A Glint In Time (History and Time)

by Frank J. Derfler

  Woo paused a moment for effect. Then he said, "Each of you might have different motivations. Perhaps they are intellectual or emotional. So, in order to further reward you, we will make you this offer. If you give us a logical scenario that we agree uses our ability to move things through time to reduce the chance of the war between Vietnam and the United States, we will pay each of you two million US dollars in any account you name, or in gold, or however you want it."

  Sally has been thinking hard. "But this is the old paradox from science fiction stories. How do we know if we successfully influenced the past? How do things change? Do we remember? It's all very confusing."

  Ted said flatly, "Where did the glass beads come from? If they appeared in the air and then we gave them to you in order to make them appear in the air again, where did they come from?"

  The younger Woo replied with more animation than they had seen before, "We believe that the universe has a great deal of flexibility. It is so vast that some time

  paradoxes are handled like the shifting of sand on a beach. They are of no consequence. But we do know that if we had tried to use other new beads to make the trip, we would have needed a great deal more power and there would have been even more heating. Other time paradoxes might be more like an earthquake. We do not pretend to know the answers to those questions. But we believe we can change things and we believe that the change we are proposing will generally be for the better. Providing you can tell us how to do it! What small object can we send back and where do we send it in order to stop a terrible war?"

  The meeting went on through a buffet lunch, but then the four Americans declared that they wanted to walk and talk. The Woo family wisely left them alone. Surprisingly, Bill had little to say.

  Janet lead off, "It's scary." she said as they walked in a tight group, practically in step. "I don't think I believe it, but then I want to believe it."

  Sally felt the same way, but she had more hope. "Think of all the lives we could save. Think of the waste of national wealth."

  The quiet Ted was intense,"TheVietnam War accelerated the tearing of the social fabric of the US. Our leaders were wrong and many people knew it. But the social institutions protected the leaders and forever lost their foundations. Damn!"

  Wirtz said simply, "If this is true, and I can't see why these people would lie, then this is the fruition of my work."

  "But how are we going to make the scenario work?" Janet asked. She and Wirtz had been working on ideas for the computer game for months. During the flight, Sally had learned that they weren't even close to solving the scenario.

  "Are we agreed that we are going to do this?" Ted asked.

  "We've got to try." Sally replied. "I'm for it." Janet said.

  "I want to see what it's about." Ted added. "I've got thirty days leave. I'll stay with you. But, I'll say right now that this offer of money is strange. I'm not sure we'd ever see it."

  "Why not? You don't trust these guys?" Sally asked.

  "No, I don't trust them, but Bill, what about the time paradox? How would we know?" Ted asked.

  Bill Wirtz said, "I saw that too. What Ted means is that if you change the past, how do you know you changed the past? Since the past isn't what it was, you don't need to change it, so you never even thought about changing it."

  "I see, it." Sally said. "But it makes my head hurt. Okay, no million dollars in gold coins. I still want to see if we can do it."The others nodded.

  Bill Wirtz said, "Thank you. Thank you all. Maybe together we can work this out. I admit that I'm a little frightened, but I'm also very very curious."

  Sally thought she heard Ted mutter, "Curiosity smeared the cat." but the others had turned back toward the administration building. She took quick steps to keep up.

  CALL ON JOE

  August 14-21 1995

  Ammero Compound

  Indonesia

  * * *

  Excerpt from the Personal Narrative

  of Brigadier General Ted Arthurs

  Recorded May 2006

  CLASSIFIED CONFIDENTIAL / TA

  "I was nervous the whole time.I didn't know if I was stopping a war or starting one."

  * * *

  Excerpt from the Personal Narrative

  of Dr. William E. Wirtz, PhD

  Recorded July 2006

  CLASSIFIED CONFIDENTIAL / TA

  "It was about August of 1995 when I really began to smell a rat.Until then, events were coming at me and I was trying to function like a normal academic. I ignored what I didn't understand and focused on small jobs. The big picture unfolded with a bang."

  * * *

  For the next week, they worked with little sleep. The graphics hardware was slightly different from the Florida system and there were some changes in the program to adapt to the new hardware. It took Bill and Janet a full day to get used to operational changes. Sally and Ted focused on opening connections to new databases. Now that they knew they were doing more than making games, they got very serious about their sources of information. Sally used the link to Florida to extend connections to the Kennedy Library and to other collections of information in electronic format.

  With the connections made, Sally and Ted formed a second scenario team. They didn't have the detailed understanding of the historical database that Janet and particularly Bill did, but they had some ideas. Bill and Janet had worked with broad ideas concerning moving pieces of information into the past. Ted wanted to focus on the moment of time of the Kennedy assassination in Dallas.

  The most promising idea was to send tacks onto the streets of Dealey Plaza in hope of stalling and re-routing the motorcade by causing flat tires.The tacks had to arrive just before the motorcade or else they'd be swept away. But if they aimed for moments before the motorcade, there were good chances of tacks trying to appear inside of people crowding along the route. Bill commented, "It's simple, it might work, it's better than anything I came up with, but we might kill some folks."

