Prologue (23 page)

DeVere shook his head. “Valerie might find it. I’ll keep it in my trunk under the spare. That way it’ll always be with me. Besides,” he added with a smirk, “my car is more reliable than yours.”

“Wait for the new timing chain. This thing can really move.” Ginter appeared relieved at the lighter turn in the conversation.

“Hutch knows not to put anything on her computer, right? You’ve talked to her?”

DeVere nodded. “I’ve told her they can hack into MIT. The history stuff is on her personal laptop that’s not on the MIT line. Nothing suspicious about a history prof with historical research, is there? Do you have the communicators?”

“Radios.
They were called radios back then. Everything is all set. I’ll keep them in the
Lynn
garage. A month from today,” Ginter added. “We’ll be ready to go.”

DeVere looked at his house. Through the slider he could see Valerie sitting at the kitchen table, her back to him, talking on the corded telephone. He reacted with a start when Grace moved into view, spoke quickly to her mother, and then moved away.

“Why the face?”
Ginter asked.

DeVere hesitated. He shifted and looked Ginter straight in the eye.

“You realize, of course, that this is a suicide mission?”

Ginter squinted in the sunlight.
“Suicide?
Hell, if you want we’ll let our Portland friend look around, get the O.K. from the Descendants, get more money, buy more fuel, and then I, not you, will go back on a test run. Just send me somewhere where they have lottery tickets.”

DeVere didn’t smile. “That’s not what I mean. Although I think we should do exactly that.
Without the lottery tickets.
No, I meant we are on a suicide mission either way. If we go back and are successful, we’ll be destroying ourselves. We might as well strap on a bomb and blow ourselves up on some train. We change one thing in history and everything changes. We convince Kennedy to invade
Cuba
, American soldiers die. Cubans die. They won’t live to have children. Their children won’t have children. If we stay and fight in
Southeast Asia
people will die there, in
South America
, in
Europe
. And not just in the Balkans. Maybe my parents never meet, or never marry, or don’t have sex the night I was conceived. Maybe they have kids, just not me. Maybe Peter lives. Multiply that by a million permutations. You and I and Amanda could all come back from 1962 and we could end up back here corporeally and all but there won’t be any Paul deVere, Lewis Ginter or Amanda Hutch.”

His lip trembled. “There may not be any Valerie deVere or”-he hesitated a moment–“Grace
deVere
.”

Lewis Ginter didn’t respond. He too looked up the hill and watched Valerie continue her animated telephone discussion.

“Can I kill them all?” deVere asked. “It’s not just me but what about them? What right do we have to-?”

“Kill someone who will never be born?” Ginter finished.

“But what happens to them?” deVere continued. “What happens to all these people who no longer exist? Who will never be conceived, sure, but they exist now. Heck, that house may not even exist. There may be a strip mall here. We’ll reappear at MIT where no one will have heard of Lewis Ginter or Paul deVere. Assuming there even is still an MIT. What if, in the world we create, things are worse-nuclear holocaust, ecological disaster? We could be non-persons in a different world.
Drifters.
Homeless people in a world we won’t know. If we are successful we may be on a suicide mission.
For what?
To stop the East from taking over?
To prevent most of the
United States
from becoming Red?
What lives will be left? Where’s our reward for destroying everything we know?
In heaven?”

Lewis Ginter remained quiet on the bench, his eyes focusing on the woods at the rear of the clearing.

“I don’t know what to tell you,” Ginter began. “We don’t know whether changing history changes life forces. David theorized that life forces were static, that there would always be a Paul deVere or Lewis Ginter, maybe in just a different form or with another name...”

DeVere grunted.

“But hey,” Ginter continued, “you might be right. Look, I don’t want to sound corny or trite but there is never success without sacrifice, and sometimes that sacrifice is the ultimate one. People die in every military operation, but that doesn’t make the operations unjust.”

“Tell that to the dead, their families and friends.”

“Yeah, well, what do we do that doesn’t have consequences? If 100,000 cars are built in
Detroit
we know that a certain number of people will be killed by them. Yet we still build them.”

“That’s different.”

“Is it?” Ginter asked. “Why?”

DeVere waved him off. “You’re being pedantic.
It’s
real people we’re talking about. Although, who knows, maybe we’ll go back and find out that we can’t interact with the physical world, we’ll just float around in a different plane unable to affect anything. Like the souls Jacob Marley describes to Scrooge,” he added with a wry chuckle.

