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One minute he was turning for home, glancing back as Algy and the Professor climbed into position on each side, glancing down for the black smoke of the German guns as they crossed the lines, glancing up and to the left and the right for any last stragglers of the patrol of Albertrosses they had sent scattering, the next -

- a blinding flash, brighter than archie ever was at this height, and a crack like thunder, louder even than the roar of the Camel’s engine -

- and a Bristol was screaming down almost across his nose, the tail unit wreathed in smoke.

Biggles swore, slammed his foot down on the rudder bar and jerked the stick back, pulling the Camel round into its lightning right hand turn, but even so he was certain he could smell the smoke as it passed. He had a glimpse of the observer standing in the front cockpit, steady as a rock as the Bristol plunged, looking along the rear-mounted gun at something on their tail -

His thumb was on the trigger, pressing a burst from the gun before he even saw what he was shooting at. A white lick of tracer, and there was the Fokker triplane swinging into his sights, bright blue with a broad stripe of white on the top plane, plummeting straight into his line of fire. He saw the moment the strut failed, and the white-striped wing folded up, graceful as a cormorant about to dive, before he passed it and came through to clear sky.

He banked, sharply, turning to make sure that the interloper was dealt with; but there was nothing to be seen of it but a tumbling shape, far below.

He levelled out, and realised that there was no sign of Algy or Harcourt either. He looked about anxiously, wondering if some patrol of triplanes had somehow contrived to fall on them unawares; but there was nothing but the blue of the sky and a distant dusting of cloud, too high and faint to conceal so much as a sparrow. Perhaps they had followed the Bristol downwards in its panicked dive, intending to escort it to safety: but no, because there was the Bristol, a thousand feet below, lifting doggedly upwards towards him, and no trace of the Camels.

They must have headed for home. Perhaps they’d taken more damage in the earlier engagement than he’d realised and hadn’t wanted to risk another fight. It didn’t seem much like Algy, to choose discretion over valour; but he supposed there was a first time for everything.

The Bristol had seemingly managed to put out whatever had been smoking in its screaming dive, and now staggered drunkenly back up to pull into formation at his left wing. Biggles grinned, and waved cheerily at the pilot and observer, before waggling his wings in sign that he was turning for home.

The Bristol didn’t peel off, however, but stuck at his side all the way across the lines. There was a squadron of Bristols up beyond Amiens, Biggles remembered, as he watched the pilot nurse the injured plane home; presumably he wanted company for as far as possible to discourage any further attacks, and small blame to him for that.

He was slightly more surprised, however, when the Bristol turned as he did to begin the approach to Maranique; but perhaps the chap was only newly arrived on this section of the lines, he thought. Perhaps he’d lost his way in the dogfight and drifted too far from his aerodrome, and needed to check the charts in the map room before he started back. He let the Bristol in first, circling the Camel over the aerodrome once, and then landed, neat and precise.

“Need some help?” he yelled to the two men who had climbed from the Bristol and were now walking across the tarmac towards him.

“Not nearly as much as we’d have needed if you hadn’t come along when you did,” grinned the pilot, stripping off goggles and flying helmet and revealing a head of unruly fair curls and bright hazel eyes in the usual goggle-shaped clear patches that the oil-spatters hadn’t reached. “Speaking of which, where on earth did you come from? We rather thought we had the sky to ourselves. I’m Lovell, by the way - this is Fraser. There’s a decent chance you just saved our lives, so I hope you’ll let us treat you to a drink before you push on.”

“Bigglesworth,” said Biggles, a little distractedly, glancing about him. “Though my friends tend to call me Biggles - saves on wear and tear, you know.”

“Are you new to this sector?” asked Lovell. “No need to ask if you’re new to the service, of course, not when I’ve seen you fly.”

“Oh - I’ve been around for a while now,” said Biggles, before calling with a frown to one of the mechanics who had come crowding around: “Here, aren’t Mr Lacey and Mr Harcourt back yet? I thought they’d be back long before me.”

“Mr who, sir?” asked the AM; rather stupidly, Biggles thought.

“Algy and the Professor,” he snapped. “They must be back. I didn’t see hide nor hair of them all the way over.”

“I think you must have got rather turned around somewhere,” said the Observer from the Bristol, cheerfully. “This is Maranique, you know - no Camels here, unless we’ve had Yanks passing through distributing largesse to the populace. I didn’t see anything of your flight, but they’ve probably gone back to wherever it is you’re based.”

“But we’re based at Maranique, of course,” Biggles flared up. “Why the dickens do you suppose I should have landed here otherwise? Look, if they haven’t got back yet then I can’t waste time - ” He broke off. He could see inside A flight’s hangar, he realised; but where he had expected to see the trim little Camels and Mahoney’s well-known streamers, all he could see were three more snub-nosed Bristols.

He pulled himself up until he was sitting on the edge of the cockpit. It was certainly Maranique, he knew the pattern of hangars and tents and temporary buildings better than he knew anywhere in the world; but it was - wrong. Entirely, unsubtly wrong. There wasn’t a face he knew amongst all the AMs and pilots who had come over to see what was happening. “Where’s Wilks?” he said, loudly.

The Bristol pilot had stepped forward, and put his hand to the fuselage of Biggles’ machine. “Don’t think I know him. Look here - ”

“You must do,” said Biggles, a little shrilly. “I bet this was his idea. It’s just the sort of idiotic stunt he’d think was terrifically entertaining. What the hell do you think you’re playing at - ”

And that was the moment when once again the lightning flashed, and the thunder roared, so loud and so shockingly close that Biggles nearly toppled clean out of the plane; and then -

“Where on earth did you come from?!”

Biggles righted himself, cautiously. He was still in the cockpit of his Camel, on the tarmac at Maranique; and just ahead of his machine, close enough that he couldn’t possibly have missed them, were two other Camels; and standing beside them were Major Mullen, and Major Raymond of Wing Headquarters, and half a dozen extremely familiar ack-emmas, and Henry Harcourt, and Algy, all blinking up at him in astonishment.

“For that matter, where on earth did you get to?” Algy went on, the words tumbling over one another in his excitement.

For a moment, Biggles could do nothing but blink in astonishment back. Then: “Where did I get to?!” he sputtered. “Where did you get to, more like! And the rest of the rational world, for that matter! One minute I’m over the German lines, the next I’m in a funfair hall of mirrors! What on earth is going on?!”

“You vanished, you ass!” Algy shouted, running up to the cockpit and reaching up to help haul him down to the ground; and once Biggles was down, he kept a good firm grip on the sleeve of his flying coat, as if to make doubly certain that he wasn’t going to perform the same trick twice. “Right in front of my nose! You said it - one minute you were there, the next minute you weren’t! I had my eyes on you the whole time, I knew you hadn’t gone down, you just - weren’t, all of a sudden! We had to come back, I didn’t know what on earth else to do - and then all of a sudden you were here again! Look here, if you’ve discovered the secret of invisibility than you might at least spread it around a bit, it’d come in jolly useful in - ”

“Captain Bigglesworth?”

Biggles turned rather dazed eyes on Major Raymond. “Sir?”

“A moment, if you please.”

* * *

The cup of hot, sweet tea had grown quite cold resting in his lap. He’d thought of taking a sip a couple of times, but hadn’t quite got round to it.

“I’m sorry, sir, but I just can’t believe a word of it,” he said, for about the third time.

“No,” said Major Raymond, thoughtfully. “I don’t suppose you can. But perhaps you have a better explanation for how one second you were in a Maranique equipped with Bristol fighters and full of men you had never met, and the next you were here?”

“Well,” said Biggles, cautiously, “I could be cracking up.”

Raymond laughed. “A perfectly reasonable explanation, if it weren’t for the fact that a round dozen independent and, presumably, perfectly sane men witnessed your disappearance and reappearance. Insanity as an explanation can only carry you so far.”

“But - all this business about - what did you call them?”

“Parallel realities,” said Raymond, imperturbably, and Biggles pulled a face.

“It doesn’t sound terribly sane either, does it?”

“Not in the least,” said Raymond. “But unfortunately it’s the best explanation we’ve yet managed to come up with.”

“But why me?” asked Biggles, utterly baffled. “For that matter, why me today, and not me last week or the week before?”

Raymond shrugged. “We have very little idea. Our knowledge of the subject is very much in its infancy. We can think of these different realities as rather like the planes of a biplane - or triplane, or however many layers of plane you wish. Normally these planes - and whoever inhabits them - simply exist in parallel. They may have developed along quite similar lines, or quite different ones - between any two the difference may be as small as whether a certain aerodrome is occupied by single-seater Camels or two-seater Bristols, or as great as whether the universe developed at all. They are connected - all part of one machine, if you will - but under normal circumstances there is no contact between them. But sometimes - under some extraordinary circumstance or other - the sympathetic resonance between two of these planes is so overwhelming that it brings them temporarily into alignment, and things may pass between one plane and another.”

“Things such as a person, or an aircraft,” said Biggles, slowly.

“Precisely. Of course, the resonance does not last for long, and when it recedes, it appears that whatever was deposited on the incorrect plane snaps back to its proper place. Just as you did on the tarmac only half an hour ago.”

Biggles shook his head slowly. “Great Scott, it’s beyond comprehension! What causes this - ‘resonance’, did you call it?”

Raymond sighed. “If we knew that, we might be able to make some practical use of it. As it is, we’re working practically in the dark. All we know is that in every incident known so far, the resonance appears to have been between two individuals of markedly similar type or circumstances - interdimensional twins, if you will. This basic similarity is what enables the resonance to grow strong enough, under certain circumstances, to collapse the barriers between their realities.”

“What circumstances?”

Raymond steepled his long, fine fingers. “Primarily when one or other is in peril of their life - which may be the reason why it has taken us until now to realise what in fact is occurring. When so many more men than usual are in peril of their lives, then the instances of such transfers must also be more common.”

“But hang it all, there are pilots dying in dogfights every day, all along the Front!” said Biggles, angrily. “Why should one of them drag their ‘twin’ over from another reality to help them out, but not another?”

“I can only speculate, I’m afraid,” said Raymond. “Perhaps because the sympathetic resonance between these interdimensional ‘twins’ has to be unusually strong in order to force the barriers between realities to break down. You and this man Lovell - if he in fact is, as we suspect, the other side of this equation - may have similarities that we don’t suspect, far more important than simply being pilots.”

“Will it happen again?” asked Biggles, abruptly. “How often can I expect to be dragged off to rescue a couple of flyers I don’t even know in a completely different plane of reality, leaving my men to face trouble alone?”

“In most cases, these are isolated incidents, with no repetition. There have only been a few known repeat cases.” For a moment, Raymond sat and looked at his hands; at the slight, nervous tapping of his neat fingernails. “For what it is worth, my only experience of this kind was of a singular visit.”

“You?” said Biggles, startled.

Raymond nodded slightly. “It was the reason I became involved in this aspect of intelligence work at all. I only saw the man - my so-called ‘twin’, a man by the name of Trevor - once. But then - “ He smiled, a very small, cool smile. “The circumstances were such as to rather inhibit repetition. He was about to be shot as a traitor to Germany.”

“Oh,” said Biggles; then, rather absurdly, “I’m sorry.”

“The worst of it was, I believe he was truly loyal to Germany,” said Raymond thoughtfully. “Or at least so he told me, at some length, as we sat in the condemned cell. He had worked whole-heartedly for German interests within British Intelligence for years; he had simply been unlucky, and bad luck in our line of business does often look uncommonly like treachery. I’m thankful to say I was returned home before I was forced to see him shot; but I wasn’t sure there was much I could have done to prevent it, even had I wished to.” He roused himself, and sat up a little straighter in his chair. “Whether your experience will be singular or not I cannot say. I can only count myself lucky to have witnessed it - not many people do, you know - and request that you report any further instances immediately.”

“Of course,” said Biggles, automatically. “Though I rather hope I don’t have anything further to report. Hopping back and forth between dimensions twice a day and three times on Sundays sounds like a recipe for going completely round the twist.”

“Oh, I’m sure it won’t come to that,” Raymond smiled, standing. “Even in a war like this, most men don’t live in peril of their lives every minute of the day.”

* * *

The first time, he had been wearing his German field uniform, and the other had been wearing his British olive drab: and that had been at the root of the misunderstanding.

Not that he would have left the other man to die, even if he’d known the truth. If you see a man clearly at the end of his strength, about to go under for the third and probably final time, with a wreckage of debris and corpses and oil all about him, then you don’t really hesitate to help him, no matter how he’s dressed. So when Captain Fairfax - alias Gustav von Karnhofen, the smartest man in German Intelligence on the western front - had got over the considerable shock of finding himself abruptly no longer on the western front, but instead falling from a height of a foot or two into surprisingly warm and extremely salty water, with the sun blazing down like a blowlamp and the remains of a boat blazing merrily fifty feet or so away - when he had got over all that (or got over enough of it, at any rate), he grabbed the failing man under the chin, pulled his head back onto his own shoulder, and began to swim on his back as quickly as he conveniently could back towards the distant line of the shore, without ever really stopping to worry too much about the man’s uniform.

Which, conveniently, was British in any case, as he discovered when he hauled him ashore. So he felt entirely justified in folding the man over, pounding him on the back, pumping his arms, and doing all the other absurd things which he vaguely thought might help in this sort of situation. He would probably have done them anyway, of course, no matter which side the man had been on; but it made life easier if he didn’t have the prospect of turning the fellow over to the military authorities to look forward to, after he had finished saving his life. His own uniform, after all, might raise a few awkward questions.

He didn’t really think about what the other fellow might make of it until the other fellow coughed, heaved, brought up a couple of pints of salt water, and opened his eyes; and Fairfax saw the startled glance down at his own German field grey, and wondered whether he ought to have confiscated the fellow’s gun before starting work on him. But the other fellow, lying on the sand and eyeing him warily, didn’t reach for the holster. Probably he realised that it was pointless after the salt-water dousing, anyway.

Fairfax sat down on the sand next to him, and dug his fingertips into the sharp, grating grains; felt the little slivers of white shell catch at him, felt the slice and salt stickiness of them. “Where on earth am I?” he asked in English, more to himself and to the universe in general than to the other man.

The other, who was wearing a captain’s uniform, just stared at him for a moment. Then, in a hoarse voice: “Libya. Perhaps Egypt. We were - we were meant to go ashore - near Sidi Barrani. Where did you come from?”

Fairfax found himself laughing. “France. Don’t try and believe it, because I don’t. I think I must be going mad.”

The other man almost laughed too, but the impulse was seen off by another wracking bout of coughs; and when he had brought them under control, he only said: “I think - everyone is.”

“Not this mad,” Fairfax murmured.

He looked out to sea. It could be the Mediterranean, he thought. He’d been to Greece, before the war began, and Italy too; the Med had looked a little like this. Though he’d never been this far south. Not to Egypt. He’d always hoped to go, one day.

No doubt madness was the most plausible explanation.

“You saved my life,” said the other man.

