Just as I was about to cross the street to avoid him, I did what one should never do and made eye contact with the angry screaming man. I’d seen him shaking his fists at one of those centuries-old row houses, and had just taken out my earphones to catch what he was shouting, something like “It’s supposed to be right here!”
His demeanor changed as he noticed me looking at him. He slumped his shoulders and suddenly looked more exhausted than angry. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m sorry. I’m just … there’s somewhere I need to be and I don’t know where it’s gone.”
He no longer seemed dangerous or threatening, simply confused. Now I just felt sorry for him. I wasn’t sure what sort of episode this man was having, but I guessed this would end how it usually did, with him giving some long story involving a desperate need for bus fare and me giving him whatever cash I could spare and maybe a referral to the folks at 802.
“You’re on Delancey Place,” I said. “Where is it you’re trying to go?”
“So here it’s not on Delancey. Delancey is here, but it is not.” He glanced around the street and then back at me. “This gets a bit, ah, complicated. I need to find my office.”
“There’s also Delancey Street …” I started, but he interrupted, handing me a business card. “The Contingency Trust,” it said, and below that “Philadelphia. New York. Boston.” It didn’t offer any address or phone number. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I’ve never heard of this.”
“I expect not,” he said. “We like to keep, ah, quiet. You’d know it as something like a law firm, perhaps, maybe a brokerage or a charitable foundation?”
I shrugged apologetically. “Sorry, I don’t …”
“No, no. That’s fine. That’s good. Probably good news, that.” Then he stepped closer, inspecting my face. “But tell me, what do you know about Verlensky?”
“Who?” I started to say, but he kept going. “You have no idea who Verlensky was, do you? Never even heard of him. The name Verlensky means nothing to you.”
“I …” I shrugged again, bewildered, my voice trailing off. He, smiled triumphantly, seeming delighted by my confusion.
“We did that,” he said. “We rid your world of Verlensky. We saved millions of lives. That’s good, yes? Saving lives, stopping the war, preventing a genocide before it ever began? Whatever else we may have done, we did that.
“But no, that’s not the question,” he continued, and his short burst of defiant pride quickly evaporated. He closed his eyes, pressing his fingertips into them, looking utterly defeated — as though he’d had this conversation many, many times before. “The question is, if you don’t know who Verlensky is, then who is your Verlensky?”
“I’m sorry,” I said, trying not to upset him further. “I’m not sure what you …”
“Who is Verlensky in your world? The second world war!” he shouted. “Did you have one or not?”
“Yes! Of course!” I was raising my voice too, now, shouting back at him without realizing it. The man’s face sagged and his knees buckled. He collapsed to the brick sidewalk, staring at the ground from his knees like a supplicant at prayer.
For a long, agonizing minute neither of us said anything. I thought of calling 9-1-1, trying to get him some help, but I couldn’t imagine what to tell them. And then he looked up at me, calm again.
“It didn’t work,” he said, extending a hand up to me. I grabbed his hand and helped him to his feet. “We have failed, again, but we can fix this. We can try again. We must. Tell me, is the main branch of the library still open here?”
This wasn’t making any more sense, but I told him it was, and that it wasn’t far.
“Excellent,” he said, smiling for the first time. “We’ll start there, locate the Trust, and try again. Where are my manners?” He reached out to shake my hand. “I am Dr. Francis Lester,” he said, gripping my hand firmly in both of his. “And you are going to help me stop a war.”
– – – – – – – – – – – –
Aaaand scene. That’s all I’ve got so far. It’s just a first draft, of course, and not really the sort of thing I do. But, still, I think I like where it’s going.
The idea of the Contingency Trust, in particular, intrigues me as something worth exploring. Let’s assume that, somehow, one does have a time machine and that one plans to use it to travel back in time to kill Hitler. Doing so would change the past and, thereby, change whatever present it was you’d planned on returning to.
Returning to the present wouldn’t be optional. It would be the only way you could know if you’d suceeded — if killing Hitler had worked. But this return would be complicated. You would need a home office of some kind, an institutional anchor of sorts designed to endure regardless of all the variable contingencies that would be bound to occur after you’d altered the past. This couldn’t simply be The Committee to Go Back in Time to Kill Hitler, because if the mission succeeded, then such a committee would be among the many things that ceased to exist in any future timeline subsequent to that success.
What you would need, then, apart from the time machine itself (that’s the easy part, really) would be some kind of institutional trust, an entity designed to be legally and financially sustainable throughout time or even throughout times. Whatever sort of staff this agency would employ — physicists, historians, lawyers? — would have to be prepared to receive reports from field agents that they would be unable to comprehend. They would need to be prepared for someone like Lester to arrive, informing them that he had succeeded in going back in time to kill the infant Verlensky, even though his success would mean that they had no idea who Verlensky was and no memory of having sent him to carry out this lethal mission, perhaps just weeks or days or moments before.
And that, of course, brings us back to the inevitable questions such stories always raise about the nature of time travel. Among those questions is the matter of whether we’re dealing with an infinite series of variations in a single timestream or whether we’re dealing with an infinite number of separate timestreams and timelines — an infinite number of alternate realities, with new realities and new timelines created by the very act of traveling into and changing the past.
I think I lean toward the latter, even if I’m not entirely sure that distinction is quite as meaningful as it might at first seem. From that point of view, of course, the whole Go Back in Time to Kill Hitler scheme starts to look more dubious.
But all of this — my story above and all such questions about the nature of time travel — is beside the point. None of that really has to do with the recent strange wave of discussion about whether or not we should Go Back in Time to Kill Hitler if we thought we could.
That discussion really doesn’t have anything to do with the mechanics and contingencies of time travel. It’s only really about the mechanics and contingencies of killing. The question is, really, do you think you could fix anything by killing the right people? Or maybe even do you think we could fix everything by killing the right people?
And that question involves a whole other sort of trust in contingency and a whole universe of other assumptions about our capacity to account for an infinite number of incalculable variables.
That’s why I liked Stephen Colbert’s response to the question about going back in time to kill baby Hitler:
I also like Atrios’ response. Even though he never even mentions the whole killing baby Hitler thing here, he’s addressing the same question:
As always the point is that there are bad and violent people out there in the world, so if we’re not going to blow them up and arm everybody who might be inclined to blow them up, also, too, then you got nothing, do you, hippie? …
As for what the hippies would do? Probably not quite so much blowing up. Might not work, but the blowing up isn’t working too well either.
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