by Alex Scarrow
That’ll be me one fine day, he mused drunkenly. A gentleman. A rich, successful businessman. Maybe even a politician one day. He grinned like a fool as he considered that prospect, stepping off the wooden-slat pavement on to the dirt of the busy street, lined with deep ruts carved by the cartwheels of an almost constant train of heavily laden wagons.
Perhaps even president, one day.
He belched: a long and loud croak that made heads up and down the thoroughfare turn. It was in fact so satisfyingly loud that he heard the lady in her lace bonnet cry out in disgust. So loud he didn’t hear the thundering of hooves bearing down on him, nor the clatter of beer barrels rolling off the back of the riderless cart, nor the scream from another woman as she realized what was moments away from happening.
Abraham’s whisky-addled mind had just about enough time to process one final thought as the enormous delivery cart careering down Powder Street behind a team of wild-eyed and terrified horses loomed up behind him … and sadly his last thought wasn’t anything noble or profound, nor farseeing. It was nothing more than this …
Well now, sir … That was a mighty fine belch.
CHAPTER 6
2001, New York
‘So, how does Foster look?’ Maddy rephrased Sal’s question.
‘Yes.’ Sal nodded. ‘I mean, is he really dying?’
‘Foster looks no different to the day he walked out on us.’ Maddy took a bite out of her bagel. Still chewing, she continued. ‘Not a single day older. Which, of course, he isn’t … because for him, every time I go see him in Central Park, it’s the same day he walked out.’ She finished chewing and swigged some coffee. ‘It’ll be us that look different to him, I guess. Not the other way round.’
‘Aye,’ nodded Liam. ‘We’ve been together a while now … seems like we’ve been together an eternity, though.’
‘Seventy-five cycles,’ said Bob. ‘One hundred and forty-nine days.’
‘Five months,’ added Sal. She looked up at Liam and Maddy. ‘Jahulla! That makes me fourteen now. My birthday, it was only four months away when I … I was meant to die.’ She didn’t need to elaborate on that. They all knew each other’s recruitment tales.
‘I missed my fourteenth birthday,’ she added quietly.
Becks cocked her head and the appropriate smile for the occasion flashed across her face, as sincere as a screensaver. ‘Many happy returns, Sal Vikram.’
Liam put down the chocolate muffin he’d been peeling out of its paper cup. ‘Hang on, I’ve missed my seventeenth birthday!’ He reached out and squeezed Sal’s hand. ‘So, a happy birthday to us both, so it is.’
‘Yeah,’ she mumbled, ‘yay for us.’
‘Uhh, so,’ Maddy sighed, ‘this was meant to be fun. Not a freakin’ funeral!’ She turned to Sal. ‘We’ll get a cake on the way home, get some candles on it and you can blow ’em out and … and we’ll play some party games or something when we get back. How does that sound?’
She nodded. The start of a smile back on her face. ‘I’d like that.’
‘Party games?’ said Bob. ‘Please explain how to sub-categorize “party games” in reference to “games”?’
Maddy shrugged. ‘They’re just stupid games. You don’t play to win. You just play because it’s a laugh. Like, I dunno … like Charades or Guess Who, or Twister. The more you mess things up the more fun it is.’
The support units looked at each other, silently discussing how to make sense of that. Maddy chuckled. ‘Twister, oh man! You two meatbots haven’t lived until you’ve played a game of Twister!’
She realized Sal and Liam were giving her the same bemused look. ‘Seriously? You guys never heard of it either?’
Liam pursed his lips. ‘Is it a bit like chess?’
‘What? No!’
‘Fidchell? Brandub?’
‘Whuh? Never heard of it. No, it’s kinda like — ’
‘Tafl Macrae?’
‘No … no, nothing like that. It’s like — ’
‘Pog Ma Gwilly?’
‘Will you shut up a sec?’ she said, exasperated. ‘I’m trying to explain it.’ Her eyes suddenly narrowed with suspicion. ‘Hang on, Pog Ma Gwilly? You … you just made that up, didn’t you?’
Liam’s good-natured smile widened to a confessional grin.
