The Long View

Maxim came to his decision on New Year’s Eve 1991, while he watched the last official State broadcast from across the river. He hated the announcer’s clipped German. He could have listened to the English version if he flipped a switch on the set. He didn’t bother. It was, perhaps, the thousandth time Maxim had heard about the rising tide of democracy in the East. The last wound from the war was about to be healed.

The fact that the announcer could say that, and say it with a straight face, was what decided Maxim.

He turned off the set, left the university, and drove his twenty-year-old BMW downtown. There he bought a black-market .32 caliber revolver from a homeless man with an eastern accent. The man wouldn’t take his Federal currency. Fortunately, Maxim had some hard Japanese money.

* * *

All one country now, Gregg thought as he paced back and forth outside the TDP building, waiting for the professor. Reunification was a surreal thought. The East had been a separate place, apart from him. The East was evil, repressive. They spoke a different language there.

Now, suddenly, everything he had known in his life was turned upside-down.

We’re joining together. The Russians are falling apart. Palestine is talking to the Jews. God, how the world could change in two years.

Gregg was normally not this reflective. He was more interested in the fabric of space-time than the fabric of history. It was Professor Maxim who had him thinking along these lines. Maxim himself was a little chunk of history.

An anachronistic chunk.

The Federal University, within fifty kilometers of the border, was supposed to be a pillar of cooperation between East and West. Professor Maxim didn’t belong here. Maxim had been a refugee, a former political prisoner, a reminder of history people were trying to forget.

Gregg’s breath fogged in the January air. Maxim was History, Gregg was Physics. There really shouldn’t have been anything to draw them together.

Gregg looked at the TDP building.

Except for this, he thought.

* * *

The graduate student’s reaction to Maxim’s plan was predictable.

“No, I won’t help you,” Gregg said.

“You don’t understand.” None of you in the West could understand. None of you who didn’t live through the war could ever understand.

Every few seconds Gregg would look around as if to see if anyone was around to hear their conversation. No one was. Maxim had made sure of that. Only two sets of footprints marred the snow outside the steps to the TDP building, the newest addition to the Federal University’s physics department. One was Gregg’s, one was Maxim’s. It was night, a holiday, and the middle of winter break. With the exception of security, the two of them might have been the only ones on the campus.

Gregg went on. “You want me to throw away a scholarship and eighteen months of graduate work for some weird sense of justice?”

Maxim shoved his hands in his pockets, feeling the cold metal of the revolver. “Justice is justice. He was never tried—”

“Damn it! The bastard lost the war. Let it rest.”

“—he is responsible for countless deaths—”

“You don’t need to convince me.”

“—the internment camps. The destruction of the country—”

“It’s over. He died forty-three years ago.”

Maxim stared over Gregg’s shoulder, at the building. “Now that there’s a tool to make him pay. . .”

Maxim’s voice trailed off, becoming a white wisp on the air.

* * *

Gregg didn’t know how to handle this. Sometimes a professor would act a little quirky, come up with odd requests. The grad students learned to deal with them.

However, Gregg never had a professor go nuts on him before.

He tried to sound reasonable. “The Temporal Displacement Project is only an observational tool. If you actually—”

“We can keep the Second World War from happening.”

Professor Maxim was crazy. Gregg could see it in the old man’s eyes. He grabbed the Professor’s shoulder and shook him. “If you actually change events within the field, you lose contact.”

Gregg only belatedly realized that he was shaking a faculty member. He let go and stepped back.

Professor Maxim seemed not to notice. His eyes remained locked on the TDP building. “Do you know about the camps?”

“I don’t want to hear this.”

“My father was one of his political enemies. Our whole family was interred in one of the ‘temporary relocation camps.’ I was six years old.”

Gregg closed his eyes. He felt sick. “You can’t change anything with the machine.”

“The last time I ever saw my mother,” Maxim whispered.

“Any change buds off a new continuum and we lose everything in the field.” Please let him see reason, Gregg thought. He could see his entire career at the University slipping away. What the hell could he do? The professor was suggesting blatantly illegal use of University property, to kill a person.

“I could stop the camps, the war, the destruction of a whole nation—”

“You kill one dictator, is that going to prevent another? What about Japan? Will this stop the Pacific war? And Christ, what about Stalin? He’s just as bad and I don’t see you gunning for him!”