  Sally and Ted continued to play with ideas aimed at avoiding the assassination, but without much luck. Sally saw

  a new side of Ted. He was considerate, thoughtful, and as brilliant in his own way as Bill. But he was also very private and strictly business. He spent what little free time they allowed themselves in his room or on long jogs around the company property. Three more days of work went by with no success. During a coffee break prepared by the attentive staff, Sally said, "Let's open the scope, Ted. Let's pull back to Kennedy's birth and step through history. Maybe we'll pick up something."

  Ted said, "It will take a lot of computing power. Let's do it when Bill and Janet aren't working so we can grab all of the parallel processors."

  Each team had found that it was best to work a few hours on and a few hours off. During the off time they did research, brainstormed for ideas, or just sat staring off into space while their unconscious minds tried to fit pieces into unseen puzzles.

  Sally and Ted rested and then picked up when Bill and Janet took a long break. They were pulling back and resetting the History Research Universal Database when Sally noticed a bright spike in the middle of 1943. "Wait, what is that?" she said over the intercom to Ted. He was on it instantly.

  They magnified the event and found that it was August

  12, 1943. They asked the computer for the significance and

  the answer was unnerving. It was the date that Joe Kennedy

  Junior, the older brother of the future president, died on a

  bombing mission.

  The size of the event showed that the computer saw it as a pivotal point for many scenarios. They paused for a moment and then Ted said, "Well, we're in the business of seeing "what if".. so let's see what happens if Joe doesn't die."

  Ted selected the event with the computer cursor and literally pushed it down into the background. In effect, telling the computer that it didn't happen. The computer then remade history, but it needed more information.

  They spent the next hour dissecting t
he event, telling the computer to go out to other libraries for more information, and looking at different alternatives. At one point, Ted dumped Bill and Janet's work out of the active memory and into long term storage in order to make more fast memory available for the new data.

  As the processing level quieted down,Ted and Sally road the time line back toward the present. When they pushed into the 60s, things looked quite different. There was no Kennedy assassination and no war involving Americans in Vietnam. All because Joe Kennedy Junior didn't die.

  Sally and Ted secured the simulation, saved all of the data, and went to get Bill and Janet. It was raining out, so the four met in the lounge instead of taking their normal walk.

  "Give me the stuff you've got from the Kennedy Library. Let's see what happened to young Joe." Bill said. Bill reviewed several pages of printouts and then told them an interesting story.

  "If you've seen any of the television documentaries on the Kennedy's, you know that the old man, Joe Senior, had great plans for Joe Junior. He was the one who was, in the old man's mind, supposed to be the President. Jack was always very competitive, but Joe seemed to have a leg up, until the war."

  "Jack became a hero through the adventure of the PT-109. He saved a crewman by swimming with a belt in his teeth, led his crew through danger, and all that. A public hero. Joe Junior was flying combat missions in Europe, but he hadn't been scratched. According to biographers, Joe was looking for some way to upstage, or at least keep up with, his younger brother."

  "The Allies were looking for a way to knock out the launching sites of the V-1 rockets. They had lost over a hundred airplanes and nearly eight hundred airmen in attacks on the launching facilities. Joe was getting ready to return to the States when he heard about the V-1 mission. The idea was to load a bomber with all of the explosives it could carry and then to remotely control it, using television, to the target and then to crash it into the target. But they didn't have enough control over the aircraft to take off. They didn't control the power, flaps, landing gear, or any of that. So someone had to take the plane off the ground, get it on the straight and level pointed in the right direction, and then bail out. Joe volunteered."

  "Wow." Ted observed, "a war of cruise missiles. Using a remotely guided cruise missile to take out the basically unguided cruise missiles."

  "Exactly!" Bill replied.

  "So how did Joe Junior die?" Janet asked.

  "He got the plane, named Zootsuit Black, according to this history, up to speed and altitude. Then he transmitted the code word, "Spade Flush", meaning that he was going to turn on the television transmitter and remote control system before bailing out. The plane was carrying ten tons of TNT. It exploded in a huge fireball over the English coast just after Kennedy made his transmission."

  "RE" Sally said quietly. "What?" Janet asked.

  "RF... radio frequency energy. The TV transmitter must have been operating on aVHF frequency... probably above 100 megahertz. The RF must have gotten into the explosives triggering mechanism and set it off. We know a lot more about RF bypassing and choking now, particularly for VHF and UHF frequencies, than they did then."

  "Yeah, it says here that the engineers wanted time for more tests, but that Joe Junior pressed to go ahead with the mission. He flew a couple of practice missions with dummy cargo, but never with a cargo containing the detonator system."

  Ted pressed the conversation in a different direction. "So how does Joe Junior's survival impact on his brother's death and the Vietnam war?" he asked.

  "I don't know yet." Bill replied. We need to pull on every scenario string to see where it leads. We can work in parallel. We'll work from the situation you established and move forward. We need to understand the impact. In the meanwhile, let's all think about the problem of how to keep Joe Junior alive."

