The laboratory turned out to be in the basement of the administration building. It looked like a power plant. Huge copper power cables snaked around a metal sphere in the center of the room. Monitors and meters were everywhere. There was a shielded area, not unlike a dentist or doctor's x-ray booth, with some controls and a thick window.
They spent more than hour watching James and his Russian assistants prepare the first glass bead for its shot in time. Then they huddled behind the lead wall. "You wouldn't get an exposure of even a full Rad if you stood right next to the thing, James said. "But if you're going to be around for a while it adds up." At James's invitation, Bill Wirtz pushed a button on the wall, there was a loud bang, and the bead was gone. "That was the bead that appeared in front of you, Dr. Wirtz." James informed them.
"You're using a lot of power." Sally observed.
"Yes," James replied. "We pay dearly for megawatt primary feeders. We have our own transformer substation here and
it feeds a large capacitor bank. I think it's the largest laser capacitor bank in the world." Sally was impressed, although again the installation she saw had an unfinished look that spoke of less than optimal engineering.
The Americans and the two older Woo brothers were back in the conference room just before noon.
"Okay," Bill Wirtz lead off "let's say we believe that you have these capabilities. Why are you spending all of this money to stop a war?"
"What is in it for us?" The oldest Woo replied with a smile at his own idiom. "It is simple. We are an international family. Our father was sent to Indonesia by his father over 60 years ago. But our Father's Father and his brothers had enterprises in throughout Vietnam and Laos. In the end, they lost everything and none of our family survived. We now face an uncertain future. China claims more than 80 percent of the South China Sea where we trade. We believe, and without the benefit of your computers, Dr. Wirtz, that Malaysia, Indonesia, Vietnam, and the Philippines will all come into conflict with China. Who knows what the Japanese or Americans will do? We can and do trade with all sides, but no good really comes from war."
The younger Woo then continued, "But, Dr. Wirtz, we asked you early in your research for forward projections based on a strong Vietnam in the 1970s. Those projections showed robust commercial and trading ties between the nations South of China. We believe those projections. We believe that a strong Vietnam, one without what is called
the American War, would have served as a building block for trade. Your governments of the nineteen sixties and seventies were correct when they viewed Vietnam as being part of a domino effect, but they only saw it in a negative sense -dominos falling. Here, we build on our dominoes, we don't knock them down. Vietnam is at the center of the area South of China. It is the key domino for growth and prosperity."
Woo paused a moment for effect. Then he said, "Each of you might have different motivations. Perhaps they are intellectual or emotional. So, in order to further reward you, we will make you this offer. If you give us a logical scenario that we agree uses our ability to move things through time to reduce the chance of the war between Vietnam and the United States, we will pay each of you two million US dollars in any account you name, or in gold, or however you want it."
Sally has been thinking hard. "But this is the old paradox from science fiction stories. How do we know if we successfully influenced the past? How do things change? Do we remember? It's all very confusing."
Ted said flatly, "Where did the glass beads come from? If they appeared in the air and then we gave them to you in order to make them appear in the air again, where did they come from?"
The younger Woo replied with more animation than they had seen before, "We believe that the universe has a great deal of flexibility. It is so vast that some time
paradoxes are handled like the shifting of sand on a beach. They are of no consequence. But we do know that if we had tried to use other new beads to make the trip, we would have needed a great deal more power and there would have been even more heating. Other time paradoxes might be more like an earthquake. We do not pretend to know the answers to those questions. But we believe we can change things and we believe that the change we are proposing will generally be for the better. Providing you can tell us how to do it! What small object can we send back and where do we send it in order to stop a terrible war?"
The meeting went on through a buffet lunch, but then the four Americans declared that they wanted to walk and talk. The Woo family wisely left them alone. Surprisingly, Bill had little to say.
Janet lead off, "It's scary." she said as they walked in a tight group, practically in step. "I don't think I believe it, but then I want to believe it."
