been built. That said, and understanding your obvious concerns, the genie is out of the bottle, Professor. I for one cannot see any way to correct that situation, and so we had better learn to live with what is happening here, as I don’t think it will be easy to change things.”
Paul pinched the bridge of his nose, realizing the terrible truth in everything Tovey was saying. The Dragon had awakened. It was inevitable that they would encounter a situation like this once time travel was proved to be possible. Here it was… The Dragon had roused from its long slumber, and the thought that he, and Maeve, with Robert and Kelly, could put all this back as it was, now seemed a farcical impossibility. What could they do? Could they slay this beast now that it was loose on the world? Perhaps not, but they could learn how to ride its back.
He looked at Tovey, a man caught up in the whirlwind of World War Two. There he was, commanding his ships, seeing to one small matter after another, until the guns roared with their anger, and the killing began. He felt a sudden kinship with the man, for he could not know the enormity of all that now lay ahead in this war, through the long years of 1942 and 1943, then on into 1944, and beyond.
They would fight to clear the Vichy French from North Africa, and then to defeat Rommel in the desert and drive the Afrika Korps back to the continent. Then would come the invasion of Sicily and Italy, and the long planning for Operation Overlord, the D-Day invasion. After that there would be the grueling battle in France, the headlong breakout and the miraculous German recovery in Belgium and Holland. Operation Market Garden would attempt to break through, but it would lead the British Army into the meat grinder of the battles for the Rhineland, and the Germans would again strike with their Ardennes offensive. And this was just the Western theatre. Would any of that ever happen now? How would this history play out given the variations they had already seen here in 1941?
He’s standing there just like I am, thought Paul, wondering how in the world he can salvage this situation, preserve his nation and way of life, and possibly prevail against the might of the German war machine now. So I’m no different, just another general fighting the war here, and we’ll just have to take it one battle at a time.
“I’m under no illusions,” he said. “I know what lies ahead for us is extremely dangerous, perhaps fatally so. And yet, if you can believe it, I once faced the prospect of reversing an intervention that would have altered the entire course of Western history, to the point where all of Christendom might have been eliminated in Medieval Europe, and the United States itself might not have been discovered as it was, being colonized by another power. In that, my very own existence was at stake, as it may be here for all of us as we now proceed. That situation came down to a very few key points on the time meridian, where levers existed that allowed us to move events back on track. It took one good woman on a horse, a message in an apple, and the death of two men to reverse that catastrophe, so you see, little things that change at just the right time can have dramatic effects. I call them Push Points, and I must believe they also exist as levers we can use in this crisis.”
“Can we find them here?” asked Elena. “Can your research team ferret out something we can work with?”
“Possibly,” said Paul, “though the situation we’re now facing is extremely grave. We have had a near catastrophic intervention in time by this Russian battlecruiser. Beyond that, our situation in 2021 is now very precarious. We were nearly put out of business when the Chinese lit off that EMP attack over the Western US. Thankfully, our facility has emergency power generators, as long as we can provide the petrol to keep them running, and our equipment was wel shielded. At this stage, I came here to discover who was involved in all of this, and what was really going on. It looked impossible, this history skewed as it is, and with so many Primes now having knowledge of what has happened—not to mention Kinlan’s Brigade in North Africa, and