The Eternal War

2001, New York

They were back in the archway less than half an hour later, still huffing and puffing after the jog from Marcy Avenue subway station. Liam whimpering about his aching side. ‘I shouldn’t have rushed that muffin,’ he groaned pitifully to himself.

On the screen in front of them, computer-Bob, their field-office system AI, was already spitting out the data pulled in from the external Internet feed.

‘He’s just vanished from history,’ said Sal.

‘Well, from civil-war history,’ Maddy replied as she skim-read the dossier being assembled, fact by fact, on the screen. ‘Nothing in there, nothing at all about him.’

‘This Lincoln fella was quite important, wasn’t he?’

Maddy turned to Liam. ‘Only the most important figure in the war. The most freakin’ important. He held the Union together.’ She saw one of his eyebrows flicker upwards, a sign that he hadn’t a clue and was hoping she was going to elaborate. ‘C’mon, you’ve been reading up a lot recently, right? Hitting the history books.’ She glanced at a pile of books stacked high beside his bunk bed. ‘So, please, tell me you know which guys I’m talking about.’

Liam frowned for a moment, then grinned. ‘The Northern fellas … them people in blue.’

‘Right. Yes. Abraham Lincoln was the president of — ’ she sighed — ‘them people in blue. Otherwise known as the North, the Union. The point was he kept them together, kept them fighting, led them to victory … but now he’s gone from civil-war history!’

Sal chewed a fingernail absently. ‘That’s going to mean a big wave, then.’

‘Uh-huh … five minutes from now we could be looking out at a world in which the Confederates won.’ She glanced sideways at Liam. ‘Them fellas in grey.’

Computer-Bob’s dialogue box appeared on screen.

› Maddy, I have completed a scan of all the civil-war data retrieved and there are no references to Abraham Lincoln in this time period: 1861 to 1865.

‘Maybe he died,’ said Sal, ‘you know … before he should’ve?’

‘Hmmm … that’s a possibility. OK, then, computer-Bob, look earlier. Go earlier.’ She rubbed her eyes, already irritable and red from her cold, beneath her glasses. ‘We have data on him from our own internal historical database, right?’

› Of course.

‘So when and where was he born?’

› 12 February 1809. Hardin County, Kentucky.

‘Do we have a proper detailed biography? All his movements from childhood right up to becoming president?’

› Yes, Maddy. I have detailed files.

She had a pretty foggy high-school memory of Lincoln. They’d studied him and the civil war for a semester. Boring stuff some of the time, but it got interesting when the country started to pull itself apart over slavery and the war began.

‘He travelled around a bit if I remember correctly, right, Bob?’

› Correct. His family moved several times. Then when he was a young adult he left home and -

She waved her hand at the webcam to stop him. ‘Right, then. All right, OK, this is what we do.’ She pushed her glasses back up her nose. ‘I want you to search every external database from his birthdate onwards. I want you to focus your data-trawling on the places he was supposed to have lived in … Kentucky, wherever else he went. Dig into their newspaper archives, a lot of that old stuff is digitized.’

‘Hold on.’ Liam sat back in one of the office chairs, dug his heels into the concrete floor and pulled himself on squeaking castor wheels closer to her. ‘The world out there doesn’t care a jot for Mr Lincoln now. He’s a Mr Nobody, right? We’re now in a timeline where he never became a famous president. So there’d not be detailed biographies an’ the like out there on the man, surely?’

‘True.’ Maddy pulled on her lip. ‘But I remember reading he was quite … I dunno … quite driven. He had an uneducated father and lived quite poor, if I recall, in a log cabin, and sort of hated all that. Wanted to better himself. So, all right, something’s happened, things have changed and he never got to be president, but maybe he managed to become a local mayor or something, or a successful businessman? Something that might have left a small mark on the world.’

She looked up at Bob and Becks in hope of a word of support. But both of them were silently blinking: networking with computer-Bob and helping the system with the data shovelling.

‘So,’ she continued, ‘if he became a local bigwig somewhere, maybe he opened some sort of, I dunno … some shopping mall …?’

‘Shopping mall?’

‘Ahhh … you know what I mean — trading post!’ She shook her head irritably. ‘Or opened some hospital wing, or some charity school for orphaned kiddies … or made some small town Independence Day speech or something. Point is … these places all had their own little two-sheet gazette, their own newspaper. And these days all that kind of stuff is up on the net as scanned data.’

She turned towards the webcam. ‘You got that, Bob?’

› Yes, Maddy, we are already searching.

‘Do you think we’ll have any more changes?’ asked Liam. ‘The world doesn’t look so different to me. Well, actually, it looks no different to me. Maybe that missing beefburger and the changed painting is all we’re going to get?’

She shook her head. ‘That can’t be all, Liam. You can’t just remove a guy like Lincoln from history and it amounts to no more than the change of a snack menu. There’ll be more changes …’ She stopped mid-sentence. ‘Just a sec …’ She dug a hand deep into her jeans and fumbled for something. She pulled out a crinkled ball of paper and quickly unfolded it. Liam recognized it as a five-dollar bill.

‘Look! He’s still on there!’ she said, turning the note round so that he and Sal could see Lincoln’s face staring out at them with a surly scowl. ‘There’s your answer, Liam,’ she said. ‘There’ll be more ripples … History hasn’t finished fidgeting around to get rid of Lincoln yet.’

Fidgeting around? Maddy realized how oddly human that sounded. As if time itself was some curmudgeonly old college lecturer who grumpily decided when he was good and ready to sit down to rewrite the history books.

‘This means another someone trying to mess things up,’ said Sal, ‘doesn’t it?’

Liam nodded. ‘Another Kramer?’

Maddy shrugged. ‘Not necessarily another Kramer.’

Not long after they’d been recruited, they’d been thrown in the deep end, having to deal with a nut-job from the future who’d thought it a great idea to help the Nazis win the Second World War.

‘But if Lincoln’s destiny has been mucked up,’ said Liam, ‘that’s changed history. That means — ’

‘I know,’ Maddy sniffed. ‘I know. It means another idiot’s fooling around with time travel.’ She puffed her cheeks. ‘All right, so here’s our plan, then … We’ll find him out there somewhere. A driven character like Lincoln’s going to have made his mark one way or another. He may not have ended up being the president, but a guy like that will have made his mark in some other way. We find him, then maybe we’ll find whoever’s just stepped back into the past and changed Lincoln’s destiny.’ She looked at Liam, even managed a laugh, not bad really, given she felt like death warmed up.

‘And you can tell whichever time-travelling moron it is who’s done this that they’re in big trouble.’

CHAPTER 8

2001, New York

It took three hours before computer-Bob’s dialogue box blinked on to the screen and Becks and Bob eventually stirred from the motionless trance they’d been in. Liam came and shook Maddy awake.

She stared up bleary-eyed at Liam, fumbling for her glasses. ‘They done?’

‘Aye.’