Jubal cleared his throat and grinned. ‘Despite widespread popular demand coming mostly from Castor and Pollux, this operation will not be combined with a sightseeing trip to watch Lady Godiva ride through Coventry.

‘Thats all today, friends. To take part in this operation you need to be convinced of three things: first, that the Nazi regime under Adolf Hitler was so vile that it must not be allowed to win; second, that it is strongly desirable to defeat the Nazis without dropping scores of atomic bombs on Europe, and, third, that it is worth it to you to risk your neck to achieve the operation's objectives. The Circle answers yes to these questions, but you must weigh them in your own conscience. If your answer is not a whole-hearted yes on all points, then please do not volunteer.

‘After you have thought it over, the remaining Gideon's Band will meet for first rehearsal at ten tomorrow morning at our Potemkin-Village Coventry. A transbooth shuttling directly to the practice village is located just north of this building.'

In Coventry, England, on Tuesday 8 April 1941, at 7.22 p.m. the sun was setting, glowing red in smog and coal smoke. Looking at this city gave me a weird feeling, so exactly had Shiva's simulation matched what I now saw. I was standing at the entrance of a civil defence first-aid station, the one that research showed that Father had worked in (would work in) tonight. It was hardly more than walls of sandbags covered by canvas painted opaque to guard the black-out.

It had a jakes of sorts (Phew!), and an anteroom for the wounded, three pine tables, some cupboards, and duck boards on a dirt floor. No running water - a tank with a spigot. Gasoline lamps.

Greyfriars Green spread out around me, an untended park pocked with bomb cratera. I could not see the monastery tower we had rented from Lady Godiva's husband, Leofric, Earl of Mercia, but I knew that it was north of me, off to my left. Field Agent Hendrik Hudson Schultz, who had conducted the dicker with the Earl, reported that Godiva's hair really was surprisingly long and beautiful but that it was inadvisable to be downwind from her, and she had apparently not bathed more than twice in her life. Father Hendrick had spent a hard sixteen months learning eleventh century Anglo-Saxon and customs and medieval church Latin in preparation for the assignment - one he completed in ten days.

Tonight Father Hendrik was with Gretchen as her interpreter; it had not been judged cost-effective to require the members of the military task force to learn an Anglic language a century older than Chaucer, when their working language was not English but Galacta, and their MOS involved shooting, not talking.

Northeast of me I could see the three spires that gave the city its nickname: Greyfriars, Holy Trinity, and St Michael's. St Michael's and Greyfriar's were gutted in earlier bombings and much of the centre of the city was destroyed. When I had first heard of the bombing of Coventry, a century ago on my personal time line, I had thought that the bombing of this historic town was an example of the sheer viciousness of the Nazis. While it is not possible to exaggerate the viciousness of that regime and the stench of its gas ovens, I now knew that the bombing of Coventry was not simply Schreckdich, as this was an important industrial city, as important to England as Pittsburgh was to the United States.

Coventry was not the bucolic town I had pictured in my mind. I could see that, if fortune favoured us tonight, we might possibly not only destroy a major part of the Luftwaffe's biggest bombers but also save the lives of skilled craftsmen as necessary to military victory as are brave soldiers.

Behind me I heard Gwen Hazel checking her communications: ‘Blood's a Rover, this is Lady Godiva's Horse. Come in, Blood.'

I answered, ‘Blood to Horse, roger.'

We had a uniquely complex communication net tonight; one I did not even try to understand (I'm a nappy engineer and a kitchen chemist - I've never seen an electron), a system that parallelled an even more astounding temporary time) space hook-up.

Like this - From outside, the west end of the aid station was a blank wall of sandbags. From inside, that end was curtained off, a putative storage space. But push aside the curtain and you would find mo time/space gates: one from Coventry 1941 to the medical school hospital, BIT, Tertius 4376 Gregorian, and the other doing just the reverse, so that supplies, personnel, and patients could move either way without traffic problems - and at the Tertius end was another double set of gates to Beulahland, so that the worst cases could be shuttled to a different time axis, there to be hospitalised for days or months - and returned to Coventry, fully recovered, this same night.

(Tomorrow there would be miracles to be explained. But we would be long gone.)

A similar but not identical double-gate arrangement served Gretchen's command. She and her girls (and Father Schultz) were waiting in the eleventh century on the monastery tower. The gate that would place them in the twentieth century would not be activated until Gwen Hazel notified Gretchen that the sirens had sounded.

Gwen Hazel could talk to the twentieth century, the forty-fourth century, and the eleventh century, each separately or all at once, using a buried throat mike, tongue switches, and a body antenna, whether she was at the Tellus Prime end or the Tellus Tertius end of the aid-station gates.

In addition to these hook-ups she was in touch with Zeb and Deety Carter, in Gay Deceiver, at 30.000 feet over the English Channel - too high for bombers, too high for Messerschmidts or Fokkers, too high for AA fire of that year. Guy had agreed to be there only if she was allowed to pick her own altitude. (Gay is a pacifist with, in her opinion, a deplorable amount of combat experience.) But at that altitude Gay was sure that she could spot Heinkels taking off and forming up long before the British coastal radar could see them.

As a result of rehearsals at Potemkin Village, drills involving every casualty we could think of, the surgical teams had been rearranged, with most of them held back on the Boondock side of the gates. ‘Triage' of a sort would be practised; the hopeless cases would be rushed through to Boondock, where no case is hopeless if the brain is alive and not too damaged. There Doctors Ishtar and Galahad would head their usual teams (who need not be volunteers for combat; they would never be in Coventry). The hopeless cases, repaired, would be gated to Beulahland for days or weeks of recovery, then gated back to Coventry before dawn.

Cas and Pol had been volunteered (by their wives my daughters Laz and Lor) as stretcher bearers, to move the worst cases from Coventry to gurney floats on the Boondock side.

It had been decided that too many surgical teams and -too much equipment showing up out of nowhere as soon as the sirens sounded would alert Father unnecessarily, make him smell a rat. But, when the wounded started pouring in, he would be too busy to notice or care.

Jubal and Gillian were a reserve team, and would go through when needed. Dagmar would go through when Deety in Gay Deceiver reported that the bombers were on their way, so that Dagmar would meet Father - Dr Johnson - as he first poked his head in. When the sirens sounded, Lazarus and I would go through, already masked and gowned, with me as his scrub nurse. I'm an adequate surgeon but I'm a whiz as an operating nurse - much more practice at it. We figured that three of us could do what might have to be done at ‘all clear', the end of the raid: grab Father and' kidnap him - drag him through the gate, sit him down in Boondock, and explain things to him there... including the idea that he could have the works - rejuvenation and expert tutoring in really advanced therapy and still be returned to Coventry 8 April 1941. If he insisted. If he had any wish to.