All Clear

by Connie Willis

  “But if the problem’s the slippage—”

  “The slippage was an indicator.”

  “We’re trapped here for good, is that what you’re afraid to tell me?” she said.

  “Yes.”

  “What about Michael’s roommate, Charles? Did he go to Singapore, or did you realize we couldn’t get out before—?”

  “No.”

  No. Which meant Charles would still be there when the Japanese invaded. He would be rounded up with the rest of the British colonials and herded off to a jungle prison camp to die of malaria or malnutrition. Or worse.

  “What about the other historians with deadlines?” she asked.

  “You’re the only one. I’d pulled out all the others. I didn’t realize you’d done the 1944 segment of your assignment first. That’s why you weren’t pulled out when the others were.”

  “And there’s no way we’ll get out before our deadlines?”

  “No,” he said. But there was no relief in his voice at having told her. Which meant there was worse to come. And if it wasn’t Colin, there was only one thing it could be.

  “The reason we’re trapped,” she said, “it’s because we altered events, isn’t it?”

  He nodded.

  So Mike had been right.

  “How did you find out?” Mr. Dunworthy asked.

  “Mike—Michael—saved a soldier’s life at Dunkirk, and the soldier went back across and brought home more than five hundred others, and Michael couldn’t see how that couldn’t have caused changes, so we began looking for discrepancies.”

  “And did you find them?” he asked.

  “None that I could determine for certain were discrepancies,” Polly said, “but Michael wasn’t the only one who’d done something. Eileen—Merope—stopped two of her evacuees from sailing on the City of Benares, and I was responsible for a shopgirl’s being injured and nearly killed. But we didn’t know it was possible to alter the course of events. We thought the slippage kept historians from—”

  Mr. Dunworthy shook his head. “We were wrong about the slippage’s function. It wasn’t a line of defense guarding against damage we might do to the continuum. It was a rearguard action against an attack that had already happened—an attempt to hold a castle whose walls had already been breached.”

  “By time travel,” Polly said.

  “By time travel. And in most cases over the years, the defenses were sufficient to hold the castle. But not all. It couldn’t hold it against multiple simultaneous attacks or in instances where the breach was at a particularly vital spot—”

  Like Dunkirk, Polly thought. Or the autumn of 1944, when the lightest touch of a Spitfire’s wing on a V-1’s fin could change who lived and who died.

  “Or in instances where the initial breach was too great,” Mr. Dunworthy was saying. “In those cases, no amount of slippage would have been sufficient to prevent the enemy from breaking through, so the only thing the continuum could do was to attempt to isolate the infected area—”

  Like Eileen’s quarantine.

  “—and attempt to repair the damage.”

  “To shut down access to the past,” Polly said, “which is what you think the continuum did.”

  He nodded. “Trapping you here.”

  And you. “I’m so sorry, Mr. Dunworthy.”

  He shook his head. “You are not to blame.”

  “But if I’d told you I’d done the rocket attacks first,” she said. “I knew you were canceling drops and changing schedules, even if I didn’t know the reason. I was afraid you’d cancel mine, so I didn’t report in, and I made Colin promise he wouldn’t tell you.”

  He nodded as if he wasn’t surprised. “Colin would do anything for you,” he said.

  “Oh, this is all my fault! If I hadn’t made him promise, if I’d reported in, you wouldn’t have let me come. You wouldn’t have had to come after me—”

  “No, you don’t know the whole story,” he said, putting up his hand to stop her. “There was an increase in slippage even before you went to 1944, but it wasn’t large, and I didn’t think it was serious. The amount of slippage had often been greater than the circumstances seemed to merit, and at other times far less, and I thought there was a simpler explanation than the one Ishiwaka had arrived at, even after he showed me his equations. I certainly didn’t see any need to pull out my historians and shut down all time travel. I thought canceling the drops of historians with deadlines and putting the others in chronological order was sufficient till I had more data, but Dr. Ishiwaka was right. I should have pulled you all out.”

