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Temporal Cold War: A Helping Hand.

Professor Bernard Quatermass interested her the moment she learnt about the rocket scientist, who contributed a great deal to rocket science in the 20th century after the Second World War.

She was especially interested in the strange events surrounding the scientist; you would never expect some strange alien plant creature to suddenly take over a rocket capsule launched into space from Earth to determine the best way and the best means of sending people into space from a planet's surface, and she was also curious about the incident in Hobb's Lane, and how it related to witchcraft, but she didn't really know what would happen if she travelled back into this parallel's history, and investigated.

She decided to give it a miss, but as she investigated Quatermass' timeline, Noys became increasingly interested in him because he was the kind of scientist who would move things forward. She decided to give him a helping hand, although she was unsure how she could do something like that.

One or two exceptions aside, Noys tended to be subtle with her meddling. She decided to open a time portal about a year following the incident at Hobb's lane, where he was busy in his laboratory at the British Rocket Group after being remonstrated by the authorities for starting a mass panic by saying aliens had landed on Earth, but what did they think was going to happen?

The space capsule discovered in the construction pit was buried so far down there was no way that it was a mere World War 2 bomb, but he had done it in a clumsy way. The government didn't like it, and as a result, he was given a rap on the hands, and he was forced to keep his head down. As a result, Bernard Quatermass was keeping his head down so he didn't make things worse and he had no new projects. Just research.

Noys checked through the advanced rocket files in her Temporal Observatory, cross checking them with the level of research Quatermass was currently at. Noys sat in her office for two hours, painstakingly copying the figures and principles of the rocket technologies onto sheets of the antique paper.

She didn't bother jotting down many of the more advanced formulas onto the paper, although she included a couple that she knew would keep the rocket scientist busy for a few years and besides with those he should be able to find some of the answers by himself, she was unable to resist the urge to drop in a few more advanced theories and ideas into the mix for Quatermass to find; she didn't know how Quatermass would take the formulas and the theories that she knew he would find, but it would be a long time before he could actually do anything with them.

Bernard Quatermass lived in the 20th century. He had set up the British Rocket Group and it came to prominence in the 1950s. By that time nuclear power was still in its infancy, but he would either find something within the theories she was going to drop on him, or he would work on them quietly for a few more decades while Earth's technological progress improved around him. For all, she knew the theories and the math might be gibberish to him, and he might throw them away or stick them in a cupboard or an archive and only retain a vague memory of them; the best-case scenario would be for Quatermass to dismiss them at first but he seemed to her, from what she had observed, to be a true scientist who would not dismiss anything that came his way and would just put it somewhere. It was Noys' hope that happened, but an even better scenario would be if he didn't dismiss anything, and he just slowly investigated the theories and formulas she would give him and made fresh advances she hadn't anticipated.

The problem was Noys simply didn't know; Rocket science was not really taught in her century. The basics, yes, but that was all. Rockets had become obsolete with the development of more advanced forms of spaceflight. It was just so impractical and wasteful compared to fusion drive rocket engines, which were more efficient and reuse-able. Noys decided to include some of the basic formulas and theories that made up a fusion rocket engine; fusion technology was not on the cards in the 50s and 60s, but if she could give him enough, he might build a nuclear fission rocket. It would be a little bit primitive and dangerous, but if she had read Quatermass as well as she thought then she knew he wasn't stupid enough to build a fission rocket and launch it within the Earth's atmosphere. The Americans were foolishly irradiating their planet while being blissfully ignorant of how stupid they were being, but Quatermass was likely to be more cautious.

While Noys would have been pleased by the potential possibilities that came from a military lunar base in the 1950s, especially since such things were very rare in some of the multiverses and they certainly hadn't appeared in her reality, the possibilities for the consequences were further down the line were endless.

For one, a third world war might begin far earlier in such a history, or research into space flight and space exploration would be more accelerated; she had learnt many of the governments in the 20th century in many parallels were cheapskates when it came to space exploration. The price for the materials and the research were always so high they either put it off or they worked with other governments, but they made such strides.

But a third world war starting in the 1950s, so soon and so fast following the second was a possibility that might be beneficial further down the line. A third world war had to happen. Noys knew it was bad to think such a thing, especially as war brought nothing but death and destruction, and they left scars which took a long time to heal or they simply didn't. And since the Earth of this reality had just fought a major global war, nobody was in much of a hurry to start a new one.

But war did breed good things as well. They bred progress, advanced science, medicine and technology. To take what was there, and make it fundamentally better. The Napoleonic Wars for instance led to widespread use of rifles, changing from flintlock to percussion and breech-loading weapons in a few decades. Britain led the way into shipbuilding technology, but the French in many a parallel constructed the first ironclad although the British competed by building the first fully iron warship, and in the Napoleonic wars, one of the first submarines were constructed; granted, Fulton's Nautilus didn't sink any warships and make an impact, but the idea was sound and it was there. Medicine was also being augmented; margarine was invented. The First World War was a time where many of the technologies so many took for granted had only just been invented, but prior to that, so many new technologies had come about from steam power to basic electricity. Noys had seen it so many times before in a variety of different parallel universes that any Federation moral outrage she had for war had died out.

War bred change and growth, it was a fact of life. She had seen the good it did, even if it caused a lot of pain and grief. It wasn't nice or wonderful, but such things were inevitable.

If a war started in the 1950s from a rocket fired from the moon, either deliberately or because of a careless accident… Noys had no idea what could come out of such a world, and while she was tempted to find a parallel to play with to see what would happen, she wasn't going to do that here.

Using the Temporal Observatory, Noys was able to see how far into his research Quatermass was at when it came to rocket design. She could see that Quatermass certainly learnt from his experiences, and he was forever improving the outer hull designs of his rockets and the life support technologies.

Downloading specs from her Temporal Observatory, Noys slowly began looking them over to see if she could drop a few hints and tips about the alloys that went into constructing the rockets and the life support systems. This stage took her an hour before she pushed her chair back and rubbed her eyes, but as she looked down at the sheets of paper, Noys smiled in satisfaction.

Picking the paper up, Noys opened a time portal and travelled to Quatermass's laboratory. She chose a time when it was empty, where the rocket scientist was trying once again to stop the military from taking control of his work. Noys placed the paper neatly on his desk, idly wondering how long it would take before the rocket scientist realised what they were, and that they were there. No sooner had she planted them there did Noys return to her own time.