“Oh,” said Fairfax, perhaps a little flippantly, “I thought I might as well. It seemed the thing to do, you know.”

“I cannot thank you enough.”

He grinned. “Try returning the favour one day, if you get the chance.”

Another cough. “Sterne.”

“What?”

“My name. Sterne. Captain.”

“Oh.” He thought for a moment. Probably there would be no harm in telling the man his real name, considering he was a figment of Fairfax’s imagination and Fairfax was going mad; but then, giving up his real identity to anybody was quite shockingly bad spycraft, even when the body in question was an hallucination. “Karnhofen. Hauptmann. Delighted to meet you.”

“Your English is excellent. I would never have guessed you were not a native speaker.”

“Thank you,” said Fairfax. “I’ve always had an ear for languages.”

He heard a faint sound: a distant thudding, a faint shout. He craned back over his shoulder towards the line of dunes. There was a cloud of white dust rising, as would be kicked up by many hooves.

“Friends of yours?” he asked, inclining his head in that direction. It was astonishing how restful life was when one knew it was all only an extremely convincing delusion.

Sterne struggled to his feet, and peered inland, his hand over his eyes to shield them from the glare. He was tall, Fairfax now saw: as tall as he was himself, and with the same dark hair and bright blue eyes. They could almost have been brothers, he thought. “Friends of one of us, at any rate. I wonder which?”

And that was the moment when there was a bright flash, and a crack like thunder, and he found himself back in his office at Varne; and if he hadn’t still been streaming salt water - a fact confirmed by his adjutant, with a splendid German military lack of curiosity, when Fairfax thrust his sleeve in his direction - then he would have been quite able to convince himself that he had simply fallen asleep over his desk and dreamed the whole thing.

* * *

Not a dream, then.

“You shouldn’t have done that,” said Fairfax, rather tritely, from the nest of bracken that he had been knocked rather precipitately into. On the ground a few feet away, in a very similar nest of bracken, there was another man: a man he didn’t know, dressed in the grubby high-collared shirt and patched corduroy trousers of a typical Belgian peasant, and with an expression of surprise on his face. The expression had been caused, presumably, by the hunting knife lodged hilt-deep in his chest; though perhaps the British officer who had flashed into existence out of thin air just in time to lodge it there had had something to do with it too.

The British officer was also looking a touch taken-aback, and small wonder. Being yanked halfway around the world in the blink of an eye was more than a little disorientating in itself, as Fairfax had cause to know. Finding oneself in the middle of a knife fight in a wood when you got there probably only exacerbated the sensation.

And the British officer was Captain Sterne. Considerably more sun-burned than he had been last time Fairfax had seen him; but still, undeniably, Captain Sterne. Not a dream, not a hallucination, not a figment of his imagination: or if he was, then at least an astonishingly persistent, solid and convincing one.

“Should I not?” Sterne asked, prodding in a desultory fashion at a spatter of blood on his sleeve. “Are you so eager to die?”

Fairfax reached into his pocket and held up a clean handkerchief, which Sterne received with a gracious inclination of the head. “Not in the least,” Fairfax said. “But you’re British, and that means he’s on your side, doesn’t it?”

Sterne looked down at the dead man. “Ah. I didn’t think of that.”

“No - well, thanks for not thinking,” said Fairfax. “It probably saved my life.”

“Who do you suppose he is?”

Fairfax crawled over to the corpse and patted down his clothes. No official papers, no letters; a handful of coins, a medallion with a picture of some saint, a cracked, dried acorn. He wondered if the man had carried it for luck. “No idea. A local patriot, presumably, who took exception to my using his wood for my work.”

(And oh, God, what a bloody waste. One of the local resistance networks had presumably stumbled across some portion of the activities of Gustav von Karnhofen, and decided he should be done away with, and sent this poor fellow to do it. Fairfax wondered, for a moment, which group he belonged to, whether he should try to make contact, let them know that von Karnhofen wasn’t what he seemed, ask them to discourage their members from taking pot-shots at him in the future - but it was useless, of course. A secret known by that many people was no secret at all. Really, he ought to be glad that his alter ego was attracting this sort of attention, as it all added to the convincing quality of his cover: but it was hard to be glad when some lad perhaps ten years his junior was lying dead on a forest floor somewhere near Cambrai, and still staring up at him reproachfully.)

Fairfax reached out, and closed the eyes.

Sterne shook his head. “I suppose this is the danger of the German position here. While your side holds Belgium and this toehold of France, every man, woman and child this side of the lines will be your enemy. We British don’t have to worry so much, on our side.”

“That’s the great advantage of not occupying a country against the will of its people,” Fairfax murmured. He saw Sterne’s eyes narrow a little, and reminded himself that a Hauptmann of the German Imperial Army such as Gustav von Karnhofen probably should know better than to voice heretical views in the presence of the enemy. He went on, quickly: “May I assume that your sudden transfer to France was - shall we say, not via the official channels?”

“Not wholly official, no,” said Sterne, smiling a narrow smile. “But I certainly seem to have been transferred here somehow. This, I take it, is what happened to you the last time?”

“It certainly looks like it.”

Sterne looked around at the thoroughly unremarkable wood. “Remarkable.”

“And if it’s running true to form, you won’t be here much longer, so - “ He stood up, and brushed himself off, and held out his hand. “Thanks. Here’s to the next time - may it not be for a good long while.”

Sterne took his hand and shook it; and just as he opened his mouth to reply, he winked out of existence, like a candle being snuffed out, and without so much as a puff of smoke to explain it.

* * *

“Oh for God’s sake - “

A brawl in Port Said.

“Get down you idiot!”

His plane caught in archie and forced down in No Man’s Land.

“I’d say we should stop running into each other like this, but I feel that would be unhealthy for both of us at this point.”

Major Sterne, scowling like a thundercloud, tethered extremely firmly to a tent pole as outside men shouted and ran about and the sound of gunfire drew nearer.

By that point, of course, they’d rather got into the habit of rescuing one another. Both, too, were quite alert to the usefulness of a bodyguard who would get hauled from one end of the world to the other in order to pull their chestnuts out of the fire, no matter how dire the situation. So the sixth time - the time when Fairfax (in the uniform of a British Major) was dragged out of the overturned wreckage of his staff car just before the second shell hit by Sterne, in the uniform of a Hauptmann of the Imperial German Army - the sixth time hadn’t really made as much difference as it probably ought to have done.

“Not Sterne then, I take it,” he managed, when he had spat out the mouthful of mud and leaf litter from the ditch that they had both dived into. “Though I suppose it’d make for a perfectly reasonable German name.”

Not-Sterne smiled, and answered him in German. “Not Karnhofen then, I assume. Karnhofen, at least, is distinctly un-British.”

He could, of course, have presented not-Sterne with the full history of Gustav von Karnhofen, his brilliant infiltration of British intelligence, his hair-raising escapades and breath-taking escapes behind British lines, which would, naturally, have entirely explained his British uniform and his British staff car and his grasp of the British vernacular; but somehow he couldn’t quite face it. He had rather the feeling that the other man would have smiled that same sharp, knowing smile, and told him a remarkably similar story about the career of Major Sterne, and they would neither of them have believed a word of it. Suddenly, lying sodden and mud-stained and bruised in a ditch in north-east France, with his ears still ringing from the barrage that had overturned his car and killed his driver and damn near killed him, he found he couldn’t quite face it.

“No,” he said. “Not Karnhofen.”

The other man nodded, without a hint of surprise, and looked out towards the lines. “How long do you suppose they’ll keep it up?”

“How should I know?”

