UR - By Stephen King Page 0,15
bruised sockets, crazed hair—he guessed he wasn’t alone. Looking into one alternate reality would have been challenging enough; here were over ten million, and although most appeared to be similar, not one was exactly the same.
The inauguration of the forty-fourth President of the United States was only one example, but a powerful one. They checked it in two dozen different Urs before getting tired and moving on. Fully seventeen front pages on January 21st of 2009 announced Hillary Clinton as the new President. In fourteen of them, Bill Richardson of New Mexico was her vice president. In two, it was Joe Biden. In one it was a Senator none of them had heard of: Linwood Speck of New Jersey.
“He always says no when someone else wins the top spot,” Don said.
“Who always says no?” Robbie asked. “Obama?”
“Yeah. He always gets asked, and he always says no.”
“It’s in character,” Wesley said. “And while events change, character never seems to.”
“You can’t say that for sure,” Don said. “We have a miniscule sample compared to the…the…” He laughed feebly. “You know, the whole thing. All the worlds of Ur.”
Barack Obama had been elected in six Urs. Mitt Romney had been elected once, with John McCain as his running mate. He had run against Obama, who had been tapped after Hillary was killed in a motorcade accident late in the campaign.
They saw not a single mention of Sarah Palin. Wesley wasn’t surprised. He thought that if they stumbled on her, it would be more by luck than by probability, and not just because Mitt Romney showed up more often as the Republican nominee than John McCain did. Palin had always been an outsider, a longshot, the one nobody expected.
Robbie wanted to check the Red Sox. Wesley felt it was a waste of time, but Don came down on the kid’s side, so Wesley agreed. The two of them checked the sports pages for October in ten different Urs, plugging in dates from 1918 to 2009.
“This is depressing,” Robbie said after the tenth try. Don Allman agreed.
“Why?” Wesley asked. “They win lots of times.”
“But there’s no rhyme or reason to it,” Robbie said.
“And no curse,” Don said. “They always win just enough to avoid it. Which is sort of boring.”
“What curse?” Wesley was mystified.
Don opened his mouth to explain, then sighed. “Never mind,” he said. “It would take too long, and you wouldn’t get it, anyway.”
“Look on the bright side,” Robbie said. “The Yankees are always there, so it isn’t all luck.”
“Yeah,” Don said glumly. “The military-industrial complex of the sporting world.”
“Soh-ree. Does anyone want that last slice?”
Don and Wes shook their heads. Robbie scarfed it and said, “Why not peek at the Big Casino, before we all decide we’re nuts and check ourselves into CentralState?”
“What Big Casino might that be, Yoda?” Don asked.
“The JFK assassination,” Robbie said. “Mr. Tollman says that was the seminal event of the twentieth century, even more important than the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo. I thought seminal events usually happened in bed, but hey, I came to college to learn. Mr. Tollman’s in the History Department.”
“I know who Hugh Tollman is,” Don said. “He’s a goddam commie, and he never laughs at my jokes.”
“But he could be right about the Kennedy assassination,” Wesley said. “Let’s look.”
.
They pursued the John-Kennedy-in-Dallas thread until nearly eleven o’clock, while college students hooted unnoticed below them, on their way to and from the local beerpits. They checked over seventy versions of the New York Times for November 23rd, 1963, and although the story was never the same, one fact seemed undeniable to all of them: whether he missed Kennedy, wounded Kennedy, or killed Kennedy, it was always Lee Harvey Oswald, and he always acted alone.
“The Warren Report was right,” Don said. “For once the bureaucracy did its job. I’m gobsmacked.”
In some Urs, that day in November had passed with no assassination stories, either attempted or successful. Sometimes Kennedy decided not to visit Dallas after all. Sometimes he did, and his motorcade was uneventful; he arrived at the Dallas Trade Mart, gave his hundred-dollar-a-plate luncheon speech (“God, things were cheap back in the day, weren’t they?” Robbie remarked), and flew off into the sunset.
This was the case in Ur 88,416. Wesley began to plug in more dates from that Ur. What he saw filled him with awe and horror and wonder and sorrow. In Ur 88,416, Kennedy had seen the folly of Vietnam and had pulled out over the vehement objections of Robert McNamara,