  The four Americans returned to the computer room, sat in their chairs, and donned headsets. Bill had just finished an initial examination of the scenario when a electronic alarms began beeping on every console. "What have we got?" Bill asked.The question was aimed at both Ted and at the Russian computer technician who had entered through a side door when the alarms went off.

  Ted answered first, "The Russian maintenance guys say that their maintenance system is reporting a high temperature on every CPU. It look like a loss of system cooling. We've got to initiate a shut down."

  "Do we have everything backed up?" Bill asked automatically.

  "Yup, we're in fine shape." he said over the interphone. Then more loudly for the technician, "Take the systems down now!"

  "Well," Bill said. "It must be a sign. Let's take a break. A good long break."

  TIME OUT

  August 23, 1995

  Siladen Island, Indonesia

  * * *

  Excerpt from the Personal Narrative

  of Brigadier General Ted Arthurs

  Recorded May 2006

  CLASSIFIED CONFIDENTIAL/ TA

  "I was planning on a way to use their helicopter as an asset."

  * * *

  Sonny Woo offered them a sight seeing and shopping tour of Jakarta, but Bill and Sally asked for a day at the beach instead. Ted agreed with enthusiasm and Janet went along. Within an hour, they were in an Ammero Group helicopter bound for the coast. Sonny Woo acted like a travel guide as they moved along at over a hundred miles an hour. "We are taking you to a special resort on Siladen Island. The water is excellent for swimming and scuba diving is available. Our country has set aside a great deal of the ocean shore for underwater marine parks."

  "Are any of you certified?" Ted asked the group. Sally knew that Ted was talking about scuba diving certification, but she was shocked when Janet said, "I am. I'm an advanced open water diver." Sally had to say, "It's something I've always

  meant to do, but I never found the time." Inside she ground her teeth at the missed opportunity. Bill just shook his head in a negative reply.

  "Maybe you could give me a lesson?" Sally asked. She wasn't going to be left that far behind.

  "Sure." he replied. Sally knew that Ted's simple answer meant that Ted was an expert diver and instructor. Probably a certified dive master.

  The resort was everything Sunny had promised. They were met at the helicopter by a stream of golf carts and taken to rooms to change clothes. Then it was back into the golf carts for the ride to the beach. Ted found a fully equipped dive shop and helped everyone rent the right equipment. Then, for then next hour he ran a course on scuba equipment on the beach.Then they entered the mild surf and coasted down to a ten foot depth. Ted led them through a series of drills demonstrating how to clear their masks, adjust their buoyancy devices, and share mouthpieces. Sally shared with Ted.

  Back on the beach, they had lunch and Ted told them that they would do a dive to a shallow reef with a local dive master in the afternoon. As they finished lunch, they watched the water and waves. "Can we do it?" Janet asked. It was just like her to say the thing that everyone was thinking.

  "Should we do it if we can?" Ted added.

  "If we find a way, we'll check out every impact. We want to make sure we aren't trading one problem for another." Bill answered.

  "I have an idea of how to do it." Sally said quietly.

  Nobody said anything, but they each looked at her with expectation.

  "Capacitors." she replied. "Capacitors are electronic components that pass alternating current while blocking direct current. Radio frequency energy is alternating current. Today, in electronic equipment we use thousands of capacitors to bypass practically every trace on a printed circuit board. In other words, small capacitors, they're the size of a pencil point today, bypass unwanted and potentially dangerous RF energy to ground."

  "Did they know about bypass capacitors in 1943?" Bill asked.

  "Sure." Sally replied.The techniques are old. We scatter these things around like popcorn today, but electronic components were scarce and expensive then. I've seen World War II radio equipment and they used very few bypass capacito
rs. Anyway, the ones they had were made of foil and wax -they didn't work very well at high frequencies. So, my thought is that we could send capacitors back in time. Disguise the new ones as the old style. If the technicians have them, they'll use them. More bypass capacitors protect the explosives from RF. Joe Junior turns on the transmitter

  and there is no boom. Joe Junior survives and there's no war."

  "It's as simple as my tacks." Ted observed.

  "How big are these things, these capacitors?" Bill asked.

  "Oh, in 1943 a bypass capacitor was about the size of a thirty-eight caliber bullet. But I've thought about this. We can take today's tiny capacitors, encapsulate them in glass or something, and make them bigger without adding much mass. Maybe we could etch the value and component name into the glass."

  "But," Janet objected, "the time machine can't send things back to an accurate geographical place. Where are you going to put them?"

  "I re-read the details of Joe Junior's flight. The airplane, "Zootsuit Black" was isolated by itself at a base in the English countryside of East Anglia. I say that we pepper capacitors on the ground around the airplane. The maintenance crew is sure to find them and if they find them I don't know an electronics technician in any time or place who wouldn't use them."

  "So we send them back to the ground around the airplane and hope that someone thinks a box of parts got broken and spread around?" Bill asked.

  "It could work." Ted observed. "In wartime, many strange things happen. Supply items mysteriously turn up about as often as they disappear."