predictions are, do you not?’
`Certainly,’ Theodore answered.
‘The only way I can listen to your words with equanimity is to recall the changes I
have seen in my own lifetime. If your prediction as to the day the war ends turns
out to be accurate, then I feel that we must take your other predictions seriously.
In the meantime, do you have anything more to tell us?’
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`I guess not. Two things, maybe. Don’t buy on margin after the middle of 1929. And
don’t sell short if a wrong guess could clean you out.’
‘Good advice at any time. Thank you, sir.’
Carol and I and the children kissed them both goodbye on Sunday 30 June then went
back inside as Captain Bozell’s car drove away, to cry in private.
The news got worse and worse all that summer.
Then in the late fall it began to be apparent that we were gaining on the Central
Powers. The Kaiser abdicated and fled to Holland, and then we knew we were going to
win. The false armistice came along and my joy was shaded by the realisation that it
was not the eleventh of November.
And the real armistice did arrive, right on time, November the Eleventh, and every
bell, every whistle, every siren and horn, anything that could make noise all
sounded at once.
But not in our household. On Thursday George fetched home from his route the Kansas
City Post. In its casualties report it listed as `MISSING IN ACTION – Bronson, Cpl
Theo, KCMo’.
Chapter 15 – Torrid Twenties Threadbare Thirties
During the fifty-odd years on my personal time line from my rescue in 1982 to the
start of the Time mission which aborted into my present predicament on this planet I
spent time equal to about ten years in the study of comparative history, in
particular the histories of the time lines that the Circle of Ouroboros attempts to
protect, all of which appear to share a single ancestral time line at least through
AD 1900 and possibly through to about 1940.
This sheaf of universes includes my own native universe (time line two, code Leslie
LeCroix) and excludes the uncounted but far more numerous exotic time lines –
universes in which Columbus did not sail for the Indies (or failed to return), ones
in which the Viking settlements succeeded and ‘America’ becomes ‘Great Vinland’,
ones in which the Muscovite empire on the west coast clashes with the Hispanic
empire on the east coast (worlds in which Queen Elizabeth dies in exile), other
worlds in which Columbus found America already owned by the Manchu emperors – and
worlds with histories so exotic that it is hard to find even a remote ancestral line
in common with anything we can recognise.
I am almost certain that I have slipped into one of the exotics… but of a
previously unsuspected sort.
I did not spend all my time studying histories; I worked for a living, supporting
myself first as a nursing assistant, then as a nurse, then as a clinical therapist,
then as a student rejuvenator (all the while going to school), before I shifted
careers to the Time Corps.
But it was this study of histories that caused me to think about a career in Time.
Several of the time lines known to ‘civilisation’ (our name for ourselves) appear to
split away about 1940. One cusp at which these splits show is the Democratic
National Convention of 1940 at which Mr Franklin Delano Roosevelt either was or was
not nominated by the Democratic Party for a third term as President of the United
States, then either was or was not elected, then either did or did not serve through
to the end of the Second World War.
In time line one, code John Carter, the Democratic nomination went to Paul McNutt…
but the election to Republican Senator Robert Taft.
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In the composite time lines coded ‘Cyrano’, Mr Roosevelt had both a third and a
fourth term, died in his fourth term and was succeeded by his vice-president, a