She was about to reach across the small round table and playfully cuff his ear when she noticed Sal staring far too intently at the cafe’s hot snacks menu card.
‘Sal? You OK?’
Her brows were locked firmly together.
Liam tapped her arm. ‘You that hungry?’
She shook her head slowly. ‘Thirty-seven items on the snack menu …’
‘Uhh … all right.’ Liam looked at Maddy. She shrugged. ‘Oka-a-y.’
‘That was a minute ago. Now,’ Sal continued, ‘there are only thirty-six.’ She looked up at them. ‘Something just vanished off the menu! Just, like, seconds ago.’
Liam looked down at the menu card he’d been studying earlier. ‘Hey … hang on, it’s not there any more.’
Maddy leaned over. ‘What isn’t?’
He shook his head. ‘I was going to order it … and … it’s, well, it’s gone!’
Sal had the menu memorized, almost word for word. ‘The Lincoln Burger.’
‘That’s the very one!’
‘Beef patty,’ she continued, her eyes closed, reciting the missing description, ‘cheese slice covered in thick Patriot Sauce with Freedom Fries on the side.’
‘Aye, that’s what I was going to order!’
‘Sal?’ Maddy reached out for her arm. ‘Did you just feel a time ripple?’
She nodded. ‘I uh … I think so. I wasn’t sure. I thought it was just me feeling sick or something. No breakfast. But then I saw the burger was gone.’
They looked at each other in silence for a moment until finally Maddy bit her lip. ‘We should head back to the arch. Check on this.’
The other end of a minute later, the five of them were hurrying down the North American History hall, weaving their way past elbow-high clusters of noisy children, babbling with excitement, clipboards underarm as they raced from one exhibit case to another on a fact hunt.
‘Could we not get one of them yellow taxis back!’ Liam called ahead, his jaw still working hard on the last of his triple-choc muffin. ‘I got a stitch in me side, already!’
‘Subway,’ Maddy replied over her shoulder, ‘it’ll be quicker. Come on.’
They were near the end of a long glass display case containing mannequins wearing uniforms from the civil war when Bob’s voice boomed down the hall.
‘Attention! Maddy! STOP!’
She stopped in her tracks and looked back down the hall, along with every last child now frozen mid-hunt, silent, eyes locked on Bob’s towering form. He calmly raised an arm and pointed towards Sal, standing beside the glass case staring in at something among the mannequins in civil-war costume.
Maddy quickly made her way through the confused children and an elementary schoolteacher regarding them with a bemused expression.
‘What’s the matter, Sal?’ she said, drawing up beside her. ‘What do you see?’
Sal slowly raised her arm and pointed at the back wall of the display, between a mannequin wearing the braided and buttoned dark-blue uniform of a Union general and one wearing a similarly ornate tunic in grey. She was pointing at an oil painting hanging on the back wall.
‘And that’s changed too,’ she uttered.
Maddy looked at the face in the painting … the famous painting every schoolkid in America knew by sight. No longer was there that gaunt face, the dark eyes hidden beneath a thunderously brooding brow and that distinctly Mennonite beard. Instead she could see a forgettable-looking balding and portly man with a salt and pepper moustache and a rosy bulbous nose. Beneath the painting was a plaque:
President John Bell 1861-65
‘Oh my God!’ she uttered. ‘Where’s President Lincoln?’
CHAPTER 7
2001, New York
They were back in the archway less than half an hour later, still huffing and puffing after the jog from Marcy Avenue subway station. Liam whimpering about his aching side. ‘I shouldn’t have rushed that muffin,’ he groaned pitifully to himself.
On the screen in front of them, computer-Bob, their field-office system AI, was already spitting out the data pulled in from the external Internet feed.
‘He’s just vanished from history,’ said Sal.
‘Well, from civil-war history,’ Maddy replied as she skim-read the dossier being assembled, fact by fact, on the screen. ‘Nothing in there, nothing at all about him.’
‘This Lincoln fella was quite important, wasn’t he?’
