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his hand as she slipped into the night. He could remember its chiming the next day as he and his father made her coffin and together lifted it into the wagon to take her up the knoll to the family resting place, where two sisters now had their mother back again.
    That clock, so ornate and out of place with its gaudy Victorian styling, held the place of honor on the fireplace mantel in the Oval Office. He smiled at the thought. The weekly ritual of winding it always brought to him the hint of a memory of a childhood caress from a mother now fifty years at rest beneath the Nebraska sod. For those few moments it was as if she were still watching over him and demanding excellence in her stem yet gentle way. He had wound it before coming here; it would still be marking its course and his when he returned.
    A door opened. Resisting a momentary impulse to behave like an ordinary mortal, Harrison deliberately kept his back turned. After several seconds a throat cleared impatiently. The President of the United States remained motionless —then finally turned and stared unwaveringly into the eyes of Adolf Hitler.
    He had met him yesterday, but that was mere ritual. Even after the press had been shepherded out, there were still all the staffers, the military liaisons, the aides, and the routine of sitting at the long table exchanging genial platitudes. Now they were alone and it was for real.
    He studied his enemy closely. He had aged a great deal since the accident, but his were still the cold remorseless eyes of a shark on its unceasing search for prey. His shoulders were hunched, the left side of his face bore a blaze of scars from the plane crash that had almost killed him on December 6,1941, the day before Pearl Harbor.
    Neither Harrison nor the rest of the world could say for certain how different it all might have been if that plane crash had never happened. But Hitler knew. And Roosevelt had guessed about it, often speculating that if Hitler had been in charge during those crucial weeks in December of 1941 Germany might well have declared war on the United States. When Roosevelt spoke of it, it was in an almost wistful tone, as if he had actually wanted a two-front war. The thought of such a fight made Harrison shudder, but then again, things would have been settled now, one way or the other. Much as he may have wanted it, Roosevelt had not even attempted to get Congress to declare war against Germany. Congress had demanded blood in the Pacific, but thought that one war at a time was quite enough.
    The plane crash had dashed Roosevelt's hope that Hitler would take care of the problem for him. Hitler had spent several weeks in a coma, during which time a triumvirate composed of Göring, Goebbels, and Haider had taken charge. Realizing that they were on the edge of disaster in Russia, far from declaring war on the USA, the three immediately declared an end to unrestricted submarine warfare in the Atlantic, thereby blocking Roosevelt's hope for a final provocation. Next they had pulled off a masterful strategic withdrawal along the entire Russia front, falling back before the offensive of the Russian Siberian divisions.
    Had the German army followed the dark romanticism of Hitler's vision and never relinquished an inch of conquered territory, it was generally agreed, the Wehrmacht would have pretty much ceased to exist in the East. Instead, the Russians wound up exhausted and overextended, and the Nazi offensive was renewed in the spring. Meanwhile America, Russia's only real hope, had become fully committed in the Pacific. Before Hitler had recovered enough to resume power, the ruling triumvirate had managed to ameliorate and block the worst of Himmler's SS atrocities as well, committing the Reich to a quasi-independent Ukraine. Result: thirty-nine divisions of Ukrainian and anti-Communist Russians in the Nazi ranks. It did not matter that after the war the SS gained back its power in the eastern occupied lands. The war by then