Elder Stow shrugged.  The man, Duko, was a workman.  Maybe he carried the dynamite to take down some building that had been made unsafe from the bombing.  A controlled collapse would be better than letting the building fall down on its own at some unknown time.  He let the man go from his mind and sipped his tea. He had other things to think about.

He bought a newspaper and read all about the blitz and speculations about what might be happening on the continent.  It did not look like the Germans were emptying the land.  He knew they were building concentration camps and removing certain portions of the population, but the majority of the people were still living in their homes—still living on the land.  They were a conquered people, but they were not going anywhere.  Instead of shipping the people to their various colonies around the world, the Germans appeared to be simply oppressing the people, and angering them.  He supposed given enough time, they might reduce the non-German population to second class citizens, something like slaves, but that would take several generations of oppression.

He shook his head and sipped his tea.

His Gott-Druk people had no interest in human slaves.  That was something the Masters would be interested in.  That thought made him pause.

As an elder on the expedition, he had been privy to the models projecting a clean sweep of the continent in 15-20 years.  By 1942-1952, Earth time, the continent should have been emptied and opened for Gott-Druk resettlement.  Something was wrong.  Things did not appear to be going to plan.

He sipped his tea and wondered if the leaders of his expedition were secretly servants of the Masters.  He had imagined the Masters were a Homo Sapiens thing, but maybe their corruption was more universal than he previously imagined.  He had much to think about.

###

After lunch, he decided he had to find Doctor Mishka.  He began by going back to the place he arrived, where German bombs reduced the bank and other buildings to rubble.  Unfortunately, his scanner could not pinpoint the location of the Kairos the way Sukki’s amulet could.

He expanded the scanner search area until he found the time gate that would take him back to 1875.  It appeared to be somewhere around Paris, as he estimated the distance.  It would let him out somewhere in the United States, depending on where Marshal Casidy traveled to in the last month.  Of course, he could not go there since he was now time locked in the exact point in time where he belonged.  Going through that time gate now would remove sixty-six years of his life as his personal time clock, as the others called it, would compensate for the time difference.  He was not even sixty years old.  He would cease to exist.

He played with the scanner until he found the time gate that would send him to 2015. That gate appeared to be around York, or maybe closer to the Scottish border.  He could not go there either.  Going through that time gate would age him seventy-four years in an instant.  No one lived seventy-four years on top of his current age.  One hundred was the limit, though he remembered reading about one Gott-Druk who lived to be a hundred and eight.  Remarkable constitution.  Elder Stow knew if he survived the time trip to 2015, he would probably die in a matter of seconds.

He sighed.  He well understood that the only reason he and the travelers could travel through time was because they were out of sync with time.  Their personal time clocks moved independently from the time period they traveled through.  Now that he was back where he belonged, his personal time clock linked up once again with general time.  Now he would suffer the consequences of getting younger or getting older depending on which time gate he tried.

Elder Stow felt sad that his travels through time were over.  He spent nine years lost in time, and like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz, all he kept thinking was he wanted to get home.  Now that he was home, he was not sure home was where he wanted to be.  He learned a lot on the road, including about the Masters.  He thought again about the expedition he was on. Things were not proceeding according to the original plan.  He knew the Mother and Father of the expedition had to be responsible.  He suspected the Masters.  He needed evidence.  He decided that now, he had a different job to do, but a job, certainly.  He imagined a likely scenario.

Doctor Mishka—Colonel Mishka would be Colonel Nadia Kolchenkov, leaving off the name of the German husband she divorced. She had to be somewhere midway between the two natural time gates. That would put her somewhere in London.  She had to have come to this part of the city and maybe helped in the area with the injured.  She may have been present with the firetrucks and ambulances, and maybe sent some survivors to the hospital.  He might have arrived even as her car was taking her away.  He would not know.

She was a Russian. She probably came to London as part of a diplomatic mission from Moscow.  She had contacts and she spoke English well.  Elder Stow supposed it was in the interests of the Soviet Union to see a strong England—one that would not be cowed by German bombs and would not surrender.  As long as England stood, that would keep half of the German army in the west, and that would be less potential pressure on the Russians in the east.

Elder Stow would have to search for her.  He would have to go to Whitehall, to Parliament and inquire.  He would have to think about how to do that safely, where they did not arrest him as a spy or something.  He was a naturally cautious person.  He wondered if his travels made him paranoid.  No, he decided.  Caution was not a bad thing.

Sirens went off in the neighborhood.  People looked up to the sky.  Elder Stow found his eyes drawn upward.  It was the middle of the day.  He dd not recall bombing in daylight, or maybe he did not know.  He found himself hustled along with the people who headed for the nearest underground station.  He could have activated his screen device and weathered the storm easily enough.  He looked.  His screen device was still set for a Decker wall.  He let it go and followed the crowd.  He felt curious.