Maddy turned to Liam. ‘Only the most important figure in the war. The most freakin’ important. He held the Union together.’ She saw one of his eyebrows flicker upwards, a sign that he hadn’t a clue and was hoping she was going to elaborate. ‘C’mon, you’ve been reading up a lot recently, right? Hitting the history books.’ She glanced at a pile of books stacked high beside his bunk bed. ‘So, please, tell me you know which guys I’m talking about.’
Liam frowned for a moment, then grinned. ‘The Northern fellas … them people in blue.’
‘Right. Yes. Abraham Lincoln was the president of — ’ she sighed — ‘them people in blue. Otherwise known as the North, the Union. The point was he kept them together, kept them fighting, led them to victory … but now he’s gone from civil-war history!’
Sal chewed a fingernail absently. ‘That’s going to mean a big wave, then.’
‘Uh-huh … five minutes from now we could be looking out at a world in which the Confederates won.’ She glanced sideways at Liam. ‘Them fellas in grey.’
Computer-Bob’s dialogue box appeared on screen.
› Maddy, I have completed a scan of all the civil-war data retrieved and there are no references to Abraham Lincoln in this time period: 1861 to 1865.
‘Maybe he died,’ said Sal, ‘you know … before he should’ve?’
‘Hmmm … that’s a possibility. OK, then, computer-Bob, look earlier. Go earlier.’ She rubbed her eyes, already irritable and red from her cold, beneath her glasses. ‘We have data on him from our own internal historical database, right?’
› Of course.
‘So when and where was he born?’
› 12 February 1809. Hardin County, Kentucky.
‘Do we have a proper detailed biography? All his movements from childhood right up to becoming president?’
› Yes, Maddy. I have detailed files.
She had a pretty foggy high-school memory of Lincoln. They’d studied him and the civil war for a semester. Boring stuff some of the time, but it got interesting when the country started to pull itself apart over slavery and the war began.
‘He travelled around a bit if I remember correctly, right, Bob?’
› Correct. His family moved several times. Then when he was a young adult he left home and -
She waved her hand at the webcam to stop him. ‘Right, then. All right, OK, this is what we do.’ She pushed her glasses back up her nose. ‘I want you to search every external database from his birthdate onwards. I want you to focus your data-trawling on the places he was supposed to have lived in … Kentucky, wherever else he went. Dig into their newspaper archives, a lot of that old stuff is digitized.’
‘Hold on.’ Liam sat back in one of the office chairs, dug his heels into the concrete floor and pulled himself on squeaking castor wheels closer to her. ‘The world out there doesn’t care a jot for Mr Lincoln now. He’s a Mr Nobody, right? We’re now in a timeline where he never became a famous president. So there’d not be detailed biographies an’ the like out there on the man, surely?’
‘True.’ Maddy pulled on her lip. ‘But I remember reading he was quite … I dunno … quite driven. He had an uneducated father and lived quite poor, if I recall, in a log cabin, and sort of hated all that. Wanted to better himself. So, all right, something’s happened, things have changed and he never got to be president, but maybe he managed to become a local mayor or something, or a successful businessman? Something that might have left a small mark on the world.’
She looked up at Bob and Becks in hope of a word of support. But both of them were silently blinking: networking with computer-Bob and helping the system with the data shovelling.
‘So,’ she continued, ‘if he became a local bigwig somewhere, maybe he opened some sort of, I dunno … some shopping mall …?’
‘Shopping mall?’
‘Ahhh … you know what I mean — trading post!’ She shook her head irritably. ‘Or opened some hospital wing, or some charity school for orphaned kiddies … or made some small town Independence Day speech or something. Point is … these places all had their own little two-sheet gazette, their own newspaper. And these days all that kind of stuff is up on the net as scanned data.’
She turned towards the webcam. ‘You got that, Bob?’
› Yes, Maddy, we are already searching.
‘Do you think we’ll have any more changes?’ asked Liam. ‘The world doesn’t look so different to me. Well, actually, it looks no different to me. Maybe that missing beefburger and the changed painting is all we’re going to get?’
