«My ex-fiance once showed me how this works,” Rachelle explained. «Sorry to bring him up. Those levers there operate the legs. And this here, this fires the cannon.»
«Okay, I’m on legs, you’re on cannon. Cool?»
Rachelle looked confused.
«Are you alright with that?» She nodded. «Great! Let’s go!»
Their Clanker rose from the ground. Bantam worked the legs such that it ran right into the middle of the battle.
As the the fighting raged on from morning to afternoon, Bantam and Rachelle destroyed at least twenty Nazi Clankers. Rachelle was a crack shot on the cannon and Bantam was brilliant in maneuvering the Clanker in such a way that they avoided being hit, as well as positioning Rachelle for the kill.
Bantam rallied the American Clankers on several occasions when all seemed lost, boldly racing his out into the middle of the battlefield while Rachelle fired at the Nazi lines, destroying their leading units.
At one point, the Nazis launched a dirigible from the Iron Scallops — and it rained down a plasma lightning on the Americans. But the battle turned when Rachelle and Bantam bulls-eyed the balloon, setting it on fire and dropping the Battle Growler to the earth far below.
It was at this point that the Nazis lost heart. Their Clankers began retreating. The Americans pounded them as they ran. Many enemy Clankers went down in a hailstorm of fire from the American lines. Cheers and huzzahs rang out.
The Nazi Clankers jumped back into their nautical conveyances which quickly turned and headed back out to sea.
It was only later that they learned that Cliff Cleveland, astronaut, had died in the battle, manning a Clanker. He had refused to back down, even in the face of the initial overwhelming onslaught of Nazi war machines.
AT MACLAREN ARMY base, Benjamin Bantam and Doctor Rachelle Archenstone were greeted as heroes.
«It was your warning which made sure the men stood at the ready,” said acting General Fitzhenry to Rachelle. «We were not caught flat-footed. And that’s what enabled us to repel the sneak attack. Next time, we’ll be ready for those villains!»
«Well, it was Benjamin who discovered the Nazi communique,” she replied, her eyes shining with admiration.
«Ah, it was nothing,” Bantam said. Rachelle hit him playfully. «Okay, it was kind of hard, actually.» She grabbed him by the neck and kissed him long and hard — and in public.
«Ho ho!» Fitzhenry said. «We should probably leave the two heroes of ‘The Great Clanker Battle’ alone …»
«Oh wait …» Bantam said — as Rachelle punched him with a pout — «I was wondering — can I get access to my capsule?»
Fitzhenry smiled. «Of course. In fact, Hoermann Volzstrang has been anxiously waiting for your return.»
IT TURNED OUT that Hoermann Volzstrang had not been able to let go of the idea that an alternate version of himself had invented time travel in a world where electricity was real. Night and day, he had been working on a way to make the time capsule work again. And that’s when he happened upon a revelation: if he isolated that capsule from the earth’s damaged magnetic field, would the mythical and magical electricity actually work again?
A hydrologic chamber was just the thing, Volzstrang figured: a rotating vat of fluidics, controlled in just the right way, could act as a shielding mechanism …
When Bantam entered the time capsule, encased in Volzstrang’s chamber, and flipped the switch, he couldn’t believe his eyes as everything lit up.
«It works!» he screamed. «It all works!»
He tried the iPhone and the iPad next — they both turned on as they should.
«Rachelle! Rachelle get in here! You have to see this!»
Bantam spent the next two hours showing her Angry Birds, Instagram, the Kindle app and other wonders. She was astonished beyond reason. Volzstrang loitered and pouted outside the whole time, so Bantam laughed as he invited him into the capsule next. He ran through all of it again. Even simple things like tiny bulbs alight with electric energy made Volzstrang visibly ecstatic with wonder.
«You must understand,” he explained with tears of joy in his eyes. «I am seeing the fairytales of my youth come alive. I am seeing magic happen before my eyes — and it is real, undeniably real.»
Bantam kissed Volzstrang’s forehead. «You bet it’s real. And your equations are what got me back here to show you. So you should thank your other self, not me.»
«This is sorcery,” Volzstrang said, voice dripping with awe. «To me, this is sorcery.»
«No, it’s not,” Bantam slapped him on the shoulder. «It’s science. Your science!»
THE WEEKS that followed were ones of unparalleled bliss for both Rachelle and Bantam.
There were lots of long mornings that drifted into afternoons and then evenings where it then seemed silly to even leave the bed.
Others on the base, including Fitzhenry, couldn’t help but smile in big goofy grins whenever the happy couple passed by holding hands. And the rest of the soldiers on the base took to saluting them wherever they appeared. The rumor that Bantam was US Army from the future had made the rounds, and now that he was a war hero in the present day, the salute seemed somehow required or at least appropriate.
«Oy, they’ll be hammered for life,” some of them said of Rachelle and Bantam, ribbing each other. Rachelle refused to explain what this meant. Eventually Volzstrang told him it meant ‘to be married’.
Volzstrang, Rachelle and Bantam also spent a lot of time together. It was during these sessions that Volzstrang revealed to Bantam that he believed that the Timewave could be stopped from rolling back through time to 1881: theoretically, he could prevent the Day of the Red Sun from ever occurring.
«But that would kill billions of people,” Bantam said. «People of this world would cease to exist.»
«Yet you’ve already done that,” Volzstrang said. «Yes, there is a version of me in both timelines. But for most people, there aren’t. By traveling back in time, and accidentally causing the Day of the Red Sun, you’ve made billions of unpeople already.»
That word, unpeople, haunted Bantam intensely.
It made him think of the gypsy, that Europa Romani.
«Were I to travel back to the future now, it would be a different future, right? It wouldn’t be the world I’d left at all.»
«That is so,” Volzstrang confirmed. «It would be the future of this world, not your world at all.»
Of course, traveling back to the future was the last thing on Bantam’s mind.
He had no intention of ever leaving Rachelle’s side again.
ONE DAY, Fitzhenry summoned Bantam to his office.
«This is a time for truth. The war is going very badly,” he confided with a wobble in his voice that caught Bantam off guard. «Our victory in New York was short-lived. The Nazis quickly regrouped and nobbled us in the southern States. Much of America is under their rule. This is not widely known: we don’t want our military or even our people to lose heart. But we will soon be beaten.
«I should also tell you that Europe has completely fallen, as has Russia. Japan is not far behind. And as Germany conquers, she annexes the men and war machines of those nations. In this way, her own war machine is thus multiplied with each defeat. Even now, her final victory is inevitable just due to sheer numbers.»
Final victory …
«Dear God,” Bantam said, his head falling. «I didn’t know …»
«No, of course not,” Fitzhenry said. «And as if to add to our sorrow, the Nazi Pin was completed weeks ago. They have launched their own man to the moon … successfully. Their wretched flag is planted in the soil of that silvery world. We have lost the space race!» Fitzhenry looked almost on the verge of tears saying the words.
«But now I must ask you a question you may be loathe to answer, or to answer falsely, for I know you are forbidden by your commanders from revealing detail future events to us: How did you defeat the Nazi’s in your world?»