Time Travel Omnibus, page 903
“Why not stop the whole war?”
“Kill Hitler in 1918? Everybody from the 20th and 21st wants to do that, or maybe kidnap him as an infant and leave him with a nice family of Buddhists in Tibet. The answer is, forget it. Removing the biggest conflict in human history makes the bosses go poof, not to mention just about everyone else born after 1950 or so. Frankly, we don’t know what history would look like if you change something that big.”
Cavalli was waiting outside the Houses of Parliament when Lord Thomson came out, trailing a crowd of aides and hangers-on. The monocle in Cavalli’s eye displayed a targeting circle and he swung the umbrella up until the bright circle was centered on the side of the Air Minister’s neck. He squeezed the handle and the umbrella fired off a smart dart loaded with pneumonia bacilli. Thomson was pretty healthy; he’d get over it in a few months. Plenty of time for the Cardington team to get the R101 really airworthy.
There was a candy bar next to his Coke when he returned. He didn’t remember getting one from the snack bar. It was a Health bar, his favorite brand. He ate it on the way to the library.
The British Imperial Airship Service had a rocky start, but by 1935 there were direct routes to Canada, India, South Africa, and Australia. Plans to extend the service to New Zealand were put on hold in 1936 and abandoned when war broke out. The airships served as fleet scouts for the Royal Navy during the first years of the war. The Japanese shot down R100 and R103, and R101 was scrapped in 1940. R102 was used to evacuate some key people from Singapore as the Japanese approached, made an epic flight home to England via Africa and the Azores, and spent the rest of the war in a hangar at Cardington before being donated to the Royal Air Museum. In his room he watched a movie on videodisk about the last flight of R102, with Michael York as the heroic captain.
At lunch one day Anna asked the Big Question. “So if you could change one thing, what would it be?”
The other trainees gave the usual answers—save Jesus, kill Hitler, stop Cortez, save Lincoln, give machine guns to Lee. Cavalli shrugged, “Find some way to save the airships, I guess.”
A couple of people who knew him just rolled their eyes, but Anna looked curious. “How come?”
“I just think they’re cool.”
He clung to the fabric covering of the Akron as she cruised out over the New Jersey coast. It was a lot harder to stow away aboard a Navy airship than a passenger craft. His first two attempts had ended in quick aborts when he ran into sailors inspecting the gas cells, so finally he moved the focus to a point just above the ship and hoped nobody was watching.
Keeping a careful hold he pulled out the radio handset and began tapping out the Morse code message he had written on the sleeve of his commando suit. It had all the proper authentications and ordered the Akron to return to base at once. By the time they straightened out the “hoax” the line squall would be long past.
The Coke was in a bottle when he stepped off the stage. He finished it as he leafed through a big glossy coffee-table book about Navy airships in World War Two. There was an exciting picture of Akron going down amid a swarm of Zeroes at the Battle of the Coral Sea, and some photos of Macon on U-boat patrol over the Atlantic. The last page of the book was a fund-raising appeal from the U.S.S. Macon Association, hoping to finish the restoration project and get her airborne again in time for the 50th anniversary of Pearl Harbor. The book noted in passing that the luxury passenger airship never recovered after 1945.
Cavalli started going to bed as soon as classes ended, sleeping through dinner and waking after midnight to use the projector. He made up the lost meals at breakfast.
In 1917 he disabled the radio of the zeppelin L-59 long enough for the ship to miss the recall message and reach its destination in German East Africa. As a result during the 1930s the Graf Zeppelin made a couple of voyages to Cape Town, but inevitably the war ended all that. Cavalli did get a nice Art Deco poster showing a zeppelin over the pyramids to put on his dorm room wall.
He tried going back to San Francisco in 1864 and giving Frederick Marriott a couple of uncut diamonds and a printout of suggestions to improve his Avitor airship. The result was that in the 1930s America purchased four big Navy airships instead of only two. The three that survived Pearl Harbor were scrapped.
He gave the German Navy’s airship commandant Peter Strasser a bad case of pneumonia in 1915, so that zeppelins were used as reconnaissance platforms and fleet scouts rather than strategic bombers. More ships and skilled airshipmen survived the war and the Graf Zeppelin was filled with American helium. All nine passenger airships were scrapped in 1939.
He stood among the sand dunes on the North Carolina coast with the dart gun umbrella in his hand, but went home again.
He did manage to ride from Rio to Friedrichshafen aboard the Graf Zeppelin, and even exchanged a few pleasantries with Hugo Eckener. Dr. Eckener was convinced the airship could maintain its position despite the growing competition from airplane. He gestured around the comfortable lounge. “Who would not trade a cramped seat in a noisy box for this?” Cavalli agreed.
Anna tapped on the door of his dorm room. “I know what you’ve been doing after hours. The projector keeps a record of every time it’s used.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Good reaction. But I checked the times and places. Friedrichshafen, Lakehurst, San Diego. The London trip had me puzzled until I found out the Air Minister came down with pneumonia the next day.”
“He insisted on going to India early and the R101 crashed.”
“Give me one good reason why I shouldn’t tell Temporal Integrity about you.”
“I’ve been careful. I haven’t made any major changes. None of these are butterfly points.”
“Glad to hear that they’re certified safe by a first-year trainee.”
“Look, I’m not hurting anyone. It’s just a little side project. A hobby.”
“John, it’s not going to work. Airships had their day from 1900 to World War Two. The war changed everything too much—they couldn’t survive as military craft and they couldn’t make money as passenger liners. Airplanes just got too good.”
“I thought of maybe stopping the Wright Brothers.”
“What?!”
“—but I changed my mind. Too big a butterfly.” He looked at her. “I still don’t understand something. Why don’t we do more? Why don’t we change things? We’ve got the power.”
“Major changes would erase us.”
“So what? It would be a better world for everyone else. Maybe time travel would get invented sooner.”
“You can’t know it would be better. Stop World War Two and you could cause something worse. Maybe a nuclear war.”
“Better the devil we know, eh?” He looked at her. “I take it you want my master key, too?”
“If you don’t give it up I have to call in Temporal Integrity.”
He sighed and dug in a pocket. “Here. I got it from Dr. Stirling’s office when he made me help move his plants.”
She took the key and turned to go.
“Now be sure you don’t try any history editing yourself,” he said.
He wasn’t sure how long he had. She might try to use the key herself, or Dr. Stirling might, and then they’d realize it was just the key to his dorm room. No time for much preparation. He checked a date in the library, let himself into the supply room, and hid in an unused classroom until dinnertime.
The stage was just warming up when somebody started pounding on the door. Cavalli leaped onto the platform just as the frosted glass smashed and a Temporal Integrity agent reached inside to undo the deadbolt. The last thing he saw of Time Center was Anna’s face. She was shouting something, but it was drowned out by the hum of the field projector.
He hoped he’d been clever, setting the controls for Berlin in early 1932. Maybe the TI agents would assume he was going for Hitler, and concentrate on guarding his apartment and Nazi Party headquarters. But Cavalli spent as little time in Berlin as possible; an hour after arriving he was having dinner aboard the express to Munich. At midnight he got a room in a cheap but tidy hotel in Friedrichshafen.
“Doctor Eckener?”
This particular morning Hugo Eckener looked tired and a little irritable. Running an airship line in the depths of the Depression would do that. “Yes, good morning. My secretary says you have come from America with a business proposal?”
“Actually, no. I just told her that to get in here.”
Eckener scowled. “I do not have time for sight-seers.”
“Oh, no. It’s about politics. The Central Party and the Social Democrats have invited you to run for President.”
“Ah, a reporter. And a very good one, too. That was all discussed in strictest confidence. I am afraid I can say nothing.”
“You must accept the offer.”
“I cannot. Hindenburg is a hero. He is the only thing keeping Germany from falling into anarchy right now.”
“But he’s going to give the Chancellorship to Hitler!”
“That little fraud? Impossible. The President is not a fool.”
“The Nazis are the biggest party, and they’re in favor of rearming Germany. Field-Marshal Hindenburg approves of that.”
“This is all speculation. Besides, my zeppelins keep me too busy to enter politics.”
Cavalli hesitated for a split second, then reached into his pocket and pulled out his computer. “Watch this,” he said, and called up the encyclopedia entry on Hitler. Eckener raised his eyebrows when he saw the little glowing screen in the young stranger’s hand, but then he began to actually watch the newsreel shots and read the text.
“Another war?”
“Worse than the first. By the end of it, Germany was in ruins, thirty million people were dead—and zeppelins were gone forever.”
“How—” Eckener stopped and composed himself. “Never mind. You have travelled in time, like the man in Mr. Wells’ story, or possibly you are an angel, like the one sent to Lot. But I am afraid it is still impossible. Even if I ran, the Nazis would oppose me. They know I loathe them.”
Cavalli took out the package he’d stolen from Mission Supply, and poured a heap of diamonds onto the table. “These are worth about ten million pounds,” he said. “You can blanket the country with ads, rent stadiums for campaign rallies, and hire guards to keep the Brownshirts away.”
Eckener picked up one diamond and scratched a vase with it, then quickly put it down again, as if it was hot to the touch. He was silent for a while. “I do not think I am qualified to be President of Germany,” he said at last.
“You’re an economist by training, and you’ve kept the Zeppelin company going through war and revolution and economic collapse. You’re a national hero. And from everything I’ve read about you, you seem like a decent man. Germany needs a decent man now, Dr. Eckener. The world needs one.”
Eckener looked at him out of those pouchy basset-hound eyes. “Who are you? Why are you doing this?”
Cavalli was about to give him another spiel about the need to stop Hitler, but then he stopped and shrugged. “I guess I just like zeppelins,” he said. “I figure with you as President there will be lots of zeppelins.”
Nine months later Cavalli was in the lounge of the Graf Zeppelin over the Atlantic. The window was open and he was holding his shift bracelet. If he hit RETURN now what would happen? Would he snap forward to Time Center or whatever occupied the site in the no-Hitler future? Would he just pop out of existence?
He watched it fall to the blue water below, then went to the bar to refresh his drink. The zeppelin droned on into the unknown.
