Going Back

by Gene P. Abel

“The German and Japanese teams: What do we know of their capabilities? Do either one of them have the capability yet to travel back and make changes? Does either team know enough of time travel theory to risk such a trip?”

  “To be blunt, sir, that’s what we would have found out at the symposium,” Lieutenant Marx replied. “It was supposed to be an across-the-board exchange of information on current theory and technology.”

  “Which the murders neatly put an end to,” General Karlson mused. “Which makes that the third victim in addition to the two scientists.”

  He turned back around for a glance at the board. Currently the display was zoomed in on the northeastern part of the country, with various dates shown here and there, ranging from 1850 to 1960. The display was in constant change, the view zooming in a bit more from time to time, dates on either end of the range dropping away as the temporal resolution narrowed. A disturbing possibility was starting to go through his mind when a senior officer to his right rear spoke up.

  “General, sir.”

  “Colonel Matheson,” the general acknowledged.

  “Even if we locate the place and time,” Colonel Matheson continued, “how can we ever track down what was changed? For that matter, how can we know if the changes even happened? We may already be caught up in the result of what someone else did and have no way to tell the difference.”

  The other man seated in the alcove behind General Karlson replied, the general leaving them to their debate but listening carefully. He always listened to any and all cross chatter that came up from the pit; it was usually quite educational.

  “There would be two possibilities, Kurt,” Lieutenant Marx stated. “One, if the change is already done, then we’re stuck with the results and have no way to tell the difference. Second”‍—here he turned in his seat to look at the glowing area of red on the board’s map as others homed in on the signal‍—“since we can still pick up that TDW, that means the changes to history haven’t caught up with us yet and there’s still time to go back and undo them.”

  “Granted,” Colonel Matheson admitted. “But that brings up a host of other disturbing problems. I got a kid that just got into Stanford; if we send anyone back, how can we be sure that what they do won’t change something so my kid instead misses out on his opportunity? Maybe some changes have already been felt and that’s why he made it into Stanford.”

  “Or, on the other hand,” Lieutenant Marx countered, “there might be some poor kid somewhere who could end up a lot better off. It works both ways, you know.”

  Much the same talk was filtering up from the pit below as the map narrowed down to upper New England, the dates ranging now from 1890 to 1945.

  “Even if we can get back there in time to stop whoever it is, we might make things worse,” someone called across the pit.

  “Or maybe someone went back to make things better for all,” another countered.

  “You’re dreaming,” said a third. “The only reason why someone would dare something this big is for purely selfish motives.”

  “Then there’s the butterfly effect,” Colonel Matheson supplied. “Everything could go absolutely perfect as far as mission parameters go, but some small element of history that no one knew about gets changed. Some kid gets saved from drowning, and that looks good, but what if he would have grown up to become a dictator that makes Hitler look like a nice guy?”

  “Or,” Lieutenant Marx countered, “time could be a lot more resilient than that. Some things may not be possible to change.”

  “You don’t know that, and that’s the problem!”

  The debate grew more heated in pace with the narrowing of the image of the TDW on the board. But General Karlson had been listening to every word, carefully weighing what was said against his single overriding consideration. “Enough,” he said, standing up abruptly.

  All there knew that attitude; the general had made a decision, and now nothing on this planet would change his mind. The room fell once again into silence. A couple of the scientists continued to work on pinning down the TDW, while all other eyes focused on General Karlson.

  “There’s only one question that counts in my view. What is the goal of that time traveler? What do they want, and how does it affect the security of this great nation? And if they did it once, what’s to prevent them from doing it again and again, continuing to wreak untold damage in our present time, and this country specifically? Can anyone answer me that?”

  None could. Meanwhile the view on the board continued to narrow. It now displayed lower-state New York with a date range of 1905 to 1925.

  “The possibility now stands,” General Karlson continued, “that one of the other teams out there may know something more about traveling through and manipulating time than we do. That is the only issue worth considering at this point. All else is peripheral.”

  He turned to face Colonel Matheson on his right, snapping out an order. “For the last couple of years we’ve had a hot team on twenty-four hours’ notice for just such an occurrence as this. Notify the team that they have their notice and are to assemble immediately.”

  “Yes, General,” Colonel Matheson replied.

  General Karlson faced back to those in the chamber before him, his words precisely clear as well as the historic consequences they implied.

  “Get that wormhole revved up. The mission is a go.”

  3

  Briefing

  By Tuesday morning the team was assembled, all six of them seated at the front of the small conference room, waiting for their briefing. They were dressed in whatever clothes they had been wearing or could grab when the MPs had come for them, and were already generally familiar with one another per protocol. Long ago the team had established relationships with each other, as for a mission such as this, there would be no time to get to know one another in the field.

  “I seriously never thought we’d really be called in for something like this,” one man remarked. “To get a chance to see history for myself, to be history, is very exciting!”