  “But you couldn’t have known what the increase meant—”

  “Dr. Ishiwaka had told me exactly what it meant, but I refused to believe him. We’d been traveling to the past for forty years without incident. I found it impossible to believe that we were a danger to the course of history. I should have listened to him. If I’d pulled you out, Michael Davies would still be alive, and you and Merope—”

  “Merope?” she said, alarmed. “She doesn’t have a deadline. This was her first assignment. Wasn’t it?”

  “Yes,” he said, and she knew there was still more.

  “The shutdown might not be a result of the continuum’s attempt to correct itself,” he went on. “It might be some sort of reflexive response to the damage, like shock in a trauma patient. And even if it is an attempt at self-correction, there’s no guarantee it will be successful. The damage may be too great or too widespread to be repairable.”

  “But it’s not,” Polly said. “We didn’t lose the war. I was at VE-Day—”

  “That was before Michael saved the soldier, and you and Merope—”

  “I know, but Merope was there, too. I saw her. And she hasn’t gone yet. She went there—will go there after Mike saved Hardy and we did all the other things, so they can’t have affected the outcome of the war.”

  But Mr. Dunworthy was shaking his head. “At the point when you saw her, there would still have been a VE-Day to which she could go. The course of history—past and present—would have remained as it had always been until the alterations reached a tipping point. That is why we are able to be here, even though we’re part of that unaltered future. And why Eileen could have gone to VE-Day. It would have remained unaltered until the moment the final alteration occurred and the continuum could not correct for it—”

  “And then everything would change.”

  “Yes.”

  “But you said …” She frowned, trying to grasp it. “I don’t understand. Hadn’t that tipping point already happened? The drops had stopped working.”

  “Not entirely. Mine was still working in mid-December.”

  “So the tipping point happened between our finding Merope and mid-December?”

  “No, it may have been after that. I don’t know when exactly. I wasn’t able to get to my drop till the night after I saw you all on the steps of St. Paul’s.”

  It was something one of us did the night of the twenty-ninth, Polly thought. They had delayed the air-raid warden on the steps of St. Paul’s so that he hadn’t been in time to save someone. Or Theodore’s screaming departure had delayed the pantomime a crucial few minutes so that one of the audience hadn’t made it home to their Anderson in time. Or her presence on the roofs had altered the actions of the fire watch in some way that would prove fateful later on.

  Or it might even have been Eileen’s taking the bombing victims to hospital or Mike’s saving the firemen. In a chaotic system, positive actions could cause negative outcomes. Like losing the war.

  Winning it had always been a near thing. “We are hanging on by our eyelids,” Churchill’s chief of staff had said. Events had been balanced on a knife’s edge, and they had tipped the balance, and the Germans had won the war.

  Oh, God, she thought, Hitler will execute Churchill and the King and Queen and Sir Godfrey, and send Sarah Steinberg and Leonard and Virginia Woolf off to die at Auschwitz, and Mr. Dorming and Mr. Humphreys and Eileen’s
vicar off to die at the Russian front. He will breed the blondes, like Marjorie and Mrs. Brightford and her daughter Bess, to blue-eyed Aryans, and starve Theodore’s mother and Lila and Miss Laburnum. And turn Theodore and Trot into young Nazis.

  But not Alf and Binnie, she thought. Or Colin, no matter what sort of world he’s born into. They’ll never go along with it.

  Hitler would have to kill them first. And he would.

  “Oh, God,” Polly murmured. “Mike was right. We lost the war. We ruined everything.”

  “No,” Mr. Dunworthy said. “I did.”

  I have got to know the worst, and to face it.

  —SIR J. M. BARRIE, THE ADMIRABLE CRICHTON

  London—Winter 1941

  “WHAT DO YOU MEAN, YOU DID IT?” POLLY SAID, STARING at Mr. Dunworthy sitting there by the pub’s fire with her coat over his knees. He had stopped shivering, but he still looked chilled to the bone. “You can’t have lost the war. How? By coming to fetch me? Or something you did since you’ve been here?”

