The Doomsday Box (27 page)

Fuchsia felt her body sink farther into the couch as she shifted to a deeper level of trance. It was for all the world as if she was growing heavier, although she thought she probably wasn't. She was aware she was also stretching, just like the others, but she was getting used to that now as well, so it didn't feel too strange. In fact, it was quite pleasant, as if she'd grown bigger and more powerful.

She entered space-time abruptly, as she always did. It came in like a
whoosh
in her head, and the sensation of expansion was almost overpowering. Suddenly it was as if she was part of the whole universe, stretching into depths of space and eons of time. She remembered what she'd told Danny about looking over a vast plain, and while it was something like that, the description didn't really work. It was more as if she was standing in space and looking around in four dimensions . . . but looking around four dimensions
all at once
. And every now and then she would pick up some little detail, like the building of the pyramids or the meteor that wiped out the dinosaurs or the great crystal battlements of Rigel 5. She could understand what she was seeing perfectly—in many ways it seemed just like an extension of herself—but explaining it to someone afterward was far more difficult. Actually, it was more or less impossible, which was why she hadn't really bothered with Danny. Besides, wonderful though it was, this experience wasn't very useful. (Which, it suddenly occurred to her, was why your mind didn't let you experience it all the time.) To discover useful things, you had to zoom in and focus, find yourself a point of reference.

Fuchsia's point of reference was Mr. Cobra.

She saw him and the start of his personal time line, winding away from the
now
they were all in. It was tempting to look at the time lines of the others—and her own—but she continued to focus on Cobra and pulled back as if she was looking down on him from above so that she could see the whole of his time line flowing into a distant future. As it left his
now
point, it meandered only a very short distance indeed before it began to intertwine with other time lines, generated by friends and family and fellow agents, until it became like a root leading up into the body of an immense, twisted tree, the combined time lines of millions, billions, living on the planet, generating their collective future.

Fuchsia zoomed in and discovered something was wrong.

For a moment she was disoriented. Potential time lines wandered off in all directions, like grayed-out options in a computer menu. These were the time lines Cobra hadn't taken, leading to a thousand different possibilities for his remaining life. She could see the time line he'd been on before they made their present contact with him, snaking its way inevitably to plague and death at Montauk. She could see where it branched—sometime during Opal's description of what had happened—making a new time line, the one they were on now. And she could see where it led. . . .

Except that it led nowhere. Nor did the intertwined time lines that made up most of the tree.

Fuchsia frowned. None of this was making sense to her, which almost certainly meant she was doing something wrong. And that was not surprising, she told herself, because she was very new to all this. What she needed to do was investigate carefully, taking her time, until she understood it properly. What she needed to do was enter Mr. Cobra's time line and find out for herself what was happening. She knew she could do that easily, because the way lay open and he had put up no resistance. She hurled herself toward the
now
of Mr. Cobra, the only possible starting point and her guarantee she would penetrate the right time line.

It was like entering an old black-and-white movie, but one lived rather than just viewed. In an itchy, scratchy way, she
was
Cobra, experiencing his experiences, even catching hints of his feelings. Yet she remained an observer, retaining her own thoughts and feelings, retaining a measure of her perception of space-time, most of all, retaining control. She flew along the time line as Cobra himself (like pressing the fast-forward button!) and saw he did indeed leave Moscow, did indeed return to Langley (briefly), then traveled to his home in New York for a joyful reunion with his wife and baby boy.

The baby was what did it. Fuchsia slowed down her examination so that she could look at the baby and found herself smiling broadly. She liked babies, but that was not the point.
This
baby was Mr. Carradine, still in nappies, far chubbier than he was in later life. This baby was delightful. This baby—

—disappeared in a blinding flash, along with its crib and the apartment and the building and the street outside, throwing Fuchsia violently out of the time line to bounce through other time lines that ended just as horribly, just as abruptly, tossing her like a rowboat in a gale until, disoriented and sickened, she managed to withdraw from the time line tree, pulling back and back until she was once again part of the still, silent depths of space-time, floating like an asteroid in fathomless, star-spangled darkness.

She calmed at once, but became aware of her racing heartbeat as she focused on her body on the couch in the personal
now
of Mr. Cobra's Moscow apartment. The memories of what she'd just experienced were flooding through her, a mix of fire and noise and heat, collapsing buildings, screaming people. She could see the shadow of a woman burned into the concrete surface of a half-collapsed bridge. She could see bodies, most of them barely recognizable. She could hear screaming so pitiful she could scarcely bear the memory. The sky above her head had turned a hideous violet, like some brutal sunset never seen in nature.

Fuchsia pushed the memories away and forced herself to concentrate. She was aware that her body was trembling, aware Danny had risen from his seat at the table and was hurrying toward her, a look of concern on his face. With a gargantuan effort she ripped herself out of the space-time trance and forced her eyes open.

“We're on a time line to a nuclear war,” she said.

C
obra said, “You're all from the future, and she can see the future, but the future she's seeing now isn't the future the rest of you remember? Who'd like to explain that to me?” The first gray light of a Moscow dawn was creeping through the window, giving him a haggard look.

“There are different futures, Mr. Cobra,” Fuchsia said.

“How can there be different futures? The future's the future.”

Fuchsia shook her head. “No, it isn't. Believe me, you have lots of different possible futures, and so have we. The one that actually happens—the main time line—depends on the choices you make and the things you do. I don't understand this any better than you do, but the time line we grew up in, the one where America and Russia
don't
go to war over Cuba, isn't the time line we're in now. In this one there's a nuclear showdown.” She hesitated, then added, “And it doesn't turn out very well.”

