Making history

'But-'

'No. I think it is better you help us by leaving alone,' said Leo with decision. 'You have been much service to us already.'

It took ten minutes of argument and wheedling to convince Steve.

'I'm really sorry,' I said, as he sulkily handed me the silvered lens case. 'But you do see

'Yeah, yeah,' he said. 'I see.'

I held out my hand. 'Cheer up,' I said. 'After all, this may never work. For all we know, in two hours time we'll discover that it can never work in this world. I may be stuck here for ever.'

He took my outstretched hand. 'Maybe,' he said. 'But more likely I'll never see you again and

'And what?'

'You've been kind to me, Mikey. I know that's all it was. Just kindness. But you've made me happier in the last couple of days than I ever was before. In my whole life. Maybe happier than I ever could be, in any world.'

'What do you mean by saying that's all it was? It wasn't kindness. I like you, Steve. You must know that.'

'Yeah. You like me. But back in England you'll have a girlfriend.'

'I doubt it. I only ever had one and she left me. But back here, when everything is as it should be, you'll have a boyfriend. Dozens of them. Hundreds. As many as you can handle. More than you can handle. A cute dude like you. You'll be beating them off... as it were.'

'But they won't be you, will they?'

'Gentlemen, please!' said Leo, who had been listening to this with mounting impatience. 'It is almost light already. We may be seen.'

Steve hugged me tightly and disappeared into the shadows.

'He's very fond of me,' I explained to Leo.

'My glasses I need only for reading,' he replied, somewhat elliptically. 'You have the rats?'

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'Yup,' I said, showing him the box.

As he input his security code into the panel by the entrance door, I cast my mind back to the night outside the New Cavendish building, when I had raced round on a bike to meet him in the Cambridge starlight, my pocket full of little orange pills.

He led me silently to the elevators whose whooping hum seemed devastatingly loud in the dead silence. Down a maze of third-floor corridors I followed him until we arrived at a door in front of which he stopped.

'How the hell did you come up with Chester Franklin?' I whispered, indicating the name-plate on the door.

'That was Hubbard's idea,' he answered, as the door clicked open.

It was dark as a cellar inside. I stood, not daring to move, listening to him fiddling with blinds. At last he flicked a light-switch and I could look around.

He pointed to a stool, like a sea-lion trainer. 'Sit,' he said. 'Please say nothing to lose me my concentration.'

I sat watching him in obedient silence.

There was a Tim, or a machine not unlike the Tim I had known. But its casing was white, tinged with duck-egg blue. That may have been a trick of the overhead lights, however, whose glow seemed to cast a faint blue over everything.

There was no mouse on this machine, but instead a joystick stuck up from the side like a lollipop. The screen was larger and there was no vestige of keyboard. Instead of Centronix cabling and yards of spaghetti, clear plastic pipes emerged from the rear, like the tubes on an intravenous drip.

A sudden horrible thought struck me and made my mouth go dry.

Suppose the Nazis had abolished the Greenwich meridian?

Leo had not asked me about the coordinates of Brunau when we had talked out there in the woods.

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His first idea four years ago, as I had guessed, knowing my Leo, had been to do something to destroy his father's factory in Auschwitz. Then he had seen that this might not be enough, and he had considered the possibility of assassinating Rudolf Gloder. He did not know how this could be done but, although his heart had been set against

murder, he had toyed with the idea of sending a bomb to an early Nazi congress. He decided such a project was too full of imponderables, so he considered next the possibility of sending Brunau Water to Bayreuth to stop Gloder's birth. He believed it would be a fitting irony. His difficulty was that Brunau Water no longer existed. At least, it might exist somewhere, but he did not know where and dared not ask. Then he heard, through an academic colleague in Cambridge, that there was work being done in Princeton, America, which pointed towards the possibility of contraceptive drugs. Such work was forbidden in Europe on the grounds of 'ethics', a hypocritical irony the macabre humour of which Leo had never been able to share with anyone. So, logical and single-minded as ever, Leo had decided to defect to the United States. He was the same Leo all right. The same overwhelming burden of inherited guilt, the same fanatical belief that he could and must atone for his father's guilt.

He had found it difficult however, once installed in Princeton, to pursue his private quest. The government authorities here believed him to be working on a quantum weapon that would give America the chance to gain a final decisive advantage over Europe. There was no justification for his asking a lot of questions about contraceptives under such circumstances. He had expected to find academic freedom in the United States, freedom of a kind denied European scientists. He had been greatly mistaken. If anything, the security and secrecy here was more intense than in Cambridge.

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Then I had shown up. Now he and I were preparing to make the world a better place by ensuring that Adolf Hitler lived and prospered.

The idea of the rats had made him laugh. Steve had laughed too. It was so foolish.

'But it makes sense!' I had protested. 'What would you do if you pumped up water one morning and it was full of maggots and bits of dead animal and smelt like a sewer? You wouldn't drink it, that's for sure. The whole cistern would be pumped out and disinfected. It stands to reason.'

