This chapter opens with an excerpt from an article by John Gribbin. The citation is very awkwardly placed immediately afterwards instead of in an endnote. It isn’t even a very good citation; it’s just a URL. Not only is this improper form, but the link is broken.
What is this excerpt about? Time travel. This is only the second instance of time travel being foreshadowed in this book. I can understand wanting something of this magnitude to be a huge plot twist, but in that case you don’t spoil the plot twist in the summary of the book. I’ve mentioned this several times because Rummel could have introduced the time travel plot by now, but instead he’s wasted about fifty pages so far on Very Special Flashback Sequences that contribute nothing to the plot and focus on characters who play a minimal role in the story. This story outline is foolish beyond belief.
There are probably some flaws in the theory of time travel quoted in the book, but I will graciously ignore them because first, I don’t know much about the subject either, and second, without the time travel there would be no story. Of course I argue that there already is no story because Rummel keeps dilly-dallying, but that is the least of our worries.
In what passes for the story itself, Viktor collapses and as he is taken out of the room, he asks John to agree to the Society’s goal, so that he can keep his memories. Apparently they are all “counting on” John to do something, but neither he nor the readers know what.
Gu tries to speak, but John is a know-it-all and starts talking about Immanuel Kant. It’s rather off-topic. (I hate to admit it, but I’m actually starting to like Gu, since she at least tells John off when he interrupts her.) Gu is a physicist and says that her laboratory was conducting research in creating a wormhole. Will we finally get to the time travel this chapter?
(Spoiler alert: We won’t. We still have a couple more flashback sequences, sad to say.)
By the way, I may not know much about wormholes and theoretical physics, but I do know enough to say that human beings simply do not have the resources to produce enough energy to send even the smallest object even a few milliseconds back in time. I point this out because Gu’s lab is apparently capable of generating such power. We will find out later that they are not employed by the government. How on Earth could a private enterprise produce that much energy? Not even all the government research agencies of all the countries in the world put together could do that. Even more unbelievably, Gu’s lab could send objects back in time several years… in the 1990s. (Although admittedly, this is a breach of the laws of physics necessary for the story to work.)
We already run into a problem. If they are sending objects back in time, then they are being reckless with the timeline. Chaos theory and quantum mechanics would dictate that even the slightest change to the past would multiply and cause unforseeable change to the present. Even if they just moved a cardboard box into the past one day, it would displace an equal volume of air and cause a hurricane somewhere in the Caribbean. Moreover, sending objects into the past opens the door to paradoxes. In this example, if Gu’s researchers sent a cardboard box one day into the past, when they did not receive one the previous day, then the box would both exist and not exist, thus causing a paradox. If, however, this sort of paradox is not allowed (as in, only causal loops are permitted) then the whole plot of the series becomes impossible. Rummel doesn’t care in the least about this, and so just handwaves the situation without bothering in the least for consistency.
Of course, John thinks that Gu is pulling his leg. However, no points will be awarded for his being skeptical and not having read the book summary, because that is the bare minimum expected for a story with any verisimilitude.
I was a brash young fellow in those years. Not the mellow, savoir-faire man I am now. (page 93)
Oh please, I cannot imagine John ever being savoir-faire or whatever he said. The description is kind of odd because, except for John interrupting Gu every five minutes, he hasn’t been that brash. He has simply let Joy, and later Tor’s groupies, push him in the direction they want. He isn’t very proactive as far as main characters go, to be honest.
Gu continues her exposition, saying that, while time travel is nice (and you know, a total breakthrough) it was useless because they couldn’t send objects through space as well as time, at least not until somebody named Gertrude Zawtoki made some mathematical contribution or other. Leaving aside the fact that “Zawtoki” is not a legitimate name, do you see the problem here?
That is correct. Time is only one of the four dimensions known to humans. A time machine will only send an object through time, not through space, and Rummel does acknowledge this. However, the Earth is not fixed in space. The Earth is constantly moving around the Sun, and the Sun is constantly orbiting the center of the Galaxy. This means that any object sent only through time and not through space would appear at a time before the Earth occupied that space, meaning that from the perspective of the researchers, the object should simply vanish and never appear in the past. I hope to any deities that may exist that those researchers did not test their time machine on living beings.