Not-Sterne shrugged, as much as he was able with his elbows planted in good French mud while peering out over the edge of a drainage ditch. “You work on the other side of the lines normally, don’t you?”

“Intelligence,” Fairfax muttered. “Not Artillery. The two words generally don’t go together.”

Another shell passed over with a whistling sound, before burying itself in the next field. They both ducked, half-heartedly, as clods of mud rained down around them.

“What on earth do they think they’re shooting at?” wondered Fairfax.

“I imagine that someone has fed them faulty intelligence,” replied not-Sterne, blandly. “Such things do happen, I believe.”

Then they lay and listened to the shells. After a while, Fairfax rolled onto his back, reflecting that he couldn’t get very much muddier, and that at least this way he wasn’t giving himself a crick in the neck. The sky, he noticed suddenly, was a fragile blue, so pale it was almost white, like light shining through fine porcelain. There was a robin singing in the hedge that backed the ditch. It was probably well-satisfied with the state of affairs, he thought: all this upturned soil must mean a paradise of worms.

“Shouldn’t you have gone by now?” he asked.

“I suppose the danger isn’t over yet.”

“Now there’s a comforting thought.”

He heard not-Sterne shift a little. Presumably the middle east didn’t offer much by way of muddy ditches to hide in, he reflected. The man must be out of practice.

“Have you ever wondered what this is?” not-Sterne asked. “This - connection.”

“Of course I have,” said Fairfax. “I can’t say that wondering about it has carried me very far forward though.”

“There must be thousands of men dying every day,” not-Sterne went on softly. “They don’t get pulled halfway across the earth to save one another. Why us?”

“Does there have to be a reason? How about sheer blind luck?”

“Sheer blind luck is not usually so ostentatious in its operations,” said not-Sterne, sharply. “I could accept as luck being rescued by the same British officer stationed in - for the sake of simplicity, let us say Cairo - once, twice, even three or four times, if they were in the same line of work as me. I cannot accept that luck is responsible for - “ He broke off, and Fairfax heard a faint, viscous splash, as if the other man had kicked the bottom of the ditch in emphasis. “ - this.”

“Some sort of sympathetic resonance,” Fairfax murmured into the quiet between the shells. “Some quirk of mind or character or career which has tangled us together - like contestants in some ghastly cosmic three-legged race. The universe can’t quite get a grip on which one of us is which, so it keeps jamming us together instead.”

“Astonishing,” said not-Sterne, dryly. “I take it you studied neither physics nor philosophy at university.”

Fairfax grinned. “Modern languages, actually. You?”

The sky was so pale that the clouds only stood out as dim ghosts. He watched them, still, as they followed the wind across to the German lines.

“I suppose we shouldn’t do it any more,” he said, after a while. “Help each other out like this, I mean. Not now we know which side our bread is buttered, as it were.”

“I suppose not,” said not-Sterne slowly. “Though it cannot have escaped your notice that if we had not, we would both be dead by now. Several times over. And I personally feel that it is much more useful to keep me alive than it would be to have you dead.”

“I feel much the same,” said Fairfax. “Not to mention that I quite enjoy being alive, generally speaking. I don’t intend to give up the habit before I have to. And quite aside from that - “

He broke off. He heard the slight liquid noise as the other man moved a little. “What?”

He breathed a small laugh. “Well. It seems unsporting to stop now, doesn’t it? Just when I’m getting to know you.”

“Are you hoping to gather enough information to unmask me?” asked not-Sterne, sounding amused.

“Naturally,” said Fairfax. “Aren’t you? You’d be doing your side rather a lot of good.”

Not-Sterne snorted. “Who on earth would believe me, when I told them where the information came from?”

The robin started his song again, its usual odd mixture of autumn melancholy and springtime joy. There were bright red hawthorn berries on the hedge still. If it wasn’t for the mud and the wet and the whooomph of the guns, Fairfax thought, it would have been quite pleasant to lie there for a while.

“Erich,” said the other man, abruptly. “If you wish.”

He digested that for a moment. “Guy, then,” he said. “For what it’s worth.”

He held his hand out towards the other man, without looking at him; and after a second’s pause, he felt it taken, a brief, polite shake.

“It would be nice to have been consulted,” he murmured, crossing his arms back over his chest to help ward off the chill of the air. “I must say, I can think of some moments when it would be wretchedly awkward to be yoinked off to the other side of the world willy or nilly just because you’d got in hot water again. And I barely know you, after all. What if I don’t even like you that much? It’d be a dratted nuisance to have formed an ineffable cosmic bond with a man I couldn’t stand the sight of.”

He quieted for a moment to listen to the birdsong. The shelling seemed to have drawn off into the distance. Maybe the gunners had discovered their mistake. Maybe they’d just given up.

“I must say though,” he went on quietly, “it’s rather nice to know there’s someone who’s having nearly as convoluted a war as I am. I knew there must be someone out there, of course, but actually meeting them makes a surprising amount of difference. You know the reasons for it, of course - a secret shared is no secret at all - and of course that’s half the fun of it, knowing you’re running rings around the lot of them; but sometimes you can’t help but wish that you weren’t the only person who knew it, if you see what I mean? That you weren’t quite so entirely on your own.”

Nothing but the lift and ripple of the robin’s song, and the breeze bringing the smell of smoke. He turned his head; and, as he had expected, found that the other man had gone.

* * *

“Oh for God’s sake, Erich, this is the third time this week! Don’t you ever rest?!”

He was quite used to the sun by this stage, and the sand as well: Erich had put his life in danger across half the Middle East, from Cairo to Jerusalem and most points in between, but the deep burning desert was often a favourite. The aeroplane wasn’t entirely unprecedented either, weaving its stuttering and uncertain course over the dunes, trying to keep low, jinking and bobbing erratically in a way that brought Fairfax’s heart into his mouth. The archie, however, was new: he was more familiar with that at home, and the isolated bursts here rang out through the wilderness of stone and sand with a sort of hollow clatter, like bells with full muffles. And then -

He saw the moment the plane was hit; saw the shudder of it, like a snipe on the wing, as the nose came up, and then down -

He began to run.

There wasn’t any suspense in it, of course: no sense of surprise. He knew who would be in that plane, though whether as pilot or observer he couldn’t guess. If Erich hadn’t been in it, then Fairfax wouldn’t have been there.

He was within fifty yards when the thing hit, that terrible crumpling crash, once heard never forgotten, but he didn’t slacken his speed for an instant. The sand shifted and gave under his feet, and when he stumbled it burned his hands, but he was at the plane inside thirty seconds, the reek of petrol in his nose, the splash of it in his ears, and the old instincts of the pilot which never quite wore away made the horror of it catch like a gaffing hook lodged deep in his belly. He had smelled a man burn: you never escaped that smell, and he could smell it now, in memory, in imagination, even though the petrol hadn’t caught yet.

He wasn’t dead yet. He wasn’t dead yet. Fairfax knew he wasn’t dead because he was still here and surely he wouldn’t be left here if the other was dead -

He was shouting, he found, as he hauled desperately at the broken struts, trying to drag away the section of the top plane that had folded hopelessly onto the cockpit, feeling it give by an inch but nothing more, digging away the soft shifting sand in which it was buried with his hands, forcing it to move -

“For God’s sake, Erich, this is the third time this week, don’t you ever rest?! Come on you dozy bastard, wake up - wake up, you need to push as I pull or I’ll never get it free - come on - “

- and Erich stirred, the dark smudge of his head just visible in the knot of wreckage. For a moment Fairfax saw his eyes blink open, blood-shot and bleary, before they met his own, and realisation arrived with a thud, and he began to struggle.

