Symphony in a Minor Key

by H. G. Stratmann

Illustration by John Stevens

Introduction

As he emerged from the alley the front of the building on his right exploded. Knocked down by the blast, Robbins staggered back to his feet, unable to comprehend what he saw.

The city was deserted and in ruins. Most of the nearby buildings were at least partly destroyed. A few were on fire, spewing acrid black smoke into the cold air. The wide street he stood on was pockmarked with craters and littered with broken wood, glass, and the tom bodies of dead animals. In the distance he heard unintelligible cries and screams, sharp firecracker-like snaps, and whistling sounds like descending skyrockets followed by thunderous explosions.

Suddenly a horse-drawn wagon whipped around the nearby street comer and bore down on him. Both the driver and the gray-faced woman at his side looked terrified as he lashed the horses to greater speed. The wagon grazed Robbins’s arm as he jumped aside just in time.

Before he could catch his breath, a portly red-faced man puffed around the same corner and sprinted toward him. As he ran past, Robbins grabbed the stranger’s arm and shouted at him in German, “What is happening?”

The fat man’s eyes bulged. “Let go of me, you fool!” he screamed. “They’re right behind me, they’ll kill us all!”

Before he could ask who “they” were the man broke free and resumed his headlong flight. As Robbins started after him an arcing shriek tore through the air. Suddenly the part of the street just in front of the fleeing man exploded, flinging him backwards high into the air, arms flailing wildly, until he landed on his head with a sickening thud.

Robbins ran to him. The man lay on his back, bloodied mouth gaping wide, unmoving eyes staring up at the sky. Dead.

Then he heard more hoofbeats coming from the other end of the cobblestoned street. Recalling the dead man’s last words, he looked around for a place to hide. The closest shelter was the crater just blasted in front of him in the middle of the street. It made a shallow foxhole, deep enough to let him duck his head below street level by lying on his stomach. Ignoring the mud staining his clothes, he peeked over the edge of the crater.

Four horsemen turned the same street comer from which the wagon and the dead man had just come. They wore identical tall black woolen hats, brown shirts open at the neck, wide red sashes around their waists, and dark pants stuffed into high military boots. A long saber hung from each one’s side. Their bearded faces too seemed identical, with coarse, menacing features.

Seemingly oblivious to his hiding place or the distant thunder of cannons, they trotted their horses down the street at a leisurely pace, directly toward him. Every few meters they would stop momentarily and peer at the surrounding buildings, as if looking for someone.

Quickly Robbins ducked his head back down, heart pounding. The alley from which he’d emerged—the one containing the portal back home—was too far away. If he tried running to it, they would see him, and could cut him down with their sabers long before he reached safety.

And if he did nothing, in a few minutes they would, literally, be right on top of him.

The melody of the Russian dance from Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker ballet flashed through his mind. He was about to be killed by—Cossacks?

Confused, desperate, Robbins closed his eyes. Like the bass part of some diabolical passacaglia, a single thought repeated itself in his mind.

What in God’s name is going on?

Exposition

“—And we have no right to play God!”

H. L. Robbins, head of the musicology section, looked anxiously at the other members of the humanities committee seated around the conference table. Then he sighed with relief. Except for Billingsley, who was grinning at her, the other Section Chiefs seemed unmoved by Brentano’s tirade.

At the head of the table, the chancellor of the Institute for Transcosmic Studies frowned at Brentano. “Thank you for your comments, Dr. Brentano. However, before we discuss whether Dr. Robbins’s proposal should be carried out, we need to establish whether it is even feasible. That’s why I’ve asked our distinguished guests from the science committee, Drs. Everett and Harrison, to come to this meeting.”

She nodded toward the elderly woman seated at her right.

Catherine Everett, Ph.D. glared back. “I gave my opinion in the report I sent to your committee.” Her eyes flashed around the table. “I assume you all read it?”

From the embarrassed looks on the faces of his colleagues, Robbins doubted any of them had been able to figure out what Everett’s report said either. He, for one, had no idea what terms like “dosed temporal loop” and “quantized timelines” meant. And as for the equations—.

The Chancellor said diplomatically, “Perhaps you could summarize your conclusions about the possible dangers of traveling back in time and changing the past.”

“No, no, no!” Everett shouted back. “There’s no danger anything we do on Transcosmic Earth can affect us! Translocating there may seem like simple time travel into the past, with all the possible paradoxes and violations of causality that implies, but it’s actually much more complicated! Anything we change there would simply replace TCE’s current history with one of a nearly infinite number of different ‘shadow histories,’ and make it the real’ one instead. But our history would stay the same!” She launched into a monologue about “temporo-quantum discontinuities” and “branching universes” that Robbins couldn’t begin to follow.

But even if he didn’t understand it, Everett must know what she was talking about. She had originated the theory of “transcosmology” that let them travel to Transcosmic Earth. Apparently, Everett and the other physicists at the Institute disagreed about what TCE was—their own Earth’s past, a “parallel” world, or something else. Whatever it was, you could “translocate” to anywhere on it within a roughly 400 year “temporal window,” stay as long as you liked, then return to “their” Earth an equal amount of time later.

Nobody he talked to seemed to know why you couldn’t travel back farther than the mid-seventeenth century, or more “recent” than 1998. Rumor was the last six decades were “off-limits” because the members of the Executive Committee who oversaw the Institute didn’t want anyone alive today to be embarrassed by anything discovered by observing their younger analogs on TCE—especially themselves. Unlike his colleagues, Robbins didn’t feel those limits hurt his work. In fact, it was because of his expertise in pre-twenty-first century Western music, whose “golden age” fell within those years, that he’d been invited to join the Institute for Transcosmic Studies.

The institute was the result of an international effort to use and regulate translocation. Its purpose was to “go back in time” on TCE and collect information and “cultural artifacts,” like music, that had been lost on their own Earth. Along with a monopoly on its use, the institute was responsible for ensuring translocation wasn’t misused. There was one rule, the “First Law of Contact,” that every member of the Institute had to obey at all cost. Anyone going to TCE was to have as little contact with the people there as possible, or do anything that might change its “past.”

It was this rule that Robbins was proposing to break in a very big way.

“—And that should answer your question!” Everett folded her arms.

The Chancellor looked as confused as the rest of them. “Then I take it you believe we can alter TCE’s past without changing our own?”

Everett’s face turned crimson. “Of course! That’s what I just said! Weren’t you listening?” Cowering like everyone else, Robbins thought it amazing that this short, grandmotherly woman with silver hair pulled back severely into a tight bun could make the lot of them—all experts in their fields, and several nearly her age—feel like grade-schoolers being scolded by a strict teacher.

“Let me put it even more simply. Transcosmic Earth was the timeline that initially produced us. But ever since a temporo-quantum event made our current Universe branch off from TCE, there’s no longer any ‘causal’ relationship between our timeline and TCE’s. Now, TCE is no longer the’ past, but only ‘a’ past—one we can change without affecting the unique past, or the present, of our own branch Universe. To use a crude analogy, just as a newborn baby, once its umbilical cord is cut, exists completely separately from its mother, and continues to exist despite what may happen to her, our Earth and its timeline now exist independent of TCE.

“What Dr. Robbins proposes will prove what I’ve been telling my denser colleagues and the executive committee for years. We won’t change our own remembered’ history, we won’t blink’ ourselves out of existence by changing TCE’s history!”

The Chancellor nodded politely. “Thank you, Dr. Everett.” She turned to the white-haired man seated on her left. “Dr. Harrison?”

Cecil L. Harrison, M.D. began, “Dr. Ertmann, the physician on my staff with the most experience in field work on TCE, made a series of nocturnal visits to the subject’s apartment starting two years before he died and collected blood samples while he was sleeping. Postmortem tissue samples and ascitic fluid were also obtained hours after he died. Our analysis of the specimens confirmed the opinion of his own physicians that he died of liver failure. However, they erroneously believed it was due to alcohol abuse or syphilis. Using tests not available in the nineteenth century, Dr. Ertmann and I found it was actually caused by chronic active hepatitis, from an infection with the hepatitis B virus he contracted no more than fifteen months before he died.

“Thus, to prevent his death, we only need to give him an injection of an appropriate medicine at least a month before he was infected. Nanoscrubbers block entry of viral DNA into cells, and have a success rate of nearly 100 percent. However, scrubbers stay in the blood and other bodily fluids, and anyone else exposed to them after he was injected could also become immunized. Since it was emphasized to me that only the subject himself should be affected by what we do, I suggest immunoboosted hepatitis B vaccine be used instead. Its average success rate is still 95 percent, and it wouldn’t affect anyone besides him.”

Harrison coughed. “Bear in mind, however, that at the time he died he had other medical problems which, even if we prevent him from dying of hepatitis, will still eventually kill him. I estimate he’ll live about five, and certainly no more than ten extra years.”

“Thank you, Dr. Harrison,” the Chancellor continued. “Our guests tell us there’s no technical reason why Dr. Robbins’s proposal can’t be done. Now we must consider whether we should do it. Drs. Robbins and Brentano have already expressed their positions. Are there any other comments?”

Now, Robbins thought, was the moment of truth. Brentano was adamantly against it. But right now it was dangerous, politically speaking, for anyone to side with her. She and the philosophy and theology section she headed had been in disgrace with the executive committee since their report on what really happened at Lourdes in 1858 had leaked to the public. The Vatican had shrugged it off, saying no official articles of faith were involved, just a popular tradition. But the crowds protesting outside the Institute compound, and whoever had sent the bomb threats, disagreed. The formal complaint sent by the French government, presumably on behalf of their tourism industry, hadn’t helped either.

Lytton and Shimura should be on his side. If his proposal was approved and set a successful precedent, they had similar proposals of their own to submit.

Billingsley, as always, was an enigma.

Shimura said, “Dr. Lytton and I strongly support Dr. Robbins’s proposal.”

The Chancellor nodded at Billingsley. The latter, easily the youngest person at the table, adjusted his bow tie and horn rimmed glasses, and ran a hand through short greasy hair. “I’m ambivalent. If Howie’s plan works, I can think of projects I’d like to do, too. Like go to Earth-Two and tell the Big Bopper and his pals to not get on that plane.”

The big what? Robbins thought.

“But Toni”—he nodded at Brentano—“is afraid we’re not smart enough to know what will happen if we change Earth-Two’s past, and that we might screw things up. Based on the kind of literature I know best, I have to agree with her that violating the Prime Directive wouldn’t be a good idea. We shouldn’t risk turning the people there, or maybe even us, into lizards.”

Into what? Robbins found Billingsley’s sophomoric obsession with “popular culture” of the last century very irritating. While the other humanities sections were recovering things of real cultural value on TCE, the sociology section Billingsley headed wasted its time scanning old “films” and recording episodes of twentieth-century radio and television programs that were probably better left lost. Billingsley defended the “scholarly” nature of these projects, saying, “The best way to understand a society is to see what its people enjoy, what they consider entertainment.” But, Robbins suspected, the real reason the powers-that-be tolerated it was that those samples of pre-Digital Revolution “entertainment” were wildly popular on the public Nets—and the Institute collected a royalty each time one was downloaded. Besides, how much scholarship could you expect from someone whose doctoral thesis was entitled, “The Role of the Tropicana Club as a Microcosm of Early 1950s American Society in ‘I Love Lucy’ ”?

And Robbins hated it when Billings ley used terms he didn’t understand. He made a mental note to run a Net search on what “Prime Directive” referred to.

