At forty-five, I was known formally as Solomon-2, but the adults generally referred to ourselves by number alone; I was "45" to my dearest friends, whom I could safely claim to know as well as I knew myself. And, as the oldest, it fell to me to luxuriate in bed each morning while determining the assignments for the day's work. As a young child, I had often wondered how Solomon-2 could have the immense wisdom necessary to make these assignments, but I had still been reasonably young when I realized that it could all be done from memory. The old man had an easy job.
And, in fact, that was exactly how I did it on the morning of November 22; I searched my memory to recall what I had done before on that day, and then told all my younger selves how to go about doing it. My memory was the oldest, hence the most likely to be temporally reliable, but of course the mathematicians could promise only that my memory was 44 cognitive years more reliable than that of the general population.
But I didn't dwell on any theoretical issues that morning, preoccupied as I was by the press of responsibilities. November 22, 1963 was the kind of day that gives the Temporal Police enormous headaches, and the TP in turn could make life a bit difficult for temporal informers like myself. Later that day, as any student of Twentieth Century American History should be able to tell you, the President of the United States would be assassinated in Dallas. The eyes of the world would be focused on that great and tragic event. Likewise, the eyes of a temporal informer would inevitably be turned toward the spectacle in Dallas, and away from the rest of the day's events.
Thus today would be a tempting opportunity for temporal criminals of every sort. Whether their goals were ideological (to disrupt history in order to make it conform to their theories), avaricious (to alter the flow of financial history), or simply malicious and vandalous, today would provide an excellent cover for their operations, as long as they didn't directly involve the assassination. And I, TI-1963A, was the only housefull of men and boys that could even detect any crime they committed.
With a fair bit of difficulty -- the likelihood that I would only live to age 45 had, throughout my life, inculcated in me the attitude that 45 was old, so I felt I had a right to procrastinate in the mornings -- I arose, dressed, and stumbled down to breakfast. At age 30 I had played the martyr and spent an entire year cooking, cleaning, and generally doing housework and caring for myself as a child, and had thus freed myself from all such obligations for the rest of my life, both before and since. So I found waiting for me that morning a sumptuous meal of bean cakes, eggs, potatoes, juice, and toast. Over breakfast I began handing out the assignments.
"Arthur-2, you'll be the only one of us watching the assassination coverage today," I told my 27-year-old counterpart. "I'm sure you know what to look for: Kennedy must die shortly after getting to the hospital, without regaining consciousness. Connally, unfortunately, will have to survive to get his greedy paws into that Watergate business in a few years. And make sure that Oswald does the right dance from building to building until they catch him in the theater. If you see anything funny and I'm not around, call the TP right away. But frankly, you're not likely to spot anything, since most criminals aren't dumb enough to meddle with something so obvious."
He -- that is, I, at 27, Arthur-2 -- nodded impatiently at the old man's words. I -- the old man, Solomon-2 -- could hardly miss the impatience in his eyes, having lived through it myself. 27 was a difficult age; for the first time, I was given real responsibilities, but they were of the least exciting, most trivial kind. As my memory now stands, I only found one abnormality in my whole 27th year. Of course, time plays funny tricks with memory, so I may have spotted more at age 27, and I may yet spot more at age 27, but it's certainly likely to remain one of the most boring years of my life no matter what becomes of the temporal flow.
Anyway, one by one I parceled out the other assignments. Nearly everyone would be spending the morning listening to radio and TV news, but after the assassination we'd all switch over to a careful reading of the morning papers. Any news from after the assassination would be so caught up in the big story that the minor ones would be almost completely overlooked.
With a story this big, the dangers were foremost in all our minds. I even told my 30-year-old self to forget housework for the day. "We'll eat out, Daniel-2, and cleaning the stove can be put on the back burner for today. I want you to concentrate on the Chinese media today: listen to their shortwave news this morning and check out the papers this afternoon. Don't let any oddities slip by." Daniel assented quietly, knowing full well that as Solomon-2 I could perfectly remember his delight at the prospect of a day's liberation from housework.
Finally, the assignments handed out, we all set to work, listening to the news accounts of a day we had lived through many times, always looking for anything that was different this time around. Between the 45 of us, we'd lived this day 990 times before.
