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Page 29.
 Dusenbery said: "A kind of medium, if you will. A lady named Anna Cranston whose mind can make time travel happen. Louis Beering made a deal with her, those many years ago."
"Maxxon," Albert Beering said, "I worshipped my older brother. I can't describe to you the pain my parents and I felt when it seemed he was going so far wrong. I was the younger brother, the drudge, the dutiful son who took over the family business, though we all felt it was Louis's proper place. Louis had the best education. Yale. Harvard. An intellectual. But corrupted. There was his mentor at Yale, Thomas Armaday, Australian, a Political Science professor not much older than Louis. A Nazi. A devotee of Hitler and Mussolini. We tried our best to bring Louis around, and I am afraid we failed.
"I never knew until recently just how much I loved my brother. Men are not supposed to admit to such things; at least not a man of my generation. Power was everything for me. Louis could have had it all; I would have been a second-stringer forever. But he threw it all away."
Jeff asked: "How did he do that?"
Beering said bitterly: "Once he got in with this Armaday, he was never the same again. He broke our parents' hearts. In fact, after my brother's death, my father died of a heart attack. That was in 1936. And my mother died not long after, in 1938. I was in charge of this great fortune, in this city that my father and I helped build. Everything would have been wonderful, Maxxon, but I was the last of my line. I was already past 40 when I married in 1952."
"Why so late?" Jeff asked. "If I'm not being impertinent."
"It's quite all right," Beering said. "Next time you're out and about, look around. It took long days, long weeks of hard work to finish out this city. And there were the war years, when we had to watch every ounce of scrap, every pound of waste. I had a bomber factory near here, that employed over ten thousand people. People say I made more money from the war. It's true. But we won, didn't we?"
"I'm not here to argue," Jeff said impatiently.
Beering continued: "Let me get to the point. Back in the 1930's, my brother was running with all sorts of crazy people, mostly of the nationalist socialist variety. Hitler, as you know, was taken with mystics. His entire command structure was a kind of big-stage Wagner production. My brother moved in similar circles in our area, though it was all very unpopular and they had to keep it underground. We are of German origin, and he was quite proud of that.
"Then, in 1934, he and Armaday latched up with a society dedicated to all kinds of weird projects."
Max Dusenbery injected: "Like time travel."
"Yes," Beering said. He paused. "Would you get me some cranberry juice, Max?" Dusenbery rose, and Beering gathered his words. "Well, it was a very exciting time. What people today don't understand is that a hypnotic nut like Hitler could make anything sound possible. Zeppelins were flying between continents. New kinds of airplanes, huge new ships like the Queen Mary were being launched, with every modern twist imaginable..."
Max Dusenbery, at the wet bar, picked up the skein of thought: "It was good to be alive, wasn't it. Of course we were all young, and there was this tremendous dynamo of Beering money that seemed to have no limit." Dusenbery brought a tray, and handed out glasses of iced cranberry juice. "When Mussolini invaded Ethiopia in 1935, I was already against the nationalist socialists. But by then I found myself between two worlds. On the one hand, I was involved in mysticism, to which Louis Beering and many like him were drawn, and on the other hand, I was drawn to the real source of power, which science was about to tap."
"The atom?" Jeff ventured. The juice felt cold and good.
"That's just one thing," Dusenbery said. "As a historian, you perhaps understand that much of man's intellectual progress seems to be centered around war. Here we were, hopelessly and unwillingly caught between the two worst wars in human history. Yes, the work that Einstein had begun as a simple patent office clerk in Switzerland around the turn of the century was about to bear terrible fruition. But there were other things. Big governments had the money and the sinister purpose to dabble in other matters. Invisibility, for example. If a ship could not be seen, it could attack at will. Hyperspeeds; there were people working on early versions of the jet engine. Throw-weight; there were people, like Goddard and von Braun, attempting to perfect innocent rockets that would of course find their initial acceptance in military circles."
"Okay," Jeff said, "let me guess, there were people working on time travel."
Dusenbery managed a wan smile. "If you want to call it that. Yes. Our government of course took no interest. But there was another government that was morbidly interested in anything that could support its growing war machine."
"Let me guess again," Jeff said. "Germany."
"Right," Dusenbery said. "Fortunately for all of us, much of the scientific work was based on that of a man Hitler despised as a Jew, namely Einstein. Einstein cobbled together a mathematical structure of time and space, a relationship of energy, mass, and momentum, that eventually led the Allies to the atomic bomb. Had Hitler not gutted the German universities of much of their intellect, especially Jewish scientists, the outcome of World War II might have been quite different. In that respect we are quite lucky."
"I'll say," Jeff said.
Dusenbery said: "During the early 1930's, a group of us were convinced that, using Einstein's work, and what came after, time travel was indeed possible. What was required was a combination of energy, mass, momentum, AND psychic power, to shove a heavy body sideways, as it were, and move it along a track in a fourth dimension, which we might think of as time."
Albert Beering cut in: "Maybe it's time introduce Maxxon to Anna Cranston, something a little more solid than all this theoretical gobble-gobble."
"Quite right," Dusenbery said. "Vincent, are you driving?"
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