“What’s the status quo that the Universe is trying to protect for the Challenger?” Laura asked.
“That’s a good question,” Jeff said. “It’s like there’s a deeper reality, a core realm of events, that nothing can change, that all forces stand ready to protect. All we seem able to do is push around the film on the surface of the pond.”
“Rena had a plan,” Laura said.
Right, but one of the twisted advantages of time travel, Jeff had found out the hard way, is that you find out right away when your plan has failed. You see its ruins staring you in the face, in the same damn world unfolding just as you did not want it to.
Rena’s plan was logical enough: her Thome had landed her in 1970, so she reasoned that whatever the power of the 1963 basin of attraction that had sucked Jeff back in his Thorne and its AWH to the eve of the JFK assassination, it could not be all powerful. True enough, apparently. So Rena thought she could take her Thome back to 2084, and tell the team what had happened. Get them to build two fleets of Thornes. Even if that took five years, a decade, that wouldn’t matter to Jeff and Laura, because from their vantage point, when one of the two fleets arrived, no time would have passed. And that fleet, by virtue of its sheer numbers, should create enough attraction in 1970 to offset at least somewhat the immense power of the 1963 basin. Jeff and Laura could then each take a Thorne back to 2084, where they could live happily ever after (Jeff could hear the slight sarcasm in Rena’s voice as he imagined her saying this to Laura). Meanwhile, the other fleet of Thornes would aim for 1986—where, again, by virtue of its numbers, it would presumably offset the pull of 1963—and it would do in 1986 whatever was necessary to stop the Challenger explosion.
But obviously something in that reasoning was wrong. Rena hadn’t been aware of Jeff’s “antibody” theory for why her Thorne had come back to 1970—she’d drawn mistaken conclusions about the strength of the 1963 basin. It was not omnipotent, true—but it took some sort of extreme crisis, like the endangering of an historically very significant President like Nixon, to counteract its weight, to attract whatever was necessary for the job, including a time traveller like Rena pulled out of a fall to 1963 for a stopover in 1970. And when the job was accomplished—Jeff’s rendezvous with Nixon aborted—the stopover was no longer necessary. So when she stepped back into the Thome she went not where she wanted—to 2084—but to where she was originally being drawn—to 1963.
To her death.
“You see, I knew that Rena wasn’t coming back, that no fleet of Thornes would ever appear, the minute you told me about her plan,” Jeff said to Laura, time and again. Because Rena and the Thornes would have been there already that very morning had they ever been going to appear. The days, months, years that followed were just a redundant chorus of confirmation.
And the space program continued in its invisible decay, its fixation on the deathtrap shuttle, the road to the Challenger paved with good and not so good intentions…
“Our problem,” Laura said one morning in the early Spring of 1972, “is that we have no way of telling, at this point, just when the fork occurs in our two different realities—yours in which the Challenger not only explodes but takes out a whole schoolhouse of children in Miami, mine in which it explodes just after takeoff and kills only the astronauts. Presumably the space program survives in my reality because no other people were killed in my Challenger explosion—the closest it came was a solid rocket booster, still carrying propellant, headed straight towards New Smyrna Beach after the blow-up. But the Air Force detonated the booster’s destruct package by radio signal at 100,000 feet.”
“Right,” Jeff said.
“But you and I are both here in 1972, and this reality seems the same so far for both of us,” Laura said. “It’s exactly, at this point, as each of us grew up in the 21st century knowing it. So the question is, how do we know if this is my reality or yours? The answer to that affects what, if anything, we do to make sure this stays my reality, or leads to it.”
“I still think the third choice of changing the political structure altogether so that Mars, not the shuttle, spearheads the space program is the best bet for the future,” Jeff said. “But that’s obvious—if apparently not possible.”
“Not so obvious,” Laura said. “If we try for that future, we risk losing my future, in which the shuttle is still center stage, but with just the limited explosion and consequences—and the beginning of some serious Mars exploration at last in the twenty-first century.”
“I guess,” Jeff admitted, grudgingly. “Not to mention that we already missed our best opportunity for getting the Mars program in motion—Nixon’s still in office. ‘I have decided today that the United States should proceed at once with the development of an entirely new type of space transportation system…’ ” Jeff did his impersonation of Nixon’s announcement to reporters at San Clemente on January 5, adding in the shifty eyes, shaking jowls, and Nixon’s patented hands-raised-above-his-head-in-victory gesture for good measure. “He had the gall to say he was especially pleased about the shuttle because it would make space work ‘safe and routine’! Do you believe that?”
Laura poured Jeff some tea.
“If we’re stuck with the shuttle,” Jeff said, “then we need to get word to NASA about the O-ring problem. But even that’s a lot more complicated than it seems. The O-rings were the culprit, as far as we know, in both your and my history. But who knows, maybe there was something more at fault in yours or mine. And there’s the question of just when should we contact NASA. The plans I brought with me from the future are almost useless until 1984. If I approach someone at NASA now, and say, hey, don’t give Thiokol the booster contract, you’re on your way to building a Russian-roulette killing machine that will break the heart of America, I’ll likely be laughed off as a crank.”
“There were plenty of flaws in addition to the O-rings,” Laura said. “The very first shuttle flight—Columbia’s—lost some of its heat tiles. One of the fuel cells failed in the second flight. The astronauts’ spacesuits were defective in the fifth flight—even though the contractors gave them their seal of approval. Fortunately, the crew abandoned their spacewalk because of upset stomachs—had they used the suits, they would have exploded. The engineers were dead-tired for a later flight and missed a sensor from a fuel hose that had broken off and was lodged against a valve. That little oversight, discovered by accident, could have caused the engine to blow up. The list goes on and on.”
Jeff shook his head. “The wisdom of hindsight again—except we goddamn have it and still haven’t a clue what to do.”
“Well, maybe we should start with something a bit easier—like whom at NASA or wherever should we contact,” Laura said.
“Is that really easier?” Jeff asked.
“I don’t know,” Laura said.
Jeff sighed. “The only one I can think of seems to have disappeared. I’ll ask Sam about him again. I still think George Landry may somehow be a key to this.”
No need to be afraid… One of the things Jeff had really loved about spending the 1960s at City College in New York was the scraggily group of kids singing Beatles songs in the Alcove behind the North Campus cafeteria. All that La Jolla seemed to have was this one guy, leaning up against the pastel grey building that housed the Western Coordinating Sciences Institute on Silverado, singing his song. But his falsetto gave Jeff the chills.
Jeff carefully slid a five-dollar bill under the guitar case. No sense letting it blow away in the warm ocean breeze.
“Thanks, mate,” the singer said.