The Tarot cards flopped on the table in an odd arrangement. Romani's eyes danced over them with a flinty flicker. Her generous mouth whispered calculations of the soul. Bantam watched and wondered through the blur of beer whether she might be interested in …
«You will meet the love of your life!» Romani called out suddenly. She smiled, her eyes madly wide. She clearly enjoyed delivering happy news to her clients.
But then, the cards pulled her eyes back down.
«You will … not meet the love of your life,” she said, sadness and confusion filling her gaze.
WTF?
Bantam looked at Rocco. They both almost burst out laughing — and stumbling. Bantam was about to demand his money back from this charlatan, this terrible witch, when she said --
«You will kill billions of people.» Her eyes stabbed at him like daggers, dripping with disgust. And again: some gravity of the soul pulled her eyes back down to the cards.
«You will save billions of people.»
«Okay, wait a minute — “ Bantam slurred. «They can’t both be true. At least lie well, fer Chrissssakes. I’ve already said I’d pay, so — “
But Romani wasn’t done. Speaking like a machine gun, she said: «And yet both are true. You have two futures, both as real and palpable as the nose on your miserable face. And your curse will be monotony. Nothing will surprise you. Your life will have no surprises. How horrible for you!
«What are you? What kind of deep and terrible thing are you? Begone from me! Avaunt! Now. Leave! Get out of my sight! Never come back here!»
Romani had gone crazy, hurling candles and cards and curses at Bantam and Rocco as though they were the worst possible people on the planet.
Bantam sighed. What had that been all about?
Whatever.
«Hey Control. We got that bad power relay figured out yet?»
«No. Sit tight Bantam. Do something to keep your mind occupied.»
Bantam looked around the cramped capsule mournfully. «I could rearrange the furniture in here, I guess. I like good Wangchung.»
Control gargled out a laugh.
«Listen. Take your time,” Bantam continued. «Just — no whammies, last thing I need on this mission is whammies. Got it?»
«Yes, Bantam,” Control said. And then more somberly: «You got it: no whammies. All our hopes are riding with you.»
That made Bantam gulp a bit.
All our hopes …
He felt a little guilty just then. Not a lot, but certainly a little. His mission was to retrieve a cure for the Shadow. Holy. Freaking. Shit. This was not about the skirts, it was about saving lives. A lot of lives. Billions, in fact.
Billions? What was that Europa Romani had said?
«When you get back,” Control said. «We’re buying you dinner. Whatever you want. Wherever you want. We’re going to make reservations now. What do you want?»
Bantam smiled. «Steak,” he said, nearly tasting it. «At Mastro’s. And I want it rare. I’m talking super-rare. Like, cow sushi.»
Laughter filled his ears. And then: «Hey champ, I think we got it fixed. How you feeling? Having second thoughts?»
«Not on your life,” Bantam replied. And he meant it.
«Well, when you pee your pants — and you will once that Volzstrang wave smacks you upside the ass — just remember your suit was designed to handle that.»
«Fat chance,” Bantam replied with a grin.
«T-minus ten minutes, Bantam. The Wave is building.»
«Thanks.» Bantam knew that half the technicians in Control thought he would actually be dead in minutes. There were some mathematical models that predicted that Volzstrang radiation was for more intense than anyone had guessed. Some schools of thought held that Bantam would simply cook in the capsule like a cat in a microwave.
But the other mathematical models — the good ones, the ones Bantam liked — predicted that the entire trip back through time would take only minutes. During it, Bantam would be safely encapsulated inside the twenty-eighth dimension.
When he arrived in the past, he would re-enter normal space. His trajectory was planned such that he would ‘re-appear’ above ground — there was no supercollider in 1944, after alclass="underline" he couldn’t very well materialize inside solid rock.
But after that: nobody had the slightest clue what would happen next.
The landing would be rough. That was a given. And of course, during World War II, the sudden appearance of some weird pod on a super-secure military base would be treated with extreme suspicion. In fact, everyone would probably assume it was a Nazi trick at first.
But once there, he was instructed to find General Coralbee. Coralbee’s son had instructed Bantam in several family secrets, things that nobody could know unless they were a Coralbee also — or one of the clan had entrusted a deep secret to him. And that would be a mark of extreme trust.
One of these secrets was that General Coralbee was gay.
This was not a big deal in the present day, but back in 1944, it was everything. The General had kept his sexual orientation an absolute secret until his dying day. He had not even indulged a relationship or even one fling, deeming the war effort to be much more important than his personal desires.
He was a soldier, and an American: anything at all that had the slightest chance of compromising this was utterly unacceptable in his worldview.
Coralbee was wedded to America.
Armed with this knowledge and other secrets, Bantam knew that if he could only get to Coralbee, he would be able to convince him he was from the future. And if he could do that, he could get access to the cure for the Shadow.
He had a number of whizbang electronic devices he was bringing with him as welclass="underline" an iPhone and iPad, for starters. He’d show these magical devices to the inhabitants of 1944. They would Oooh and Ahhhh. He’d wow them with his future-tech. This kind of thing couldn’t be faked, Coralbee’s scientists would tell him.
There would be no other reasonable conclusion: Ben Bantam really is from the future, they would say.
His story would hold up. They would eventually realize they were all on the same team. They would give him the cure for the Shadow. It might even take months to convince them, but that didn’t matter: time was on his side. He could even leave the 1944 years or even decades later, so long as he arrived in the future near his departure time.
Of course, there was the second problem: Once they believed he was a from the future, they were going to want future-weapons and knowledge to defeat the Nazi’s. They would lean on Bantam for information. And he had been strictly instructed not to tell them anything specific about the War itself.
He went over it again in his mind, the carefully-worded phrase they had given him: I’m here and I’m American, so you already know things will turn out well for the United States. But if I reveal anything more than that, then we all run the great risk a different outcome. And that would be highly undesirable. I’m under orders from the future President of the United States that I may not disobey.
The truth was that there were different schools of thought on whether the past could be changed or not. Some felt that inevitability would always take hold: the past could not be altered. Any attempt to do so would introduce ‘wild chance’, as once theorist put it: freak events would occur that were way outside of statistical probability. For example: should Bantam attempt to kill Hitler, Bantam himself might be killed by a meteor — to to preserve the consistency of the timeline.
But others had argued that this theory did not allow for free will, and therefore had to be incorrect. Even the smallest action Bantam might take could have profound effects on the future. This was the Butterfly Effect crowd. They had nearly succeeded in stopping the mission into the past, but the Shadow was proving too large of a threat. What good was it that the Nazi’s had been defeated — only to have the entire human race wiped out less than a century later? Even if Bantam profoundly altered things and succeeded in returning with the cure, this will still be a better outcome than human extinction, it was argued.