He stopped and looked at Polly. “You believe it was Alf and Binnie, don’t you?”
“No, I know it was. They told me,” she said, and at Mr. Dunworthy’s doubtful look, “You forget, it only happened seven months ago as far as they’re concerned, not fifty years. They don’t know it was you they ran into, though. How long did you stand there, speaking to them and the guard?”
“Five minutes, perhaps. Not long.”
“But long enough that if they’d told you straight out where you were instead of trying to get money out of you, you wouldn’t have collided with the Wren.” She leaned forward. “On the night we were looking for John Bartholomew, Eileen saw him and ran after him, but she wasn’t able to catch him because Alf and Binnie leaned forward. “On the night we were looking for John Bartholomew, Eileen saw him and ran after him, but she wasn’t able to catch him because Alf and Binnie jumped in front of her. And they were what kept her from going back to Oxford on the last day of her assignment.”
“I don’t understand. You think Alf and Binnie are somehow responsible for that, and for what I did? That it’s their fault and not mine? But if I hadn’t come through, if I hadn’t decided to go see St. Paul’s, it wouldn’t have happened.”
“Exactly,” Polly said. “Listen. Because they kept Eileen from going back through to Oxford, she was there to save their lives at least once and possibly more than that.” She told him about the measles and the City of Benares.
“And they repaid her by keeping her from catching John Bartholomew?”
“Yes,” Polly said eagerly. “And because they delayed her, when she did go after him she was waylaid by a fire captain and forced into driving a bombing victim to St. Bart’s. She saved that bombing victim’s life, and Mike saved Hardy’s life, and last night I saved Sir Godfrey’s.”
“And you think those people went on to do something important in the war?” Mr. Dunworthy asked. “What?”
“I don’t know. Perhaps someone went to see the pantomime Sir Godfrey’s going to put on, and their house was bombed while they were at the theater. Or your Wren’s RAF plotting saved some pilot’s life, and he went on to do bombing runs over Berlin. Or the naval officer who stopped to help your Wren torpedoed a U-boat or captured the Enigma codebooks or sank the Bismarck. Or one of them affected someone else who did something. We know Hardy brought back five hundred and nineteen soldiers from Dunkirk. And those soldiers could each have—”
“And you think this is all part of some grand plan?”
“Yes. No. Not a plan, but … the thing is, it wasn’t an accident that I was performing at the Alhambra, and it wasn’t an accident that Sir Godfrey was at the Phoenix.” She told him about her shoe and ENSA and Mrs. Sentry at the Works Board seeing her in A Christmas Carol and what Sir Godfrey had told her about his decision not to join the touring company and go to Bristol.
“I was able to save his life because I was here, because none of our drops would open. I think we may have been wrong about why they’re not opening, and about the slippage. What if it’s not to prevent us from altering the course of history? What if it’s to put us where we can? To keep us here until we do?”
She reached forward and took his hands in hers. “What if by colliding with the Wren, you saved her life instead of causing her death? What if she was on the way to meet the Wren who was killed, and because you delayed her, she wasn’t there when the bomb hit? Or what if you saved the life of the naval officer? Or the man in the black suit? Was he going toward St. Paul’s or coming from it?”
“Toward St. Paul’s.”
“Then he might have been a member of the fire watch going on duty, and on the twenty-ninth he found one of the incendiaries and put it out, and if you hadn’t run into him, St. Paul’s would have burned down. And Alf and Binnie were what made you run into him.”
“But—”
“Mike saved Private Hardy’s life because the slippage caused him to arrive in Saltram-on-Sea too late for the bus. And I met Sir Godfrey because the net sent me through in the evening instead of the morning.” She told him about being caught by the warden and taken to St. George’s. “And because of the slippage that first time you came through, you ended up at St. Paul’s Station. Where you needed to be to run into the Wren.”
“So you’re saying slippage’s function is to bring about alterations, not prevent them? That it kept us here intentionally?”
“I know what you’re going to say, that a chaotic system isn’t a conscious entity—”
“That’s exactly what I’m going to say.”
“But it wouldn’t have to be. You thought the shutting of our drops was a defense mechanism. Perhaps it is, only not to shut off interference from the future, but to enlist it when the continuum’s threatened. If Hitler’d won the war, he’d have had time to develop the atomic bomb, and he wouldn’t have hesitated to use it against the United States and all the other non-Aryan peoples. He already had a plan in place for wiping out Africa’s ‘mud people,’ and he wouldn’t have stopped there. He could have ended by wiping out—”
“Everything,” Mr. Dunworthy said. “Gotterdämmerung, the twilight of the gods. But if that’s the case, and the continuum wanted to protect itself, why didn’t it simply let us come through and shoot Hitler?”
“I don’t know. Perhaps the system only allows minor changes. Or unintentional ones. Or perhaps something else is going on in those divergence points which makes it impossible to alter them. Or perhaps we came into the picture too late. Like the Good Fairy in Sleeping Beauty—”
“The Good Fairy?”
“Yes,” she said earnestly. “She couldn’t undo the spell, she could only make it less terrible. Time travel wasn’t invented till long after the start of the continuum.
Perhaps we’re too late to completely repair it, but we can still—”
“But even if that’s true, and even if you saved Sir Godfrey’s life and Mike saved Hardy’s and I saved the Wren’s, we still altered events, and history’s a chaotic system where a good action, done with the best intentions, can have the opposite effect. How can you be certain that even if the continuum intended us to make repairs, we did? That we didn’t make things worse instead?”
“Because they were already worse.”
“Worse? What do you mean?”
“I mean, what if we’ve been looking at the war the wrong way round? What if the disaster had already occurred, and the outcome we were altering was a bad outcome?”
“A bad outcome?” Mr. Dunworthy said, bewildered.
“Yes. What if the Allies lost the war? You said there were dozens of times when the outcome balanced on a knife’s edge, like in that old saying, ‘For want of a nail, the shoe was lost, for want of a shoe—’ ”
“—the horse was lost.”
“Yes, and because of that, the rider and the battle and the war were lost. There were scores of times in World War Two like that, when if things had gone even slightly differently, we’d have lost. Well, what if we did lose?” she asked. “What if your Wren was killed in Ave Maria Lane and Sir Godfrey was killed in Bristol and Eileen’s bombing victim died in the back of the ambulance because they couldn’t find a driver and Hardy ended up in a German POW camp and they lost the war?”
“But then time travel would never have been invented. Ira Feldman—”
“No, because the continuum’s a chaotic system, which means time travel was already a part of it, and they hadn’t lost it. Because you’d come and run into a Wren and set a cascade of events in motion. And Mike was part of that cascade, and our being stranded here.”
“We’re the horseshoe, in other words.”