  “No,” he said. “I did it before you and Michael and Merope were even born. When I was seventeen years old.”

  “But—”

  “It was the third drop we’d done to World War Two and the first to the Blitz. We were still refining the net coordinates, and all I had to do was to verify my temporal-spatial location and go back. I’d come through in the emergency staircase of a tube station, and when I found out I’d come through to the seventeenth of September 1940 instead of the sixteenth, I was frightened I might be in Marble Arch.” He stopped and stared bleakly into the fire. “Perhaps it would have been better if I had been.”

  “Which station were you in?” Polly asked.

  “St. Paul’s,” he said. “And when I found that out, I thought taking a side trip to see the cathedral couldn’t hurt.” He smiled bitterly. “I’d been fascinated by it since I first saw the fire watch stone as a boy. And here St. Paul’s still existed. So I ran up the street to look at it, just for a moment.”

  He put his hands to his head. “I wasn’t looking where I was going—an apt metaphor for the entire history of time travel. I collided with a young woman, a Wren, and knocked her bag off her shoulder, and all of her belongings spilled out and onto the pavement.” He stared blindly ahead as if he was seeing it happen. “Coins scattered everywhere, and her lipstick rolled into the gutter. She was carrying several parcels, and those flew out of her hands as well. Two other people—a naval officer and a man in a black suit—stopped to help, but it still took several minutes to gather everything up.”

  “And then what?” Polly asked.

  “And then the sirens went, and the Wren and the two men hurried off, and I went back to St. Paul’s Station to my drop and to Oxford.”

  “And?”

  “And a Wren was killed in Ave Maria Lane that night.”

  “And it was the Wren you collided with?”

  “I don’t know. I never knew her name. I don’t even know if she was the one I affected. It might have been the black-suited man. There’s no record of a naval officer being killed that night, so I don’t think it was him, though my delaying him might have set in motion a sequence of events which killed him the following day, or the following week.”

  “But you don’t know for certain that you killed any of them, or that the collision altered anything at all.”

  “That’s true. It may not have been the collision. I gave two children a shilling to tell me the name of the tube station, and had a conversation with a station guard. And I interacted with a number of other people in the station, pushing past them or making them go round me. I might have delayed any of them a critical few moments, and the difference might not have resulted in anything till much later on.”

  Mike had said the same thing about the Dunkirk men he’d saved—that the alteration might be invisible for months, even years.

  “In which case,” Mr. Dunworthy was saying, “it would be impossible to trace the initial altering event back to its source.”

  “But from what you’ve said, you don’t know that there was an altering event at all,” Polly argued. “There’s no proof you did anything.”

  “Yes, there is. Up till then there hadn’t been any slippage. It began on the very next drop. Unfortunately, that was a drop to the Battle of Trafalgar, and the one after that was to Coventry, and we drew the erroneous conclusion that the slippage made it impossible to alter events.”

  “But you said you came through a day later than you were supposed to.”

  Mr. Dunworthy shook his head. “I’d made an error in the coordinates. I checked it as soon as I returned. The net was set for the seventeenth.”

  “What about locational slippage? You said you thought you’d gone through to Marble Arch.”

  “No, I said I might have. We couldn’t do specific locations back in those days, only a general area.”

  “Then there might have been locational slippage.”

  “But if there had been, it would have prevented me from colliding with the Wren.” He smiled bitterly at her. “No, I caused the slippage and then misinterpreted that cause. And we proceeded to wander through history,” he said bitterly, “gawking at wars and disasters and cathedrals, with no thought of the consequences of what we were doing.”

  Polly looked at Mr. Dunworthy sitting there. Mr. Humphreys had said he looked like he had the weight of the world on his shoulders. And he does, she thought.

  “For the past forty years, we’ve been blundering through the past like bulls through a china shop, fondly imagining that it was possible to do so without bringing about disaster, till it finally came crashing down on us. And on you.”

  “But there was no way you could have known,” Polly said, reaching out to pat his arm.

