If there's a man who is down and needs a helpin' hand
All it takes is you to understand and to pull him through, ah-hah-unh
Seems to me we got to solve it individually, ah-hah-unh
And I'll do unto you what you do to me

- The Rascals (People Got to be Free)

Carmen heard a communications trill in her ear, “Bryce! I was expecting to hear from you!” Bryce Unger, her boss, was the overall head of the Temporal Integrity Commission. All of the species’ units reported to him, not just the humans.

“Have you seen any current broadcasts?” he asked.

“Just about ready to check them now. Levi, if you please.”

“Huh, oh, yeah,” he said, and clicked around until he found a broadcast for 3110, reflective of the changes that had been made.

“Something else you need from us?” Carmen asked.

“Get Porter ready and put her out there,” Unger said, “There’s no sense in dawdling.”

“Understood. Calavicci out,” she tapped her left ear once, to end the call, “All right. Marisol and Boris, can you do Polly’s surgeries today?”

“I think so,” Boris said, “It will mean a late night. Are you up for it, Doctor Castillo?”

“I’ll be all right,” she said, “Come along,” she beckoned to Polly, “Let’s get started as soon as possible,” The three of them left.

“That broadcast, Levi?” Carmen prompted.

“Right, uh, here,” he fiddled with the PADD a bit, and the video of an anchorwoman was projected onto the wall of the conference room.

The anchorwoman said, “Negotiations with Tellar hit an all-time low point when a Tellarite government official insulted the President of United Earth, referring to him as a unicellular organism. President Brian Mendenhall said that Earth would not stand for such insults. ”

She paused for a breath and then continued, “In other news, first contact was made with a species called the Suliban. Our first Warp Four ships should be able to visit various Sul helixes within the next year.”

“I bet we’ve got wiped families,” Kevin said, “Probably anyone like me, with mixed species heritage.”

“That would mean Otra’s family is wiped as well,” Deirdre said.

“Weird, I was able to reach my sister, and she and I are both part Calafan,” Rick said.

Tom looked up when Rick said that, “So, uh, so she’s all right?” he drawled.

“Yes, and, uh, I’ll tell you later,” Rick said.

“Moving right along,” Carmen said, “Avery, Sherwood, Bernstein, Katzman, Grant - you and I are all pure human. So is Castillo. So we’re probably not affected. I imagine Boris is affected, though.”

“Checking,” Tom said, “Yeah, Yarin’s family is wiped. Can’t tell what his wife’s up to but she can’t be Mrs. Yarin, I suppose.”

“My family’s gone, too,” Kevin said, “I bet most of the Commission needs to stay in. We got a lotta repair work to do.”

“Once we know exactly what it is,” Carmen said, “The Iron Curtain came down early - before 1980, right? Let’s concentrate on that, for now.”

“They’ve got quite a mess on their hands,” The Perfectionists’ leader said to Otra, perhaps a half an hour later, “I imagine there’s a great deal of scrambling going on.”

“It’s nothing to me,” Otra replied, still a little woozy from the effects of the gas. The hatch was, again, not as perfectly sealed as it should have been. She couldn’t see much, it was probably just the walls of the cargo hold. Even the grey shapes were gone - perhaps the wine shipment had already gone out.

“Now, I know that that part’s untrue. Tell me, Otra, do you like your cell? If you don’t cooperate, you’ll be in there for an awfully long time.”

“You forget I’ve already been here for a while. How long am I going to be your pet?”

“Iron Curtain - where are you getting that from, Deirdre?” asked Carmen.

“Here,” she projected an image onto the wall of the conference room. It was of the Berlin Wall coming down, “Here’s the original version of the event. And here,” she clicked a few times to find the image she wanted, “is the new reality.”

The new reality was a similar scene, but the hair and clothes were different, “Bell bottoms!” Crystal exclaimed, “The new version is the 1970s, maybe even the late ‘60s, rather than 1989!”

Tom clicked around, “It says here that the Berlin Wall was torn down in 1969.”

“What’s precipitating this?” Carmen asked.

“1969, 1968,” Kevin said, “Ah, here we go,” he projected a map onto the wall, “This is a 1968 map of Europe; it’s the one that was put up as a background during the Nixon-Humphrey-Wallace Presidential debates.”

“Here’s the original map,” Rick said, projecting it.

“Well, look at that,” Carmen said, “The pink are the Communist countries, right?”

“Looks that way to me,” HD said.

“In the original, there’s pink over, uh, East Germany, Poland, Romania, um, Czechoslovakia, Albania and Bulgaria,” Deirdre said.

