One Thousand Years (28 page)

“You know,” he mused, “if they keep changing history,
there was probably a first version when the Grauen did nothing, and
the Allies won the war.”

“Don't
let that give you solace, Sam. We believe that, whether by
happenstance or planning, they've been rewriting our history —
probably over and over again. The people of the Reich will never
have a real future while they keep meddling. There is only one
decisive victory: The last.”

“On
that last point, at least, we can agree,” McHenry said. There
was a touch of sadness in his voice.

Dale
stirred her spoon in her soup. “You almost had a victory,
Sam.”

He
said nothing to that.

“I
mean the medical device that you tried to pass along. It was a
clever solution, sacrificing this war for a greater victory in the
future, long after we leave.”

“I
don't see it as that clever at all,” he said. “It was
the very least thing I could do. I couldn't figure out how to win
this war. I couldn't figure out how to save the Jews of Europe. And
I couldn't figure out how to save my president. I wasn't nearly
clever enough.”

“It's
not your fault that you're outmatched, Sam. I mean no offense by
that. We have some of the finest minds on this ship. We are all
genetically enhanced. All the SS personnel here have rechner support
implanted into our brains. We have powerful rechners aboard this
ship. And when we got the Tiger back, we had very intelligent robots
able to quickly search and inventory everything. You got much
further in your plot than anyone expected. You did the best that
anyone could do. As they used to say in your times, don't sell
yourself short.”

Someone
around a corner had shouted, “
Achtung!
”
Hearing a whirl of the clicking of heels, McHenry rose to attention
when Dale did. He didn't mind the military formality. He loved it,
in fact. But he remembered thinking, those two months ago, that he
didn't want to spend the rest of his life heiling the
Führer
.
Not Hitler, and not this one. Then quickly, they heard Mtubo
telling everyone to sit down until he stood before Dale and McHenry.

“May I join you?” he asked, perfunctorily.

“Certainly,
Oberführer
,” Dale replied.

After they sat down, Mtubo, still towering over him, continued what might
have been Dale's earlier response. “The Grauen may think
they're being benevolent. You do not know the dangers that the
future will bring.”

“I
know what the dangers are today,” McHenry replied.

Mtubo
shook his head. “We live in a society where any
fifteen-year-old may have the knowledge to build a nuclear weapon.
Any small group of teenagers has the capacity to create biological
weapons that would kill half the people in a city. It takes a
well-structured society like ours to control that. By ensuring that
national socialism is victorious, the Grauen may have been working to
keep humanity from destroying itself.”

“You
don't think democracies could survive?” McHenry asked, more as
a reaction than a question.

“They
could not survive without becoming something else. Only nationalist
governments — one-party nationalist governments — can
impose the politically difficult but critically important policies
needed to move a society forward beyond your century.”

“Free
societies can adapt.”

“They
will adapt. They will become national socialist.” Mtubo
relaxed his posture ever-so-slightly, and eased his tone. “Do
not misunderstand me, Herr McHenry. I do admire your tenacity. You
have inspired me.”

“Inspired
you?” McHenry was flummoxed. “How?”

“Your
plan to have history change after our departure was superior. We had
not expected that of you.”

“Really?”
McHenry's eyes narrowed. “Even had it worked, I thought it
was insufficient. I just didn't think there was any other way.”

“We
are almost at the transit point. We will make an announcement there,
but the
Kommandant
has already been informed, and I will tell
you now. Our next destination will be the future: an altered future.
Our analysts project a national socialist future, and a good one,
but not our future. While there we will make a reference survey and
then take supplies for a much greater expedition.”

A smile was forming on Dale's lips.

Mtubo continued: “And here is the key: My oath, and the oaths of
the men and women on this ship, are with our
Führer
,
Katrina Renard — not with whomever will be leading the Reich at
that future date. After our servicing, we will then be going much
further back in time. You see,
Sturmbannführer
Dale has
confirmed something in an experiment she conducted.” He turned
to Dale.

“We can correct the timeline,” she said. “Once the Grauen
have been removed from our history, we will come back and nudge
events back into the sequence we want. It was only a small
experiment, but
Göring
can carry it out on a larger
scale. We could, potentially, restore the Reich to ninety-eight
percent of the way it was when we left.”

“Wait a sec,” McHenry said.
“What do you mean,
removed from history
?”

“Surely, you must have considered this was our goal,”
said Mtubo, now flashing a smile McHenry had never before seen.
“We will eventually be going back further in time, deeper,
to a point when the Grauen had not yet evolved.
We will end their existence before they end ours.”

*

After
lunch, McHenry made his way down to the hangar section.
What
Mtubo said didn't matter
, he told himself. It was an interesting
plan, but he assured himself it would never happen anyway.
Not if they're going to the future first.

The
Tigers were packed and clamped down for interstellar flight.
Nevertheless, McHenry was able to climb aboard. If anyone had asked,
he'd have said he wanted to reminisce, but no one did. He didn't
quite know why, but they had long since accepted his misadventure.

He
had two sets of wings on his uniform. One on his “Ike”
jacket, and the other on the shirt beneath it. With a flip of one
switch, he opened the garbage disposal in the cargo bin. He removed
the wings from his shirt, and gave it one quick look. Tossing it
from one hand to the other that he might feel the weight, a greater
weight came off his shoulders. These were, indeed, the sterling,
U.S. Army Air Force issue that he had traded with Donaldson. He
placed them into the disposal, and allowed the system to close and
cycle, destroying the evidence.