The Chancellor said, “Dr. Velikovsky?”

Robbins tensed. Velikovsky, of the history section, was the pivotal vote.

The latter began, “This is not an easy decision. Even a tiny, critical change in TCE’s past could have great, perhaps very negative repercussions for its later history. I can’t be certain whether saving this particular individual would be such a change. Those extra’ ten years Dr. Harrison referred to were relatively quiet, politically speaking, in his own country—though not elsewhere in Europe. While the subject himself was something of a political revolutionary, it’s difficult to see how he could affect the course of the various revolutions that occurred in Europe in 1830 and 1831. Conversely, if he were to live to 1848 or 1849, when even more critical events occurred—well, that would be even harder to predict. In that case, I would have to vote ‘no’ to Dr. Robbins’s proposal.

“However, since Dr. Harrison is convinced he’ll die no later than the 1830s, at this time I’m inclined to favor Dr. Robbins’s proposal.”

The Chancellor said, “Any other comments?”

Brentano again. “I’d like to remind everyone that the decision we make today might, as Dr. Robbins said, ‘enrich’ both our world and TCE—or it could destroy them. Even if we do have much to gain, is it worth such a terrible risk?”

Robbins said, “Although I appreciate Dr. Brentano’s concerns, as I said before, and as Drs. Everett and Velikovsky have confirmed, the risks seem minimal. And oh, how much we and TCE stand to gain! Genius, whether it is in music or some other field, is a rare and precious thing. Those individuals blessed with such great powers of creativity and original thought are given to the rest of humanity only briefly, but what they do far outlasts their own lifetime. It is tragic when one of them is taken away from us prematurely by an accident of nature, leaving his work undone—the masterpieces he might have created, unfinished, or stillborn. We have the means to correct one of those tragedies. I believe we should do it.”

“Any more comments? No?” The Chancellor continued, “Is there a second for Dr. Robbins’s proposal?”“Seconded!” Lytton and Shimura spoke simultaneously.

“Those in favor of Dr. Robbins’s proposal, raise your hands.”

Robbins’s own arm went up immediately, followed by those of Lytton and Shimura. After some hesitation, Velikovsky’s joined them.

“Opposed?”

Brentano and Billingsley.

“Let the record show that the humanities committee has voted four to two in favor of Dr. Robbins’s proposal.”

For the first time since the meeting started, Robbins relaxed. He’d won! The hardest part—getting the executive, then the science, and now the humanities committee to approve his proposal—was over. The rest should be simple—just go to TCE and do it. Robbins could barely contain his excitement.

Soon he would travel to Vienna in 1825 and save the life of Ludwig van Beethoven.

“Congratulations.”

Robbins sighed. He’d known this was coming.

Antonia had asked to come to his apartment in the staff quarters that evening. “Just to talk,” she’d said. But he knew what she wanted to talk about.

“Thank you,” he replied.

“When are you going?”

“Tomorrow morning.”

“I don’t suppose there’s any way I can talk you out of it?”

“No, there isn’t.”

The muted lights in the apartment cast a lustrous sheen on Antonia’s long brown hair. Though they were both toward the middle of middle-age, unlike his own, her hair was just starting to show a little gray. And as for the rest of her—he knew all too well how heartachingly beautiful she was.

He and Antonia Brentano had been among the first of the humanities staff to come to the Institute. Though different in many ways, they found they both shared a passion for classical music. Acquaintance had turned to friendship, and then they’d discovered something else they shared—loneliness. Neither of them had ever been married, or had any close family. Immersed in his work for so many years, until he met her he hadn’t noticed what was missing from his life.

In retrospect, it was natural that they’d drifted into a brief but intense love affair—and just as natural it should end. They’d soon realized they were both too dedicated to their work to have enough time and energy left for each other. Afterwards, they’d still maintained a cordial, platonic friendship. But now they might lose even that.

They sat on the couch together silently for a while, listening to the music. A large bust of Beethoven frowned at them from atop the Steinway that filled a good part of the living room. Pictures of Robbins’s other favorite composers hung on the walls. The one of J. S. Bach seemed to be smiling in approval at the piece Robbins had selected—the master’s “Concerto in F-sharp minor, for three violins and string orchestra.” Absorbed in the first movement’s intricate counterpoint, it took him a few seconds to realize Antonia was speaking.

“Why, Howard? Why do you have to do this?”

“It’s just like I said at the meeting. I want to allow a genius whose life was cut tragically short to create new works for the benefit of all humanity.”

“Oh, cut the melodrama! If you’re really serious, you have the worse case of hubris I’ve ever seen. Is it an ego thing with you—a way to bask in Beethoven’s reflected glory by being the instrument for his ‘resurrection’? If that isn’t ‘playing God,’ I don’t know what is!”

“But I really mean it! There’s nothing selfish in this!”

The expression on Antonia’s face told him what she thought of that.

“Listen,” he began, “over the last four years my staff and I have traveled to TCE and recovered thousands of scores by the great composers that were lost for one reason or another centuries ago. We knew about some of them from surviving fragments or the incipits—the first few measures of the main theme—in catalogs of their works that the composer or a nearcontemporary compiled.”

“Like, the Kochel catalog for Mozart’s works?”

“Exactly. Since we knew about when those ‘lost’ works were composed, we’ve been able to go back and retrieve them. When we did that, however, we also found many new’ works that nobody knew anything about!”

The concerto had entered its heartrendingly lyrical slow movement, a Largo in A major. “The piece by Bach we re listening to now is one of them—unknown, forgotten for over three centuries until I went to Cothen in 1722 and scanned a copy of the score. By going to TCE we’ve managed to nearly double the amount of his music we had before the Institute was formed!”

“I don’t understand. How did all that music get lost?”

“Several reasons. After Beethoven’s time, we already had nearly all of the music the ‘major’ composers wrote. Unless they destroyed what they considered ‘inferior’ works, like Chopin. Or, if they were very careless with the manuscripts.” Robbins smiled to himself. After rummaging through Schubert’s closet at various times during the mid-1820s, he’d finally found the completed third and fourth movements of the composer’s B minor symphony—the one that used to be known as the “Unfinished.”

“Before Beethoven’s time, however, very little of a composer’s music was published. Mosdy, the scores of their works existed only in a small number of hand written copies, all of which could easily be lost by accident or neglect. Plus, the major composers before Beethoven were very prolific. Bach himself wrote nearly 2,000 works. They wrote so much music it was hard even for them to preserve or keep track of everything they wrote!

“But now my staff and I have become victims of our own success. We’ve managed to recover just about everything those composers wrote. At the rate we re going, soon we may not need to go to TCE anymore.”

“So that’s it!” The anger was back in Antonia’s eyes. “This proposal is just your way to justify staying at the Institute!”

The concerto began its fiery third movement, back in the tonic minor.

“No, that’s not it at all! Till now, all we’ve been doing is acting like scavengers. We’ve been retrieving these lost works for ourselves, we now have them—but the ‘First Law of Contact’ forbids us to give them back to the people of TCE! What I’m going to do will benefit both us and them!

“Lytton understands. Think of all the poets and writers who died ‘before their time’! Like Percy Shelley—drowned at age twenty-nine in a stupid boating accident. Or John Keats, who died at age twenty-six from tuberculosis, something that Harrison could prevent easily. Edward says the first thing he’d do is give Charles Dickens a few more years of life, so he can finish The Mystery of Edwin Drood. The point is, if any of them lived longer on TCE, anything new they created would become part of both our cultural heritage—and theirs!

“And Shimura—his list has van Gogh, and—.”

“All right, all right! I don’t disagree with you about the possible benefits, just the risks.” She glanced at the brooding plaster figure on the piano. “But why Beethoven? Why not someone who died younger—like Mozart? He’d probably live even longer and write more music than Ludwig.”

“But that might backfire! If Beethoven lived too much longer, his career would overlap those of Chopin, Schumann, and other composers active in the late 1830s and ’40s. If he was alive and writing constantly greater masterpieces himself then, they might feel discouraged, unequal to the task of reaching his standard of excellence, and not write much themselves! Although we’d still have them, TCE could be deprived of their greatest works. The same thing could happen if we saved Mozart, only worse—because Beethoven himself would be one of the composers who might be ‘discouraged’!

“But remember, Harrison said Beethoven won’t live much longer even if I do temporarily save’ him. So, both we and TCE should get the best of both worlds—a few more works by one of the greatest composers of all time, and no bad effects on his contemporaries. Plus, we’ll prove we can do something good for the people of TCE, too.”

“But that’s the real question, isn’t it? How do we know we’ll do something good for them?” Antonia took a piece of paper from her purse. “Billingsley asked me to give you this. He says you haven’t answered his messages, and he’s been too busy making trips to TCE to catch you in person.” She smiled grimly. “He said he wants to salvage as much pop-culture’ as he can from the twentieth century before you ‘screw things up and wipe it out.’ ”

How typical, Robbins thought. He took the note and stuck it in his pocket.

The Bach concerto sounded its final cadence. In the silence that followed, Antonia sighed. “It’s getting late, and I have to leave.”

Robbins walked her to the door. In the open doorway she said, “I don’t care at all for what you’re going to do. Even if the chance of something bad happening is small, it’s still too much.” She hesitated. “But I do care about you. Whatever happens, take care of yourself.”

She gave him a brief hug, brushed her lips chastely across his cheek, and was gone.

The scent of her perfume lingered in the empty room. Sitting down at the piano, he played “Für Elise,” mentally changing the title to “Für Antonia.” “You don’t mind, do you?” he asked the bust of Beethoven. The latter scowled back at him.

Then he remembered Billingsley’s note. It read, “Dear Howie, Please read these stories. They might make you change your mind about changing history on Earth-Two.”

There was a list of ten titles and authors. Well, why not?

“Computer?”

“Yes?” a warm contralto voice answered from the walls.

Robbins looked at the first title on the list. “Access story, ‘A Sound of Thunder.’ ”

“Category, science fiction?”

Robbins frowned. “I suppose so.”

“Author, Bradbury, Ray?”

He checked the note. “Yes.”

“Would you like it read to you, or a printout?”

“Printout.”

Robbins watched as sheets of paper spat out of a slot in the nearby wall into the wire basket attached beneath it. When the printout stopped, he read the first few pages—then threw the papers down in disgust. Hunting dinosaurs—how ridiculous!

He should have known better. Once he’d asked Billingsley why he always used the term “Earth-Two” instead of the standard “Transcosmic Earth.” The latter had replied very seriously that it referred to a series of “graphic novels” written in the last half of the twentieth century. He’d given Robbins a list of titles and authors then, too.

Intrigued in spite of himself (What was so “graphic” about them? And what did those strange titles like Flash of Two Worlds refer to?), he’d asked for printouts from the Net then, too. His surprise at receiving pages of small, crudely colored and lettered pictures turned to anger when, at his query, the computer said those so-called “graphic novels” were more commonly referred to as “comic books.” It was so—typical of Billingsley, quoting from simple-minded stories written for children!

Robbins read more titles on the note. Timescape. By His Bootstraps. The Men Who Murdered Mohammed. Appointment in Berlin. Then he crumpled it and tossed it on the floor. Probably more of the same. Not worth wasting his time over.

Fingers poised over the keyboard, he hesitated. Right now he didn’t feel in a heaven-storming, Beethovean mood. Something lighter—like Chopin. Playing through several of the master’s etudes from Opus 25, some of his tension drained away. As the last fluttering strains of the delicate etude no. 9 in G-flat major, the one nicknamed “The Butterfly,” laded away in the quiet room, he addressed the bust on the piano again. “Do you think I’m doing the right thing?”

