THE H-BOMB GIRL

by Stephen Baxter

  “In the end they wheeled me off to the delivery room. They gave me gas and air. I had one last big push, and out came Patrick. They cleaned me up, wheeled me back to the ward, and put him in my arms.” Bernadette smiled at her baby. “He had this tiny little face, all squashed up and red. He smelled of soap, even then.

  “Then the Mother Superior came and said I had to give him up for adoption. She said it was better to take him off me right then, before we got used to each other.”

  Joel asked, “What did you do?”

  “Punched her in the gob.”

  Laura said, “So they brought you back here.”

  “More floors to clean.”

  “But they’ll take him away eventually,” Joel said dismally, still cradling Patrick. “They’re too strong. The nuns, the social services, the whole lot of them. They’ll even call the police. Take him off you by force. It would be horrible. It’s what they do.”

  “No,” Laura said impulsively. “We can’t let that happen. There must be another way.”

  “I knew you wouldn’t give up, Laura. Not you.”

  The new voice was the nun who had been sweeping the floor. She was standing over them, her face masked, her brush in her hand.

  Bernadette snatched her baby back from Joel and held him close.

  “It’s all right,” said the nun. And she pushed back her wimple.

  It was Agatha.

  Laura stood up and faced her. “What are you doing here?”

  Agatha’s thin face was strained, and she looked vaguely frightened. “Are you glad to see me?”

  Laura said honestly, “I don’t know. It’s complicated.” Agatha was a figure out of a kind of nightmare. And yet Laura was tied to her. This was her daughter. Or would have been—or something. “I thought you’d go back to your own time machine.”

  “I smashed it up.”

  Laura frowned. “Why?”

  “I came here to change the future, remember. I failed. And my future doesn’t exist; it never will, because there was no Sunday War. I can’t go home.”

  Laura wondered if Agatha was telling the truth about destroying her machine. Agatha was an instinctive survivor. Even if she decided to stay here, she might have wanted to keep her options open. A time machine, hidden in 1963. What if it still worked? What if somebody found it?

  “What will you do here?”

  “I don’t know. Get a job. Make a few friends.” Her pale face was pinched. “Believe me, even if I end up sleeping in the streets, I’m better off than where I came from. And in the meantime I’ve come to help you,” she said to Bernadette.

  “Help me do what?”

  “Get out of here. With your baby. That’s what you want, isn’t it? Give it five minutes. The Mother Superior does her rounds, regular as clockwork. We have to wait until there’s a gap. Then we’ll get out the back.”

  Joel grinned. “Ace. It’s like breaking out of Colditz. But what about your mum and dad? Aren’t they waiting out the front?”

  “I’ll phone them,” Laura said. “They’ll understand.”

  Bernadette looked bemused. “But what then?”

  Joel looked Bernadette in the eyes. “Bern—look—there’s something I never told you. The way I feel about you. I mean—”

  Bernadette touched his hand. “Poor old Joel. I always knew.”

  He seemed amazed. “You did?”

  “Of course. Everybody could tell. You’re no actor, you silly sod.”

  “You chose Billy Waddle over me. I understand that. But now Patrick’s here I want to be with you. I want to help you raise him.”

  “Oh, Joel. You’re just a kid.”

  “I’m older than you,” he said. “A bit. And I want to help you. Even if, you know.”

  “What? Spit it out.”

  “Even if we’re never together. I’ll help you even so.”

  “But,” Laura said awkwardly, “it’s not just that you aren’t Patrick’s dad. You aren’t the same colour.”

  Joel said, “So people will give us stick for that. So what?”

  Bern looked him straight in the eye. “People can all bog off. You’re on, soft lad. Tell you what, though. From now on, I’m on the pill.”

  “Then it’s settled,” Laura said. “We’ll all help. I’ll twist Dad’s arm, to help get rid of the nuns and the social. Bern, I bet your mum will take you in if we can help support you. There’s that bit of money from Billy Waddle for a start. We’ll work it out somehow. All we have to do is get out of here.” She looked at Agatha. “But why are you doing this?”

  “For you. She’s your friend.”

  Laura nodded. “All right. But you look, well, frightened.”

  Agatha forced a smile. “Not of the Mother Superior. I’ve been frightened every day since I decided to stay here.”

  “Why?”

  “Because,” Agatha said slowly, “history has changed under me. The world I came from will never exist. I shouldn’t have been born. I’m a sort of mistake in time. All this Catholicism is worrying me. What about my soul? Will I go to heaven or hell? If my timeline has gone, do I still have a soul at all?” Her eyes were hollow.

  Bernadette was astonished. “Don’t tell me you were brought up a Catholic.”

