And so the infinite tunneling pathways of Q remained undiscovered, unexplored, unexploited.
Until now. She had not created them, merely intuited their existence, studied and defined them, as electricity, atomic fission, and DNA had been illuminated and used by humans, and created her Device. Her alternative to war’s solution to war, which always resulted in more war. An alternative that might bring peace.
And suddenly, now reached backward, forward, sideways, around all corners, to encompass Everything. The singing strings of which the universe was composed could be known, and used. Humans could learn how to play their own music of time at last.
At least they would at some point in this process, which might be a long one. Or which might happen in just one or two generations: an evolutionary leap.
That was, roughly, what Dr. Eliani Hadntz was thinking on this particular afternoon, November 22, 1963, in this new timestream.
She perched on a stool in a dingy bar in Dallas, wearing jeans and a plaid shirt, a red bandana knotted around her neck, drinking a cold long-neck Bud while pool balls cracked off one another behind her. She was watching John F. Kennedy’s speech at the Dallas Trade Mart, the speech he had intended to make the afternoon of November 22, 1963, on a small black-and-white TV that sat on the bar. She was the only one in the bar who seemed interested in the President’s speech. She’d paid the bartender a dollar to change the channel.
She had to meet with Bette at some point. Hadntz was not sure where Bette was right now, but she was in extreme danger. Bette was resourceful. She would know what to do in any circumstance, yet Hadntz was uneasy. The exceedingly complex, vast computational power of Q had shown that World Prime had been headed toward some very heavy storms, which included global environmental disaster, increased proliferation of nuclear weapons and the will to use them, financial disasters of great magnitude, and widespread, willful ignorance of scientific education. Consciously controlled evolution would ensue on this new path, where the Dance family, except for Bette, resided now. But whose consciousness, whose idea of goodness? Hadntz was not the first person to think deeply about how to bring about the greatest good for the greatest number of people, plants, animals, and the living membranes of air and water in which they lived, but she was the first who had ever attempted to try to affect such change using the tools of mathematics, physics, and the biological sciences.
Others who knew about the existence of the Device were few, but powerful, and most definitely not altruistic. Would Q, at this point, even allow itself to be used for a negative purpose? It might still be fragile enough to be vulnerable. And certainly Sam, Megan, Jill, and Brian Dance were fragile, though Sam and Jill were the only ones who knew about the Device. And Wink—Alan Winklemeyer—knew. His timestream had diverged from World Prime within a day after the Device’s true activation, in the presence of Sam and Wink, in the observation plane that flew with the
Enola Gay
. Wink was a curious man. Rather a playboy, he had never married, and found himself, with the rest of their Army compatriots, in Sam’s company during their reunions—though he and Sam were the only ones who realized the intersection of timestreams, that nexes, and knew how it had come about. Since then, he had gained some skill in traversing timestreams, as had Hadntz long ago. But where was he now?
Ah, where were they all? Dead and gone; ashes. Her renowned father, lecturer in physics in Vienna, who had enabled her physics doctorate; her mother, Rosa, with a medical degree from Switzerland, the only place she could get one in Europe at the time, but could not practice, nor own property, in Vienna. Freud, in whose salons Hadntz had participated; Lise Meitner, whom she had met at the German front in Lviv, Poland, 1915, where she was doctoring and Meitner was taking X-rays and avoiding developing poison gas at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute. Her former fiancé, who died in her arms in that same hospital, gassed, who had married another woman because he had not wanted to marry a woman doctor … so very, very many, gone in this war-torn century. Rosa had died in a concentration camp at the end of the war, captured in a hospital in Budapest, while Eliani had been elsewhere in Europe, developing her Device, which might save millions of future children from the same fate: the most terrible choice she had ever made, for surely, she could have saved her mother. Yet, her mother would have understood her choice completely, for she had fiercely reared her daughter to make such choices, to be in a position to be able to actually make changes. Big changes.
Hadntz dashed away tears with a bar napkin. She had neither time nor tolerance for self-pity. She had made hard choices. No one would ever know their depth, or their cost.