Beethoven scowled at him even more disapprovingly.

Development

“Look’s good from this side, Dr. Robbins.”

Robbins examined himself in the changing room’s full-length mirror, and nodded in agreement. The “Night Operations Camouflage” suit that Miles, the Portal Technician, had just helped him put on resembled a deep-black wet suit, covering him from shoulders to ankles with an opening for his head. A wand-like digital scanner hung from a black belt around his waist.

Miles continued, “I calibrated and focused the portal just before I came here. You can translocate as soon as you finish getting dressed.”

Robbins sat down on a bench and tugged a pair of black boots on. “We’ll have to wait for Harrison. He’s bringing the vaccine I’m going to use.”

Miles frowned. “Dr. Harrison’s bringing it?”

“That’s what he told me. Why do you ask?”

“Because just before I left the Portal Room to help you, Dr. Ertmann came in. I assumed she had it.”

“Well, as long as one of them brings it.” He stood up, and Miles handed him a black hood. It covered his entire head except for small circles at his eyes and slits for his mouth and nostrils. Robbins pressed the edges of the hood and suit together. Their magnet: ic strips made a tight seal.

Miles handed him a pair of black goggles. Securing them with a strap behind his head, Robbins turned them on. A multicolored display appeared at the top of the left lens. “Fully charged, diagnostics check out,” Robbins read. “Lights off.”

In the darkened room the goggles switched to “NightVision” mode. Though it was like looking through green-colored lenses, everything in the room could be seen as clearly as in normal light.

“Lights on.” Robbins checked himself in the mirror again, and smiled. Billingsley called the NOC suit a “cat burglar outfit”—not a bad description for what it was designed to do.

To avoid contact with the people of TCE as much as possible, most of the work done there consisted of searching through rooms at night for manuscripts or other documents. Should a “native” happen to come into one of those dark rooms unexpectedly, the NOC suit was supposed to keep the wearer undetected long enough to hide or escape.

“Don’t forget this.”

Robbins took the bracelet from Miles and snapped it around his left wrist. No, he didn’t want to forget that. Without it, he couldn’t activate the portal from TCE and return to their Earth.

They walked back through the short corridor to the Portal Room.

Harrison was there, bending over a young woman wearing a white lab coat who was slumped forward in a chair near the main control console. Robbins didn’t recognize her. She seemed to be in her early thirties, with cascading red hair and pale skin. Sobbing violently, she buried her face in her hands.

Harrison looked up at Miles and him, obviously worried. “Do either of you know what’s wrong with Dr. Ertmann?”

Miles shrugged. “Beats me. She was fine when I left her about ten minutes ago.”

Harrison bent down again, close to the woman’s ear. “Dorothy, what’s the matter? Are you sick? Do you want me to get some help?”

Slowly Ertmann looked up at Harrison. Her face was drawn, her eyes red and moist. When she wasn’t crying, Robbins thought, she was probably quite pretty. “I’m so sorry,” she said, “I should have known better than to—She stopped suddenly, staring at Robbins. “Who is he?” she demanded.

“That’s Dr. Robbins.” Harrison said. He frowned at Robbins’s black, hooded form. “That is you, isn’t it?”

Robbins nodded.

“Dr. Harrison, do you mind if I leave now?” Ertmann pleaded. “I’m sure he”—she pointed at Robbins—“will tell you what happened!”

“Do you feel up to walking? I can get a wheelchair—.”

“No, that’s all right.” With an effort Ertmann lifted herself out of the chair and headed toward the exit. “I just need to go to my room and ... lie down for a while.”

“Well, if you’re sure you’re up to it—.”

“I’m sure. Please, I just need to be alone!”

After she left, Miles said, “Doc, what was that all about?”

Harrison shrugged. “I don’t know. I arrived just before both of you came in, and found her sitting there, crying!” He paused. “Dorothy has always been—sensitive. When things don’t go right she can get very flustered. But I’ve never seen her this upset before.”

Shaking his head, Harrison took a small white box from the floor and opened it. “I’ll go check on her after we finish here.” He extracted a device resembling an automatic pistol, and a small bottle filled with clear fluid. Flipping its metal tab off, with a twisting motion he inserted the top of the bottle into a round slot on the bottom of the body of the device, then gave it to Robbins. “Any questions?”

“No.” Robbins hefted the transcutaneous injector in his hand. Yesterday Harrison had demonstrated how easy it was to operate by using it on him. “Press the tip of the injector firmly against the upper arm like this, release the safety catch, and pull the trigger.” Robbins had felt only a slight tingle as the sterile water Harrison had loaded it with passed through his skin, leaving a small red spot that quickly disappeared.

Robbins nodded to Miles. “Ready when you are.” The latter moved toward the control console, pausing to pick up several objects off the floor and replace them on a nearby shelf. Glancing over the displays on the console, he said, “The portal is still stable and active. Local time on TCE is now... 1:10 A.M., November 17, 1825.”

Nervously, Robbins went to the entrance of the portal. It was a large cylinder, about six meters long and laid on its side. It was flattened a little where it touched the platform, and its entrance was about three meters in diameter. When the portal was active, like now, at the near end of the cylinder was pure blackness. From past experience Robbins knew better than to stare into that utter emptiness. It made him dizzy, as if he were looking down over the edge of a high cliff into a bottomless chasm.

Here goes. Walking into the portal wasn’t painful. It felt like his whole body had been turned into a mildly vibrating tuning fork, resonating at middle C. Miles had told him the sensation was due to his passing through “low-level phase-inverted force fields” used to keep air molecules and microorganisms from passing from Earth to TCE. Those fields did, however, let “slow-moving, macroscopic objects” like him through. And, the portal was basically a one-way path from Earth to TCE. With a few exceptions, like the oxygen bound in his blood when he breathed there, no matter or energy originating on TCE could come into their world—.

Suddenly his thoughts were interrupted—he was there. His first breath brought a multitude of unpleasant smells. The NV goggles activated automatically in the dark room.

He was in the kitchen of Beethoven’s quarters. A fireplace filled with musty ashes was set into one wall. The room had several tables and open shelves, with plates, bowls, and utensils on them. In one comer stood a dusty, dilapidated pianoforte. Robbins smiled slightly. It was ironic that the composer, who had started out as a piano prodigy and contributed so much to the literature for the instrument, had become so indifferent to it in his final years. After finishing his last sonata and the Diabelli variations a few years before, he wrote no other major works for it. Maybe it was because he couldn’t hear and enjoy his own playing, or was too preoccupied with major projects like the Missa Solemnis or the Ninth Symphony. Whatever the reason, it was sad to see his piano so badly neglected. Given extra years of life, maybe he would write for it again.

He didn’t notice the knife lying on the floor until he accidentally kicked it. It skidded across the floor and rattled into a corner. Robbins froze instantly, straining to hear anyone talking or moving, alerted by the noise. But everything stayed silent.

Slowly, he entered the main living area, carefully avoiding bumping into the small writing desks and chairs scattered around it. He was tempted to examine the partially-notated sheets of staff paper on the desks, but refrained. First things first.

The door to Beethoven’s bedroom was open. Moving even more cautiously, he entered it.

The composer was lying on his right side in a small wooden bed, snoring quietly. A thin blanket covered him up to the waist. He wore a plain night shirt that was tom in several places. A fringe of unruly hair peeked out from beneath his night cap.

Robbins contemplated the sleeping figure. Here, he knew, was one of the greatest musical geniuses of all time, one who set a standard of excellence that no later composer had ever surpassed. Superficially, though, all he saw was a paunchy man, prematurely old at fifty-four, with a homely, pockmarked face.

With a grunt the man on the bed strained and farted loudly. Robbins froze again, expecting him to wake up any second. Instead, a smile came to the man’s face. He resumed his melodious snoring.

Robbins looked carefully for a place to inject the vaccine. Fortunately, there was a large tear in the night shirt over the upper left arm. Cautiously, he raised the triangular flap of cloth upward, exposing the skin beneath. He released the safety on the injector and pressed it down—.

There was a faint click as the injector fired. Robbins jumped back, watching to see what the composer would do. But he only snorted, and kept on sleeping.

Slowly, Robbins retraced his steps back out to the main room. There he succumbed to temptation and ran his scanner over the sheets of music he’d seen before. Back in the kitchen again, he checked the chronometer display in his NV goggles. He had been on TCE ten minutes—and was right on schedule. Since an equal amount of time had passed for Harrison and Miles on the other end, they would be expecting him to return about now.

The next step was to reactivate the portal, return temporarily to Earth, and then translocate back to see if the composer was still alive in Vienna on March 27,1827—the day after he was “supposed” to die. Excitedly, he pressed a stud on the retrieval bracelet. The air shimmered in front of him, like heat waves above a hot street, indicating where his end of the portal was located. He stepped into the shimmer...

Robbins took another peek over the rim of the crater. The Cossacks were still coming slowly toward him—about seventy meters away. Ducking his head back down, his mouth slid wetly across the muddy side of the crater. A few measures from On the Beautiful Blue Danube lilted through his brain before he could shut it off. He was going to have to make a run for it and take his chances. Not a great choice, but better than just staying there in the mud and dying on his belly—.

Suddenly he heard the Cossacks yell excitedly. Glancing up again, he saw them pointing toward the barrel of a rifle poking through the second-floor window of a building on his left. There was a sharp crack! and the tall black hat of one of the Cossacks went flying off.

Immediately two of them dismounted and ran into the building. The other pair quickly brought themselves and all of their horses close to the front of the building, out of range of the rifle. Robbins braced himself to make a run for the alley containing the portal while the Cossacks were distracted, but thought better of it. The two by the building were directly across the street from the entrance to the alley. They would probably see him before he reached it—and he doubted they were in any mood to take a prisoner.

From the building Robbins heard men shouting—and then a woman scream, “No!” A moment later the two Cossacks emerged dragging a young man, and a woman Robbins assumed was his wife. She was in her late teens, with auburn hair, and obviously pregnant. She pleaded with their captors not to hurt her husband Josef, her baby, or her. The young man just shouted curses at them.

The Cossacks laughed harshly. One of the pair still on horseback dismounted and said something to the couple in broken German. Robbins couldn’t make out all of it, but what he did understand made him feel sick. Then the Cossack nodded to the one holding the woman. The latter pulled her down on her back to the dirty street, pinning her arms and grinning wolfishly in patient anticipation as she struggled futilely. The other one knelt beside her, and roughly pulled and ripped her long skirt high above her waist.

Paralyzed with horror, Robbins stared open-mouthed at the scene playing out in front of him. The bare thrashing legs and waist of the woman. Glimpses of her protruding, pregnant abdomen. The husband, locked in a tight bear hug by the Cossack standing behind him, no longer cursing but pleading with them in the names of Jesus and the Blessed Virgin. The other Cossack, standing with his back to Robbins just in front of the young woman’s feet, slowly, methodically, pulling down his pants.

Robbins clenched his fists, reflexively praying to God himself to tell him what he could do to help her. He wasn’t a fighter, he didn’t have any kind of weapon. If he tried to stop them they’d just take a minute to kill him, and then get on with it.

What could he possibly do to change things—.

“Nothing changed.”

Robbins slumped down into the cushioned chair in the Chancellor’s office. He was still dressed in a long coat, coarse woolen trousers, white shirt and vest—typical dress for a Viennese bourgeois, c. 1827.

