'Who?' Ben demanded.

'You know how it works, Ben. We can't target an individual in the past. We can only broadcast. And hope there are minds as receptive as yours – natural radio receivers, waiting to pick up news from the future.'

Julia said, 'You put in the prophetic stuff as a sort of lure, didn't you, Rory? You sent it back beyond Claudius to the year of Christ's birth, to catch the attention of the early Christians. You hoped to snag your dupe in the past by giving him a bit of foreknowledge that could make him powerful or rich, for instance about the building of Hadrian's wall. And you hoped that that power would be used as you intended: to fulfil your ultimate command.'

'To do what?' Ben asked.

Julia grinned. 'Why, to kill the Emperor Constantine!'

Ben found himself on the edge of panic. 'Rory – we discussed the dangers – what gives you the right to make such choices?'

'What gives us the right not to use such a gift?'

Ben thought fast. 'But this is just fantasy. Just talk. For Constantine was not cut down before Nicea, was he? And the Church was not restored to some state of innocence. The Pope still sits in Rome.'

'Rory failed,' Julia said.

'Well, I can't deny that,' Rory said.

'But he made the attempt, Ben.'

'That's impossible.'

'No.' She smiled. 'I have proof.'

Rory's eyes narrowed. 'What do you mean by that?'

'The Party has a rather good research institution. It's called the Ahnenerbe – it reports to Himmler, you know. Some quite innovative research into racial origins. I wrote to them…' She opened her briefcase and extracted a battered volume. It was a history of Rome.

Her Nazi scholars had not been able to retrieve Rory's testament in full. But elements of it had been recorded in an autobiographical work by the Emperor Claudius. That work too was lost, but there were references to it in other histories, from which, with a little care and some guesswork, some of Rory's lines had been reconstructed. She passed her book to Ben, opening it at a marked page. He read in disbelief, the text pale on old, yellowed paper: