by Anthology
Marie laid a reassuring hand on the doctor’s forearm. “Don’t worry. With a few simple calculations, I can give you the exact location of each fragment.” The doctor’s jaw dropped as Marie told him exactly where to probe and cut to extract each fragment.
Marie made dozens of X-rays that day, working with all the surgeons at the field hospital. Some followed her instructions closely and performed some of the most brilliant operations of their careers. Others were skeptical, and neither they nor their patients did so well.
It was well after dusk before Marie could repack her equipment and prepare to leave. She was just closing up her car when the young surgeon came hurrying toward her. “I know you must leave, but there is another matter I must discuss with you.” The surgeon hesitated a moment and cast a nervous glance at Marie’s radiation-scarred hands. He shivered briefly, then silently rebuked himself for acting like a squeamish first-year student facing his initial cadaver.
“I have read your articles on the promise and the dangers of radiation with great interest, Madam Curie. I would now like to show you several cases I have here at the hospital whose symptoms bear some resemblance to those you have described for radiation sickness. These men are in the wing reserved for gas victims, but they were not gassed. While serving together, they endured a furious barrage that included a great many of what my military colleagues call ‘air bursts.’ These shells apparently contained some kind of powered blistering agent—similar to mustard gas, perhaps, but not a gas at all. In any case, it seems to have done some internal damage as well as burned their skin, though their uniforms were not damaged at all. Will you come?”
Marie’s spine stiffened. “Of course,” she said.
The ward was long, and dim, and much too damp and cold for Marie. It also held far too many young men. Why, she thought, had mankind not yet managed to find a way to settle disputes except through violence? Marie stopped at yet another hospital cot as an orderly held up a lamp. In the light, Marie saw the unmistakable signature of radiation at work, tearing apart a living body from the inside. A few questions to the emaciated young man brought the same answers she had heard before. The enemy shells had exploded overhead, showering the trenches with a dully gleaming black ash, like soot from a dirty chimney, or coal dust. The soldiers had hastily donned their gas masks, though not before some of them had inhaled the stuff. They had braced for an assault—the enemy usually followed up a gas attack that way—but none had come. They lived in their gas masks for days, walking about in the gritty ash the whole time, and feeling progressively weaker as they watched their skin develop sores and fissures. Finally, the rain came, and the black ash disappeared into the mud. And then came the assault.
Marie asked to see one of their uniforms and carefully scraped off a small sample of the black dust. Back at the tent that had served as her makeshift X-ray room, she examined the powder and ran several chemical tests. Pitchblende! thought Marie. Those animals are filling artillery shells with pitchblende to make our soldiers sick! But it’s more than just pitchblende ore—even weeks of exposure to that wouldn’t make them so ill so fast. What could it be?
Marie X-rayed the men, and the images confirmed her worst fears. Advanced radiation sickness, with bone deterioration and damage to the lungs, liver, heart, and kidneys, as well as the characteristic sores that she had seen on her husband’s body and her own. But what could produce such results so fast?
Marie gathered a few fresh samples and packed them carefully for transport to her lab. There she ran test after test, feverishly trying to isolate the additional substance she believed was there. At last, she found it. A remarkably simple molecule, really, she thought. But somehow it intensifies the natural emission of radiation from radioactive substances at least a thousand times. Most likely, it reduces the half-life considerably to do so. An elegant discovery, though it has been put to a highly immoral use. By grinding the pitchblende to a fine powder, they guaranteed that some of it would be taken into the body, either via ingestion or inhalation. Once radium and other radioactive substances are inside the body, they cannot be completely removed. And radiation emitted inside the body is far more potent than radiation originating outside it. Even so, however, it would normally take years for symptoms of this magnitude to occur. But this—this accelerator particle has greatly amplified the effect.
The implications staggered Marie. Thousands—perhaps millions—of horrible deaths, just like her Pierre’s. And not just soldiers—this material was in the land and the groundwater. For perhaps the first time in her life, the publicly stoic Marie Curie felt faint. When she recovered her equilibrium, she returned immediately to the field hospital and sought out the surgeon.
“These men will die, no matter what you do,” she said. “It would be kinder to shoot them now than to let them suffer the agony that lies ahead. But I know you wish to do what you can for them, so I give you this advice. You must gather up everything these men have touched—particularly anything they carried or wore during the attacks—and bury it. Use staff people who have not attended these patients before. The furnishings and bedding in here might have to be discarded as well. I have brought some instruments with me that can determine the level of contamination. In the meantime, move the staff from this ward to other duties. No one should work in here for more than a few hours at a time.”
She stared at the surgeon with the same intensity she had with the orderly many hours before. “If you don’t have the authority to see to these requests, you must take me to someone who can. We stand on the brink of a new dark age!”
Excerpt from Ongoing Status Report: Incident #6712514—ATR 600120.346
By preventing the untimely death of Pierre Curie in April 1906, the subject Peter Bower set in motion an alternate timeline that was initially thought to be benign and of limited scope. Further examination, however, has demonstrated that the effects are more significant than expected.
