Never Meet Again

What if the war had ended differently? For Professor Jochim Kempfer, this isn't a theoretical question. After years of building a device that tears open the membrane between realities, he steps through into a world where Germany lost WWII, where Russian tanks roll through Berlin, where his wife Marthe still lives. The life he left behind was a gray drift of grief and routine, haunted by memories of her. Now he must confront the unbearable possibility that in another version of history, their sacrifice meant something, that their life could have been different. Budrys builds his alternate Berlin with precise, unsettling detail: the food lines, the occupation, the quiet humiliations of defeat. But the real horror isn't political. It's the question that haunts every page: did we choose our lives, or did we simply end up in the world we deserved? A haunting meditation on grief, regret, and the impossible weight of 'what if.'