Smedley Faversham was no fool, and he saw at once the danger of his plan. He must not go rushing blindly yesterwards, changing the past willy-nilly. If Smedley Faversham killed Hitler at the wrong point in space-time, history might proceed along an alternate timeline that was actually worse, not better, than the one in which Hitler had lived. Smedley would have to do his homework. He jotted a simple memorandum in his datebook ("KILL HITLER," neatly lettered on a blank page underneath the heading Things to Do Today), and then he searched for the ideal nexus of space-time in which to perform the grim deed.

It would hardly do, Smedley thought, to kill Hitler in Berlin in 1933, at a point in the timeline when he was already Chancellor of Germany, and had much popular support. "If I kill Hitler in 1933, one of his followers will take his place ... and the timeline will not change significantly," Smedley theorized. "So I'll just have to kill Hitler before that point. I must go farther back in time."

Yes, but when? Smedley rejected the notion of killing Hitler at the moment of his birth in Austro-Hungary in 1889. A newborn baby--even a baby who was destined to invade Poland--had committed no crime punishable by death. Nor could Smedley bring himself to do the deed at any point in the timeline during Hitler's boyhood in Linz.

"I must kill the man who committed the supreme evil, not the innocent child who became that man," Smedley vowed. "But in order to alter the timeline, and save humanity from Hitler's evil, I must kill him before he does anything particularly evil."