“Do tell,” Paul snickered.
“Exactly,” Amanda said. “I’m of the opinion that without Castro to worry about, Kennedy would have stayed in Vietnam. Even if we change just one thing, maybe the first domino never falls and worldwide domination by the East is stopped in its tracks. If we stop just one country from going we might stop it all, and preserve our western way of life.” She snickered. “We wouldn’t be living under a bunch of goddamn civil administrators hand picked by Vodkaville.”
“Hell of an assumption,” Paul said.
“Got a better one?” she challenged.
“Hey, that’s why you’re here,” Paul said. “You’re convinced of that?”
She sighed. “No, but it’s the best I’ve got.”
Paul raised his glass before remembering that his beer was already empty. The waitress had not yet arrived with the refills. Ordinarily he would have stopped at one, driving home and Valerie smelling it but tonight, tonight… He put his glass down. Amanda was the historian, she’d forgotten more 20th Century American history than he’d ever known, but still, there had to be something more certain than that.
“So we go back to change Kennedy’s mind in October of 1962,” Amanda continued. “I say we go back earlier, say mid-summer, do the drum beat, stay through the Cuban missile crisis to make sure Cuba gets invaded, and get out of there in the late fall returning here the day we left. We won’t even miss one faculty meeting. Otherwise we give Ché and Ho Chi Minh a free pass, and the rest, as they say, is history.”
“Why even screw with trying to start an invasion?” Lewis asked suddenly. The pair turned to look at him.
“That can’t be that certain a thing to do,” Lewis continued. “Why not just go after Ché Guevara himself? We know where he’ll be in Bolivia in 1968. I can pin point the day and locale where they almost got him. Let me train 12 guys—two snipers with eight or ten for perimeter protection—and we can find a wormhole back to the spot a few days early, set up an ambush, and wormhole right back afterwards leaving him dead in the jungle. That seems a lot better than hoping we can convince a bunch of newspaper guys to convince the public to convince Kennedy to start a war.”
Paul stared across the table open mouthed. “Are you crazy, Lewis?” He looked around the pub nervously before turning back to his friend. “How are you going to give 12 guys military training without getting noticed? You think you can do that? And where the hell you going to train them? The Public Garden? C’mon!”
Amanda shook her head forcefully. “Paul’s right. Where are you going to find a dozen people you can even trust? And there’s no way you could train them for a guerrilla attack. That would take daily training for weeks. Months even. The satellites would pick that up in an instant, you know that.
“And,” she continued, “how would you ever get them all into the lab at once without raising suspicion? And where would you get the weapons?”
“But, could Lewis’ plan work?” Paul asked cautiously.
Amanda shrugged. “That’s the other thing. Even if we did this training thing and killed Ché Guevara how do we know that Castro wouldn’t have sent someone else to pick up where Ché left off and maybe still be successful?
“No,” she said forcefully, slapping her beer back down on the table so that some sloshed out. “The key is Cuba itself. Take out Cuba in ‘62 and no one can be sent to Bolivia. And the only way to do that is with an invasion. Invade Cuba and Ché never leaves for Bolivia.”
Lewis took another sip without answering. He stared straight ahead. “Maybe,” he mused. “Maybe.”
“The Bay of Pigs was an unmitigated fiasco for JFK,” Amanda continued. “The Cuban Missile Partnership—what they used to call the Cuban Missile Crisis—boiled down to America removing first-strike nukes from Turkey, another colossal blunder by Kennedy. Simply put the guy couldn’t afford a third strike with re-election coming up, so he pulled out of Vietnam rather than get waxed there.”
“But we could have won in Indo-China?” Paul asked.
Ginter snickered. “Absolutely. America was the strongest power in the world. We would have clobbered a bunch of guerilla fighters in Vietnam.”
“So exactly what happened over there?” Paul asked.
“It was quick and brutal,” Amanda said. “In November of 1963 Kennedy decided to pull out. Evacuation was complete in ’64. By the end of ’64 the country’s under Ho. Mass retribution everywhere, thousands of arrests and summary executions of suspected sympathizers and French collaborators, a bloodbath. Kennedy washed his hands of the whole thing and got reelected.”
The waitress arrived with the three replacements. Paul paid her in cash. When she had left Lewis spoke up. “O.K., I’ll buy it. We can find a wormhole that will fit.”
Paul and Lewis each hoisted their own glasses but Amanda left hers untouched. Lewis studied her over his whiskey glass before slowly setting it down. He shot a glance at Paul.
“What’s the matter, Professor, doubting your own theory?” Ginter asked.
She sighed. “No, it’s not the theory, not the history. It’s more the ethics, or maybe the collateral consequences.”
“Such as?” Paul asked.
She turned to him. “When you first told me about this, you mentioned different theories. What happens if we go back and change history but we change something so that our parents never meet and so we are never born? Then there is no one to go back and change things so does the old history come back again? And what happens to the people who are alive today but who are never born because we change things? Have we in essence killed them?”
“Love birds,” Lewis announced as Nigel and Natasha sidled back to the table, hand in hand. Paul noted that Nigel seemed more intent on keeping Natasha’s hand than Natasha seemed interested in being led.
“Shall we join you?” Nigel asked cheerfully. He looked down at the table. “Say, with a birthday isn’t there usually cake?”
“Diet,” Amanda announced.
Paul was desperately hunting for an excuse for why Nigel couldn’t join them when Natasha saved him.
“Come on, Nigel,” she pleaded, squeezing his hand. “I want to dance some more.” She leaned in and whispered something in his ear. Nigel laughed and the pair moved off again.
“I wonder what she sees in him?” Paul asked.
“I wonder why she didn’t press him on joining us?” Lewis asked.
“Well, if you’re right,” Amanda added breezily, “she can’t think that we’d say anything in front of her. So, what about my ethical quandary?”
Lewis turned back and shrugged. “The Theory of Merger. David theorized that all life forces might be static, almost pre-programmed. Sort of like programming on your computer that’s not yet installed. It’s still there and at certain points in time the person will be born, the installation will occur. Changing historical events only changes the history, not the people, not the life forces which remain constant. Under his theory, if you come back through a return wormhole, but have changed things so that you never would have left, then the returning life force will merge with the one that never left and the memory of the returning life force will dominate.”
“So, you’ll remember your old life while resuming a new one,” Amanda mused.
Paul shrugged and took another sip. “But it’s all just a theory.”
“Do you believe it?” Amanda asked.
“No, I don’t,” Lewis answered. “It conflicts with what we know about genetics. But if life forces can have other genetic make-ups well, then maybe.”