“And in the new one, Czechoslovakia is green, not pink,” HD pointed out.

“What happened in Czechoslovakia in 1968?” Carmen asked.

“It looks like there was an uprising, a relaxing of the rules. But in August, there was a vote on whether to bring in Russia to restore order. This resulted in, uh, the Bratislava Declaration,” Crystal read off her PADD, “In the new reality, the vote failed, and Czechoslovakia remained free.”

“And in the original history?” Kevin asked.

“The vote succeeded - the, uh, the Bratislava Declaration - and tanks rolled through the streets of Prague. Communism was restored until the Velvet Revolution, in 1989,” Crystal replied.

“So someone voted the wrong way. We’ve gotta get those tanks to roll on time,” Carmen said.

“Exactly,” Crystal said, “Prague Spring has to end.”

The surgeries proceeded apace. There was no time to fool around, although Marisol did point out to Boris, once she’d uncovered Polly’s brain, “It’s the paracortex. In pure Betazoids, it’s the seat of their empathic abilities, and it’s rather intricate. Here, it’s only slightly more developed versus what it’s like in pure humans. I doubt she has much in the way of empathic abilities.”

“So she fakes it, eh? Hand me the microscalpel, please.”

“All right, we’ll have three expeditions into the past, I think,” Carmen said, “Richard, you’ll go to Prague alone, probably also to - where did you say that vote was held?”

“Bratislava,” Crystal replied.

“Right. Make sure that vote tips the right way. Then there’s the other missions. Sheilagh, you’ll take Fluxy and handle the computers mission once we’ve got it nailed down. You’ll take Polly along for training.”

“All right.”

“HD, you’ll have the music mission, whatever it is. Tom will fly you in the Jack Finney. You’ll be nominally in charge of the mission but you are to work on all major decisions together. You will work as a team, is that clear?”

“Sweet - I get to tell ya what to do, Bro’.”

“You heard the lady,” Tom said, “This is a joint venture.”

“What about Marisol?” Levi asked, looking up for the first time in a while.

“She will stay here,” Carmen replied, “so we can benefit from her visions when the timelines start to change. Okay, Crystal, get Richard ready. Everyone else, let’s start by concentrating on the computers problem.”

“Oh, I’ve already found it,” Levi said. It wasn’t smugness - he had simply, quite literally, forgotten to tell them.

“Oh?” Carmen asked.

“There’s no World Wide Web. Uh, not until, um, 2518,” Levi replied.

“What?” Sheilagh began clicking around, “It was supposed to be started in 1989 by Tim Berners-Lee. But Levi’s right. There’s no interconnection when there should have been one, a good half a millennium earlier.”

“C’mon, I’ll get you rigged for Prague,” Crystal said to Rick, and they departed.

“What makes the Worldwide Web possible in the first place?” Tom asked.

“That’s a logical starting point,” Carmen allowed.

“Lots of computers - it’s silly to have a network if there are only two or three people who want to talk to each other,” Sheilagh said.

“They, uh, they needed satellites, too, at least in the beginning,” Kevin added.

“Well, there’s your problem - no satellites, or not enough,” Deirdre said, “Reagan’s not elected, so there’s no SDI.”

“SDI?” Carmen asked.

“Strategic Defense Initiative,” Tom said, “It was, uh, it looked good on paper. The idea was that there’s be armed satellites in space, in orbit around the Earth, to intercept Soviet missiles.”

“But,” Sheilagh read off her PADD, “it looks like SDI never got off the ground, except for the satellites. There was nothing else to do with them, so they were used for communications.”

“And you said that the Iron Curtain coming down prematurely caused Reagan to not be elected,” Carmen said.

“Right,” Deirdre replied.

“I can’t help thinking that there’s something more,” Sheilagh said, “There’s more to the Worldwide Web - there’s also LANs. Uh, those are Local Area Networks. They eventually kind of morph into Wi-Fi, which makes it possible for people to really take their laptops anywhere and connect with others around the world. There has to be an idea to link computers, and that all happens before Reagan takes office.”

“Maybe some of the ways to link up computers never happened, or weren’t invented,” Kevin offered.

“Does it go as far back as 1968?” Carmen asked.

“I don’t think so. I think it’s in the 1970s,” Sheilagh said.

“All right, let’s look at the ‘70s.”

“Carmen, do you mind if I look at the music problem instead?” HD asked.

“I suppose not.”

Shout it from the mountain on out to the sea (out to the sea)
No two ways about it, people have to be free
Ask me my opinion, my opinion will be
Nat'ral situation for a man to be free

Git right on board now

- The Rascals (People Got to be Free)