Pynchon as protagonist--4 of 4

[Paul Di Filippo]

"The British Empire fell to pieces after my Second
World War.  They meant nothing.  No, the geopolitical scene
was strictly the US versus Russia.  They were the only
players who really mattered.  Well, the Russians invaded
Pakistan, our ally, where the Afghanistan rebels had their
bases.  We responded with conventional forces, and the
conflict escalated from there.  The next thing we knew, the
birds were launched, and World War Three had begun.
"I was assigned as a simple guard in the command center
under the Rockies.  That's how deadly those bombs were--we
had to hide our asses under the weight of mountains just to
survive.  Well, in the first few minutes of the war--and it
only lasted an hour or two--everything went like clockwork.
The generals gave the launch codes to the soldiers manning
the silos, read the damage reports handed to them, counted
up their losses and launched a second batch of missiles in
response....  But then things began to break down. We were
still getting a few visual feeds along the fiberoptics--the
whole atmosphere was churning with electromagnetic pulses of
course--and the sights that we saw--"
The man began to weep at the catastrophe that hadn't
happened yet, and apparently never would.  His face was
briefly contorted with an intensity of deep emotion.  I was
rapidly becoming bummed out.  This had gone from being a
kind of half-amusing, half-draggy conversation with a lively
minded liar to a Coleridge-style buttonholing by a certified
maniac.
Tears in his beard, the old reporter pulled himself
back together, obviously drawing on some immense reservoir
of will.  He caught me by the elbow, and I was frozen.  His
touch had communicated to me the certainty that every word
he spoke was the truth as he knew it.
"The carnage was awful.  It drove technicians and
soldiers alike mad.  Nobody had predicted this.  There was
mutiny, rebellion, firefights and suicides in the command
center, some pushing to continue the war, others to cease.
"I couldn't take sides.  My mind was paralyzed.
Instead, I dropped my rifle and fled, deeper into the
enormous bunker.
"When I came to myself again, I was in a lab.  Everyone
there was dead, suicides.  I slammed the door, locking
myself in.
"There was an apparatus there.  It was a time machine."
"Jesus!"  I shook his hand off and looked around me
for help in dealing with this madman, but everyone was busy
getting drunk, except Pig, who was still blissfully snoring.
I was on my own.  "Atomic bombs, rockets, okay, maybe.  A
time machine, though.  Do you expect me--"
"I don't expect anything.  Just listen.  As soon as I
discovered what the device was--an experimental, one-way,
last-ditch project that had never even been tried--I knew
what I had to do.
"I wanted to live out most of the century again, up to
the year the final war had broken out, so I set the machine
for seventy years in my past, 1915.  I figured I could hang
on till my eighties.  And the second decade of the century
was early enough to start changing things.
"There were spatial settings as well.  I put myself in
New York.  Instant transition, very elegant.  There I stood,
dressed all wrong, eighteen years old, the tears still wet
on my face.  But quite certain of what I had to do.
"Very quickly, I established myself as a reporter. It's
amazing the scoops you can deliver when the future is an
open book.  Then I began systematically killing some very
important people.
"Einstein was first.  He had already published some
papers of course, but I staged his death so as to discredit
his work as much as possible.  Travelling to Switzerland, I
carried with me the government-issued poison the lab
technicians had offed themselves with.  I had grabbed it
before entering the wayback.  Traceless, efficient stuff. It
was no problem to slip
  some into the coffee Einstein and I
shared. I paid a Zurich orphan boy to report to the
authorities that the "Jewish pervert" had died during sex
with him.  Quite a remarkable scandal.  No respectable
scientist would touch his theories afterwards with a
ten-foot pole."
"Walesa?" I half-heartedly quipped.  He ignored me.
"After such an obvious target, I began working through
a list of everyone who had had a hand in developing either
atomic fission or rocketry.
"Bohr, Lawrence, Fermi, Dyson, Alvarez, Feynmann,
Panofsky, Teller, Oppenheimer, Goddard, Sakarhov, the
Joliot-Curies, von Braun, Wigner, Ley, Dirac--  I completely
wiped the slate of history clean of most of
twentieth-century nuclear physics. It was easier than I had
ever dreamed. Those people were vital, indispensable
geniuses. And so trusting.  Scientists love to talk to
reporters.  I had easy access to almost anyone.  The Army
had taught me many traceless ways to kill, and I used them
once my stock of poison ran out.  It was pathetically
simple.  The hardest part was keeping my name clean, staying
free and unimplicated.  I visited the victims at night,
usually at their homes, without witnesses.  I misrepresented
my employers, my name, my nationality.  Oh, I was cunning, a
regular serial killer.  Bundy and Gacy had nothing on me,
and I eventually beat their score.  But for the salvation of
the world!"
