Little Differences
by Paul Levinson
Illustration by Darryl Elliott
Dion was singing “Abraham, Martin and John” on the radio.
Jeff was making breakfast.
When Dion got to the part about Bobby, Jeff took the egg he was about to crack and threw it against the wall. Then he did the same with another. Then he took the whole box and smashed it on the floor, and stomped on it for good measure.
He was still mopping up the mess and crying when Laura walked in a few minutes later.
“Honey! What’s wrong?”
Jeff shook his head, said nothing. They’d been over this before. He had to steel himself against this kind of thing. He’d never make it to 1986 if he broke down every time he heard a song about an assassination he could have stopped. But there was something about that last verse—
Laura pulled him up into her arms, kissed his neck, drew his arms around her.
“I still have egg on my hands—”
“It’s OK, baby,” she said. “Shhh, it’s OK.” She kissed him again.
“It’s just that last verse.” Jeff said. “I don’t think ‘Abraham, Martin, and John’ was originally written that way—with the verse about Bobby. They just tacked it on, after he was killed. That’s why his name’s not in die tide. It’s bad enough I was here when JFK and now Martin Luther King were murdered, and I did nothing—”
“You tried with JFK,” she said. She stroked his head. “It wasn’t your fault.”
“I tried and I failed,” Jeff said. “And now Bobby. If his name wasn’t in the song at first, maybe he wasn’t supposed to die. Maybe I, we, were supposed to save him. And I did nada—nothing!”
“We’ve got to stay focused on the Challenger,” Laura said.
“I know,” Jeff replied.
“That’s the key to all of this,” she continued. “If we don’t stop it from crashing into that schoolhouse in Florida and killing all of those kids…”
Jeff knew she was right. Nothing else mattered compared to changing that reality from his timeline to Laura’s, from a world in which the space program died a final death to one in which just the astronauts died in the Challenger, and the space program limped along and took wing again in the following decades. Still…
“It’s just—this has been one lousy year, event-wise,” Jeff said. He looked at the calendar on the refrigerator. It was on its last page—December, 1968. He’d be glad to pull it down and throw it in the trash with the rest of the year.
“Well, at least we’ll have Apollo 8 circling the moon this Christmas, and Armstrong and Aldrin on the moon next year,” Laura said.
“Yeah,” Jeff said, “and Nixon in office. He’ll throttle the Apollo program barely out of its cradle, and then give the Shuttle such poor funding that it’s amazing it didn’t blow up long before 1986.”
“We’ll just have to do something about that, then, won’t we,” Laura said.
Jeff hugged her, eggy hands and all, and thought, yeah, and maybe we can still do more than that too.
“God, these hamburgers are gonna kill me, but I love ’em.” Sam McKenna smiled across the table at Jeff, and made a stab at wiping some of the grease off of his chin.
“Part of the charm of the South Campus Cafeteria,” Jeff said. “Lousy food, cold spilled coffee on your table, a good shot at getting boiling-hot coffee on your hands. But hey, there’s always a chance of picking up a juicy tidbit of conversation about another professor, maybe even about yourself, from unknowing students at a nearby table.”
Sam chuckled and eyed the table next to them. “Not likely,” he said. “They seem to be talking about dead Greek philosophers. I don’t think any of them have tenure here.”
“Well, at least we know they didn’t die of South Campus hamburgers,” Jeff said. “They probably aren’t as bad for you as you think, anyway. There are dozens of cholesterols—”
“I don’t wanna hear about cholesterol,” Sam said and waved Jeff off. “Let’s get back to what we were talking about—the space program.”
Just as well, Jeff thought. Now that he was finally in line for a tenured position himself in the Sociology Department, there was no point jeopardizing it by dropping too many hints about a future only he could know. It was enough that he was discussing the space program with Sam—the sharpest professor in the Political Science Department, and someone Jeff had become quite close to in the past year.
“I think you’re way off in your concerns,” Sam continued. “Politicians are crazy about space—everyone loves it. Hell, LBJ sent framed photos of the earthrise—the shot taken by Apollo 8—to heads of state around the world, including Ho Chi Minh!”
“Johnson’s out of office next week,” Jeff said.
“You think Nixon’s going to risk hurting the space program with the Vietnam War on his head? Scuttle the only bright thing he’s got going for the American image these days?”
I know he is, Jeff thought. Not that the Democrats weren’t responsible too. He’d studied Mondale’s 1969 speech in Congress, to be delivered just a few months after Apollo 11. He’d gone over it and the entire Congressional record leading to the Challenger very carefully before he’d left—that was, what, almost six years ago, before he’d come here from 2084 in the Thorne? Seemed like more than a lifetime. But he could hear the screen with Mondale’s words as if they were right in front of him now. The Senator from Minnesota had been talking about the NASA proposal to go to Mars in the 1980s. “I believe it would be unconscionable,” Mondale had said in that deadening twang of his, “to embark on a project of such staggering cost when many of our citizens are malnourished, when our rivers and lakes are polluted and when our cities and rural areas are dying.” Right—but the only thing that had died had been human exploration of space, its home beyond Earth. And Mondale, for all his talk, was just a senator then. Nixon as President had been the one.
All Jeff trusted himself to say to Sam was, “I think Nixon’s going to surprise you about what he’ll do—in Vietnam as well as in space.”
“Oh, I have no illusions at all about Nixon and Vietnam,” Sam said. “He says he has a plan to end the war—I’ll believe it when I see it. We’ll be lucky if we’re out of there by the time the next Presidential election rolls around. But on space… look, tell you what. A friend of mine at Georgetown told me Nixon already has plans to set up a task-group as soon as he assumes office to map out the path for the space program post-Apollo. Surely that shows a commitment to space?”
“You’re missing the point, Sam: post-Apollo. Why not continue it? Why not get some manned missions going to Mars?”
“So maybe he’s just looking for a new name,” Sam replied, “so he can distance the program from Kennedy, because missions to Mars deserve their own Greek god. Look, I’m going down to Washington for an association conference next month. Why don’t you tag along? I could introduce you to my friend.”
The conversation at the other table was heating up.
“The Greeks haven’t done anything in two thousand years,” one of the kids was saying. “Even politically, you people are the weakest country’ in Western Europe today.”
“Papadopoulos can change that,” someone with a Greek accent replied. “He’s a great man—for Greece and the world.”
The first student guffawed. “Papadopoulos is a jackass—another dictator with delusions of grandeur.”
Another voice with a Greek accent spoke up. “The Spiro Agnew—he’s the greatest Greek in the world today!”
A strange feeling went through Jeff-one which he’d been trying to suppress, ignore, for the past few months. But it was getting harder to give it no for an answer.