The Chancellor sat behind her desk, a look of concern on her face. Everett sat in a chair next to him.

“I translocated to Vienna again a little after dawn on March 27, 1827. After I came out of the alley containing the portal, I walked several blocks and found a street vendor selling newspapers.” Robbins paused dejectedly. “On the front page it said, ‘Yesterday afternoon, our beloved Herr Beethoven passed on to his reward.’ Then I returned to Earth, and translocated back to Vienna on the afternoon of March 29, 1827.” Briefly he described blending in with a large crowd of mourners as the composer’s funeral procession wended its way through the streets of Vienna.

He looked at Everett. “Why didn’t it work?”

The latter shook her head. “I don’t know. From the standpoint of transcosmological physics, there are two possibilities. One is that I’ve been wrong all these years about the pliable’ nature of TCE’s history. The other is that, by injecting Beethoven with the vaccine, you may actually have prolonged his life—but in a new ‘subbranch’ universe you created by that intervention. The problem is, if that were so, we might be able to translocate only into the ‘original’ Universe where he died on the same day as in our history. Thus, from our point of view, we will seem to have done nothing.”

So that’s that. Robbins loosened the collar of his starched linen shirt and sighed. So close—.

“But, there is another possibility.”

He looked at Everett again.

“The reason may not be transcosmological, but medical. Maybe Harrison’s opinion that Beethoven died of hepatitis is wrong. Maybe you didn’t give the vaccine properly.”

Robbins frowned. Well, he thought he had—.

“Also, Harrison said the success rate with the vaccine was 95 percent. That means it would fail one time out of twenty. Maybe we’ve just been unlucky.”

Robbins looked thankfully at Everett, feeling like a condemned prisoner who had received, if not a full pardon, at least a stay of execution.

The Chancellor asked, “What do you propose we do?”

Everett shrugged. “Harrison’s the expert on the medical possibilities. I suggest we discuss them with him.” She paused. “Speaking of Harrison, wasn’t he supposed to be at this meeting too?”

Just then the office door opened and Harrison walked unsteadily into the room. He collapsed into an empty chair and wiped a pale forehead with his palm. Right now, Robbins thought, he looked more like a patient than a physician.

“Sorry I’m late,” he mumbled. “I—Dr. Ertmann is dead.”

The Chancellor frowned. “Who?”

“Dorothy Ertmann. She’s been with me for five years.”

“I’m sorry to hear this.” The Chancellor looked truly concerned. “How did it happen?”

“She killed herself.” Harrison massaged his eyes. “At least she knew what to inject herself with to make it quick. Relatively painless.”

Everett said, “Do you know why she did it?”

“She left a note. But it wasn’t very specific. Something about her being so sorry that she’d betrayed the Institute and all of us. Especially me.” Harrison sighed. “Her closest relative is a younger sister in Des Moines. I’ll have to call her.”

The Chancellor said, “I know how upset you must be, and we won’t keep you here any longer than necessary. Before you arrived, we were discussing why Dr. Robbins’s project failed.”

Harrison listened patiently as Everett repeated sotto voce what she’d told them earlier. He said, “Based on our tests, I’m certain our diagnosis of the cause of Beethoven’s death is correct. And I taught Dr. Robbins to use the injector myself. It’s so simple to use, it’s virtually idiot-proof.” He glanced at Robbins. “Sorry, that didn’t come out right.”

“No offense taken.”

Harrison continued, “Also, the vaccine won’t work if the recipient can’t generate a good immune response, or if the infection is too severe.”

Everett said, “Could the dose itself have been defective in some way?”

Harrison shook his head. “No. I tested it myself shortly before giving it to Dr. Robbins. It never left my possession until I gave it to him.”

“Then what do you suggest, Dr. Harrison?” the Chancellor asked.

Harrison shrugged. “Dr. Robbins should go back again, and inject Beethoven with nanoscrubbers. Barring previous treatment with a specific blocking agent, they’re essentially M-safe.”

Everett frowned pensively at Harrison. “While I was listening to you I thought of another possibility.” She paused. “Deliberate sabotage.”

Harrison sat straight up in his chair. “What are you suggesting?”

“It strikes me that both the transcosmological and medical reasons for this Mure are so remote that we can’t rule out the human factor.”

“I told you, I tested the vaccine myself and kept it with me until—.”

“I’m not accusing you of anything. Or Dr. Robbins either.”

Me? Robbins thought. This is my project. How could she think—. He paused. Unless she thinks I’m so diabolically clever I proposed it just to sabotage it, so no one else would try to change TCE’s past. Robbins felt a trickle of sweat form under his armpits. I know I didn’t sabotage it. But how can I prove it to them?

Everett continued, “Do you know anyone else who had both the technical knowledge and opportunity to sabotage the project?”

Harrison frowned. “Well, I suppose—.”

“Dr. Ertmann.”

They all looked at Robbins.

“Remember, Dr. Harrison? She was in the Portal Room just before I translocated. Could she have done something?”

Harrison glared at him in a way unbecoming someone dedicated to the saving of lives.

“Madame Chancellor,” he said, “I find Dr. Robbins’s insinuation in very poor taste, considering the person in question has just died under tragic circumstances and cannot defend herself.”

“We understand, Dr. Harrison,” Everett said. “However, try to put your personal feelings aside, and give us an honest answer.”

Harrison’s shoulders sagged. “Dr. Ertmann was very—idealistic. She was one of the most caring and dedicated physicians I have ever worked with.”

He paused. “However, I must say this too. When Dorothy went back and obtained those specimens from Beethoven, she was under the impression it was a standard pathology project to discover his cause of death—the kind she and I have done on so many other historical figures before. After Dr. Robbins’s project was approved, I”—he hesitated—“told her what its real purpose was. And yes, I know that information was only supposed to be given on a strict ‘need to know’ basis. But I believed that, considering the dangerous work she’d done, she had the moral, if not technically the legal right to know.”

Everett said, “And how did she react when you told her?”

“She became very angry. She cited the potential risks of erasing our own world, or of causing some unforeseen catastrophe on TCE—much like Dr. Brentano did at our recent meeting. She even accused me of lying to her, and betraying her.”

The Chancellor asked, “But—what does this all mean?”

“It means,” Everett answered, “that we try again. But this time, it’s going to be a little more complicated. And,”—she looked at Robbins—“a lot more dangerous.”

After putting on his NOC suit, Robbins re-entered the Portal Room. Miles was talking to Everett and Harrison. “—Now that you mention it, I did pick up a pair of NV goggles and a retrieval bracelet off the floor after Dr. Robbins and I came back into the Portal Room.”

Everett looked at Robbins. “The technician says Dr. Ertmann was left unattended at the active portal for ten minutes. So she had time to enter TCE, and do something to sabotage your attempt to vaccinate Beethoven. Harrison says she probably injected him with a blocking agent which would prevent him from responding to the vaccine you gave, or any nanoscrubbers we might inject later.”

Harrison nodded.

Robbins said, “Tell me again. What exactly am I supposed to do?”

“The technician has set the coordinates to translocate you to Beethoven’s apartment about five minutes before we believe Dr. Ertmann arrived. What you need to do, is stop her. Confront her when she arrives. Convince her to return without doing what she came to do.” A grim smile formed on Everett’s lips. “Be creative.”

Robbins replied, “But how is that going to change anything? You’re saying that if I stop Dr. Ertmann, the vaccine I injected should work then, and Beethoven will live longer. But, 1 know he didn’t live longer, because when I went to TCE the day after he was ‘supposed’ to die, he was dead. Therefore, I won’t succeed, I can’t succeed in stopping her! Do you understand what I’m trying to say?” Robbins frowned. He wasn’t sure he understood what he was trying to say. “It sounds like I’m supposed to change what’s already happened. And I remember you said it’s impossible to change our past.”

“No,” Everett replied patiently, “we can’t travel back along the timeline of our own branch Universe and change its past. But, as I said at your meeting, we can change the ‘past’ of TCE without running into the kind of causality problems you’re trying to describe. In other words, from our past’ and ‘present’ perspective, Dr. Ertmann did succeed in preventing the vaccine from working and prolonging Beethoven’s life. However, if you go back ‘now’ and stop her, from our ‘future’ point of view—which will become the present’ when you return through the portal after stopping her—at that time, from our perspective, she will have failed, and the vaccine you gave will work. Is that clear?”

Robbins knew she couldn’t see his face through the black hood of the NOC suit, but she must have guessed how bewildered it looked.

Everett said sympathetically, “Even if you don’t understand, just take my word. If you do what I tell you, it will work.” Then a real smile flickered on her lips. “Trust me, I’m a physicist!”

Robbins and the other two men blinked. Now’s the time she decides to show she has a sense of humor, he thought.

Recovering first, Miles said, “The portal is stable and active, Dr. Everett.”

The latter said, “Good luck, Dr. Robbins.” Sounds like I’ll need it. He walked to the portal entrance—.

“One more thing.” Caught with one leg in the air, Robbins teetered on the threshold of the portal before righting himself.

The grim smile was back on Everett’s lips. “Make sure you stay on TCE no more than fifteen minutes. Otherwise you might—literally—run into your past’ self coming through to inject the vaccine. I’m not sure what would happen if that occurred, but some of the possibilities are very—unpleasant.”

As if I didn’t have enough to worry about already.

At least the translocation went smoothly—no rude surprises so far. The kitchen in the composer’s apartment was almost exactly as he remembered it. His NV goggles guided him back to the main studio room. He positioned himself in the corner of the room farthest from the bedroom door—and waited.

After what seemed like an eternity, he heard a faint rustle from the kitchen. A few seconds later, she came through the open doorway. Ertmann was dressed just as he’d last seen her in the Portal Room. She was wearing the NV goggles and bracelet Miles had mentioned. In her left hand she held an injector like the one he’d used to inject the vaccine—or was that “going to use”? He let her get half way to the bedroom door before he whispered, “Stop.”

She froze like a statue. While the rest of her remained immobile her head swiveled slowly towards the direction of his voice.

“I know what you’re planning to do, and I can’t let you do it.” Robbins hoped he sounded menacing.

“Dr. Harrison sent you, didn’t he,” she whispered back.

“Yes.”

Shoulders slumped in resignation, she placed the injector in a pocket on the side of her lab coat. “I should have known it wouldn’t work.”

“Now we’re going to go back to the kitchen together, activate the portal, and leave. Understood?”

The expression on her face was so forlorn he had to suppress an urge to go over, give her a hug, and say, “There, there, it’s all right.”

Ertmann shrugged. “Why not?”

Moving quietly to her side, Robbins steered her back toward the kitchen. As they entered it he started to activate the retrieval bracelet on his wrist—and then she broke away from him and screamed, “No!”

Startled, Robbins froze. What if she’d just woken Beethoven up—.

“What you and the others are planning to do is wrong!” she shouted. “It could destroy our world, and this one! Billions of living, breathing human beings—on our Earth, this one, all of us—might be snuffed out like we’d never existed, or maybe suffer something worse than we can possibly imagine! I can’t let you do it!”

She snatched a wicked-looking, vaguely familiar knife from a nearby table and pointed it at him.

Robbins stared at her. What was he supposed to do now? He was taller than she was, probably stronger. But he was no fighter, she was about fifteen years younger than him—and she had a knife.

“Don’t be foolish,” he said. “It’s over. Just what do you think you’re going to do with that knife?” Remembering too late that she was probably an expert at surgery, he hoped she’d take it as a purely rhetorical question. “We’re on to your plan, and you can’t fight all of us!” Of course, he added to himself, the rest of “us” don’t happen to be here right now—.

The knife in Ertmann’s hand drifted slowly downward. “You’re right,” she whispered. “I can’t fight all of you.”

You’ve got her on the ropes, now finish her off! “Harrison took you into his confidence. He trusted you—and you betrayed him! You betrayed all of us at the Institute—but most of all you betrayed him. He’s been like a father to you all these years, and you still betrayed him!” He wasn’t sure if the “father” part was true, but it sounded good.

The knife clattered to the floor. Robbins glanced over his shoulder, expecting to hear curses in German and see an irate composer storm out of the bedroom to confront the prowlers in his home.

“You’re right,” Ertmann repeated. The NV goggles covered her eyes so he couldn’t see the tears, but she was sobbing. “What do you want me to do?”

“Activate the portal and leave—now!”

It was hard to act so cruelly. He had to suppress another urge to give her a comforting hug. Quietly, she fumbled with the bracelet on her wrist. The portal snapped to shimmering life—and then she was gone.

Robbins exhaled slowly. Didn’t know you had it in you.

Then he tensed again. Just because Beethoven hadn’t made a dramatic entrance into the kitchen didn’t mean he wasn’t stumbling around in his bedroom trying to light a candle to see who was making the commotion. Cautiously, Robbins walked to the bedroom, and peeked in.

The great man was snoring heavily, lying in the same position Robbins had seen (would see?) him in when he came with the vaccine. Robbins mentally kicked himself for forgetting something so basic. Ertmann could have shouted and made noise all night and it wouldn’t have woken Beethoven up!

He went back to the kitchen. He wasn’t sure how much time he had before “he” would come through from the other side. And he certainly didn’t want to find out first-hand what kind of unpleasant things Everett was alluding to if he encountered his “earlier” self.

As Robbins started to activate the portal a sudden thought stopped him. When he re-emerged back on Earth, Ertmann would still be alive—wouldn’t she? He’d assumed that, by going back into the “past” to confront her and change what she’d done, he’d also be preventing her from committing suicide. Now, trying to remember what Everett had said, he wasn’t so sure. But you couldn’t talk to a “dead” person like that—could you? Then he remembered what he’d told Ertmann, how she’d betrayed everyone, especially Harrison—and where he’d heard those words before. If she was still dead when he returned to Earth—.

Feeling sick, he activated the portal and stepped through.

“Well, was it worth it?”

Robbins smiled at her. “I think so.”

He sat down next to Antonia on the couch in his apartment. The last ten days had been the most exhausting—and exhilarating—of his life. He’d made thirty-two trips to TCE since translocating a second time to Vienna on March 27, 1827—and this time finding the newspaper headline was about somebody named Metternich, and not Beethoven’s death. Daylight trips to music shops, more nighttime excursions to the composer’s home during his additional lifetime—. Beethoven’s apartment now seemed as familiar to him as his own.

After the composer died in 1834, he and his staff made scouting excursions every one to two years to see what effect his “new” music had produced on other composers. So far the survey had reached 1847—and found no significant changes. Chopin, Schumann, Mendelssohn, Berlioz—the new masterpieces Beethoven created hadn’t affected their music. Maybe it was because those final works were so distinctly in his own individual style—an apotheosis of everything he had previously written. A musical valedictory, rather than breaking new ground like the Eroica.

Antonia said, “When can we hear this wonderful music?”

“Soon.” Late this afternoon his staff had finished downloading all the scores he’d scanned from the composer’s manuscripts into the musicology section’s own computer system. After assigning digitized instruments to each part, and adjusting the dynamics and tempos, they now had versions of the music ready for playback.

“I have to admit, I am curious. What did he write during those ‘extra’ years?”

“Mostly chamber music. The remaining movements of his string quintet in C major. Three string quartets. Two piano sonatas. Three trios for piano, violin, and cello.” He paused. “And one work for orchestra.”

Antonia arched her eyebrows.

“You and I will be the first people on our Earth to hear Beethoven’s final symphony.

“The A minor.”

“The Tenth.”

Raising his arm as if holding a baton, he brought it down with a sudden down-beat. “Computer—begin!”

The slow introduction to the first movement began with a series of crashing dissonances by the full orchestra. Finally the clashing chords resolved themselves into a quiet, gentle theme in C major, introduced by a solo clarinet and supported by pizzicato strings. Gradually the melody was taken up by the rest of the orchestra, underwent a brief development—then suddenly disappeared in a dark descent into A minor as the main Allegro section began. A short exposition presented two tragic themes. (“Both,” Robbins whispered, “are derived from ones in works by J. S. Bach. The ‘Crucifixus’ section of the Mass in B minor, and a cantata entitled ‘Christ Lay in the Bonds of Death.’ ”) The development section kept almost exclusively to minor keys, the sense of pain, foreboding, and heroic but futile struggle in the music becoming more and more intense. The recapitulation brought no relief, finally ending in a whisper of hopeless resignation in the tonic minor.

The Andante second movement was a set of alternating variations on two themes, one in F major and the other in C minor. (Robbins smiled at the quizzical look on Antonia’s face. “Sound familiar, don’t they? Both melodies are similar to ones in Messiah. The aria He Was Despised, and the chorus, ‘Surely He Hath Borne Our Griefs.’ Beethoven once said Handel was his favorite composer.”) The movement’s initial quiet, pastoral mood eventually gave way to darkness and despair in its last measures.

The third movement Scherzo was a Presto in C minor that sounded like a dame macabre, a hideous joke. (“The main theme is like the one Mozart used in the ‘Dies Irae’ section of his Requiem.) Each return of the prayer-like melody (“More Mozart—from the Masonic Funeral Music”) in the A-flat major Trio sections was, just as a glimmer of hope seemed to appear, abruptly trampled by the reappearance of the dark theme of the main section.

And then—the fourth and last movement, initially marked Moderate. It opened with the reappearance of the original gentle C major theme from the beginning of the symphony, played this time in A minor. The higher strings and woodwinds played it softly, tentatively. Just as it swelled into a tragic sigh a harsh new theme played fortissimo by the trombones and lower strings tried to overwhelm it. ( “That new theme,” Robbins whispered, “is a verbatim quote of music Beethoven’s old teacher, Haydn, wrote to honor the emperor of his native Austria.”) Despite this onslaught by the second subject, the primary theme returned again and again, each time more forcefully, until it and the Emperor’s Hymn seemed locked in a titanic struggle full of clashing dissonances. Then, after a sudden and dazzling modulation to its original key of C major, with trumpets blaring and timpani thundering the primary theme overwhelmed the “imperial” one, shattering it into scattered notes and crushing it out of existence. Its true power and strength finally revealed, the full orchestra took up the melody in a coda of orgiastic celebration and joy that made the ending of Beethoven’s preceding symphony seem tame and restrained by comparison. Finally, amid martial fanfares of barbaric intensity by the brass and percussion, the strings and woodwinds played the victorious C major theme in a massive contrapuntal tour de force that brought the symphony to a triumphant close.

They sat together in silence for a long time, the music echoing in their ears, and hearts.

Finally Antonia spoke. “You’re right. It was worth it.”

“Actually,” Robbins said, “Beethoven started a new symphony, in C minor, in 1826. But it never got beyond some sketches. Then, in 1831, he started this work, and finished it early in 1834. He wrote in his diary he’d been inspired to write it by some recent events, like the Poles rising up and trying to free their country from Russian rule. And especially by a gift his nephew Karl gave him on his sixtieth birthday—a German translation of Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound. He said the music depicts the triumphant struggle of the human spirit and Life against tyranny and Death—the ultimate victory of freedom over oppression. Like the Fifth Symphony, or the Leonore Overture No. 3, only more so.

“Interestingly enough, a few years after it was first performed, the primary theme from the fourth movement, the one that closes the symphony so dramatically, was used as the basis for a very popular patriotic song. Just about every music shop I’ve gone into on TCE from 1837 on had copies of it for sale. The last time I went to Vienna, in 1847, a crowd was even singing it at some kind of street rally.”

The lyrics were by an obscure Hanoverian poet. In the original German, they were hardly great poetry. Lytton had written a version in English for him which was no better. Like the first verse—“Arise, ye German sons, unite! / No foe can stand before thy might! / The future now belongs to thee, / In union lies thy destiny!”

“It’s like the way new words were written about the same time to Haydn’s Kaiserhymne too, praising Germany instead of the emperor of Austria. Deutchland über alles, which became the German national anthem.”

“Did Beethoven get to hear the symphony before he died?”

“Well, he could never have ‘heard’ it. Towards the end of his life he was almost completely deaf. Remember the story, that when he conducted the first performance of the Ninth Symphony, someone had to turn him around to see the audience applauding? But if you mean, did he ever attend a performance—no. He died just before a set of concerts was going to start. It was first played a week after his funeral.”

He smiled at the bust of Beethoven on the piano. The composer scowled angrily back at him.

Robbins frowned disappointedly. I thought you d like hearing your symphony!

“What exactly did he die of, Howard?”

He blinked. “From injuries suffered in a tragic street accident.” Run over by a runaway wagon carrying offal. Never heard it coming. TCE had lost the romanticized story of the composer leaping from his deathbed to shake his fist in defiance at the lightning-filled sky. But, he believed, it had gained far more.

Antonia looked dreamily ahead, the music still playing within her. “When are you going back?”

Tentatively, he draped his arm over her shoulder. “Tomorrow morning. We’re right on schedule with our survey, up to 1847. Velikovsky says there were major political disturbances in Vienna in 1848 and 1849, so he told me to ‘jump ahead’ to 1852, when things should be safe.”

She replied, “So you’re free for the night.” Antonia’s eyes gazed deeply into his, a shy but gently inquisitive smile on her lips. He had last seen that look in her eyes far too long ago, and knew she wasn’t planning to go back to her own apartment tonight.

Much later, with Antonia lying asleep in his arms, Robbins gazed contentedly up at the ceiling of his bedroom. Memories of the music, of Antonia’s body moving rhythmically against his, wafted through his thoughts like a slowly-played fugue. It was moments like this that made Life worth living. Now, even if he were to die tomorrow, he would die happy.

But as he drifted off to sleep, memories he’d suppressed for the past ten days seeped back into his mind. Of Everett saying, “No, there was nothing you could have done to save her.” Of Harrison, Ertmann’s mentor, reassuring him, “No, it wasn’t your fault. She did it to herself.” Maybe they were sincere, maybe they were even right. But as hard as he tried, he couldn’t rationalize it, or forgive himself. So young, so beautiful. . . . He’d wanted to hug her, comfort her—not kill her! Remembering those things, the exuberance he’d felt from listening to the Tenth Symphony, from making love with Antonia, faded and died.

His semi-conscious mind tried to block those memories by replacing them with music. But the melodies it played were from tragic symphonies. Unlike those of Beethoven, some symphonies in a minor key, like Tchaikovsky’s B minor or Haydn’s E minor, did not finish in a bright, triumphant major key, but maintained the darker minor tonality and a mood of Sturm und Drang tragedy and despair to the very end. Sometimes, in music as in the real world, Death did defeat life.

As Antonia pressed warmly against him, sleep finally claimed him too. But he slept poorly. All through the night more music haunted his dreams. Motifs from Schumann’s overture to Manfred, especially the one representing Astarte. And the second movement of Schubert’s string quartet in D minor. The one subtitled, “Death and the Maiden.”

