"Come, then! Quick!"
* * * * *
The fire had rolled farther into the forest; everywhere the evergreens
were burning like torches. Sparks rained down from overhead as they
approached the time traveler's resting place, and directly ahead the
thicket was a sheet of flame. From Kahl came a wounded cry; he broke
from the guards and dashed forward. Then he stopped as if he had run
into a stone wall.
The soldiers closed up, weapons thrusting.
"But this is the place!" Kahl was muttering feverishly. "It was right
there--" He pointed at the bare, smoldering grass.
The ten-foot metal cube of the time traveler had burned to feathery ash
and drifted away on the breeze--or it had in some no less unbelievable
fashion vanished utterly.
Schwinzog's smile was not good to see. "Of course there is nothing
there," he nodded satisfiedly. "Lieutenant Kramer, arrest these men.
They are American saboteurs, and will be tried as such tomorrow by the
_Volksgericht_."
"We," Eddie Dugan summed up the situation, "are up the creek without a
paddle."
"And we don't know where the creek is," added Manning. "Only that
this is 2051, and the Nazis evidently either won the war or staged a
comeback somehow after losing. Neither idea seems possible, but here
we are. Item, America is still fighting Nazism--at least, there are
'American saboteurs.' Item two, we landed smack in the middle of a
wasp nest stirred up by those same saboteurs. They must have scored a
success; did you see that building in the woods beyond that field?"
"What building?"
"I noticed it just as they were loading us into their armored paddy
wagon. It had been a big place--already fallen in; the fire must have
started there. And the boys that started it must have been the ones
that German captain was talking about--the ones that wore Caps of
Darkness and flew off in an invisible helicopter."
"I'm getting a headache," groaned Dugan.
"I'd like to meet them," said Manning thoughtfully.
They could not see each other, but they could talk between the
adjoining cells. Kahl was in the cell on the other side of Manning's;
he had raved most of the night at the guards and the equally responsive
steel walls. The two Americans had slept long and refreshingly; they
had long since learned to sleep under any and all conditions. There
were no windows to show daylight, but they must have been there most of
twenty-four hours.
They hadn't seen much of the world of the future, thought Manning
ruefully; only the glimpse of a street filled with shiny silent
automobiles and oddly garbed pedestrians, as they had been hustled from
a rolling dungeon to a stationary one. But if the town was Freiburg, it
had changed a lot since they had last seen it--a skeletonous waste of
ruin, with nothing left standing that the American bombers had wanted
to flatten.
"We shouldn't of let that Kahl talk so much," resumed Dugan
gloomily.
"How could we stop him? Anyway, I have a feeling he talked himself in
even deeper than he did us."
Their discussion was ended by a clatter of boots, the arrival of a
bristling escort. They were being honored with treatment as dangerous
and important prisoners--a distinction less flattering than ominous.
* * * * *
The "People's Court" before which they were being taken was obviously
not the extralegal supreme court which Hitler had made into a bogey-man
for scaring grown-up consciences to sleep; this was a local affair, in
the same building that housed the jail. All four prisoners were herded
into a rather small chamber, innocent of audience or jury. Opposite
the entrance, beneath a huge hooked-cross banner, three men in black
robes sat behind a desk. Two of them were old men who regarded the
defendants with dull, incurious eyes; between them, his bulk dominating
and shriveling them, sat Herr Schwinzog.