With Erich pushing from below and him pulling from above they managed to heave the half-severed fragment of splintered top-plane out of the way; then he grabbed Erich’s arms, and all the colour went out of the man’s face and his mouth clamped into a thin white line, but he pushed with his legs all the same and Fairfax hauled with all his strength, and after what felt like forever there was a great ripping sound and he came slithering out, slick as a newborn foal with engine oil and petrol, and Fairfax dragged him back by main force, and the tank helpfully refrained from going up until they were a dozen paces away, so it could really have been an awful lot worse.

Fairfax lay on his back, chest heaving, breath rasping, feeling the heat of the fire stronger even than the blast of the sun, as Erich vomited, brokenly, into a convenient thorn-bush somewhere to his left.

“Don’t you ever feel like retiring?” he said, as soon as he could get the words out. “Dashing about the desert at the head of an Arab insurgency, crashing stolen planes - and where did you learn to fly, by the way? Well, I call it flying - “

The noise of vomiting had been replaced by the noise of spitting, and harsh, rattling breathing, and he sat up and looked over at the other man.

He was still wearing the remains of a loose white robe, though his head was bare. It showed the patches of petrol, the miscellaneous stains, the blood. There was a raw, red stain rapidly soaking the right sleeve that Fairfax especially didn’t like the look of.

“You’ve been asking rather a lot of your guardian angel lately,” he muttered, as he crawled over.

Sterne’s eyes were half closed, heavy with pain, the blue only a wild bright glitter under the dark lashes. There was blood in his hair, blood and sweat and sand and petrol, and Fairfax without so much as a thimble of fresh water to wash it off. With infinite gentleness, he moved aside the loose white sleeve to uncover the British uniform underneath; then caught his breath and wished he hadn’t. Christ, no wonder the man had gone pale when Fairfax had hauled him out.

“I shall not - be asking - for much more,” said Erich.

He had wondered, for a while, if there was something he was supposed to be doing with the strange bond that the universe had tied between them. Perhaps he should have been trying to convince his double to defect; perhaps he should have been trying to kill him. Perhaps it was something quite different: some mystery they were meant to solve, someone they were meant to save. Perhaps nothing to do with the war at all: perhaps their destinies had got off track years before, and they were meant to be at Heidelberg together, discovering a system of ethics that would revolutionise the world, or a means of generating unlimited motive power without the need for the expense and filth of coal or oil. There were certainly days when he thought something had gone badly wrong with the world and everyone in it, so why should the two of them be any different?

He didn’t want to kill him.

He didn’t even want him to die. He didn’t know what it was that brought them together, but right now - right here - it was clearly and only this: to ward death off for one day more, and see where things went from there.

“You’ll get what you’re given,” he muttered, rather nonsensically, as he began to look him over. A wound to the scalp, trickling blood, but the skull not cracked as far as he could feel; cuts, grazes, marks of impact on the forehead, the cheek, the nose; one blue eye bloodshot, both unfocussed. A wheezing, gasping edge to the breath that could have meant he was winded and could have meant a punctured lung; marks of impact on the right of the chest, a broken rib or two probably, a cracked collarbone perhaps. The arm -

Well. Nothing much he could do about that, apart from tie something round it and hope he didn’t bleed to death before Fairfax could get him to the closest approximation he could find to a hospital.

“I suppose that’s the great advantage to this sort of get-up,” he said, conversationally, a little breathlessly, as he tore a couple of long strips from the already ripped white robe and used them to tie a bundled pad of the stuff in place. “Dashed useful when it comes to first aid. There’s not a lot of potential for bandages in the average pair of army-issue tropical shorts.”

He had to look, as he tied it tight as he could bear; but he purposefully didn’t listen.

“Still with me?” he asked a minute or two later.

“I - should ask you that…” said Erich, through whitened lips.

“The danger hasn’t passed yet,” he said, brusquely. “Self-evidently. And I don’t get to go until it does. Are we on your side of the lines?”

A bearing of teeth, between a smile and a snarl and a hiss. “Which - side is that?”

“Don’t waste our time,” he snapped. “I might be able to get you to someone who can help, but not if I’m heading in entirely the wrong direction. Which way do we go?”

Erich’s head shifted, uneasily, against its pillow of sand. “Not sure. If - if I held my course - a little to the north of it - Zabala - but we won’t make that. An oasis. My friends - used it - before - “

He broke off, panting with the pain; and Fairfax thought of that last time, only a couple of days before. A shambles of men and horses and blood and machine gun fire, and he didn’t know what on earth had gone wrong but it had quite obviously gone about as shockingly wrong as it could go; and Erich, sheltering behind the shattered body of the most beautiful white horse Fairfax had ever seen, the fingers of one hand still twisted into its mane, though Erich didn’t seem to notice it. There had been blood on his hand, his wrist, Fairfax had seen, perhaps where a bullet had grazed him. It left a bright smear on the short white hairs of the horse’s neck.

He knew what had happened to Erich’s friends among the Arab tribes.

“They might not welcome you,” he said softly.

Another flash of teeth, and there was blood between them now, blood on his gums, on his lips. “They will not. But it is - a pick-up point. In an emergency.”

“How far?” asked Fairfax, looking around for something he could use to carry him. Perhaps he could have scavenged something from the plane; but the plane was still burning, bright as a beacon, with a column of black, greasy smoke rising from it straight and stark into the clarity of the morning sky.

“I - not sure. Two. Three.”

They were speaking German. He wasn’t sure when they had begun. Erich always sounded different in German: more precise, more curt. A Prussian officer, not an old Etonian. Or at any rate it was normally curtness that clipped the humour and warmth out of his voice; today, however, it was pain. But there was nothing Fairfax could do about that, so he ignored it as best he could.

“Could we just wait here?” he suggested. “Someone will see the smoke.”

Something that might have been a laugh. “I have - more enemies than friends.”

Fairfax shook his head. “You astonish me.”

The narrow slit of eyes drifted closed. “There is - nothing - to be done.”

“There is, or I wouldn’t be here.”

“We - do not know - why you are here. Why - any of this - “

“Do your legs still work?” Fairfax interrupted. Erich frowned, almost petulantly.

“I believe so.”

“Then you can use them.”

Another of those almost-laughs. “And then - I shall sprout wings - for an encore.”

“If there’s help to be had two or three kilometres away, then I’m going to get you to it,” said Fairfax, bluntly. “And I don’t give much for my chances of carrying you on my back - you’re a touch on the solid side. So up on your feet, Major, and let’s get started.”

‘On his feet’ was a painful exaggeration. His legs might have been uninjured, but Fairfax wasn’t sure how much difference that made when Erich could hardly hold himself upright or set one foot in front of another and every breath was a torment. Still, he got him up, Erich’s good arm clasping tight around Fairfax’s neck, the injured one tucked as firmly as they could manage into the breast of his tunic, and Fairfax’s own arm around Erich’s waist, trying to find anywhere he could hold him without gripping bruises or broken bones. A three-legged race, he’d once called it, years ago, and that was what they looked like: absurd, reeling, stumbling drunkenly over soft sand and clay pellets and wind-scowered rock, locked hopelessly together, a composite creature that should have been two capable men but somehow had less strength and speed than one alone.

Time stretched: narrowed: focussed: the only thing was to find a place to set each foot, to plant himself steady, to drag Erich onward, step by step by step. The sun, the heat, the dust, the thirst, the screaming of his back, his neck, his arms, the backs of his calves, none of it was real compared with that: one step, then another, then another.

The oasis, when he came to it, was a surprise: he hadn’t looked up in forever.

