20th Century Un-limited

by Felice Picano

  “That was the Little Climate Shift, as we have come to call it. When the second or Big Climate Shift took place, the ice and glaciers dropped directly down the center of North America, gliding over the Great Lakes and the Great Plains but leaving whatever was south and west of the Rockies ice-free. New Angeles, more or less replacing this town, is where I reside. Alaska too is ice-free but no one lives there at all. It was depopulated centuries ago.”

  “Continue,” I prompted.

  “The total world population is maybe nine million and dropping. Less than any time since the time of the Classical Greek civilization, circa 500 B.C. Most of the people alive are much older, three to four times my age. Population replacement is at a rate of below minus sixty, meaning that one child is born for every sixty who die, and few are born healthy. At that rate, we can last maybe another four more generations or ninety to a hundred years. Then we’ll go out—like a light. Extinct.”

  “Dire.” I agreed.

  I finished my lemonade and wanted something stronger. The picture he painted was beyond bleak.

  “Not to be an egotist, but where do I fit in to all this?”

  “About ten years ago, and after some thirty-five years of research, the Ministry of Other Times was able to finally focus on those times and those places where it all changed for the worst.”

  “In the 1960s, right? We were aware of it then.”

  “Actually, it changed before you were aware of it, Chris. Before you were even born. You all had the right idea, your counterculture generation, in the 1960s. But you were simply too late. Because it actually all changes now, in the next few years. It changes in seventeen places around the world, and it does so very clearly. Also, it requires forty-seven people to prevent it from happening.”

  I was beginning to put it together.

  “One of whom was…who, exactly? Someone who I replaced? Is that what you’re saying?”

  “Exactly, Christopher. Someone who never made it to the Los Angeles YMCA the night that you arrived, April twelfth, 1935. And because he never arrived, he also never arrived at his already planned job interview with an oil company the following morning at a downtown office building just off Wilshire Boulevard. And because of that, he never took a job there, and he never rose to an executive position, and as a result of that, he never okayed research into certain procedures and techniques which as a result never got developed, so that…well, I don’t need to get technical. But don’t worry. He was totally unharmed. He was in an ‘accident’ and he was projected forward. He lost some memory, but he’s doing fine. He’s in a different field where he will rise to the top. Someplace where he is safe for all of us.”

  “Wow” was all I could say.

  “You understand that once we were able to pinpoint the when, the where, as well as the who, we felt utterly compelled to go into action and stop that from happening.”

  “Okay. Granted. I’d do the same thing. But I’m here because why…?” I tried, “You needed to fill his time/space with another body?”

  “Yes. A body of approximately the same weight, height, size, and age, yes.”

  “I see. Then there was nothing personal about it. Morgan saw me walking up the hill and he what, calculated what I’d weigh at eighteen years old and…?”

  “I’m afraid it’s not quite that simple, Christopher. We had our eyes on you way before that. Remember how suddenly that house on upper Crescent Heights went on the market? Don’t you recall how you were just able to afford it, despite thinking it was out of your price range?”

  “Yes. But that wasn’t for another eleven years after that that I met Morgan! Which,” I stopped myself, “is, of course, meaningless to the Ministry of Other Times! So he was chosen. So was I. Why me?”

  “Because you had accomplished. Because you were already effective!”

  “So effective that I was broke in 2009.”

  “You would have come back in 2011 or 2012. Really! But anyway, you were a high achiever. Anyway, what tipped us off that you were a PTR was your unusual method of death. Because it was approximately your size and build, the body that was found was assumed to be yours. No one looked into it closely.”

  “No, Morgan explained that’s how it would work. You used the term PTR. What does that signify?” I asked. “Potential Time what?”

  “Potential Time Repair.”

  Repair—not Repairer. “You mean I was like a swab of glue?”

  “A bit more complex than that. At any rate, history says that in 2010 you went away on a car trip to visit friends in Paso Robles. Am I correct?”