Back before time travel became a reality, writers long on imagination but short on temporal logic delighted in spinning yarns of confusing paradoxes and impossible situations. Nowadays, the mathematicians can prove that paradoxes are by definition impossible, and that impossible situations do not generally occur. Time has a set of rules and an equilibrium of its own, so that you can only change it in ways that form a consistent and coherent temporal reality. Time plays tricks with humanity's greatest schemes. For example, if you lack the imagination to try anything more paradoxical than the tired old one about fornicating with your otherwise-virtuous grandmother, in the hope of becoming your own grandpa, you're likely to suddenly realize -- as if you had always known -- that your grandmother's virtue was a laughingstock in the first place, and that your dalliance with her couldn't possibly guarantee your own ancestry. In short, you can't break time, you can only bend and twist it in a given direction, often with unexpected side-effects at the points of greatest stress.
But even though you can't "break" time with paradoxes, the power to bend it is enough to tempt time travelers into all sorts of mischief. The inventor of the time machine, Dr. Evenrosh himself, first used it to correct his mistakes in an unhappy love affair of his youth, only to have the resultant happiness cause him to lose all interest in science as a young man. The time machine winked out of existence, thus undoing the correction and bringing the time machine back into existence, all of which left Dr. Evenrosh with only the confused certainty that, for one reason or another, it just hadn't worked.
From such experience came the rationale for the creation of the Temporal Police. Fearful that attempts to play with time could produce genuinely disastrous accidental results, all efforts to change the past were made strictly illegal, and a new bureaucracy arose to police the fourth dimension. Still, a rather large problem remained: how could we detect any meddling with the past if that meddling affected our own memories of what the past used to be?
The inevitable solution was the Temporal Informer. People like me were created in test tubes from otherwise doomed sperm and egg cells -- typically snatched from a uterus in the not-too-distant past. We were each assigned to a certain year, as I had been given 1963, and spent our entire lives in it. Every year, on December 31, 1963, I would go back in time 365 days to start the year anew. The variously aged versions of myself lived together in what our neighbors certainly must have thought a very odd family: all boys, no mother, and so many of us in all! But since we only lived in the neighborhood for one year before making a great show of moving out at year's end (to make way for the 1964 family), the neighbors really had no time to carefully investigate the objects of their suspicions.
As Temporal Informer 1963A, I'd spent my whole life watching that year roll by. I had no complaints; with the exception of the assassination, it was actually a pretty good year, at least in America where I was stationed. And I'd come to know 1963 as well as a farmer knows his land. But there were questions I couldn't answer, too. Most notably, why was there no Timothy-2? What happened to me at the end of my forty-fifth year? The question, always a good one, was becoming ever more relevant to me (Solomon-2) as the new year approached. The big fear, of course, was death. But if I was to die at age 45, why hadn't one of my younger selves found the body, or at least heard about it? My memories always showed me Solomon-2 present on December 31, but no corresponding Timothy-2 transported back with the rest of us to January 1. It made no sense.
At least, no sense that appealed to me.
But anyway, I was describing November 22, 1963. As it turned out, all hell broke loose that day. Oh, it wasn't the assassination; that put the rest of the world into a turmoil, but events like that just aren't very surprising the 45th time around. The only things that could surprise me, in fact, were the very kinds of temporal disturbances it was my job to detect. And on November 22, as a 45-year-old, at least, I encountered three such abnormalities, one of which was by far the most disturbing I'd ever known.
The first of us to notice anything amiss was, oddly enough, Arthur-2. I had told him to watch the assassination story, and he had begun by reading the previous day's coverage of the Kennedy trip to Texas and the plans for Dallas. He walked into my study carrying the November 21 New York Times and looking both worried and self-satisfied.
"What's up?" I asked him, immediately sensing trouble both from his demeanor and from my inability to remember this conversation from my own past. "Kennedy cancel his trip or something?"
"Almost," I heard my younger self answer. "It could be even worse, I suppose. Look at this." He pointed to a front page story about the presidential trip. "Texas Dem Split Widens," said the headline.
"That does look wrong," I agreed immediately. "I thought the Texans papered over their squabbles for the Kennedy visit."