He let Erich down in the shade of a palm, perhaps not as carefully as he ought, but he was nearly at the end of his strength, and he wasn’t sure that Erich had been able to feel much by way of external stimuli for the last goodness-knew-how-long anyway. He dropped down next to him, drawing great heaving gulps of the hot, tortured air, his mouth so dry he hardly dared close it in case he choked on his own swollen tongue. For a long while he simply sat and wheezed, his head in his arms; then, slowly, he straightened, and looked around.

“I thought - oases - had pools of water,” he muttered, thickly.

Erich didn’t reply.

“Must be - down below,” he managed. “Sunk into the sand. Probably foul. Never like it is in the books, is it?”

He glanced across at the other man. His eyes were mere slits; his face shockingly pale. Fairfax touched a hand to the forehead, pushing aside the sweat-limp straggle of dark hair. Cool. Astonishingly cool. His breathing was shallow and rapid.

“Shock,” he said, for the sake of saying something. “If I had brandy I’d give it to you.”

He lifted Erich’s good hand - or better hand, anyway, because there was a grubby bandage on it still from that battle a day or two, a week, a lifetime ago.

“How many lives have you lived this week, Erich?” Fairfax murmured, as he chafed it, roughly. “Just the three I know about, or were there more?”

He wasn’t sure how long it was before he saw the dust; heard the hoof beats. He pushed himself wearily to his feet, and drew his service revolver. There wasn’t much point in it, of course: not one against so many, and so many armed with rifles at that; but at least it commanded attention. He stood over the other man’s body, and wondered, vaguely, why he did so; but it had become so much habit by now that he hardly felt he had a choice.

They drew rein a few paces away, the dust thick enough to choke him, leaving a thicker layer of grit over Erich’s broken figure on the ground. Shouts he didn’t understand - he could speak six languages but Arabic wasn’t one of them; angry faces, gestures, pointings. Something repeated, over and over again, perhaps a name though not a German one, perhaps a demand, or an insult. Restless hooves, sidling closer. A stink of horses and a press of men. He lifted his gun.

The men at the back of the crowd heard it first: he saw the faces lift, heard the way the voices changed. It passed as a ripple through the group of men before it reached him the last, though it was a sound he should know better than any of them: the powerful beat of the Mercedes engine. But he was the first to find the dots high in the shining blue of the sky. He watched them as they circled, once, twice, then came lower.

One of the men in the group called something; raised his gun; pointed it towards the man lying at his feet. A shout from another man, a sharp negation; a reply; and he didn’t speak Arabic, but he knew rage, and fear, and the thirst for revenge. A scuffling, surging movement in the crowd, the roar of the engines, louder now, as the two aircraft swept down onto the hard sand only a stone’s throw away, a sudden, irresistible movement -

- and he dropped, flat, over the other man; and at the same instant he felt the blow, like a kick from a horse, to the upper part of his arm, and heard the shot.

He slithered to the side over Erich’s body, feeling more astonished than anything else. Then another shot, and another, and then men around them scattered, horses rearing and plunging in the confusion before their riders wrenched them round and away, and they were left, the two of them, sitting - lying - absurdly on the sand.

The pilot pushed his flying goggles up one handed: the other hand was still holding his pistol ready. He was looking at Fairfax in astonishment.

“It’s Major - Hauptmann - he is a German officer,” called Fairfax, the German stumbling off his tongue, oddly awkward and ungainly. “He crash-landed not far from here. I helped him back. I - I was the passenger.”

“Is it Captain von Stalhein?” the pilot shouted.

Fairfax looked down at the man he had known for several years and didn’t know at all. Von Stalhein. It could be so.

“Yes,” he shouted back.

The pilot hesitated. “You are British?”

Fairfax fought down the urge to laugh. “I’m not holding him prisoner - if that’s what you mean. I was - trying to save his life.”

“I saw,” said the pilot. “Are you hurt?”

Fairfax considered that for a moment. He was feeling quite exceptionally buoyant, all things considered: presumably it was the sense of unreality that always came with the shift between places that was catching up with him. His arm, much to his surprise, didn’t hurt at all, even though when he looked at it there was really quite a lot of blood there. Perhaps he had been right in the first place. Perhaps it really was all simply an astonishingly detailed hallucination.

“Probably,” he called back.

“I’ll come and see if you’ll put the gun down,” said the pilot. The pilot of the second plane said something which was lost in the noise of the engines; but the first pilot shook his head. “Will you put it down?”

Fairfax was astonished to find that he was apparently still holding the gun. He let it drop.

“What’s the matter with him?” asked the pilot, suddenly close at hand. Fairfax blinked himself awake.

“His arm. The bone’s - you can see it. I thought it was in the crash, but he must have been shot. We’re the same person, you see.”

The curious thing was, he couldn’t tell now whether he was speaking German or English or a little of both.

The pilot’s face was swinging about most unnervingly. He tried to tell him to keep still, but the words came out wrong.

“ - will be well treated - you understand?”

“Not - a prisoner - “ he managed. “German. Deutsch.”

The pilot looked confused. He was awfully young. Maybe even younger than Lovell and Fraser, and they were really frightfully young. He’d like to see them again.

And then a hoarse, wheezing sort of a voice, though he had a suspicion he knew it from somewhere. “He is German - a double agent. His name - is Captain von Karnhofen. He has done more - for his country - than you will ever know.”

Not a bit of Prussian precision left in him, poor fellow. He couldn’t even remember whose country was whose.

* * *

The world came swirling back in slow stages: in a murmur of German, in whimpers and cries of pain, in that very particular blend of carbolic and hot canvas which was unique to hospital tents. And in some of those swirls of consciousness he heard the voices at the next bed, several voices he didn’t know, one he did, and that one was strained and clipped and hoarse. Fairfax lay on his back, his eyes closed, and drifted in and out of awareness, and listened, even though his mind was hardly working well enough to process what he heard. It only went to show, he thought muzzily, that spying was in some ways more an instinct than a system: in the blood, not in the brain.

He shouldn’t have been allowed to listen to the voices at the next bed. He was tolerably sure of that. The beds were so close he could have reached out and touched Erich’s, and the next man along could have touched his, all the way down the ward. No place for privacy: no place for the sort of conversation those men at the next bed were having, all ’and who did you speak to on day x, and who on day y, and how did this influence your behaviour on day z?’. Fairfax lay and listened to their questions, questions he had been asked himself a hundred times after a hundred different missions, and the great space full of beds and men and nurses and doctors and stretcher-bearers itched at the back of his neck. There was a sort of palpable disrespect in the awful openness.

He watched him through a veil of lashes when the other men had departed; watched him as he lay, his breath coming short and shallow, his eyes wide open and glassy, gazing up at the glow of the sun through the canvas roof. He didn’t move, or speak.

But even if they had been on the same side Fairfax couldn’t have asked, or expected to be answered; so he dozed, and rested, and feigned unconsciousness, and when night came, and everyone but the ward sisters had been cleared out, and the majority of the other patients were sleeping, he leaned over as close as he could, and asked the only question that he could.

“Why am I still here?”

There was no reply. No ‘I didn’t realise you were awake’; no ‘how much did you hear?’; certainly no ‘thank you for saving my life’. Perhaps he was sleeping: but Fairfax didn’t think so.

“The longest either of us have stayed before was about five or six hours, that time when you came to Varne,” he went on, words a low murmur that wouldn’t carry further than the narrow space between their beds. “I believe it’s been more than two days now.”