Robbins frantically pounded the sides of the crater with his fists. There had to be something he could do to help her! The Cossack’s pants were around his ankles now, his bare buttocks quivering as he laughed, relishing the woman’s terror—in no hurry to turn the horror of anticipation into the greater one of reality. He raised himself higher over the rim of the crater, his eyes desperately scanning the ground for a rock, a stick, anything he could use to fight them, even if he died trying!

And then he saw it—a flash of metal against the waist of the fat dead man lying nearby. Tucked into his belt.

A pistol.

Suddenly he heard music again in his mind. The whole Tenth Symphony, compressed into an almost instantaneous burst of sound and power. The dramatic battle of the human spirit against evil and Death, always fighting back, never giving up no matter how much pain and suffering it had to endure, until finally winning its ultimate victory!

In an instant, like a Titan unchained, he raised himself up from the ground, ran toward the dead man, pulled the gun from his belt, and sprinted towards the group ahead. The tiny bit of his mind that remained rational tried to tell him that he’d never fired a gun, that he didn’t even how many bullets it had, but he ignored it. He screamed in Russian, “Stop!”

The Cossacks stopped laughing, and looked at him.

Holding the pistol outstretched with both hands, Robbins stood just far enough away so he could cover all four of them. The music within him started to fade as the reality of the situation sank in.

“Let go of them, you bastards!” The gun swiveled from one to the other. For the first time Robbins got a good look at the weapon. It looked like the kind he’d seen in that violent, century-old “Western” Billingsley had shown him once. Remembering what the hero of that “movie,” Shane, had done with his six-shooter, Robbins cocked the hammer of the gun with his thumb.

The Cossack directly in front of him slowly bent over, pulled his pants back up, and turned around.

“Peace be with you, my friend,” he said through broken yellow teeth. “The Czar has sent us to free you from your oppressors. Certainly not to harm you!” He gestured toward the woman on the ground. “There is enough here for us to share. Let us all pleasure ourselves, and be brothers.”

Even from five meters away Robbins could smell how foul his breath was.

The Cossack bent down again and seemed to brush some mud off his boot, curling his hand. Straightening up, he began to walk slowly towards Robbins. “Let me shake your hand in friendship—.”

“Stay back!”

The other man’s face looked wounded. “Surely you would not shoot down an unarmed man, one who only wishes to be your friend, like a dog! Surely you, a man of the German people, who are known even in our land for their courtesy and gentleness, would not do such a thing!”

Something glinted in the hand the Cossack had used to clean his boot. As the Russian raised his arm back to throw the knife he’d taken from the scabbard hidden in his boot, Robbins’s finger squeezed the trigger of the gun. The recoil staggered him. He recovered in time to see the other man and his knife begin a slow fall to the ground, the top of his head blown away in a scarlet shower of blood, bone, and brain.

The Cossack still on his horse tried to spur it at him. Two shots, and he too lay sprawled and bloody on the ground. The one pinning the woman down leapt up and pulled out his saber. It clattered to the street after a bullet tore through the center of his face.

The last one was still holding the woman’s husband, using him as a shield. As the Cossack tried to pull out his saber the man twisted away from his captor. Robbins put a bullet into the Russian’s belly.

The sound of the Cossacks’ horses whinnying and striking their hooves hysterically against the cobblestones snapped Robbins back to reality. The young man was at his wife’s side, brushing off the blood and gore that had splattered on her bare flesh. Gently pulling her skirt back down, he hugged and comforted the sobbing woman in his arms.

In a daze Robbins walked slowly toward each of the bodies in turn, careful not to step in the spreading red puddles on the street. He didn’t need Harrison here to tell him they all looked very dead. The gun at his side dangled from his finger, then dropped to the ground.

“Will you be all right now?” he asked the man, who’d raised his wife to an unsteady standing position.

“Yes, if you help me,” the man said, glancing toward the nearest horse.

Robbins helped him lift the woman onto its back, sidesaddle. Then the man led the horse down the street, avoiding the crater Robbins had just vacated. He watched the couple turn the comer at the other end of the street, and heard the woman shout over the distant rumble of artillery, “God bless you, and thank you!”

Then, trying not to look anymore at what was on the ground, Robbins walked slowly toward the entrance to the alley—and the portal home. So much for the “First Law of Contact,” he thought darkly as he reached for the bracelet on his left wrist—.

Suddenly there was a sharp bang! and a tearing pain ripped through his back under his right shoulder. Knocked down by the impact, he looked back toward the front of the alley and saw one of the Cossacks—it was the one he’d shot in the belly-lying on his side, pointing the smoking barrel of the gun at him. The Cossack grimaced, dropped the gun, and then lay still.

His back burning like acid, Robbins stared in disbelief at the red stain slowly spreading on the front of his shirt. Somehow he managed to stand up and stagger farther into the alley, fighting the urge to faint. When he tried to raise his right arm more pain lanced through him, and it was getting hard to breathe. Swinging his left wrist over toward his right hand, his numb fingers fumbled with the retrieval bracelet.

Suddenly the air in front of him shimmered, and the welcoming darkness of the portal appeared. Gasping for breath, legs feeling like lead, he stumbled into it. Blackness surrounded him, a peaceful oblivion without beginning or end...

Recapitulation

When he woke up the pain was gone, and he could breathe again. The room was bright and decorated in white. He was in a strange bed, in an unfamiliar place—.

“Don’t try to get up, Howard.”

He sank back into the sheets, and smiled thankfully.

Antonia sat by the edge of the hospital bed. “Dr. Harrison says the surgery went fine, and soon you’ll be as good as new.” Robbins saw the relief in her eyes as she kneaded his hand. Life is so short and uncertain, he thought. It was time to get his priorities right. Cut back on his work, convince Antonia to do the same—and find time to build a life together.

Suddenly he felt very tired. As much as his heart wanted to gaze into Antonia’s eyes, the rest of him just wanted to sleep.

“You won’t leave me, will you, Antonia?” he croaked.

“Never, Howard. I’ll never leave you.”

He drifted back to sleep, Schumann’s Träumerei wafting through his mind.

But when he woke up, Antonia was gone.

The nurse who came in a few minutes later told him that he’d been in the institute’s hospital over four days. Then Velikovsky walked in. The latter asked him to describe what had happened on that street in Vienna in late 1852. Though eager to listen to every detail of the incident, he brushed aside Robbins’s queries about what it all meant with “It’s still too early to tell.”

After Velikovsky left, Robbins tried to think it through himself, but couldn’t. As many times as he’d traveled to TCE, his knowledge of the non-musical history of the places he visited was too sketchy.

Harrison saw him the next morning. “Everything seems to be healing well.” He paused. “Velikovsky asked me to tell you that there’s going to be a special meeting of the humanities committee at 1600 hours. Medically speaking, it should be safe for you to attend.”

“What’s the meeting about? That—incident on TCE?”

Harrison hesitated. “Yes. Velikovsky and his people started investigating it right after you returned, and he’s presenting their preliminary findings and suggestions to the executive committee this morning. He’ll meet with the science committee at 1400 hours, and your committee after that.” He looked at Robbins with an expression that resembled pity. “There are many rumors circulating as to what he will say.”

“Such as?”

Harrison shook his head as he left. “I always try to deal with facts, not things that may or may not be true. Life is so much simpler that way.”

A little before 1600, two nurses helped him get dressed and into a wheelchair. The orderly who scooted him through the underground tunnel to the institute’s main building, got him to the meeting room just on time.

The others were already there. He took the last empty seat, between Billingsley and Antonia. She didn’t respond to his greeting, but stared stonily ahead. Before he could speak again the Chancellor said, “Thank you all for coming here on such short notice. As you know, Dr. Robbins was seriously injured during his last translocation to TCE. We all wish him a speedy recovery.”

Then Velikovsky spoke. “For the last five days my staff has been traveling to TCE investigating the historical anomaly experienced by Dr. Robbins. Many were given missions which would normally have been considered too dangerous. Some have actually been injured—several fatally. Through their dedicated efforts, we now know that Transcosmic Earth has suffered a major catastrophe.”

Everyone in the room glanced at Robbins. What happened? What did I do?

Velikovsky continued, “Outside of a surge in nationalistic activity in the various German states in the preceding decade, we did not discover any significant deviations in the history of TCE until 1848. In that year, in our history, a number of popular and nationalistic movements threatened to or, in a few cases, succeeded in changing the political structures of many countries in Europe.”

Robbins listened as Velikovsky described events he only vaguely recalled from the historian’s orientation lectures. Demonstrations and riots in Vienna and Berlin in March, 1848 which forced the royal family of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Hapsburgs, to flee their capital and threatened to topple the other major German state, the Kingdom of Prussia. The calling shortly thereafter of the Constituent National Assembly in Frankfurt. Its purpose was to try to unite all the independent German states—Prussia, a hodgepodge of much smaller principalities and cities in middle and southern Germany, and the Hapsburgs’ empire composed of Austria, Hungary, and much of central Europe—into a single nation.

In the end, Velikovsky said, that attempt failed. By 1849 the reactionary factions, the ones who supported the political status quo, had won. The first successful steps towards German unification were delayed until the mid-1860s. Through the Realpolitik policies of Prussia’s “Iron Chancellor,” Otto von Bismarck, that kingdom and the smaller German states were united in 1871 into the German Empire with the king of Prussia, William I, as its Emperor. The Hapsburgs continued on their own separate path, their Austro-Hungarian Empire marked by a growing decadence and military weakness until its political incompetence touched off the First World War in 1914. Except between 1938 and 1945, the Germans in Austria never were a part of the nation that became “Germany.”

“That is what happened in our history and,” Velikovsky continued, “until recently, on TCE. But while our history has not changed, that of TCE certainly has. There, in 1848, Prussia, the smaller German states, and the entire Austro-Hungarian Empire were united into the Pan-German Empire, with the Hapsburg ruler Ferdinand I assuming the title ‘Emperor of All the Germans.’

“Such a major change in the political structure of Europe—a new nation of over 75 million people in the very middle of the continent, much larger than any except Russia—produced a history far different from ours. The event which almost cost Dr. Robbins his life in 1852, one which never happened on our Earth, was the near-capture of Vienna, the capital of the new empire, by the army of Czar Nicholas I. The German forces under Prince Alfred von Windischgratz were finally able to repel it, and a week later won a decisive victory over the Russians at the Battle of Olmiitz. The French, under the newly self-crowned Napoleon HI, also launched an attack as the Russians were threatening Vienna. They were more successful, defeating the Germans near Cologne. After an armistice, they forced the Pan-German Empire to cede all territory west of the Rhine to their own Second Empire.”

He went on, adding more details. The Franco-German war of 1868, ending with the execution of Napoleon III and the installation of a German prince on the throne of France. The successful invasion and subjugation of Russia in 1878 by a general named Moltke, with a member of the German royal family placed on the throne of the Czars.

“—And with the formation of the Anglo-German Confederation in 1892, all of Europe, North Africa, the Middle East, and Australia were under the direct or indirect control of the Pan-German Empire. Over the next two decades the Confederation extended its influence to include all of Africa and, after a bloody war with the Empire of Japan, Asia. By 1912, except for those countries in the Western Hemisphere which were not possessions of formerly-independent European nations like Great Britain and Spain, a “Pax Germanica” extended across TCE.

