Prologue
Page 13
Across the street deVere’s neighbor rode a mower across the front lawn while occasionally glancing at the automotive behemoth parked in deVere’s driveway.
“That’s O.K.,” deVere answered as he watched his neighbor turn the front corner of his house. “Just having it here is worth it. Why don’t you leave the hood up? It looks more imposing that way.”
Ginter shot deVere a quizzical look before following his gaze across the street. “Oh, the neighbors aren’t real fond of the huge hood scoop in the yard of their MIT professor, I see.”
“Jealous,” deVere said.
“I have to call Triple A. They’ll tow it for me.” Ginter pulled a cell phone from his belt and switched it on.
DeVere reacted with alarm. “Tow it? To your house or to Lynn?”
“Lynn,” Ginter answered. “I can’t rebuild the engine at my apartment. No tools there. Besides, I can’t use my spot in the garage for that.”
DeVere kept his eyes on his neighbor as the tractor rounded the rear of the house. When the neighbor disappeared he turned back to his guest. “Do you think that’s safe? I mean, letting Triple A know about the garage in Lynn and all?”
Ginter shrugged. “Why not? That’s why I rented it. Remember? To rebuild this thing.”
DeVere nodded. “Just jumpy, I guess.”
Ginter was already punching in numbers.
“You seem to know the roadside assistance number by heart,” deVere observed.
“When you’re a single guy and you drive what I like to drive, the numbers you get to know very well are take-out food and Triple A.”
“You could just buy a fast car if that’s what you like. That new WRX-51 is supposedly the fastest car ever made and that’s right out of the showroom without being tuned. According to the Globe, that is.”
Ginter was already speaking with a customer service representative and giving directions to deVere’s house. When he finished, deVere turned and walked to the back yard. Ginter followed alongside.
“Valerie ban you from the house today?” Ginter asked as they moved into the back yard. “Or is it just me?”
DeVere winced. “It’s too nice to be inside. Besides, Grace is home.”
DeVere led Ginter to the rear of the clearing where a brown picnic table stood under the shade of a large maple. As deVere swung one leg over the bench to face the house a breeze rustled through the branches. Ginter sat opposite, facing the woods.
“Suburban life. Not bad,” Ginter commented.
“So,” deVere said once he was settled. “What did you find?”
“I found a wormhole. It took me about three hours. I’m getting better at this. It connects this coming September first at 8:08 p.m. in the lab with July 23, 1962 at a point in Central Park, New York City at 2:48 a.m. The wormhole will be open for a little over 38 minutes at this end, and about the same, about 43 minutes, at the other end. Hell, we could stay at The Waldorf,” he chuckled.
“The return is from December 24, 1962, the day before Christmas, at 3:32 p.m. It gives us five months and one day to change the world.”
DeVere nodded absently, his eyes fixed on the back of his house. “Why Central Park?” he asked.
Ginter shrugged. “It puts us in New York City which is where we want to go. Parks are actually a good idea. There are no buildings there and we can assure that there were none there in 1962. According to geological maps of the park I’ve dug up the arrival spot is near a clump of trees, so there’s a decent chance of us not being seen when we appear. Especially at two in the morning.”
“If we appear,” deVere corrected.
Ginter leaned back. “Well, there’s always that. But you’ve got to admit that the experiments have gone well. The rat shows no ill effects.”
“We still need to test it on humans. We need an observer to go and come back. Once. One of us needs to go someplace and come back. That way…” deVere’s voice trailed off.
Ginter snickered. “That way if it fails and one of us dies the other will be around to…do what, try again with someone else?”
“It’s just safer,” deVere insisted. “We can’t just jump into this. We have to be careful.”
Ginter’s snicker turned into a full laugh. “Careful? Careful about what? If we actually do what we’re hoping to do the whole damn world is changed to we don’t know what. How the hell careful is that?”
DeVere flinched. “Do we have the fuel?” he asked.
“You mean to go?” Ginter asked.
“No, for a test run. Do we have enough for more experiments?”
Ginter shook his head forcefully. “No way. Right now we have enough to open one more wormhole and do a big send-off and of course the return opens automatically. But we don’t have enough to do more experiments and also a send-off.”
“Can we get more? Enough of it?”
Ginter shook his head again. “Not without more money. And the Descendants seem pretty adamant on this. No more money unless they are brought in to see what they’re buying.”
“What about Lorrie?” deVere asked.
“Lorrie too,” Ginter answered. “But she had no choice. Eckleburg won’t give her the money unless this Pamela Rhodes person is shown what we’re doing and reports back to them. Eckleburg wants to see all.”
“Why her?”
“They still think it’s explosives. She’s the boom expert.”
“I thought she was a printer. Pamphlets or something.” DeVere was confused.
“That too. But she’s also some sort of explosives expert. Or so she says. They picked her to check us out. Or rather, to check you out. Unless she says O.K. there’s no more money and without the dough we can’t get any more fuel.”