She shook her head. ‘That can’t be all, Liam. You can’t just remove a guy like Lincoln from history and it amounts to no more than the change of a snack menu. There’ll be more changes …’ She stopped mid-sentence. ‘Just a sec …’ She dug a hand deep into her jeans and fumbled for something. She pulled out a crinkled ball of paper and quickly unfolded it. Liam recognized it as a five-dollar bill.
‘Look! He’s still on there!’ she said, turning the note round so that he and Sal could see Lincoln’s face staring out at them with a surly scowl. ‘There’s your answer, Liam,’ she said. ‘There’ll be more ripples … History hasn’t finished fidgeting around to get rid of Lincoln yet.’
Fidgeting around? Maddy realized how oddly human that sounded. As if time itself was some curmudgeonly old college lecturer who grumpily decided when he was good and ready to sit down to rewrite the history books.
‘This means another someone trying to mess things up,’ said Sal, ‘doesn’t it?’
Liam nodded. ‘Another Kramer?’
Maddy shrugged. ‘Not necessarily another Kramer.’
Not long after they’d been recruited, they’d been thrown in the deep end, having to deal with a nut-job from the future who’d thought it a great idea to help the Nazis win the Second World War.
‘But if Lincoln’s destiny has been mucked up,’ said Liam, ‘that’s changed history. That means — ’
‘I know,’ Maddy sniffed. ‘I know. It means another idiot’s fooling around with time travel.’ She puffed her cheeks. ‘All right, so here’s our plan, then … We’ll find him out there somewhere. A driven character like Lincoln’s going to have made his mark one way or another. He may not have ended up being the president, but a guy like that will have made his mark in some other way. We find him, then maybe we’ll find whoever’s just stepped back into the past and changed Lincoln’s destiny.’ She looked at Liam, even managed a laugh, not bad really, given she felt like death warmed up.
‘And you can tell whichever time-travelling moron it is who’s done this that they’re in big trouble.’
CHAPTER 8
2001, New York
It took three hours before computer-Bob’s dialogue box blinked on to the screen and Becks and Bob eventually stirred from the motionless trance they’d been in. Liam came and shook Maddy awake.
She stared up bleary-eyed at Liam, fumbling for her glasses. ‘They done?’
‘Aye.’
‘Where’s Sal?’
‘Viewing. Bob’s with her.’
Viewing — Maddy knew what he meant. Sal was sitting out in the middle of Times Square watching for the subtle further ripples of a time wave.
‘Any more changes?’ s
he asked, sitting up and swinging her legs wearily over the side.
‘Not that me or Sal have noticed.’
She shuffled over to the computer desk feeling worse than ever, if it was even possible, despite having managed to grab some quilt-time. She squeezed past Becks, still standing like a sentinel, her eyelids flickering and twitching like the wings of a humming-bird.
She slumped down at the desk just as she heard the echoing hiss of their kettle stirring to life. Liam — bless him — was making Maddy her wake-up brew. Coffee, black, strong and treacle-sweet.
‘Hey, Bob, what have you got for me?’
› Hello, Maddy. We have collated all the data hits for ‘Abraham Lincoln’ dating from 12 February 1809. There are 7,376 data references to the name. Most of these will be in reference to other people of the same name.
‘Right. So can you filter it down to occurrences in places where Lincoln was supposed to have lived?’
› Affirmative. I have done this. There are 109 data entries in relation to the following locations. 1809 — Hardin County, Kentucky. 1816 — Perry County, Indiana. 1830 — Macon County, Illinois. 1831 — Coles County, Illinois. 1831 — New Salem, Sagemon County, Illinois. 1831 — New Orleans. 1836 — Springfield, Kentucky. 1846 — Washington DC. 1848 — Springfield, Kentucky. 1860 — Washington DC.
‘Right … and some of those hits will be him. Some will be other guys of the same name.’
› Affirmative. There is one data entry I calculate to be of particular relevance. Do you wish to see it?
‘Yeah, put it up.’
One of the monitors on her right suddenly stopped relaying a real-time feed of Wall Street stock values and instead displayed the sepia-coloured scan of an old newspaper. She saw the paper’s title banner:
