They watched Tamerlane's abortive attempt to repeat Genghis Kahn's Asiatic Conquest. They stood by while a man from the far future gave England's Cromwell the necessary encouragement for his coup d'etat. ("Cromwell's head will roll anyway," Laniq said cheerfully.) The pages of history came alive again when Napoleon cavorted for them at Elba, convinced by a man who appeared mysteriously out of nowhere to break the chains of his exile and try his hand once more at world empire. ("Thank God for Wellington.") They watched Kerensky's provisional government fall in the days of the Russian Revolution, paving the way for Communist dictatorship. But Kerensky was betrayed from within, and not by a Russian but a man from the future. ("We don't know about this one yet, Barwan.") And not the Germans in a secret railroad train, but men from the future in a time-conveyor, spirited Lenin back from Russia in time to assume the mantle of empire and so pave the way for Stalin and Malenkov.
"I want to show you one thing more before we head for the year 1954," Laniq told Tedor, whose head by now was swimming with a vast new—and sinister—concept of history. "Did you ever hear of Adolph Hitler?"
The city was Munich in the early 1920's, narrow cobbled streets all a-clatter with horses and wagons and learning the new sound of the gasoline automobile and the swaying electric trolley. Munich, Germany, city of commerce, transportation hub noisy with the sounds of arrival and departure, its byways crowded with small homburgs, bicycles, checkered caps. The Munich of the Beer Halls and great steins of hearty German beer and singing and raucous laughter. But also the Munich of unrest, distrust, intense intellectual turmoil, and the Munich which, not many months later, was to be the scene of the abortive putsch in a beer cellar which started a slight little man with stray-locked dark hair on his path toward world conquest.
They sat in a beer hall, Laniq and Tedor, and at a table near them sat a man, young but with eyes which to Tedor were at once the most fiery, most intense and oldest he had even seen. He was a man, Tedor guessed, who would never know a tranquil moment in his life; cold, friendless, fidgety, smouldering with nameless resentments.
"That's Hitler," Laniq said unnecessarily. "It is why we have come here."
They had spent three hours in the beer cellar so often frequented by Hitler, a second-rate poster artist, ex-Army corporal and smouldering revolutionary.
A man came to the table and joined Hitler, not half a dozen feet from where Laniq and Tedor sat with their beer. As the one was stamped with his personality as clearly as ever a man could be, so the other was poker-faced non-descript, neither German nor non-German, feverish agitator nor tranquil pacifist.
"You have come," said Hitler, easily loud enough for Tedor to hear. "It is good. I have spent the entire day thinking of what you have told me. It is like a storm bursting inside of me, a happy torment, as if it holds the seeds of a strife which can make everything clear, lucidly clear for Germany and the world, their destiny, one the master the other the follower. You will one day be a great man."
"Not I, Adolph. You harbor the inherent qualities for greatness."