[ WP ] Hitler is getting tired of time travellers coming to assassinate him , so he travels forward in time to kill the inventor of the time machine , who travels back in time to kill Hitler .

I felt him coming a moment before he arrived of course; I was the one who solved The Equation, and no one understands it like I do. I was ready. Linda, bless her, was babbling as usual, but there was no time ( ironic, right? ) and so I pushed her rudely into the doorway of a department store and shouted, `` Stay!'' 
 
 I'd catch hell about that later, if there was a later. 
 
 He emerged about fifteen feet up the sidewalk, saw me and his face was all hate. I had expected to laugh at the mustache, the haircut -- he has become more of a caricature than a man -- but in the moment I could not find anything funny. There was nothing human about his mad lurch, as if every cell that made up the organism called Adolf Hitler wanted me murdered. 
 
 I had not bothered to learn German, and it was clear from his tone that whatever he said, it was n't flattery, `` Deine Oma masturbiert im stehen! Deine Mutter geht in der Stadt huren! Zerspringen!'' 
 
 I wondered for a moment at the elaborate chain of events, of timestream dilations, that must have occurred to bring him The Equation. The very first thing the very first person I showed it to tried to do was go back in time and kill Hitler, which resulted in a kind of bubbling. Earthquakes, floods, still a Hitler though. No one ever learned. They kept trying. Almost broke the world a few times, until me and a few other like-minded souls put a stop to it. 
 
 Now he was here, and he had the Knowledge, and he wanted my blood. Well, I maybe used to be a theoretical physicist, but a deep understanding of spacetime and a few thousand years of subjective time spent in places between spaces had made me something else. I dropped into the Material stance. Solid and connected to the earth and the moment, grounded in time. Low, legs spread, arms out. I could punch him out of space and time themselves from a position of such strength. 
 
 Except... Hitler's mad, animalistic charge halted and he stepped into the Relative stance. Tall and long and leaning back, undulating hands in front of him like a snake-charmer's dance. For the first time, I felt afraid, really afraid. 
 
 I said, `` Who taught you the Time Kata?'' 
 
 And in broken, but intelligible English, Adolf Hitler said, `` You. Did.'' 
 
 And he came at me. 
 
 I struck hard and time seemed to freeze around me; Linda half-rising with a dawning confusion on her face, the drivers and their cars, a bird in the air above. Everything was anchored in my stance and my will except for my enemy, who came on. He was still five feet away when, ten seconds before I had even assumed my stance, he punched me from behind. Linda was still on the steps, the bird was not visible. Not only did he know the forms, but he was *skilled*. 
 
 I changed to the Correspondence stance, and I lashed out with blows too fast for the naked eye to see, and they struck all about me. Windows shattered, cars were tossed aside and chunks of brick and building material filled the air. 
 
 And five seconds before that, Hitler was going for Linda, going for the woman I had loved, and then hated, and then resigned myself to and finally come to love again. Before I had pushed her away to safety, Hitler was there, driving a ridgehand toward her throat. 
 
 `` **NO! **'' 
 
 I had never used the Kata in anger. In theory it was not possible to do the mental math, to comprehend all the possibilities and to make the complex movements in anything but serenity, but I did. It stopped being something separate from me, and became a part of me, like an arm. 
 
 Like a dog shaking its fur dry I shrugged harsh and time sloughed off around me, I stepped outside it, and back to when Hitler had first emerged on the sidewalk. When he did, I was behind him, and I struck him with a double-fisted blow that broke his spine in two places. And then he emerged differently and deflected my blow with his shin, lashing out in a sidekick. I sidestepped it, but space bent and it struck me in the head hard enough to crack stone. I was seeing stars, but also seeing his hand perilously close to Linda's throat, and so I charged him, football tackle style, and when I hit him I poured all my rage and all my calculations into it, and we *fell*. 
 
 In the place which was simultaneously everything and nothing, we fought. He struck at me across time, and injuries befell me throughout my history. I was crippled as a child, sickly as a teenager. Broken again and again and each time it left scars of my body. But at the same time I struck him, breaking his hands before he ever learned to paint, crushing his throat and giving him a raspy voice that no man would follow, striking. 
 
 The aftershocks we created echoed throughout time. People died. Species went extinct. The earth groaned and heaved. Tsunamis and earthquakes swept throughout history, altering time forever. My final blow, struck with a hand full of broken bones attached to a ravaged body, struck Hitler my enemy straight through the moment he was born, and the force of my strike blew apart that time completely, destroying the Braunau am Inn in Austria and everything for fifty miles around it in an explosion of pure white light. 
 
 The injuries i had collected throughout my personal timeline were upon me then though, and as i lay in the crater I breathed wetly and looked up the stars. I had killed Hitler, surely that was something worth dying for. I closed my eyes and... 
 
 Suddenly it all made sense. I had spent years studying the math, which written out consumed three entire walls of my lab, and finally in a blast of intuition, I came to comprehend. It was *it*, The Equation, the theory of everything! As I studied it, I came to realize the ramifications, realize that anything was possible. You could gaze through time, gather unlimited energy... you could fix everything! 
 
 I turned to my TA Abraham and said, `` Do you see it?'' 
 
 He was nodding, almost feverish looking. He said, `` With this... we could do anything. Travel through time even.'' 
 
 And I saw that he was right. I laughed then, the laugh of a man victorious over something that had longed troubled him, and said, `` Let's go have a few pints in celebration, then go back in time and kill Hitler.'' 
 
 I laughed again, but Abraham did n't and we had some pints. I went home to Linda and we had a big fight because she was still mad about the affair. Abraham went and did his own thing, and then things started getting interesting.
