Chapter II

And beyond it was not the gloomily raftered feast-hall of a Nazi baron, with gray March outside its windows--but a woodland rich with high summer. A breeze stole in from that preposterous outdoors and brought warmth and scent of firs, and of something else.... Suddenly there was a crashing in the thicket, a thud of racing hooves. "A deer," said Manning stupidly. "Something must have scared it." Dugan, sweating with his back to the door, relaxed slightly.

Like an echo from behind Manning came a dry cackle of laughter. He faced about again; his glare stilled even the Herr Doktor's hysterical glee.

"All right, how'd you do it?" he snapped in English, then, with returning control: "_Erklaren Sie das sogleich!_"

"_Gern_," grinned the scientist. "This room, all of it, is my invention. It was built into the house, but when I closed the switch, it moved, and left the house behind."

"Where are we, then? No riddles!"

"It is simple enough. What you see outside is the world of the future--no longer future to us, but present, though about a hundred years removed from the 'present' which we have just left. This room is my time traveler--_der Kahl'sche Zeitfahrer!_"

Meantime Dugan had taken a look out the door. He said nothing, but his eyes grew larger and larger in a paling face. Manning told him, tersely and without comment, what Kahl claimed to have done; in his own mind he had already accepted it as truth, the only possible explanation for the seeming impossible. He said stonily to the German: "The demonstration of your invention is very interesting. But now we must deliver it to American Intelligence, who will appreciate your genius. Set the machine to take us back where we came from."

"I could not if I would," retorted Kahl. "Because of your interference, I had no opportunity to make adjustments. I merely threw the activating switch, and the _Zeitfahrer_ exhausted its power before coming to a stop. You see, the switch is still closed. Only the field has collapsed as the batteries went dead."

There was a sound like a sob. It came from the hard-faced Wolfgang. The man's patent terror was more convincing than Kahl's assertions.

Manning eyed him coldly, inwardly surprised at his own reaction to the news that they were stranded. Perhaps he was still dazed by the incredible--but his chief emotion was a waxing excitement and wonder at the thought of seeing with his own eyes that world of the future about which people dreamed and speculated, cursing the shortness of their lives....

Dugan had guessed more than he had understood the meaning of Kahl's words. But to him the situation suggested more routine concerns.

"Say, Ray," he inquired, "do you suppose we're AWOL?"

"I don't think so," Manning choked down an impulse to wild laughter. "No more than a guy that's blown off his post by an 88. Anyway, I don't remember any General Order that says you've got to be in the right year. But our program now will have to be: get oriented in this place, this time, I mean, and dig up some fresh batteries to send this thing back to 1945. In the twenty-first century batteries shouldn't be scarce; we'll just have to be careful about contacting the natives, so we don't get tossed in jail or the booby hatch.... To begin with, let's get out of here. This damn traveling vault is getting on my nerves." He motioned at Kahl and Wolfgang. "Outside."

Kahl didn't stir; his eyes narrowed slyly. "There is no sense in your treating us as prisoners, now. The war is ancient history."

"Until further notice," said Manning, "we'll continue as of 1945. Move!"

Grudgingly they moved. Kahl growled over his shoulder, "One thing does not seem to have occurred to you. This is _Germany_ of the future, where Wolfgang and I are much more likely to find friends than you are."

* * * * *

Manning did not answer. He had halted, stiffening, on the time machine's threshold, and sniffed the air critically. To him came sudden recognition of the scent which mingled, strengthening, with that of spruce and fir: a heavy, tarry odor of burning. He looked upwind. Through the rifts of the treetops were clearly visible clouds of black smoke, boiling upward against the blue sky. Flames flickered angrily beneath, and to Manning's ears came the faint but subtly all-pervasive crackling of the fire. It was drowned out briefly by the alarmed croakings of a flight of ravens that circled overhead and then flapped away, and in the relative stillness that followed another sound was audible--that of human voices, raised in shouts and commands.

