Then I saw him working on graphs and scientific data in one of many cubicles that formed a concrete warren underground. One night when I had just got off to sleep, I woke with a start to find myself actually with him. At least that is what it seemed like. He, or I, for I suddenly realized that my ego had got into his body, was lying flat on the ground in pitch darkness. But the darkness lasted only a second, then I was aware of a hideous din and blinding flashes momentarily lighting up the scene all round. I knew then that I was in the middle of an appalling air-raid and that he had been knocked out by blast. The flashes showed a flat countryside, broken only by some groups of hutments and several long mounds with concrete entrances. I was absolutely terrified, but I picked myself up, ran like a hare for the nearest bunker and threw myself inside. In my panic I tripped, went head over heels down the steep stairs and knocked myself out at the bottom.

When I came to I was back in bed in Chicago, feeling like death and with frightful bruises on my head and body. Next day I heard over the radio about the great air-raid on the German Research Works at Peenemünde, and I had no doubt at all that it was there that I had been. I can only imagine that in the instant Lothar passed out he sent a spiritual SOS to me, and that on finding his body empty I entered and saved it.

On another night during the final phase of the war, Lothar called me to him. By then, of course, I had long-since realized that he was one of the scientists working on Long Range Rockets, as at times I had had brief visions of him both at work and taking his pleasure with several different German girls who had jobs at the Establishment. Owing to his hypnotic powers, few women could resist him; but his mind was always too much occupied with serious matters for him to become a slave to that sort of thing, and it has no bearing on what followed.

I think it was again fear that had caused him to call for me, but there was nothing I could have done to help him on this occasion, for he was fully conscious and I remained only an invisible presence by his side, sharing his desperate anxiety. The Russians had just surrounded the Station and entered it, and he was terrified that they would shoot him. But they didn't. They marched him off with a number of other scientists to a railway siding and they were all locked into cattle-trucks.