Sally felt the same way, but she had more hope. "Think of all the lives we could save. Think of the waste of national wealth."
The quiet Ted was intense,"TheVietnam War accelerated the tearing of the social fabric of the US. Our leaders were wrong and many people knew it. But the social institutions protected the leaders and forever lost their foundations. Damn!"
Wirtz said simply, "If this is true, and I can't see why these people would lie, then this is the fruition of my work."
"But how are we going to make the scenario work?" Janet asked. She and Wirtz had been working on ideas for the computer game for months. During the flight, Sally had learned that they weren't even close to solving the scenario.
"Are we agreed that we are going to do this?" Ted asked.
"We've got to try." Sally replied. "I'm for it." Janet said.
"I want to see what it's about." Ted added. "I've got thirty days leave. I'll stay with you. But, I'll say right now that this offer of money is strange. I'm not sure we'd ever see it."
"Why not? You don't trust these guys?" Sally asked.
"No, I don't trust them, but Bill, what about the time paradox? How would we know?" Ted asked.
Bill Wirtz said, "I saw that too. What Ted means is that if you change the past, how do you know you changed the past? Since the past isn't what it was, you don't need to change it, so you never even thought about changing it."
"I see, it." Sally said. "But it makes my head hurt. Okay, no million dollars in gold coins. I still want to see if we can do it."The others nodded.
Bill Wirtz said, "Thank you. Thank you all. Maybe together we can work this out. I admit that I'm a little frightened, but I'm also very very curious."
Sally thought she heard Ted mutter, "Curiosity smeared the cat." but the others had turned back toward the administration building. She took quick steps to keep up.
CALL ON JOE
August 14-21 1995
Ammero Compound
Indonesia
Excerpt from the Personal Narrative
of Brigadier General Ted Arthurs
Recorded May 2006
CLASSIFIED CONFIDENTIAL / TA
"I
was nervous the whole time.I didn't know if I was stopping a war or starting one."
Excerpt from the Personal Narrative
of Dr. William E. Wirtz, PhD
Recorded July 2006
CLASSIFIED CONFIDENTIAL / TA
"It was about August of 1995 when I really began to smell a rat.Until then, events were coming at me and I was trying to function like a normal academic. I ignored what I didn't understand and focused on small jobs. The big picture unfolded with a bang."
For the next week, they worked with little sleep. The graphics hardware was slightly different from the Florida system and there were some changes in the program to adapt to the new hardware. It took Bill and Janet a full day to get used to operational changes. Sally and Ted focused on opening connections to new databases. Now that they knew they were doing more than making games, they got very serious about their sources of information. Sally used the link to Florida to extend connections to the Kennedy Library and to other collections of information in electronic format.
With the connections made, Sally and Ted formed a second scenario team. They didn't have the detailed understanding of the historical database that Janet and particularly Bill did, but they had some ideas. Bill and Janet had worked with broad ideas concerning moving pieces of information into the past. Ted wanted to focus on the moment of time of the Kennedy assassination in Dallas.
The most promising idea was to send tacks onto the streets of Dealey Plaza in hope of stalling and re-routing the motorcade by causing flat tires.The tacks had to arrive just before the motorcade or else they'd be swept away. But if they aimed for moments before the motorcade, there were good chances of tacks trying to appear inside of people crowding along the route. Bill commented, "It's simple, it might work, it's better than anything I came up with, but we might kill some folks."
Sally and Ted continued to play with ideas aimed at avoiding the assassination, but without much luck. Sally saw
a new side of Ted. He was considerate, thoughtful, and as brilliant in his own way as Bill. But he was also very private and strictly business. He spent what little free time they allowed themselves in his room or on long jogs around the company property. Three more days of work went by with no success. During a coffee break prepared by the attentive staff, Sally said, "Let's open the scope, Ted. Let's pull back to Kennedy's birth and step through history. Maybe we'll pick up something."
