星星之火可以燎原

(A spark can start a fire that burns the entire prairie.)

- Chinese Proverb

„How do you change the world?“ It was a rhetorical question by Mr Tuniak, but even though I did not respond, I was still thinking about it. “Have you ever heard of Sulla?” Now this question was directed at me.

“No, I don't think so”, I said.

“Sulla was a Roman statesman”, Mr Tuniak said. “He was also a very good general and fighter, which is why he was able to declare himself... dictator. Nowadays, you would call it a dictatorship. But with all the power he amassed, he mainly did one thing: Passing laws that would make it difficult, if not impossible, that anyone else could ever repeat what he did. He wanted to make sure that no one could declare himself dictator ever again. And once he had achieved that, he retired. He gave back all his power.”

“When did he live?”

“About forty years before Julius Caesar came to power”, Mr Tuniak said. “I'm telling you this to make one thing clear. No one can force change. And if you do, it won't last long.”

“Did you know that back then? When you set out to change history?”, I asked.

“Not as well as I do now”, Mr Tuniak answered. “Alice and I both knew the general principle. We knew that if we wanted to succeed, we would have to make a lot of small, seemingly insignificant changes. We couldn't just travel to the past and give the scientist there the plans for a computer.”

“They wouldn't have known what to do with it.”

“No, no, that wasn't the problem at all. What I'm trying to tell you is that we couldn't just travel to the past and teach the people there everything we knew. They had to discover the knowledge themselves. They had to understand the very basics.” He stood up and slowly started to walk up and down in front of his window. “I can travel to the Stone Age, built a water mill there and show someone from that time how to use it. And he will be able to use it quite well. You mustn't underestimate people just because they lived in the past. But what will our Stone Age man do, when a part of the mill breaks down? If he hasn't built it himself, he won't know how to repair it.” He stopped. “This is all rather simplified, of course.”

“Of course.”

“Are you just going to let the time machine stay out here in the open?”, Alice asked. She had just exited the machine and had gone a few steps, before turning around and looking back. The big grey cuboid that was the time machine had landed close to the border of a forest, right next to a moor. She was sure that it was visible even from quite far away.

“Yes”, Alexander answered. “Watch.”

He was holding a small remote control in his hand and pressing a button on it. The door of the time machine was closing and for a few moments nothing further happened. Then the time machine seemed to disappear directly in front of Alice's eye. But it was still standing there. It was as if it had suddenly turned into glass and one could look right through it and out the other side. If one was standing right in front of it or knew where to look, it was possible to see its outline. But from a bit farther away, it had turned virtually invisible.

“Wow, how does it do that?”, Alice asked.

“Have I never shown you that before?”, Alexander asked in surprise. “The whole outside of the machine is... like a big screen. When I activate it, it shows whatever's behind it.”

“Cool”, Alice said.

“It works better with a static background, not like the forest here”, Alexander continued. “When things move, like the leaves on the trees, it looks a bit dodgy at the edges.”

“I hope we will be able to find it again”, Alice joked.

“Don't worry.” Alexander showed her a little screen that was on the remote control. “With this, I can also locate the machine.”

“Can you also control it and order it to travel through time?”

“Unfortunately not”, Alexander said. “But I'm working on it.” He looked around, but didn't find any landmark he could use for orientation. “Now, which way lies Hackney?”

“How did you choose the points you wanted to change?”, I asked.

“With Feodor's formula and chance”, Mr Tuniak admitted. “We looked for times and locations where the formula failed to produce good results.”

“Where you couldn't predict the future?”, I asked. “Why?”

“Because we had the idea that these points would be easiest to change”, Mr Tuniak explained. “The formula is only predicting trends. If we get a certain result then that means that several factors are pointing in one direction. To change that direction, one would have to change most of these factors. A time consuming, difficult and sometimes even impossible task. But when the formula failed to produce any trend, it meant that things were in flux. That several outcomes were possible, every one of them as likely as the others. It meant that history could develop in many different directions. At least, that's how we interpreted it.”

“And afterwards you again used the formula to predict the effect your changes would have? Isn't that... a bit contradictory?”

“It wasn't an exact science and we knew it”, Mr Tuniak said. “There were even several instances where we didn't even know what to put into the formula to make it work, so we just travelled a bit into the future, to observe the effects.”

I felt how goose bumps started to form on my arms, when I thought about how casually Mr Tuniak had changed history back then.

The sand storm had abated, but was still strong enough to reduce visibility to about five metres at most. Alexander was waiting, leaning on a stone well and waiting for Alice to return. From time to time he looked at his watch. It was to be expected that she would be late due to the sand storm, but he still felt restless and uneasy.

