A story I will probably never write

[sollers]

because it would take too much research.

A Neonazi group develops a time machine. They send an agent back to a school in South London to kill a schoolboy, because eliminating this individual would, by itself, give Germany a far better chance of winning WWII

Agent carries out mission and returns to base. Nothing has changed.

Boss: You idiot! You killed the wrong boy!

Agent: What do you mean? I killed Jones.

Boss: You were supposed to kill R.V. Jones!

Comments

[mildred_of_midgard]

Reminds me of a recent xkcd, but less cliched. http://xkcd.com/1063/

[sollers]

The main aim was to be a tribute to R.V. Jones, whom I admire overwhelmingly (and who,as it happens, went to my elder daughter's school in its previous incarnation)

[mildred_of_midgard]

Well, yes, I was assuming that reminding me of an xkcd comic was not your intent. It's just that it was such a recent comic that it was still fresh on my mind.

I know only a little about Jones; Turing's my personal hero of the defense against Hitler.

[sollers]

Turing is I think a bit over-hyped. He produced a lot of theoretical stuff that was truly major in the development of computers, but he didn't play a part with Colossus, which was the first programmable computer.

And R.V. Jones was involved with a huge number of things. Without some of the things he did, the intelligence from Bletchley wouldn't have had anything like the same effect.