None of the names he had mentioned meant anything to
me, except Einstein's, whom I recalled as a crazy Jewish
physicist who had died in disgrace in Switzerland.  I had to
assume that they were real people though, and had been as
pivotal as he claimed.  "Why did you have to kill
scientists, though?  Why didn't you go the political route,
try to change the political structures that led to war, or
eliminate certain leaders?"
"Too much inertia.  The politics had been in place for
decades, centuries.  The science was just being born.  And
it was the scientists' fault anyway.  They deserved to die,
the arrogant bastards, unleashing something they could
barely comprehend or control like that, like children
chipping away at a dam for the thrill of it.  And besides,
what difference would it have made if, say, I could have
gotten someone different elected as president, or nominated
as premier?  Would Russia have gone democratic under someone
other than Andropov, released its satellite nations,
disengaged from Afghanistan?  Bloody unlikely.  But still, I
didn't neglect politics.  I reported favorably on the
creation of the president's scientific advisory council that
started under Roosevelt, and curried favor with its members.
I wrote slanted stories ridiculing the notion of funding
anything even remotely connected with rocketry or atomic
power.  Not that there were many such proposals, after the
devastation I had wreaked.  Of course, I kept killing off as
many of the second-stringers as I could who had popped up to
take the place of the missing geniuses.
"History remained pretty much as I remembered it, right
up till the Second World War.  Nuclear physics just didn't
have much impact on life until the 'forties.  But by the
time Hitler invaded Poland, I was certain I had succeeded.
There would be no atomic ending to that war.  I had staved
off the ultimate destruction of the earth.
"Naturally, my actions meant a huge loss of American
lives in the invasion of Japan.  Hundreds of thousands of
extra deaths, all directly attributable to my intervention
in history. Don't think I haven't thought about those men
night after night, weighing their lives in the balance
against those of the helpless civilians in Hiroshima and
Nagasaki, and, later, every city on the globe. But the scale
always tipped the same way.  Atomic destruction was
infinitely worse."
He was talking almost to himself now, more and more
frantic, trying to justify his life, and my incomprehension
meant nothing. By my side, Pig had stopped snoring.
"After the war, though, events really began to diverge
from what I knew.  It all slithered out of my control. The
permanent American presence in a devastated Japan led to
stronger support of the Chinese Republicans against Mao and
his guerillas, resulting in their defeat. How could I know
though that having the Americans on their Mongolian border
would make the Russians so paranoid and trigger-happy? I
couldn't be expected to predict everything, could I?  The
border incident that started your World War Three--a total
freak accident!  Out of my hands entirely!  But what does a
little global skirmish mean anyway?  As long as there's no
atomic bombs.  And there's not, are there?  You've never
seen any, have you?"
I could only stare.  He grabbed my shirtfront.
"I fucking saved your ass from frying," he hissed.
"I'm bigger than Jesus!  You all owe me, you suckers.  I
made your world--"
There was a shot, followed by screams and the sound of
clattering chairs and shattering glasses.  The
time-traveler's hands loosened and he fell to the floor.
Pig Bodine had my service revolver in his shaky hand.
"My fucking Dad died in the invasion of Japan," said
Pig.
"Bodine," I opined, "I think you've just killed God."
"This is war, man.  Why should God get off free?"
We split fast from The Iron Stein before anyone could
gather their wits to detain us.  We found Sugarbunny and
Viorica and shacked up in a safe spot till the show, which
we thought it would be okay to attend, under cover of
darkness. After all we had been through, it would have been
a shame to miss it.
The Beatles played superbly, especially Pete Best on
drums.  The whole crowd forgot their J-Day jitters and began
to groove.  During their last number--a little ditty called
"Tomorrow Never Knows"--I began to cry so hard that I missed
all of the Supremes' set, and the opening notes of the
King's "Mystery Train."
But Presley's singing made my world seem real enough
again, and more important than ever before.
After the concert the four of us ambled off
hand-in-hand through the nighted streets, lit only by the
stars so impossibly high above, where no "rocket" bearing
"atomic bombs" had ever trespassed, back toward the truck,
now as empty of its four-color contents as my brain was of
plans.
Yet somehow I felt content.
"Where to, boys?" asked Sugarbunny.
"The future," I said.  "Where else?"
"Nyuck, nyuck," snuffled Pig.  "How about tripping into
the past?  I'd like to be in that barn again."
"If you get the chance, please don't ever try it, Pig.
Living in a world created by a moral idealist is bad enough.
One made by an amoral hedonist--I can't even begin to
imagine it."
The girls were puzzled.  Pig sought to explain by
goosing them simultaneously so they squealed.
"Could it be worse, Tom?  Could it be?  Snurg, snarf,
hyuck!"
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