"Looks like the local fire department's on the job," remarked Dugan.

"The fire!" exclaimed Kahl hoarsely. "It is blowing toward us--If it reaches the _Zeitfahrer_--"

"Guess the man's right," said Manning. "If that is the fire department, we'd better get in touch with them." All four started to run, quartering across the visible face of the blaze toward the voices' source.

They had covered a hundred yards when from ahead, sharp above the snapping flames, a shot spanged. The two Americans instinctively hugged the ground; Kahl and Wolfgang, in advance, froze and stared at the screen of firs. From just beyond exploded a violent fusillade, with the hasty clatter of automatic fire setting the tempo; and in the midst of all the shooting was the noise of a racing motor and a rackety whir that could come only from spinning propeller blades.

The sound rose and seemed to hang overhead. Manning looked up and thought for an instant that he glimpsed the dark moving shape of a flying thing; but when he looked straight at the spot there was nothing. A moment later he was conscious that the roar of the engine had ceased and with it the noise of firing. The crackle of the forest fire came as from far away to deafened ears.

Dugan and Manning looked blankly at one another. They got to their feet and stood in indecision.

"Damned if I know," said Manning bewilderedly. "For a minute I thought we'd landed in the middle of another war. Now I don't know whether it was real or--"

"_Halt!_" barked a keyed-up voice on their right. "_Still-gestanden, oder ich schiesse!_"

The man who had appeared from the bushes, despite the unfamiliar uniform he wore, was at least real. So was the tommy gun he trained on the group, and the look of vicious eagerness that twisted his face.

"_Das Gewehr fallen lassen!_" he shouted.

"Better drop it," said Manning quietly to his companion. "We don't know what the score is yet. And that guy _wants_ to shoot."

Other uniformed figures appeared behind the first man. All of them were armed and looked excited and dangerous. But surprising was the caution, amounting to anxiety, with which they fanned out and kept their weapons leveled; they seemed to expect some formidable and disconcerting counterattack from the disbanded and outnumbered captives.

The first arrival jerked a thumb toward the way he had come; his manner didn't encourage protest. And Manning, who had read science fiction stories, reflected that a time traveler's best bet was to keep his mouth shut.

Beyond the fir grove a meadow-like clearing opened out. Smoke was drifting across it and the fire licking at its edges, but that didn't seem to be what was bothering the men who swarmed about it. Some of them were squinting into the bright summer sky, nervously fingering guns, others arguing in loud groups. A crowd clustered about a helicopter which perched on the grass with slowly revolving vanes. Toward it the four prisoners were marched.

* * * * *

Under the intermittent shadow of the helicopter's blades a big man in curiously patterned civilian garments stood with arms akimbo, facing a soldier who was ramrod-stiff and obviously embarrassed before him.

"There was no chance, Herr Schwinzog," the latter was insisting. "They wore _Tarnkappen_, and they were inside the machine and had the engine going before we knew that anything was wrong. We fired on them as they rose, and they made the helicopter invisible. Of course, then it was too late to stop them--without shutting off the power over the whole district, and that would mean chaos--"

"Of course it was too late," said Herr Schwinzog bitingly, "since it was already too late when you started thinking. You may as well put your report in writing, Captain, and hope that your superiors don't see fit to demote you. For my part, I shall use my influence to see that they do."

He pivoted, grinding his heel into the turf, and snapped at the man at his elbow: "What is it?"

The soldier saluted jerkily. "Unauthorized persons, Herr Schwinzog. We apprehended four of them about two hundred meters to the northwest. Two were armed."

"Hum!" grunted the big man explosively. His eyes narrowed, coming to rest on the group of captives. His scrutiny was chillily penetrating. He held it on them while the shadows of the helicopter vanes swept across his face a dozen times. Then he said flatly, in slightly accented English: "You, no doubt, are Americans?"

Manning was silent, feeling the dream-sense of unreality overcome him again. That question tangled time and space--it and another thing: around the left arm of Schwinzog's oddly cut coat was a broad band, and in a circle on it sprawled a stark black swastika. A hundred years ago--if a hundred years _had_ passed--American armies had been trampling that emblem in mud and blood.

But Dr. Pankraz Kahl burst out, "_Wir sind keine Amerikaner! Wir_--" including himself and Wolfgang with a sweep of the arm, "_sind Deutsche!_"

Schwinzog regarded him expressionlessly. "And you?" he turned abruptly on Manning and Dugan.

"We're Americans," said Manning steadily, in English. Schwinzog's face did not change. But something in the look with which he had received Kahl's statement had jangled an alarm in Manning's brain. And he was still determined to keep his mouth shut and his ears open as much as possible.

Immediately he knew he had been right; for Schwinzog turned again to Kahl. "You say you are German. Your citizen's card, then."

The Herr Doktor started automatically to fumble at a pocket, then paused and made a wry face. "I--we have no such papers as you want. Naturally, since we--"

"Since you are spies?" Schwinzog folded his arms and the fingers of his right hand caressed his swastika brassard.

"That is ridiculous!" shouted Kahl. "I am trying to explain to you that we are visitors from your past! We come from a hundred years ago!"

For the first time Schwinzog looked interested. "And how do you explain your presence in the year 2051 _nach der Zeitwende_?"

The scientist was soothed. "I am Dr. Pankraz Kahl, member of the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gesellschaft, inventor of the world's first _Zeitfahrer_."

"A time traveler? A machine of some sort?"

"Of course."

"Then where is this machine?"

"Back there in the forest--the forest! The fire! It may have reached it--" Kahl plucked at Schwinzog's coatsleeve. "You must save my invention--"

The other shook him off. "When I see it I will save it."

"Come, then! Quick!"

* * * * *

The fire had rolled farther into the forest; everywhere the evergreens were burning like torches. Sparks rained down from overhead as they approached the time traveler's resting place, and directly ahead the thicket was a sheet of flame. From Kahl came a wounded cry; he broke from the guards and dashed forward. Then he stopped as if he had run into a stone wall.

The soldiers closed up, weapons thrusting.

"But this is the place!" Kahl was muttering feverishly. "It was right there--" He pointed at the bare, smoldering grass.

The ten-foot metal cube of the time traveler had burned to feathery ash and drifted away on the breeze--or it had in some no less unbelievable fashion vanished utterly.

Schwinzog's smile was not good to see. "Of course there is nothing there," he nodded satisfiedly. "Lieutenant Kramer, arrest these men. They are American saboteurs, and will be tried as such tomorrow by the _Volksgericht_."

"We," Eddie Dugan summed up the situation, "are up the creek without a paddle."

"And we don't know where the creek is," added Manning. "Only that this is 2051, and the Nazis evidently either won the war or staged a comeback somehow after losing. Neither idea seems possible, but here we are. Item, America is still fighting Nazism--at least, there are 'American saboteurs.' Item two, we landed smack in the middle of a wasp nest stirred up by those same saboteurs. They must have scored a success; did you see that building in the woods beyond that field?"

"What building?"

"I noticed it just as they were loading us into their armored paddy wagon. It had been a big place--already fallen in; the fire must have started there. And the boys that started it must have been the ones that German captain was talking about--the ones that wore Caps of Darkness and flew off in an invisible helicopter."

"I'm getting a headache," groaned Dugan.

"I'd like to meet them," said Manning thoughtfully.

They could not see each other, but they could talk between the adjoining cells. Kahl was in the cell on the other side of Manning's; he had raved most of the night at the guards and the equally responsive steel walls. The two Americans had slept long and refreshingly; they had long since learned to sleep under any and all conditions. There were no windows to show daylight, but they must have been there most of twenty-four hours.

