THE H-BOMB GIRL

by Stephen Baxter

  Joel grinned as he fished coppers out of his pocket. “You’d think the Post Office would give us free calls in the circumstances. I think those scallies are getting closer. We’d better get a shift on.”

  Laura called the last number Dad had given her. To her huge relief he picked up the phone immediately.

  “Laura? Where the hell are you? I had somebody call at the house. You and Mum—”

  “We’re in hiding. We both are.”

  Dad snapped, “What? Hiding? Who from?”

  “From a teacher at school. You remember Miss Wells?”

  “That’s ridiculous.”

  “Not ridiculous. Complicated. She’s working with Mort.”

  He was silent.

  “Dad, are you there?”

  “What do they want?”

  “The Key. Dad, you do believe me?”

  “Of course I believe you.”

  “I want you to come and get us.” She tried not to sound like a helpless kid. But she couldn’t think of where else to turn. “We’re in a cellar, under—”

  Dad said sharply, “No. Don’t say it. If you’re right this phone call might be monitored. I’ll find you.”

  “How?”

  “Never mind that. And I’ll find out what Mort is really up to. I’ll try, Laura, I promise I’ll try. But use the Key, if you need to.”

  But she was starting to think she couldn’t use the Key, no matter what.

  She tried to be brave. “Maybe all this will still blow over.”

  “Well, they’re arguing in the United Nations. The Russians still haven’t tried to crash through the Q-line, with their ships and their subs. But on the other hand they haven’t started dismantling their missiles on Cuba yet.

  “And they’re panicking in Washington. They’re frightened Khrushchev might have been deposed by his generals. But Khrushchev might think the same about Kennedy.

  “It’s all this rotten communication.” He sighed. “I don’t believe anybody really wants to go to war. But the next twenty-four hours will be critical.”

  Black Saturday, Laura thought. “Dad—”

  But the phone started beeping in her ear, and though she tried to cram in more money, she got no more time.

  Laura held on to the handset, even when it fell silent. She didn’t want to face Joel. Hearing Dad’s voice for the first time in days affected her more than she expected. After all, last night she’d read about how he was due to die, when the first wave of Russian missiles landed on the military targets on Sunday morning, less than forty-eight hours from now. And she hadn’t even been able to tell him goodbye.

  Joel said, “Hey, look.”

  Something glinted in the sky. It was a milk bottle, filled with some brownish fluid, with a bit of burning cotton wool stuck in the neck. Spinning over the roof of a house, it looked quite beautiful.

  The bottle landed, and fire splashed over the road.

  “A Molotov cocktail,” Joel said. “You wonder where they got the petrol.”

  A mob erupted from an alleyway only fifty yards from the phone kiosks. They threw rocks and bricks, and waved crowbars and wrenches, and hurled more petrol-bombs. As they ran into the road a force of police came the other way. In their helmets and black uniforms the scuffers ran in formation, with bits of wood held in front of them, improvised shields.

  The rioters were mostly men, young and angry, but there were some older men, a few women, and even kids, ten or eleven or twelve. All hungry, Laura supposed, all frightened.

  Joel said, “Those scuffers haven’t got their numbers on their coats. That’s against the law.”

  The two forces clashed in the middle of the road. Rioters fell under blows from truncheons, but the police were being battered as well. One scuffer went down, his uniform on fire. The fires from the petrol bombs started to gather together into a major blaze.

  A shell whistled up into the air from the police lines. It landed among the rioters and white gas splashed.

  “Tear gas,” Laura said. She took a handkerchief from her blazer pocket and stuck it over her mouth, and pulled Joel away.

  As they ran back to their hole in the ground, she heard the muffled pops of gunfire.

  Lunch was more tinned rice, tinned beans, black tea.

  Joel sat alone, eating his lunch in the shadows. Bern cradled Nick, who was sleeping again, his hands clamped around his head. Bern had barely said a word all day.

  Laura sat with Mum and Agatha. “We’ve got family business to sort out. And you need to know who we’re hiding from, Mum.”

