether one day mankind would alsoeventually become extinct.

‘Kinder,’ he said eventually. ‘Perhaps itwould.’

Much kinder.

He had no appetite for his meal now.

You trust me, Paul, don’t you?

He’d always trusted his inner voice, his instinct. It had guided him far better in hislife than any tutor or mentor, any father-figure or friend. ‘If you can’t trustyour own instinct,’ someone had once told him, ‘then you’re a lostman.’

Don’t you see? Someone or something is out there. And it will findyou, whatever you do, however much you decide to erase history and disguise your tracks. Itwill eventually find you. The body was a warning.

Deep down he knew there was truth in that. Perhaps he’d known that from the moment heand Karl had been presented with that cruelly twisted corpse, but he’d been unable tobring himself to admit it.

I think you realize now… your run of luck has finally come to anend.

‘Fifteen years,’ he said.

That’s right, fifteen years. Twelve of them as the world’sgreatest ruler. And in that time you’ve achieved so very much. But your time hasfinally run out. Someone has come to get you.

‘A time traveller?’

Possibly. Or worse.

‘Worse?’

You’ve meddled with time. You’ve crossed dimensions.You’ve stepped through chaos itself. There’s no knowing for sure what seeks youout.

Kramer felt his guts twist with anxiety, a churning unease eating away inside.

An agent of the future could take this world from you with anassassin’s bullet. But it could be far worse. Something we can never hope tounderstand could come for you… could be out there in that dark city rightnow…

He felt his scalp prickle, his skin turn cold.

But you could prevent that.

‘By destroying this world?’

Yes, Paul… by destroying this world.

He pushed his chair back. Oddly, there was some growing comfort in that notion. This worldrendered still, silent, lifeless and unchanging. An everlasting monument to the world createdby Paul Kramer. All life ended with a sudden flash, instead of the protracted misery thatwould exist in the future. And there was a way — a doomsday device he’d consideredin his idle moments.

We both knew this might happen one day. Didn’t we? Perhaps it wasalways going to be your destiny.

Kramer narrowed his eyes, almost sensing the inevitable subtle shifting of destiny ahead ofhim, future histories adjusting, rewriting, as he felt his decision being firmly made.

‘Then it has to be so.’

His voice, his instinct, seemed appeased by that.

A fitting end to things, Paul. Mankind was always destined to destroyitself. It’s in our nature to destroy all that we create. And you will be the one whodoes it.

Isn’t that just a little bit like being God?