Donaldson
had the ones made from a future metal. He wondered how soon he could
notice the difference; how long it might take to remember something
from his dreams; and then, ultimately, to find what that metal was
made from, and exploit that knowledge. That last step may take a
couple of generations, he pondered, but that was plenty of time.
This war may be lost, but the larger one against a world conquest was not.
The United States was going to have one advantage it didn't
have before.
Göring
will face a significantly altered future when they arrive.
It should be a free people that fight the Grauen.

*

When one sees Hitler's December 1943
peace settlement offer
, it's tempting
to consider the list and forget the record of the man making those
promises. On their face, many of these items would be very crippling
to the Third Reich. They suggest that Hitler was willing to go very
far. One could easily imagine adding the saving of millions of Jews
to the list. But it is doubtful that Hitler would have lived up to
such agreements any longer than he considered necessary. This book
speculates that he would not.

I've
tried to make this book as historically accurate as possible.
Epigraph quotes and dates at the start of each chapter are all
authentic, and the dates given are as originally printed or when
first spoken.

The
quotes at the start of chapters
4
and
17
were translations found at
the
German Propaganda Archive
by Dr. Randall Bytwerk at
Calvin College
[
www.calvin.edu/academic/cas/gpa/
], and used
with permission. It's an invaluable resource to get far more than a
glimpse of the period.

Although
the Tuskegee airmen were real, the characters in this book are not
based on anyone in particular. For those who did not know, the
Tuskegee airmen were so named because they first trained at the
Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. I should not need to explain that
1944 was not the most tolerant time in U.S. history, or any country's
history. These men had to put up with the racism of the day, and
fight a war besides. But I didn't want this book to be about racism.
This is a story about heroism.

It's
a valid question whether Nazis could drop the racial elements of
their ideology after a number of generations. If they didn't, it's
impossible for such a society to be capable of world conquest. At
the time, the Nazis themselves were perfectly willing to make
alliances with other cultures and races whenever it suited them.

Dale's
background explanation for this — while unreliable, and told
from a Nazi point-of-view — is mostly true. The Waffen-SS was,
indeed, mostly non-German troops. Their stories are not as simple as
this, but that is another matter.

Many
of Dale's pontifications and distorted history lessons are either
based on real history or things the Nazis and their apologists might
have said at that time, regardless of whether or not it was factual.
As such, everything Dale says in this book needs to be taken with
more than a grain of salt.
For example,
her words
calling Germany
“
the first country in Europe to overcome the class struggle
”
is actually from a quote by Robert Ley, leader of the Nazis' German
Labor Front. Because of the war and the Holocaust, people don't
usually think of Nazism's social side, but it had a strong one.
Dale's phrase “oligarchs of wealth” is actually from
Father Charles Coughlin.

I quoted Father Coughlin
(
here
and
here
)
because his was an American voice of the
times, and he is often thought of today as a Nazi apologist. In
spite of some critical differences, I do imagine that, had the Nazi
ideology ever become dominant worldwide, his influence might have
become part of the American blend.

While Dale was obviously lying about the Holocaust, it is true that a small
percentage of the victims did die from typhus, notably among them
were Anne and Margot Frank.

Although it's certainly true that the Nazis worked restlessly
to kill Jews up to the last minute,
the largest numbers were killed in 1942 and 1943.
McHenry never really had a chance of stopping it, although
I do regret myself not being clever enough to write a better attempt.

It was true that there were labor strikes in the U.S. and U.K. during
the war, and that this sometimes included strikes at war plants.
People today like to think that everyone supported the war effort
back then, but that does not mean their support came without bumps in
the road. These were sometimes really bad bumps. Yet, as McHenry
surmised, those strikes didn't substantively affect supplies for
those fighting at the front.

There's
no denying that this book was influenced by today's events. Only
some of that is intentional. Most references to the peace movement,
and Dale's anti-war stance, were with 1944 in mind. Various elements
really were like that. Some did accuse President Roosevelt of waging
war for imperialism and for Wall Street.

The U.S. government reacted with congressional hearings of the same type
used for communists in the 1930s and — more famously — in
the 1950s. The Justice Department put several dozen on trial, as is
briefly mentioned in the epigraph at the top of
chapter 21
.

I know that I've left holes in the backstory. Some would say that Vice
President Wallace had communists on his staff who would have pressed
him to keep supporting the war while the Soviet Union was in it. To
that I say, maybe, but 1944 was an election year. Even those
communists would have preferred a Wallace victory to his Republican
challenger. And besides, Wallace hated the British Empire. It would
have been a more difficult alliance.

Others
would argue that the Soviet Union would not have given up after their
victories in 1943, even if everyone else did. Dale shrugs this off
when McHenry brings it up. In reality, there were several ways this
could have worked out, particularly with the Allied bombing campaign
out of the picture once the U.S. and the U.K. decided to stand down.
The Soviets had not developed that capacity until after the war.
I'll agree there must be more to it than that, but this book was
focused on Sam McHenry and the United States. And, really, had this
book's scenario actually occurred, you could expect the Grauen to
have surreptitiously aided Germany on the Eastern Front just as they
had in Normandy.

—
R.M.B.

*

1. Eventual evacuation by Germany of all occupied and conquered territory, including Czechoslovakia.
   

    
   

2. Abandonment of all German claims to colonies.
   

    
   

3. Ultimate disestablishment of the German navy.
   

    
   

4. Germany to retain no merchant navy as such but to reach an agreement with Britain regarding German overseas shipments.
   

    
   

5. Abolition of Nazi propaganda abroad.
   

    
   

6. An agreement with the Allies on civil aviation.
   

    
   

7. Germany ultimately to cease maintenance of an air force.
   

    
   

8. Germany to remain always in close consultation with Britain on matters concerning common defense interests.