“And pulling any other time travelers back here who happened to be floating around nearby in time-flux,” Jeff said.
Laura nodded. “Look at this very year—1964. The Beatles, Bob Dylan, Marshall McLuhan—the sexual revolution, feminism, the ecology movement all get big boosts in the next few years. Why all of that packed into this one decade? Couldn’t be coincidence. The answer is that the 1960s were infected—and inspired—by time travelers. Despite all of our attempts at curbing possible cultural contamination from the future, it can’t be done. You’ve seen that. Some leaks out—and causes massive cultural upheavals.”
“John Lennon was a time traveler?” Jeff asked.
“I don’t know, maybe,” Laura said. “Maybe that’s why he was murdered. At very least I’d say he was touched by time travel.”
Jeff’s head was reeling. Someone else who didn’t deserve to die, whose death he’d like to prevent if he could. Surprise Lennon’s killer in that Dakota alley, break his goddamn gun-hand… Was Jeff bound to spend his whole life now as a shackled witness to history? “How’d you find me?”
“Wasn’t too hard,” Laura said. “Once I got back here, realized I was stranded, I figured I might as well see if you landed back here too. We knew you were a teacher. You had to live, earn money somewhere. So I went around to every school in the area, saying I wanted to be a sociology major, and asking for information about the faculty. This was my plan for 1985, so I had some good credentials ready, made them just right with a little alteration. And when I talked to your chair at City College, I knew I hit pay dirt—he showed me your outline, and its emphasis on McLuhan. McLuhan’s been well known in Canada for over a decade, but not down here.”
“Why didn’t you tell me who you were?” Jeff asked.
“I didn’t want to spook you—have you run away on me, where I couldn’t find you again.”
“Good you succeeded in at least one thing,” Jeff smiled tiredly.
“Yeah.”
“With all the people who came back to save Kennedy, not a single one succeeded at that, did they?” Jeff asked.
“No,” Laura said, “at least not as far as we know in our universe of knowledge.” She shook her head. “I really do think that there’s something about history that resists attempts to change it.”
“Hawking’s Chronology Protection Conjecture?” Jeff said. “Thorne and his colleagues claimed to have refuted that, though I admit the math was a bit beyond me.”
“Refuted in theory—with the assumption of clean loops with no causality interference—but loops are much dirtier in practice, especially with big events affecting so many people like assassinations,” Laura said. “Attempts to change those either fail completely, or maybe just change the events a little bit—or cosmos forbid, maybe even ironically set up the events to happen in the first place.”
“Not to mention that they’re hazardous to the health of the time travelers,” Jeff added.
“You really think we’re in danger?” Laura asked.
“Obviously. My guess is the Universe sort of cleans up after itself—does what it can to make sure there aren’t too many loose ends, joints out of time, around at any one time. From that perspective, we’re irritants to the Universe—our very being here disturbs it. But that doesn’t mean we’ll definitely be killed. Maybe we’re just, I don’t know, accident prone, more likely in a statistical sense to meet harm than others. If we’re really careful, maybe we’ll live. After all, you and I are still alive and kicking.”
Laura pulled him down next to her on the couch.
Jeff’s mind flipped back to the images of the Challenger. “It’s so frustrating. To be back here, and not be able to even do anything about it. I mean, we have almost twenty years to plan some sort of intervention—maybe we can do something, something small that won’t rock the boat too much, but just enough to deflect the disaster, or the worst of it.” He saw the faces again. “Over a hundred kids were killed when the Challenger crashed into that schoolhouse near Miami. The kids dead, the astronauts dead, those images and flames burning into everyone’s brains all over America and the world—no wonder it stopped the space program dead in its tracks. No president or Congress could support it after an accident like that—even dictators couldn’t force it on their people—”
“What did you say?” Laura looked at him.
“What? About the Challenger?”
“What do kids in a schoolhouse have to do with that?” Laura asked.
Jeff looked puzzled.
“The Challenger explosion was a terrible thing for the country, and the space program, yes,” Laura said. “It was horrible—everyone saw those seven astronauts walking to their death, waving to the cameras, right on television. But it blew up just a minute or so after launch—nowhere near Miami or a school filled with kids.”
Jeff gasped. “And the space program continued in your timeline?”
“Oh yes,” Laura said. “I mean, it’s got its problems. Serious ones. But we’ve got settlements on Mars and the asteroid belt and—”
And for the first time since he had stood in front of the NYU Student Building with police lights mocking him in the night, Jeff had more than a whisper of hope.
“Maybe the difference between your version of reality and the one I remember,” he said, “is us.”