Because Professor Curie did not die in a street accident, as he was meant to, his radiation sickness became progressively more advanced until medical science could no longer put the combination of unusual symptoms down to known maladies. X-rays of his bones showed extensive decay, and the blackened, hardened skin of his hands eventually succumbed to the necrosis as well. Most of his organs had suffered damage, and malignant tumors had formed throughout his body. Eventually his organs began to fail one by one, and in 1910, he finally died. Biopsies of his bones and skin revealed radioactivity. The conclusion was clear, even to Pierre and Marie, who had been blinded to the dangers by their passion for discovery—radioactivity was lethal. The medical community trumpeted the health hazard to the public, and legislation was quickly enacted to ensure that radium, thorium, polonium, uranium, and all other radioactive elements would be tightly controlled and available only to researchers who were properly protected against them. The “Radium Girls” incident in the United States in the 1920s and 1930s never occurred, and radium salts did not find widespread public use as medicinal substances.
However, the lethal properties of radioactive substances attracted great interest from warmongers, terrorists, and others with a penchant for killing large numbers of people. And though the refined radioactive elements were controlled, their naturally occurring source—pitchblende—the very ore from which the Curies had extracted radium and polonium in the first place—was not, nor could it be. Huge deposits still existed in Eastern Europe, and when World War I broke out, military scientists quickly developed a means to create dirty bombs by grinding pitchblende and mixing it with an accelerator substance that dramatically increased the decay rate of the component substances—as well as the production of radon gas. Millions of people died, and vast tracts of land in France and other countries were poisoned and rendered uninhabitable for the next thousand years.
Nuclear fission became a reality during the third term of American President Woodrow Wilson, and nuclear weaponry wasn’t far behind. World War II commenced ten years earlier than it otherwi
se would have, and the death toll increased by a factor of one hundred. Other divergent events occurred as well. For example, the famed British-American collaboration that produced the first stockpiles of penicillin almost did not occur because the frantic effort to perfect bigger and deadlier nuclear bombs consumed most of each country’s brainpower and funding. Only the efforts of an obscure young official in America (one Richard Nixon) salvaged anything from the drive to produce penicillin, and the wonder drug still was not available in large quantities until after the war.
Clearly, this timeline must be corrected.
But it seems that Marie Curie, already dying of radiation-induced organ damage, anemia, and perhaps leukemia, decided to take matters into her own hands. Wildly intelligent, she gained an understanding of time travel. However, since she does not know the deviation point and would not be likely to accept the need for her husband’s early death anyway, intervention will be necessary to prevent an even larger divergence.
“Iréne, please hand me that rheostat.” Marie turned from the machine she was working on to address her daughter.
“Mother, I still don’t understand why you feel the need to test this machine on yourself before going public with our findings,” said Iréne Joliot-Curie, picking up the requested component and handing it to Marie. “We’ve already proved that time travel is possible by using this machine to transport inanimate objects into the future and waiting for them to reappear. The applications of Mr. Einstein’s theory are staggering—and we have your discoveries to thank for the necessary power to traverse time itself.”
“I’ve told you before, Iréne,” said Marie, picking up a wrench to tinker with the power generator system on the time machine, “mankind was clearly not ready for radioactivity so soon. Look at the devastation that our discovery has wrought.”
“But why do you have to go back before your own discovery of polonium?” Iréne persisted. “You were always a reasonable woman with a good scientific head on your shoulders. Can’t you just go back and convince yourself not to do it?”
Marie cursed under her breath as she worked at the circuit. “I do not necessarily subscribe to the theory that science fiction writers have put forward that having two of oneself in the same place and time will cause a disaster of epic proportions. But I do believe it would not accomplish our goal of delaying the inevitable discovery of radioactivity. If your father and I hadn’t discovered those elements, someone else would have, and very quickly. I had to work like a demon to get those papers out before someone beat me to it, and Schmidt beat me by three weeks on one anyway. If the stage is set for a scientific discovery, someone will make it. No, the discovery that led to ours is the one that must be negated.”
“You mean . . .” said Iréne, comprehension dawning in her eyes.
“That’s right,” said Marie crisply, straightening up and crossing to a locked cabinet. “Henri Becquerel must be prevented from making his discovery. That one was an accident anyway—he was working on something else entirely at the time.” Marie withdrew a key from her sleeve and unlocked the cabinet, then reached in and took out a pistol. “Who knows how long it would have taken for someone else to make that discovery?” Placing the gun in her reticule, Marie returned to the time machine and began adjusting the dials.
“Ma chérie, you’re not going to . . .”
“Don’t be silly, Iréne. You know what a pacifist I am. This is just insurance. A person alone in a strange place and time needs some protection, after all.” With that, Marie picked up the time transport unit, pressed the switch, and disappeared.
A moment later, Marie looked about. Yes, it was definitely a laboratory, and there on the desk was an open notebook with Becquerel’s handwriting in it. She knew the hand well, from their periods of collaboration and the time they had jointly prepared the speech for the 1900 World’s Fair.
Outside the window, the day was gray and cloudy. Henri would be abandoning his effort to induce X-ray generation by exposing uranium to sunlight for today. Now all she had to do was find a place to hide until he put the uranium and the covered photographic plate in the drawer, wait until he left, and put the plate out on the table. In the morning, Becquerel would think he had forgotten to put it in the drawer and continue his experiments. No more cloudy days should occur between now and the completion of his work. He would draw the wrong conclusion, fail to discover the existence of Becquerel rays, and radioactivity would not be discovered for some time to come.
Marie sighed as she mentally said goodbye to her own Nobel prizes. But this was for the good of mankind—and besides, if she didn’t discover radium, she would not have to lose Pierre. Perhaps they both could live out full, normal lives. Some things were worth more than fame.
“Excuse me, Madame Curie,” said a pleasant voice from behind her. Whirling, Marie beheld a lithe younger woman clad in gray overalls. “I can’t tell you what a pleasure this is. I’ve studied your work for many years. You could say that you’re my hero.”
“Who—who are you?” stammered Marie. “And how did you know I was here?”
“Katrina Mason, Timecorps,” the girl said.
“Timecorps?” Marie was only stunned for an instant. If she’d discovered time travel, certainly others could, too.
“Ma’am, I have to ask you . . . just what do you intend to do with that gun in your purse?”
“Probably nothing,” replied Marie with a shrug.
“You don’t intend to kill Becquerel, do you?”
“Well, I shouldn’t have to. But I believe I would if it became necessary. Pierre never liked him anyway,” said Marie matter-of-factly.
Katrina sighed. “I’m sorry, ma’am. I can’t let you do this. The alteration to the timestream would be too fundamental.”
“But don’t you understand!” hissed Marie with a passion usually reserved for her work. “Mankind wasn’t ready for radioactivity. Its discovery has to be delayed. And his discovery is the crucial point.”
“No ma’am, it isn’t,” said Katrina. “Your husband’s death is. Pierre was supposed to die in 1906, on that night when he came home and said a strange young man saved his life. That was the divergence point.”
“Pierre?” said Marie faintly. “How could Pierre’s earlier death prevent all the devastation that’s happened?”
“Nothing can prevent wars,” said Katrina gently, leading Marie to a chair. “Violent conflict is ingrained in the human species. But Pierre’s death in 1906 would have lessened the overall death toll.” As compassionately as she could, Katrina explained the divergence to Marie, counting on her scientific mind to make her understand.
“No,” said Marie when the explanation was finished. “I won’t relinquish my plans here. I understand how Pierre’s death delayed the knowledge of radiation’s power and thus its exploitation for war. But my solution would also provide that delay by ensuring that the discovery of radioactivity occurred at a later time, and it would save Pierre in the bargain. And you do not know,” she continued, raising a finger to stop Katrina’s attempted interruption, “that it would produce any negative result. Do you?”
Katrina averted her eyes from Marie’s hard stare. “Well, no, ma’am,” she admitted. “But a divergence of this magnitude generally does have unfortunate results.”
Marie raised a hand dismissively and spoke with cold fury. “There is no scientific basis for assuming that what occurred by happenstance should produce any better or worse result than a planned alteration. In any case, I will not allow a solution that involves the loss of my Pierre, either in 1906 or in 1910. I want him to live a normal life. If you can accomplish that some other way, I will agree to your plan.”
Katrina thought a moment. “Well, there might be a way,” she said. “Let me contact headquarters.” Taking a small rectangular object from her pocket, she pressed a number of keys, then spoke rapidly into it.
“All right,” said Katrina as she put the object away. “We have a proposition for you—and for Pie
rre.”
Rapidly she explained the plan. Marie considered it briefly, then smiled. “I believe we have a deal,” she said.
“Great!” said Katrina. “Now let’s get you out of here before Henri arrives.”
“Don’t worry about him,” said Marie. “He never gets out of bed before ten anyway.”
Excerpt from Final Status Report: Incident #6712514—ATR 600120.346
Agent Mason successfully prevented Marie Curie from altering Henri Becquerel’s discovery of radioactivity and returned her to her own time. Two additional forays were needed to set up the conditions required for the agreement.
Pierre Curie was removed from the timestream in April 1906, two nights after Kevin Bower had saved his life. The cadaver substituted for him in the carriage accident was never questioned, since its head was crushed. The body was identified as Pierre Curie from the cards he carried and the bottle of radium bromide in his pocket. After decontamination, Pierre received cybernetic implants in his damaged legs and cybernetic replacements for his damaged organs.
In the last years of her life, Marie faded into obscurity as her illness began to take its toll. In 1934, she too was removed from the timestream and replaced by a specially constructed double, who wasted away and “died.” The residual radiation in both her substituted corpse and Pierre’s prevented any later attempts at autopsies. Marie also received cybernetic replacements for her damaged body parts, as well as synthetic bone marrow to correct her leukemia.