Pynchon as protagonist--4 of 4

[Anville Azote]

Great stuff.  I just have one quibble.

On 11/6/06, Paul Di Filippo <pgdf at earthlink.net> wrote:
> "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.

This really is too late to stop the Theory of Relativity.  Einstein's
work was well accepted by this point; already in 1911, Hermann
Minkowski had put forth the elegant spacetime conception of special
relativity.  "From now on," he said, "space of itself and time of
itself will sink into mere shadows, and only a kind of union between
them will preserve an independent reality."  The math was done, the
science accepted; so this part ---

> "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.

--- just wouldn't work.

Did we give up flying planes when Charles Lindbergh came out as a
Nazi?  Johannes Stark, physicist and Nobel laureate, went so far down
that path that he was sentenced to prison after the war.  We still
speak of the "Stark effect" --- the influence of electric fields on
emission spectra --- not even blotting out the name of the Nazi, let
alone suppressing his work.  Speaking in all seriousness, I doubt
posterity would treat pedophiles much worse than it does National
Socialists.

Other than the machinery of how the time traveler prevented atomic
warfare, though, the story is great.

-A. A.


  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!"
>
>