Vicky in Time

About the Book

Three time travelers, two male physicists and the virtual wife of one of them, Barbara, a psychologist, seek to preclude the World Wars by preventing birth of Kaiser Wilhelm. They kidnap Queen Victoria's daughter Vicky before her marriage to the Kaiser's father. On the way back to 2011, their time machine runs out of fuel (fusionable deuterium) in 1935. Vicky accepts salvation from the awful life of her own history, and all four persons assume 1935 identities and adapt to circumstances. Barbara gets a WPA grant for a theatre troupe and develops Vicky into a stage and then radio personality. Learning that the first Great War occurred anyway, and foreseeing the second, the men begin with a foreclosed machine shop in the Great Depression. In national defense effort, they build a corporate empire from scratch, so as to finally produce more deuterium. Among all of the details, this is the story of evolution of a unique extended family.

About the Author

Gilbert S. Bahn is a retired engineer and current free-lance historical researcher with a storyteller’s imagination. Characters form, incidents occur, lifelines develop, and then a story gets committed to paper. His first novel was begun over forty years ago and went on the shelf while he pursued his career in research and development, turning out over 30 technical papers, four books, and an international technical journal which he founded and edited for five years. During that period, as a Boy Scout leader, he also conceived Stories from a Hundred Campfires, a work still in progress. Upon retirement he conducted an exhaustive study of conservative Democratic Senators targeted by FDR for defeat in the 1938 primary elections. Recently he has concentrated on historical demography. Writing fiction is his form of relaxation.