Also, I am curious as to who this Gertrude Zawtoki is. Is she one of Tor’s groupies? If she is, then which war or democide did she survive? If she isn’t one of Tor’s groupies, then how does she know about their time machine? Lastly, how come she is mentioned by name, but none of the other researchers involved in the invention of the time machine are? She will never be mentioned again after this, so she isn’t important to the plot. It just seems pointless and inconsistent on the part of Rummel.
John is smarter than I give him credit for; he actually does bring up some of my objections, but, much to my annoyance, they’re simply blown off. Gu spouts some bullshit about different objects affecting the past to different degrees, even though chaos theory clearly states that even the smallest changes will add up given enough time. Rummel’s justifications for things tend to be quite half-assed. I would forgive most of this if Rummel bothered to be consistent with himself.
Another “explanation” that Gu gives, one which completely contradicts her previous one, is that the act of time travel creates parallel universes. However, later on the very page where the parallel universe explanation appears, it is proved wrong, yet the characters still claim that their time travel creates parallel universes.
Ludger Schmidt takes up the exposition baton which Gu apparently passed to him. Ludger was actually mentioned at the very beginning of the introductions, but did not actually appear until now. This appears to be a poor attempt at a Chekhov’s Gunman1 because he is actually somewhat important to the plot. What I find interesting is that Rummel can come up with a legitimate-sounding name for his Swiss German character, but his African and Asian characters get extremely implausible names. But I’m going off-topic.
Ludger tells John that Tor’s groupies have carried out sixteen experiments with time travel, even sending some living things back in time. Have none of them ever read “A Sound of Thunder”? This is reckless endangerment of everyone on Earth!
One of their subjects was a monkey which they sent back to 1900 in a sealed capsule. They placed the capsule at the bottom of Lake Superior. The monkey was not brought back, so even if the capsule didn’t leak, the monkey would have suffocated or starved eventually, so they euthanized it.2 Still, that’s rather cruel of the Survivor’s So-Called Benevolent Society. What have they done to that poor monkey?
Interestingly enough, Tor’s groupies, in the year 1999, were able to recover the capsule containing the monkey’s body. They even admit that this means that they did not create a parallel universe, which suggests that actually changing the past is impossible. Of course, if the past cannot be changed and they know it, then the book would have to end right here. But it doesn’t. It turns out that Ludger is in fact a Holocaust survivor.
Yep. We have another Very Special Flashback Sequence. So far, that’s the only time travel we’ve gotten in this book.
I said that Ludger was a Holocaust survivor, but that designation is sort of misleading. He was never in the camps and he is not a Jew, Gypsy, or any other undesirable. In fact, he was a German police officer. Yes, instead of actually having the obligatory victim of the Nazis be a member of a group actually targeted for elimination, Rummel has him be of the same group as the oppressors. This is different from the pattern set by the rest of Tor’s groupies. I understand that Rummel was trying to say that tyrannical governments ruin everybody’s lives, not just the lives of people they profess to hate, but these are the Nazis we are talking about. Equating what Ludger goes through to what a survivor of Auschwitz (for example) went through is just offensive.
Ludger says that he was a police officer who was among those assigned to, and I quote, “be involved in the final solution of the Jewish problem”.3 So Ludger wasn’t even part of the resistance or anything. There are no words.
Ludger and the other police officers are taken to a military officer named Hans Schaefer, who speaks as though this were just a run of the mill assignment. I know what Rummel’s doing here, but I’m quite peeved at his poor choice of survivor for this flashback. I should also point out that unlike the Khmer Rouge guerillas, Interahamwe militia men, and Communist Party administrators from previous Very Special Flashback Sequences, Schaefer never uses any profanity. Rummel, if you are going to begin with your evil characters swearing like sailors, at least be consistent about it.
Schaefer tells Ludger and the police officers that they are to kidnap the city’s Jews from their homes, lead them into the forest, and then shoot them in the back of the head. (Presumably this flashback takes place before the Nazis decided to just move them all into camps and gas them.) Schaefer then starts acting like a stereotypical Nazi, just so that Rummel can remind us that he’s evil, as though ordering people to shoot others in the back of the head weren’t evil already.
