“Eight years! Eight years!” He whispered as he lay there, staring unfocussed at the ceiling beyond the paper he held. “Müller doesn’t understand, Hal… none of them understand!” He paused for a second as the wild, hysterical grin returned. “But I do, Hal… I do! Only one thing that can fix it all… only one action that can put it all right, and I’ve been waiting all this time… waiting for just this day!”
Samuel Lowenstein had somehow held onto his sanity for the entire length of his captivity. Throughout all the initial beatings and torture, and the years of solitary confinement to follow, he’s clung to his reading, and his regular talks with Müller and his guards, and somehow he’d managed to skirt around the boundaries of madness. Part of that very conscious process of maintaining control over his own thoughts and emotions had, ironically, been the unequivocal recognition that his own situation was completely and utterly hopeless.
He was a single prisoner — a man who technically had no identity in that era and simply didn’t exist — trapped in a time many years in the past and held captive by an ascendant Nazi Germany that was now no longer destined to lose the Second World War. There was no possibility of escape, for there was literally nowhere he could escape to, and there was also no way as a single individual he could have any chance of reversing the changes to history his captors had created through the terrible perversion they’d perpetrated on his own life’s work.
Yet somewhere, deep inside his subconscious there had also lived that small, ridiculous belief that there might still be a chance… that in the 24 hours left of Realtime after the New Eagles had departed the 21st Century, Hal Markowicz and the governments of the Earth had somehow managed to prepare a counter-attack. No one on the planet, either living in the 1940s or from their original era in 2010, understood the concepts behind temporal displacement research as completely as Samuel Michael Lowenstein: no one understood as instinctively and completely as he that there was only one possible way the damage the New Eagles had wrought upon the history of the world itself might be reversed. No one except — perhaps — for his colleague and friend, Hal Markowicz.
It’d originally been an unconscious whim upon which Lowenstein had decided to keep the piece of newspaper clipping; he’d swear before God himself that there’d originally been no thought in his mind of rescue or escape at the end of that first day, when he’d folded the newspaper and kept it with him rather than simply throwing it away. Yet as the years wore on and he spent the greater majority of his time in solitude thinking about his own predicament, and that of the planet as a whole, he quickly came to realise that if there ever did exist the slightest possibility of returning history to its rightful course, then there was just one possible way that might be achieved.
“And I have it right here…” he stated with soft certainty, once again focussing his eyes on the piece of newspaper he held before him. The headlines and articles might’ve been smudged and worn away, but there was one piece of information that could still be clearly read. In the top, right corner of the page, directly beneath the last five letters of the Berliner Tageblatt masthead, the day and date was there for all to see: the exact date that the New Eagles had arrived in that era from the 21st Century.
For the first time in almost a decade, the cold, hopeless resignation had lifted from Samuel Lowenstein’s eyes, replaced by a sharpness and intensity that had been absent for many years. The reality behind Müller’s lies was obvious to him, and that meant that somewhere out there beyond the borders of Grossdeutschland, others from his world and his reality had arrived to do battle against the New Eagles and Nazi Germany. They’d need his help… would need the information he held in his hands… and for the first time in many years, the despair within his soul had been supplanted by hope and the possibility of rescue.
Sitting up, then rising to his feet once more, Lowenstein folded the newspaper clipping once more and returned it to its ‘hiding place’ within the pages of Einstein’s book. Carefully replacing that where it’d come from on the bottom shelf, he took out some blank sheets of paper and a ball-point pen he’d kept secreted in the same area above his books and carried them across to the small table, the flickering candle in his other hand.
In the dim candle light, he began to write notes on everything he’d seen and learned over the last seven years that he’d spent captive in 1930s Germany: every important piece of information he could think of pertaining to his captors and their activities that might possibly be of use to an allied force was committed to those pages in a hurried, almost illegible scrawl. He worked long into the early hours of the morning before exhaustion finally forced him to rest, seeking much-needed sleep as dawn finally broke over the French countryside with the chirping of birds as his restless lullaby.
He awoke late into the next morning with a sense of drive and determination he’d not felt in many years, his mind and body rejuvenated by the new and very real hope, no matter how slim, that there might possibly be a way to put an end to the New Eagles and their perversion of history. He made more notes… pages of them… and kept them well hidden inside and behind his collection of books, taking care to ensure neither Müller nor any of the guards saw him write a single word. The time to act was coming, and he’d need to be prepared… Samuel Lowenstein had no intention of allowing that opportunity to slip by unrealised.
Pas-de-Calais near Sangatte
Northern France
Thursday
July 4, 1940
Even by comparison to landing a flying boat, the Opel trucks provided an uncomfortable ride in Edward Whittaker’s admittedly biased opinion as they pulled into the armed compound. In the five days since being dragged out of the Channel by an enemy E-boat, he’d spent time in three different cells with three of the four main arms of the Wehrmacht: Kriegsmarine, Luftwaffe and SS in that order. All in all however, he couldn’t claim to have been treated particularly badly, all things considered. The guards had been generally terse, and as he didn’t speak German and almost none of them spoke any English, there were occasions when some pushing and shoving had been used to pass on instructions, but overall he’d so far been given little to complain about.
On the third day, he’d been thrown into the back of a large truck with a group of fellow British and French prisoners-of-war and delivered to a newly-constructed POW camp a few kilometres north of Boulogne-sur-Mer. The amenities were sparse and primitive, but the dormitories themselves were all new and the Luftwaffe guards seemed at worst to be neutral rather than outwardly hostile. They’d been ‘welcomed’ by the colonel in charge and had the camp rules read out to them: the camp was for officer POWs only, with all of the hundred or so already present therefore of commissioned rank. As a result, the regimen was a little more relaxed than Whittaker presumed it might’ve otherwise been for enlisted me.