"Here we are. I'm going to have to get this place organized someday."

The colonel-doctor laughed. The crowded little shop hadn't changed in decades. "You said the same thing the first time I came in. That was fifteen years ago."

"And I meant it. I just haven't found the time."

Hodzв took the card, it said in two lines:

FIAN GROLOCH

He nearly collapsed.

"Is something wrong, Doctor?"

"Right here under my nose all the time," he murmured. Off and on, he had had a dozen private detectives tearing up America for as many years, and no amount of money had been able to unearth more than one Groloch, the Fiala whose address he had obtained from a letter written fifty years ago, to the then mayor of Lidice.

He surged toward the door.

"Doctor! Without your hat?"

Neumann's question reestablished his link with reality.

German troops were already over the border at Eger. They had been for days. In hours the full might of the Wehrmacht would roll. It was too late. There was no time to do a proper job. Right now.

He resumed his business with Neumann, a plan already shaping in the depths of his mind. Its success would hinge on two eventualities: his own ability to escape Czechoslovakia before the iron grip of the Third Reich tightened, and Fian Groloch's known unfamiliarity with his nation's early history.

Had Fial been there in Lidice, Neulist's trap could never have been sprung.

His escape route led through Poland, and along the way a Czech patriot named Josef Gabiek lost his papers, identity, and life.

• • •

The night was pitch. The air moaning through the hatch was chilly. Kubis shivered so much his teeth rattled. But that had nothing to do with cold. He had been doing it since takeoff.

For the first few hours he had worried aloud, constantly, about the Luftwaffe, but the endless silence and absolute confidence of his companion, the man who called himself Josef Gabiek, had compelled him to retreat into a fear-filled shell.

How could Gabiek be so certain? So sure that he had been able to sell the British and the government-in-exile?

Gabiek was not certain. This time around he had moved the operation up five days in hopes of taking Fian Groloch by surprise. Also, there was the fact that the real Josef Gabiek, in the operation of his own past, hadn't survived.

The light came on. The RAF men shoved the equipment bundle to the hatchway.

"Time to go," said Kubis, more to himself than to his companion.

Gabiek rose slowly, tightened his chute harness. "It's changing, Jan," he muttered. "I can feel the difference now."

A minute later the soil of their homeland was rushing toward them from the darkness. Gabiek tracked the equipment chute. Kubis searched the upsurging forest for a sign of the SS men he knew would be waiting…

Gabiek was right, just as he had been all along. It went perfectly.

Morning. May 29, 1942. The open-topped green Mercedes sports car and escort were right on time.

Couldn't Gabiek miss?

The older man jumped out and began firing. Without effect.

Kubis threw the bomb.

The Mercedes disintegrated.

But Heydrich clambered out and came toward them, blazing away with his pistol.

Reinhard "Hangman" Heydrich, "protector" of Bohemia and Moravia, had been whipped about like a rat in a terrier's mouth. Pieces of seat-back spring protruded from his back. His spine had been shattered.

Yet he stood there and fought back.

It wasn't his appointed time to die.

As they fled through their smokescreen, with Heydrich's slugs hunting them, Gabiek said over and over, "I can't change it. But it's different."

To effect their escape they were supposed to place themselves in the hands of a priest at Karl Borromaeus Church in Prague. There, among scores of Resistance fighters hiding from the insanity of the security police, Gabiek encountered another time traveler.

The nun was so aged and feeble that she had to perform her limited duties from a wheelchair.

"Dunajcik!" Gabiek gasped.

He didn't know how he knew, but he did. It hit him like a thunderclap. There remained not a shred of doubt.

Kubis gave him a strange look.

"I'll wait here." Gabiek slid behind a pillar, afraid Dunajcik might react as he had. The old woman seemed popular. She might send someone after him…

The conviction grew more absolute. Inside that crone was the man who had caused all this by his treachery at the programming theater…

Gabiek backed from the church, his head shaking. It was a mystery. How could he be so positive? And how could the lieutenant have become a priestess? The man had always been weak and effeminate, and a bit too mystically oriented-but this vast a failure in one educated by the State?

He, as Neulist, had failed, he realized. He had not extinguished the spark of Uprising. It persevered, and had thrust its insidious evil into his own office…

The idiot was so happy he almost glowed. Was do devoted that he had done nothing to apply twenty-first century common knowledge to the retardation of the aging process in the body he wore.

Was the fool in such a hurry to get to Heaven?

Or had that ugly body been too old when he had arrived?

At least some laws of chronological conservation appeared to be in effect.

The Hangman, despite his ruined spine, would not die till the historically appointed moment. He lingered till the fourth of June.

Meanwhile, the Protectorate (and Reich) rapidly deteriorated toward chaos. Gabiek, ignored in all his efforts to betray the Resistance fighters in the church, and to link Lidice with the assassination attempt, suffered frustrations equaling those of his dealings with the Zumstegs. Damn it, the security police had to move. Fian Groloch was bound to remember his history soon. This fuss had to alert him.

But the timetable continued rectifying itself back toward historically established precedent.

Heydrich finally died.