"Some people thought that was Kennedy's whole reason for visiting, in fact -- to calm down the Texas party conflicts. Anyway, I'm sure they did a better job of it than this. Listen: it says here that the conservative faction of the Texas Democratic Party has finally openly broken with the national party's position on civil rights. Governor Connally has publicly stated that the Kennedy Administration is moving too fast on the Negro question. Kennedy is furious, as is his man in Texas, Senator Yarborough. The upshot is that instead of Connally riding with Kennedy while Yarborough rides with Vice-President Johnson, they've swapped. It'll be Yarborough in the car with the President when the shooting starts."
It took a moment for Arthur-2's words to sink in. This was a major problem. With a different man in the car, all bets were off. They might trade seats, they might sit in different positions -- in short, Kennedy might survive the trip to Dallas. Sympathy for Kennedy could not detract from my alarm or my sense of duty. The integrity of time must be preserved, and Kennedy must die.
"All right, good work," I told him, "we'll send a report to Time Central. Have you done a fix yet on when the change was made?" Even the largest disturbances in the temporal flow could generally be traced to a single instant of sabotage, although the only tool we had for finding that instant was our own memories.
"No, but I've got a hunch. It says here that the rift opened up at a party the night before last, when Connally drank a little much and starting shooting off his mouth about Kennedy and the Negroes. Maybe the sabotage was at the party. Maybe somebody spiked Connally's drink."
I went to my desk and opened the roll-top to reveal the standard-issue Temporal Police Computer. After feeding it the current time (it operated in a stasis field that made it difficult for it to be sure when exactly I was using it) and the approximate time of the party, I waited while it performed its arcane calculations. "12.57 cognitive years," it finally printed out, "would have elapsed since the disturbance if it occurred when you say." In other words, if the sabotage had really occurred during the party, then my thirteen year old self should still remember the correct version of history, while my 12-year-old, Lionel, should not. A quick check with the boys showed that this was indeed the case. In fact, Lionel's belief was that Kennedy had been assassinated, but not in 1963; he had, according to Lionel, been shot down at his greatest moment of triumph, as he toured the rubble of Hanoi in 1967. I shuddered at the magnitude of the change, and at Lionel's casual acceptance of it, and hastened to send my report to Time Central.
After filing the report, in all the requisite detail, my job was done as far as that case was concerned. Temporal Commandos would try to set things right, while I could only proceed on the assumption that they would do what had to be done. My job wasn't to undo temporal crimes, only to spot them. The excitement over, I set myself -- all of me -- back to work monitoring the news of the day.
The next incident that day was one of the rare times when I have been fairly sure that my efforts to prevent and detect temporal crimes have failed. It was evening already, the rest of the day having passed by relatively uneventfully. Kennedy had died on schedule, an indication that our warning to the Temporal Police had proved effective. Lionel's memories of the day now agreed with my own. The evening news had been exclusively about Kennedy until the last few minutes, when Chet Huntley quickly summarized the news of the rest of the world that day.
"And in California today author Aldous Huxley died of cancer. The author of Brave New World, Island and other works of fiction and non-fiction was 69 years old."
I nearly fell out of my chair at the words, my younger selves told me later. But none of them, not even my nearest counterpart, Roger-2, saw anything odd in the story. This only added to my alarm. If Roger-2 had already changed to fit this new reality, my own time was limited indeed. I frantically began writing a note for Time Central. Here is what I wrote:
"November 22, 1963: Aldous Huxley was not supposed to die today! In 1972 he should publish his master work, The Awakening Mind, and then lead the global -- "
That was as far as I got, however. I read what I had written, but all that I could recall -- and all that I can remember now -- was that Aldous Huxley had indeed died on November 22, 1963. Since that memory has remained with me, along with the memory that I once believed it to be terribly wrong, I can only conclude that some temporal crime has succeeded. But the evidence is long gone. My fragmentary report, to which I could now add nothing, was apparently inadequate for the Temporal Police to track down the criminal.
Not too surprising, I guess. It turns out the TP were already busy indeed, as I learned shortly before bedtime on that all-too-busy day.
Actually, I'd already gone to bed ten or twelve times that day, and even my adolescent selves were getting ready to drop off, when the call came from Time Central.
The mere fact of receiving a call, rather than the normal electronic messages, from the Temporal Police in their protected headquarters in an energy field a few seconds after the Big Bang, was remarkable enough to get all our attention right away. But it was the words that we heard that really set my adrenaline flowing through thirty or so frightened bodies.
