Algis Budrys's "Never Meet Again" opens in an alternate 1958 Berlin where Nazi Germany won the Second World War and now rules a triumphant thousand-year empire. Elderly Doctor Professor Jochim Kempfer, celebrated for wartime radar work, sits on his customary park bench beneath the linden trees, ostensibly enjoying a make-work government sinecure. In reality he has spent fifteen years secretly building, in a hidden basement laboratory, a device that exploits the theory of alternate probability worlds — machinery capable of shifting an object's atomic vibratory rate so that it slips sideways into a parallel universe. His true motive is grief and buried rage: early in the war he was coerced into surrendering his anti-submarine radar research to the state in exchange for a promise that his wife, Marthe, held under "protective custody," would be released once she recovered from a minor illness. The regime never freed her, and she died in the state's sanitarium. Kempfer has outwardly become a model of the regime's honored elite — decorated by Hitler himself — while inwardly he has never forgiven it. His old colleague and friend Georg Tanzler intrudes on his reverie, jovially urging him to stop mourning Marthe after so many years and to take a holiday to Carlsbad instead. The conversation forces Kempfer to admit aloud, for the first time, that he blames the state for Marthe's death and that he intends "to go away." Panicked that Tanzler will alert the authorities, Kempfer flees to his laboratory, locks himself in, and — as pursuers pound on the door — throws the activating switch. His body is wrenched into a neighboring probability-world's version of the same physical location, leaving the overloading apparatus to destroy itself (and singe Tanzler) behind him. He emerges in a drastically different Berlin: shabby, war-battered, patched together after "total reconstruction," patrolled by shapeless-uniformed Volkspolizei, and divided by a checkpoint between Soviet and American occupation zones. Kempfer realizes with mounting horror that in this world Germany lost the war catastrophically — bombed to ruin by American and British air power, overrun by the Soviets, and now split and impoverished under occupation. Lacking papers, money he can use (he has only smuggled diamond rings), or any understanding of this world's history, he wanders in cold and mounting cardiac distress, drawing suspicious stares for his fine "American-looking" clothes. Exhausted and near collapse against a building wall, surrounded by a wary, silent crowd too fearful of Soviet reprisal to approach him, he glimpses a passing woman and impulsively cries out "Marthe!" It is indeed a counterpart of his wife — in this timeline never imprisoned, never killed, but for years genuinely believing her Jochim died in the Allied bombing of Hamburg and visiting his grave with fresh flowers. Overjoyed and disoriented, she takes the ailing old man home, nurses him, and they attempt to reconcile their two histories: he tries to explain probability travel and his machine; she recounts her world's Germany — Goering's fatal strategic blunders, the failure to adopt radar, the crushing Russian and Allied victories, the atomic bombing of Japan, and the American-dollar-backed pressure now bearing down on the shattered postwar order. Kempfer begins to grasp that he must now rebuild his device from scratch, clandestinely, to escape again — a task that took him fifteen years the first time and that his failing body can no longer sustain. Before he can act, Marthe reveals she has already reported his fantastic story to her superior at the Ministry — Colonel Lubintsev, a genial, dangerously pragmatic Soviet advisor. Lubintsev arrives at the bedside, cheerfully unsurprised (the Soviets keep dossiers on every world's most valuable scientists) and openly delighted at the device's military potential: shuttling weapons, matériel, even revolutionary allies between probability-worlds to give the Soviet side a decisive advantage against the Americans. Marthe, now a committed servant of the new order, defends her decision to Kempfer as an act of love and duty, dismissing his horror as residual Nazi conditioning she is confident he'll unlearn; she weeps not for what has been done to him but for years of grief she fears may now feel wasted. Sealing the trap, the "technical expert" Lubintsev has brought in to assess Kempfer's needs turns out to be this world's own Georg Tanzler — eager, enthusiastic, and utterly unaware of any betrayal, greeting Kempfer as an old friend. Crushed — used by one totalitarian state and now claimed by another, and confronted with a Marthe who is loving but a stranger shaped by a different history, so that the wife he lost can, in the story's ironic sense, never truly be met again — Kempfer can only whisper that he intends to "go away again." But his machine's single irreplaceable use is spent, its components destroyed in the overload that powered his one crossing, and his body and fifteen years are already gone. The story closes on that quiet, defeated line, leaving Kempfer's promise of escape as a fantasy he has no way left to fulfill: he has traded one merciless system, and one grief, for another, permanently.
By Algis Budrys · First published 1957 · Genre: Science Fiction, Alternate History, Literary Fiction