He found plenty of noise in the underground.  People mostly shouted out names.  They wanted to be sure family and friends made it to the shelter.  It was not a kind of mad dash, however, as apparently, after months of bombing, families had staked out areas where they could be found.  “John.”  He heard a woman call.  “John.  Mister Stow.”

Elder Stow spied Mildred from the bank.  “Hello,” he said and waved before he went to sit beside the woman.  She had a thermos and offered him some tea.  He smiled his thank you, but his eyes remained on the people.  Some down the way started singing.  People laughed, smiled, told jokes and stories.  Some brought books to read. A couple of men read newspapers.  Some wrote in notebooks, and others simply looked around with some uncertainty.  To be sure, Mothers kept their children close.  Elder Stow had a question.

“How long do these raids go on?”

Mildred returned his smile.  “Daylight raids are usually not so long.  The Germans try to get in and out quickly before the RAF start shooting them down.  Nighttime raids might last longer.”

“Shorter and longer are not very accurate,” Elder Stow said.

Mildred shrugged.  “Best I can do,” she said as they began to hear some rumbling through the underground and something like dull pounding above.  “That sounds like down by the Thames,” Mildred said, one hand to her ear.  Elder Stow took her word for it, but as they listened, the pounding grew louder and closer until it sounded like the bombs were falling overhead.

“Seems to me they already flattened your neighborhood,” Elder Stow suggested.

“They are not that precise,” Mildred responded, as Elder stow got distracted by a man who got down on the tracks and walked a short way to the edge of the tunnel.  It was Duko, and he appeared to have a lever of some sort in his hands.  Even as the pounding overhead increased and Elder Stow looked up, he figured out what Duko did with that dynamite.  He turned on his personal screen before he whipped out his screen device and barely got the Decker wall turned in time for the ceiling on the back half of the station to explode.  People screamed and held their ears.  Some of the ceiling fell, and some people got hurt before the ceiling stopped miraculously in midair.

Elder Stow got out his sonic device and used it to amplify his voice.  “Get out from under the collapsing ceiling.  I can’t hold it up forever.”  He did not have to shout.  People were already moving from under the collapsing section of the roof.

Elder Stow saw more dynamite over his head, and all the way to the stairs.  He saw more over Duko’s head where it would block the tunnel on both ends.  He imagined Duko, and the two men with him would head down the tunnel far enough to be safe before blowing up the other half of the ceiling, effectively trapping the survivors, if any.  But Elder Stow imagined they would not be entirely trapped.  Even as he looked toward the stairs, the stairwell exploded, and more people got hurt.

Duko began to yell and pointed at Elder Stow.  The two men pulled out handguns and opened fire, hitting one man, the wall, and Elder Stow with one bullet that bounced off his personal screen.  By then, Elder Stow had his personal weapon in hand.  He noticed it was still set to full power and wide angle.  He dared not wait.  He turned off his screen device which allowed the ceiling at the far end to collapse before he rushed right at Duko and his men.  He jumped to the tracks and fired down into the tunnel before they could escape.  All three men became smoking hulks of ash and burning flesh and whatever detonation device Duko had melted.  The walls down the tunned got inadvertently widened and the ceiling in that place collapsed enough to bury the men so the people did not have to stare at the carcasses.  Fortunately, the ceiling did not collapse enough to block the air from that direction.

Elder Stow quickly looked overhead and saw that the dynamite above his position did not detonate.  The ceiling looked solid enough to hold up.

1941 A.D. London

Kairos lifetime 120: Nadia Iliana Kolchenkov, Doctor Mishka

Recording …

Doctor Misha knew where she was in 1914.  She might not have remembered the exact time and location, but she could make a good guess.  Where she might be in 1941 was a complete mystery.  About all she could do was dress Elder Stow in a suit, gather some American dollars, and tell Elder Stow to go to a bank when he arrived to exchange the dollars for the local currency.  That, and she hugged him and said good luck.  Elder Stow hugged them all and when he stepped out on to a city street, he sniffed and wiped his eyes.

“Who would have thought?” he asked himself.  Homo Sapiens were not the evolutionary mistake he grew up believing.  They were complex, indomitable spirits.  And the Earth belonged to them.  It was no longer the Gott-Druk home.  It took a couple of years of travel to realize that, but he no longer had doubts.  The Gott-Druk home world was out there, in the night sky, and it was a good world—no, it was a very good world.

Elder Stow pulled out his scanner.  It did not take much effort to recognize he landed in London.  He had visited most of the European capitals in his day and set their recognition patterns in his scanner.  Of course, he was most familiar with Berlin where his people settled and decided on a strategy to take down the human race.  He touched his communication device but paused.  He thought first to find that bank.  He might be stuck in this place for a long time if there were no Gott-Druk presently monitoring the planet.  He looked around.

Elder Stow saw several damaged buildings and one that collapsed entirely.  Men walked around the rubble that looked like it had been on fire several hours ago.  He saw the emergency vehicles parked in the street and plenty of street repair vehicles as well.  He saw three men rummaging through the rubble of one building.  Somehow, he knew they were looking for bodies.

“Excuse me,” he interrupted one man’s journey as the man crossed the street.  “The nearest bank?” he asked.  The man pointed at a broken building where several police officers stood around guarding the vault in case the crowd decided to see what money got liberated by the bombs.  “The nearest open bank?”  Elder Stow rephrased the question.

The man, a workman of some sort frowned and set down the bag he carried.  Elder Stow stared at the bag.  It appeared full of red sticks.  The man did not notice.  He got busy looking around at the streets.  He appeared to think, but at last, he pointed.  “Two blocks, turn left, two more blocks on the right.”

Elder Stow shifted his eyes again to the man and smiled.  “My thanks, Mister…”

“Duko,” the man said.  He snatched up his bag and hurried off.

Elder Stow walked the four blocks shaking his head.  Something did not seem right about that man.  He wondered about the red sticks as well, but he had to pause as he got to a street wholly untouched by the bombs.  It looked full of cars and commerce like any street in any major European city untouched by the ravages of war.

He stopped an elderly woman on the street.  “The bank?”

“That is where I am headed.  You can walk with me,” the woman said, and Elder Stow grunted.  He realized what was wrong with that man. He was not an Englishman.  He spoke with an accent, though Elder Stow could not pinpoint the man’s country of origin.

The woman walked, Elder Stow beside her, and she spoke.  “I’m Mildred Harkness.  I assume you are not from this neighborhood.”

Elder stow shook his head to clear his mind and focus.  “Stow,” he said, and then thought to humanize the named.  “John Stow, and no, I am from America.”  It was the last time zone he visited so he figured it was not entirely a lie.

“I thought I heard Irish for a minute,” Mildred said.

Aha, Elder Stow thought.  The man was Irish, and something else…  “No,” Elder Stow responded.  “Strictly American, and I have some money I need to exchange into the local currency.”  He pulled out a bill to show her.

“Yes, I see,” Mildred said, and smiled for him.  “It just so happens I know the right person to talk to.  Mister Wilson is the man that keeps up with all the current exchange rates.  I’ll introduce you.”

“That would be very kind of you,” Elder Stow responded and returned the old woman’s smile.  They walked in silence for a minute.  Elder Stow hardly knew what to ask.  He thought through information he had gleaned about the second world war.  That was during the early part of his journey with the travelers before he honestly realized the integrity of history was at stake.  At first, he was curious to hear about what his crew might be facing in the future, and what the shape of the world might be in if and when he returned.  He heard all about the Nazis and the atrocities they committed as well as the subsequent Soviet oppressors.  Oddly enough, neither wiped the European map clean the way the Gott-Druk would have wanted.  Something must have interrupted the Gott-Druk plans, because surely a relatively empty Europe that the Gott-Druk could recolonize would have been the plan.

“Odd time to be in London,” Mildred picked up the conversation.  “I assume you are here on official business.  Odd time for a tourist to visit London, what with the blitz and all, though the spring is nice.”

“I have a feeling the blitz may be coming to an end,” Elder Stow said and smiled again.  He recalled it was less than a year.  October to May if he remembered correctly.  He imagined his people would have wanted to break the spirit of the English people, but that just told him how little the Gott-Druk really understood Homo Sapiens.

“An end to the constant barrage of bombs day and night would be wonderful, especially the night raids.  I hardly remember what a good night’s sleep feels like.”

“I would say hang in there, but you Londoners appear to be doing that very well.”

Mildred nodded before she said, “Here we are.”  She took Elder Stow to the window and Mister Williams was very accommodating.  Elder Stow had to remember pounds and shillings were not decimal like dollars and cents, but he could handle the math well enough.

When he left the bank, he saw Mildred had gone.  She seemed a nice person.  Many humans were nice people, and it was good to remember that.  He saw an open luncheon place across the street and thought to get a snack, and tea.  He thought, England and tea.  He had some things to think through before he stumbled forward any further.

Of course, his people did not give the Germans atomic weapons.  They did not want an empty Europe that was full of atomic radiation, even though atomic energy would be the next logical step on the technological ladder, followed by lasers and some primitive sort of computers—what Lockhart and the others called computers—and rocketry.  Such rocketry was little more than fancy explosions that did not happen to use gunpowder.  So anyway, his people planned to empty the continent by more primitive means, by using gunpowder and such, even if it took a long time to do it.

Elder Stow paused.  He recognized the red sticks the man carried.  Trinitrotoluene.  Decker called it TNT; a stable explosive that needed to be set off with a simple pressure wave.  Elder Stow wondered why a man would be carrying around a bag full of…what was the word? …Dynamite.