The Eternal War Read Online Free PDF Page B

his heels into the concrete floor and pulled himself on squeaking castor wheels closer to her. ‘The world out there doesn’t care a jot for Mr Lincoln now. He’s a Mr Nobody, right? We’re now in a timeline where he never became a famous president. So there’d not be detailed biographies an’ the like out there on the man, surely?’
    ‘True.’ Maddy pulled on her lip. ‘But I remember reading he was quite … I dunno … quite driven . He had an uneducated father and lived quite poor, if I recall, in a log cabin, and sort of hated all that. Wanted to better himself. So, all right, something’s happened, things have changed and he never got to be president, but maybe he managed to become a local mayor or something, or a successful businessman? Something that might have left a small mark on the world.’
    She looked up at Bob and Becks in hope of a word of support. But both of them were silently blinking: networking with computer-Bob and helping the system with the data shovelling.
    ‘So,’ she continued, ‘if he became a local bigwig somewhere, maybe he opened some sort of, I dunno … some shopping mall …?’
    ‘Shopping mall?’
    ‘Ahhh … you know what I mean – trading post !’ She shook her head irritably. ‘Or opened some hospital wing, or some charity school for orphaned kiddies … or made some small town Independence Day speech or something. Point is … these places all had their own little two-sheet gazette, their own newspaper. And these days all that kind of stuff is up on the net as scanned data.’
    She turned towards the webcam. ‘You got that, Bob?’
    > Yes, Maddy, we are already searching.
    ‘Do you think we’ll have any more changes?’ asked Liam. ‘The world doesn’t look so different to me. Well, actually, it looks no different to me. Maybe that missing beefburger and the changed painting is all we’re going to get?’
    She shook her head. ‘That can’t be all, Liam. You can’t just remove a guy like Lincoln from history and it amounts to no more than the change of a snack menu. There’ll be more changes …’ She stopped mid-sentence. ‘Just a sec …’ She dug a hand deep into her jeans and fumbled for something. She pulled out a crinkled ball of paper and quickly unfolded it. Liam recognized it as a five-dollar bill.
    ‘Look! He’s still on there!’ she said, turning the note round so that he and Sal could see Lincoln’s face staring out at them with a surly scowl. ‘There’s your answer, Liam,’ she said. ‘There’ll be more ripples … History hasn’t finished fidgeting around to get rid of Lincoln yet.’
    Fidgeting around? Maddy realized how oddly human that sounded. As if time itself was some curmudgeonly old college lecturer who grumpily decided when he was good and ready to sit down to rewrite the history books.
    ‘This means another someone trying to mess things up,’ said Sal, ‘doesn’t it?’
    Liam nodded. ‘Another Kramer?’
    Maddy shrugged. ‘Not necessarily another Kramer.’
    Not long after they’d been recruited, they’d been thrown in the deep end, having to deal with a nut-job from the future who’d thought it a great idea to help the Nazis win the Second World War.
    ‘But if Lincoln’s destiny has been mucked up,’ said Liam, ‘that’s changed history. That means –’
    ‘I know,’ Maddy sniffed. ‘I know. It means another idiot’s fooling around with time travel.’ She puffed her cheeks. ‘All right, so here’s our plan, then … We’ll find him out there somewhere. A driven character like Lincoln’s going to have made his mark one way or another. He may not have ended up being the president, but a guy like that will have made his mark in some other way. We find him, then maybe we’ll find whoever’s just stepped back into the past and changed Lincoln’s destiny.’ She looked at Liam, even managed a laugh, not bad really, given she felt like death warmed up.
    ‘And you can tell whichever