Ginter nodded. “I’ve thought of that. There is a test we could run if we get the money. We could build a canister with a spring loaded robot arm-a sort of catapult attached to it. We could load the arm with a biodegradable object, like an apple. We could send the canister back to the middle of nowhere for two hours, and make sure that the spring is powerful enough to launch the apple beyond the mouth of the wormhole one hour after arrival. When the canister comes back without the apple, we know that quantum mechanics exists in the time travel realm and that the traveler will be able to interact with the physical world of the past. We make the object to be tossed biodegradable to minimize the risk of the object itself somehow affecting anything. Send it back to a desert or whatever.”

“Not bad,” deVere agreed, suddenly intrigued. “Why not ice?
Prevents the possibility of an apple starting a forest in the middle of a desert and changing the environment.”

“I thought of ice. But if the canister comes back without ice how do we know the ice didn’t just melt in the wormhole?”

DeVere nodded and pursed his lips. “O.K.,” he said.
“How about two cubes?
Right next to each other?
One on the catapult and one in a net of some sort attached to the canister. Find a smaller window of time and bring the canister back. If the netted cube is still there and the other one is not, then the catapult worked.”

Ginter nodded.
“Even better.”

“But not perfect,” deVere said. “The problem is that launching an ice cube, or anything else, does not prove that whatever goes back can necessarily interact. It might still just hover in suspended animation outside the mouth of the wormhole. The launch might be successful but it might just be a launch along its own plane.”

“And you don’t think that the canister we sent to the
Concord
Bridge
disproves that?”

“Actually, I don’t,” deVere said. “The chronometer was solid when I picked it up. But what was it for that year when originally it had not been there? Was it physically present? Physicists have argued this one for years. We have to find out before we risk people.”

“So, we need to send back a canister that can interact with the past by bringing something back.”

DeVere nodded.

“A drill bit,” Ginter said.
“Sent to the middle of our favorite desert and scoop up some identifiable sand.”

DeVere nodded again. “Not a bad idea.”

Ginter let out a low chuckle. “You’re right.
Of course.
We do need to do more experiments.”

“
Which means we need to contact this Pam woman and let her see what we’re doing.
”

Ginter shook his head. “I don’t like that. I don’t know her. She was a friend of Pomeroy’s and he’s disappeared. I have no contacts in
Portland
. Don’t even like the town.”

“Can we scam her?” deVere asked. “Show her something else?”

“She knows it’s at MIT.”

“Well, can we show her the lab but tell her the Accelechron is something else?” DeVere was desperate.

“I have an idea.” Ginter reached for his cell phone, laid it on the picnic table, and began fishing through his wallet. He located a slip of paper and picked up his phone. He studied the slip and began punching numbers.

“You’re going to call her on an open cell phone?” deVere asked.

“What do you think? I’m supposed to leave a note for her in a secret location at
midnight
? Don’t be corny. I’ll be discreet.”

DeVere sighed. “I’d think you’d be better organized with women’s phone numbers, given your proclivity to collect them.”

Ginter grinned. He looked at the phone, frowned, and walked up the hill toward the house.

“The reception is only slightly better up there,” deVere called out after him. “At least you don’t have her on speed dial.”

“I’m actually calling Lorrie to set it up with her and Eckleburg,” Ginter said as he walked toward the garage.

As Ginter moved up the slope deVere looked back at his house. Valerie had disappeared from view and the kitchen was empty. He turned back to the woods, stood up, and sat on the table. He raised his face and let the sun’s rays warm his skin. If all went well, in one month he, Lewis and Amanda would be plunging back to the past to change things. And maybe to destroy everything they knew. They would be creating a new world, a different world. For a moment he thought of his grandfather, and his grandfather’s overwhelming faith. His grandfather had believed in God, and Paul wondered whether he should also.
Genesis.
That was the story of the creation. Of course he had studied it in religion classes in college. Was that what he was doing now, creating a brand new world?
A brave new world?
If they succeeded, only he, Lewis and Amanda would remember the old one.

It’s not a bad life here. I have a nice home, a nice position, a great daughter; I’m respected and liked by my students. Heck, even
Arnold
leaves me alone. The squishers don’t harass me. What right do I have to smash up everything? Just to save one person?