  “Yes. Morgan said he’d arrange it so that my burned-out car would be found driven down a ravine in a flaming accident with a skeleton too charred for recognition.”

  “That’s exactly how history says your death happened,” Allegre confirmed. “You have no idea, do you, of your reputation later on? I’ll show you sometime. You changed the world in your own time in two distinct areas. How many people do you think do that? So…we figured you could be relied upon to do the same in this time.”

  “Be a high achiever here and now also?”

  “Yes. That was why you were selected.”

  That was a great deal to absorb. I chewed and chewed and only partly absorbed it at the table.

  Then I said: “Okay. Now that we’re totally in the clear…what next? You calmly explain to me what needs to be done, and I will do…what?”

  “That’s the ever-loving beauty of it, Christopher.” Allegre laughed. “We don’t have to explain anything to you. In three years minus a few weeks, you are…already…doing it! On your own! No prompting needed.”

  I was stumped. “By making movies for teenagers?”

  “Yes. You see, you can’t escape your instincts for changing the world and for making things better and also for making art of some kind. Also you can’t escape your competency, nor your abilities, nor your flexibility. Qualities that you take for granted and which were needed to achieve in your own era, which was one of generally high competency for excellence. Qualities which are rarer and needed at this time and place, where they are in somewhat shorter supply. You barely think about it, but you’re a sensation, Christopher! Shirley Temple is cute. Mickey Rooney is darling. But you’re the toast of the town because at twenty-one—that’s the official fake age now, right?—you’re a triple threat. And because you have already effected change in this new timeline.”

  What Allegre meant was—as the result of American Boys.

  The film had in fact opened many people’s eyes to what had happened and what was still happening all across the country. Our well-off teens in Westwood and Carthay Circle and Santa Monica and Hancock Park, teens we had carefully cultivated for and through our movies, actually began to effect change themselves. After they saw the movie, they wrote to us at the studio in droves, asking how they could help. So we went out and met them at their schools and churches and synagogues and said they had to help. They had to organize, they had to form charities. They knew what they wanted to do already: to build shelters and safe homes for those kids who we had shown to be in such peril. They would do it first in Southern California, then all over the state, and then eventually all over the country.

  Sue-Anne had said to them, “I will personally help you do that. I will be your leader.”

  As a result, half of them signed up on the spot and another third filtered in later on; an amazing number. Teenagers became the face of L.A. Cares because for one thing, our young victims had learned to trust only young people: each other. So our teens went out on bikes and on foot and in busses and in cars and they talked to homeless youth all over the city, handing out food, telling them about the shelters and the free rooms and board. The rooms were small and simple and only two young people fit in each one. But the shelters were guarded by other teens and safe. Dr. Weissman gathered a team of physicians and dentists and oculists, and every weekend they met at the shelters and treated any kids who came in. They gave everyone physic
al and dental and eye exams. They put them on special regimens of food, vitamins, and medication. No child or teen or young person was forced to remain or to do anything to earn these benefits. Soon those shelters were full, and they were building extensions and new shelters, usually in the iffier parts of town because that’s where the kids in peril were. Anyone at the shelters who wanted to help build them or work got training and paid work helping to build new shelters. Soon L.A. Cares had a good-sized contingent of helpers, aides, and clients, and sometimes who was who or what became all mixed up…delightfully.

  Sue-Anne went to the White House and met Eleanor Roosevelt and she told her all about it, and she got help there too.

  We’d also been getting phone calls and letters from other actors and people in the film industry, asking how they could help, and so we formed Hollywood Cares. Free movies, free school classes, free art supplies, donated pianos, and musical instruments and typewriters and people to show how to use them all arrived, and soon the kids and some stars were mixing. If any young person had a dream or a desired vocation, we tried to locate someone to help them toward that goal. Soon, Hollywood Cares was joined by Broadway actors when we opened up East Coast shelters. It became the thing to do for all the popular actors, from Carole Lombard to Laurence Olivier, to get involved when they weren’t shooting a film or promoting it. This of course meant lots of young people would learn all the various crafts involved in filmmaking too.

