Asimov's Science Fiction - June 2014 by Penny Publications Page B

his index finger to Taylor's wondrous cold candle light.
    Deke was pissed off at Taylor when he came back empty-handed after his second attempt—"figuratively; I wasn't, like, gonna bring back the head of Baby Hitler.
    That's... that's fucked up"—so Deke tried it the next night—twice in a row—and couldn't do it either. Taylor tried twice more after that.
    "C'mon," I said, "It's the
Hitlers;
I'm positive you could've found
someone
—"
    "Oh, we did."
    After his fourth failure, it dawned on Taylor that the only guy he could think of that was, without a doubt, really and truly heartless enough to kill Baby Hitler was Hitler himself.
    "That's nuts," I gasped.
    "Yeah, well," he slurped his coffee, "I was stressed. I'd studied German Language and Literature in college, so... it sorta
seemed
like the Universe
wanted
me to talk suicidal Old Hitler into going back in time, killing Baby Hitler, and erasing the Holocaust."
    "Did it?"
    Taylor paused. "Nope."
    It took some doing—you have to catch a Hitler at the right part of his downfall, and you need to hit him with the right argument—but Taylor did it. Taylor did it once. Then again and again and again. Sometimes Hitler killed Baby Hitler. Sometimes he didn't. But it never seemed to change anything: Taylor came home to the same old Holocaust every time.
    "And I guess, maybe sometimes he stayed behind to shepherd Baby Hitler. Certainly enough of them ran off, having done the deed or not. We didn't sweat it, 'cause it didn't seem to have any
impact."
Taylor slurped reflectively. He dug a flask out of his jacket pocket and dumped it into his mostly empty coffee. If yesterday you'd told me that the Hitlers
weren't
identical cousins, that really it was a time-traveling elderly Hitler come back to guide and protect his younger self—I would have told you that was the stupidest thing I'd ever heard. Time portals? Old Hitlers taking on young versions of themselves as protégés, protecting their baby selves from a Jewish time-traveling conspiracy? What a load of third-rate
Star Trek
horse shit. But now that I'd seen Taylor's portal-and-grapefruit act, I realized that "identical cousins" really was incredibly stupid sounding. It made no sense, but we all believed it just because it happened to be what happened.
    "Then Deke and I got busted by the FBI. It'd never occurred to us that someone else might
also
be doing freelance historical revision. I came back from the chilly lower Danube valley one night—thankfully Hitlerless—to find Deke standing around in cuffs with two Agent Smiths and a bunch of guys in hippie costumes waiting to use the portal. We got recruited on the spot." Taylor frowned. "Or more like drafted. But that's when we got hip to the mathematical models: According to the FBI these back-in-time hijinks were basically harmless, because they spawned their own little bottle universes. That's why me and Deke couldn't get any traction on the Holocaust; everything downstream was happening at somewhen else."
    I'm no mathemagician, but that made no sense, and I said so: "If going back in time and monkeying around just spawned harmless off-shoot timelines, then why was the FBI bothering with their missions? Wasn't all their portaling just making more useless dead-end universes? Didn't everything that they were trying to prevent happen anyway?"
    Taylor shrugged. "We were conscripted; no one answered our questions, apart from to say we were helping to prevent terrorism." I must have made a face, because Taylor held up a hand.
    "I know how that sounds, but we were told it was all about 'minimizing loss-of-life in the primary timeline'—i.e.,
our
timeline—which we bought, because we wanted to think we were doing good things." He took another sip of booze coffee. "You want some fries or something? My treat."
    "Didn't you ever wonder why the FBI had to sneak into the Department of Ag at night? If it was a legit operation, I mean. Why couldn't they sign up to use it during