Neither of them had been able to come up with a better suggestion, so into Steve's lens box the rats had gone, their suppurating bodies almost falling to pieces as a retching Steve scooped them up between two pieces of cardboard.

Leo had taken the cardboard from Steve and finished the job. His was the strongest stomach of all.

I watched him working now: his strong blue eyes darting over his creation, his long fingers operating switches, his whole restless body almost trembling with the intense concentration of his actions.

He seemed to sense my gaze for he looked up at me. 'It goes well,' he whispered.

'About Brunau,' I said. 'You'll need the coordinates. I'm worried that

'You think I don't know them?'

'Forty-seven degrees, thirteen minutes, twenty-eight seconds north, ten degrees, fifty-two minutes, thirty-one minutes east.'

He nodded. 'Your memory is good. See. We are looking there now.'

'I remember something else,' I said. 'You once told me that in this life you are either a rat or a mouse. Rats do good or evil by changing things and mice do good or evil by doing nothing.'

His eyes flicked over to the silvered lens-case. 'Most appropriate,' he said. 'Now, if you are ready. It is time.'

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The tubes that ran from the back of the machine gleamed with shooting pulses of red light. The screen swirled and glowed with colour.

'That's it?' I asked. 'Brunau?' '1st of June. Four a.m.'

'The colors are different from last time.'

'They are meaningless,' he replied in that faintly contemptuous tone of voice scientists use with dumb laymen. 'The representation can be any color you choose to assign.'

'What are the red lights in the tubes there?'

Data,' he said, a note of worry and surprise in his voice. 'It is data. This is not how it was before?'

'Pretty much the same,' I said, reassuring him. 'The wires coming out of the back were different, that's all.'

'How did they look?'

'Well, they weren't transparent, that's all. The data ran through copper wires.'

'Copper wires?' he sounded amazed. 'Like old-fashioned telephones? But that is primitive.'

'It worked didn't it?' I said, springing rather illogically to the defense of my own world.

He looked back at the screen. 'Can it be so simple?' he asked. 'I just press this and my father's factory at Auschwitz never happened?' His finger was stroking a small black button below the screen.

I had not told Leo that in our previous world his father had also been at Auschwitz. I thought it might unhinge him to know that, no matter what he did to history, his father seemed to be destined to supervise the bestial destruction of Jews.

He turned from the screen and from his pocket he took two white masks. He attached one to his face, hooking the strings over his ears, and handed the other to me. I put it on, and great waves of menthol filled my nose and lungs, making my eyes run. I saw that he was weeping too. He blinked back his tears and pointed at the lenscase.

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I undipped the lid of the box, opened it, swallowed hard and looked inside.

A huge, flapping, trail-legged insect flew out and hit me in the eye.

I dropped the lid and shouted in terror. 'Quiet!' Leo hissed. 'It is not a wolf.'

He handed me two sheets of card with a frown.

I lifted the lid again, keeping my head at an angle, ready to duck any more flying creatures.

There didn't seem to be many flying creatures in there. A few fleas maybe, but nothing as substantial as that first horrible bug. No, most of the creatures left in this Pandora's box were of the slithery kind. They had been busy over the past few hours: breeding and busy. The whole box heaved and shuddered with life. It was all too gloopy and broken up to be lifted between two bits of card.

'I think ...' I said, my voice sounding deep'and muffled under the mask, 'I think it's best if I just empty it, don't you?'

He looked into the box, nodded silently and pointed me towards what looked like a tall church font. The top part, the bowl or basin, was where I supposed the bits of rotting rat should go. From the underside, pulsing data tubes led to the back of the machine.

Leo signalled for me to get it over with and I held my breath and emptied the contents of the box into the basin. Even through a menthol-soaked mask I could tell how great the stench was. Averting my eyes, I banged the edge of the box against the lip of the bowl and heard the sludging slither of rotting flesh slap out onto the plastic of the font basin, like gruel being doled into bowls by a workhouse matron. I took a quick look at the box and saw that there was more stuck in the corners.

'Could you pass me something to scoop out the rest with?' I said to Leo.

He rose, looked quickly about him and picked up a coffee mug from a table in the corner of the room.

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He gave it to me and watched as I scraped at the sides and corners.

'Well, well, well. And just what in consarned tarnation is going on here?'

I looked up in horror. The coffee mug and lens-case fell from my hands and hit the floor with a crash.

Brown and Hubbard stood in the doorway. They each held a gun in their hands.

'Now don't either of you go moving,' said Brown moving into the room. 'I want to find out - Jesus fucking Christ!' His hand flew to his mouth and he backed away, gagging. I saw vomit leak from between his fingers.

The smell had reached Hubbard and I saw him pull a handkerchief from his pocket. I looked at Leo and I saw that he was staring at the black button below the screen ten yards away from us. The clouds of color were still rolling on the screen. Everything was ready.

I took a small step to my left towards the machine.

'Oh, no you don't/ said Hubbard, handing the handkerchief to Brown. 'Not one step.' He raised the hand holding the gun to shoulder height and pointed it straight at my head.

