I felt a chill, despite the heat of the sun on my back and head. Suddenly this brilliant Palaeocene world seemed faded — a transparency, through which shone the pitiless light of time.

“So you detected your traces of Plattnerite, and you found us,” I said. “But I imagine you were disappointed merely to find me — again! — and no horde of warmongering Prussians. But — look here — can’t you see there is a certain paradox?

“You develop your time ironclads because you fear the Germans are doing the same. Very well. But the situation is symmetrical: from their point of view, the Germans must fear that you will exploit such time machinery first. Each side is behaving precisely in such a way as to provoke the worst reaction in its opponents. And so you both slide towards the worst situation for all.”

“That’s as may be,” Bond said. “But the possession of time technology by the Germans would be catastrophic for the Allied Cause. The role of this Expedition is to hunt down German travelers, and to avert any damage the Germans inflict on History.”

I threw my hands in the air, and Palaeocene water rippled about my ankles. “But — confound it, Captain Bond — it is fifty million years until the birth of Christ! What meaning can that firefly struggle between England and Germany — in such a remote future — have here?”

“We cannot relax,” she said with a grim weariness. “Can’t you see that? We must hunt the Germans, right back to the dawn of Creation — if necessary.”

“And where will this War stop? Will you consume all of Eternity before you are done? Don’t you see that that—” I waved a hand, meaning to summarize all of that awful future of shattered cities and populations huddling in subterranean eaves “ — all that — is impossible? Or will you go on until there are two men left — just two — and the last turns to his neighbor and bashes out his brain with a lump of shattered masonry? Eh?”

Bond turned away — the light of the Sea picked out the lines in her face — and she would not reply.

This period of calm, after our first encounter with Gibson, lasted five days.

It was noon of a cloudless, brilliant day, and I had spent the morning putting my clumsy nursing skills at the service of the gurkha doctor. It was with a sense of relief that I accepted Hilary Bond’s invitation to join her for another of our walks to the beach.

We cut through the forest easily enough — by now, the troopers had cleared respectable paths radiating from the central encampment — and, when we reached the beach, I hauled off my boots and socks and dumped them at the fringe of the forest, and I scampered down to the water’s edge. Hilary Bond discarded her own footwear, a little more decorously, and she piled it on the sand with the hand-weapon she carried. She rolled up the legs of her trousers — I was able to see how her left leg was misshapen, the skin shrunken by an ancient burn — and she waded into the foamy surf after me.

I stripped off my shirt (we were pretty much informal in that camp in the ancient forest, men and women all) and I dunked my head and upper body in the transparent water, disregarding the soaking my trouser legs were receiving. I breathed deep, relishing it all: the heat of the sun prickling on my face, the sparkle of the water, the softness of the sand between my toes, the sharp scents of salt and ozone.

“You’re glad to get here, I see,” Hilary said with a tolerant smile.

“Indeed I am.” I told her how I had been assisting the doctor.

“You know I’m willing enough — more than willing — to help. But by about ten o’clock today my head had got so full of the stench of chloroform, of ether, of various antiseptic fluid — as well as more earthy smells! — that—”

She held her hands up. “I understand.”

We emerged from the Sea, and I toweled myself dry with my shirt. Hilary picked up her gun, but we left our boots piled on the beach, and we strolled by the water’s edge. After a few dozen yards I spotted the shallow indentations which betrayed the presence of corbicula — those burrowing bivalves which inhabited that beach in such numbers. We squatted on the sand, and I showed her how to dig out the compact little creatures. Within a few minutes we had built up a respectable haul; a heap of bivalves sat drying in the sun beside us.

As she picked over the bivalves with the fascination of a child, Hilary’s face, with her cropped hair plastered flat by the water, shone with pleasure at her simple achievement. We were quite alone on that beach — we might have been the only two humans in all that Palaeocene world — and I could feel the sparkle of every bead of perspiration on my scalp, the rasp of every grain of sand against my shins. And it was all suffused by the animal warmth of the woman beside me; it was as if the Multiple Worlds through which I had traveled had collapsed down to this single moment of vividness to Here and Now.

I wanted to communicate something of this to Hilary. “You know—”

But she had straightened up, and turned her face to the Sea. “Listen.”

I gazed about, baffled, at the forest’s edge, the lapping Sea, the lofty emptiness of the sky. The only sounds were the rustle of a soft breeze in the forest canopy, and the gentle gurgle of the lapping wavelets. “Listen to what?”

Her expression had become hard and suspicious — the face of the soldier, intelligent and fearful. “Single-engined,” she said, her concentration apparent. “That’s a Daimler-Benz DB — a twelve-cylinder, I think…” She jumped to her feet and pressed her hands to her brow, shielding her eyes.

And then I heard it too, my older ears following hers. It was a distant thrum — like some immense, remote insect — which came drifting to us off the Sea.

“Look,” Hilary said, pointing. “Out there. Can you see it?”

I sighted along Hilary’s arm, and was rewarded with a glimpse of something: a distortion, hanging over the Sea, far to the east. It was a patch of otherness — a whorl no bigger than the full moon, a kind of sparkling refraction tinged with green.

Then I had an impression of something solid in the middle of it all, congealing and spinning — and then there was a hard, dark shape, like a cross, which came hurtling low out of the sky — from the east, from the direction of a Germany yet to be born. That thrumming noise grew much louder.

“My God,” Hilary Bond said. “It is a Messerschmitt — an Eagle; it looks like a Bf 109F…”

“Messerschmitt… That’s a German name,” I said, rather stupidly.

She glanced at me. “Of course it’s a German name. Don’t you understand?”

“What?”

“That’s a German plane. It is die Zeitmaschine, come to hunt us down!”

As it approached the coast, the craft tipped in the air, like a seagull in flight, and began to run parallel to the Sea’s edge. With a noisy whoosh, and so fast that Hilary and I were forced to swivel on the sand to follow its progress, it passed over our heads, not a hundred feet from the ground.

The machine was some thirty feet long, and perhaps a little more from wing-tip to wing-tip. A propeller whirled at its nose, blurred by speed. The craft’s underside was painted blue-gray, and its upper sections were done out in mottled brown and green. Strident black crosses on the fuselages and wings marked the craft’s country of origin, and there were more gaudy militaristic designs on the painted skin, of an eagle’s head, an upraised sword, and so on. The underside was quite smooth, save for the craft’s single load: a tear-drop mass of metal perhaps six feet long, painted in the ubiquitous blue.

For some moments Bond and I stood there, as stunned by this sudden apparition as if by some religious visitation.