| An excerpt from Blast in the Past
Doc Loeb scratched his head in disbelief. "Don't you understand, Wade? You've caused a temporal shift! You've caused the whole timeline of the future to change.... just locally, of course... affecting only a few people... namely: your family."
Wade swallowed hard and tried to grasp the science. "Whaddaya mean, doc? What's gonna happen?"
Doc Loeb threw his hand behind his back and paced furiously. "When you stopped Hank Calder from... from deflowering your mother, you changed her life. Instead of losing her virginity in the back seat of a Dodge, she'll go on to be an unspoiled virgin, perhaps for years."
Wade straightened. "So what?"
"So what?!" Doc Loeb slapped his forehead and paced back and forth. "Remember what you told me? Your father would never have had the guts to seduce your mother. She had to seduce him. But she won't do that if she's a virgin. They may never even go out on a date!"
Wade slapped his own forehead and pulled at his hair. "I'll never be born!"
"Exactly!" the doc shouted, finger jabbing sharply at Wade's nose. "The future you knew will cease to exist. Even if you manage to go back there, you'll be a stranger in your own time, a man without an identity. Why... you'll have no birth certificate, no valid Social Security number, no school records...." He marveled as the whole cascade of consequences that came to him.
"I'll become a bum!"
"And that's not all! Your parents won't ever have married each other. They'll be different people. You're brother and sister won't exist."
Wade could hardly believe what he was hearing. Pulling his mother out of Hank Calder's car seemed like a heroic thing to do... not a suicidal one! "Doc what can I do?"
Doc Loeb stroked his wispy beard. "You have to intervene, Wade. You have to set things right. Your mother has to become the kind of girl who would make a pass at a boy, Wade. That means she has to lose her virginity... and lose it good."
"Doc! Doc.... I— I have to turn my mother into a slut?!"
Doc Loeb grabbed his shoulders and looked him in the eye. "It's the only way, Wade." |