A Glint In Time (History and Time) by Frank J. Derfler

in engineering school. If you bend the pin back and forth to break it off flush with the insulation, they'll never find it."
    "Ted, what did you see when you tried the scenario with the laptop computer?" Janet asked. Bill was confused, but Janet seemed very focused.
    "All, I know for sure is that it was very different from what we saw here. Bill was concerned by the fact that so little changed when we ran various scenarios here. Well something big changed when the Florida computer looked at it." Ted explained.
    Bill swore and muttered under his breath. "I knew it wasn't right. Let's get back."
    "No." Ted said. "Let's finish our walk and act naturally. The Woo family has a lot at stake here and they seem to get things pretty much their way. They won't want us screwing things up for them. Keep cool. We're a long way from the good old USA."
    When they finally got back to the computer room, Ted busied himself with a little pinpoint sabotage. Just seconds
    after Ted had broken off the pin in the cable and walked into the kitchen, the Russians emerged from their room in a cloud of strong cigarette smoke. They were obviously investigating an operational alarm from their computer management system.
    "Those consoles in back seem to have lost their network connections." Sally offered. "See what you can find and I'll check these out."
    The two Russian technicians seemed happy to let her do just that, so she set each of the two front consoles in maintenance mode, accessed the underlying communications program, and set each console's network address to that of a computer in Florida. As soon as she was done, Bill and Janet quickly sat down. "Give me a minute." Sally said quietly. "I have to re-program the routers and then you'll be in."
    The Russians worked for over an hour on the consoles in the back while Bill and Janet worked quietly in the front. Finally, the Russians replaced the sabotaged cable. Sally heard them talking quietly as they examined the old cable. They took it with them as they left the main room.
    Ted and Sally sat down at the rear consoles, put on headsets, and tapped into the discussion and interaction between Bill and Janet.
    "Tag that event, Jan. Now let's move down and make the system work the problem and show us what it thinks is causing this branch to terminate. Okay, now let's go to text."
    The text Bill was talking about was really a shorthand script produced by the computer to explain its links and logic. Bill and Janet could read it quickly, but it was an unknown language to Sally. She and Ted kept quiet as they monitored. Bill and Janet were on a roll and they didn't want to slow them down.
    "We changed the Cuban Missile Crisis." Bill said as he skimmed the text. "Nuclear explosions in the Florida straits. One to two million instantly die in Florida. Then there are two branches. One shows terrible economic conditions in the US for decades and the other shows a short nuclear exchange between the US and the Soviet Union. The chances of going down either branch are 50/50. No wonder this scenario showed no Vietnam war. The US became an introverted and paranoid country after it suffered a nuclear attack. The reliability of the projections quickly falls to zero after that. There is no reliable basis for any scenario projections beyond the nuclear explosions."
    "How come this didn't show up on the local computer" Janet asked.
    "The program isn't identical." Bill said. "That can be the only answer."
    "But why would they be different?" Janet asked.
    "Because somebody put in a sub-program to block out catastrophic events." Bill replied. "Let me see this reference, Janet. Pull it down in plain text." Bill said.He highlighted a reference to known data in the timeline.
    Bill read aloud in a quiet voice."In a 1989 meeting in Moscow, people who had participated in the Cuban Missile Crisis candidly exchanged information on their capabilities, motivation, and knowledge at the time. The US was worried about twenty long range