  “I suppose Sue-Anne was another PTR,” I asked Allegre. “She’s placed here too, like me?”

  “Actually, not at all. She is a link we found for you. She was pretty much sitting around twiddling her thumbs, waiting to be useful. But because of all of you, the youth movement of the 1960s that you originally lived through, Christopher, and were a part of, well, now that will happen in the late 1930s and early 1940s. It will be national and then it will be worldwide. An entire generation of youth will raise their consciousness about politics, and social injustice, and then about the environment.”

  “Great! But what if we inadvertently change something and it results in me not being born at all later on and therefore…”

  “We’re monitoring your parents, of course. Not to worry.”

  “Well, what if I change something and someone else isn’t born?. Say Jonas Salk?”

  “Salk and Sabin are already here. We watch their timeline carefully too. Remember, Christopher, you are not the only PTR we are dealing with. There are forty-six other…repairs.” He suddenly changed his tone of voice. “Tell me if I’m wrong: you’re already thinking about a film different from any of the ones MGM has planned, aren’t you?”

  “Don’t you already know?”

  “No!” he insisted in a whisper. “We don’t know. We cannot know. Don’t you see, Christopher, because now we are changing the timeline altogether! We have to change it, otherwise…”

  “Otherwise it becomes the ‘dire situation.’ No, I get it.”

  “Good. Now tell me about your idea for the new film,” he insisted.

  “I don’t know…It’s just a fantasy right now. It’s going to be really, really, hard to pull it off for all kinds of reasons. This studio system is great when it works. But Lord, with all the egos involved and all the money needed, it’s elephantine. It takes manipulating, not to mention ass-kissing and…”

  “That never stopped you before,” he said.

  “No, it hasn’t. Well, my new idea is about,” I lowered my voice, “World War Two! And, by the way, won’t that nasty bit screw everything up for you and your PTRs?”

  “Not if it doesn’t happen, it won’t,” Allegre said.

  “Not if it what?!” I couldn’t believe my ears.

  “Not if someone with the media power of Christopher Hall in the new timeline of 1938 or 1939 makes a movie about it, predicting it, say, or…”

  “Wait. Wait. Wait. That’s not my plan at all.”

  “What is your plan, then?” he asked.

  “Well, something a lot smaller. You see, I want to write and direct and produce a movie, a full-color movie, an expensive movie, filled with stars—about a Jewish family living in Germany,” I said. “They’ll be kind of ordinary. Nice people, with ordinary, recognizable problems and joys. I’m calling them the Golds. There’s a mother and father and unmarried aunt who lives with them. Grandparents who live in another town. Three boys and a girl…But these ordinary people who will end up guess where? In exile. Beaten to death by Nazi thugs. In concentration camps. In Nazi ovens at the end of the picture!”

  I waited for him to say, you can’t do that.

  Instead he said, “If they are alive today in Europe, isn’t that exactly where the Golds will end up? In those awful places?”

  I tried to absorb what he was saying.

  “Yes, they will. And that’s what I want to draw attention to: what’s happening over there already with all the anti-Jewish laws. And what can and will happen.”

  “Not necessarily will happen,” Allegre said. “Remember that you’ve changed the timeline. You and Sue-Ann and American Boys and your teenage fans.”

  “Do you mean to tell me that the Holocaust doesn’t have to happen?” I asked. “Really?”

  “Remember, Christopher. There are forty-six other PTRs…”

  “But Hitler’s already in power in Germany. Tojo has the Japanese emperor under his thumb and his armies are halfway across China. Mussolini’s Brown Shirts are in Yugoslavia and all over northwestern Africa.”

  “Yes. But recall where they all end up, Christopher.”

  “Defeated. Dead.”

  “Exactly. How they end up is set in stone. But not when they end up there,” Allegre said. “Frankly, we would prefer that World War Two did not occur.”