  He drew his arm back violently. “There were dozens of clues,” he said furiously, “but I didn’t want to see them. I wanted to go on believing we could insert ourselves into a chaotic system without altering its configuration, even though I knew that was impossible. That our very presence, even if we did nothing more than breathe in and out, had to change the pattern and alter the outcome.”

  “But if that’s true, then we all did it, and every historian who’s ever gone to the past is to blame.” She frowned. “But why weren’t there indications up to a few months ago? Why did it take forty years?”

  “That I don’t know. In a chaotic system, not all actions have significant consequences. Some are damped down by other events or absorbed or canceled out. It may have taken that long for enough changes to accumulate for a tipping point.”

  Like the vases and china and crystal in the china shop, Polly thought. Each crash of the bull against the table, each pounding step, brings them nearer and nearer to the edge, till one last minor nudge takes them over it. That’s what Mike and Eileen and I did, that one last tiny nudge. And it brought the continuum crashing down.

  But Mike had tried to go back through his drop before he saved Hardy’s life. Why hadn’t it let him?

  “Why didn’t—?” Polly began, and realized Mr. Dunworthy was in no condition to answer any more questions. He looked dreadful, and in spite of the fire, he’d begun to shiver again.

  “Time to go home,” she said. She put money down for the tea and brandy, removed her coat from his knees, and put it on.

  When she took his arm, he didn’t resist, but let her lead him out of the pub, onto the wet, now-dark street and into a taxi. His hand, as she helped him in, was hot to the touch. “You’ve a fever. I think I’d better take you to hospital. St. Bart’s,” she said to the driver.

  “No,” Mr. Dunworthy said, clutching her arm. “They were very kind to me. They don’t … Please, not the hospital.”

  “All right, but when we get home I’m telephoning the doctor.”

  And I’m going to go in first so I can give Eileen some warning, so she won’t think he’s the retrieval team and get her hopes up.

  But he is the retrieval team, she thought bleakly. He c
ame through to rescue me, and now he’s as stuck in this morass as we are.

  They pulled up in front of the house. “I need to run inside and fetch your fare,” she told the driver. “I’ll be back straightaway,” but he was shaking his head.

  “I’d best ’elp you take ’im in, miss,” he said. “You’ll never manage ’im by yourself.” And before she could say anything, he was out of the taxi and helping Mr. Dunworthy out, so she had no opportunity to warn Eileen.

  But Eileen seemed to size up the situation instantly. “Can you help us get him into bed?” she asked the taxi driver.

  “Who’s at?” Alf asked, emerging from the kitchen with a slice of bread in one hand and a spoon in the other.

  “Mr. D—” Eileen began.

  “Mr. Hobbe,” Polly said.

  “Is ’e soused?” Binnie asked.

  “No, he’s ill,” Polly said.

  Binnie nodded wisely. “That’s what Mum allus—”

  “Binnie, go turn down the bed,” Eileen said.

  “Not Binnie. Rapunzel. I’ve decided my name’s Rapunzel.”

  I am going to kill that child, Polly thought, but Eileen said calmly, “Please go turn down the bed, Rapunzel.”

  She did, tossing her perpetually untied hair ribbon as if it were Rapunzel’s braid, and Polly helped Mr. Dunworthy out of his wet coat and shoes while Eileen ran down to the corner to phone the doctor.

  She’d been afraid Alf and Binnie would come in and ask annoying questions, but after a minute of standing in the doorway whispering to each other, they disappeared.

  When she came out to hang Mr. Dunworthy’s wet shirt on the oven door and put the kettle on, Alf asked, “ ’E ain’t a truant officer, is ’e? Or a tube station guard?” Which meant they thought they recognized him from somewhere. She hoped they hadn’t tried to rob him as he walked to St. Paul’s.

  “No,” she said. “He’s Eileen’s old schoolmaster.”

  Schoolmasters were apparently as frightening as truant officers. The two of them didn’t even attempt to follow her into his room, though by the time the doctor arrived they were back to their old selves.