“Don’t shout.”

Gregg realized, again, who he was talking to. He was lecturing a history professor— and a camp survivor— on World War Two. However, it was pointless to stop now. “Even if I helped you get in there, you know what this world is going to see? Nothing! At best you’ll be trapped in the thirties in a world we can’t contact. At worst the whole waveform will collapse and you’ll cease to exist.”

There. Now please, Professor Maxim, lose the Messiah complex and go home.

The professor was unmoved by Gregg’s outburst. “Let me explain to you what we’re going to do.”

To hell with tact.

“Christ!” Gregg shouted. “I am not helping you get access to the machine. Understand?I’m not even authorized to take power readings from the damn thing. I’m not going to let you in. I’m not going to program it. And I’m certainly not going to explain to the administration, or the police, why I translated you into a non-existent wave—”

Gregg slowed his tirade because the professor pulled a gun from his pocket.

“—form?” Gregg finished.

They stood there, silent, as snow dusted down on the campus.

The professor seemed very calm. “There are security cameras. Everyone will see you were under duress.”

“Don’t do this.”

Professor Maxim pulled a piece of paper from one of his pockets. “These are the space-time coordinates.”

Gregg took the paper and gulped. “1935?”

“You may recognize the scene of Weiss’s assassination attempt.”

“No one here is going to be affected.”

“I will see a world better off than our own.”

“They’ll kill you.”

“Perhaps— but the risk is worth it. Now, we will go to the labs.”

Gregg watched the gun.

* * *

Professor Maxim appeared in a marble hallway two thousand kilometres away and fifty-five years earlier than the TDP building at the Federal University. Gregg had managed to program the machine.

Gregg would watch too, on the display at the TDP lab, until Maxim’s bullet severed the connection between this world and his.

Maxim slid into the shadows.

In a few minutes the man who would become dictator would leave an office suite down the hall. He would start walking briskly down the hallway, ringed by his quartet of bodyguards. Those bodyguards were mere shadows of the personal army of enforcers he would employ when his populist socialism would win him the 1936 election.

The last election.

Maxim waited there, behind a recessed pillar next to the stairs, much as the failed assassin would wait. Maxim waited for the noise to tell him that the assassin’s botched job had begun.

Then, there it was.

He heard an initial gunshot. The one belonging to the white-suited assassin, Carl Weiss. Maxim heard a bellow, “OOOOOOhhh!” that could only belong to the dictator himself.

The noise of a war zone assaulted Maxim. Gunfire reverberated through the darkened hallway. Somewhere, up there, the bodyguards were shooting Weiss to ribbons.

The chaos was brief. As the echoes were just starting to fade, Maxim heard shoes squeaking. Someone was running down the marble hallway, toward him.

Maxim drew his revolver, and stepped out, blocking the progress of the worst dictator the Twentieth Century had ever known.

The two men locked eyes.

For the first time Maxim saw him in the flesh. Here was the man responsible for World War II, responsible for millions of deaths, the man who had sent Maxim’s family to the camps. Here was the man responsible, first for Maxim’s detention during the war, and then for the regime in the East that had held him for years as a political prisoner.

“They’re trying to kill me,” the dictator said in a breathless voice.

Maxim backhanded him with the revolver. The man staggered back clutching a bloody lip.

“‘Every man a king,’” Maxim quoted as he pointed the gun.

The man’s eyes widened.

“‘If Fascism came to America it would be on a program of Americanism.’” Maxim fired.

Huey Long clutched his side and grimaced at the impact.

Two thousand kilometres north of Baton Rouge, and fifty-five years later, at the Federal University in Minnesota, Gregg lost all contact he had with the Louisiana State Capitol.

Maxim stared at the bleeding dictator and thought—

FDR would be president in 1936.

FDR wouldn’t abolish the Congress.

FDR wouldn’t send the unemployed masses to build the American war machine.

FDR wouldn’t run detention camps.

FDR wouldn’t assassinate the chancellor of Germany.

FDR wouldn’t start start the war which would divide and destroy the United States of America.

“The Kingfish isn’t going to be president now,” Maxim said.

He left the senator from Louisiana to stumble down the marble hallway, to bleed alone.