A nameless traveler from the future appears in Hitler’s bunker moments before the
Führer’s suicide. Hitler interprets the man as a Valkyrie, come to escort him to a
higher place, but the man (who is made up to look exactly like Hitler) has plans that
don’t exactly include a Nordic heaven in Hitler’s future.
Immortality, FĂĽhrer! That is what I offer. I have come to you
from the future!
On the verge of becoming a man, John travels a river that is an admixture of time-flow
and liquid metal—or possibly of magic and science—with the goal of finding out about
a father whom he barely remembers.
John followed the boot tracks away from the launch. They led inland, so there was no time
pressure to fight. His clothes dried out as he walked beneath a shimmering patch of
burnt-goald worldwall that hung tantalizingly behind roiling clouds.
“Down the River Road” by Gregory Benford, in After
the King: Stories in Honor of J.R.R. Tolkien, edited by Martin H. Greenberg (Tor
Books, January 1992).
Benford notes that his 2009 story must have come from a childhood memory of Mack
Reynolds’ nearly identical 1952 story, “The Business, As Usual.”
Yes, I learned that later. I must’ve read it as a kid (was 11 then).
I must look it
up sometime. I knew Mack, too, visited him in Mexico in 1966. Odd how the mind works.
“Caveat Time Traveller” by Mack Reynolds, in
Nature,2 April 2009.