The all clear went, its steady, sweet note as reassuring as Sister Gabriel’s voice murmuring, “You mustn’t worry about that now,” as she led Bevins back to bed. “You must try to sleep,” she said, tucking him in. “Everything’s all right.”
Is it? Mike thought, and in the morning made Fordham read him the rest of his Herald. The RAF had shot down sixteen planes, and the Germans had only downed eight, but that didn’t prove anything. The RAF had had far fewer than the Luftwaffe to lose, and he knew from his first-year lectures that they’d come within a hairsbreadth of losing the Battle of Britain. And the war.
In the afternoon, a middle-aged woman in a green WVS uniform came into the ward, pushing a cart full of books and magazines, and Mike waylaid her and asked if she had any newspapers. “Oh, yes,” the volunteer, whose name tag read “Mrs. Ives,” chirped. “What would you like? The Evening Standard? The Times? The Daily Herald? It has a lovely crossword.”
“All of them,” he said, and the next several days scanned them for the number of planes downed, which were posted like baseball scores—Luftwaffe 19, RAF 6; Luftwaffe 12, RAF 9; Luftwaffe 11, RAF 8.
The hell with the names of the small craft, he thought. I should’ve memorized the daily stats for the Battle of Britain. Without them, the numbers meant nothing, though they were worryingly large, and he read the other news feverishly, looking for something, anything that would prove events were still on course. But he only knew the events up to Dunkirk. Had the Germans blown up a passenger train? Had they shelled Dover? Had Hitler announced he intended to have completed the conquest of England by the end of summer?
He didn’t know. All he knew was that the news over the next week was uniformly bad: “Convoy Sunk,” “British Troops Abandon Shanghai,” “Airfields Sustain Major Damage.” Had things really gone that badly or was this a sign that the war had gone off-track, that he’d altered the course of—
“You mustn’t fret about the war,” Sister Carmody said severely, taking the Express he was reading away from him. “It’s not good for you. Your fever’s back up. You must concentrate all your energy on getting well.”
“I am,” he protested, but she must have instructed Mrs. Ives not to let him have any more newspapers because when he asked her for the Herald the next day, Mrs. Ives chirped, “How about a nice book instead? I’m certain you’ll find this interesting,” and handed him a masssive biography of Ernest Shackleton.
He read it, figuring if he did, Mrs. Ives might relent and let him have a newspaper, and that even a boring biography had to be better than lying there worrying, but it wasn’t. Shackleton and his crew had gotten stranded in the middle of the Antarctic with no way to let a rescue team know where they were and the polar winter closing in fast. And one of Shackleton’s crew had frostbitten his foot and had to have part of it cut off.
And even after Mike had finished it and lied to Mrs. Ives about how much he’d liked it and how much better he was feeling, she still wouldn’t let him have a newspaper. And he had to get his hands on one soon because today was the twenty-fourth, and the twenty-fourth had been one of the war’s major divergence points.
It was one he’d learned about when he was studying time travel theory. Two Luftwaffe pilots had gotten lost in the fog and been unable to find their target, so they’d jettisoned their bombs over what they thought was the English Channel and was actually Cripplegate in London. They’d hit a church and a historic statue of John Milton and killed three civilians and injured twenty-seven others, and as a result, Churchill had ordered the bombing of Berlin, and an enraged Hitler had called a halt to the battle with the RAF and begun bombing London.
In the nick of time. The RAF had had fewer than forty planes left, and if the pilots hadn’t gotten lost, the Luftwaffe could have wiped out the remaining air forces in two weeks flat—some historians said within twenty-four hours—and marched unopposed into London. And with Britain out of the way, Hitler would have been able to concentrate all his military might on Russia, and the Russians would never have been able to hold Stalingrad. “For want