Connie Willis - All Clear

That was the cruelest irony of all, that they had undone the future out of a desire to help—Eileen’s giving Binnie aspirin to bring her fever down and tearing up the letter to keep the children from drowning, Mike’s unfouling the propeller because he couldn’t stand the thought of fourteen-year-old Jonathan being killed and pushing the two firemen away from the collapsing wall.

Even the act which had set it all in motion had come not from malice but from an innocent desire to see something beautiful. It seemed impossible that compassion and kindness should be the weapons of destruction, that just the opposite should be true. It was true that in a chaotic system, good actions could have bad consequences, but why—?

Polly had the sudden feeling that she knew the answer to that, that it lay just out of reach, like a word on the tip of one’s tongue. She stopped on the street and stared into the blacked-out darkness, mentally reaching for it. It had something to do with Alf and Binnie blocking Eileen’s way, and the shelter at Holborn—

A siren not twenty feet away screamed, and she jumped, startled and then annoyed at the interruption of her train of thought. It had had something to do with the shelter at Holborn … no, that couldn’t be right, Alf and Binnie had been at Blackfriars, not Holborn, but it was Holborn, she was certain of it. Holborn and Mike’s missing the bus and …

No, it was gone. And this raid wasn’t going to be one of those times with twenty minutes from alert to bombs. She could already hear planes, and she should get the aspirin to Mr. Dunworthy as soon as possible.

But when she arrived home, he was asleep. Alf was, amazingly, sitting at the kitchen table doing his lessons. Whatever he’d done to the tube station guard or the truant officer must have been something appalling even for him.

Binnie was reading aloud to Eileen from the book of fairy tales. “ ‘You must be home before the clock strikes twelve,’ the fairy godmother told Cinderella, ‘or the spell will be broken.’ ”

“Should I wake Mr. Dun—Mr. Hobbe and give him the aspirin?” Polly interrupted to ask Eileen.

“No, sleep is the best thing for him.”

“What does that mean, the spell will be broken?” Binnie asked. “What happens when it’s midnight?”

“I’ll wager Cinderella blows up,” Alf said. “Boom!”

“Go on to bed, Polly,” Eileen said. “You look done in.”

I am, she thought. We all are. And midnight’s coming.

She went to bed, but sleep was out of the question, and when she heard Mr. Dunworthy coughing in the night, she got up quietly, fetched a glass of water, and took it and the aspirin in to him.

He was sitting up in bed. “Oh, good, it’s you,” he said when she switched on the lamp beside the bed. “I need to tell you something.” And whatever it was, it was more bad news, because he had the same hopeless look he’d had in St. Paul’s and in the pub.

“First, you need to take these,” she said, and while he downed them, she felt his forehead. It was still hot. “You’re still feverish. You need to try to sleep. Whatever it is, you can tell me in the morning.”

“No,” he said. “Now.”

“All right,” she said, and sat down on the edge of the bed.

He took a deep, ragged breath. “The continuum will go on attempting to correct itself whether it can succeed or not.”

Like a vanquished army fighting bravely on, Polly thought.

“And since we’re the source of the damage,” he said, “and since access to the future is no longer available—”

“It will have to kill us to stop us doing any more damage.”

Mr. Dunworthy nodded.

“You think that’s why Mike—Michael—was killed, to stop him from altering any more events?”

“Yes.”

“And it will do the same to us,” Polly said. “Including Eileen.”

He nodded.

“When?”

“I don’t know. Before the end of the Blitz, I would say. That’s its best opportunity. There are a number of large raids between now and the tenth of May.”

“But you know where the raids are and where and when the bombs hit, and we can make certain we’re in Notting Hill Gate on those nights. It’s safe!” she insisted, but even as she said it, she could hear Mrs. Brightford reading Sleeping Beauty to Trot, could hear her reading about the king destroying every spinning wheel in the kingdom, vainly attempting to stop the inevitable.

“Isn’t there anything that can be done?” she asked.

He was silent, and she thought, appalled, He still hasn’t finished. There’s more bad news to come. And how could anything be worse than a death sentence for Eileen?

“What is it?” she asked, but she already knew. Their actions hadn’t just affected the course of the war. They’d affected Theodore and Stephen and Paige and Mr.

Humphreys. Eileen had kept Alf and Binnie from going on the City of Benares, and Mike had kept Hardy from being killed at Dunkirk. Those alterations would have to be corrected, too.

And how many others? Marjorie? Major Denewell? Miss Laburnum and the rest of the troupe? If she hadn’t done that reading of The Tempest with Sir Godfrey, they wouldn’t have formed the troupe. They wouldn’t have been safely in Notting Hill Gate every night instead of at home being killed, like they were supposed to be.

they wouldn’t have formed the troupe. They wouldn’t have been safely in Notting Hill Gate every night instead of at home being killed, like they were supposed to be.

“It’s not just going to kill us, is it?” Polly asked, her throat dry with fear. “It’s going to kill everyone we’ve come into contact with, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” Mr. Dunworthy said.

Are these the shadows of the things that will be, or are they shadows of things that may be, only?

—CHARLES DICKENS, A CHRISTMAS CAROL

London—Winter 1941

FOR SEVERAL LONG MINUTES AFTER MR. DUNWORTHY TOLD her, Polly simply sat there next to his bed. In the long nights lying awake on the platform, in the emergency stairway, she’d thought that she’d imagined every possible explanation for their plight, every possible dreadful outcome, but this was unimaginably more terrible. Not only were they going to die, but they would be responsible for the deaths of everyone who’d befriended them, everyone who’d helped them and been kind to them—Marjorie and Eileen’s vicar and Daphne and Miss Laburnum and Sir Godfrey. Everyone they cared about.

“So that’s that?” she said finally.

“I’m so sorry,” Mr. Dunworthy said, and she could only nod, her eyes full of tears for him, for them. And for all the people they had killed.

Would kill. She must have made some sort of sound because Mr. Dunworthy reached out a hand to her and said, beseechingly, “Polly—”

She stood up and took the glass from him. “Try to rest,” she said, and switched off the lamp. “Put out the light, and then put out the light.”

She took the glass out to the dark kitchen and set it on the table, closed Binnie’s fairy-tale book, and then went down to the cellar and sat at the bottom of the stairs, staring into darkness.

She had thought she’d given up hoping that they’d somehow be rescued even before Mike died, even before they’d failed to get a message to John Bartholomew, but she realized now that some part of her had gone on hoping. Gone on believing that there was some other, magical explanation which, as Eileen said, accounted for everything. Which fit all the facts and was right there in front of you all the time, only you couldn’t see it. But this wasn’t an Agatha Christie murder mystery, with a tidy solution and a happy ending. There was no happy ending. And she was the murderer.

They were all murderers. Mr. Dunworthy had killed a Wren, and Mike had killed Commander Harold and Jonathan, Eileen had been responsible for the vicar’s joining up, and she had been responsible for Marjorie’s enlisting in the Royal Army Nursing Service.