She had recruited Bette during Kristallnacht, in Vienna, and Bette had worked her own relationship with Dulles and the OSS to enable secret development of the Device, which kept it out of the hands of any government. Bette, and Sam, had paid the price too, of their own free will. Their only mistake had been in thinking they could protect their children.
She, Hadntz, could seemingly live “forever,” whatever that meant, fragmented among timestreams, continuing her work. In other timestreams, which repeatedly branched, she was an internationally lauded scientist. But she was repeatedly and strongly drawn to this timestream, just one step removed from that of her birth. If hunger for a long life had ever mattered to her, that hunger was long extinguished—except for her desire to help humanity change for the better. After her husband had died, and after all the atrocities she had witnessed, during two world wars that lay bare the darkest corners of humanity’s appetite for atrocity, her own life seemed unimportant to her, just one life among billions. But on a larger scale, regarding her work, it mattered tremendously. She still envisioned an egalitarian world, free of all that was worst in human nature. An Africa, Middle East, Asia, and South America free from the legacy of colonization, artificial nations, corruption. That world was based on universal, science-based education, which Dr. Montessori had so brilliantly pioneered, and which continued to evolve as its tenets were confirmed by FMRI and other tools. The path was not easy, but her training in the biological as well as physical sciences was an unusual combination, giving her a uniquely wide view of the physicality of consciousness, and of the brain’s astounding plasticity, in which she placed all her faith. Change for the better could and would sweep across the world, perhaps in a very short time, much as the printed word had washed away the Dark Ages. But
this
change would spring from human biology itself.
Focusing once again on a small, black-and-white Kennedy, Eliani Hadntz allowed herself a rare second of satisfaction: surely there were a lot of pissed-off people in Washington right now.
Familiar heartache eclipsed her satisfaction. At least, this sadness confirmed, for her, that she was still human. This event, for those who could straddle the timestreams—and this event would, in itself, help spread that capacity—spectacularly confirmed the existence of the Device, which she, Bette, Sam, and Wink had kept secret from most of the intelligence community. They would relentlessly pursue Bette and her family for the notes, the knowledge. For the Device itself.
Bette would have to vanish.
Hadntz motioned to the bartender to turn up the volume as Kennedy wound up his speech:
“Finally, it should be clear by now that a nation can be no stronger abroad than she is at home. Only an America that practices what it preaches about equal rights and social justice will be respected by those whose choice affects our future. Only an America that has fully educated its citizens is fully capable of tackling the complex problems and perceiving the hidden dangers of the world in which we live. And only an America which is growing and prospering economically can sustain the worldwide defenses of freedom, while demonstrating to all concerned the opportunities of our system and society.”
Equal rights. Social justice. Education. Economics. Those were the high points, and she fully agreed. Who wouldn’t? The main question was whether or not Kennedy had the clout to carry through on his vision.
At least now he had a chance to try.
Hadntz slid off the barstool, slapped a dollar on the counter, and headed for the door. She had to keep watch over the Dance family now. They were her responsibility.
It was time to get back to work.
She knew by now: The War, and her work on the Device, would never end.
Bette
December 1963, Battle Creek, Michigan
T
HE MAN BEHIND
the mahogany desk at General Mills in Battle Creek, Michigan, responded to the secretary on his intercom: “Who?”
“Mrs. Bette Elegante.”
“I don’t recall the name. Do I have an appointment with her?”
“Yes, sir.”
“What is the nature of the appointment?”
“She says that it is national interest.”
“Tell her she has five minutes.”
The woman who entered his spacious office on that winter day wore a subdued black business suit. Her blond hair was perfectly coiffed in a flip. High heels showed off rather spectacular legs.
He rose and held out his hand. “Hello. Fred Alexander.”
She shook his hand firmly and quickly. “My name is Bette Elegante, and I would like to propose a business arrangement. My firm has developed a line of inexpensive, exciting toys for cereal boxes.”
