It was the war in the middle of the twentieth century that started the world’s descent into madness. A man called Adolf 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 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