  The man was in his midthirties, an inch below six feet, and in good enough physical shape for an obvious academic, and had short black hair, dark eyes, a slight tan, and what he called his big Jewish nose. The clothes he wore were baggy enough for the many pockets filled with various notes, and in one case a small pocket computer.

  The man seated next to him was a little shorter, about the same age, and a bit on the skinny side, and had tousled brown hair down to his ears, and hazel eyes. He looked as though he was in desperate need of a bit more sunlight in his life. “I’ll admit to some intellectual curiosity myself, Professor Stein,” the second man said.

  “Oh please, it’s just Ben.”

  Seated with them were the others: a lean young black woman with short-cropped hair whose gaze constantly assessed any possible threat in her environment and those around her; a man who had “career military” stamped all over him‍—fortyish, muscular, with crew-cut hair and a no-nonsense demeanor; and a younger man, six foot and all muscle, his uniform neatly pressed.

  Finally, a man sat in the third row behind them all, carefully observing the other members of the team as if with a look he could assess their worth. Also in his midthirties, everything about him screamed average save that look in his eyes of careful deduction and a high degree of reasoning. Behind it was a mind that broke everything down into cause and effect, data and deduction.

  General Karlson entered the room with an aide by his side. The facing wall had a six-foot monitor built into it. The aide approached it, sticking a small data stick into a slot while the general addressed his team.

  The general got straight to the point. “We’ve just gotten word that both the German and Japanese teams are either assembling their own teams or have already done so. At the least they have both picked up the same TDW we did; at worst, one of them is the cause of that TDW. The goal
s of those teams are unknown but assumed to be nationalistic in nature.”

  The screen behind him now lit up, displaying a schematic map of New York with various lines of data streaming by beneath it.

  “Analysis of the TDW indicates that while it appears small in amplitude, it could still build like a tidal wave by the time it catches up to our present. Your mission is to make sure that tidal wave never happens. Now, as you can see by the display behind me, we’ve traced it to New York City around the year 1919.”

  “No closer?” Professor Stein interjected. “That’s a pretty big city, even back at the turn of the last century. Close to six million people, as I recall.”

  “We’re lucky we got it down that far,” the general stated. “We believe that this time and place is a temporal hinge point, which Dr. Weiss here can briefly explain.”

  All heads turned to the one seated beside Professor Stein, who cleared his throat and proceeded to explain.

  “A temporal hinge point is when a lot of key events are happening that will ripple around the globe and on through history. Picture it as something like a lit match‍—by itself nothing of any real consequence, but if said match happens to be lying within an inch of several loose trails of gunpowder and some highly unstable explosives, the result of lighting that match could be catastrophic. Or like a game of pool: a simple shot of the Q-ball into a cluster of other balls could scatter them all over the place. A temporal hinge point is like that: make a change at such a point and there’s no telling how many different cause-and-effect ripples it will send through history.

  “We’ve been mapping a few of them,” he continued, “but the problem is that not all such hinge events involve actions known to our history books. Such a hinge point can range anywhere from a day up to a week.”

  “Then that’s how long you people will have,” the general stated. “New York City of the year 1919 is one such point, and whoever went back before us has changed that hinge point. Your mission orders are to discover who’s gone back to that period, discover whatever it is they changed, and undo or prevent that change from happening, if in the judgment of your team leader such a change is inimical to the better interests of the United States.”

  “A week,” Professor Stein said in a breath. “That’s not much time to track through a city of six million.”

  “It’ll have to be,” the general stated. “Now I know you are all generally familiar with one another, but just to make things clear, allow me the introductions. Professor Ben Stein here is your historian. Besides being specifically versed in this period of history, his little data computer you see sticking out of his pocket is programmed with everything we know from the year 1850 to 1980.”

  “Which I would caution,” the professor broke in, “is not everything that has happened in history. Prohibition was just ratified; President Wilson returns to New York from the Versailles Peace Conference about early July with his League of Nations proposal. There’s post-war recovery problems, an influenza outbreak. The Bolshevik Revolution just happened in Russia only a couple of years prior, and that has everyone on the lookout for anarchists leading to the Red Scare, and of course the Fascist movement in Italy. But those are only the major points. We need to be on the lookout for seemingly innocent events.”

  “Which is why you’re on this mission,” the general continued. “Sitting next to him we have Dr. Sam Weiss, your physicist specializing in temporal mechanics. He’ll be on hand to handle any technical problems.”

  Dr. Weiss gave a nod, and the general moved on to the lean black lady behind Dr. Weiss.

  “Agent Sue Harris, special ops and combat specialist. Her job is to make sure that the rest of you survive long enough to complete your mission. Beside her is Captain Robert Beck.”

  The fortyish man with the crew cut gave a terse nod.

  “He’s the military observer to make sure this mission comes off at all costs.”

  “All costs?” Professor Stein asked uncertainly. “What does that mean, exactly?”

  “It means that we’re expendable.” Agent Harris put it matter-of-factly. “But the mission is not.”

  “Our very history is at stake here, people!” General Karlson snapped. “And to make sure that nothing gets in the way of that mission, we come to Lieutenant David Phelps, combat and infiltration specialist. He’s your muscle.”

  The younger man in uniform beside the captain responded with a slight nod but nothing more. That left the man in the back, in the third row, whom the general now indicated with eye contact.

  “Your team leader is Special Agent Lou Hessman. It’s his job to play detective and figure out what’s going on in 1919 and what caused that TDW. Professor Stein, you’ll be working closely with him to make sure he has everything he needs in the way of known events of that period.”

  “Of course.” Professor Stein nodded.

  “He also has his own little pocket computer with dossiers of the possible candidates that may have been chosen from the German and Japanese teams, complete with pictures to identify them when you encounter them. Remember, you have to complete your mission before they complete theirs.”

  “So, in a city of six million, we have to track down whatever got changed and whoever did it, without even knowing the nature of the event we’re trying to track down,” Professor Stein summed up. “That’s a pretty tall order.”

  “The resolution of the temporal scanner has been getting better,” Dr. Weiss stated, “but it still has its limits. If we’d had Dr. Graystein and his notes, we no doubt could have pinpointed things a lot more precisely. Or even Professor Miles’s temporal map.”

  Special Agent Hessman finally spoke up in his quiet tone. “Murders that I don’t doubt were to pave the way for this TDW. General, as Professor Stein has noted, this task could take weeks or months, but I’m guessing we have significantly less time than that.”

  “And you would be right,” General Karlson grimly replied. He indicated Dr. Weiss, who replied with the details.

  “Analysis of the TDW leads us to believe that this particular temporal hinge point covers approximately one week local time. If our mission is not accomplished within that time period, then whatever changes that have been created by the other unknown team will most likely be permanent, or at least well beyond our capacity to repair.”

  “A week,” Professor Stein quietly remarked, “to search for a needle in the haystack of New York City.”

  “You will be dropped off as close to the origin day of the TDW as possible,” the general told them. “Now, if there are no other questions, you’ll be taken to outfitting and given some period clothing and equipment to wear, as well as some cash from that period to use as needed. Professor Stein’s and Agent Hessman’s pocket computers are a couple of the few non-period items that’ll be allowed. Am I understood?”

  “Perfectly,” Captain Beck replied.

  “Good. Then this briefing is at an end.”

  With that, the general turned on his heel and headed for the door. His aide pulled the data stick out of the wall before following along behind him, while the others got to their feet as a soldier came forward to lead them away to be outfitted.

  4

  The Chamber

  Officially the space was known as the temporal projection chamber, unofficially “the Bubble” due to its general shape. The team members walked in dressed in their period clothing and for a moment gawked at what lay before them, while Dr. Weiss beamed with pride at what he’d had a part in creating.

  The whole large chamber was circular and stretched a hundred yards from one side to the other. The expected banks of computers, control equipment, and status monitors lay ringed around the outer walls, while on one far wall twenty feet above floor level was a stretch of armored glass behind which was the control booth. The main center of attention, though, was at the middle of the room, comprising a good chunk of
its width.

  A circle of man-sized pods ringed a raised central platform, the pods lying horizontally and covered with clear lids, currently hinged open. The pods were festooned with control and read-out panels and bathed in a soft inner light. At the back of each pod was an arm-thick braided cable stretching into the air to the apparatus fixed into the ceiling forty feet above. The circular platform on which the pods were arranged was elevated a step above the ground and was currently a hub of activity with a pair of technicians doing their last-minute checks.

  The ceiling resembled a large alternator or generator of some sort, with each of the pod cables connecting to its edge at a different point along its circumference. From there a tangle of thick cables wound their way around the hundred-foot circle of tightly wrapped wiring to meet in the center at what looked like a large metal ball, polished to a mirrored sheen. From the back of the ball projected two long metal arms attached end to end behind the ball in a straight line, growing wider toward their ends. The arms stretched along the arc of the curved cable-covered portion of the ceiling before slanting down a couple of feet past that portion of the apparatus, their wider ends bearing a resemblance to propeller blades.

  That the twin arms were made to spin, using the ball as their axis, was obvious from their appearance. The inner edges of the arms seemed like they would barely touch the tightly packed mass of cabling above them, lending even more of a resemblance to a generator.

  For a moment all the team could do was stare as the double doors hissed closed behind them, marveling at what they were about to climb into.

  Agent Sue Harris made the first remark. “Do I have to wear these heels? The dress I can understand, but I’ve managed to stay away from high heels for most of my adult life.”

  The incongruous remark snapped the men out of their daze and earned a flicker of a grin from Professor Stein before he gave his reply. “Period clothing usually precluded women wearing anything you might term as comfortable. It was all about elegance, at least in the circles we must engage with. You should be more concerned about being a black woman in New York in the year 1919. Not as bad as down in the southern states of the time; more like ‘sophisticated discrimination.’ Interestingly, when it came to blacks, the women’s suffrage movement‍—‍”