But by then I hoped and expected that, with Tamara's help, Father could be made to see the Quixotic futility of going back to the Battle of Britain when that battle had been won more than mo millennia earlier.

With Tamara's help - She was my secret weapon. By a concatenation of miracles I had married my lover from the stars... and thereby married my son, to my amazement and great happiness. Could more miracles let me marry the only man I have always loved, totally and without reservation? Father would certainly marry Tamara, given the chance - any man would! - and Tamara would then see to it that Father married me. I hoped.

If not, it would be enough and more than enough simply to have Father alive again.

I had gone back through the gate to Boondock when I heard Gwen Hazel's voice: ‘Godiva's Horse to all stations. Deety reports bandits in the air and forming up. Expect sirens in approx eighty minutes. Acknowledge.'

Gwen Hazel was standing beside me by the gates in the hospital, but this was a communication check as much as an intelligence. My own comm gear was simple: a throat mike not buried but merely under a bandage I did not need; a ‘hearing aid' that was not one and an antenna concealed by my clothes. I answered, ‘Blood's a Rover to Horse, roger.'

I heard, ‘British Yeoman to Horse, roger. Eighty minutes. One hour twenty minutes.'

I said ‘Blood to Horse. I heard Gretchen's roger. Should I?'

Gwen Hazel shut off transmission and spoke to me, ‘You shouldn't hear her until you both shift to Coventry 1941. Mau, will you please go through to Coventry for a second comm. check?'

‘I did so; we established that Gwen Hazel's link to me, forty-fourth C to twentieth C, was okay, and that now I could hear Gretchen - both as they should be. Then I went back to Boondock, as I was not yet gowned or masked. There was one point in the transition where something tugged at one's clothes and my ears popped - a static baffle against an air-pressure inequality, I knew. But ghostly, just the same.

Deety reported that the bombers' fighter escort was becoming airborne. The German Messerschmidts were equal to or better than the Spitfires, but they had to operate at the very limit of their range - it took most of their gasoline to get there and get back; they could engage in dogfighting only for a few minutes - or wind up in the Channel if they miscalculated.

Gwen Hazel said, ‘Dagmar. Take your station.'

‘Roger wilco.' Dagmar went through, gowned, masked, and capped - not yet gloved... although God knows what good gloves would do in the septic conditions we would experience. (Protect us, maybe, if not our patients.)

I tied Woodrow's mask for him; he did so for me. We were ready.

Gwen Hazel said, ‘Godiva's Horse to all stations sirens. British Yeoman, activate gate and shift time. Acknowledge.'

‘Yeoman to Horse, roger wilco!'

‘Horse to Yeoman, report arrival. Good hunting!' Hazel added to me, ‘Mau, you and Lazarus can go through now. Good luck!'

I followed Lazarus through... and swallowed my heart. Dagmar was gowning Father. He glanced at us as we came out from behind that curtain, paid us no further attention. I heard him say to Dagmar, ‘I haven't seen you before, Sister. What's your name?'

‘Dagmar Dobbs, Doctor. Call me Dag if you like. I just came up from London this morning, sir, with supplies.'

‘So I see. First time in weeks we seen a clean gown. And masks - what swank! You sound like a Yank, Dag.'

‘And I am, Doctor - and so do you.'

‘Guilty as charged. Ira Johnson, from Kansas City.'

‘Why, that's my home town!'

‘I thought I heard some tall corn in your speech. When the Heinies go home tonight, we must catch up on home town gossip.'

‘I don't have much; I haven't been home since I got my cap and pin.'

Dagmar kept Father busy and kept his attention - and I thanked her under my breath. I didn't want him to notice me until the raid was over. No time for Old Home Week until then.

The first bombs fell, some distance away.

I saw nothing of the raid. Ninety-three years ago, or seven months later that same year, depending on how you count it, I saw bombs falling on San Francisco under circumstances in which I had nothing to do but look up and hold my breath and wait. I'm not sorry that I was too busy to watch the bombing of Coventry. But I could hear it. If you can hear it hit, it is too far away to have your name on it. So they tell me. I'm not sure I believe them.

Gwen Hazel said in my ear, ‘Did you pear Gretchen? She says they got sixty-nine out of seventy-two of the first wave.'

I had not heard Gretchen. Lazarus and I were busy with our first patient, a little boy. He was badly burned and his left arm was crushed. Lazarus got ready to amputate. I blinked back tears and helped him.

Chapter 28 - Eternal Now

I am not going to batter your feelings or mine by describing the details of that thousand-year night. Anything agonising you have ever seen in the emergency room of a big city hospital is what we saw, and worked on, that night. Compound fractures, limbs shattered to uselessness, burns - horrible burns. If the burns weren't too bad we slathered them with a gel that would not be seen here for centuries, put dressings over the affected areas, and had them carried outside by civil defence stretcher bearers. The worst cases were carried in the other direction by Cas and Pol - behind that curtain, through a Burroughs-Carter-Libby gate, to Ira Johnson Hospital in Boondock, and (for burn cases) shifted again to Jane Culver Burroughs Memorial Hospital in Beulahland, there to spend days or weeks in healing, then to be returned to Coventry at ‘All Clear' this same night.

All of our casualties were civilians, mostly women, children, and old men. The only military (so far as I know) around or in Coventry were Territorials manning AA guns. They had their own medical set-up. I suppose that in London a first-aid station such as ours would probably be in the underground. Coventry had no tube trains; this aid station was merely sandbags out in the open but it was safer, perhaps, than it would have been in a building - one that might burn over it. I'm not criticising. Everything about their civil defence had a make-do quality about it, a people with their backs to the wall, fighting gallantly with whatever they had.

In our aid station we had three tables, operating tables by courtesy, in fact plain wooden tables with the paint scrubbed right off them between raids. Father was using the one nearest the entrance; Woodrow was using the one nearest the curtain; the middle one was used by an elderly Englishman who was apparently a regular for this aid station: Mr Pratt, a local veterinary surgeon, assisted by his wife, ‘Harry' for Harriet. Mrs Pratt had unkind things to say about the Germans during the lulls but was more interested in talking about the cinema. Had I ever met Clark Gable? Gary Cooper? Ronald Colman? Having established that I knew no one of any importance she quit trying to draw me out. But she agreed with her husband when he said it was decent of us Yanks to come over and help out... but when were the States going to come into the War?

I said that I did not know.

Father spoke up. ‘Don't bother the Sister, Mr Pratt. We'll be along a bit late, just like your Mr Chamberlain. In the meantime please be polite to those of us who are here and helping.'

‘No offence meant, Mr Johnson.'

‘And none taken, Mr Pratt. Clamp!'

(Mrs Pratt was as good an operating nurse as I've ever seen. She was always ready with what her husband needed without his asking for it - long practice together, I suppose. She had fetched the instruments he used; I assume that they were the tools of his animal practice. That might bother some people; to me it made sense.)