“Except for different patterns of immigration to it in the late 19th century and, of course, no war with Spain in 1898, until 1912 major events in the United States were very similar to those on our Earth. That year, Woodrow Wilson was elected president on an ‘antimonarchist’ platform. It included his ‘Ten Points,’ calling for the ‘liberation of the enslaved peoples of the world, the establishment of democracy, and the right to national self-determination.’ That began a period of forty years in which the US waged an ideological, indirect war against the Confederation that included fomenting civil unrest, terrorism, and guerrilla wars using proxy ‘national democratic liberation front’ groups within its borders. In the early 1950s, however, this ‘cold war’ reached a crisis after the successful invasions of Cuba and Canada by the United States, and the overthrow of the republican government of Mexico by a Confederation-backed local faction and its replacement by a monarchy headed by a Hohenzollern prince.”

Velikovsky paused. “To understand what happened next, remember that nearly all of the important scientific figures from 1848 on we are familiar with still existed on TCE. For example, Albert Einstein, Edward Teller, and Wernher von Braun did similar pioneering work, but never emigrated to the United States. Those born in America, like the Wright brothers, J. Robert Oppenheimer, and Robert Goddard had careers even more successful than in our history. Thus, the technology on TCE in the middle of their new twentieth century was as advanced or, in some cases, more advanced than at the corresponding date on our world.”

Velikovsky looked directly at Robbins. “On December 1, 1953, the United States of America launched a massive preemptive nuclear strike with its full arsenal of aircraft and missiles against the major cities and military installations of the Confederation. The latter retaliated in kind.”

There was a long silence. “It was difficult to assess the full range of destruction produced immediately, and by the later effects of residual radiation, plague, and the famine caused by the resulting ‘nuclear winter.’ We estimate that three billion people—85 percent of the total population of TCE when the war began—had died by the end of 1954. After 1996, we’ve been unable to find any survivors.”

I did it, Robbins thought to himself. I don’t know how, but I killed all those people. Eyes closed, he didn’t dare look at the rest of them. Especially Antonia.

From a distance he heard Velikovsky say, “There are two important questions we must answer. What caused this catastrophe? And can we do anything to change it? I will defer the latter question to Dr. Everett. As to the first, I would like your opinion, Dr. Robbins.”

Reflexively he opened his eyes.

Velikovsky said, “Computer, display.”

A holographic display appeared in the middle of the table.

“This is a recording made in Frankfurt on July 4,1848 at the official announcement of the formation of the Pan-German Empire.” The recording must have been taken from the top of a tall building. Robbins looked down at a sea of cheering humanity in the great open area, and a dais on which stood bemedaled dignitaries. At ground level, near one end of the raised platform, he noticed a military band that seemed ready to start playing.

“The man speaking,” said Velikovsky, indicating the walrus-mustached figure speaking softly in German in the middle of the image, “is the same Baron Otto von Bismarck I mentioned earlier. In our history, he was one of the many nobles in the Prussian and Hapsburg courts who opposed German unification in 1848. In the revised history of TCE, however, for reasons we still do not fully understand, they were among its most enthusiastic supporters.” The tiny figure in the display concluded his speech with a generous sweep of his arm toward “our new Kaiser.” As if on cue the band started to play a powerful, triumphant, martial time.

Robbins felt his flesh turn cold. Now he understood. As they sang together the faces of the tiny figures in the recording showed a mixture of pride, fervor, and single-minded patriotism. Workers, peasants, aristocrats—men and women, people from every level of society, different in so many ways, but all united in a common cause—in their love for their country. Right arms raised in a salute to their new leader, they shouted the words to the song passionately, in complete, fanatical unity—as if they were now inspired to go out and conquer the world.

It all made sense. He thought of the armies of Revolutionary and Napoleonic France, marching out to the strains of La Marseillaise to overrun Europe. Or the Germans of the twentieth century on their Earth, with Deutchland über alles. Even the English, perhaps, during their days of Empire, with God Save the King. A memory from his childhood came back to him—the time his father had taken him to a baseball game. The swelling pride he’d felt at being an American, standing with the rest of the crowd, as he’d heard The Star-Spangled Banner sung for the first time.

The people in the recording seemed to feel the same thing, but many times more intensely as they sang their own anthem. Aufstehen! (“Arise, ye German sons, unite!”) A song whose melody was based on the primary theme of the fourth movement of Beethoven’s final symphony.

The A minor.

The triumphant Tenth.

“Dr. Robbins?” Velikovsky was speaking to him. “Dr. Brentano says you’re familiar with the song these people are singing, and that it might have a bearing on the question we are discussing. Is that correct?”

“Yes,” Robbins said. “But first—could you please turn off that recording?”

After the others had a little time to absorb what he’d told them, Robbins turned to Everett, who was sitting by herself in the far comer of the room. “Is there any way we can undo all this? Change things back the way they’re supposed to be?”

She nodded. “I think we can. At the science committee meeting earlier this afternoon, Harrison said the vaccine-blocking agent the late Dr. Ertmann tried to use would still be effective even if it were given up to twenty-four hours after you injected the vaccine. All you have to do is translocate to Beethoven’s apartment again, say thirty minutes ‘after’ you gave the vaccine, and inject this neutralizing agent into him. Theoretically, that would undo what’s been done to this point, and TCE would return to normal.’ I propose that you do just that.”

That’s all? That’s all I have to do? He looked down at his hands, clenched them, then opened them. I destroy worlds, then I create them again—.

But not anymore. He had no desire to play God. After this one last time, he swore never to go back to TCE again.

The Chancellor said, “Is there a second for Dr. Everett’s proposal? All in favor? Opposed? Let the record show that the humanities committee has voted six to zero in favor of her proposal.”

Robbins sighed. The sooner he did it the better he’d feel—.

“And that,” the Chancellor continued, “brings us to the second item on our agenda. Dr. Velikovsky has submitted a proposal which was approved by the executive and science committees earlier today. It involves setting up a special task force to review future projects for changing the history of TCE. The applicability of this proposal is, of course, contingent on Dr. Robbins’s anticipated success in returning TCE to its original state. If he does, and this proposal is approved by the committee today, the task force will—.”

“What?” The Chancellor looked startled at Robbins’s interjection. “Are you saying that, if I do make things right on TCE, you’re going to let someone else go back and change them again?”

Velikovsky said, “Precisely. You have shown it is possible, with appropriate manipulations, to change TCE’s history without changing our own. Thus, instead of passively retrieving lost information as we’ve done in the past, we now know we can use TCE as a vast laboratory for studying the effects of carefully selected changes on subsequent political, scientific, and artistic developments. After each such experiment is finished, we can go back and, as you will be doing, undo that change and reset TCE’s history to its ‘default’ condition.”

He smiled warmly at Robbins. “Although the change you caused had, in that particular history of TCE, disastrous consequences for its people, we here on our Earth have benefited greatly. The dynamics of what is, to us, an ‘alternate’ history will provide enormous material for analysis and review for years to come. And this is just the beginning. We all owe you a debt of gratitude for showing us what can be done.”

Robbins wished he still had that gun he’d dropped on TCE. “Do you realize what you’re saying? You’re talking about deliberately manipulating, possibly destroying billions of innocent people for the sake of an ‘experiment’!”

Velikovsky looked pained. “Not real people, like us. ‘Shadow people,’ in a ‘shadow history,’ without a real existence of their own. As Dr. Everett has said, they live in a ‘pliable’ past that is not truly real’—.”

“Don’t you dare misquote me!” Everett interrupted. “You know what I think of your proposal!”

Robbins glared at Velikovsky. “They are real! Flesh and blood! I saw them! I touched them!” I killed four of them personally! “They can be hurt, they can feel pain just like us—and we have no right to play God!”

“Order, order!” The Chancellor looked angry. “We must discuss this proposal in a civilized manner. You and Dr. Velikovsky have had your say. Does anyone else wish to comment?”

There was another round of shouting, this time with Antonia on one side and Lytton and Shimura on the other. For every “Shelley” that Lytton mentioned or “van Gogh” that Shimura brought up, Antonia countered with “And how many billions of people have to suffer and die to get those tew extra poems and paintings?”

Billingsley said nothing. Just fiddled with his bow tie.

After the arguing died down the Chancellor said, “Is there a second for Dr. Velikovsky’s proposal?”

“Seconded!” Lytton and Shimura spoke simultaneously.

“All in favor?”

Velikovsky, Lytton, and Shimura raised their hands.

“Opposed?”

Robbins’s arm shot up first, then Antonia’s. Billingsley raised his lazily.

“Let the record show that the humanities committee has voted three to three on Dr. Velikovsky’s proposal.” She paused. “As per our by-laws, I must now cast the tie-breaking vote. Based on the positive recommendations made earlier today by the executive and science Committees, I feel that I too must vote in favor of the proposal. Let the record show that—.”

“That does it!” Antonia’s face was crimson. “You little tin gods can play your games with peoples’ lives by yourselves! I have nothing but the utmost contempt for you, and refuse to be a part of it!”

She stood up. “I resign from the Institute! Good-bye!” She glared at Robbins and sneered in a low voice, “You and your damn music!” Then she left the room.

“What a woman.” Billingsley said suddenly. He stood up. “I didn’t say anything before we voted because everybody had their minds made up already. Now, I’ll just say that a person can stand for a lot of pushing if they have to.” He paused. “But there are some things a person can’t take. I resign too.”

He moved toward the door. “It’s sad. I used to think we were the good guys. That we were Earth-One. Looks like we’re really Earth-Three.

“And for those of you who don’t get that one, here’s another twentieth century term that seems appropriate right now. A.M.F.!” Billingsley’s last words as he left the room were what that acronym meant.

Robbins blinked. He’d never seen the Chancellor blush before.

Recovering her composure she said, “Any more business? Then this meeting is adjourned.”

The others began to stand, say their own good-byes, and leave. Robbins stayed in his chair, alone with his memories and regrets. Faintly, deep within him, his mind played through the final Adagio of Haydn’s “Farewell” Symphony. As each instrument played its plaintive “auf Wiedersehen” and left, all the things he had hoped and lived for, everything that brought meaning to his life, seemed to go with them. Finally, as the two remaining muted violins closed the work softly in the distant, lonely key of F-sharp major, he got up and left too.

Back in his own apartment, he felt a little better. Harrison had sent a message for him to get a good night’s sleep before going back to deliver the vaccine-blocker in the morning. He sat down at the Steinway and, wincing occasionally from the pain in his upper back, began to play. But the pieces his fingers selected made him feel depressed again. The third movement of Chopin’s Sonata no. 2 in B-flat minor, then Haydn’s Variations in F minor. As the last questioning notes of the latter work’s coda faded away, the doorbell rang. Praying it was Antonia, he opened the door—.

It was Everett.

“May I come in?”

She sat down on the couch. He sat down beside her.

“Nice piano.”

“Thank you.”

Everett looked at him sadly. “You look depressed.”

“Of course I am!” Everett’s hair shimmered like spun silver in the muted light. Almost like an older version of—. “If I go to TCE and manage to undo all the damage I’ve done, Velikovsky and the others are going to use all those people as guinea pigs for their ‘experiments’!” But isn’t that what you did? No, I was trying to do something good for them and us! Tell that to all the people you killed. “And if it doesn’t work, I’ll still be responsible for the death of billions of people—the whole human race there! Either way, it’s all my fault!”