"Hello, 1963, this is Temporal Central, Priority One, May Day, Urgent. I'll give it to you fast because we don't have much time left. Temporal HQ is crumbling; all but one of the computers have disappeared, our younger operatives are gone, and we don't know how long the energy stasis generators will keep us going here. We don't know what's wrong; all we could get out of the analysis computers was a date, December 31 of your year, before the computers ceased to exist. We're down to ten men and women here, with minimal equipment. We probably won't last long enough for you to help us, you'll have to bring us back by undoing whatever damage was done December 31. I hope we've given you enough --"
That was it. Only static followed. Time Central had ceased to exist. Soon, probably, I would too.
"Kevin," the senior I barked out, "Watch the babies. Let me know the instant Alvin disappears, and then time how long we keep Barry. We've got to find out if we can even survive until December 31 ourselves before we can figure out what to do constructively."
"Crap work," I grumbled as Kevin, "Give the crap work to the kid, every time."
"You think Jacob's old enough to do it, Kevin?"
"Heck no, but --"
"But nothing. The youngest qualified me does the job. Now get to it." I turned my back to my younger self to indicate that the argument was closed, and Kevin left the room. He wanted to be in on the excitement, I knew, but I also knew he'd take his assignment seriously. The rest of me gathered at the dinner table to map out our strategy and speculate on our options.
Options! It didn't take us long to figure out how few we had. All we knew was that somewhere in the world, on December 31, something would happen that would destroy the reality we knew, would change the course of history so that the Temporal Police -- and ourselves with it -- would cease to exist. (More accurately, it would cause us never to have existed in the first place, but the distinction seemed unimportant to me.) The only thing we could do was to study the history of December 31 in excruciating detail in the month that remained before that date, in the hope that we would think of something.
Our discussion had become decidedly somber and perhaps even gloomy already when Kevin came back in, carrying Barry. One look was all we needed. Giving voice to the obvious, Kevin quietly announced, "It's starting. Alvin's gone."
It took just about 24 hours exactly for Barry to follow Alvin into never-never land. Our computer calculated from this that at most three of us would still be around on December 31. It couldn't be certain, because our times weren't precise enough, but one or two of us would almost surely make it. There was hope, however slim. So we all set to work, doggedly reviewing everything we and our computer knew about December 31, 1963. And as each day passed, our numbers were reduced again.
On December 8, Peter approached the oldest me excitedly. Peter was 16, now the youngest version of myself in existence. "Look at this," he said, gesturing with a scrap of computer printout. "Joshua Steinway, born December 31, 1963. This was Evenrosh's great uncle! There's a correlation!"
It seemed slim to me, but certainly any correlation between December 31 and Dr. Tipaysh Evenrosh, the inventor of the temporal transport, was the best lead we had yet. "Good work," I told Peter, acutely aware of his fear and my own, and of our knowledge that he would disappear tracelessly within a few hours. "We'll keep looking but we'll follow this one up for sure. Any ideas what the connection could be?"
"Only the obvious -- somebody prevents the great uncle's birth and thus removes a critical influence on the young Evenrosh, something like that. I suppose it could be more subtle, but it's hard to think of something else that could have happened on the birthday."
I nodded, his thoughts not surprisingly having parallelled my own. "Perhaps I'll have to stand guard in the delivery room," I mused.
"Not a bad idea, I think," said Peter seriously. "I -- well -- I just wanted to wish you luck. Since I won't be there," he finished awkwardly.
"You'll be there, Peter," I assured him quietly, pointing at my balding skull. "You already are. Right here. Where most people keep their past selves, I'll be keeping you."
He smiled ruefully at that. "Sure, I'll be right there. But only till the end of the month, eh? And then where will I -- we -- go?"
While I in my younger days -- what was left of them -- continued to study December 31 and to debate the relevance of Joshua Steinway's birth on that day, I as Solomon-2 became increasingly aloof and withdrawn. The computer was now predicting that my nearest counterpart, Roger-2, would disappear at about 1 AM on the thirty-first, leaving me to cope with the bulk of that fateful day alone. Alone, for the first time in my life. While my younger selves debated what I should do that day, I could not help but dwell on the apparent inevitability of my own demise.