  At last, she tried to explain the whole truth to Mum.

  “So let me get this straight,” Mum said. “Miss Wells, your teacher, is actually yourself, from the future. The year two thousand and something.”

  “2007,” said Agatha.

  “I think so.”

  “And you,” Mum turned to Agatha, “are Laura’s daughter. My granddaughter. And, you say, you’re older than me. But you won’t even be born until 1967. Five years from now.”

  Agatha just looked back steadily.

  “And you grew up after an atomic war.” Mum, on impulse, cupped Agatha’s cheek. “You poor thing. You’ve had a rotten life, haven’t you? That’s why you’re so—joyless.”

  Agatha closed her eyes and leaned into Mum’s hand.

  Laura stared. “You’re taking this very calmly, Mum.”

  She shot back, “You don’t think much of your mother, do you, Laura? I’m not some sort of imbecile. This business of time travel. I did watch Quatermass, you know. And a couple of years ago there was that rather good film with Rod Taylor. What was it called?”

  “The Time Machine,” Nick said. His voice was muffled by his hands.

  Laura turned. “I didn’t know you were awake.”

  “I’m not,” Nick said. “I just fancied Rod Taylor.”

  Mum said, “As for all this business of meeting a granddaughter who’s older than me, if you’re brought up a Catholic you get used to believing two impossible things before breakfast. Compared to the Mystery of the Holy Trinity, a time-travel paradox is a piece of cake!” She actually laughed. “But there are some things I don’t understand.”

  Laura nodded. “Like what?”

  “You said Miss Wells is your future self.” She turned to Agatha. “That would make Miss Wells your mother, wouldn’t it? And,” she said to Laura, “the diary says you, well, darling, you die, in 1970. You’d only be about twenty-two. So how could you live to be sixty-something to become Miss Wells, and come back here in a time machine?”

  Laura opened her mouth, and closed it. “I hadn’t thought of that.” She hadn’t put all these things together, the presence of Miss Wells, Agatha, her own death in the diary. “I suppose I’m not used to thinking this way.”

  “There’s no paradox,” Agatha said. “Miss Wells is your future self. But she’s not the future self who became my mother.”

  Mum asked, “How can that be? You’re both from the future.”

  “But from different futures.”

  “Woah,” Nick called weakly. “I think we just crashed through another conceptual barrier.”

  Laura tried to get her head around this. “OK. OK. Agatha, you came back from your atom-war future.”

  “We say, the ‘Sunday War timeline’,” Agatha said.

  “But Miss Wells isn’t from that timeline,” Joel called over. “She’s from a different timeline. Is that right? What kind of future is that?”

  “You’d have to ask Miss Wells.”

  Mum said, “If you’re all from these different timelines, how can you all be coming back to the same place? Liverpool 1962?”

  “Because this is where they all branch off from,” Agatha said. “All the histories.”

  Laura thought she understood. The timelines were like roads leading off from a roundabout: Agatha’s Sunday War, Miss Wells’s unknown future, maybe other possibilities. There was a different version of herself in each of the futures, each marching
down her own road. And 1962 was the roundabout, the place all the different histories met.

  “I suppose it all depends on the way the Cuba crisis works out. Peace, or nuclear war.” This was the crucial point in human history, the moment so dramatic that it would shape all history to follow.

  Agatha said, “I knew you’d understand, Mum.”

  “Don’t call me that.”

  “So that’s why they’ve come here, to this pivot of history,” Joel said. “Two futures, fighting to be real. And 1962 is their battleground.”

  Nick, lying on his back, cackled. “You should write for the comics, our kid. Dan Dare, maybe.”

  “He’s right,” Agatha said. “This is a fight for the future. And here’s how I’m going to win.”

  Agatha said the military planners, working in their citadels in the post-nuclear ruins of Britain in the year 2007, had “war-gamed” how America and its allies could have won a nuclear war in 1962.