“No it isn’t. It’s more my fault than yours. I could have vetoed your proposal anytime. You wanted your music, I wanted to prove we could change TCE’s history without changing ours. We both got want we wanted. Just not what we expected.”

Everett moved closer. “How much of that report about TCE I sent out three weeks ago did you understand?”

Robbins rolled his eyes.

“Oh. That much. Well, I’m not very good at asimoving, but I’ll try. The key thing you have to understand is, at any instant in time, ‘choices’ are being made. At the smallest scale, a radioactive atom may ‘choose’ to decay or not decay. When you get up in the morning, you choose to part your hair on the right or the left. The “present’ is the sum of all the specific choices and decisions made in the past. Nearly all those choices are trivial,’ in the technical sense that they don’t lead to any ‘significant’ difference in the history of the Universe. They might affect only an atom or, at the macroscopic level, only a tiny portion of the cosmos. But, occasionally, one of them makes a ‘critical’ difference.”

She paused. “On September 17, 1666, someone, or something made a choice which—god, nature, whatever you call it—considered so important that it caused our Universe to split into two branches. In one branch, one choice’ was made, some event occurred—and in the other branch, it didn’t. On November 9, 1998, the same thing happened, due to some other choice. What we perceive as the ‘real world’ is just one of those latter two ‘branch’ universes. What we call TCE is the discreet timeline, the ‘history,’ between those two branch points in 1666 and 1998.

“If you’re wondering what the actual choices were that made the Universe split in those two particular years—well, I wish I knew, too. But I do have some guesses. In 1666 Isaac Newton—You’ve heard of him, haven’t you?—was doing some of his most important work.” She smiled wryly. “It’s supposed to be a myth but, maybe, in the other branch universe, the apple ‘decided’ not to fall.

“As for 1998—well, I’ve never told anyone this before. People think I have delusions of grandeur as it is. I was in my high school library that day looking for a copy of Little Women. I went down the wrong aisle, and happened to see a set of the Feynman Lectures on Physics.” A sad, faraway look came to her eyes. “Perhaps, in that other branch universe, there’s no transcosmology. Maybe, at this moment, I’m a retired English teacher playing with my grandchildren.”

She sighed. “We can’t physically travel to any of those other branch universes, or back into the past’—that is, from 1998 to ‘now’—of our own particular branch. Actually, we might be able to do it someday, if you believe in stable wormholes—which I don’t. On the other hand, folding space-time to travel to TCE, which is in a null energy state relative to our branch Universe, is fairly easy. It’s like temporarily reconnecting an umbilical cord between a baby and its mother. We use a—.”

She noticed the blank look on his face, then muttered a word that sounded like “reason.” “Never mind. You don’t really need to understand why this should work, just what you have to do.”

Her face moved closer to his. “I have a plan. It’s more dangerous than anything we’ve done so far. Depending on how strict nature is about violating causality, it might not even work at all. But it’s the only way we can make everything right on TCE, and here.”

Robbins’s eyes opened wide. “How?”

“As I said, we can’t physically travel back into the past of our own branch Universe and change things that have already happened. But, by using TCE, we might be able to change them by a less direct method.” She smiled. “Actually, this idea isn’t very original. I first read about it in some old science fiction stories when I was in college.”

“Science fiction?”

Everett looked at him quizzically. “Do you read science fiction too?”

“No, but maybe I should.” He started to ask her if the idea she was referring to was in “graphic novels” too, but thought better of it.

Everett reached up and took a book of piano music from the top of the Steinway. Taking a pen from her purse, she began writing on the book’s blank back cover. “This is what you need to do—.”

Robbins’s eyes opened wider as she explained her plan.

“But didn’t you say it was dangerous to—?”

“Believe me, I wish there was another way!” She handed him the book. “Will you do it?”

Robbins looked at the instructions she’d written on it, then turned it over. It was his copy of Beethoven’s Sonata in E-flat major, Opus 81a. He leafed through the score, remembering the subtitles the composer had given to its three movements. Les Adieux. L’Absence. Le Retour. Then he turned the book back over and reread what she’d written.

“Well, Dr. Robbins? It’s your choice.”

He sighed. “If it’s the only way to make things right—of course I’ll do it.”

With a sense of déjà vu Robbins entered the Portal Room after changing into a NOC suit. Miles, Everett, and Harrison were there again—just like when he’d gone to TCE and prevented Ertmann from injecting Beethoven with the same medicine he was supposed to give him now.

Harrison handed him the injector. “I’ve loaded it with the vaccine-blocker. Inject it the same way you did the vaccine.”

From his place at the control panel Miles said, “The portal is stable and active. Spatial coordinates are the same as when Dr. Robbins translocated to inject the vaccine. Temporal coordinates are set for ... twenty-nine minutes and counting after he returned from that translocation.”

“Let me check those coordinates.” Brushing the technician aside, Everett scrutinized the panel carefully.

Injector in hand, Robbins walked to the entrance of the portal, waiting. He hoped Everett knew what she was doing.

The latter’s hand played briefly over the control panel.

Miles frowned. “Excuse me, Dr. Everett, but why did you change—?”

“Dr. Robbins,” she said, pointedly ignoring Miles. “Do you remember everything I told you?”

“Yes.”

“Then—good-bye!”

As the blackness of the portal enveloped him, Robbins ran over Everett’s instructions once more in his mind. He hoped this wasn’t just going to make things worse. But even if it meant his own destruction, he was determined to set things right. His last thought before he arrived was to remember what Everett said could be sent back into their own past via TCE.

Information.

Suddenly his thoughts were interrupted—he was there. His first breath brought a multitude of unpleasant smells. The NV goggles activated automatically in the dark room.

He was in the kitchen of Beethoven’s quarters. A fireplace filled with musty ashes was set into one wall. The room had several tables and open shelves, with plates, bowls, and utensils on them. A wicked-looking knife lay on one of the tables. In one comer stood a dusty, dilapidated pianoforte. Robbins smiled slightly, thinking how ironic that was.

Slowly, he entered the main living area, carefully avoiding bumping into the small writing desks and chairs scattered around it—.

“Stop.”

Robbins froze, terrified. Slowly, his head swiveled in the direction of the whispered word. His NV goggles revealed another person in the room. Someone about his height, and wearing a NOC suit just like his.

The strange man spoke again. “Don’t go into the bedroom.”

Robbins whispered back, “Who are you? What are you doing here?”

The dark figure stepped closer, and removed its goggles and hood. Robbins blinked, unable to comprehend what he saw.

It was his own face.

The man replaced the goggles over his eyes. “Don’t talk, just listen.”

Robbins nodded as the stranger spoke. Many of the latter’s instructions didn’t make sense but, he was assured by the other man, in time he would understand them. Robbins felt sick when the man told him why he had to do all those things right.

He did protest about injecting the vaccine he carried into the stranger’s bare right arm, but obeyed. “They have to think you really did inject it into Beethoven, so you can’t go back with the injector unused,” the stranger explained, wincing as he rolled his sleeve back down and rubbed his right upper back with his left hand. “If everything works out the way it should, there’s no way that can hurt me. And now you’ve been absent long enough. It’s time for you to return.”

Robbins followed the other man into the kitchen. “Are you coming too?” Robbins asked. The other man replied, “No. If Everett’s right, and this works, I can’t go back.

“Oh, one more thing.” Robbins saw him walk over to Beethoven’s pianoforte, and smile.

“Now, listen very carefully—.”

“Are you disappointed it didn’t work?”

Robbins shrugged. “I’ll live.”

Antonia sat next to him on the couch in his apartment, listening to the music with him. Eyes closed, she smiled dreamily as the symphony ebbed and flowed around them.

Draping his arm lovingly over Antonia’s shoulder, Robbins closed his eyes too. He was still trying to work out in his mind everything that had happened in the three days since the Humanities Committee had approved his proposal. Especially after he’d translocated to TCE intending to give Beethoven the vaccine.

Just as the man in Beethoven’s apartment had told him to do, immediately after he’d returned to Earth he’d gone to find Ertmann. Actually, he didn’t have to “go” anywhere. She was still calmly sitting in that same chair in the Portal Room with Harrison and Miles nearby, just like before he’d entered TCE to inject the vaccine. As soon as she saw him, before he had a chance to say anything, Ertmann “confessed” to them that she’d gone back before and injected Beethoven with something to block the vaccine. At Robbins’s suggestion, they’d called Everett to come to the Room and get her opinion on what they should do next. She had looked at him a bit suspiciously, as if to say she was the one who was supposed to suggest he go back a little “earlier” and confront Ertmann on TCE. But she’d agreed he should do it.

Back again in Beethoven’s apartment, when Ertmann appeared he’d pleaded with her to trust him, said he was on her side, and told her what they had to do. And, he’d said finally, when you go back, please, please don’t hurt yourself!

Then, after returning to Earth himself, he’d changed clothes and translocated back to Vienna on the morning of March 27, 1827. The newspapers there reported that Beethoven had died the day before—naturally, since he’d never injected him with the vaccine. Then he’d returned home once more—to “failure.”

The hardest part was lying at the special humanities committee meeting yesterday that he’d done his best to prolong Beethoven’s life. The others seemed surprised when he’d then asked to withdraw his proposal. He told them he’d had second thoughts about the possible disastrous consequences it might have for both TCE and their own world. He’d even used examples from the stories Billingsley had given him—and, most damning of all, the one the “stranger” in Beethoven’s apartment had told him about.

The vote in favor of withdrawing his proposal was four to two. Lytton and Shimura were the holdouts, disappointed they’d never get a chance to try out their own pet projects. Robbins still wondered if he’d done the right thing, following all the instructions the man who said he was a “future” version of himself had given him. But, if you can’t trust “yourself,” who can you trust?

As he’d asked her, Ertmann had visited him in his apartment earlier this evening. He’d stressed that she should never, ever tell anyone about their “conspiracy.” If anyone found out what really happened, they might try it again—and neither of them wanted that. Dorothy had thanked him for everything, especially the way he’d helped Harrison convince the Executive Committee not to dismiss her from the Institute. Then she’d given him a warm hug, planted a chaste kiss on his cheek, and left.

The memory of that hug lingered vividly in his mind. Robbins found himself having to suppress some very unplatonic thoughts. But no, he was a little too old for her. Besides, he already had a beloved.

The symphony was approaching its thunderous, explosive climax. Antonia snuggled closer to him. “Beautiful, isn’t it,” she murmured dreamily. “So ecstatic, so full of life and celebration.”

“Yes,” he agreed. “But not as beautiful as you.”

As their lips touched and he lost himself in their kiss, the music seemed to fade for a moment, replaced by another melody—a powerful, triumphant, martial tune in C major. The one the man in Beethoven’s apartment had tapped out on the pianoforte in the kitchen. Robbins wished the man had told him where it was from.

Antonia whispered softly in his ear, “Don’t be too disappointed you didn’t get your ‘new’ music. Remember, ‘Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter.’ ” Then, her breasts barely grazing his chest, she looked shyly up at him. He had last seen that look in her eyes far too long ago, and knew she wasn’t planning to go back to her own apartment tonight. Over her shoulder he glimpsed the bust of Beethoven on the Steinway. The ghost of an approving smile seemed to play on its plaster lips.

In the background, endlessly repeated booming notes by the full orchestra were followed by a skyrocketing upward glissando and the last fortissimo chords of Beethoven’s final symphony.

The D minor.

The joyous Ninth.

Content

Symphony in a Minor Key
by H. G. Stratmann

Introduction

Exposition

Development

Recapitulation