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and
checked the date: I was back! I couldn’t wait to tell Niki all
about this – it was going to blow her mind.
     
    ***
     
     

Two
     
    When I got back to the
present, the first thing I wanted to know was whether or not
history had been changed by my intervention. I was in for a big
surprise.
    I’d called Niki just
after I’d returned from Heathrow and took her out for dinner – with
my iPad in tow. We ordered food, and I brought up present day
photographs of New York City on the screen from the
Internet.
    “ Oh–my–god!
Just take a look at this Nik!” I couldn’t believe what I was
seeing. Niki looked casually at the screen.
    “ It’s New York
City – so what?” she said.
    “ Yes, it’s New
York City – with the World Trade Centre twin
towers! ”
    “ Are you okay
Joe?”
    “ I’m fine –
I’m more than fine – I’m wonderful ! Just hold on one second –
you are just not going to believe this…” I searched for the pictures of the
destruction of the World Trade Centre I’d downloaded from the
Internet ten years ago: the two planes flying into the twin towers,
people running from the buildings, and the final collapse. “That’s
strange…”
    “ What is
it?”
    “ My pictures –
they’ve all gone. I had some photographs showing the attack on the
World Trade Center in 2001, and now they’ve gone…” Suddenly
something clicked with Niki.
    “ Joe, I’ve
just remembered something. I don’t think I’ve ever told you this,
but when I was at school in September 2001, I received a very
strange phone call from a man about a terrorist attack on the World
Trade Centre…”
    It was unbelievable – the
call I’d made to Niki from the airport when she was at school was
now in present consciousness… it had become reality!
    “ That was me!
I called you from Heathrow airport that day!”
    “ What are you
talking about? How could it be you? You never knew me then – it was
years before we met. But this guy definitely knew me – no
question.” This was fantastic… my mind was doing summersaults… the
implications of this were staggering. Niki noticed that my mind was
suddenly in a very different place from hers. “Joe?”
    “ That man –
did he give you his name?”
    “ I don’t think
so – not that I remember. He just said he was a friend of my
father’s. But that was the weird thing, when I talked to Baba later
he’d no idea who that could be. None of his friends would know
which school I was in… and no–one asked him. Anyway, the attack
never happened, so he must have been a crank.”
    “ Or the man
convinced the authorities that it was a real threat, and they
stopped it happening.”
    “ Yeah, well,
they didn’t stop the assassinations, did they?”
    “ Assassinations? What assassinations?”
    “ Bush and
Blair of course.”
    I suddenly froze. I sat
and listened whilst Niki explained how US President George W. Bush
and British Prime Minister Tony Blair had been killed by terrorists
in 2002. The two leaders met at Bush’s Texas Ranch in April that
year, and were killed instantly when suicide bombers breached
security.
    “ But why am I
telling you this Joe – how could you have forgotten
that?
    “ So what about
the Iraq invasion?”
    “ What Iraq
invasion?”
    “ The one to
look for weapons of mass destruction?”
    “ Joe, you’ve
been totally weird since you got back. I think you need a
rest.”
    My intervention had had a
lot more impact than I could have imagined – and I was just
learning the extent of it. Everything is connected: change one
thing, you change many others. No Bush or Blair meant no Iraq
invasion, which implied that Saddam Hussein was still very much
alive – and still in power. Gordon Brown became Prime Minister
after Blair’s death until 2005, when David Cameron was elected
leader of the country. In the US, Hilary Clinton was now President
– no Barack Obama. But at least there was no change to our personal
lives – or so I thought.
    As