If I failed to right the wrong -- whatever it was -- of December 31, then I would simply cease to be, to ever have been. If I succeeded, I would immediately confront the fate that had awaited me all my life, my apparent death at age 45. No 46-year-old version of myself had ever been seen by a younger me. Either I would die, or face some unknown future of solitude, of a uniqueness I had never known.
For someone used to living with 44 copies of himself in a world where history is known in advance and scrutinized for minor aberrations from that advance knowledge, death seemed the least frightening of the possibilities. Ceasing to ever have existed was slightly worse, but living alone in an unknown future was the scariest of all. Yet that, of the three, was the most inevitable: at the least, I would be alone and ignorant on December 31.
It did occur to me, in fact, that the current emergency and my disappearance at age 45 could be somehow related, but I couldn't construct any clear hypothesis of what that relationship could be. The paradoxes made me shudder; could I reconcile the past absence of myself at age 46 or older with the impending absence of anyone 44 or younger? Unable to make any sense of it, I tried to persuade myself that they were unrelated, two catastrophes bearing down on me like a freight train and a runaway truck when I was unfortunate enough to be standing at the railway crossing. One of them, I knew, would hit me for sure.
By Christmas Day, a sense of desperation had begun to descend upon the seven of us still remaining in the emptying house. There were no new leads; our only hope was that the problem was related to Joshua Steinway's birth. In the afternoon of Christmas Day, we decided to act. Roger and I would journey to Grinnell, Iowa, where Steinway was to be born. The others would continue their research at home in the time remaining them, and would let us know via telephone if they found anything new. Meanwhile, the oldest two of me would try to get ready to do what we could to assist in the birth of a Very Important Baby.
We got our first glimpse of Marianne Steinway, the expectant mother, in Cunningham's Drug Store in downtown Grinnell on the afternoon of December 27. It was a Friday afternoon, and the whole world was in a festive mood in the holiday euphoria. Mrs. Steinway was buying some pads and creams for her feet, which were apparently suffering greatly under their increased load. Mrs. Steinway looked about ready to pop.
"Won't be long now, eh, Mrs. Steinway?" asked Mr. Cunningham, his genial smile even wider than usual. "You look just about ready to get this over with."
"Lord, I do hope so," she replied. "If I gain one more pound I'm gonna outweigh my husband, and he'll never let me live that down."
"Well, I'm sure it'll all be over soon. You rest yourself this weekend and then have a good healthy baby, you hear?" So the conversation went, as I discreetly eavesdropped. Nothing wrong here, no sign of abnormality at all. It was discouraging. We might be in the wrong continent entirely, utterly off track and without hope of saving Temporal Control. All we could do now was wait, watch Mrs. Steinway, and hope for the best.
I made my last phone call on the night of December 29. Quincy-2, only two years younger than me, was the only one left there. He was lonely and depressed, and his only news was bad: they had learned nothing new. Marianne Steinway was our only hope. I talked to Quincy, who was obviously scared and morbidly depressed, until suddenly there was no one on the other end of the line to talk to. Now there were only two of me, Roger and Solomon.
As soon as night fell on December 30, Roger and I (Solomon) took up positions outside the Steinway home. The baby, we knew, should be born at 10:25 AM, so we figured they'd be leaving for the hospital some time during the night. Roger would probably vanish before the action began, but he came along to keep us both company as long as possible. We stood under a grove of trees outside the rural home, and looked past the house at the endless fields of moonlit corn. We were waiting for something we couldn't name. Anything odd. But to us, a house in the middle of a cornfield was odd enough. Would we even spot an oddity if it arrived?
After hours of fruitless waiting, we noticed that a dark figure had suddenly appeared on the lawn. Of course, after staring into the dark for hours my eyes could be playing tricks, but I had not seen the man walking up to the home at all. He simply materialized, I was sure -- materialized as only a time traveler can. Out of nowhere. He was dressed appropriately for 1963, but that only proved that he had done his homework before he arrived. A ski mask covered his face entirely.
It took him only an instant to get his bearings; he seemed to recognize the place and knew exactly what he wanted. He ran straight to the Steinways' car, opened the hood, and had begun to fool with the engine before Roger and I had even begun to react. "That's it! Let's go!" I whispered, and we leapt out of our concealing shrubbery and raced across the lawn to stop the intruder.
