All Clear

ALL CLEAR

London —26 October 1940

By noon Michael and Merope still hadn’t returned from Stepney, and Polly was beginning to get really worried. Stepney was less than an hour away by train. There was no way it could take Merope and Michael—correction, Eileen and Mike; she had to remember to call them by their cover names—no way it could take them six hours to go fetch Eileen’s belongings from Mrs. Willett’s and come back to Oxford Street. What if there’d been a raid and something had happened to them? The East End was the most dangerous part of London.

There weren’t any daytime raids on the twenty-sixth, she thought. But there weren’t supposed to have been five fatalities at Padgett’s either. If Mike was right, and he had altered events by saving the soldier Hardy at Dunkirk, anything was possible. The space-time continuum was a chaotic system, in which even a minuscule action could have an enormous effect.

But two additional fatalities—and civilians, at that—could scarcely have changed the course of the war, even in a chaotic system. Thirty thousand civilians had been killed in the Blitz and nine thousand in the V-1 and V-2 attacks, and fifty million people had died in the war.
 
And you know he didn’t lose the war, Polly thought. And historians have been traveling to the past for more than forty years. If they’d been capable of altering events, they’d have done it long before this. Mr. Dunworthy had been in the Blitz and the French Revolution and even the Black Death, and his historians had observed wars and coronations and coups all across history, and there was no record of any of them even causing a discrepancy, let alone changing the course of history.

Which meant that in spite of appearances, the five fatalities at Padgett’s Department Store weren’t a discrepancy either. Marjorie must have misunderstood what the nurses said. She’d admitted she’d only overheard part of their conversation. Perhaps the nurses had been talking about the victims from another incident. Marylebone had been hit last night, too, and Wigmore Street. Polly knew from experience that ambulances sometimes transported victims to hospital from more than one incident. And that people one thought had been killed sometimes turned up alive.

But if she told Mike about having thought the theater troupe was dead, he’d demand to know why she hadn’t known St. George’s would be destroyed and conclude that was a discrepancy as well. Which meant she needed to keep him from finding out about the five casualties at Padgett’s till she’d had a chance to determine if there actually were that many.

Thank goodness he wasn’t here when Marjorie came, she thought. You should be glad they’re late.

Excerpted from ALL CLEAR by Connie Willis Copyright © 2010 by Alan Dean Foster. Excerpted by permission of Spectra, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.