Ted said, "It will take a lot of computing power. Let's do it when Bill and Janet aren't working so we can grab all of the parallel processors."
Each team had found that it was best to work a few hours on and a few hours off. During the off time they did research, brainstormed for ideas, or just sat staring off into space while their unconscious minds tried to fit pieces into unseen puzzles.
Sally and Ted rested and then picked up when Bill and Janet took a long break. They were pulling back and resetting the History Research Universal Database when Sally noticed a bright spike in the middle of 1943. "Wait, what is that?" she said over the intercom to Ted. He was on it instantly.
They magnified the event and found that it was August
12, 1943. They asked the computer for the significance and
the answer was unnerving. It was the date that Joe Kennedy
Junior, the older brother of the future president, died on a
bombing mission.
The size of the event showed that the computer saw it as a pivotal point for many scenarios. They paused for a moment and then Ted said, "Well, we're in the business of seeing "what if".. so let's see what happens if Joe doesn't die."
Ted selected the event with the computer cursor and literally pushed it down into the background. In effect, telling the computer that it didn't happen. The computer then remade history, but it needed more information.
They spent the next hour dissecting the event, telling the computer to go out to other libraries for more information, and looking at different alternatives. At one point, Ted dumped Bill and Janet's work out of the active memory and into long term storage in order to make more fast memory available for the new data.
As the processing level quieted down,Ted and Sally road the time line back toward the present. When they pushed into the 60s, things looked quite different. There was no Kennedy assassination and no war involving Americans in Vietnam. All because Joe Kennedy Junior didn't die.
Sally and Ted secured the simulation, saved all of the data, and went to get Bill and Janet. It was raining out, so the four met in the lounge instead of taking their normal walk.
"Give me the stuff you've got from the Kennedy Library. Let's see what happened to young Joe." Bill said. Bill reviewed several pages of printouts and then told them an interesting story.
"If you've seen any of the television documentaries on the Kennedy's, you know that the old man, Joe Senior, had great plans for Joe Junior. He was the one who was, in the old man's mind, supposed to be the President. Jack was always very competitive, but Joe seemed to have a leg up, until the war."
"Jack became a hero through the adventure of the PT-109. He saved a crewman by swimming with a belt in his teeth, led his crew through danger, and all that. A public hero. Joe Junior was flying combat missions in Europe, but he hadn't been scratched. According to biographers, Joe was looking for some way to upstage, or at least keep up with, his younger brother."
"The Allies were looking for a way to knock out the launching sites of the V-1 rockets. They had lost over a hundred airplanes and nearly eight hundred airmen in attacks on the launching facilities. Joe was getting ready to return to the States when he heard about the V-1 mission. The idea was to load a bomber with all of the explosives it could carry and then to remotely control it, using television, to the target and then to crash it into the target. But they didn't have enough control over the aircraft to take off. They didn't control the power, flaps, landing gear, or any of that. So someone had to take the plane off the ground, get it on the straight and level pointed in the right direction, and then bail out. Joe volunteered."
"Wow." Ted observed, "a war of cruise missiles. Using a remotely guided cruise missile to take out the basically unguided cruise missiles."
"Exactly!" Bill replied.
"So how did Joe Junior die?" Janet asked.
"He got the plane, named Zootsuit Black, according to this history, up to speed and altitude. Then he transmitted the code word, "Spade Flush", meaning that he was going to turn on the television transmitter and remote control system before bailing out. The plane was carrying ten tons of TNT. It exploded in a huge fireball over the English coast just after Kennedy made his transmission."
"RE" Sally said quietly. "What?" Janet asked.
"RF... radio frequency energy. The TV transmitter must have been operating on aVHF frequency... probably above 100 megahertz. The RF must have gotten into the explosives triggering mechanism and set it off. We know a lot more about RF bypassing and choking now, particularly for VHF and UHF frequencies, than they did then."