“There is - “ The words were a brief, dry croak, cut off abruptly by a tight, unquellable coughing. Fairfax eased his feet to the ground, found the cup of room-warm water from the little wooden cabinet between their beds, and held it to Erich’s left hand until he was able to grasp it and drink.

“There is - always the boat,” said Erich, when he was able. “You can go home the long way round.”

Fairfax found himself laughing; a small, rather startled breath of laughter. “Actually, I rather think I can’t.”

A short silence. “What do you mean?”

“So you hadn’t noticed,” said Fairfax. “I wondered. I suppose some changes are more obvious than others.”

“What changes?”

“When did the British take Jerusalem?”

Erich frowned as he settled himself back amongst the pillows. “They have not.”

“No, not here,” said Fairfax. “But where I come from, we took Jerusalem in December last year.”

There was a moment of stillness. Then Erich’s head shifted on the pillow; turned, so that his eyes met Fairfax’s own. “It’s not possible.”

“I don’t see why you should think it’s perfectly possible to drag someone instantly from France to Palestine, but baulk at the idea of dragging them from some other world entirely,” said Fairfax, pragmatically. “It’s impossible either way, but it’s happened all the same.”

“There is only this world.”

“How do you know?”

“To repeat all this - across all the worlds - it is unthinkable.”

They had given him morphine; he had seen the orderly administering the dose. Enough to muffle the pain of that terrible break, but not enough to stop him from answering questions. Even in the dimness of the tent lit only by night-lights, his pupils were scarcely more than pinpricks. Fairfax wondered if he could see at all, or if he was only swimming in a sea of shadows. His words were clear; strangely disconnected. Floating.

“Perhaps,” Fairfax said. “But we’ve all had to think the unthinkable rather a lot recently.”

Against the whiteness of the pillow, Erich’s face had a curious greenish tinge where it wasn’t bruise-violet or the livid purple-red of scrapes and scratches: the pallor of blood-loss under the tan. “If there are other worlds,” he said, after a moment, “then perhaps somewhere things have ended differently.” Then, quite tranquilly, he said: “I failed, you know.”

Fairfax slipped back into bed. It was surprisingly cool: the tent lost warmth quickly when the sun went down. “Yes, I know.”

“Perhaps that’s why you haven’t gone home. Because whatever bond it was that tied us together has unravelled.”

For a moment, Fairfax lay, and digested that. “Has it?”

“All this - “ A languid movement of the elegant hand, the one that wasn’t strapped up carefully to his chest, sweeping the air between them. “It was because we were the same - the same work, the same lies. You were like me. But I have failed.”

Fairfax smiled, a very small smile. “So have I, you know.”

Erich’s eyes met his, pale, still.

“Haven’t you noticed that our traffic has become a little one-way over the last month or two?” Fairfax asked. “But then, I suppose I’ve been hopping over here so often we haven’t really had time to pine for one another. There aren’t nearly so many daring escapades for the average desk-bound officer at Wing Headquarters as you might imagine, though I’ve done my best to alleviate the tedium where I could. I’m afraid Gustav von Karnhofen is no more, you see - aside from this temporary resurrection you’ve treated me to, of course, and thank you very much for that.”

Erich’s brow puckered a fraction, as though he was trying to work through a particularly intractable equation. “But - you are alive.”

“Just because he’s dead, it doesn’t mean I am.”

Erich only lay and blinked at him, twice, absurdly slowly.

Fairfax tried a different tack. “You’re still alive too, you know.”

Erich’s head shifted restlessly on the pillow: a faint hint of negation. “Only because of your interference.”

“Well - yes, I suppose it’s true that for once I managed to cheat death quite without your assistance, contrary to expectation,” said Fairfax, with half a smile. “But I failed, all the same. Quite comprehensively, really.”

“How?”

“Oh, willfully and unprofessionally, of course,” said Fairfax lightly. “Two painfully naive and largely untrained - though admittedly charming and fearfully bright - lads stumbled right into the middle of my little plots and subterfuges, and I was forced to decide which was more important - the subterfuges, or those charming lads’ lives. Absurdly, I decided it was the latter.”

“So,” Erich said in a gasping breath that was almost a laugh. “You were English, in the end. Gustav von Karnhofen could not have hesitated to put his country first.”

Fairfax felt the twist of that in his gut. There was a razor edge behind it; a viciousness that cut deep, although he knew that the blow wasn’t aimed primarily at him. “Perhaps not,” he said.

Erich lay, holding his gaze; when he blinked, which wasn’t often, the movement was dragging, veiling the hot glitter of his eyes. “I played at being a British officer for too long,” he said, after a long moment, his voice a low rustling, like a soft wind through reeds. “I took too much pleasure in the game for the game’s sake - as if it was a cricket match, and there was nothing greater at stake than ‘fair play’. I should have done better.” He swallowed. His lips were cracked, Fairfax could see. They were close enough that he could see the very tiny welling up of blood where one of those cracks had worked open again. “There was - a young man. Hardly more than a boy. I felt sure from the start that he was not what he claimed. There was so much more I could have done - I could have shot him out of hand, easily, no one would have questioned it.”

“But you didn’t.”

“No. And so he bettered me. But I was not sure.” There was something furtive in the whisper, as though the words were some dreadful secret he couldn’t risk another human hearing: here, in a hospital tent with fifteen other men in it; here, where it no longer mattered at all. “I was almost sure he was not what he claimed - but I wanted him to be, you see. A good spy should not want. I made myself uncertain, and so I couldn’t do what was needed. Do you see?”

And he didn’t, not really, not even with the fragments he had heard that afternoon; but Erich’s eyes were as bright as lamplight and morphine could make them, and there was a terrible vibration of earnestness in his voice.

“You call it a love of fair play,” said Fairfax. “You could equally call it a sense of honour.”

“No,” said Erich, shaking his head urgently. “No. An officer’s honour consists in doing what he must for his country. To set one’s personal honour higher than one’s duty - “

“My duty was to let those two boys die,” Fairfax pointed out. “I knew that perfectly well. There was no other British agent as well positioned as I was within German military intelligence. It had taken years of work and preparation to get me there - the sacrifice of tens, perhaps hundreds of decent men on both sides. I should never have shown my hand for the sake of two green boys - boys of the kind that die by the hundred every day. But they were there, you see, and I was the only one who could have saved them, and so I did. And I can’t regret it, I’m afraid, although I know I should. To do anything else would have been mere cold duty, and no man can live his life by that alone. In the end, all one can do is make the choices that one can live with, no matter how absurd or ill-judged those choices may be.”

And it was true: God help him, it was true. Even sitting at his desk at headquarters, reading of the deaths of men that von Karnhofen could perhaps have saved, knowing he had thrown away the work of years on no more than a whim, knowing his sudden superfluity, he couldn’t quite regret it: that moment of human weakness when he had thrown it all away because of two young men he scarcely knew. It was the difference between the concrete, the particular, the immediate, the specific, and the vagueness of general principle. Rex Lovell and Tony Fraser: concrete, and specific, and alive, and he couldn’t regret it. Though he knew perfectly well that he should.

“You are British,” said Erich, dismissively, shifting awkwardly on the bed so he was no longer angled towards Fairfax, but lay looking up at the dark canvas of the roof once more. “You hear the applause as you return to the pavillion, and can comfort yourself that at least you played the game.”

“Yes,” said Fairfax. “Better to lose the game than lose everything that matters.”

“But it is not a game,” said Erich; and his voice was soft, and utterly desolate. “And everything has been lost.”

He lay, for a few endless minutes, and watched him: the unguarded misery of his face, this man, this not-Sterne, whom Fairfax had known for so long, whom he had known more clearly than perhaps anyone else did, as close to him as his own shadow: this man whose name he had found out the day before.