  Joel said, “Well, I’m still in CND. We got through the Cuban crisis but the bombs still exist. That’s what I’m worried about.”

  “None of us knows how long we have,” Bernadette said.

  Laura said, “No. And Dad says there will always be something to be frightened about, always some hideous threat of the end of the world, just around the corner. You just have to be sensible and keep on muddling through. And make the most of now.”

  “She means,” Bernadette said, “never miss a chance to shop.”

  Agatha smiled, pale. Then she glanced at a clock. “It’s time.”

  Bernadette clutched the baby in her arms. “I’m packed.”

  The way out the back was through a laundry room, where giant steel cylinders swallowed up heaps of towels. As they seemed to be in the charge of Sister Agatha, nobody stopped them.

  The door at the rear of the building wasn’t locked. They burst out into the open air.

  The evening sunlight was bright over Liverpool, reflecting from the windows of the terraced houses, and making the roof tiles shine pink. They ran off into the maze of terraced streets, laughing and talking, the four of them with the baby, until they were sure nobody could catch them.

  Afterword

  The Cuban Missile Crisis really happened. In October 1962, the Cold War almost got very hot indeed.

  In 1962 the Soviet Union, Russia, was losing the arms race with the west. The US had 5000 nuclear weapons it could have used to destroy Soviet targets. The Russians only had 300.

  The Soviet Union was a poor country, compared with America. But Premier Khrushchev saw a cheap way to even up the balance of power. He decided to plant bases for short-range missiles close to America on the island of Cuba, where there was a friendly Communist government. President Kennedy’s America had earlier mounted a failed invasion of Cuba.

  During the summer of 1962 the Russians sent cargo ships to Cuba laden with missiles and warheads, and 40,000 soldiers and technicians. All this was kept secret. Khrushchev planned to reveal the missile bases to a stunned world when they were ready.

  But in October 1962 American spy planes spotted the missiles and their launch pads, still under construction. President Kennedy could have ordered air strikes, or invaded Cuba. But he feared triggering a third world war.

  So Kennedy ordered a “quarantine.” US Navy ships were ordered to turn back any more Russian vessels. Kennedy was trying to show firmness without provoking a fight.

  Behind the scenes there were frantic negotiations with the Russians. But things could have gone horribly wrong. Communications were poor, and soldiers on the ground might have started shooting on their own initiative.

  The emergency preparations for nuclear war shown in this book,
with children being evacuated from the cities and everybody urged to build fall-out shelters, are based on plans the British government actually made at the time. They weren’t put into place during the Cuban Crisis; the events in this novel didn’t come to pass. But the Vulcan bomber fleets really were put on stand-by, and there were protests against nuclear war in many large towns and cities.

  Saturday 27th October, “Black Saturday,” was the most dangerous time of all. An American spy plane was shot down by the Cubans, and the US Navy forced a Russian submarine to the surface. Black Saturday was perhaps the closest we ever came to an all-out nuclear war, and the systems used, such as the “Single Integrated Operations Plan” shown in the story, really were hair-trigger.

  If the war had come about, it would have been every bit as terrible as depicted in this story. In 1956 Harold Macmillan, who would be prime minister in 1962, said, “We cannot hope to emerge from a global war except in ruins.”

  But the Russians and Americans calmed down. Missiles on Cuba just weren’t worth risking war over.

  On Sunday 28th, the Russians agreed to a secret deal. They dismantled their bases on Cuba, and in return the Americans got rid of missiles in Turkey. Kennedy and Khrushchev ordered a “hot-line” telephone link, so they could talk directly to each other if there was another emergency. President Kennedy won great praise for his calmness and firmness in the crisis. It was a great shock when, just over a year later, he was assassinated in Dallas, Texas.

  A recent book on the Cuban Missile Crisis is High Noon in the Cold War by Max Frankel (Ballantine Books, 2.004). A movie about it, called Thirteen Days and starring Kevin Costner, was released in 2001.

  Nobody has built a time machine, and nobody knows what would happen if you went back in time and tried to change history. Some scientists like Stephen Hawking think it would be impossible. Others think you wouldn’t really change history but create a whole new future, starting from the point where you made your change. So you could end up with lots of “parallel” futures, in which people’s lives work out differently. That’s the idea used in this book.

  And, like Agatha in the novel, if you did go back to change the past, you might find yourself stranded in the new future you created, watching your own life working out differently than you remember. If you’re interested, try How to Build a Time Machine by Paul Davies (Penguin, 2002).

  “Merseybeat” groups really did play in my old school, Saint Edward’s College in West Derby. Even the Beatles played there, in October 1961. Apparently the highlight was Paul McCartney singing “Besame Mucho.”

  Any errors or omissions are my sole responsibility.

  Stephen Baxter