“What about a legit purchase? Through the school? Most of our work is already done anyhow.”
“No way,” Ginter answered. “We need too much and Arnold would get suspicious. Plus, he’s such a tightwad he’d never O.K. it. We have to buy it off-market. It’s risky, and expensive.”
DeVere frowned. “We’re going to have to bring her in. Show her what we’re doing.”
“Why?” Ginter asked, making a face. “She doesn’t know anything about time travel. She’s a freakin’ bomb expert. Besides, if Eckleburg finds out he’d go ballistic. They all would. I say we just go. Screw Pamela Rhodes. Screw ‘em all. Crank it up September first and off we go. You, me, and Hutch.” Ginter paused. “That is, if you still want to take her,” he added, glancing back at the house.
DeVere looked down at the ground. The lawn hadn’t been mowed in almost two weeks. It was starting to go to seed in some places. He wondered why Valerie hadn’t started nagging him about it. Maybe she just doesn’t care anymore.
“We need Amanda,” deVere said. “We’ll need her there. She knows the history. She’s been getting the 1962 stuff loaded into her laptop. No one is suspicious about that. That’s her field of study.”
Ginter nodded noncommittally. “We can still just go. The three of us, just go.”
“No!” deVere said forcefully and turned squarely to Ginter. “It’s too risky. If we all go and end up dead, or unable to interact with the physical world, there’ll be no one to take our place and try again. We have to be sure it’ll work on humans and that whoever is sent back can actually interact. Not just float around. Let me go someplace first. That way, if it fails you and Amanda can try again.”
Ginter turned sideways on the bench. He raised his right leg and hunched forward over his knee. He cast his gaze to the house and then back at deVere.
“What do you think of her plan?” deVere asked.
“I don’t know,” Ginter answered carefully. “She’s the historian and all. But I always thought the big screw up was at Yalta. When Roosevelt gave away Eastern Europe. If I thought we could land on the navy cruiser Quincy in January of 1945, as it transported FDR to Yalta, we’d convince him to stand firm. Without that toehold in Eastern Europe the Sovs may not have gone anyplace. But of course we could never get a
wormhole targeted on a moving ship. How could we ever figure out its location at a given moment in time?
“Or else we could stop Ché Guevara in Bolivia when they damn near had him. If we could just undo that...” Ginter let his voice trail off.
He paused and looked at deVere. “Why, what do you think of her plan?”
DeVere shrugged. “There’re probably a hundred things we could do. But this Cuban invasion seems as good as anything else. Get Kennedy to invade Cuba, get rid of Castro, stop Ché Guevara and the United States has a decent shot in Southeast Asia and maybe Lindsay will have a shot in Europe.”
Ginter turned his back to deVere. He reached into his pocket and retracted an object. Although deVere could not see the end of Ginter’s arm he knew he had a scanning disk.
“A little late now, isn’t it?” deVere asked.
Ginter waved it around before returning it. “Force of habit, I guess.”
He turned sideways to his host. “Do you trust her?”
DeVere was taken aback by the question. “Valerie?” he asked dumbly. “Do I trust her?”
“Not your wife,” Ginter retorted. “Hutch. Do you trust her?”
DeVere reddened. “Yeah,” he answered. “Yeah, I trust her. Don’t you?”
Ginter shrugged. “I don’t know. There’s something about her.”
“Such as?” deVere asked warily.
Ginter swung back around and spoke deliberately. “Didn’t it seem a bit strange to you that she jumped on this whole idea so quickly? We tell her about it, that we’re planning on changing history, and her response was when does she pack for the trip?”
“So?” deVere asked defensively. “She’s been through a lot. Hey, she’s beaten cancer. Pretty big surgeries. Maybe that’s made her realize quicker than the rest of us the value of not wasting time. She’s anti-Soviet. Always has been. Was anti-Soviet in grad school, for Christ sakes.”
“Paul, that was a long time ago.”
“Lewis, if she were going to turn us in she would have already done so. It’s only you and me. The squishheads would have swooped down and we’d both be in Guantanamo now.”
“What do you know about her recently? Paul, you’re 53 years old. You were what, 25 when you last saw her? It was easy to spout anti-Soviet stuff back then. You were both young and rebellious. Times have changed.” Ginter looked steadily at deVere. “People change.”
“Not Amanda,” deVere insisted. “I know her.”
Lewis Ginter shrugged. “You mean you knew her.”
“Hey,” Paul answered angrily. “You’re the one who told me she was anti-Sov before you knew that I knew her, remember?”
Lewis Ginter shook his head. “What I said was that my sources were telling me that she said anti-Soviet stuff. There’s a difference.”
DeVere took a deep breath before continuing. “Is there something in particular that troubles you? I mean other than the fact that she used to be anti-Sov, still says anti-Sov stuff, and is eager to help us?”
