It was Doctor Hardin. He looked exactly as Bantam recalled — he had not aged at all.
Impossible!
How could he be here?
«Benjamin Bantam," Hardin said. «Ah, forgive me for the shock I know you must be feeling. Please do remain seated and I will explain. It is really I, as I am sure you are questioning your sanity and evidence of your own eyes. There is a perfectly logical, sane explanation for my presence.» Then, he lifted his eyes to the room. «Hello! Hello one and all. My name is Doctor Hardin and I know you've just heard a tale wherein I was a character, and I've now stepped from the pages of that fairyland of the imagination and into your reality! Ha! That's quite a shocker — a shocker indeed. Now. Does anyone have any of those marvelous Hershey bars? They are really one of the best things about your world!»
Kovington rolled his eyes. In response to the glare of a General next to him, he said, «Yes. He's always like that. He never shuts up. You just have to let him go on until he gets to the point.»
«I … I do," Sabine said, reaching into her purse and handing him the delicious chocolate bar he so craved. He snapped it from her hand greedily.
«Ah! Thank you, Miss Sabine! And your voice sounds just like Rachelle's! It is really amazing!»
«Hardin!» Kovington snapped. «Explain the rest of it.»
«Ah yes. Of course, of course.» He snapped off a bit of chocolate and ate as he spoke. «I was not captured by General Veerspike and killed, as it seems apparent to me now that you believed I had been. Instead, after you had been spirited away by Cliff Cleveland and Rachelle, Mr. Bantam, I hid in a private underground lab that no one but I knew existed. I knew Veerspike would come for me, of course, I was no fool! And I did not wish to die.
«For weeks, I hid, even when General Veerspike had been dispatched. After all, I had been fooled once by a Nazi spy: who knew how many more of them were on the base? I had been caught flat-footed the first time: I resolved this would not happen again. So I decided that I would conceal my presence on the base indefinitely.
«To only one did I reveal my presence: to Doctor Hoermann Volzstrang. And I bade him to swear an oath that he should not break ever to not reveal this secret.
«Together, we constructed a mechanism that I might inhabit, a coggler's work of wizardry: an exoskeleton of an Army soldier in full armor. It — ah — compensated for my height with a very clever set of gearing false legs and arms. I could wear this extraordinary device and work it from within, allowing me to walk around the base at will, undetected. I knew enough of the passwords and what would fool the enlisted men into not questioning me, most believing me to be a superior officer they had simply never met before. «In fact, Benjamin, on more than one occasion, you and Rachelle walked right past me! We brushed shoulders twice. Oh, how I ached to say hello. But I could not risk the possibility that more Nazis were present that had yet to be routed out.
«When at last that fateful day came, the day of the battle on the base, Hoermann told me of the plan that Rachelle had conceived. I had no argument: we were desperate and I also believed that the plan would work. Volzstrang also told me of the clever box he had devised to deliver the notebook to you, and how it would preserve it from the effects of timeline propagation: the book would not be rewritten — although history all around it would be.
«And he revealed to me that had another such box. He had meant for it to preserve more things, as it was the size of a trunk. It was too small for a man … but it was not too small for me. He bade me to enter it. I contemplated this, and realized that I would know no one in an alternate 1944. But I would know something of the inhabitants of the year from which Benjamin Bantam came. Perhaps even Benjamin himself! But did we know which year? What date? Why yes, Hoermann replied. The capsule clearly indicated the exact date and time of departure. «And so I took Hoermann's box back to my lab, for I had another invention that I did not have a practical use for until now: a chemical that would cause a human to hibernate indefinitely. There would be some aging, but very slowly: every two years would equal a single day to the human body.
«Quickly, I prepared a timer device that would automatically administer intravenously the perfect amount of the solution over a period of decades. As you know, Benjamin, we of my world are quite adept at clockworks and the material sciences — more adept, I daresay, that you in the here and now! So I was able to set the timer to wake me precisely one week before your departure into the past.
«Into the Volzstrang's box I went, and closed its lid down upon me. And I administered the solution that would cause me sleep for decades upon end …»
«But you were underground," Bantam interrupted. «How did you know that box wouldn't become your coffin?»
«I didn't," Hardin shrugged. «But I also could not be sure if I would not be erased from time or not if I did not take this risk. And in any event, I had very good reason to believe that I would be found and dug up.» Hardin chuckled.
«What?» Bantam asked.
«You yourself told me of the plan to leave the cure for the Shadow buried somewhere on the base, in case you failed to return to the future. That meant a search would be conducted just prior to your departure. Any strange object would be unearthed. And my box was certainly strange.»
«Oh, we found him alright," Kovington said. «Metal detectors went all haywire the second we were on top of him. Dug up a weird little crate, looked like a Victorian music box. Didn't look like there was any way to open it, and we never guessed someone was inside. We figured it was junk from the 1800's or something — some settler tossed it off a wagon and it got buried over time in a landfill or whatever. It didn't look dangerous, or even something from modern times, so we tagged it and stored it.
«Then one day, out comes him. The duty guard almost has a heart attack. He explain who he is and mentions Benjamin Bantam. Well that gets our attention. So we --»
«Wait," Bantam said. «When was this, exactly?»
«Almost a full week ago," Hardin said in nearly a whisper.
Bantam's eyebrows shot up. A week?
«I saw the young you," Hardin said. «Several times. And then again, just this morning. He didn't see me, of course.»
«There was to be no interaction," Kovington said. «Doctor Hardin made that clear when we spoke for the first time. Benjamin Bantam had not yet met him when he first appeared.»
«So you knew … " Bantam rasped at Kovington. «You knew this whole time, even before you sent me back, you knew exactly what would happen!»
Kovington nodded. «That is correct. I also knew what had been prevented from happening: a new Nazi empire — and so I knew I couldn't tell you or anyone else. Doctor Hardin and I kept this information strictly to ourselves — until now. And since your mission to retrieve a cure for the Shadow succeeded, it seems that this was correct course of action.»
Bantam stared at his feet and let this sink in. They knew! Hardin had been wandering around on the base for an entire week in the future ….
«Why did you believe him?» Bantam asked Kovington.
Hardin chuckled and held up his arm, causing it to buzz and whirr louder than usual. «This alone was enough. Once they'd got a gander at my mechanical arm, they knew I could not be from their world. It was the equivalent of you showing me an iPad.»
«But now I'm afraid we have a new problem," Kovington said.
That got the room's attention. Everyone had assumed the crisis was over, this was simply a tie-up-the-loose-ends sort of meeting.
«Bring it in!» Kovington barked.
Two guards carried in a large bedside alarm clock, handling it with gloved hands. It was a big flat-panel digital clock, with large backlit LCD numbers ticking along. With a sleek, silver design and a curved base, it was like the sort of over-the-top thing one would get at The Sharper Image.