Despite the mess they were all in, Danny was growing to like Cobra more and more. He took things as they came, didn't try to insist they should be some other way. Mr. Carradine had the same characteristic. Cobra was showing it now, for he said lightly, “So I can imagine. How long have we got?”

“To nuclear war?” Fuchsia looked suddenly helpless. “I don't know how to estimate time properly when I'm in that state. My guess would be . . . maybe two weeks.”

“But it could be less?”

Fuchsia nodded. “Yes.”

Opal said, “I think I know what might be happening here. . . .”

They turned to look at her expectantly. After a moment, Michael said quietly, “Go on.”

Opal licked her lips nervously. “Us traveling back in time shouldn't move us onto a different time line.
Couldn't
move us onto a different time line. We know where
our
time line leads because we've already lived through it. So we must
still
be on that time line—”

“Opal, I
saw
a nuclear war,” Fuchsia protested.

“Yes, I know. But I think you only saw it because at this point in time, we haven't done whatever it is we need to do to stop it.” Opal waited.

It took Danny a minute or two to catch up, but then he got it suddenly. “Hey, cool! You mean
we're
the ones who'll stop the Cuban crisis! If we hadn't gone back in time, Cuba would have led to war. But we
did
go back in time, so something we do now will divert the time line and make it turn out the way my grandfather told me. Wow!”

Danny knew all about the Cuban Missile Crisis from his grandfather, who'd talked about it a lot before the stroke killed him. The old boy had been in the army when it happened, so he'd been really worried that he might be in the front line of a nuclear war. What happened was simple enough. The Russians had decided to teach the Americans manners by setting up nuclear missile sites in Cuba, which was close enough to America for the rockets to hit all the big American cities. Naturally, the Americans were none too pleased. President Kennedy was still alive then and told the Russian premier—Danny couldn't remember his name—to pull the missiles out. The Russians refused. Everybody thought President Kennedy would order a nuclear strike on Russia, Grandpa Stanley said—he
already
had American nuclear missiles in Turkey, close enough to hit all the big Russian cities. But President Kennedy had ordered a naval blockade of Cuba instead, to stop any more military hardware getting through.

That was when it really got scary. The Russians said they weren't going to remove their missiles and they weren't going to stop their ships sailing for Cuba either. Everybody knew, of course, that if the Americans sank a Russian ship, it was World War III for sure. But in the end, the Russians backed down and pulled their missiles out of Cuba. The Americans took their missiles out of Turkey a few months later, but pretended Cuba had nothing to do it.

Michael frowned. “What's your grandfather got to do with it?”

“Doesn't matter,” Danny said. He looked around their faces and grinned. “All we have to do now is figure out what decisions we have to make to divert the time line. Or what actions we have to take, I suppose.”

Michael raised an eyebrow.
“All?”

“Don't knock it,” Cobra said. “I'm not sure I buy all of this. I'm not even absolutely sure I buy any of it. But, know what? That doesn't matter. Because the CIA is suspicious that the Soviets are up to something. That's why I've been working undercover. You kids—” He shrugged. “Anyway, let's not waste time going over old ground. If what we do next might make a difference, let's decide what we'd do next if we didn't have this thing hanging over us. Let's decide what we would be doing if Fuchsia hadn't dropped the bomb, no pun intended.”

“We would be trying to work out why Jack Stratford wanted us dead when he couldn't have anything personal against us,” Opal reminded him.

“True,” Cobra said. He looked from one to the other. “Any ideas, or do you want to jump straight to my opinion?”

“I'll take your opinion,” Opal said at once.

“Stratford has to be a Soviet agent. It's the only thing that makes sense. Or a Commie sympathizer, at least. Either way, he's on their side. As regular CIA, it would be easy enough for him to find out I was on an undercover mission related to the information we had about the possibility of Cuban missiles. He wouldn't have details of what I was doing, of course—when you go undercover you work on your own; it's the only safe way—but he'd know enough to warn the Soviets that the CIA was suspicious. Then you all turn up. You tell him what year you're from, and he has to realize that whatever your mission, you're bound to know—from your history books if nothing else—that the Soviets tried to put missiles into Cuba. Worse, you're looking for the agent who's trying to confirm just that very thing. So he has to get rid of you.”

“Just a minute,” Michael said. “Stratford himself is a time agent. He's bound to know the Soviets didn't succeed in getting missiles into Cuba.”

Cobra gave him a withering look. “Yeah, and that's exactly what he wants to change.”

“So now we know Jack Stratford is a traitor,” Opal said. “What do we do about it?”

Cobra looked at her for a long minute, then shrugged. “I contact the folks back home and have him arrested on suspicion of treason.” He glanced at Fuchsia. “Think that's enough to change our time line?”

Fuchsia frowned back at him. “I don't see how,” she said.

“Neither do I,” Cobra agreed.

“This is scary,” Fuchsia said. “I know we have to do something that will stop a third world war, but I don't know what.”

“Are you sure?” Danny asked suddenly. “I mean, can't you go back and look at the grayed-out time lines and see what we did in one of them where the war doesn't happen?”

Fuchsia shivered. “There are millions of them. And I'd have to find exactly the right moment in each one. Like finding five minutes out of your life when you live to be ninety-nine years old. It could take months . . . years. And actually I don't think I could do it at all.”