An Evil Nazi Scientist ™ shows up from out of nowhere with a crude drawing of a human head, with a red marking showing the police officers where to shoot. Presumably, law enforcement did not undergo training exercises in the 1940s.4
Then there are these lines:
Looking self-satisfied, the doctor stood beside his pad, looked at us, and waited for questions.
When none came, the oberleutnant asked, “Are there any questions?” (page 96)
That sounds redundant to me. These sentences should have been revised, because right now they just sound stupid.
None of the police officers, not even Ludger, care that they are going to fill the role of the militia men from Laurent’s flashback. So far, Ludger is just as guilty of the atrocities as any of his comrades who go along with the killing. Sure, he monologues about how he can’t do it, but not because he thinks that Jews deserve the same rights as Germans, as he later says that they should “just” be deported to Africa or locked in a ghetto. He says to himself that he “must” do it, because otherwise, he would be viewed as a coward.
Ludger does not come off as very heroic here. Laurent was far more heroic, and he killed two people. Does Rummel really want us to sympathize with this man? He clearly believes in most of the Nazi ideology, and only disagrees insofar as the “undesirables” being killed.
The next morning, Ludger and the police officers arrive in the city to kidnap the Jews. According to Ludger, the Jews were prevented from escape by the Ukrainian Auxiliary Police. At first I thought that Rummel forgot that the Ukraine had been part of the Soviet Union, but it turns out that that was actually a real thing. Speaking of Ukraine, where was Viktor during all this? The poor guy had to suffer through both the Holodomor and World War II. Unlike Rummel, I recognize that these events did not occur in a vacuum, so his characters should not simply vanish between their Very Special Flashback Sequences and the present day.
When Schaefer asks if any of the police officers feel that they will be unable to exterminate the Jews, Ludger says nothing. Our hero, ladies and gentlemen!5
We are told that each police officer took one Jew at a time into the forest and shot them individually, with the bodies taken to a concentration camp, where they would be disposed of.
There is a line break for no apparent reason. After it, Ludger takes a Jewish woman with him to the forest. Even decades later, he remembers what she looked like and thinks she was pretty. Move over, John…
I grabbed her arm and said, “Gekommen —Come.” (page 99)
So, did Ludger really say the same thing twice in two languages? During this flashback, the characters are understood to be speaking German, so it is unnecessary for Rummel to suddenly not translate one word. Of course, the Polish woman Ludger is speaking to probably does not know German, but no indication is made that Ludger can speak Polish. So did he just say “gekommen” twice? That isn’t even correct German anyway.
While walking through the forest, preparing to bring this woman to her death I should point out, Ludger keeps monologuing to himself. He is rather casual for somebody about to shoot an unarmed woman in the back of the head. The lack of any emotions before killing someone is usually the sign of a violent sociopath. Just sayin’.
When she did, all I could see of her head was her black hair. At that moment, I heard somebody nearby. I looked to the left and saw a girl stretched out on her stomach. One of my fellow policemen had his rifle’s bayonet pointed at the back of her head. The scene seemed frozen in time, a still picture. It will be in my mind always. No day goes by that the image doesn’t appear to me, sometimes when I get up in the morning; sometimes before bed; sometimes in my nightmares. Even while I’m trying to make love it will flash into my mind, which immediately destroys all passion. (Ibid.)
Eww… did we really need to read that, Rummel?
Yeah, Rummel will often mention sex when doing so would be really, really inappropriate.
This scene is important though, because seeing his fellow police officers kill innocents makes Ludger unable to go through with the act himself. He falls to his knees and hugs his would-be victim. I am not making this up.
Somehow, even though he is dealing with ruthless Nazis, Ludger is able to just walk away from the forest without killing anyone, and without getting in trouble. However, he is unable to bring the woman back with him, and to be fair to Rummel, there really was no way he could possibly save her, so I’ll let that pass. Ludger, in an uncharacteristic fit of ballsiness, then asks Schaefer to be excused on account of not feeling well. Amazingly, Schaefer does not force him to kidnap any more people, though he does force him to stay and watch. At the end of the day, Ludger is dismissed. He moves back home and survives the war. Since Ludger was described as living in Switzerland during the introductions, he must have moved there eventually. The question becomes whether he went The Sound of Music route and tried to escape during the war or not.
