converted to the godlessness of The Guide, and other thousands of his
dupes are dying, unprepared to face their Maker!"

"All right, you invented a time-machine," Benson said. "In civvies, I
was only a high school chemistry teacher. I can tell a class of juniors
the difference between H_{2}O and H_{2}SO_{4}, but the theory of
time-travel is wasted on me.... Suppose you just let me ask the
questions; then I'll be sure of finding out what I don't know. For
instance, who won the war I was fighting in, before you grabbed me and
brought me here? The Commies?"

"No, the United Nations," Anthony told him. "At least, they were the
least exhausted when both sides decided to quit."

"Then what's this dictatorship.... The Guide? Extreme Rightist?"

"Walter, you'd better tell him," Gregory said.

* * * * *

"We damn near lost the war," the man in the black jacket and striped
trousers said, "but for once, we won the peace. The Soviet Bloc was
broken up--India, China, Indonesia, Mongolia, Russia, the Ukraine, all
the Satellite States. Most of them turned into little dictatorships,
like the Latin American countries after the liberation from Spain, but
they were personal, non-ideological, generally benevolent,
dictatorships, the kind that can grow into democracies, if they're given
time."

"Capitalistic dictatorships, he means," the cadaverous man in the blue