SMALL MOMENTS IN TIME
Jack Campbell
Given godlike powers, you must decide whether to use them—and either choice has huge consequences.
The odd truth of working as a temporal interventionist is that some there-and-thens are better than others. History books make the past sound like one thrilling event after another. But for every Shootout-at-the-OK-Corral moment of excitement, there are days, weeks, months and years of people just doing the things that people have to do. Things important enough to keep them alive and their society functioning. Plenty of the all-too-usual human drama, but not the stuff of great historical drama. Most people don’t believe that when I tell them, though.
I leaned against the window frame, squinting against a dry, hot wind blowing across the Kansas prairie and into my face, bringing the gritty taste of fine dust into my mouth whenever I licked my lips. Sometimes I think about the fact that the dust might literally have once been part of someone I knew in another long ago there-and-then. Usually, I try not to think about that, but something about the apparently endless prairie and the seemingly endless wind brought it to mind now, along with memories of the Earps and their brief moment in another western town where the wind had always seemed to be blowing hard.
The thin curtain drawn back from the hotel window fluttered in that wind. From my second-story room, I could see down the main drag of Junction City, Kansas circa July, 1918 A.D. Such as it was. Lots of wood structures, some brick and some sandstone block construction, primitive internal combustion-driven automobiles contending for space on the road with horse-drawn wagons, and a few clouds in a faded blue sky as yet contaminated mainly only by that damned dust.
A cluster of men wearing drab military uniforms came around a corner, offering a small reminder of the hosts currently grinding each other into the bloody mud of Europe, just as they’d been doing for the last four years here and now. I knew that particular war was finally drawing to a close. If I wanted to, I could find out the names of the soldiers I saw and learn which of them would die before the end of the war. I didn’t want to.
Instead, I gathered up the coat local fashion demanded I wear despite the weather, wished I could do without the neck-tie local fashion likewise demanded, took a drink of the lukewarm water remaining in the pitcher the room boasted instead of a sink, and headed for one of the local grain suppliers.
I had to walk into the sun to get there, but local fashion at least had the wisdom to also demand hats with brims, so I was protected from the worst of the glare. “Jeannie. Confirm my directions to this place.”
“One more block down, then two blocks south. Just before the railroad track.”
“Thanks.” Jeannie, my implanted personal assistant, had a wonderful navigational package. A female friend of mine had once remarked that my having Jeannie inside me was perfect for a man, since it meant I could ask for directions without anyone knowing I’d done so.
The grain supply office was filled with the musty smell of a different kind of dust, this from the endless bushels of wheat which passed through the office or the nearby grain elevators. I could see the grain dust as well, clouds of it floating gently in the air currents, as I walked down the line of sample bags, looking for specific seeds for wheat variants which had gone extinct between now and the future I came from. A lot of people needed those extinct plant seeds, and needed them enough to be willing to pay the large sum needed to bring me to Kansas in the early years of the twentieth century.
I found a couple of wheat varieties listed among the requirements Jeannie kept track of for me, as well as a bonus rye variant, and purchased sample bags with some of the better-than-real counterfeit local currency I’d outfitted myself with. Such are the exciting adventures of a temporal interventionist.
I stopped by the town’s other major grain supplier and found a few more samples I needed, then walked back to the hotel to drop off my purchases and have lunch there. Lunch turned out to be fried chicken. Again. But at least it wasn’t chicken and dumplings. Again. The iced tea made up for it, though. Downtime farmers know how to make iced tea like nobody else.
Conversation among the other hotel guests was mostly about the war, of course. One of the couples was put out because they couldn’t see their son, who was at the big Army base nearby. I shrugged it off as the usual sort of wartime security, until they said the word “quarantine.”
Downtime diseases make any temporal interventionist nervous. You can’t develop an immunity or sometimes even get a vaccination for some bug that died out centuries before you were born. Even if decent medical records existed for the period, those records were only as good as the medical theory and technology of the time. And primitive armies were notorious for attracting epidemics. The little nanobugs that helped out my immune system could deal with a lot of things, but you never knew just how virulent something unknown might turn out to be. I hurriedly finished my lunch and headed for my next objective in town, determined to get my work done and then out of here and now as fast as possible.
“Jeannie, did any serious disease outbreaks take place in or near Junction City, Kansas in 1918 A.D.?”
“Only the Spanish Influenza.”
Anyone watching would’ve seen me jerk with momentary shock. “Is that all?” It’d been a long time since the Spanish Influenza when I’d first learned about it, but it still held the dubious record of being the deadliest epidemic in history, which was why I immediately recognized the term. “Here?”
“It apparently originated in Camp Funston.”
“I thought the big Army installation here was named Fort Riley.”
“That’s correct.”
I felt briefly reassured, then remembered why “artificial intelligence” is still a disparaging term. “Is Camp Funston related in any way to Fort Riley?”
“Camp Funston is located on Fort Riley.”
“Thanks for elaborating. How serious is the threat at this time and place?”
Jeannie, as always, sounded authoritative and calm. “Very limited, which is why there is no disease warning flagged on this here-and-now. The early phases of the Spanish Influenza were widespread in some areas but had low mortality rates consistent with usual influenza outbreaks.”
