The Eternal War

Lincoln heard movement and closed his eyes. A moment later he felt a gentle nudge, the grain sack beneath him shifting, and the warm breath of someone leaning over his face.

‘He still asleep?’

‘Dead to the world, I think.’

A chuckle. ‘Jahulla, it’s hard to imagine this drunk being the President of America, isn’t it? ’

‘He’s still got a while to sort himself out, so he has.’

‘Information: the American civil war begins in April 1861.’

‘Well, there you go … he’s got exactly thirty years to sort himself out. Loads of time.’

A pause. ‘What do you think, Bob? Reckon we’ve patched up history?’

‘The target person is alive. History data files show that he will embark on a career as a lawyer in the next few years. Then go into politics.’

‘Lawyer? Shadd-yah! You’re joking!’

‘Negative. Not joking.’

A pause.

‘Hmmm … I could imagine him as a lawyer. He’s got the temperament. Argumentative, so he is. Anyway …’ He heard a footstep. ‘Come on, Sal, let’s go and explore New Orleans while we got the chance. He’ll be fine. We should leave before he wakes up. With a bit of luck he won’t even remember us.’

Movement again. Lincoln heard the swish and rustle of cotton skirts. Then the receding sound of footfalls down the wooden planks of the dockside. He opened his eyes once more and watched the three dark shapes: one a giant of a man, another a slender young man and the third a young woman. His mind was still foggy from the whisky he’d been drinking earlier in the afternoon, foggy … but still able to function. In the last couple of minutes he’d heard enough to make a feebler-minded person than him question their very sanity.

… 1912 … time travel …?

As a boy Lincoln had once discussed such an absurd idea with a friend — what if a man could speed up the turning of a clock? Or slow it? Or stop it? Or … even wind it back the wrong way? What if a man could walk in days past? Meet great men from history and talk to them. An absurd idea. A fanciful notion for their imaginative young minds. Yet … here it seemed to be, the very idea he and his childhood friend had playfully considered while resting in the branches of a sycamore tree.

Is this possible?

Perhaps in some far-off future time — 1912, for example — it could be possible. The ingenuity of man seemed to know no bounds. Every year it seemed a new device was being invented, new knowledge of how God’s earth functioned uncovered. Who knows what science men would be wielding like magic in the year 1912?

He eased himself into a sitting position. His head pounded as if some small gold prospector was at work in there with a rock hammer.

And what was it the much deeper voice had said? That he would be a lawyer? And one day … did the girl actually say it? Did she actually say the word president?

He felt a shudder of excitement course through him, blowing away the cobwebs of his hangover.

President?

If that was true, really true, if those three strangers did actually come from a time beyond his own and could know such things, know his destiny … then they would know how it would be possible that a poor fellow like him would one day lead this country as its president.

His skittering mind reached out further. Perhaps there was an even greater goal, a greater destiny for him than a life of politics. He realized it would be a far greater thing to be the only man from 1831 to visit the future, to actually see with his own eyes all the wonderful devices on air, sea and land that man’s ingenuity could create. He imagined the cities of this time full of towers of glistening crystal that prodded the very heavens.

I would truly like to see this future …

CHAPTER 12

2001, New York

Maddy sat with her feet up on the computer desk, her trainers resting on a stack of pizza boxes. She watched the monitor in front of her, a looping display of tragedy unfolding in painful endless repetition.

The flickering, shaking camcorder footage of a passenger plane swooping low across the skyscrapers of Manhattan … and in those precious heartbeats of time before it finally crashes into the side of the north tower … a hope? Even though you know what happens, isn’t there always that fleeting moment of hope, a possibility that it might actually miss this time? That it just flies between them? That Julian and nearly three thousand other people might return home that day and tell their families of the near miss that terrified them all for a few moments?

But the loop of footage never changes.

She watched it in slow motion. It ended, as it always did, with an orange fireball, a quickly growing pillar of black smoke and a million sheets of paper raining down like confetti, like snow to the streets of Manhattan.

Maddy remembered that day as if it was yesterday. She’d been nine. She’d been at school. An ashen-faced teacher’s assistant had burst into their classroom and blurted out the news. The television set in the corner had been switched on and there it was, the smouldering north tower. She remembered her teacher sobbing, and other girls in her class following suit.

Or maybe there was a chance that this world with its subtly altered reality — no President Lincoln — was going to be different enough for the American Airlines Flight 11 to take off and arrive at its destination, and no one was going to die tomorrow. It had only been one tiny ripple of change so far … but, not for the first time, she wondered how nice it would be to preserve an alternate world changed just enough to spare Julian, and three thousand others, their lives.

‘Maddy?’

She looked up at Becks, standing beside her. ‘Uh? Hey, Becks.’

‘I have finished.’

Maddy had given her the task of checking on the growth tubes in the back. There were six foetuses hanging in that awful murky, smelly growth solution, being fed a mix of nutrients that kept them in stasis. None of them would grow any larger until they activated the growth mode and cut the mix with steroids. As long as they had power feeding the tubes, the foetuses — future Bobs and Becks — took care of themselves. Although, occasionally, the filters needed to be pulled out, cleared of gunk and put back in. A quite horrible job. Even worse, Maddy mused, than pulling rotting hair and skin and whatever else was in there from a blocked plughole. Even worse, if it was possible, than emptying their chemical toilet.

‘All of the growth tubes are performing optimally,’ she said drily. ‘All the in-vitro clone candidates are fine.’

‘Good.’

‘Do you wish me to make you some coffee?’

Maddy could still smell that gunk on Becks’s hands. ‘Uhh … no, that’s OK.’ She picked up a remote control and switched one of the monitors to show a cable channel. The Simpsons was on. She recognized it as an old episode she’d seen too many times over the years. But, of course, here in 2001, for every kid just coming in from school and watching it now, it was a brand-new episode.

And one of those kids … is — was — me.

She had to be out there, right now: a nine-year-old Madelaine Carter, sitting in the kitchen having an after- school bowl of Nugget Crunch, most probably watching the very same episode. And Mom, sitting at the kitchen table beside her, asking her about her day and Maddy grunting answers back.

What she’d give to just grab her coat, her wallet, walk out of the arch and get the first flight from JFK to