"Paul Levinson - Loose Ends 02 - Little Differences" - читать интересную книгу автора (Levinson Paul)

Little Differences [Story 2 of
the Loose Ends Saga]
Paul Levinson
A DF Books NERDs Release

Copyright ©1998 by Paul Levinson

First published in Analog, June 1998

Dion was singing “Abraham, Martin, and John” on the radio.

Jeff was making breakfast.

When Dion got to the part about Bobby, Jeff took the egg he was about to crack and threw it against the
wall. Then he did the same with another. Then he took the whole box and smashed it on the floor, and
stomped on it for good measure.

He was still mopping up the mess and crying when Laura walked in a few minutes later.

“Honey! What's wrong?”

Jeff shook his head, said nothing. They'd been over this before. He had to steel himself against this kind
of thing. He'd never make it to 1986 if he broke down every time he heard a song about an assassination
he could have stopped. But there was something about that last verse—

Laura pulled him up into her arms, kissed his neck, drew his arms around her.

“I still have egg on my hands—”

“It's ok, baby,” she said. “Shhh, it's ok.” She kissed him again.

“It's just that last verse.” Jeff said. “I don't think ‘Abraham, Martin, and John’ was originally written that
way—with the verse about Bobby. They just tacked it on, after he was killed. That's why his name's not
in the title. It's bad enough I was here when JFK and now Martin Luther King were murdered, and I did
nothing—”

“You tried with JFK,” she said. She stroked his head. “It wasn't your fault.”

“I tried and I failed,” Jeff said. “And now Bobby. If his name wasn't in the song at first, maybe he wasn't
supposed to die. Maybe I, we, were supposed to save him. And I did nada—nothing!”

“We've got to stay focused on the Challenger,” Laura said.

“I know,” Jeff replied.

“That's the key to all of this,” she continued. “If we don't stop it from crashing into that schoolhouse in
Florida and killing all of those kids...”
Jeff knew she was right. Nothing else mattered compared to changing that reality from his timeline to
Laura's, from a world in which the space program died a final death to one in which just the astronauts
died in the Challenger, and the space program limped along and took wing again in the following