A dark shape was coming closer. She was dressed completely in black and walked bent and using a wooden staff for support and only managing small steps. An old beggar, Alexander thought, and didn't pay any further attention to it.

“What are you standing around like that, young man?”, the dark shape said in a deep voice.

Alexander wanted to respond, but stopped. The old beggar had spoken English, modern English, which would not come about for another few centuries.

“Alice?”, Alexander asked, not quite believing it.

Alice took off the clothes with which she had protected her face from the sand and grinned. “No, just an old man, wandering around and telling stories”, she said, her voice still unbelievably deep.

“Since when are you able to imitate voices that well?”, Alexander asked.

“Have you never listened to any of the recordings I've made?”, she asked.

“I have, but... that was all your voice? I had thought that someone had manipulated it afterwards to change it.” He made a small bow. “I'm impressed. You should have become an actress.”

“Yes, I'm quite good at impersonating an old man by now”, Alice said. “By the way, I've noticed that if I don't shave, people mistake my hair for a beard. Why didn't we think of that?”

“How was Jazirat?”

“Quite nice. Taken all together I'm sure that over a hundred children have listened to my stories”, Alice answered as they walked back to the time machine. “You're still not convinced that this will achieve anything?”

“Let's say that I'm still sceptical”, Alexander said. “I think we should act in a more direct manner.”

“You are underestimating the power of stories”, Alice said. “Believe me. If you want people to invent ships, you don't show them that wood swims. You tell them of an island where all their wishes are granted.”

“Alice suggested that we should not just influence or inspire adults, but children too”, Mr Tuniak recounted. “We invented several stories for that purpose. Stories, which we then translated into the native languages and told to children.”

“Wasn't it very difficult to learn all the different languages and dialects?”, I asked.

“Oh, we were never perfect. It was easier for me, I was usually able to make small talk and so, but Alice learned most things just by ear. When she told the stories, she had learnt the words just by listening and repeating the sounds. She was able to say her stuff and she knew what the words meant she was saying, but nothing beyond that.”

“Didn't people notice?”

“They would have, but that's why we invented her disguise as an old man.” Mr Tuniak was smiling. “She became an old man who had trouble hearing, but children liked to listen to him. And if someone was asking her something she didn't understand, she pretend to be nearly deaf. Sometimes she went alone, sometimes we travelled together. When we were together, she often pretended to be my grand-father and I was her grandchild. I have to admit we also had a lot of fun with that. But that was only phase one of our plan.”

“We spent a few years changing small things throughout history”, Mr Tuniak continued. “But we never changed anything big, nothing that would radically alter history. History had to stay roughly the same at least up to the point where my mothers first entered the time machine.”

“Because otherwise there would be the risk of history altering so much that your mothers would never invent the time machine and you would never be born”, I said. “Wouldn't that lead to some kind of paradox? You know... if you change history, so that you don't exist anymore, then who was it that changed history, so that you couldn't exist.”

“Juliette has got a theory regarding that particular kind of paradox, but we never tested it”, Mr Tuniak said. “We considered it too risky.”

“What did she say?”

“She thinks that as soon as such a paradox happens, history changes completely and in a way that makes that paradox impossible.”

“I'm not sure I understand that.”

“Neither am I.” He was silent for a few moments, maybe because he was trying to solve that paradox right now. But then he said: “So, Alice and I had made all the changes to history that we had wanted to make. That is only one sentence, but, as I said, it actually took as several years to accomplish that.”

“Did you return form time to time to the villa or to Leviathan?”

“No”, Mr Tuniak said. “The others would have notice that we were aging a lot faster than them and started asking questions. We wanted to avoid that.”

“And what did your changes accomplish?”

“Well, taken for themselves little to nothing. Historians would probably say that the knowledge we brought or inspired got lost again We looked at it differently.” He paused for a moment. “It's probably best, if you imagine it this way: We took care that knowledge was gathered, collected and hidden. It wasn't hidden on purpose, of course, but was simply forgotten if you didn't know where to look for it. But that was something we knew and because of this we... we were like squirrels who had hidden their nuts so that we could later dig them out again. At the end of the nineteenth century we founded a few companies whose purpose it was to do exactly that. Find the knowledge and put it to use.”

“That sounds... unnecessary complicated”, I said. “Is that kind of knowledge, old knowledge, even relevant after a few years?”

“More than you can imagine”, Mr Tuniak said. “But fortunately, you don't have to imagine it. I will show it to you.”

NEXT WEEK:

The computer is incredibly fast, accurate, and stupid. Man is unbelievably slow, inaccurate, and brilliant. The marriage of the two is a force beyond calculation.