Ben hesitated. 'It's undeniable, sir.'

'Yes, it is. Undeniable. Good word, that. But there are other sorts of motivation, aren't there? Look, Kamen, you and I are going to get to know each other a little better. I want you to understand what it is I want, and why I want it. Perhaps I can make you share my desires, to some degree, or at least sympathise with them. And if so you will have a positive motivation to make the experiment work, as well as negative. So what do you think? Will that work?'

'I've no grasp of psychology, sir.'

'Well, that doesn't surprise me. Do you know anything about me, Kamen? No, of course you don't. Suffice it to say that I have been politically active since I was a boy, when I worked for a nationalist group in the Rhineland. I was motivated, you see, by the humiliations heaped on my father, who fought honourably in the last war, only to be betrayed by the very politicians whose lives he had protected.

'My petty grouping was absorbed into the Party, and then – I was still only twenty – my true career began. I worked for a time as a reader in the Official Party Department to Protect Writing. But I was drawn to scholarship – I had studied history, you see. I was part of a research party that visited the Canary Islands. It is believed that these are fragments of Atlantis, and a homeland for an Aryan race. After that it was a natural step for me to join the SS, and come to work for the Ahnenerbe…'

'You need to find something to impress Himmler,' Ben said. 'Sir.'

'Got a sharp tongue in that rodent head of yours, haven't you, rat-boy? But, yes, it's true. We are all jostling for position in the Reichsfuhrer's court.'

'And that is why you need the Loom.'

'Yes.' Trojan eyed Ben. 'I wasn't planning to reveal this to anybody, not until your precognitive abilities are proven – until we have proof the Loom can work. But in the interests of motivation – ' He opened a drawer and extracted a brown card folder. 'You do understand,' he said casually, 'that if you ever breathe a word of this I will personally cut out your tongue and feed it back to you?'

'Yes, sir.'

'Good boy. Now, take a look at this.' He spun the folder across the desk. 'I know you're no historian…'

Inside the folder was a kind of poem, nine stanzas with a prologue and epilogue, rendered in German and what looked like Old English. 'The Menologium of the Blessed Isolde",' Ben read.

These the Great Years / of the Comet of God

Whose awe and beauty / in the roof of the world

Lights step by step / the road to empire

An Aryan realm / THE GLORY OF CHRIST…

He looked up. 'What is this?'

'A kind of calendar. Authentic-looking document for the time. And a prophecy, if you will – or it would be, if you were stuck in the sixth century. Entirely faked, of course. I've been working on it with various scholars – linguists, astronomers.' He sounded paternally proud, and he wanted Ben to understand. 'It must span centuries. My parapsychologists assure me that its most likely recipient will be a relative of the hapless pagan afflicted by O'Malley, generations before my own target. The document is encoded to ensure its own survival – for instance, in the hands of monkish scribes – and has an embedded chronology. Look – can you see? It is structured around the repeated visits of a comet to the skies.'

'What comet? I don't understand.'

'Halley's comet,' said Trojan, and he grinned. 'Now, Halley's comet might not mean much to you or me, Kamen, but it means a lot to the English-'

'The Norman Conquest.' Ben looked at the Menologium, piecing it together. 'Halley's comet returned in 1066. This is what you want to send back to the past, isn't it? This document.' It seemed unbelievable. 'Are you planning to, um, adjust the outcome of the Norman Conquest of England?'

'Think of it,' Trojan said ardently. 'Hastings! What a catastrophe that October day was, so long ago! England, you know, was thoroughly Nordic. Why, only a generation before 1066 it had been part of Cnut's Scandinavian empire. King Harold himself was half-Danish! But William, that creature of the Pope, defeated Harold; the Jewish-Christian conspiracy defeated the Nordic race that day. And now the Aryan stock of the English is polluted by cross-breeding with the degenerate French. Quisling, the wise leader of Norway, argues this cogently, by the way.'

'And what if that could be reversed?' Ben said evenly.

'You have it,' Trojan said. 'Exactly! The Normans would have been smashed for a generation, and Harold secure on his throne. England, Scandinavia, Germany – the Nordic countries would have remained strong, and dominant over the Jewish-Christian south.' His eyes were misty, almost as if his own rhetoric was making him cry. 'Think of it. I would shine in Himmler's eyes. And 1 could become a hero of the English – Harold's grave was the first place I visited after the invasion. They would tear down the Objective wall and strew my path with petals…'

Ben saw that this man had no real idea what he was meddling with – no idea that if this prophecy did what he intended there was every possibility that he would be erased from existence, along with Ben, Himmler and the applauding English.

Trojan turned to him. 'Now do you see the scope of my ambition? Even a Jew can think. And I hope that you will share some of my intellectual excitement.' Then his expression shifted, becoming more calculating. 'Of course the gesture is the thing. Even if the Loom doesn't work the very effort will grab Himmler's imagination. So what do you think?'

'I think I have no choice but to work with you.'

'But I need you to want to work with me, Benjamin Kamen. Can you do that?'

'Oh, yes, sir, I can do that,' Ben said. He glanced down at the Menologium, thinking fast. 'Perhaps I could study this draft. Polish it a bit. Make it more mine.'

'Yes!' Trojan clapped his hands. 'Good idea. Keep it, work on it. Perhaps that will help you make the whole project part of you. I think that's enough for today. I have other duties. But you have only one duty, Benjamin – sleep! And sleep well.' He was already turning to other papers.

Clutching the Menologium to his chest, Ben turned and made for the door. And he began to plan how he could use this opportunity to make a cry for help.

XX

There was bottled beer in the fridge.

Bathed, wrapped in a dressing gown, having eaten his fill and then some, and mildly drunk after sipping his first alcohol in more than a year, Gary sat before the television. Earnest German voices spoke over images of spectacular advances in the east and in Africa. Gary had no way of working out how much of it was true. Other voices spoke of gloomy news from the rest of Britain, of a hungry, cold and demoralised population, the famine to come in the winter, the flight of the people from cities like Birmingham and Manchester. There were even pictures of queues at the Winston Line, defeated English folk clamouring to come into the Reich protectorate, smiling Wehrmacht troops handing out cans of meat and chocolate for the children.

Now a documentary programme came on. Sponsored by the SS, it illustrated the cosmological ideas of one Hans Horbiger, an Austrian engineer. Gary understood little of the German commentary, but he soaked up the general ideas from the pictures.

Horbiger said the universe was driven by heat, like a giant steam engine. A cartoon sky filled up with tiny stars so cool they were clad in ice, and hot giant stars. When the icy stars fell into their hot neighbours there were spectacular explosions that sprinkled planets and moons, like sparks from a firework. That was how the earth had been born. Initially earth had had a whole family of moons, which were made of ice – as was the existing moon, the last survivor. One by one the moons fell to the earth, causing immense cataclysms. Gary watched as the earth was repeatedly plated over by ice, save for a central belt where giant tides were raised by the falling moon. The most recent of these disasters had been eleven thousand years ago, said Horbiger; life had survived only in a few refuges.