by Anthology
“And?” I prompted.
“And? You fool. Don’t you see? Our immune systems were so strong, so vigilant. They didn’t have enough to do. They attacked us. More and more. Our digestive systems, our nervous systems, our joints, our cardiovascular systems. Everything. And we didn’t realize what was happening until literally millions were afflicted and more coming down by the day.”
“Millions?” I prompted.
“At first. By now it’s billions. Crippled and dying by the very immune systems which are supposed to protect them.” He looked back at me at last, his eyes wild. “Billions. Society is collapsing. Worldwide. Too many people sick in the most fundamental ways with no means of correcting their conditions. They just linger on, dying very slowly, needing more and more medical care. The only ‘cure’ we have is to suppress the immune system with some crude methods available to us. Do you know what happens when you do that? The autoimmune diseases go into remission, but then you die from any number of ‘normal’ illnesses. We can’t win.” He gestured down his own body. “The medications I have to take to keep my immune system from causing me further agony themselves make me prone to seizures. How’s that for a bargain with the devil?”
I tried to read truth or falsehood in his eyes and couldn’t manage either. I asked Jeannie, instead, then relayed her information. “That sort of thing started to happen. In the very-late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. We developed treatments.”
“We didn’t! Don’t you understand? We bought you time.”
“Bought us . . . ?” The things I knew suddenly clicked into place. An influenza that killed those with the strongest immune systems. Killed them by the tens of millions. Leaving those with weaker immune systems still alive to pass that on to future generations. “Eugenics.”
“No! This isn’t about making humanity ‘better,’ whatever the hell that means. It’s about culling enough of the strongest immune systems from the human gene pool now in order to put off the onset of the autoimmune plagues for another one or two generations. Long enough for medical science to develop the means to diagnose and treat the disorders before they overwhelm the human race.”
I turned inward to Jeannie again. “Is what he’s saying plausible?”
“The scenario outlined does not fall outside the realm of possible historical outcomes.”
“Is it likely?”
“Insufficient data.”
Smith shuddered, and I looked down to see my hand gripping his arm so tightly that even on his thin frame the flesh was coming up in ridges between my fingers. “You want to be free to kill tens of millions of people.”
His gaze was defiant, now. “Yes. For the sake of billions of people in the future.”
“I’ve heard that argument before.”
“I’m sure you have.”
“Do you think this’ll save you? Produce an alternate version of you who’s healthy?”
“I don’t know. I don’t care. Not about me.” His eyes flicked away from mine, but I saw tears welling there. “The kids.” He was whispering again. “Dear God. The kids. They don’t even know. Don’t understand what’s twisting and crippling and killing them. They live and die in pain and we can’t even explain to them what’s happening. We can’t help them.”
It’s not supposed to be like this. When you meet someone bent on mass murder, they’re supposed to foam at the mouth and talk like a fanatic and their eyes are supposed to be filled with righteous certainty. And I was supposed to be absolutely certain that stopping those deaths was the right thing to do. Instead, I felt a sick uncertainty inside, and translated it into anger. “You’re just killing a few tens of millions of people for the kids, huh? You don’t plan on being better off yourself? Do you realize the odds that introducing this plague here and now could just cancel you out? Eliminate your ancestors so you never exist outside of the closed loop you’ve created? You’d never see that great new world you say you want to make.”
Smith’s mouth worked for a moment before he could answer, but I saw a strange glint of what I thought must be eagerness in his eyes. “This is more important than me.”
I closed my eyes to shut out the sight of his. There was only one thing I could be certain of. In my history, Smith’s mission had unquestionably succeeded in its immediate goal. The Spanish Influenza had killed its millions upon millions. If I stopped him, I’d be making a major temporal intervention with results I couldn’t predict on the future from that point forward. Would it be the hell Smith was describing? Or better? Or worse? There simply wasn’t any way for me to know. “How can I let you go out of here and kill tens of millions of people?” I finally said softly.
Smith kept his eyes fixed on mine. “For the sake of billions yet to come.”
“That kind of math is an abomination.”
“It’s also true. Dammit, do you think we wanted to do this?”
And somehow I knew then that Smith wasn’t lying. He might be delusional or crazy, but he believed what he was saying. Which left it up to me. Change my future, or let Smith kill on a scale unmatched in human history. Save tens of millions, maybe, and if Smith was to be believed, condemn billions to awful fates. Take a chance that whatever my own intervention caused here would produce a future no worse than the one I knew of from this point forward. But that was impossible to know. Even aside from the group impact of so many humans living who’d died in my history, any one of those individual Spanish Influenza victims could’ve been another Hitler or another Einstein or another Martin Luther or another Julius Caesar. I looked at Smith again, letting my eyes stray down his ruined body. What kind of society would send somebody in his physical condition on a mission it regarded as so important? Only a society at the end of its rope.
I didn’t trust myself to speak. I just let my grip on Smith go and stepped back. Then I turned around and walked out. He might’ve called something after me. I couldn’t be sure and didn’t want to know.
Dawn found me staring across the anchorage of Freeport, thinking about the extra, unknown cargo those ships would be carrying soon. I looked down at my hands, didn’t see any blood there, and wondered why. Twenty million. At least. For the future good of the human race. For the future I knew, for better or worse, though it easily could’ve turned out a lot worse. I knew that, and when push came to shove I couldn’t risk a worse outcome in the future. Even though that future now felt forever tainted. Playing god isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. “Jeannie—”
“Yes?”
“It’s nothing. I just finally figured something out.” That flash of eagerness in Smith’s eyes. He wasn’t afraid of being cancelled out of the future he was creating. No, he wanted to be cancelled out of that future. Wanted to cease to exist, so that even an alternate version of him who had no idea what “he’d” done would suffer the ultimate penalty. I understood now. Because, unlike Smith, I’d have to live with the knowledge of what I’d done, or more correctly what I hadn’t done, for the rest of my life. “Work up a jump home, Jeannie. Let’s get out of here.” Before Smith’s influenza started its deadly march across the planet.
I hope the kids who would’ve been Smith’s came out okay.
SPOILERS
Linda P. Parker
I did it for the mysteries.
—S.J. Cameroon
“I can get you what you need.”
The leader of the Angels of Time, the Reverend John J. Something-or-other, had a shiny slick look that made me want to pick up the handful of change that lay on one of Rick’s crates and stuff it deep into my pocket.
He stood in the middle of Rick’s squat, in what had once been an upscale apartment building with cavernous lofts, but now was just junk space that nobody wanted. He was beautifully dressed in a dark gray suit and a blinding white shirt, and he pretended a jolly friendliness. But he looked around out of the corners of his eyes, and his nostrils flared as if he smelled something rotten.
Not that I could blame him. Rick’s squat wasn’t nice
and it wasn’t clean. It had a tattered old sofa and a couple of wooden crates for furniture. And a sleeping bag for a bed and a chair with only three legs for a nightstand. Propping it up was a stack of old books, probably scavenged from the library where Rick had worked. There wasn’t much call for history books anymore, not since Timeshares.
Rick’s space wasn’t even the nicest the building had to offer. That’s why it annoyed me for some jerk to be so obvious with his disdain.
Rick always let others have the best of what was available. He’d done it when he had his dream job, assistant librarian at the university, and he did it now that he had no job and no place of his own. The way he had cared for the books, he now looked after the homeless kids and the crazy old ladies and the men like him, anachronisms in a world without mystery.
But still, there must have been something to the way Rick lived. Even with the library gone, he was once the happiest person I knew. Or he had been, until he won the Time Lotto.
And that’s why we were now standing in Rick’s room with Reverend John, who reached into the inside pocket of his shiny suit and pulled out the tiniest e-phone I’d ever seen. He thumbed it on, punched a couple of buttons, and then handed it to Rick.
Duane, who had been lurking in the shadows of the far corner, shuffled forward to look over Rick’s shoulder. Duane was the one who’d set up the meeting. He had once been an Angel of Time, before he’d decided he liked things, like drugs and sex, that just weren’t all that angelic.
On the screen was a document with a long list of explosives and components. The writing was so tiny I had to squint to see it. Ballistite, guncotton, mercury fulminate, Trinitrotoluene TNT, RDX. The names meant nothing to me.
“Old style C4?” Rick handed the phone back without looking at the list. “Can you get C4 without heavy metals in it?”
The reverend straightened his shoulders as if he was proud of what he was doing. “Yes.”
That bothered me. None of us were proud of our plans. We just couldn’t think of anything else to do.
“It has to be metal free,” Rick insisted.
“Yes,” the reverend repeated. “I can get it. You don’t need to worry about that.”
“We’ll decide what we need to worry about,” I snapped.
Rick put a hand on my arm. “Good stuff? Not something somebody cooked up in their basement last week? And without metals. We won’t make it past the first floor if it triggers the alarms.”
The reverend nodded.
Rick looked from me to Duane.
Reluctantly, I nodded. Not so reluctantly, Duane nodded. To my mind, Duane liked the idea of blowing things up a bit too much.
“Okay,” Rick said to the reverend. “What’s it going to cost?”
“There’s no charge.”
All three of us were immediately on guard. “No charge?” we said in unison.
“My price is simple. When it’s done, the Angels of Time will get credit.”
“Credit!” Duane turned very red. “We’re not going to risk our lives for—”
Rick put his hand out to stop Duane. “That’s fine,” he said, and he held out his hand to the reverend to shake.
Before they could agree, I said, “We’ll need a weapon, too. A gun with no metal parts.”
The man hesitated for just a fraction of a second, and then he gave a brisk nod and shook Rick’s hand. “I can have everything within a week or so.”
“Duane will contact you about where to drop it off,” Rick said.
I walked behind the reverend to the door and watched him. As he walked down the hallway, he pulled a handkerchief out of his pocket. He was wiping his hands when he disappeared down the stairwell.
The air seemed a bit easier to breathe with all that shine gone. “He’s gone.”
Duane whirled on Rick. “I’m not risking my—”
“Duane. Take it easy.” Rick smiled, calm and cool as could be, like always. “All I agreed to was that he could claim credit for the Angels. I didn’t say anything about who else might claim credit.”
Duane whooped and slapped Rick on the back.
I couldn’t meet Rick’s gaze. I liked him. And I knew I was going to double-cross him.
A week later we had our explosives, and I had my plastic gun. It felt like a toy in my hand.
My friend Larry came back from his scouting trip and told me who built Stonehenge. Of course, he swore me to secrecy first, because he was expecting to make a big splash on the history reality shows. I couldn’t look at him after that.
A week after that, we had our plan.
Dina, a friend who worked at the local coffee shop, took her Timeshares trip and didn’t come back. Of course, Timeshares wouldn’t have admitted that if anyone had asked.
There was failsafe on top of failsafe. Supposedly, no one could travel back and not return, the same way nobody could go back in time and change anything. The pretrip hypnotic programming prevented tampering. Supposedly it also prevented you from smashing your monitoring devices so they couldn’t activate and bring you home. I guess Dina found a way around that.
Dina had wanted to see the world before it was spoiled. She had wanted to see the earth before it was overpopulated by humans and polluted by corporate greed. Now she was living in a green world without pollution, without crowding, without war or hatred, without Timeshares.
I was envious.
The night, the night, we used a van Duane had “found” in another part of town.
As we drove past Timeshares, past the elegant, U-shaped drive with its fountains splashing water from Lourdes, I tried to look at it as a first time visitor would, but I couldn’t. The expensive, glittering elegance had turned lurid and gaudy for me. The lights were too bright, and the stained glass windows, imported directly from medieval England, were over the top. The Timeshares Travel Agency logo, supposedly painted with pigments from Lascaux, looked faded and tired.
We parked and Jo, Lu, and two others dispersed in different directions to find possible getaway cars and sit tight until they were needed.
Duane, Rick, and I headed toward Timeshares. We were dressed in silvery gray so that at first glance we looked like Timeshares employees.
As we walked, I thought about Rick. He and I were the only two of the group who’d been on a time trip.
There had been such an outcry when the company rolled out the red carpet for its zillionaire clientele, such fury that something like that was only available to the very rich, that a lottery system had been started. Every month, five were chosen out of the millions who’d signed up.
Rick had been one of the first TimeLotto winners. And one of the few people who’d chosen to go forward in time instead of someplace in the past.
It was surprising how most people wanted to go back in time. And it wasn’t just a safety issue, though I was sure that played into it. Timeshares sent people back to scout in the past, but who could ever be sure of the future? Going forward was a crap shoot. What someone scouted yesterday and found safe could be completely changed by the events of today.
Plus, Timeshares wouldn’t let anyone go just a few years forward. They claimed there was a mental health issue involved in traveling to a time in which you were still alive, though that was crap. I knew that after any important business decision had been made, one of the Timeshares execs traveled a few years forward to make sure they’d made the right decision.
Rick said I was the only one he’d told about what he’d seen of the future. What he’d seen was the reason he was walking beside me wearing a backpack with enough C4 in it to blow up a city block. It was the reason I was walking beside him.
As we approached the city block that housed Timeshares, Duane gave us a grinning thumbs-up and angled off toward one of the visitor parking lots.
Rick checked his watch. It was an old-fashioned one with hands that swept around and around, pointing to the minutes and hours.
I turned aside to look at mine, shielding it from him. My watch w
as a Timeshares Digital that showed time, date, temperature, and could be programmed to show the same information for five different continents. Or five different centuries.
Rick took a deep breath and blew it out. He gave a tiny nod and walked away toward the back of Timeshares.
I watched to make sure he turned the corner before I started off toward the front of the building. We were supposed to reconnoiter, then rendezvous on the opposite side of the block, near the delivery and service entrance. That’s where Rick and Duane thought we were going to break in, after Duane’s diversion had everybody’s attention, after we’d called in a bomb threat for the building.
My plan was simpler.
At the employee entrance, halfway down the block, I stopped and took out the things I’d stuffed into my pockets—my Timeshares Security badge and my ID.
I held my badge up to the reader, then typed in my PIN.
The wrought iron gate, built by a famous gunslinger/ blacksmith during the period called the Old West, slid open.
I went through to a door that let me into a brightly lit hallway lined with walls of one-way glass. I could see the grounds outside, and the glittering lights from the fountain. The air was dry and overprocessed. The guard post was empty.
The door at the other end of the hall opened, and a guard came trudging toward me. Then he recognized me, and he straightened and quickstepped the rest of the distance.
“You need to send some guards along the fence,” I snapped. “I saw a couple of people dressed in black walking toward the delivery gate.”
He thumbed the headset in his ear and relayed my message.
A half dozen guards, all straightening their uniforms, came hustling down the hall. They breezed past me and jogged along the fence.
My guard made an officious pretense of scrutinizing the photo on my ID, then me, then the ID again.
When the explosion came, I started even though I was expecting it. The loud boom rattled the glass walls.
The guard jumped like the C4 had been set off in his pants.
Behind me, some time traveler’s car went up in flames. The night sky lit up like sunrise. The reflection of red flames danced in the windows.