  By “winning,” they meant surviving more or less intact, while destroying the Russians. In the Sunday War the whole world had been bombed flat. The plan now was that it should be just Russia that got bombed flat, while the west survived.

  It all depended on Laura’s Key.

  “That’s the trigger,” Agatha said. “That Key can be used to launch one Vulcan, one British nuclear bomber plane.”

  “Aha,” Joel said. “And given how the whole world is on a knife-edge over Cuba, that could be enough to change things.”

  In the Sunday War, the first nuclear bombs would fall on Sunday 28th October. But Agatha intended to change history—to use the V-bomber controlled by Laura’s Key to drop the first bomb twenty-four hours before that, in the small hours of Saturday 27th.

  Joel said quietly, “Tonight.”

  The British bomber, striking without warning, would take out one Soviet city.

  The Russians wouldn’t believe the British had acted alone. They would retaliate by striking at the Americans. The fastest way to do it would be to fire off their Cuban missiles, while they had the chance, at mainland America.

  “And almost certainly,” Agatha said, “one of the Cuban missiles would hit Washington. That was what they were designed to do. Kennedy and all the American decision-makers—all dead.”

  After that the American military machine, decapitated, would immediately lunge into total war.

  “It would all be automatic,” Agatha said. “They call it the Single Integrated Operations Plan. It’s what’s supposed to happen if all the leaders are killed. First the big intercontinental missiles would fly, the Atlases, the Jupiters, the Thors, the Titans. The nuclear bombers would follow, the B-52s, the supersonic B-58s. And the submarines around the coast, and all the missiles from places like Turkey.”

  If Kennedy had survived, he might have pulled back. As it was, the machine would take over. That was the whole idea. To trigger America’s war machine to destroy Russia, unthinking.

  “The Russians couldn’t strike back,” Joel said. “Not with anything like the same firepower. And they couldn’t defend themselves against the missiles, the bombers. So their cities, industries, military bases—”

  “All destroyed before dawn in Moscow,” Agatha said. “Nine hundred and fifty atomic weapons landing on Russia in the first wave. And it wouldn’t end there. Later in the day the Americans would launch their second wave.”

  Laura asked, “What would be left to attack?”

  “The trees.”

  It was called the taiga, a vast belt of fir-tree forest that stretched across the north of the Soviet Union, halfway around the North Pole. After three hundred and seventy more nuclear strikes, Russia would become one vast firestorm.

  “With all that smoke in the air blocking out the sun, not a blade of grass will grow in Russia for a whole year. The Nuclear Spring, they will call it.”

  By Christmas 1963 perhaps a tenth of the Russian population would be left alive.

  “While America will lose a few million,” Agatha said. “Tops.”

  “And that’s what you call a victory,” Laura said.

  “Yes! Don’t you see? In a nuclear war, the only way the Russians can hurt us is if they have time to fire off their weapons. That’s what happened in my timeline, the Sunday War. But if you attack them first, if you just hit them really hard with all you’ve got, you can wipe them out before they can respond.”

  “And,” Laura said, “the one V-bomber controlled by my Key-”

  “That starts it all off.”

  Joel stared at her. “You’re talking about starting a nuclear war deliberately. The deliberate genocide of two hundred million people. Maybe a tenth of everybody alive on the planet. What kind of monster are you?”

  She looked hurt. “You haven’t lived the life I’ve lived, Uncle Joel. Don’t call me a monster. You don’t know.” She turned to Laura. “Now you know it all. Will you help me, Mum? Will you give me the Key?”

  Laura stared back. “I need to think.”

  “We don’t have long,” whispered Agatha, and the candlelight made her face look deeply lined.

  Chapter 23

  Friday 26th October. 8 p.m.

  We’re running out of time.

  Four hours left to Black Saturday. Which will get even blacker if Agatha has her way.

  We keep hearing shouts. Screams. Cracks that might be gunfire. Maybe it’s the police against the rioters. Or maybe the police have just withdrawn and left them to it.

  Either way they are getting closer to us.

  If we’re going to do something it has to be soon. But what?

  Joel was talking about time travel with Agatha.

  “What about time paradoxes?” he said. “I’ve read Ray Bradbury and Robert Heinlein.”

  “Go on.”

  “Suppose Laura gave you the Key, and your Nuclear Spring future came about. Then you would never have been born. Would you just—” he waved a hand in the air “—fade out of existence?”

  “No. It turns out it doesn’t work like that. I would continue to exist, to live and breathe. But I’d be stranded here. The last relic of a future that will never happen.” She touched her diary. “Everything written down in here wouldn’t happen. Everything I remember would never happen. But I would remember it even so.”

  “That’s a paradox.”

  “So is disappearing…”

  Laura called a council of war. Everybody except Agatha, who she asked to sit out so they could talk things over.

  And except for Bernadette. She wouldn’t play. She skulked off to a dark corner, complaining of a headache.

  Joel said, “Come on, Bern. We need you. You’re the only sensible one here.”

  “Bog off.” Her voice was slurred.

  Laura was suspicious. “Bern, what’s up? Are you drunk? You’re not supposed to drink when you’re pregnant, are you?” She leaned closer, hoping to smell Bernadette’s breath.

  But Bernadette pushed her away and curled up. “I said bog off.”

  Laura gave up and rejoined the others.

  They sat in a circle around a candle, Laura, Joel, Mum, Nick. Their faces floated in the dim light.

  Nick still had his sunglasses on. “ ‘When shall we three meet again, in thunder, lightning, or in rain?’”

  “There are four of us,” Joel said.

  “ ‘When the hurly-burly’s done. When the battle’s lost and won.’ Macbeth. Did it for O-level.”

  “Is this helping?” Mum asked sensibly.

  “Sorry, Missus Mann.”

  Mum turned to Laura. “So what do we do?”

  Laura blurted, “You’re my mum. You should be telling me.”

  Mum smiled, a bit sadly. “Dad gave you the Key, not me. It was probably a wise choice.”

  Joel said, “What are the options?” He counted them on his fingers. “One. You could give the Key to Agatha, as she asks. So she can kick off her Single Integrated Operations Plan and kill all the Russians.”

  Nick said, “You’d b
e swapping tens of millions of deaths in the Sunday War, for hundreds of millions in the Nuclear Spring.”

  “I don’t want to be responsible for one death, let alone a million.”

  Joel shrugged. “Fair enough. So the Nuclear Spring timeline bites the dust. Who’s going to tell Agatha?”

  “Option two,” Mum interrupted. “You could use the Key the way Dad told you to. You have the code, the phone number. You could call this Regional Who’s-it Controller of Whatchamacallit.”

  “I’ve got a threepenny bit,” Nick said, mocking. “You can pay me back after the nuclear holocaust.”

  “Then we’ll all be taken into safety in some government bunker. And drink tea and eat choccy biscuits until it’s all over.”

  “No,” said Laura. She was making her mind up as she spoke. “The Key. I can’t use it.”

  Joel said, “What? Why not?”

  She’d been thinking this over ever since reading Agatha’s diary. “The Key controls a nuclear bomber. Megatons. Agatha wants to use it to set off a global nuclear war deliberately. Well, maybe if I try to use it at all, I’ll set off a war by accident.

  “You know what the diary says about Agatha’s timeline. How the Sunday War starts tomorrow. Something triggers it, some small incident somewhere. What if the Key is the trigger?”

  Nick said, “It might be nothing to do with your Key. It’s probably some divvy on either side in Berlin, or Cuba—”

  “But it might be the Key.” She patted her chest. “And I know that if I keep the thing tucked away in here it can’t do any harm. I don’t want there to be a nuclear war,” she said fervently. “Any war. Because, for one thing, as soon as any bomb falls, anywhere, Dad will be killed.”

  Mum looked away.

  Joel nodded. “Right. And that’s why you tried to get your dad to come and get you out of here, when you rang him this morning. Because you can’t risk using the Key.”