The moment she was gone, Mike said accusingly, “You said there were supposed to be three fatalities.”
“There will be,” Polly said. “They’ve only been searching a few hours. They’ll find-”
“Find who?” he said. “You heard Eileen. Those two women worked on fifth. We were on fifth. There was no one there.”
“I know,” Polly whispered, drawing him back around the corner, out of sight and earshot of the others, “but that doesn’t mean they weren’t in the store. They might have gone down to the basement to the shelter-”
He wasn’t listening. “There are only two,” he said in that driven voice. “There were supposed to be three.”
“There may have been someone in the offices. Or it may have been a charwoman. Or the guard who chased us. Just because they haven’t found all the casualties yet doesn’t mean there weren’t any. It was sometimes weeks before all the bodies at an incident were found, and you saw that pit. This doesn’t prove your being at Dunkirk affected-”
“You don’t understand, I saved a soldier’s life. Private David Hardy. He saw my light-”
“But one soldier-”
“It wasn’t one soldier. After I saved him, he went back to Dunkirk and brought back four boatloads full of soldiers. Five hundred and nineteen of them. And don’t tell me changing what happened to that many soldiers didn’t alter history. It’s a chaotic system. A goddamn butterfly can cause a monsoon on the other side of the world. Changing what happened to five hundred and twenty soldiers is sure as hell going to change something! I just hope to God what I changed wasn’t who won the war.”
“It wasn’t.”
“How the hell do you know?”
Because I was there the day we won it, she thought. But telling him that meant telling him she had a deadline, and he was still reeling from finding out about the drops and the retrieval teams. “Because the laws of time travel say it’s not possible,” she said. “And historians have been traveling to the past for nearly forty years. If we were altering events, we’d have seen the effects long before now.” She put her hand on his arm. “And the men you saved were British soldiers, not German pilots. They couldn’t have affected Padgett’s bombing.”
“You don’t know that,” he said angrily. “It’s a chaotic system. Every action’s connected to every other action.”
“But they don’t always have an effect,” she said, thinking of her last assignment. “Sometimes you do things that you think will alter the course of events, but in the end they don’t. And you said yourself there should be discrepancies, and there haven’t been.”
“You’re certain? There hasn’t been any event that was supposed to have happened that didn’t? Or that happened earlier or later than it was supposed to?”
“No,” she said, and thought suddenly of the UXB at St. Paul’s. Mr. Dunworthy had said it had taken the bomb squad three days to remove it, which would have been on Saturday, not Sunday. But Mr. Dunworthy could have made a mistake about the date, or there could have been an error in the newspaper reports.
“No, none at all,” she said. “And even in a chaotic system there must be connections. The butterfly flapping its wings can only cause a monsoon because both involve air movement. The lines of connection between your soldiers and the number of casualties in Padgett’s simply aren’t there. And besides, five hundred and twenty British soldiers not dead and not in prisoner-of-war camps would help the war effort, not hurt it.”
“Not necessarily. In chaotic systems, positive actions can cause bad results as well as good, and you know as well as I do that the war had divergence points where any action, good or bad, would have changed the entire picture.”
I’m going to have to tell him about VE-Day, even if it does mean his finding out about my deadline, she thought. It’s the only way to convince him. But once he found out she had a deadline, he’d-
“Polly! Mike!” Eileen’s voice called, sounding frantic, and they hurried back around the corner. “I came to tell you-”
“What is it?” Mike said. “Have they found bodies?”
“No, and everyone except Miss Miles and Miss Rainsford have been accounted for.”
“What about the guard at the staff entrance?” he asked.
“He’s here. He was the one who told them he thought I was in the building. He thought you might have been, too, Polly, but I told him that as soon as you got to fourth you realized I’d gone and left. The bomb apparently hit just after we got out.”
And if we hadn’t been able to get the lift door open, Polly thought, or if we’d run into the guard on the way down-She looked anxiously at Eileen, wondering if she was thinking the same thing.
Eileen was shivering, though that could be due to her thin blouse and the damp, chill air. We should have done that looting we were accused of and stolen that coat off the mannequin.
“You’re sure everybody’s been accounted for? Even the charwomen?” Mike demanded, his voice rising the way Eileen’s had in the tube station. He’s just as near the edge as she is, Polly thought. He’s in no shape to hear more bad news. “Yes, everyone,” Eileen said, “but that isn’t what I came to tell you. It was two words.”
“What was?” Mike asked impatiently.
“The name of the place Gerald was going. It was two words. I was speaking to Miss Varden about Miss Miles, and she said she lived in Tegley Place, and when she said it, I thought, The airfield Gerald told me he was going to was a two-word name.”
“Middle Wallop?” Polly said.
Eileen shook her head.
“West Malling?”
“No. I’m positive one of the words began with a T. Or a P-” She stopped, looking past Polly. “Oh, thank goodness, it’s Miss Miles!” She ran to meet the young woman coming across the street.
“What happened?” Miss Miles said, staring at the scattered mannequins.
“Padgett’s was bombed last night-” Eileen began, but Mike cut in, “Was Miss Rainsford still in the building when you left last night?”
“No,” Miss Miles said, still staring blindly at the sprawled bodies.
“No, you don’t know? Or no, she wasn’t in the building?” Mike shouted, and Eileen turned to look at him incredulously, but his anger had roused Miss Miles from her trance.
She turned from staring at the mannequins and said, “She wasn’t here yesterday. Her brother was killed the night before last.”
“You’d best tell Mr. Fetters that,” Eileen said, and to Mike and Polly, “I’ll be back straightaway,” and led Miss Miles off toward the others.
“Well?” Mike said before the two girls were even out of earshot. “You heard her. Everybody’s been accounted for. Which means there weren’t any fatalities.”
“It doesn’t mean that at all,” Polly said. “They could have been passersby. On my way to Padgett’s I saw a woman and her little boy insisting the doorman get them a taxi. They might still have been waiting for it when the bomb hit,” she said, though if that were the case, their bodies would have been blown out onto the pavement like the mannequins. “No one knew we were in Padgett’s. There might have been other people who-”
“Or the continuum might have been altered,” Mike said, looking like he was going to be sick, “and we’re going to lose the war. And don’t tell me it’s impossible.”
It is impossible, she thought, but she said, “If England lost the war, then Ira Feldman’s parents would have died in Auschwitz or Buchenwald, and he’d never have invented time travel, and Oxford would never have built the net, and we couldn’t have come through.”
“You’re forgetting something,” he said bitterly.
“What?”
“We came through the net before I saved Hardy.”
And I was at VE-Day before he saved Hardy, she thought, but-
“Why else would there be a discrepancy?” he said.
“You don’t know that it’s a discrepancy. You don’t know you saved Hardy, either.”
“What do you mean? I told you-”
“Perhaps it wasn’t your light he saw. Perhaps it was a light from some other boat, or a reflection off the water. Or a flare.”
