Looking at the muttering men, Brek shook his head. “I was mistaken,” he said deliberately. “I failed to take account of the two-way nature of time. But the future, I see now, is as real as the past. Aside from the direction of entropy change and the flow of consciousness, future and past cannot be distinguished.
“The future determines the past, as much as the past does the future. It is possible to trace out the determiner factors, and even, with sufficient power, to cause a local deflection of the geodesics. But world lines are fixed in the future, as rigidly as in the past. However the factors are rearranged, the end result will always be the same.”
The Astrarch’s waxen face was ruthless. “Then, Veronar, you are doomed.”
Slowly, Brek smiled. “Don’t call me Veronar,” he said softly. “I remembered, just in time, that I am William Webster, Earthman. You can kill me in any way you please. But the defeat of the Astrarchy and the new freedom of Earth are fixed in time - forever.”
THE LAST BATTALION
David Drake
“Well, I’m sorry it stopped working,” Senator Stone answered irritably over his shoulder, “but since the late news was one of the things I got a mountain cabin to avoid …”
“Well, it is strange,” his wife repeated. She was as trim-bodied at fifty as she had been when he married her just after VD Day, the first time he could think of a future after three years of flying Mustangs into hostile skies. She was still as stubborn as the WAAF he had married, too. “It was fine and then the color went off in flashes and everything got blurry. And it’s getting worse, Hershal.”
Stone sighed, closing a file that was long, confidential, and involved the potential expenditure of $73,000,000. The cabin’s oak flooring had an unexpected tingle as he walked across it in slippers to the small TV. His feet were asleep, he thought; but could they both be? Not that it mattered. He slapped the set while Miriam waited expectantly. The screen continued to match colored pulses to the bursts of raw noise coming from the speaker. Occasionally an intelligible word or a glimpse of Dan Rather slipped through.
“Some kind of interference,” Stone said. He was six feet tall, with a plumpness that his well-cut suits concealed from the public but was evident in pajamas. His hair had grayed early, but it was still thick and smooth after sixty-one years, no small political asset. Stone was no charmer, but he had learned years before that a man who is honest and has the physical presence to be called forthright will be respected even if he is wrong—and there are never many candidates the voters can respect. Shrugging, he clicked the set off. “If you needed somebody to fix your TV, you should have married some tech boy,” he added.
“Instead of my hotshot pilot?” Miriam laughed, stretching out an arm to her husband. She paused as she stood, and at the same moment both realized that the high-pitched keening they had associated with the television was now louder. The hardwood floor carried more of a buzz than a trembling. Miriam’s smile froze into a part of her human architecture, like the ferrous curls of hair framing her face.
Earthquake’! thought Stone as two strides carried him to the south door. Not in the Smokies, surely; but politics had taught him even more emphatically than combat that there were always going to be facts that surprised you, and that survivors were people who didn’t pretend otherwise. He threw the door open. Whipsnake Ridge dropped southward, a sheer medley of grays formed by mist and distance. The sky should have been clear and colorless since the Moon had not yet risen, but an auroral glow was flooding from behind the cabin to paint the night with a score of strange pastels. The whine was louder, but none of the nearby trees were moving.
“Miriam,” Stone began, “you’d—”
The rap of knuckles on the north door cut him off.
“I’ll get it,” Miriam said quickly.
“You’ll stay right here!” the senator insisted, striding past her; but her swift heels rapped down the hallway just behind him.
Stone snapped on the entryway light before unlatching the door. The cabin had no windows to the north as the only view would have been the access road and a small clearing in the second-growth pine of the Ridge, a poor exchange for the vicious storms that ripped down in winter. The outside door opened into an anteroom to further insulate the cabin, and that alcove, four feet square in floor plan, was filled by two men in black uniforms.
“You will forgive the intrusion, Senator and Madame Stone,” stated the foremost in a rusty voice more used to commands, “but we could not very well contact you in more normal fashion in our haste.” The speaker was as tall as Stone, a slim ramrod of a man whose iron-gray hair was cropped so short as to almost be shaven beneath the band of his service hat. The dull cloth of his uniform bagged into jackboots as highly polished as his waist-belt and pistol holster. It was not the pistol, nor the long-magazined rifle the other visitor bore that struck the first real fear into Stone, though: both men wore collar insignia, the twin silver lightning-bolt runes Stone thought he had seen the last of thirty years before. They were the badge of Hitler’s SS.
“May we enter?”
“You go straight to Hell!” Stone snarled. His left hand knotted itself in the nearer black shirt while reflex cocked his right for as much of a punch as desks and the poisonous atmosphere of Washington had left him. The second Nazi was as gray as the first and was built like a tank besides, but there was nothing slow about his reactions. The barrel of his rifle slammed down across Stone’s forearm. Almost as part of the same motion the stock pivoted into the senator’s stomach, throwing him back in a sprawl over Miriam’s legs. The entranceway light haloed the huge gunman as he swung his weapon to bear on the tangle of victims almost at its muzzle.
“Lothar!” the slim German shouted.
His subordinate relaxed, “Ja, mein Oberfiihrer,” he said as he again ported his rifle.
With a smile that was not wholly one of satisfaction, the black-shirted officer said, “Senator, I am Colonel Ernst Riedel. My companion—what would you say—Master-Sergeant Lothar Mueller and I have reached a respectable age without inflicting our presence on you. I assure you that only necessity causes us to do so now.”
Stone rose to his feet. Riedel did not offer a hand he knew would be refused. Miriam remained silent behind her husband, but her right arm encircled his waist. Stone looked from the men to the rifle used to club him down. It was crude, a thing of enameled metal and green-black plastic: an MP-44, built in the final days of the Third Reich. “You’re real, aren’t you!” the senator said. “You aren’t just American slime who wanted something different from white sheets to parade in. Where do you hide, Nazi? Do you sell cars in Rio during the week and take out your uniform Sundays to look at yourself in the mirror?”
“We are real, Senator Stone,” Riedel said through his tight smile. He raised his left cuff so that the motto worked on the band there showed. It read “Die Letze” in old-style letters. “We are the Last Battalion, Senator. And as for where we hide—that you will know very shortly, for we were sent to bring you there.
“Madame Stone,” he went on formally, “we will have your husband back to you in days if that is possible. I assure you, on my honor as a true Aryan and before the good God and my Leader, that we mean no harm to either of you.”
“Oh, I’ll trust your honor,” Miriam blazed. Fifteen years as a senator’s wife had taught her the use of tact, but nothing would ever convince her that every situation should be borne in silence. “How many prisoners did you shoot in the back at Malmedy?”