Up The Line

12.

One thing they made clear to us was that good changes in the past are also forbidden. Dozens of people have been eliminated for trying to persuade Abe Lincoln to stay home from the theater that night, or for trying to tell Jack Kennedy that he should for God’s sake put the bullet-proof bubble on his car.

They get wiped out, just like the murderers of Jesus and the rescuers of Hitler. Because it’s just as deadly to the fabric of now-time to help Kennedy serve out his term as it would be to help Hitler rebuild the Third Reich. Change is change, and even the virtuous changes can have unpredictably catastrophic results. “Just imagine,” said Dajani, “that because Kennedy was not assassinated in 1963, the escalation of the Vietnamese War that in fact did take place under his successor did not occur, and so the lives of thousands of servicemen were spared. Suppose now that one of those men, who otherwise would have died in 1965 or 1966, remained alive, became President of the United States in 1992, and embarked on an atomic war that brought about the destruction of civilization. You see why even supposedly beneficial alterations of the past must be prevented?”

We saw. We saw it over and over again.

We saw it until we were scared toothless of going into the Time Service, because it seemed inevitable that we would sooner or later do something up the line that would bring down on us the fatal wrath of the Time Patrol.

“Don’t worry about it,” Sam said. “The way they talk, the death penalty is inflicted a million times a day. Actually I don’t think there have been fifty executions for timecrime in the past ten years. And all of those were real nuts, the kind whose mission it is to murder Mohammed.”

“Then how does the Patrol keep the past from being changed?”

“They don’t,” said Sam. “It gets changed all the time. Despite the Time Patrol.”

“Why doesn’t our world change?”

“It does. In little ways.” Sam laughed. “If a Time Courier gives Alexander the Great antibiotics and helps him live to a ripe old age, that would be an intolerable change, and the Time Patrol would prevent it. But a lot of other stuff goes on all the time. Couriers recovering lost manuscripts, sleeping with Catherine the Great, collecting artifacts for resale in other eras. Your man Dajani was peddling the True Cross, wasn’t he? They found out about him, but they didn’t execute him. They just suspended him from his profitable run for a while and stuck him in a classroom. Most of the petty tinkering never even gets discovered.” He let his glance rove meaningfully over his collection of artifacts from the past. “As you get into this business, Jud, you’ll find out that we’re in constant intersection with past events. Every time a Time Courier steps on an ant in 2000B.C., he’s changing the past. Somehow we survive. The dumb bastards in the Time Patrol watch out for structural changes in history, but they leave the little crap alone. They have to. There aren’t enough Patrolmen to handle everything.”

“But that means,” I said, “that we’re building up a lot of tiny alterations in history, bit by bit, an ant here and a butterfly there, and the accumulation may someday cause a major change, and nobody will then be able to trace all the causes and put things back the way they ought to be!”

“Exactly.”

“You don’t sound worried about it,” I said.

“Why should I be? Do I own the world? Do I give a damn if history gets changed?”

“You would if the change involved seeing to it that you had never existed.”

“There are bigger things to worry about, Jud. Like having a good time from day to day.”

“Doesn’t it scare you that someday you might just pop out of existence?”

“Someday I will,” Sam said. “No maybes about it. If not sooner, then later. Meanwhile I enjoy myself. Eat, drink, and be merry, kid. Let the yesterdays fall where they will.”