“Surely, though, an event of enormous complexity, that war? Four years that altered the nature of the world?”
“Complex after it began, not before.” They stood staring down at the car roofs through several moments; then Rube said, “World War One began almost casually. For no big reason. Dissensions between nations, you read. Well, yeah, they existed all right. Always do. But trivial in 1914. Even more so in ’13 and ’12. A lot of talk about colonies, but who really needed or even wanted them anymore? Their day was over, they all knew that. A lot of bluster for the hell of it, really. Ignorant men in high places. Without much understanding of historical cause and effect. Issuing stupid ultimatums out of no real necessity. A foolish war. Blundered into, no one actually wanting it or truly believing it would even happen. Some wars have to happen, no stopping them. Our own Civil—”
“Rube.” Danziger stood smiling at him. “I’d like nothing more than to hear the full lecture. With lantern slides. But at this time of night I’m afraid I’d flunk the exam.”
Rube smiled, glancing at his watch. “Right. Time to go home. But you can’t help thinking: Without that war, this might have been a remarkable century. Quite possibly even a happy one, Dr. D.”
“Rube, Rube”—Danziger laughed, clapping Rube lightly on the shoulder—“you never change, do you? What’s it been, three minutes, four? Since you learned what the old newspaper meant? Yet you’re off and running, aren’t you?”
Rube smiled again. “No. Because I don’t know where to turn. If Si were standing here right now, I wouldn’t know what to tell him. I’m not a full-fledged historian, you know. Only got into it after I joined the Army. And my specialty is military history, specifically the two World Wars in Europe, after they began. I don’t know any more about purely domestic American history than the average high school senior. But we have people who do. People who might know, and probably do know, how that war might have been prevented. Maybe almost was prevented. Dr. Danziger, I’m not thinking about some little experiment cooked up by Esterhazy and me. Some tiny change in the past that might affect the present in an equally tiny way. I’m thinking about the actual possibility of preventing World War One. I know that you can reach Si Morley; well, it’s time to do it.”
“Is it? Why?”
“Jesus. Prevent World War One—if that’s possible. And you ask why?”
“Sure.” Danziger reached out to touch the old newspaper in Rube’s hand. “Because show me the next day’s issue. And the issue of a month after that. And a year. Then a decade later. What would those newspapers have to tell us? Of the nature of the world? Who can assure us that if World War One had never happened, the world would now be a rose garden?”
Rube stood staring down at the unmoving street. “Certainty,” he murmured. “Certainty. You’re obsessed with it!” He swung to face Danziger again. “Who the hell is ever certain about anything? Including his own next breath! We’re affecting the future right now just standing here. Some loony insomniac across the way may be watching us, starting a train of loony thought, and blow up the fucking world!”
“That we can’t help. But we don’t have to make the risk retroactive.”
“Yes we do. If we can, we’ve got to.”
“Minutes. Only minutes have passed, and listen to you. Well, I’ll never help you, Rube. Ever.”
Rube nodded several times, then smiled, the deep smile, utterly friendly and without guile, that made most people like him very much. “Okay,” he said, then impulsively offered the old newspaper in his hand to the older man. “Here you are, Dr. D, a souvenir. You might as well have it.”
“No, no, Rube, you must keep it; it belongs with—”
“You’re the only one saw what it meant; I want you to have it. My lieutenant friend can explain not bringing it back; she likes me.” He looked around the room for a place to lay it, then walked to Danziger’s pigeonholed desk, cluttered but orderly. Eyes skimming the desktop, he pushed the phone and its attached notepad aside, clearing a space, and set the paper down, memorizing in the instant of seeing them ten digits penciled on the pad.
He walked home, twenty-odd blocks including five long cross-town. He liked being out now, watching the occasional car or early pedestrian. Idly wondering about them, seeing their numbers begin to increase. Seeing the nighttime sky begin to alter, trying to sense the very moment that last night ended and tomorrow began. Thinking idly about time itself, wondering if it was ever to be understood.
When his alarm rang two hours and twenty minutes after he got home, the city noisy and fully alive down on the daylight streets, Rube rolled to the phone and dialed seven of the ten digits—759-3000—he had seen on Dr. Danziger’s phone pad.
“Plaza Hotel, good morning.”
“Good morning.” He spoke the last three digits: “Four-oh-nine, please.”
“Hello?”
“Hello, Si. Welcome back to the present. This is Rube Prien.”
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.