They hadn't seen much of the world of the future, thought Manning ruefully; only the glimpse of a street filled with shiny silent automobiles and oddly garbed pedestrians, as they had been hustled from a rolling dungeon to a stationary one. But if the town was Freiburg, it had changed a lot since they had last seen it--a skeletonous waste of ruin, with nothing left standing that the American bombers had wanted to flatten.

"We shouldn't of let that Kahl talk so much," resumed Dugan gloomily.

"How could we stop him? Anyway, I have a feeling he talked himself in even deeper than he did us."

Their discussion was ended by a clatter of boots, the arrival of a bristling escort. They were being honored with treatment as dangerous and important prisoners--a distinction less flattering than ominous.

* * * * *

The "People's Court" before which they were being taken was obviously not the extralegal supreme court which Hitler had made into a bogey-man for scaring grown-up consciences to sleep; this was a local affair, in the same building that housed the jail. All four prisoners were herded into a rather small chamber, innocent of audience or jury. Opposite the entrance, beneath a huge hooked-cross banner, three men in black robes sat behind a desk. Two of them were old men who regarded the defendants with dull, incurious eyes; between them, his bulk dominating and shriveling them, sat Herr Schwinzog.

Into the deathly silence a hoarse voice cried, "_Heil Hitler!_"

It was Wolfgang, his conditioned reflexes spurred by sight of the swastika flag. The Americans stared at him; it was the first words they had heard him speak--perhaps they were the only ones he knew. Herr Schwinzog raised his eyebrows.

"What did you say?"

"_Heil Hitler!_" repeated Wolfgang mechanically.

"What does 'Hitler' mean?" asked one of the old men curiously.

"I don't know," said the other old man. "Perhaps he is feigning insanity."

Kahl found his voice. "But this is monstrous nonsense!" he shrilled. "Is this not the _tausendjahrige Reich_ that Hitler promised us--"

"Silence!" snapped Schwinzog, and the scientist quailed. "You are not here to plead or talk gibberish, but to hear sentence. Your case has been decided after thorough investigation." He fixed all the prisoners with a frigid gaze. "You Americans are capable of more cunning than most Germans give you credit for; I know that well, for I was a colonial administrator in your country for ten years. Your attempt to masquerade as 'time travelers' shows originality in the conception and thoroughness in the execution. Needless to say, nothing directly incriminating was found among your effects. The experts report that even the metal identification tags found on the two who call themselves Ray Manning and Edward Dugan are authentic reproductions of those used by the American army at the time of the Conquest.

"However, you made the mistake of using too much imagination in the effort to confuse. Your story is too preposterous to be taken seriously, especially since our best scientists have declared time travel impracticable. Accordingly, we could sentence you to death for unauthorized presence inside the Reich and for evident complicity in the attempted sabotage of a German experimental station.

"In view of the absence of direct evidence of subversive actions, we have decided on leniency. The two prisoners, real names unknown, alias Pankraz Kahl and Wolfgang Muller--your claim to German citizenship has been checked with the central archive in Berlin and found to be false. Therefore I sentence you for the crime of imposture to five years in a concentration camp."

Kahl burst into a desperate, unheard babble of protest. At a wave of Schwinzog's hand the guards closed in. The Herr Doktor was dragged away bodily, shouting disjointedly about the blindness of the Philistines and Hitler's thousand years.

"As for you two," Schwinzog eyed Manning and Dugan with an oddly speculative air, "since you have admitted American nationality, your punishment is limited to immediate deportation--back to America."

They were more staggered than they would have been if he had said they would be executed for failure to wear monocles.

As the guards surrounded them, Schwinzog raised his hand, his face adorned by a mocking grin. "One more thing. You will be interested to know that the raid on the Black Forest experimental station missed its objective; the building destroyed was an unimportant storehouse. The actual refining plant is nowhere in the vicinity. The project of which your organization seems to be so well informed goes on as before and will be completed inside a week. You may carry the message to America: _One week to live._"