The entire affair was handled with great tact and honor. No shots were fired, no lives were lost, and the one hundred twenty-three American passengers arrived safely in Liverpool with glowing stories of how correct, how chivalrous, the German U-boat sailors had been. America remained neutral throughout the Great War. Indeed, a good deal of anti-British sentiment swept the United States, especially the Midwest, when their newspapers reported that the British were transporting military contraband in secret aboard the liner and thus putting the lives of the American passengers at risk.
“Well,” I said, beckoning to the waiter for another Pernod, “the war is over, and we must face the future as best we can.”
“Yes,” said my companion gloomily. “I agree.”
One group of burly Germans was being particularly obnoxious, singing bawdy songs as they waved their beer glasses to and fro, slopping the foaming beer on themselves and their neighboring tables. No one complained. No one dared to say a word. The German army still occupied much of France.
My companion’s face was white with fury. Yet even he restrained himself. But I noticed that he glanced at the watch on his wrist every few moments, as if he were expecting someone. Or something.
If anyone had betrayed France, it was me. The world that I had been born into was a cesspool of violence and hate, crumbling into tribal savagery all across the globe. Only a few oases of safety existed, tucked in remote areas far from the filthy, disease-ridden cities and the swarms of ignorant, vicious monsters who raped and murdered until they themselves were raped and murdered.
Once they discovered our solar-powered city, tucked high in the Sierra Oriental, I knew that the end was near. Stupidly, they attacked us, like a wild barbarian horde. We slaughtered them with laser beams and heat-seeking bullets. Instead of driving them away, that only whetted their appetite.
Their survivors laid siege to our mountaintop. We laughed, at first, to think their pitiful handful of ragged ignoramuses could overcome our walled city, with its high-tech weaponry and endless energy from the sun. Yet somehow, they spread the word to others of their kind. Day after day we watched their numbers grow, a tattered, threadbare pack of rats surrounding us, watching, waiting until their numbers were so huge, they could swarm us under despite our weapons.
They were united in their bloodlust and their greed. They saw loot and power on our mountaintop, and they wanted both. At night I could see their campfires down below us, like the red eyes of rats watching and waiting.
Our council was divided. Some urged that we sally out against the besiegers, attack them, and drive them away. But it was already too late for that. Their numbers were far too large, and even if we drove them away, they would return, now that they knew we existed.
Others wanted to flee into space, to leave Earth altogether and build colonies off the planet. We had the technology to build and maintain the solar-powered satellites, they pointed out. It was only one technological step farther to build habitats in space.
But when we put the numbers through a computer analysis, it showed that to build a habitat large enough to house us all permanently would be beyond our current resources—and we could not enlarge our resource base as long as we were encircled by the barbarians.
I had worked on the time translator since my student days. It took enormous energy to move objects through time, far too much for all of us to escape that way. Yet I saw a possibility of hope.
If I could find a nexus, a pivotal point in time, perhaps I could change the world. Perhaps I could alter events to such an extent that this miserable world of terror and pain would dissolve, disappear, and a better world replace it. I became obsessed with the possibility.
“But you’ll destroy this world,” my wife gasped, shocked when I finally told her of my scheme.
“What of it?” I snapped. “Is this world so delightful that you want it to continue?”
She sank wearily onto the lab bench. “What will happen to our families? Our friends? What will happen to us?”
“You and I will make the translation. We will live in an earlier, better time.”
“And the others?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know. The mathematics isn’t clear. But even if they disappear, the world that replaces them in this time will be better than the world we’re in now.”
“Do you really think so?”
“We’ll make it better!”
The fools on the council disagreed, naturally. No one had translated through time, they pointed out. The energy even for a preliminary experiment would be prohibitively high. We needed that energy for our weapons.
None of them believed I could change a thing. They weren’t afraid that they would be erased from existence, their world line snuffed out like a candle flame. No, in their blind ignorance they insisted that an attempt at time translation would consume so much energy that we would be left defenseless against the besieging savages outside our walls.
“The savages will no longer exist,” I told them. “None of this world line will exist, once I’ve made the proper change in the temporal geodesic.”
They voted me down. They would rather face the barbarians than give up their existence, even if it meant a better world would replace the one they knew.
Outwardly, I accepted their judgment. Inwardly, I became the most passionate student of history of all time. Feverishly, I searched the books and discs, seeking the nexus, the turning point, the place where I could make the world change
