Rebel in Time

'I'm sure that you are right. I never thought about it that way.'

'I have,' Troy said, grimly. 'For some time now I have been trying to get inside the colonel's head, to reason like him — react like him. I think that I have succeeded to some degree. But it's not very nice in there. The colonel is a sickie. I won't go into every step of the logic involved, but I am pretty certain now that I know what plan he had in mind. It may sound a little far-fetched, so try not to laugh when I tell you.'

'Nothing is laughable about that man,' Kleiman said. 'Allan Harper was my friend. That poisoning, that was an awful way to die.'

They listened, patiently, with disbelief at first — then with growing understanding. 'You make a strong case,' Roxanne said, 'and what you say could be true. It is an insane idea — but McCulloch is no longer sane, is he?'

'Nutty as a fruit cake,' Kleiman said. 'And let me tell you, I hope that Troy is right and that this is what he has done. Because it means that he has gone forever and, from our point of view, he is long since dead. He may have lived for a time in the past, but at least he never brought this particular insane plan to fruition.'

'How do you know?' Troy asked.

'Because history hasn't changed, has it? The South lost the war and that is that.'

'They lost the war here — but perhaps they didn't in a parallel branch of time,' Roxanne said.

Troy lifted his eyebrows. 'I don't follow you.'

'One of the many theories of the nature of time. It rejects the most accepted theory which holds that time is like a river, sweeping from the past, through the focal point of the present, and on into the future. Unchangeable. We can watch it, but we can't affect it. A modern version of the ancient argument of predestination. But this comes into instant conflict with the argument for free will. If the future cannot be changed, then we are all just puppets of time, predestined to live out our lives with no more freedom of choice than actors in a movie. But if we have free will, and can alter our future, then from the point of view of the future — we will have altered the past.'

'Deep stuff,' Kleiman said. 'Physics shading off into philosophy. But we really have to think about these problems now, since we know that travel through time is possible. Which brings us to this other theory about the nature of time, the multi-branching time of parallel possibilities. For instance, let us say that the British killed George Washington as a traitor before he could win the Revolution. If that had happened, the US today might still be a British colony. So perhaps there exists another universe where this did happen, a world parallel to our own. There may be an infinity of such universes, each one brought about by a probability in time, a choice, a selection made that launched a different possible world.'

'Some theory,' Troy said.

'Indeed it is,' Kleiman agreed. 'Which returns us to our starting point. If the theory of parallel probabilities exists, then it doesn't matter to us what McCulloch did back in the past. It can't affect us. If he accomplished nothing, then our world remains the way it is. If he got away with his fiendish plans, then he started another branch in time and we are still not affected. But if time can be changed for us — and it hasn't changed, why then, his plans have failed.'

'You have forgotten another possibility,' Troy said. 'Perhaps his plans failed because someone stopped him. Someone from the present time who knew what he was up to, who went back and prevented him from carrying those plans through.'

'An interesting speculation,' Roxanne agreed, 'but one which we will never be able to answer. It's another time paradox. Either the colonel failed because he was doomed to fail, therefore there is no need for someone to stop him. Or he was stopped by someone from the present, but since we know he has been stopped there is no reason to stop him. What's done is done, and it is certainly not our problem.'

'I still think that it is,' Troy said grimly. 'The colonel, I can't forget him. Nor can I forget what he has done — and what he might do. Whatever you say, I still feel that he has to be stopped.'

'If he could be stopped, fine, but how can that be done?' Kleiman asked. 'I think you will find that is not an easy question to answer. He has escaped justice here by fleeing through time. Perhaps the best thing for all of us to do is just to forget him. We can do that if we concentrate on the fact that as far as this world is concerned he has long since been dead and buried in the past.'

'That's all right for us here, today,' Troy agreed. 'But what about the people whose lives he might affect? We know that he is there, in the past, with some murderous plan. Isn't there a way that he could be apprehended?'

'I doubt it,' Kleiman said. 'What do we do? Send a message back through time to the police? Warn them to be on the lookout for one Wesley McCulloch wanted for murder in the next century?'