Borrowed Time by Jack Campbell Page A

took me back to Norfolk with them, and I headed for Richmond to get my jump gear and come back Uptime. With the Merrimack nullified, the Union took Norfolk a couple of months later."
    “And no one thought it amazing that both North and South decided to produce these ironclads at the exact same time?” my client marveled.
    I couldn’t help smiling. “Downtime historians labeled it a remarkable coincidence.” Coincidence explains everything and nothing, which made it convenient for Temporal Interventions like the Wright Brothers’ engine and Ericsson’s ironclad.
    "That's wonderful. Is there any chance this torpedo the other T.I.’s used will be found and create temporal problems?"
    "No, the bottom there is soft mud, so any pieces left after it exploded sank right out of sight.”
    The client shook her head, plainly bewildered. “But now history records this battle of ironclad ships. It couldn’t have before. Why didn’t your changing history change our present as well?”
    “Because I didn’t change the present. It’s based on the North winning the American Civil War. Fine. The North won. Some details changed, that’s all.”
    “But . . . but . . . someone once said God is in the details!”
    “They did? They were wrong. God doesn’t care about details. Neither does the Universe. Ask a quantum physicist. Historians used to care about details, which is why all the inconsistencies in the historical record drove them crazy.”
    “I still don’t understand,” the client lamented. “If our present is based on large events which are inevitable, such as the North winning the American Civil War, why do some people try to change those large events?”
    I grinned reassuringly. “Because they’re people, because they can try, and because people do things regardless of whether they’re right or smart. As to inevitability, we don’t know that. You hired me, I stopped the other guys.”
    “But what if I hadn’t hired you and no one had stopped them? Wouldn’t our present still remain the same if you’re right? Wouldn’t someone else have ensured the North still won?”
    “I don’t know. Is that a risk you’d care to take?” The client stared, then nodded and left. I leaned back for a while, remembering people and places long gone to dust, then started reviewing a file on Victorian England. Something told me I might need that information someday.

Author's Note on Working on Borrowed Time
    Another story featuring my hero from Small Moments and Circle . Now he has to deal with a big change that could alter history in major ways. That change involves something which did occur in history and left a very big mark at the time. The Tunguska Event in 1908 was a mysterious airburst in an unpopulated region of Siberia. The exact strength of the burst is now estimated at being equivalent to ten to fifteen megatons of TNT, or equal to a nuclear weapon one thousand times as powerful as that which was dropped on Hiroshima. I have often wondered that it struck on practically the only spot on Earth where such an explosion would directly or indirectly cause no loss of human life. What a lucky coincidence, because if it had landed on a city . . . It’s a big job, but fortunately, our hero finds an ally.

Working on Borrowed Time
    The Here and Now which I call home has a number of advantages compared to most earlier There and Thens, one of which is air conditioning. I was still wiping sweat from my forehead and contemplating the fairly recent dust of now-ancient Egypt on my sandals when Jeannie interrupted my work. “You have a call from Mr. Farrow.”
    I automatically looked up, even though my implanted Assistant couldn’t be seen, and fastened an annoyed glare on the nearest wall. “Tell him I just got home and ask him to call me back in a few hours.”
    “He says it’s very urgent.”
    I smothered an exasperated reply. Whenever I got together with other Temporal Interventionists we usually ended discussing one of the