From Time to Time

10

I SAT PLAYING WITH TABLE crumbs, herding them around the cloth with a finger, listening. Rube and I had been here in the Oak Room of the Plaza Hotel for a while now, the breakfast crowd thinning, on our second and third cups of coffee. Finally I reached over to put a hand on Rube’s arm, shutting him up. “Okay, Rube, okay. Go back and prevent World War One. Sure. Any old time. Who wouldn’t? But say it out loud—‘Prevent World War One’—and doesn’t it sound a little bit silly?

“Listen. What is that war? To you it’s old black-and-white film on TV. Plus whatever you’ve read, been taught and told all your life. An enormous thing, millions killed, a million men killed at the battle of Verdun alone. Prevent all that? Ridiculous.”

“But Si. Before it started? Summer of 1914, maybe? Too late even then, I think. But 1913? Maybe. Because as you go back the thing shrinks. Into beginning causes. Smaller, more individual, more manageable. And in 1912 only a handful of men are even thinking about war. You’re back there, God damn it, to when events are small, and can be changed.”

“So I go back and do what? Shoot the Kaiser?”

“It could work. You think it couldn’t? But if you try it, Si, sneak up on his left side; that’s the bad arm. I have no idea what you could do. I couldn’t pass a high school exam in American history. I could in European. Right now I could describe to you a certain specific time and place in which a meeting occurred. Between three men whose names I could give you, including middle initials. Anyone else in my field could do the same. Three men who met in 1913 in a Swiss restaurant. Which is still there, incidentally. In Berne—I made a point of eating there once just to see it. And, Si, if someone had—well, what? If someone had done nothing more complicated than stall a car, say, before the old limousine taking two of those men to that meeting . . . and had simply gotten out, apologized, and then spoken a few sentences—which I could dictate right now—they would absolutely not have gone on to their meeting. Altering the course of subsequent events just enough to send them down a little different path. And”—Rube softly and noiselessly pounded the cloth with his fist—“there’d have been no war.

“So if I could get myself to Switzerland—”

“No.” He grinned. “You’d have to speak German. But if you picked up a phone on July 14, 1911, in Paris, all government offices closed, and made a certain phone call”—he grinned again—“in good idiomatic French, of course, you’d have accomplished the same thing in quite a different way and for different reasons. Hell, if you could even speak English the way the English do, and could hang around on the public sidewalk outside the House of Commons between noon and twelve-forty on May nineteenth, twentieth, twenty-first, or twenty-second—it wouldn’t matter which—in 1912, a certain young aide of Joseph Chamberlain would come along. I could supply you with two good photographs as he looked then. And if you simply stepped forward and spoke about forty-five words in a nice fluty English accent, an event of that session of Parliament would have turned out differently. And would almost certainly have altered the position of England in a system of European alliances that did lead directly to war. But like most of your semiliterate countrymen, all you can do is speak plain vanilla American.”

“Oh, yeah, as they say in the old movies. And how about you?”

“I read German, French, and Italian. And can get along speaking them if you don’t mind a foot-in-the-mouth accent. Didn’t speak anything but good old ’Murcan till I joined the service and got into army history. Now I can also do fairly well reading Russian, and even printed Japanese. But for you we’ll have to have something involving only Americans, and prewar U.S. isn’t my specialty. I’d have to get to Washington, pick some brains.” He sat watching me, waiting.

“And what do you think Dr. D would say about this?”

“Oh, we both know what he’d say; I can quote from the little red book, the wise, wise sayings of the cautious Dr. D. Supercautious—I believe he carries a spare set of shoelaces. But we’re not talking about changing the past, Si; it would be a restoration. The old newspaper tells us that.” He hunched forward over the table toward me. “The twentieth century, Si, should have been the best, the happiest, the human race ever knew. We were on our way in those first early years! And then the great change occurred. Something that sent us down another path. Into a war nobody needed. What we can do, Si, would not be a change but a restoration to the path the world was already on.”

“I came here for a few days. Not to see anyone, except Dr. D. Least of all you. Just a final visit, mostly to walk around. Storing up images. Like a man visiting his old hometown for the last time. Now instead”—I shook my head, laughing a little—“instead you want me to prevent—”

“Give me a week, Si. That’s all. Meet me at noon a week from today. At the old place. In the Park where we talked the very first time.”

He waited, watching me, but what rushed through my mind was not what Rube thought. My mind was screaming, Tessie and Ted. Do this, and you’ll be where Tessie and Ted are! But that’s a forbidden thing, isn’t it? Not if I have to do what Rube is asking. Not my fault then, is it?

“Well? You’ll meet me in a week?”

I nodded: scared and terribly excited. Tessie and Ted . . .

Rube said, “You going to talk to Danziger?”

“I think so.”

“You’re not going to let him talk you out of—”

“No. It was different when you and Esterhazy only wanted to fool around with the past. Just to see what would happen. Then I was with Danziger. But this: yeah, sure; I’ll meet you in a week.” Tessie and Ted . . .