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Praise for books by Nobel Peace Prize finalist
R. J. Rummel
"26th in a Random House poll on the best nonfiction book of the 20th Century"
Random House (Modern Library)
“. . . the most important . . . in the history of international relations.”
John Norton Moore Professor of Law and
Director, Center for National Security Law, former
Chairman of the Board of Directors of the U. S. Institute of Peace
“. . . among the most exciting . . . in years.”
Jim Powell
“. . . most comprehensive . . . I have ever encountered . . . illuminating . . . .”
Storm Russell
“One more home run . . . .”
Bruce Russett, Professor of International Relations
“. . . has profoundly affected my political and social views.”
Lurner B Williams
“. . . truly brilliant . . . ought to be mandatory reading.”
Robert F. Turner, Professor of Law, for-
mer President of U.S. Institute of Peace
". . . highly recommend . . . ."
Cutting Edge
“We all walk a little taller by climbing on the shoulders of Rummel’s work.”
Irving Louis Horowitz, Professor Of Sociology.
". . . everyone in leadership should read and understand . . . ."
DivinePrinciple.com
“. . .exciting . . . pushes aside all the theories, propaganda, and wishful thinking . . . .”
www.alphane.com
“. . . world's foremost authority on the phenomenon of ‘democide.’”
American Opinion Publishing
“. . . excellent . . . .”
Brian Carnell
“. . . bound to be become a standard work . . . .”
James Lee Ray, Professor of Political Science
“. . . major intellectual accomplishment . . .will be cited far into the next century”
Jack Vincent, Professor of Political Science.”
“. . . most important . . . required reading . . . .”
thewizardofuz (Amazon.com)
“. . . valuable perspective . . . .”
R.W. Rasband
“ . . . offers a desperately needed perspective . . . .”
Andrew Johnstone
“. . . eloquent . . . very important . . . .”
Doug Vaughn
“. . . should be required reading . . .shocking an sobering . . . .”
Sugi Sorensen
NEVER AGAIN Book 3
RESET
NEVER AGAIN
R.J. RUMMEL
Llumina Press
Copyright 2004 R. J. Rummel
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or trans-mitted in any form or by any means electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from both the copyright owner and the publisher.
Requests for permission to make copies of any part of this work should be mailed to Permissions Department, Llumina Press, PO Box 772246, Coral Springs, FL 33077-2246
ISBN: HC 1-59526-355-1 PB 1-59526-354-3
Printed in the United States of America by Llumina Press
Relevant books by R.J. Rummel
Understanding Conflict and War (five volumes)
Lethal Politics:
Soviet Genocide and Mass Murder since 1917
China’s Bloody Century:
Genocide and Mass Murder since 1900
Democide: Nazi Genocide and Mass Murder
Death By Government
Power Kills: Democracy as a Method of Nonviolence
Saving Lives, Enriching Life:
Freedom as a Right and a Moral Good (online book)
Never Again Series
War and Democide Never Again
Nuclear Holocaust Never Again
Loves dark enemy
Power, like a deadly plague,
kills what it touches
Acknowledgements
Again, I owe many thanks to the thorough evaluation, many helpful suggestions, and careful editing of Marg Gilks. I continue to be indebted to the many visitors to my website at www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/ who commented on or questioned the material there. They often had an impact on this series, and this novel in particular.
And foremost, always, is my wife Grace. She made this series and this novel possible. Without her, I could not have written it. Come here, sweetheart.
To be sure, this is a book of fiction. Although some characters may in name and position bear a striking resemblance to historical figures, they are fictional. Nonetheless, I must say again that whatever errors of fictional facts exist are mine, and wholly mine.
Chapter 1
Early Afternoon, Thursday
November 15, 1906, Fourth Universe
San Francisco
Joy Phim
o roar of automobile engines, no exhaust-heavy air; instead, the swish of leather and bridles, rattling chains, creaking wooden N wagons and thumping wagon doors, and the clomping and sloshing of horses’ hooves. Drivers shouted at their horses or each other. One yelled to another with a wave as they passed, “Yo, Fred!
You still driving that old nag? Time to turn her into dog food.”
Smiling, Fred shouted back, “Don’t talk about my wife like that!”
Horses bearing riders, horse-drawn carriages, bicycles, trucks, and wagons of all descriptions passed continuously as Joy Phim and John Banks sauntered along San Francisco’s Market Street. The stench of horse dung and urine permeated the air, and flies were everywhere; stop for a moment, and they attacked any bare flesh. The flounced hem of Joy’s shoe-length walking skirt was muddy where it brushed the boards that passed for a sidewalk. The boardwalk dipped and rose, and was slick in places where mud had splashed up from the gutter. Here and there, broken boards created a hole that rivaled the potholes in the street, and an occasional broken board stuck up at an angle, waiting to catch the unwary dress or pants leg. But the boards were better then slipping and sliding on the puddled, potholed street.