“Why am I still here?” he asked again.

“I don’t know,” said Erich.

“I think you might,” he said. “You remember that time at Varne - you didn’t go back until after the bomber raid that night. The danger hadn’t passed until then.”

“Are you suggesting we should start evacuating the other patients?”

“No,” said Fairfax. “I don’t think that’s where the danger lies, do you?”

Another silence, before Erich said: “I do not intend to shoot myself.”

“How certain are you of that?” asked Fairfax, evenly.

Another of those smiles that were more like grimaces. “Certain enough.”

“Perhaps you might inform the universe of it, then,” said Fairfax. “It doesn’t seem too sure.”

“Perhaps you should be encouraging me. My death might send you home.”

“It might - but if there’s another way of managing it, I’d rather try it first.”

“Why?” asked Erich, with nothing in his voice but a sort of quiet curiosity. “Despite all - this - “ That same gesture, all-encompassing, infinitely weary. “- we are on different sides, you and I. You should rejoice in my death.”

“Yes. I’ve known that for a good while now. It’s no more true now than it’s ever been. And in any case - “ Fairfax stifled a yawn. His arm was aching abominably, and he felt as though he’d been dragged through a mangle, not only through the fabric of reality. “Truth be told, I’ve always found it a little difficult to keep track of sides.”

“I wondered if I was supposed to kill you,” said Erich. “When I first realised what you were. I thought that might be the reason why I kept being pulled to you.”

“Typical German egotism,” murmured Fairfax. “Of course you assumed that the universe would be on your side.”

“Typical British hypocrisy,” answered Erich, turning his head a little so Fairfax could see the dull gleam of his eyes again. “You wondered precisely the same thing.”

Fairfax laughed quietly. “Of course I did. That night at Varne, when we sat in my quarters and drank abominable cognac and waited for you to disappear - I couldn’t stop thinking about what would happen if I shot you. Would the body vanish, I wondered, or would I have to explain to my batman why I had a stray Captain lying on the floor of my room with a bullet in the back of his skull?” He grew quiet again. “That night - while we were talking - it was the first time I’d realised that our worlds weren’t the same. Suddenly it all seemed so vast and impossible that I was quite desperate for it to mean something - anything, really. But even then I didn’t want it to mean that.”

His voice was quite still; tranquil; not loud enough to rouse any of the medical staff.

Erich’s head shifted a little on the pillow. “I remember we drank to brotherhood.”

“We drank to rather a lot of things,” Fairfax said.

For a long moment, Erich lay and watched him. “You saved my life today.”

“I’ve saved your life rather a lot,” Fairfax pointed out.

“Today you were shot for me.”

“Yes,” said Fairfax. “It seemed the thing to do, you know.”

“I think that looking for meaning in any of it is as absurd as looking for pictures in the clouds,” said Erich, his voice neither mocking nor bitter, but only impossibly tired. “It meant nothing - none of it did. You have failed, and I have failed. We have both imagined that we could change the world, and we have neither of us changed anything.”

“If that’s true,” said Fairfax, “then perhaps the manner of our failure matters more than ever.”

Erich’s shook his head. “When the bullet comes, in the end, it will not care how we face it.”

“No. But it makes all the difference in the world to us.” And he reached out across that narrow gap between the two beds, and found Erich’s hand, his good hand, the one that was freshly bandaged now, the one that had rested, bloodied, against the horse’s white neck. Their hands were very similar: he’d noticed it before. A horseman’s hands, long-fingered, supple and strong. “You’ve failed. So have I. I’d never really failed in my life before this little business blew up, but I rather suspect that it’s the sort of thing every man has to get used to sooner or later. He has to get up, and trudge on to the next failure, and the next, because how we face each failure is how we show who we are. And I don’t know about you, but I’ll find the trudge a little easier to bear knowing that you’re trudging alongside me.”

“I do not know you,” said Erich, his voice quiet and cold; but his hand did not pull away. “Not really. You are not my comrade. You are not even my friend.”

“No,” said Fairfax. “Something closer than that. So close that the universe can’t always tell us apart. Didn’t I say at the start, how irritating it would be to be shackled to someone one didn’t even like? But then, that’s how it often is with brothers, isn’t it? Liking hardly comes into it.” And then, with a suddenness that astonished him, he told him: “Fairfax. My name is Fairfax.”

Erich regarded him for a moment, his pale eyes unblinking. There was two days’ growth of scruffy beard on his jaw; bruises, mottled and variegated, over half his face, the swelling almost concealing the sharp line of the cheekbones. “It hardly matters now.”

“It never has,” said Fairfax. “We come from different worlds - we never have really been able to do anything for one another but this. You need to carry on living. That’s all.”

For a long moment, Erich said nothing. His breath was catching a little in his chest. Fairfax wondered how much pain he was in: how far the morphine would have worn off since the last dose. He wondered what time it was. He had woken up wearing regulation-issue pyjamas, and his watch had been nowhere to be found. He wondered, suddenly, what they were making of his disappearance at home.

“He dragged a German pilot fifteen miles across the desert, in the heat of the day, you know,” said Erich. He spoke as though continuing a conversation he had been taking part in for hours. “He could have left him. He must have been a madman. A hero. Or perhaps the most perfect spy I have ever encountered. I expected a man like you - like me. He was nothing like us. He seemed as though he could never be anyone but himself.” He paused; reflected. “Perhaps he couldn’t. Perhaps that was the trick.”

Fairfax sighed. “And perhaps your decision to spare him made no difference at all. Perhaps you could have shot the fellow out of hand, squared it with your sense of honour and fair play, and still lost. You can’t know for certain.”

Something like a smile on Erich’s lips, a faint, contemptuous curl. “Perhaps I would always have failed, you mean.”

“Yes,” said Fairfax, “You wondered if perhaps there was a world where things ended differently, and perhaps there is; but perhaps you never stood a chance. All I know for sure is that where I come from, Jerusalem has fallen. The Ottomans are a spent force. We’ve got you on the run all through the Middle East. In this world, something has bought your side another six months of grace, and it seems more than likely that that something is you - El Shereef, Major Sterne, Erich von Stalhein, however many other names you’ve collected. That’s frankly astonishing. And perhaps you haven’t won the war for them, and perhaps I haven’t won it for us either, but perhaps we’ve both done more than anyone in their right minds could have expected us to do. Isn’t that enough?”

There, in a German hospital tent, where their talk was punctuated by the mutters and shouts of pain and fear from the other patients, by the soft tread of the orderlies and nurses; there, with the wound in his arm pulsing in time with the thudding of his heart; there, a world away from home, with his war fought and lost and with no one to hear but the man who the universe had selected as his alter ego, his doppelgänger, his twin, he could utter it, as he could nowhere else: oh, God, let it be enough. The sacrifices and the mistakes and the failures: let them have been enough, because he could do no more.

“Is it?”

And feeling the weight of Erich’s steel-sheened gaze on him, he laughed: because he was Guy Fairfax, and he too had learned many years ago to distrust all straight-forward answers. “I think perhaps it’ll have to be.”

He lay and watched a little while, as Erich’s eyes grew visibly heavier; he lay, with his hand over the other man’s, as if to keep him anchored there. He thought, once or twice, of saying something more: a thank you, perhaps, or a good luck, because he had the distinct feeling that he might not get many more chances to say them; but in the end he kept silent. They both knew what the other meant to say, after all. He watched, until Erich slept; and then closed his eyes himself.

He awoke in his own bed; his hand still curled around the empty air.