Franc and Lea watched the fire from the safety of Tom’s rented Ford sedan, which he had driven to the outskirts of the aerodrome and pulled over on the shoulder. They had quietly collected their bags and walked down the gangway stairs; a stunned shuffle through customs, where officials stamped the Pannes’ passports and welcomed them back to America, then Hoffman met them just outside the receiving area. He instantly started to ask questions, but they signaled him to stay silent until they were out of earshot of the other passengers.
As they walked out to the car, Franc spotted Eric Spehl, still wearing his flight coveralls, climbing into the back of a Checker cab. Unnoticed by either his fellow zeppelin men or the Luftwaffe intelligence officers, the rigger made his getaway. Fifteen minutes later, the bomb went off.
As clanging fire trucks raced down the road toward the inferno, the three of them looked at one another. “Well,” Tom said, “at least we haven’t created a paradox. We’re still here.”
Franc stared at the blazing airship. “The hell we haven’t!”
“We don’t know that yet,” Lea said from the back seat. “There’s been an anomaly. A serious one, to be sure, but it’s still only an anomaly.”
“Some anomaly.” Franc nodded toward the burning ship. “This isn’t like someone in Dallas noticing a couple of our people behind a fence during the Kennedy shooting. That didn’t change the course of history. This…”
“Oberon’s still there.” Tom cocked his head toward the uplink case where it lay open next to Lea; she had just used it to contact the timeship. “If this was a paradox, Vasili shouldn’t be up there and we would have disappeared. Right?”
“Define paradox,” Franc said angrily. “Tell me exactly what happens during a spatiotemporal paradox.”
“I don’t…”
“Come on, tell me precisely how a spatiotemporal paradox would affect a contemporary worldline…”
“Cut it out.” Lea snapped the case shut. “We can figure it out after we get to the rendezvous point.”
So they drove away from Lakehurst, heading southwest down lonely country roads into the cool New Jersey night. Deep within the Pine Barrens, house lights gradually became farther apart until they disappeared altogether. A low fog had settled upon the marshlands; the sedan’s whitewalls beat against frost heaves in the weathered blacktop. Lea moved the case to the floor and lay down in the back seat; she remarked how incredibly large automobiles had been during this period, and Tom responded by observing how much gasoline they consumed in order to move this much mass. Franc, sullen and impatient, switched on the dashboard radio and turned the knob from one end of the dial to another, picking up AM-band stations out of Trenton, Philadelphia, and New York. Ballroom jazz, comedy shows, crime melodramas: he roamed back and forth, searching for something that might explain what had just happened.
Just as they turned off the highway onto a narrow strip of dirt road, a variety show out of New York was interrupted by a news flash. The German airship Hindenberg, which had mysteriously exploded an hour and fifteen minutes ago just after it had arrived in New Jersey, had been destroyed by an act of deliberate sabotage. An unsigned communique received by the station only a few minutes earlier stated that an underground organization in Germany was claiming responsibility for the act. The note stated that a bomb had been placed aboard the airship to awaken the world to the atrocities being committed by the Nazi government, and to send a clear signal to the German people that Adolf Hitler could yet be overthrown.
Franc switched off the radio. There was a long silence in the car. “That’s what I define as a paradox,” he said at last.
“We’re still here,” Tom said softly.
“Which only means that we’ve survived our own disturbance.”
“Who says it’s our fault?” Lea was sitting up again. “No one knows why Spehl’s bomb went off when it did. Maybe the timer was faulty and it was supposed to go off at eight o’clock.”
“Or maybe he went back and reset it,” Tom said.
Franc nodded. “Sure. He ran into Emma Pannes the day before and decided that he didn’t want to sacrifice a beautiful fraulein to the flames.”
“So it’s my fault?” Lea gaped at him. “I can’t believe you…!”
“I’m joking.”
“That’s not very funny. I don’t even think you’re…”
“Will both of you just shut up?” Tom gripped the wheel more tightly as he strained to make out the primitive road through the fog. “We can’t do anything about it now, so just…”
Lea wasn’t through. “Do you think this is funny?”
“No, I don’t. But it’s a possible hypothesis for how…”
“Shut up!” Tom yelled. “Goddammit, both of you, just shut up!”
Once again, there was cold and awful silence in the car.
The road finally opened onto a broad clearing where a farmhouse had once stood some ten years before until it had been destroyed by one of the brush fires that periodically raged through the Pine Barrens. Only a halfcollapsed brick chimney remained; the rest was rotted cinders, old cedar stumps and high grass, damp with rain and age.
Tom stopped the car and switched off the headlights; a chorus of bullfrogs and crickets greeted them when they opened the doors. Lea shivered and drew her overcoat more closely around her as she instinctively stepped closer to Franc. She had been born and raised on the Moon; nature sounds made her nervous. Franc put his arm around her as he stared up at the overcast sky. A westerly breeze was blowing the clouds away, revealing crisp bright stars in the moonless sky. “You gave Vasili the correct coordinates, didn’t you?” he asked, then saw the expression on her face. “Sorry. Only asking.”
Tom pulled the uplink case out of the back seat, carried it a few feet away and set it down. He returned to the car, clicked on the dome light, briefly inspected the car’s interior. No, there was nothing here that shouldn’t be left behind; Franc and Lea’s bags were stowed in the trunk, and they had all their documents and recording equipment with them. He pulled a small gold box out of his breast pocket, thumbed a recessed switch on the side, carefully placed it on the wheel well in the back seat. Five minutes after they departed, the Hertz company would be mysteriously deprived of one Ford sedan, or at least until some hunter chanced upon its charred wreckage.
When he joined Franc and Lea again, he saw that they were staring up at the sky. Looking up, he saw nothing for a moment. Then a small black shape moved past the Big Dipper, a circular patch slightly darker than the night sky. “Better get out of the way,” he murmured. “Grab the case.”
The three of them hurried to the edge of the clearing. When they turned and looked up again, the shape had expanded into a broad opaque spot that grew larger as it blotted out the stars. Metz had the Oberon in chameleon mode; it was now nearly invisible to the naked eye. Even if radar had been in widespread use at this time, the timeship wouldn’t have appeared on any screens; the beams would have been deflected by its polymer-coated fuselage. Only the negmass grid on the craft’s underside could be detected, and that operated in near-total silence. It wasn’t until they heard a low hum and the wet grass of the clearing began to flatten out that they knew the Oberon was at treetop level.
The humming grew louder, then the timeship suddenly appeared just above them. Deliberately designed to resemble a classic sombrero-shaped flying saucer, it could have appeared on the cover of a late-twentieth century UFO magazine; indeed, it had, for an alien-abduction story debunked by most contemporary experts. Light gleamed from its single porthole as landing gear opened like flower petals from its flat underside between the hemispherical pods of its wormhole generators. Oberon seemed to hesitate for just a moment, then the humming of its negmass drive sharply diminished and the timeship settled to the ground.