Despite the tension Ginter chuckled at the argument. He turned and looked at the woods. “I have nothing concrete. It just seems that she threw in here too quickly. I’m also bothered by where she’s been teaching. Prague, Leningrad, Leipzig. Seems to have spent some time traipsing around the Soviet Union. Strange places for a fire-eater.”
DeVere was hot now. “She also taught in North Carolina. All those places you named have universities. She’s an American history prof, for Christ sakes, Lewis. There were openings there.”
“There’s something else,” Ginter said. “After the second Sino-Soviet War when she was still in Leipzig she started traveling to Moscow pretty regularly.”
“So?” Paul asked.
“She went there a lot. An awful lot. According to my sources she started spending every damn school vacation there. Who the hell vacations in Moscow?”
“She could have been doing research,” Paul argued.
“For six or seven years?” Ginter scoffed.
“Is that all you’ve got? Just Moscow?” Paul asked angrily.
Ginter shrugged. “Who knows where she went from there? Could have been going to a KGB training center for all I know.”
“That’s just it, Lewis. You don’t fucking know. She’s a history professor. She travels on her breaks. History professors are supposed to travel and do research, aren’t they? Besides, wouldn’t it be more suspicious if she were going there during the semester when she was supposed to be teaching? This was on her free time.”
“Yeah, maybe,” Ginter answered, trying to diffuse the rising tension. “Maybe you’re not the only one who’s jumpy.”
DeVere nodded. “So, you’re O.K. with her plan?”
“Hey, I have the coordinates. September first. Eight oh eight from the lab. I’ll be ready to go. The money’s printed. You going to keep it here?”
DeVere shook his head. “Valerie might find it. I’ll keep it in my trunk under the spare. That way it’ll always be with me. Besides,” he added with a smirk, “my car is more reliable than yours.”
“Wait for the new timing chain. This thing can really move.” Ginter appeared relieved at the lighter turn in the conversation.
“Hutch knows not to put anything on her computer, right? You’ve talked to her?”
DeVere nodded. “I’ve told her they can hack into MIT. The history stuff is on her personal laptop that’s not on the MIT line. Nothing suspicious about a history prof with historical research, is there? Do you have the communicators?”
“Radios. They were called radios back then. Everything is all set. I’ll keep them in the Lynn garage. A month from today,” Ginter added. “We’ll be ready to go.”
DeVere looked at his house. Through the slider he could see Valerie sitting at the kitchen table, her back to him, talking on the corded telephone. He reacted with a start when Grace moved into view, spoke quickly to her mother, and then moved away.
“Why the face?” Ginter asked.
DeVere hesitated. He shifted and looked Ginter straight in the eye.
“You realize, of course, that this is a suicide mission?”
Ginter squinted in the sunlight. “Suicide? Hell, if you want we’ll let our Portland friend look around, get the O.K. from the Descendants, get more money, buy more fuel, and then I, not you, will go back on a test run. Just send me somewhere where they have lottery tickets.”
DeVere didn’t smile. “That’s not what I mean. Although I think we should do exactly that. Without the lottery tickets. No, I meant we are on a suicide mission either way. If we go back and are successful, we’ll be destroying ourselves. We might as well strap on a bomb and blow ourselves up on some train. We change one thing in history and everything changes. We convince Kennedy to invade Cuba, American soldiers die. Cubans die. They won’t live to have children. Their children won’t have children. If we stay and fight in Southeast Asia people will die there, in South America, in Europe. And not just in the Balkans. Maybe my parents never meet, or never marry, or don’t have sex the night I was conceived. Maybe they have kids, just not me. Maybe Peter lives. Multiply that by a million permutations. You and I and Amanda could all come back from 1962 and we could end up back here corporeally and all but there won’t be any Paul deVere, Lewis Ginter or Amanda Hutch.”
His lip trembled. “There may not be any Valerie deVere or”-he hesitated a moment–“Grace deVere.”
Lewis Ginter didn’t respond. He too looked up the hill and watched Valerie continue her animated telephone discussion.
“Can I kill them all?” deVere asked. “It’s not just me but what about them? What right do we have to-?”
“Kill someone who will never be born?” Ginter finished.
“But what happens to them?” deVere continued. “What happens to all these people who no longer exist? Who will never be conceived, sure, but they exist now. Heck, that house may not even exist. There may be a strip mall here. We’ll reappear at MIT where no one will have heard of Lewis Ginte
r or Paul deVere. Assuming there even is still an MIT. What if, in the world we create, things are worse-nuclear holocaust, ecological disaster? We could be non-persons in a different world. Drifters. Homeless people in a world we won’t know. If we are successful we may be on a suicide mission. For what? To stop the East from taking over? To prevent most of the United States from becoming Red? What lives will be left? Where’s our reward for destroying everything we know? In heaven?”