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long as your arm."
"And you want to stop it?"
"Yes. The way I see it now, the cotton gin is such a consequential
event that to prevent it from happening, along with everything else
we've done, might just be enough. If we can do this, we may have beat them."
"So they'll stop at nothing to stop us."
"No, so we can't go right away. That one history book isn't enough,
either. The stuff about Eli Whitney is very sketchy. We'll have to research
his life further. Find the significant moment to stop it."
"How long will that take?"
"A day or two at the minimum. We'll have to voyage upstream and read some
books."
"Then that's what we'll do," she said, with definite certainty.
"We must." Leaning over, Jan kissed her forehead gently.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Jan spent two full days in the New York City Library in
September of 1975. When he emerged, he felt he knew all that could be
known of Eli Whitney and the invention of the cotton gin.
Whitney had graduated from Yale College in September
1792 after nine years of study and was soon turned down for the teaching
post he had expected in New York. More out of desperation than
anything else Whitney had a closet full of bad debts and such men were
tossed in prison in those years he then accepted an offer to tutor the
children of a certain South
Carolina plantation owner named Major Dupont.
Whitney set sail for the South but his ship ran aground and he was forced
to return to New York out the price of passage.
Once there, he came into contact with a smallpox victim and was forced to
remain in the city, undergoing variolation treatment, which consisted of
a series of inoculations taken from the blood of mild sufferers of the
disease.
Whitney recovered. In the meantime, through the agent of his future employer,
he struck up a friendship with Catherine
Greene, the wealthy widow of a famous hero of the Revolution.
Mrs. Greene also owned a Southern plantation hers was in
Georgia and she loaned Whitney enough money for him to again book
passage to Savannah. Mrs. Greene would also be journeying home on
that same ship. During the course of the voyage, Mrs. Greene invited
Whitney to visit her plantation and spend a few days before continuing on to
South Carolina and his job with Major Dupont. He accepted. Not particularly
eager to assume his new duties, Whitney extended his brief stay into
a long vacation. While there, he learned of the apparently
insurmountable difficulty faced by Southern planters in trying to extract the
seeds from upland cotton. Inspired, Whitney immediately set out to
develop a means for doing this. Within six months, he had invented a
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workable cotton gin. As a result, he never did go to South Carolina.
Studying this narrative, Jan could easily spot several key moments in
Whitney's history where intervention seemed most apt.
Back home, over dinner, he informed Gail of his decision.
"We'll go to New York. I think it's better than waiting for him to go South."
"But won't they think so, too? Kirk, I mean."
"I imagine so. But that's the point. We can't be afraid to meet them
face-to-face. Besides, I bet they have Whitney shadowed from the day he
was born until the moment he finished work on the gin."
"Then they're sure to spot us."
"The idea is we spot them first."
"There is one point that bothers me, though. I thought, in
1776, we took care of the Revolution. But now this woman Mrs.
Greene you say her dead husband was a famous general in the war and that's how
she got her plantation. The land was a gift from the state of Georgia in
honor of General Greene. So the way
I see it is: no war, no general, no plantation. Therefore, Whitney cannot
invent the cotton gin because there's no place for him to do it. Right?"
Jan shook his head. "Wrong. You see, the changes have to be cumulative. It's
like the ripples that form on the surface of a pool when a stone is
dropped in the middle. They spread outward, growing wider all the time.
Well, so far those ripples we've made have not extended as far as 1792. And
they won't, either unless we drop another stone."
"By blocking the cotton gin?"
"That's right."
"Then when do we leave?"
"Dawn tomorrow."
She grinned. "I'll be ready."
In 1792, New York City was a tiny, grim heap of a town with a population
still numbering in the thousands. Livestock, including hogs and hens,
roamed freely through its muddy boulevards and stagnant pools of water lay
against the curbs in dark, dank profusion. The odors of garbage and
sewage clung everywhere.
Jan was glad the Academy had inoculated them against every known contagious
disease. In these foul streets there must be a hundred to catch.
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