Roger got there first, wrenching the stranger away from the car and hurling him to the ground. This gave me time enough to see that the saboteur had succeeded in attaching an ominous black box to the car's ignition system. I had no time to remove it right away, however, for the intruder had flung himself at Roger with a desperate viciousness. After hurling Roger down, he began to run away, and I gave pursuit. On the other side of the lawn I caught him and threw him to the ground. In the moment it took me to catch my breath, however, he pulled out a gun.
I can't say how long that moment lasted. It seemed hours, but was probably only twenty seconds or so. He could have killed me easily, and yet he waited, with a tension so palpable I thought I could see his muscles quivering. At the time, I thought it was indecision about killing me, but now I know better. He waited, pointing his gun at me, while Roger, recovered, crept up from behind and hit him on the head with a rock from the garden.
I then watched, still motionless ten feet away, as Roger lifted the ski mask to see the intruder's face. He gasped briefly, looked at me in puzzled amazement, and disappeared. It was well after midnight. For the first time in my life, I was alone.
Unsteady, I walked over to the body and looked down at the now-visible face, to see what Roger had seen in the last moments before he ceased to ever have existed. I looked down, and sank to my knees in horror. I could have been looking in a mirror. The face was mine, a few days older at most. It was the face of a dead man.
I was too startled to react, now, when another figure materialized on the lawn. This one was obviously a time traveler, no doubt about it. From his age and his clothing I could see at once that he was a 32nd century teenager looking for a joy ride. He quickly ran to the Steinways' car and hopped in. The keys were in the ignition, in the trusting style of 1963 rural Iowa. Presumably Mr. Steinway felt this would help him get his wife to the hospital in a hurry. Of course, if the car were stolen, he might not have gotten her to the hospital at all--
I jumped to my feet, realizing at last that this teenager was the one who had to be stopped. But before I could even begin to run to him, he turned the key, and the car exploded.
The blast shook the house itself, and the car was reduced to rubble. Soon the police would arrive, and they would incidentally see Mrs. Steinway to the hospital. The great uncle would be safely born. The older me had done my job well. And an only-slightly-younger me had killed him for doing it.
When the car exploded, killing the joyrider, it must have set time back on the right course again. I went home and found the house once more teeming with my younger selves, none of whom knew anything about my recent adventures. I told them nothing. I didn't want to grow up knowing that I would kill myself, more or less, at age 46. All my life I had wondered why Solomon-2 was so quiet all day on December 31. Now I knew.
As midnight approached, we began our annual ritual. One by one, starting with the youngest, we transported back to January first. As the room emptied, it was finally just Roger and me, the two oldest. He turned to me, knowing that I must know exactly what he was going to say, but not yet knowing how I would answer. I was tempted to speak his words in unison with him, but I was too cheerless to do so.
"Solomon," he asked me, "where are you going now? I know you aren't going to follow me back to January first. Where am I going next year? Don't I have a right to know?"
I could remember how earnestly certain I had been, as Roger, that the knowledge of what was to come must be better than pure ignorance. But I could no longer agree. "To my future," I told him quietly. "I'm going to meet my future, just as you're going to meet my past. That's all. Go, now."
Roger looked at me now, and I knew he sensed depression, defeat, and death in my eyes. I turned away and he stepped into the transport box. I pressed a button and he disappeared into the past. I was alone for good.
I wrote this account knowing that it would be received with interest at the Paradoxical Research Institute of Naive Chronological Experimentation. I'll send it there when it's complete, before I go back to die on the morning of December 31. I think it is especially interesting that there appear to be two stable realities for the month of December; that lived by my younger selves, and that lived by Solomon-2 in his final year. For the youngsters, December was perfectly ordinary, while for me it was a time of frantic effort to save the structure of time itself. Are both versions real?
What I fear most is not the dying, though that terrifies me to no end. It is the possibility of not dying -- of failing to complete my mission -- that scares me even more. I must prevent that teenager from stealing the car, or Temporal Control will cease to exist. Apparently I must die in the process, to startle and delay my younger selves so that they don't dismantle my bomb. I don't know how I can be so strong: to sit there, holding a gun, knowing that Roger is crawling up behind me to kill me with a rock. How can I sit there and do nothing?
I am no coward, but I would never have believed that I could face death so bravely. Never, that is, had I not already seen it with my own eyes.