But our flashback sequence does not end there, oh no. Not so fast, bucko. Four years later, when the war was over (so the incident in the forest had to happen in 1941 at the earliest) Ludger walks into Schaefer’s office (how he is still employed during the denazification process, we’ll never know) and stabs him with the bayonet of his rifle.
Somehow, Ludger gets away with murder. THIS IS FORESHADOWING.
With that poetic justice, the chapter ends. All told, this flashback sequence was a twisted perspective flip of Laurent’s, and though I understand that Rummel was trying to say that dictators ruin everybody’s lives, even those of their loyal citizens (and also that the mere footsoldiers on enemy lines aren’t evil, though their governments might be) the whole thing comes off as wrong. There is a time and a place for such moralizing, and a story about the Holocaust probably isn’t one of those times or places.
Footnotes
1 Ah, TV Tropes and its puns.
2 Don’t ask how they could assure that eventuality from their vantage point in the future. I can’t figure it out either.
3 page 95
4 Speaking of which, Ludger would have to be pretty old by the main story, in fact older than Viktor, yet he does not behave like a senior citizen at all.
5 With apologies to Linkara.
Fair on 7 December 2012, 02:23 said:
No! Go away, Bad Picture! sobs uncontrollably
swenson on 7 December 2012, 09:16 said:
Unless you are Stephenie Meyer and the plot twist is “they’re vampires”. As with this book, it’s a plot twist that isn’t, and never should’ve tried to be a plot twist in the first place.
I think this is a good way to approach it. Standard time travel tropes are probably all completely wrong, if indeed travel into the past is possible (which I don’t think it is), so you might as well just accept whatever rules the story sets down for it.
You… are kidding, right? I’m fairly certain that if you’re shooting someone in the head, it doesn’t particularly matter where, because so long as you hit the middle somewhere, you’re either going to kill the person or severely cripple them, and I doubt the Nazis would stop to check “oh, is this person still alive but just in need of emergency surgery and years of physical therapy? Let’s take them to a hospital!”
WAT. Do people say that in ordinary conversation? Because no people I know do. Ever. Because that’s just weird. shudder
And now that we’ve gotten into Ludger’s “only following orders (except I kind of agreed with them)” section, I have that quote I mentioned I’d like to share:
Nuremberg Principle IV, if you’re curious. It seems appropriate. I know the guy didn’t actually kill anyone (which is… unlikely, particularly considering how obsessive the Nazis were about people being insufficiently Nazi-ish), but still.
Epke on 7 December 2012, 12:55 said:
About the whole time travel thing that they’ve not only kept hidden from the government, but aren’t funded by it: couldn’t Rummel at least pretended they used, I don’t know, CERN or something? Not saying it would work, but it’s better than “Oh, money makes EVERYTHING POSSIBLE!”
My German’s pretty bad, but isn’t the imperative when addressing an unfamiliar person(s) of “come” “kommen Sie” rather than “Gekommen”? Because I think that means “came”, rather than “come” (past).
That’s… I’m not touching this one. Go away.
So… he left the woman to die? To be killed by one of his colleagues? Wow. Yeah, that’s heroism right there.
Canadian Man on 7 December 2012, 15:24 said:
Yeah, the Nazis did terrible things to the German people because Hitler was an evil dicator.
Look up Canada’s residential school system one of these days, Rummel. Particularly the part where the government kidnapped thousands of children between 1884 and 1948 (the program lasted longer, but those were the years of the legally-mandated kidnapping) and sent them off to religious schools where they would be beaten and raped before dying of tuberculosis.
Brendan Rizzo on 7 December 2012, 17:13 said:
WUT.
I thought that Australia’s Stolen Generation and the U.S.‘s Indian Industrial Schools were bad, but this is a whole new level of evil. Of course, Rummel never once mentions it in his books.
Emma on 7 December 2012, 21:08 said: