The Doomsday Box

by Herbie Brennan

  Opal said, “I think I know what might be happening here. . . .”

  They turned to look at her expectantly. After a moment, Michael said quietly, “Go on.”

  Opal licked her lips nervously. “Us traveling back in time shouldn’t move us onto a different time line. Couldn’t move us onto a different time line. We know where our time line leads because we’ve already lived through it. So we must still be on that time line—”

  “Opal, I saw a nuclear war,” Fuchsia protested.

  “Yes, I know. But I think you only saw it because at this point in time, we haven’t done whatever it is we need to do to stop it.” Opal waited.

  It took Danny a minute or two to catch up, but then he got it suddenly. “Hey, cool! You mean we’re the ones who’ll stop the Cuban crisis! If we hadn’t gone back in time, Cuba would have led to war. But we did go back in time, so something we do now will divert the time line and make it turn out the way my grandfather told me. Wow!”

  Danny knew all about the Cuban Missile Crisis from his grandfather, who’d talked about it a lot before the stroke killed him. The old boy had been in the army when it happened, so he’d been really worried that he might be in the front line of a nuclear war. What happened was simple enough. The Russians had decided to teach the Americans manners by setting up nuclear missile sites in Cuba, which was close enough to America for the rockets to hit all the big American cities. Naturally, the Americans were none too pleased. President Kennedy was still alive then and told the Russian premier—Danny couldn’t remember his name—to pull the missiles out. The Russians refused. Everybody thought President Kennedy would order a nuclear strike on Russia, Grandpa Stanley said—he already had American nuclear missiles in Turkey, close enough to hit all the big Russian cities. But President Kennedy had ordered a naval blockade of Cuba instead, to stop any more military hardware getting through.

  That was when it really got scary. The Russians said they weren’t going to remove their missiles and they weren’t going to stop their ships sailing for Cuba either. Everybody knew, of course, that if the Americans sank a Russian ship, it was World War III for sure. But in the end, the Russians backed down and pulled their missiles out of Cuba. The Americans took their missiles out of Turkey a few months later, but pretended Cuba had nothing to do it.

  Michael frowned. “What’s your grandfather got to do with it?”

  “Doesn’t matter,” Danny said. He looked around their faces and grinned. “All we have to do now is figure out what decisions we have to make to divert the time line. Or what actions we have to take, I suppose.”

  Michael raised an eyebrow. “All?”

  “Don’t knock it,” Cobra said. “I’m not sure I buy all of this. I’m not even absolutely sure I buy any of it. But, know what? That doesn’t matter. Because the CIA is suspicious that the Soviets are up to something. That’s why I’ve been working undercover. You kids—” He shrugged. “Anyway, let’s not waste time going over old ground. If what we do next might make a difference, let’s decide what we’d do next if we didn’t have this thing hanging over us. Let’s decide what we would be doing if Fuchsia hadn’t dropped the bomb, no pun intended.”

  “We would be trying to work out why Jack Stratford wanted us dead when he couldn’t have anything personal against us,” Opal reminded him.

  “True,” Cobra said. He looked from one to the other. “Any ideas, or do you want to jump straight to my opinion?”

  “I’ll take your opinion,” Opal said at once.

  “Stratford has to be a Soviet agent. It’s the only thing that makes sense. Or a Commie sympathizer, at least. Either way, he’s on their side. As regular CIA, it would be easy enough for him to find out I was on an undercover mission related to the information we had about the possibility of Cuban missiles. He wouldn’t have details of what I was doing, of course—when you go undercover you work on your own; it’s the only safe way—but he’d know enough to warn the Soviets that the CIA was suspicious. Then you all turn up. You tell him what year you’re from, and he has to realize that whatever your mission, you’re bound to know—from your history books if nothing else—that the Soviets tried to put missiles into Cuba. Worse, you’re looking for the agent who’s trying to confirm just that very thing. So he has to get rid of you.”

  “Just a minute,” Michael said. “Stratford himself is a time agent. He’s bound to know the Soviets didn’t succeed in getting missiles into Cuba.”

  Cobra gave him a withering look. “Yeah, and that’s exactly what he wants to change.”

  “So now we know Jack Stratford is a traitor,” Opal said. “What do we do about it?”

  Cobra looked at her for a long minute, then shrugged. “I contact the folks back home and have him arrested on suspicion of treason.” He glanced at Fuchsia. “Think that’s enough to change our time line?”

  Fuchsia frowned back at him. “I don’t see how,” she said.

  “Neither do I,” Cobra agreed.

  “This is scary,” Fuchsia said. “I know we have to do something that will stop a third world war, but I don’t know what.”

  “Are you sure?” Danny asked suddenly. “I mean, can’t you go back and look at the grayed-out time lines and see what we did in one of them where the war doesn’t happen?”

  Fuchsia shivered. “There are millions of them. And I’d have to find exactly the right moment in each one. Like finding five minutes out of your life when you live to be ninety-nine years old. It could take months . . . years. And actually I don’t think I could do it at all.”

  Opal said, “Forget the fancy tricks, Danny. Try to think what we would logically do in these circumstances. Because we must have done something that made sense logically, otherwise we wouldn’t have created the time line we were born in.”

  “So forget about time lines,” Michael said, “and think of what we’d want to do if we just came here on our mission and had reached this stage.”

  “Well, the first thing we’d do,” Opal said, frowning with concentration, “is to tell Cobra about the vials and get him to agree not to send them, and we’ve done that. Then we’d try to make sure he was going to stay firm for the next twenty years—”

  “And we’ve done that too,” Michael interrupted. “By having Fuchsia look at his time line. Which takes it round in a circle because she’d see the business about the war and we’d all start worrying about that. This won’t get us anywhere.”

  “But we can’t just sit here and wait to be blown up by an H-bomb!” Opal sounded less angry than desperate.

  “What would happen if we simply went home?” Michael asked. “Send the signal and have Mr. Carradine take us back?”

  They all looked at him as the implications of his words fell into place.

  “Just . . . leave events here to take their course?” Danny asked. “Let the war take place and Cobra be killed?”

  “If he’s dead in two weeks, he won’t send through any viruses,” Michael said. He looked over at Cobra. “No offense, sir. We’re just considering all possibilities.”

  “None taken, son. What you say’s kind of interesting, in a gruesome sort of way.”

  “I don’t think I could do it,” Opal said. “But it would mean we’d completed our mission. . . .”

  “Of course you could do it,” Cobra told her firmly. “If it was the only possibility. No sense in you hanging around to get killed if you don’t have to.”

  Fuchsia said, “If we go home now, we’ll still be on the same time line.”

  “I don’t understand your point, Fuchsia,” Michael said.

  “If we’re still on this time line, we won’t exist when we get home. Home won’t exist. Because everything will have been wiped out in a nuclear war in 1962. I know this is difficult to understand, because time is difficult to understand, but if we signal Mr. Carradine now, it’ll be like committing suicide.”

  “So we can’t go home,” Opal said, “and we can’t think of anything more we need to do here, so
. . .”

  “Maybe you should stop thinking what you should do and start thinking what we might do,” Cobra said firmly. “Me, I really don’t give a damn about your viruses right now. Right now I’m interested in what might be happening in Cuba, because this is my world. And from what the little lady says, you should be interested in that as well, since it’s Cuba that’ll kill you if you turn around and go home without solving our problem.”

  “I’m sorry,” Opal said at once. “You’re right. We can’t just look at this from our own point of view.”

  “So why don’t you start by telling me everything you know about missiles in Cuba?”

  Opal looked at him. “I think we’ve already told you everything we know about Cuba. At least I have. You must understand, this is history for everybody here. We only know what we learned at school.” She hesitated, then added, “And I’m afraid I wasn’t paying much attention.”

  “Understood,” Cobra said. “But let’s see how much you really do know between you. By which I mean details. So let’s try to piece together what happened in the time you come from. The Russians wanted to put missiles into Cuba, right?”

  Michael nodded. “They made an agreement with Mr. Castro, the Cuban president. I don’t know the exact terms, but they were going to give aid to Cuba in return for permission to site nuclear missiles there.”

  “The bit I remember,” Fuchsia put in, “was that President Kennedy went on television with spy pictures of Cuban missile sites and loads of Russian military stuff, big trucks and maybe tanks. And he said the Russians had lied about it. And then everybody got worried that the Americans would bomb the Russians and start a world war, or maybe just bomb the Russians in Cuba and start a world war, but what Mr. Kennedy actually did was send his navy to blockade Cuba. And then everybody worried that he’d sink a Russian ship and start a world war, but then Mr. Khrushchev—that was the Russian premier, I remember—Mr. Khrushchev called his ships back. And everybody gave a big sigh of relief.” She stared vaguely over Cobra’s shoulder. “Mr. Kennedy was awfully handsome. Much better looking than Mr. Khrushchev. Or Mr. Castro.”

  With the mention of Mr. Castro, something stirred in Danny’s mind. He fought to bring it into focus, then remembered the bearded man in battle fatigues who’d attended that weird meeting in KGB headquarters. He’d looked like Castro—Danny had even thought that at the time. Then there was the map of the island with the three names written inside boxes. “Where’s San Cristóbal?” he asked. It was the only name of the three he remembered.

  “That’s in Cuba,” Opal said. “I don’t think it’s the capital, but it’s somewhere in Cuba. Isn’t it, Michael?”

  “Yes, definitely,” Michael confirmed. He looked at Danny. “Why do you ask?”

  “It was in October,” Danny said suddenly.

  Cobra rounded on him at once. “What did you say?”

  “The Cuban crisis—it was in October,” Danny repeated. “It all came up over two weeks in October; my grandfather told me. This is only the middle of April. October is still six months away. It didn’t come up now at all, not in our time.” He looked around excitedly. “That’s the difference. That’s what’s different between our time and this time.”

  Cobra frowned. “You mean the Soviets aren’t planning Cuban missiles yet?”

  “Yes, they are!” Danny shouted. “That’s the whole point—they definitely are. I’ve just figured it out. But these aren’t the same plans that led to the crisis in October. These are different plans, with a very different outcome if you let them go ahead. If you let them go ahead, there’ll be a nuclear war.”

  Cobra stared at him without expression. “If we know for sure that they’re discussing Cuba now and can give a few details to prove it, leaking that back to the Russians should be enough to make them postpone things for a while until they tighten their security. Which sounds a lot like what you tell me happens in your time frame.”

  “But we do know for sure that they’re discussing Cuba now and we can give them details to prove it.” Danny laughed. “I was at their planning meeting—I saw the maps!”

  Chapter 43

  The Team, Langley, Virginia, 1962

  A cavalcade of police cars, all sirens and flashing blue lights, escorted a Black Maria noisily past Pete’s Pies and Coffee.

  “That him?” Danny asked through a mouthful of blueberry and apple.

  “I expect so,” Cobra said.

  “Will he get the death penalty?” Opal asked, a little anxiously.

  “He might,” Cobra said.

  “I hope he doesn’t.” Opal strongly disapproved of capital punishment, even for traitors like Stratford.

  “I don’t care either way,” Cobra told her tiredly. “Stratford seems like small potatoes when you’re trying to stop a third world war. Speaking of which . . .”

  Fuchsia, who was noisily demolishing a genuine sixties milkshake, put the straw down long enough to smile at him and say, “Quite sure, Mr. Cobra. I’ve looked and looked, and we’re definitely on the right time line now.”

  “I’m relieved to hear it, young lady,” Cobra said, although he’d already heard it several times before.

  Danny finished his pie and stared at the empty plate. “You picking up the tab for us?” he asked Cobra.

  Cobra nodded. “Least I can do.” He looked a different man now he’d abandoned his KGB uniform for a neat suit.

  “Think I’ll have another piece of pie,” Danny said. “Don’t seem to make it like this in London.”

  Michael, who was drinking coffee, said thoughtfully, “I wonder if we’ll notice any changes.” When the others looked at him quizzically, he added, “After we get back.”

  “Sure we will,” Danny said, waving at the waitress. “No plague. Or at least I’m really hoping it’s not there.”

  “I meant apart from the plague,” Michael said.

  Frowning, Opal said, “What are you thinking of, Michael?”

  Michael stared into his coffee for a moment. “Well, it isn’t just the plague, is it? I mean, we’re still on the same time line we were on when we left—Fuchsia says she’s quite sure of that—but we came back and changed it. The way we traveled in time was like looping the loop. Now we’re going back, the exact details can’t be the same. There shouldn’t be any plague, but will Mr. Carradine remember there ever was a plague? And if he doesn’t, where will he think we’ve been? Remember, Cobra won’t even visit the fourteenth century now; Fuchsia’s quite sure of that.”

  Fuchsia put in brightly, “On the old time line it was Stratford who convinced Mr. Cobra about germ warfare. That can’t happen now.”

  “And Fuchsia herself,” Michael went on. “When we left, all she had was uncontrolled glimpses of the future. Just glimpses. Now she can see space-time and time lines and things like that. She has more abilities than the rest of us put together.”

  “Oh, I wouldn’t say that,” Fuchsia told him modestly.

  Danny forked open his new slice of pie. “I suppose Mr. Carradine will bring us back . . . ?”

  There was a sudden silence before Opal asked, “What do you mean, Danny?”

  Danny chewed vigorously, but managed to maintain a thoughtful expression. “Well,” he said between mouthfuls, “he sent us off to stop the plague, which we’ve done. But if the plague never happened, maybe he won’t even remember there ever was one, like Michael says. And if he doesn’t remember the plague, he won’t remember sending us to stop it, so you can hardly expect him to remember to bring us back.” He finished his second helping and pushed the plate away with an expression of deep satisfaction.

  There was a long silence, then everybody spoke at once.

  “Does that mean you’re stuck here?” Cobra asked. “Hey, maybe I could get you into the CIA in this time!”

  “No, that’s just silly, Danny,” Fuchsia said.

  Michael’s contribution was a worried, “I doubt very much the changes would extend that far because . . .” He let the se
ntence trail off as if he couldn’t think of a reason.

  Opal said, “There may be paradoxes. I don’t think you can travel in time without them. I just hope—”

  Danny shrugged. “Soon find out. We should be going now, shouldn’t we, Opal? Or do I have time for thirds?”

  “No, you’re right,” Opal said. “We should be going.”

  “Let me get the check,” Cobra said. “Then I’ll drive you across.”

  For some reason Mr. Carradine hadn’t bothered to explain, the pickup point for their return had to be the same as the area in which they’d found themselves when they first entered 1962. Cobra dropped them by the parkway and they walked the final few hundred yards to the clump of bushes where they had originally emerged. “This is actually a very good spot,” Fuchsia remarked. “It’s well hidden, so we won’t frighten anybody by suddenly disappearing.”

  “If we disappear,” said Danny, who’d been going on a bit in the car about Mr. Carradine not remembering.

  “Oh, shut up, Danny!” Michael told him, exasperated.

  “Who’s going to send the signal?” Fuchsia asked. They all had their signal badges, but three were actually redundant: it only needed one to alert Mr. Carradine. He’d handed out the others as a security measure, Fuchsia supposed, in case one or more of them got lost.

  “I will,” Opal said promptly. She took the badge from her pocket.

  “Well, go on, then,” Danny urged her. “I want to see if I’m right about Mr. Carradine not remembering.”

  Opal sent the signal.

  Chapter 44

  The Team, the Montauk Project, Present Day

  The young soldier tried to look stern, but only succeeded in grinning. He showed no hint of plague and was, above all, alive. “Mr. Carradine said I might find you here,” he told them. “He wants to see you at once.” Then he dropped the formal air and added, “I think you might be in for it.”

  Opal glanced at the others. Michael was looking around the transportation chamber as if he’d landed in Wonderland. Fuchsia was smiling broadly, probably because Danny had just taken her hand. “Where’s Mr. Carradine?” Opal asked the soldier.