I…” he stammered, caught off guard, “… I thought someone might have come looking for me from my newspaper. I told my editor I was going to Saltram-on-Sea and that I’d send him a story about the invasion preparations, and I thought when he didn’t hear from me, he might—”
“What does he look like, your editor?”
“Brown hair, medium height,” he improvised, “but he may have sent someone, another reporter or—has anyone asked about me?”
“No. They might have spoken to Dad, I suppose. If they did, he very likely told them you’d gone back to London. That’s what we thought you’d done.”
Which might mean the team was looking for him in London. “Daphne, if my editor or anyone else does come, will you tell them where I am and what’s happened? And ask your father if anyone inquired about me. If they did, write and tell me.”
“Oh, I will. I’ll write you even if no one comes. And I’ll come visit you again if Dad can spare me.” Again that flirtatious glance at him. “Next time I’ll manage a cake, I promise.”
The matron came in and announced that visiting hours were over. Daphne stood up. “Thank you for coming,” Mike said, “and for the grapes. And for telling me about the Commander and Jonathan. I’m so sorry.”
She nodded, her made-up face suddenly sad. “Miss Fintworth says not to give up hope, that they may still be alive, but if they are, why haven’t they come home or written to us or anything?”
“Time,” the matron said sternly.
“Goodbye. I’ll come again soon, and you needn’t worry, I won’t go out with anyone but you,” Daphne said, planted a lipsticky kiss on his cheek, and hurried out to more whistles.
“You lucky devil,” one of the patients called out.
Lucky. I killed an old man and a fourteen-year-old boy. Here he’d been worried about saving Private Hardy’s life, and instead—I should have refused to go in the water. I should have told the Commander I’d lied before, that I couldn’t swim. Instead, he’d unfouled the propeller, and it had affected events, all right. It had gotten the Commander and Jonathan killed. And what else had it affected? What other damage had he done?
He lay awake well into the night, going over and over it, like an animal pacing its cage, and when he closed his eyes, trying to shut it out, he saw Jonathan and the Commander, heard the Stuka diving and the water splashing up where they’d been only moments before. If he hadn’t unfouled the propeller, the bomb would have hit the bow. They’d have begun taking on water, and one of the other boats would have come over to take everyone off and transfer them to—
But there hadn’t been any boats anywhere nearby, and there’d been dozens of Stukas. And with a damaged bow, they’d have been a sitting duck. On its next pass, the Stuka would have hit them amidships and killed everybody on board. Was that what was supposed to have happened? What would have happened if he hadn’t been there?
He sat up in bed, considering the implications of that possibility. If they were supposed to have been killed, if the Lady Jane had had an asterisk next to it on that list he hadn’t memorized, then he’d altered events not by getting them killed, but by saving them.
And a chaotic system had built-in mechanisms for countering alterations. It had negative loops that could tamp down effects or cancel them out altogether. History was full of examples. Assassins missed, guns misfired, bombs failed to go off. Hitler had survived an attempt on his life because the bomb had been put on the wrong side of a table leg. A telegram warning of the Pearl Harbor attack had been sent in time to have the ships take defensive measures, but it had gotten put in the wrong decoding pile and hadn’t arrived till after the attack.
And if the Commander and Jonathan weren’t supposed to have been rescued, that would have been easy to correct. Had their deaths on that second trip been part of a negative loop, of a cancellation? If it was, then he might not have done any damage after all. And that was why he’d been allowed to go to Dunkirk, because his actions hadn’t had a lasting effect on the outcome. But it still left Jonathan and the Commander dead. And what about Private Hardy?
Unless his saving of him had been canceled out, too. Hardy’d been drenched when