* *

The voices went on talking, while I strained my eyes even more in an
effort to pierce that gray fog covering the rent in the ceiling. And
then I saw. Saw at first, as if through a thin gray screen of gauze.

I was looking up into a room of some sort. A big room. An incredibly big
room. A room so big that two dozen belfry rooms would have fit into it!

And then it got even clearer. There was a desk at the end of the room. A
tremendously ornate desk. A desk behind which was sitting a small, gray
uniformed, moustached man.

There was another uniformed person of porcine girth standing beside that
desk and pointing to a map on the wall in front of him. He was jabbering
excitedly to the little man at the desk, and he wore a uniform that was
so plushily gaudy it was almost ridiculous.

The two kept chattering back and forth to each other in German,
obviously talking about the map at which the fat, plush-clad one was
pointing.

I turned incredulously to Stoddard.

"Wh-wh-what in the hell goes?" I demanded.

Stoddard seemed suddenly vastly relieved. "So you see it and hear it,
too!" he exclaimed. "Thank God for that! I thought I'd lost my mind!"

I grabbed hard on his arm. "But listen," I began.

"Listen, nothing," he hissed. "We _both_ can't be crazy. Those are the
voices we kept hearing before. And those two people are the talkers.
Those two German (five words censored) louses. Hitler and Goering!"

There, he'd said it. I hadn't dared to. It sounded too mad, too wildly,
babblingly insane to utter. But now I looked back through that thin gray
cheesecloth of fog, back into the room.

The two occupants couldn't be anyone other than Hitler and Goering. And
I was suddenly aware that the map Goering pointed to so frequently was a
map of Austria.

"But what," I started again.

Stoddard looked me in the eye. "I can understand a little German," he
said. "They're talking about an invasion of Austria, and if you will
look hard at the corner of that map, you'll see a date marked--1938!"

I did look hard, and of course I saw that date. I turned back to
Stoddard.

"We're both crazy," I said a little wildly, "we're both stark, raving
nuts. Let's get out of here."

"We are looking back almost five years into the past," Stoddard hissed.
"We are looking back five years into Germany, into a room in which
Hitler and Goering are talking over an approaching invasion of a country
called Austria. I might have beli