Overhead, wires looped either singly or in bundles from pole to pole, and from poles to buildings. They cut the cloudless blue sky into sections that could have been pieces of a child’s jigsaw puzzle. “There must be a million of these wires,” John commented, eyes wide, as he looked up for the first time. Many of the wires had deteriorated; the insulation hung from some, and others curled dangerously close to the ground from leaning poles. “San Francisco still must be recovering from the earthquake and fire; the condition of the street and utility wires in this section of town show that there still is much to do.”
Joy grunted in response, while her nose wrinkled and her upper lip curled as if drawing away from the smells assaulting her nose. All her senses were quivering antenna automatically cataloguing what was to
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be ignored, remembered, or what demanded an instantaneous response in the form of a defensive move or offensive attack. This was a background to her thoughts.
She felt they were on their way. With the help of the three guys they met and hired soon after their arrival in this universe a couple of hours after midnight, she and John were able to get around San Francisco easily. They now had hotel rooms to live in. Actually, the Fairfax Hotel was theirs. John had bought it when its manager wouldn’t give them rooms because Joy was Asian.
They had registered their new Tor Import and Export Company this morning. Just an hour ago, they had bought from the Bank of California the 8th Street warehouse in which their time machine had landed. And Joy had almost put behind her for a while the deep, heart-rending sadness she felt over leaving her mother behind, and the absolute horror of the message from the future of this new universe they were about to create that had awaited them on their arrival.
Their mission? To prevent war and democide—genocide and mass murder—by fostering democracy. The Survivor’s Benevolent Society, of which Joy’s adopted mother Tor was a leading member, had discovered the research that proved democracy is a method of nonviolence and a way to perpetual peace. They therefore sent volunteers Joy and John back in time to 1906 San Francisco to foster democracy, lobby for peace, and assassinate the warmongers and mass murderers, such as Hitler and Stalin. They staked their resources and the lives of Joy and John on preventing the horrible wars and democides of the twentieth century—the wars and murders that had so victimized members of the Society.
But within hours of Joy and John arriving in this time, their mission had changed. For they received a message from the future, impossibly, from far in the very future they were here to create—their new universe. It told of a nuclear attack on the democracies by the fundamentalist Islamic Abul Sabah, and his resulting victory and radical new world order. It was a horrible message. Although it told them that they did succeed in their mission to prevent the wars and democides that had happened in the world they left, they realized they’d created the conditions that made possible Sabah’s nuclear attack, the defeat of the democracies, and the death of possibly two billion people.
Two billion loving, thinking, feeling human beings! Joy had been crushed by this toll. She had been shocked to her core by her responsi-bility for it. As she remembered this
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had failed her mother, who had given up her loving daughter to this mission. She had horribly bungled the Society’s deepest hopes for peace, hopes that it had placed on her and John’s shoulders.
Suicide. It was all that remained for the shamed and dishonored warrior.
And she had reached for that peace of death. Her knife had been but a second away from the carotid vein in her neck when John, no warrior, had done the perfect thing. At the last second, he had slapped her head away from the knife and yelled, “Kill Sabah! We’ll kill him soon after he’s born in 1914.”
Yes, she had realized, touching her burning cheek. Yes. That was it.
They could kill him and save the world from his nuclear attack and radical Islamic world totalitarianism. This challenge overcame her shame. It was worthy of a warrior.
Her thoughts kept returning to that nuclear war, to the sheer horror of some two billion people murdered for the sake of one religious sect, by the power of one man. The message they had received from the far future about Sabah played like a video loop in her mind, interrupted only with the repeated question, How and when can we—I—assassinate him?
This is no good, Joy finally chided herself. Let Sabah go. He will not be born until 1914 and what happened in the New Universe will happen. It is set. We can’t do anything about it. We can only change this one—the Third Universe.
She visualized the whole question of Sabah, his nuclear attack, and his world victory over the democracies as wrapped up in solid ball. She imagined putting that ball in a metal strongbox, locking it, and putting it into a vault with a massive steel door, then closing and locking the ponderous door and walking away. It worked. She sighed with relief as her mind cleared. Now, face forward, head up, and shoulders squared, she was ready to meet head-on the overwhelming challenge they faced.
She and John, alone, pitting their lives against the armies, secret services, and tyrants of the world.
The excitement of her new life and surroundings, awful smells and pesky flies notwithstanding, was invigorating. Joy now looked with fascination at this new world about her. They walked far behind the three guys—Sal Garcia, Dolphy Docker, and Hands Reeves—who had been squatting in the warehouse where their time machine came to rest.
