She whirled, her purse flying to the ground. Her hand went to her mouth. She whispered, through her knuckles: "Jochim ... Jochim...." He clutched her, and they supported each other. "Jochim ... the American bombers killed you in Hamburg ... yesterday I sent money to put flowers on your grave ... Jochim...."
"It was a mistake. It was all a mistake. Marthe ... we have found each other...."
From a distance, she had not changed very much at all. Watching her move about the room as he lay, warm and clean, terribly tired, in her bed, he thought to himself that she had not aged half as much as he. But when she bent over him with the cup of hot soup in her hand, he saw the sharp lines in her face, around her eyes and mouth, and when she spoke he heard the dry note in her voice.
How many years? he thought. How many years of loneliness and grief? When had the Americans bombed Hamburg? How? What kind of aircraft could bomb Germany from bases in the Western Hemisphere?
They had so much to explain to each other. As she worked to make him comfortable, the questions flew between them.
"It was something I stumbled on. The theory of probability worlds—of alternate universes. Assuming that the characteristic would be a difference in atomic vibration—minute, you understand; almost infinitely minute—assuming that somewhere in the gross universe every possible variation of every event must take place—then if some means could be found to alter the vibratory rate within a field, then any object in that field would automatically become part of the universe corresponding to that vibratory rate....
"Marthe, I can bore you later. Tell me about Hamburg. Tell me how we lost the war. Tell me about Berlin."
He listened while she told him how their enemies had ringed them in—how the great white wastes of Russia had swallowed their men, and the British fire bombers had murdered children in the night. How the Wehrmacht fought, and fought, and smashed their enemies back time after time, until all the best soldiers were dead. And how the Americans, with their dollars, had poured out countless tons of equipment to make up for their inability to fight. How, at the last, the vulture fleets of bombers had rumbled inexhaustibly across the sky, killing, killing, killing, until all the German homes and German families had been destroyed. And how now the Americans, with their hellish bomb that had killed a hundred thousand Japanese civilians, now bestrode the world and tried to bully it, with their bombs and their dollars, into final submission.
How? Professor Kempfer thought. How could such a thing have happened?