Gretchen was half-led, half-dragged into a broad corridor. Although there was dirt and dust, and the smell of smoke was stronger here, there was less structural damage deeper into the carcass of the building, and nothing to stumble on or over. People around her were running.
Running for their lives…
Through the buzzing, ringing in her ears Gretchen thought women were screaming. She had no idea where she was being taken, just that the sound of shooting — that was what the bang, bang hammering was — was getting closer and closer.
“This way!” Her scarecrow rescuer cried.
He bundled Gretchen ahead of him into a darkened room.
As the door slammed behind her she stumbled and fell. Her frantic arms found nothing to arrest her tumble, until jarring onto a carpeted floor they crumpled beneath her.
Gretchen’s forehead hit something unyielding.
Her last memory before her personal universe went dark was of a never-ending burst of what could only have been automatic gunfire in the corridor outside.
Author’s Endnote
Thank you again for reading Timeline 10/27/62 — USA Book 2: California Dreaming. I hope you enjoyed it — or if you didn’t, sorry — but either way, thank you for reading and helping to keep the printed word alive. Remember, civilisation depends on people like you.
Note: if you have read USA ‘Book 1 — Aftermath’ the rest of this ‘Author’s Endnote’ is the same as the corresponding section in that book.
As a rule I let my books speak for themselves. I hope it does not sound fuddy-duddy or old-fashioned, but broadly speaking I tend towards the view that a book should speak for itself.
However, with your indulgence I would like briefly — well, as briefly as is possible without being overly terse — to share a few personal thoughts with you, the reader about the Timeline 10/27/62 World.
I was not yet seven-and-a-half years old in October 1962 when I realised my parents were paying an awful lot of attention to the radio, devouring every line of print in their daily newspaper and were not quite themselves, a little distracted in fact, now that I think about it. I heard the word ‘Cuba’ bandied about but did not know until much later that the most dangerous moment of my life had come and gone without my ever, as a child, knowing it.
I was not yet eight-and-a-half years old when one day in November 1963 the World around me came, momentarily, to a juddering halt. I had heard the name of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, and I even knew that he was the President of something called the United States of America. I did not know then that he was a womanising, drug dependent and deeply conflicted man who had lied to the American people about his chronic, periodically disabling illness which in any rational age ought to have disqualified him from the Presidency; but I did know that he was a charismatic, talismanic figure in whom even I, as a child more interested in soccer, model trains and riding my new bicycle, had invested a nameless hope for the future. And then one day he was gone and I shared my parents’ shock and horror. It was not as if a mortal man had been murdered; JFK had become a mythic figure long before then. It was as if the modern day analogue of King Menelaus of Sparta — hero of the Trojan Wars and the husband of Helen, she of the legendary face that launched a thousand ships — had been gunned down that day in Dallas.
The Cuban Missiles crisis and the death of a President taught a young boy in England in 1962 and 1963 that the World is a very dangerous place.
Many years later we learned how close we all came to the abyss in late October 1962. Often we look back on how deeply Jack Kennedy’s death scarred hearts and minds in the years after his assassination.
There is no certainty, no one profound insight into what ‘might have happened’ had the Cold War turned Hot in the fall of 1962, or if JFK had survived that day in Dallas. History is not a systematic, explicable march from one event to another that inevitably reaches some readily predictable outcome. History only works that way in hindsight; very little is obvious either to the major or the minor players at the time history is actually being made. Nor does one have to be a fully paid up chaos theoretician to know that apparently inconsequential events can have massive unforeseen and unforeseeable impacts in subsequent historical developments.
Consider the example of Adolf Hitler.
If Corporal Adolf Hitler had died in a gas attack on the Ypres salient in Belgium on 14th October 1918 — as he might well have died that day — it is possible that there would have been no Holocaust, no Nazi Party, and no death camps.
Notwithstanding, with or without Hitler it is also possible, more likely probable, that there would have been a second general European War two or three decades later, albeit not the one we actually had. Hitler’s war aims in 1939 were strikingly similar to the Kaiser’s in 1914, unsurprisingly because most of what we regard as being his war aims were in fact drafted by members of exactly the same military caste which had been so keen on war in 1914, and had been so embittered by Germany’s crushing defeat in 1918. While I readily concede that no senior officer of the German General Staff went so far as to write a book extolling the necessity for lebensraum — or ‘living space in the East’ — Hitler was by no means the only man in Germany in the 1920s and 1930s who publicly and unashamedly yearned to expand the Pax Germanica, the German Peace, into the Baltic States, Poland, White Russian and the Ukraine. Moreover, it was not Adolf Hitler who invented the ‘myth of the betrayal of Versailles’. That invention was the convenient fig leaf behind which the High Command of the vanquished German General Staff hid behind — all the better to gloss over its numerous egregious military and political war time blunders — to undermine and discredit the democratic legitimacy of the post-war Weimar Republic which to a man, its members detested.
Adolf Hitler was an undeniably horrible, bad, psychopathic despot who was very good at public speaking and without him German history between the World Wars would have been different in character but not necessarily in outcome. Basically, there is no way in which we can actually know that Corporal Hitler’s demise in the 14th October 1918 gas attack would have prevented World War II; or with or without the little corporal’s survival, that another even more catastrophic and tragic war was, sooner or later, inevitable.
I do not pretend to know what would have happened if the USA and the USSR had gone to war over Cuba in October 1962. One imagines this scenario has been the object of countless staff college war games in America and elsewhere in the intervening fifty-three years; I suspect — with a high level of confidence — that few of those war games would have played out the way the participants expected, and that no two games would have resolved themselves in exactly the same way as any other. That is the beauty and the fascination of historical counterfactuals, or as those of us who make no pretence at being emeritus professors of history say, alternative history.
Nobody can claim ‘this is the way it would have been’ after the Cuban Missiles Crisis ‘went wrong’. This author only speculates that the Timeline 10/27/62 Series reflects one of the many ways ‘things might have gone’ in the aftermath of Armageddon.