The drifters were now their first company employees.
She and John watched the horse traffic so new to their eyes and noses, and ogled the eye-catching store window displays. There was a
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Graphophone Grand for $25.00 that played music or voice from a cylinder, a precursor of the disk record player. Here was a Swiss Calendar pocket watch for $4.95. And next to it a Delmar folding camera for $3.75. At another store was a Kit Carson Cowboy saddle for $20.00.
John had to almost drag Joy past the gun shop displaying in its window the Marlin repeating rifle for $10.00, the Winchester repeating rifle for $12.50, and that which almost transfixed her, a 50-caliber Springfield government breech loading rifle with leaf sight and twenty rounds for $2.90.
Now, with her mind clear, she enjoyed pointing out in mock horror the women’s clothes displayed in some of the shop windows. There was a taffeteen silk waist with a tight blue collar, and three hemstitched straps down the front that ended in buckles; it had wide cuffs, and three rows of tucking in the back. In another window was a lady’s wash suit, with waist and skirt made of percale and trimmed with white cord and strips of white braid; it had cording around a high standing collar. Then there were the capes, the current rage among middle-class women.
Capes with bows, capes with buttons, capes that were decorated like mid-twentieth century modern art, and capes made of silk, mohair, bro-caded satin, and wool.
Joy kept muttering, “I’ll give up eating rice before I wear those stupid clothes.”
John nodded toward a shop that displayed corsets and corset covers in its window and, apparently never tiring of the joke he’d been repeating since they arrived, told Joy in mock seriousness, brows deeply furrowed, “You’re gonna have to get one of those things, the way your stomach bounces like Jell-O.”
Slim but curvaceous and lithe from her daily martial arts practice, Joy raised her eyebrows and rolled her eyes heavenward before looking down at his crotch. Waving her finger at it, she told him, “I’ll wear one of those when you wear a jockstrap and cup, big boy, the way you allow yourself to bulge out.”
John’s face went red and he quickly glanced around, then joined her laughter with a breathy, “Ha-ha.” He kissed his index finger, pointed it at her, and jiggled it for a moment, as they continued their stroll toward his newly purchased Hotel Fairfax, still a mile away.
Carla Akwal
From across the street, Hadad al Jaber watched Joy and John with wide eyes, raised brows, and gaping mouth. He could not seem to take
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his eyes away from them, and had almost tripped or slipped on the boardwalk twice. He exclaimed to Carla Akwal, his time travel partner from 2013, “I cannot believe it. Here they are. I am actually seeing alive the most famous couple in history. Some countries even have set aside a day of remembrance in their honor. There are statues of them all over; paintings of them hang in many a government building.” He sneered. “Stupid. Dumb.” He eyed Joy. “But Joy Phim is even more beautiful than her paintings, even at this distance. No wonder Joy was able to spin webs around people.”
“You mean men,” Carla corrected, drawing away from him and crossing her arms. “She will spin no web around me.”
She glared at him, then stepped toward him, grabbed his arm, and shook it. “Come on,” she said, “have you become so mesmerized by that woman that you have forgotten why we are here? We are to kill them, not lick their feet.”
“Okay,” he replied, lifting his chin and trying to stand tall. He looked for a gap in the slow horse and wagon traffic, so they could cross the street. Impatient, he yelled to Carla, “Go!” and dashed forward.
Dodging a horse-drawn cart, he slithered across the street, his shoes making slurping noises in the puddles. Carla followed him, but he had cut too close to the cart, and she ran into the horse’s nose. The horse reared up, screamed, and skittered at an angle, almost upsetting the cart it was pulling. Carla tripped over a pile of horse manure and slid to her knee. She hurriedly got to her feet, dodging the frightened horse. She waved her fist at the shouting, red-faced driver as she pulled up on the boardwalk next to Hadad, who was waiting, hands on hips.
He growled, “What took you so long?”
Without looking at him, Carla headed rapidly toward Joy and John.
They were ambling down the boardwalk about fifty feet away, and seemed so entranced with what they were seeing that they had not heard the horse’s scream.
A sudden clacking noise behind her made her turn. Hadad was kicking a broken board that stuck out of the boardwalk. “Damn thing caught my pants leg,” he hissed.
Carla sneered, “What is taking you so long?”
Hadad gave her a steely stare when he caught up, and then both of them riveted their attention on Joy and John’s backs as they hurried toward them.
Twenty feet.
Joy was giggling to John about something.
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Fifteen feet.
John walked around a hole in the boardwalk and, pointing to it, said something to Joy.
Ten feet.
Hadad and Carla took out their Stahls.
Five feet.
Already exulting with triumph, Hadad aimed at Joy’s head and Carla coolly did the same for John’s.