  I was stunned.

  “‘We’ at the Ministry of Other Times?” I asked.

  “Yes. World War Two is very messy. Millions killed. Millions displaced. Economies shattered. Worse, it’s very distracting. It will end the same way it did in your time, eventually, but it will bring on almost a decade of destruction, not to mention distraction from the real problems: the ones that lead to our time hundreds of years from now. But if the war doesn’t happen at all, well, so much effort can be applied to the problem of world health, to hunger, disease, to renewable fuels, to desertization, to deforestation, to water and land conservation.”

  “You mean if I make a movie about the Gold family ending with them in the ovens?”

  “If you make it so that your political predictions inside the film begin to come true, Christopher. And people begin to see them come true!”

  “I see.”

  “If you do that, important people will then meet with you. You already have a toehold in the White House thanks to Sue-Anne. You will meet people and you will explain the crucial moment so that it the crucial moment doesn’t happen.”

  “This is nuts. The crucial moment being what? The Anschluss with Austria? Isn’t that later this very year?”

  “Yes, but the crucial moment is further along.”

  “Munich? Chamberlain and Daladier appeasing Hitler at Munich!” I tried.

  “No. Even that can occur.”

  “Wait. I remember. The Annexation of the Sudetenland. Wait, no. That was an accord too. The crucial moment would be after that, it would be when Hitler invaded the rest of Czechoslovakia. The non-German part?” I said. “The part that didn’t want to be annexed? Am I right?!”

  “Bingo!”

  “So in the new plan, what happens?” I wondered.

  “France, the U.S., and Britain go into a state of high alert and already begin to arm. As soon as Germany invades, the Allies declare war on Germany in defense of Czechoslovakia, and get this, they do so in September of 1939.”

  “I see! One month before Hitler actually started the war in my time.”

  “In the timeline change, the Allies have an air force all ready in France and Belgium to counter the German buildup. They immediately begin to bomb Germany fr
om the Ruhr to Berlin to Danzig and across the militarized south of the country,” he said. “That happens while the Nazis are focused upon annihilating Poland and invading Denmark.”

  “I see,” I said. “So Mussolini is forced to step down in when? Earlier? In ’39? Ditto Franco in Spain in ’39 or ’40? Then what? We then have one of them, say Ribbentrop himself, reveal the Brest-Litovsk secret pact with Russia. That’s an excuse to declare war on the Soviet Union too, launching our combined air forces from newly acquired bases in Germany and Poland? And…?”

  “And,” Allegre went on calmly, “the Allies assassinate Stalin and his cohorts. Do you see how they all fall into place, just like dominos, Chris? After Europe, everyone then goes after Japan. That way nuclear weapons are not fully developed, nor do they have to be developed at all, as that’s another great waste of time, personnel, and resources.”

  “But rockets already existed by then—by right now, possibly.”

  “Yes, but they are rockets with non-fissionable payloads. Good for outer space exploration. We’ll need those for harvesting future minerals. For air. Water. Methane. Our abandonment of space in your time-era was another major error, leading to our future’s dire situation.”

  Our desserts arrived. For me, Nesselrode pie, a treat from my childhood, its recipe all but totally lost by 2010. For him, another shrimp cocktail.

  “Can that happen? Really?” I asked.

  “Asks the disgruntled, solitary sixty-five-year-old man from the year 2010,” Allegre said, “who is busy and thriving in the mid-1930s, where he is the number-one teen movie star in the country.”

  “I see your point. But…who’ll listen to me?”

  “First, your friends. Who will help you make the film. The ones from Alsop House. Who by then will have the power and the places and the ability to help you make the best film ever seen. A film so startling and tragic that everyone must see it in the free world. Then your teenager audience, who will listen to you as to no other person before you. And then their parents. And I’m told the First Lady loves to meet talented young people. Arrange a private screening of The Golds at the White House.”