The Time Surgeons

“You what?”

“I had sex with Dr Harlington. The Dr Harlington.”

She had just arrived home and had been undressing in their bedroom when the words just spilled out, like some great achievement or revelation that would not be contained.

Trevor stared at her. “I… well, I guess he’s a guy like any other. But Christ, I’m impressed. He can have anyone, and you got him, right under the noses of an entire delegation of luminaries. Wow. Dr Harlington. The Time Lord himself.”

The outline of Harlington’s achievement, and what could be done with it, had by now been released to the public. It took little time for the media to anoint him with the title of Time Lord.

She smiled, tossing her panties into the dirty clothes. “His DNA will be on these panties. Maybe I should auction them off.”

“Classy.”

“That’s me. All class. That’s how I hook the big fish.”

“How did you hook the big fish?”

“You sound a little too surprised. Don’t you think I’m good enough?”

“Oh, I think you’re good enough,” he growled, raking his eyes over her now naked body. He grabbed her and she squealed as he threw her on the bed. “If you’re good enough for the Time Lord, you’re good enough for me. If he had you, I’m keen to be next in line. Talk about one degree of separation. There’s something ridiculously horny about sharing, um, that with a Time Lord.”

“You bastard!” she said, wrapping him in her legs and twisting so she was on top of him.

“That’s if I’m still good enough for you, Wonder Woman.”

She sighed. “I suppose after having sex with a god that having it with a mere man is a big step down. First let me check,” she said, reaching down between his legs. “Hmmm, strange, how gods and men are so much alike.”

He laughed, and twisted her over on her back. “Well, let’s see how much alike we really are!”

Vickie had flown to the Machine facility for the opening as one of the Important People, but her physical presence was not required for her actual research. That’s what physicists and technicians were for. They would target and collect the data and send it to her; she would tell them what she needed; all her work could be done from the comfort of her own workplace far away.

At odd moments she would look up from her work and wonder what would have happened if the Protectorate had decided that she should work at the facility. Would she and Harlington have repeated their union? She thought not. That night seemed as if it should stand alone, an immaculate achievement, to be observed and honored but remain forever singular, forbidding the commonplace of repetition. She was happy that any temptation was so far away. Mortal men were enough for her.

She was in charge of the entire historical project. There were a number of side projects of interest to the Protectorate that would be handled by others under her ultimate control, but the main one she would be doing personally.

The event that defined their history was poorly understood. The Protectorate dearly hoped to understand it, knowing that the more they understood the better armed the world might be to prevent a repetition.

Nobody really knew how the War had started. The Americans blamed the Russians; the Russians blamed the Americans; within those broad areas of blame, some blamed the Government, some blamed a rogue commander, some blamed men gone mad under the pressures of impending war, some even blamed accidents. But between the incompleteness of the record, the deliberate fog of propaganda and the more random fog of war, it was all speculation with little certainty.

Vickie aimed to fix that, and she faced the prospect with delight. Perhaps I shall achieve my own brand of divinity after all, and prove worthy of the night I shared with a god.

The incredible energies that fed the Machine were not without price. The Machine could not be run too often. Each time it had to be checked, recalibrated and if necessary repaired. Alignments had to be precise within a small margin of error. If an instability developed the Machine might be damaged, possibly beyond repair, at the least costing days or weeks of lost time. And for all that the Machine could pierce the barriers of time, those who used it were carried along in time’s inexorable flow, powerless to add or remove a second of it.

There was also a reason why the staff worked on site, beyond ensuring maximum reliability of information and instant feedback of results. It was unlikely that an error would do more than damage the Machine. But the possibility remained that a greater breakout of its immense energies could occur. Nothing concentrated the mind more than being at ground zero of your own mistakes.

The heart of the Protectorate was kindness and altruism. But it protected that heart with teeth of steel.

So it took a while. In addition to the War investigation, there were the lesser but still important historical projects, technical monitoring and improving of the equipment, and purely physical experiments.

But slowly the story took shape. At first Vickie probed times and places that the records they did have indicated may have contained clues. She then followed the clues or tried again. Iteration after iteration they approached the truth of the War.

Finally she knew.

The Russians had placed nuclear missiles on the island of Cuba, near the United States of America. Vickie was no military strategist, but even she could see that was clear provocation: no doubt some ill-conceived bargaining chip in the mess that was international diplomacy in the Cold War, a mess still little understood.

The USA felt it could not ignore or allow this, so in order to show its displeasure and prevent further provocations or indeed outrages, it blockaded Cuba with its warships.

The Russians, of course, thumbed their noses at the Americans, attempting to bypass the warships with their submarines.

Neither side wanted war. The Russians feared the Americans and did not trust their stated intentions of peace. The Americans feared the Russians and did not trust theirs. Neither could back down and show weakness, fearing the other side would press its advantage, and that allies would weaken and enemies be emboldened; that the end result of any show of weakness was surrender or war. Enough men on both sides remembered the folly only decades earlier of appeasing an enemy who talked peace while plotting war. They could hear the talking but only guess at the plots, and they dared not be taken for fools this time.

The world stood at the brink. Neither side would move into war; neither side would retreat into peace. It would only take a spark to blow the whole thing up.

Then the spark struck. The Americans detected a submarine trying to run their blockade, deep under water. They tried to force the submarine to surface by peppering its location with depth charges. The Russians in the submarine assumed they were under attack, which meant they were already at war. This submarine was armed with a nuclear torpedo, and it attacked. Most of the American fleet was obliterated.

The Americans responded with force. So did the Russians. And that is how the War began.

She looked at her report. She had finished it with what could become the iconic photo of the death of the Old World: a nuclear fireball rising from the center of the ruined US fleet.

Looking at it made her sick to the stomach.

You crazy, stupid, irredeemable idiots.

It was all just a ghastly mistake. They had played with fire and it had turned on them. What possessed the Americans to drop depth charges on a nuclear armed submarine? She realized that they mustn’t have known. But they knew the Russians had them. What possessed them to run such a risk? Perhaps they believed it had only normal arms. Then they would not have feared an attack from it. On what a small thing can the death of a world hinge.

But the world had not died. It had been wounded grievously but had not perished. And the Protectorate had grown out of the ashes, charged with never allowing such a thing again. She felt a swell of pride that in her own small way, she was helping in that noble quest.

Most people would have stopped there. The story was clear and logical. Every step of the disaster was mapped and every step made sense, each in its own crazy fashion. Every step that led them to their doom. There was no more to be said.

If she stopped now, no doubt the Protectorate would be satisfied. They would act on the knowledge as best they could, if there were any way to act on the death of a billion people due to a mixture of stupidity and bad luck. Neither were susceptible to being outlawed.

But Vickie was intelligent and thorough. The Machine was hellishly expensive to run, and she knew that after her report its work on this project would be terminated. But the story did not satisfy her. Perhaps there was no more to learn, but if she stopped now she would never know for sure, and she would forever doubt and regret.

She composed a message to the operators of the Machine.