If I could find a nexus, a pivotal point in time, perhaps I could change the world. Perhaps I could alter events to such an extent that this miserable world of terror and pain would dissolve, disappear, and a better world replace it. I became obsessed with the possibility.
«But you’ll destroy this world,» my wife gasped, shocked when I finally told her of my scheme.
«What of it?» I snapped. «Is this world so delightful that you want it to continue?»
She sank wearily onto the lab bench. «What will happen to our families? Our friends? What will happen to us?»
«You and I will make the translation. We will live in an earlier, better time.»
«And the others?»
I shrugged. «I don’t know. The mathematics isn’t clear. But even if they disappear, the world that replaces them in this time will be better than the world we’re in now.»
«Do you really think so?»
«We’ll make it better!»
The fools on the council disagreed, naturally. No one had translated through time, they pointed out. The energy even for a preliminary experiment would be prohibitively high. We needed that energy for our weapons.
None of them believed I could change a thing. They weren’t afraid that they would be erased from existence, their world line snuffed out like a candle flame. No, in their blind ignorance they insisted that an attempt at time translation would consume so much energy that we would be left defenseless against the besieging savages outside our walls.
«The savages will no longer exist,» I told them. «None of this world line will exist, once I’ve made the proper change in the geodesic.»
They voted me down. They would rather face the barbarians than give up their existence, even if it meant a better world would replace the one they knew.
I accepted their judgment outwardly. Inwardly I became the most passionate student of history of all time. Feverishly I searched the books and tapes, seeking the nexus, the turning point, the place where I could make the world change for the better. I knew I had only a few months; the savage horde below our mountaintop was growing and stirring. I could hear their murmuring dirge of hate even through the walls of my laboratory, like the growls of a pack of wild beasts. Every day it grew louder, more insistent.
It was the war in the middle of the twentieth century that started the world’s descent into madness. A man called Adolph Hitler escalated the horror of war to new levels of inhumanity. Not only did he deliberately murder millions of civilian men, women and children; he destroyed his own country, screaming with his last breath that the Aryan race deserved to be wiped out if they could not conquer the world.
When I first realized the enormity of Hitler’s rage I sat stunned for an entire day. Here was the model, the prototype, for the brutal, cruel, ruthless, sadistic monsters who ranged my world seeking blood.
Before Hitler, war was a senseless affront to civilized men and women. Soldiers were tolerated, at best; often despised. They were usually shunned in polite society. After Hitler, war was commonplace, genocide routine, nuclear weapons valued for the megadeaths they could generate.
Hitler and all he stood for was the edge of the precipice, the first terrible step into the abyss that my world had plunged into. If I could prevent Hitler from coming to power, perhaps prevent him from ever being born, I might save my world—or at least erase it and replace it with a better one.
For days on end I thought of how I might translate back in time to kill this madman or even prevent his birth. Slowly, however, I began to realize that this single man was not the cause of it all. If Hitler had never been born, someone else would have arisen in Germany after the Great War, someone else would have unified the German people in a lust for revenge against those who had betrayed and defeated them, someone else would have preached Aryan purity and hatred of all other races, someone else would have plunged civilization into World War II.
To solve the problem of Hitler I had to go to the root causes of the Nazi program: Germany’s defeat in the First World War, the war that was called the Great War by those who had lived through it. I had to make Germany win that war.
If Germany had won World War I, there would have been no humiliation of the German people, no thirst for revenge, no economic collapse. Hitler would still exist, but he would be a retired soldier, perhaps a peaceful painter or even a minor functionary in the Kaiser’s government. There would be no World War II.
And so I set my plans to make Germany the victor in the Great War, with the reluctant help of my dear wife.
«You would defy the council?» she asked me, shocked when I revealed my determination to her.
«Only if you help me,» I said. «I won’t go unless you go with me.»
She fully understood that we would never be able to return to our own world. To do so, we would have to bring the components for a translator with us and then assemble it in the early twentieth century. Even if we could do that, where would we find a power source in those primitive years? They were still using horses then.
Besides, our world would be gone, vanished, erased from space-time.
«We’ll live out our lives in the twentieth century,» I told her. «And we’ll know that our own time will be far better than it is now.»
«How can you be sure it will be better?» she asked me softly.
I smiled patiently. «There will be no World War II. Europe will be peaceful for the rest of the century. Commerce and art will flourish. Even the Russian communists will join the European federation peacefully, toward the end of the century.»
«You’re certain?»
«I’ve run the analysis on the master computer a dozen times. I’m absolutely certain.»
«And our own time will be better?»
«It has to be. How could it possibly be worse?»
She nodded, her beautiful face solemn with the understanding that we were leaving our world forever. Good riddance to it, I thought. But it was the only world we had ever known, and she was not happy to deliberately toss it away and spend the rest of her life in the a bygone century.
Still, she never hesitated about coming with me. I wouldn’t go without her, she knew that. And I knew that she wouldn’t let me go unless she came with me.
«It’s really quite romantic, isn’t it?» she asked me, the night before we left.
«What is?»
«Translating across time together. Our love will span the centuries.»
I held her close. «Yes. Across the centuries.»
Before sunrise the next morning we stole into the laboratory and powered up the translator. No one was on guard, no one was there to try to stop us. The council members were all sleeping, totally unaware that one of their loyal citizens was about to defy their decision. There were no renegades among us, no rebels. We had always accepted the council’s decisions and worked together for our mutual survival.
Until now. My wife silently took her place on the translator’s focal stage while I made the final adjustments to the controls. She looked radiant standing there, her face grave, her golden hair glowing against the darkened laboratory shadows.
At last I stepped up beside her. I took her hand; it was cold with anxiety. I squeezed her hand confidently.
«We’re going to make a better world,» I whispered to her.
The last thing I saw was the pink glow of dawn rising over the eastern mountains, framed in the lab’s only window.
Now, in the Paris of 1922 that I had created, victorious Germany ruled Europe with strict but civilized authority. The Kaiser had been quite lenient with Great Britain; after all, was he not related by blood to the British king? Even France got off relatively lightly, far more lightly than the unlucky Russians. Germany kept Alsace-Lorraine, of course, but took no other territory.