Brown wiped his mouth and, still holding the handkerchief against his lips, glared at us with fury and distrust. I felt that for some reason he was more angered by his uncharacteristic outburst of profanity than by the throwing up. I had sensed when we had first met that he set a lot of store by his soft-spoken cowboy image. No doubt his underlings celebrated him as a wonderful eccentric Gary Cooper-like kind of eccentric. Gary Cooper never said 'Jesus fucking Christ'. At least not in any movie I ever saw.

'I don't know,' he said, through the handkerchief, 'just what sick perversions we have stumbled on here, but I sure as the deuce mean to find out. You stay right where you are, you hear? Don't say a word. Just nod or shake your head, understood?'

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Leo and I nodded in unison.

'Good boys. Now. You got any more of them there masks in this room?'

Leo nodded. 'Where are they?'

Leo pointed to his pocket.

'All right now. You reach into that pocket, nice and slow and you throw them to me, okay?'

Leo shook his head and put up a finger.

'What's that? You mean you only got one of the suckers?' Leo nodded. He had thought, I realised, to bring one for Steve, expecting him to be with us for our moment of triumph.

'Shoot. Well, never mind. You throw that one mask over then.'

Leo did so. Hubbard caught it neatly and passed it to Brown, who gave him in return the vomit-filled handkerchief.

Hubbard stared at this offering for a moment and then threw it into the corridor behind him.

Brown adjusted the mask over his face and came fully into the room, his gun at hip level.

'You just make sure these boys are covered/ he said over his shoulder to Hubbard. Hubbard nodded weakly and leaned against the doorframe. The smell was getting to him and he didn't have a handkerchief.

His movement to one side revealed, crouched behind him in the shadows of the opposite doorway, Steve.

I swallowed, not daring to look to see if Leo had seen him too. Brown was moving slowly towards us, his eyes darting suspiciously about the room.

He was now close enough to see the bowl of rats, maggots, lice and other crawling horrors.

'Holy dang!' he said. 'Just what in the name of heckfire is going on here?'

I stole another look at Hubbard, who was looking at Brown and trying not to breathe. I let my eyes slide slowly over to Steve. He was staring at me, white-faced

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and frightened. I swallowed again and spoke, as loudly and clearly as I could through the mask.

'It's just an experiment,' I said.

'What's that?' asked Brown. 'Experiment? What kind of disgusting, God-forsaken, heathen experiment could this ever be, boy? Answer me that?'

'All you have to do is press that black button. The one just below that screen there. The black button. Then you'll find out.'

'Oh no, son. No one is going to go pressing any buttons round here until I've heard some explanations.'

I flicked my eyes over to Steve again and saw him straighten. He would need a diversion just to start. 'Explanations?' I bellowed. 'Explanations? There's your explanation ... there? I stabbed a finger dramatically towards the far corner of the room.

Pathetic really. I mean, talk about the oldest trick in the book. But it's a good book, and the trick would have been cut from subsequent editions if it didn't sometimes work.

I won't say it worked this time. Not fully. Brown did look in that direction for a fraction of a second, but that was the extent of it. In that same fraction of a second Steve, God bless him, hurled himself through the doorway, knocking Hubbard sideways, and threw himself almost lengthways at the screen.

At the same time, Brown turned and fired his gun.

I heard Leo whimper and I heard Hubbard's body collide with a bookshelf as he tried to regain his balance from Steve's onslaught. I saw blood and gristle explode from out of the back of Steve's neck and splatter against the wall. I saw a wisp of blue smoke come from the end of Brown's gun. And I saw Brown, God rot his soul, raise the muzzle of the gun to his mouth and make to blow the wisp away like the mean, no good gun-slinger he was. The mask was in the way, of course, so the noise that should have gone with the gesture, the little flute of triumph, was

missinc

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And, reader, I saw this. I saw Steve's flailing hand feel

for the little black button below the screen and press it hard with the strength of ten men and I swear, and will swear to my dying day, that as I leaped forwards to catch his falling body, a smile - a radiant smile for me and me alone - flickered on his face as he fell back and died in my

arms. Epilogue

The event horizon

'It just doesn't learn, does it?' 'Exactly the same thing last week.' 'Next time, it's shandy or nothing.' 'Well, hold him up, Jamie.'

'Me? Why should I hold him up? He's covered in ids.'

'Don't call it ick, darling, that's so twee.'

'Where's that girl he came with last week? Why can't she help?'

'Oh, don't you know?' 'Know what?' 'Dumped him.' 'What's going on?' 'Hark!'

'She moves, she stirs, she seems to feel, the breath of life beneath her keel.'

'Poetry, Eddie?' 'And why not?'

'Well, what are we going to do with it?'

'Mm. No cab is going to accept a mess like this are they?' 'Where am I?'

'You're in Cairo, Puppy.' 'In the court of Cleopatra.' 'You're my body servant.'

'Oh no, I can't be. Not Cairo.'

'Well, Paris then. In Madame de Pompadour's boudoir.' 'Double Eddie?'

'Yes, Pups, what is it, sweetie?'

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