“We already have arrangements with—”
She had already set her briefcase on his desk. She opened it and took out a plastic case, the lid of which displayed a picture of a large American flag planted on what appeared to be the moon.
He leaned forward. “All right, as long as you’re here, what do you have?”
She opened the box, removed one small figure, and set it on his desk. It reminded him of the green plastic soldiers his boys played with, but it was a bit larger, and brightly colored. “This is an astronaut.”
“A what?”
“That is what we will be calling people who go into space. Look. The helmet comes off.”
“Isn’t that … a girl? Is she … colored?”
“Oh, yes. We will have girls, boys, black, white, and in between.”
“Well, I don’t know…”
“This is a space capsule. See how the door opens?” She popped one of the tiny figures inside. “And this is a launchpad. You operate it with a rubber band—like so.” A tiny rocket, with the capsule snapped onto the top, flew across the room. She walked over, stooped with fascinating grace, and picked it up. “The capsule separates from the rocket as soon as it gets into space. Oh, here are some cards—you get one in each box of cereal—that give facts. Like, ‘Where does space start, anyway?’”
“I don’t know.”
“Sixty-two miles, or one hundred kilometers, above the Earth.” She handed him the rocket and space capsule. “Just pop that off—that’s right. Kind of fun, isn’t it? Kids will love it. Their parents will have to buy a lot of cereal to complete the set—which we plan will continually grow in size.” She opened another small plastic box. “Here are some components of the planned moon colony. President Kennedy mentioned one in his last speech.”
“Yes, yes.” He pointed. “What’s that there?”
After fifteen minutes of examining the toys and putting them through their paces, he had assembled, with Bette’s help, a moon colony complete with twenty different astronauts and scientists. Finally he looked up. “And how many different toys?”
“Fifty.”
“That’s a lot of cereal.”
“Exactly.”
“I’m interested. What do I do?”
Bette took a contract from her briefcase. “Sign here.”
“I’ll have our lawyers look this over.”
“Of course. You can get in touch with me at our office. Here’s the number.”
“This is an exclusive, correct?”
“Of course. It’s all in the contract.”
* * *
It was late afternoon when Bette walked out into downtown Battle Creek, and the sky was darkening. An icy wind blew a curtain of snow down Main Street. The sidewalks and street were narrow corridors bounded by mountains of plowed-up snow.
Another step completed. She had appointments with the other big cereal manufacturers, and had slightly varying lines of toys for each of the big cereal manufacturers—different colors, different designs. She’d hired a woman, back in Virginia, to answer the phone number she’d given and take messages.
Her black Mercury Comet station wagon was parked on the next block, and she managed to keep her composure until she flung her briefcase into the backseat and slid into the front seat. She slammed the door and leaned her forehead against the steering wheel.
Bette had at least realized why Hadntz did not seem to age in a normal way. She ping-ponged around in time. Whatever that meant. Whatever time was. Bette had experienced that, now, and it was simply sad, and wrenching.
She wondered where—or, to put it differently,
when,
Hadntz was now. Certainly, she would meet Hadntz again, and she didn’t know what the good doctor’s intentions would be, at that point. They were ever changing, based on a much wider palette of possibilities than Bette’s.
Bette’s intentions, on the other hand, were absolutely clear. The essential agents in Hadntz’s Device, which fostered altruism, were also in the cereal toys she had just sold to General Mills. These agents were transmittable, through touch, and through the very air. They formed networks, which would grow. Their molecular design came from another time line, one in which engineering had accomplished molecular replication. Should one be cut in two, each would regenerate a complete figure. This practically guaranteed worldwide distribution in a short period of time. She had no idea how long it would take to generate any real results. It could be decades. It was just another prototype spawned by the Device, another vector.
Bette was doing the only thing she knew to do, at this point—continuing the evolution of humanity through distribution of the Device, in the form of a very attractive children’s toy, to be used when they were going through their very precise intervals of sensitivity to various stimuli, their brains categorizing, organizing, linking.