Time Travel Omnibus, page 797
The street beyond the Fairlane looked clearer and uglier than he’d expected—a bright messy watercolor spilling onto itself. He wondered what his expectations about this place were really based on. Probably more on Andrews’s “Village Squared” hit of last year than the hours of 1980s film and photographs he had reviewed till his eyes had burned with fatigue.
He spotted a blonde girl in what used to be called dungarees walking towards him. “Uh, pardon me, Miss,” he said as nonchalantly as he could, “do you know the time . . . and the date please?”
She gave him a strange look and glanced at her watch. “A quarter to twelve,” she said, without slowing a step.
Well, thanks a lot, Jeff thought. “Excuse me, Miss, I’m sorry to bother you, but if you could tell me the date as well . . .”
He found himself shouting after her. She just kept walking. He shook his head and walked the other way.
The chill was beginning to eat at him as he made his way towards West Fourth Street and Washington Square Park. There the usual complement of derelicts and weirdos—some things never change, he smiled—were keeping the late-night vigil. No point in trying to get a straight answer about the date from that crew. He sighed, then noticed the quaint old phone booth on the corner. He picked up the receiver and pumped in eight quarters in rapid sequence to make sure he would get a connection. “Hello, Operator, could you tell me what today’s date is?”
“The date, sir? I’m sorry, but we’re only supposed to give out numbers.”
“Well, is there a number I can call to find out the date?” A faint odor of urine permeated the booth.
“Checking, sir. No, I have a number for the time, but I don’t see one for the date.”
“Well, then, do you think you could be a human being instead of, uh, a computer, and tell me the date anyway?”
“I’m sorry, sir, but we’re only supposed to give out numbers.”
“And have you no function in the universe or reason for existence other than giving out numbers?”
“I have no function, sir.”
Jeff slammed the phone down and shook his head. I’d make a great diplomat, he thought. At this rate, I—“Having trouble with the phone, Jack?” Jeff turned to find himself addressed by—was it a slacker or a hippie?—about twenty-five years of age. “The phone company’s been hangin’ everyone up lately, man.”
“Yeah,” Jeff smiled, “it’s getting worse and worse. Look, I wonder if you might be able to help me. I’m disoriented, I’ve got to know what the date is.” Jeff leaned out of the booth, deaf to the quarters that clanged in the coin return.
“I can dig it, man, really.”
“Good, then, can you tell me what the date is?” He inhaled deeply of the less tainted air outside the booth. Compared to what he had just been breathing in, it smelled like perfume.
“Well, like, that’s a difficult question, man. I mean it’s November 21st now, but it’ll be November 22nd in a few minutes. And of course for the cats over in England it’s already been November 22nd for a few hours, and—”
“OK, good,” Jeff said. “And the year?”
“The year?”
“Right, the year—as in 19—”
“Oh, well that’s the same everywhere, man. 1963.”
“What?”
“I know it, man, time flies faster and faster these days—”
Jeff walked dazedly down the street, fighting to think through flashes that spat at his brain. What the hell was this? He was supposed to have emerged some time in the fall—the end of November was cutting it a little close, but OK, that still gave him at least some weeks to get to NASA, Morton Thiokol, whomever. He knew the Thorne wasn’t perfectly precise. How could it be—generating the kind of savagely powerful local field needed to keep the Artificial Worm Hole open long enough to operate across time. So it couldn’t be that exact. But twenty-three years? What could he do to prevent the Challenger explosion back here in 1963?
He shook his head and it cleared a little. He had no choice now but to return to the lounge, activate the mechanism for return to 2084, and try the damn thing again. He retraced his steps to the Student Building. But his legs moved slower and slower, as if they opposed the decision to return. Finally he stopped.
He stared at the Student Building across the street. He focused on its gargoyled facade and played with a quarter in his pocket. He pivoted suddenly and walked quickly again in the direction of the park. A hundred and twenty-one years was a long time to have traveled into the past just to rush right back. He could take a few more minutes to think this over.
He wandered towards Sixth Avenue, then inside a coffee shop. He sat down and read the sticky plastic menu without comprehension. The cracks in the red leatherette upholstery jabbed his thighs.
“Had a rough day, huh, honey? What’ll it be?” The dyed blonde waitress was right out of a turn-of-the-century video. Upset as he was, Jeff the cultural historian liked this.
“Just a tea with milk, please.” By any conceivable logic, he ought to return as soon as possible to 2084, so he could try this again, and with any luck arrive at least a few months before January 28, 1986. To do that, he had to go back now to the lounge in the NYU Student Building from which he’d emerged, the exact same place, that was the way the Thorne worked.
But something in Jeff rebelled against this logic—something in his nature which said, look, you’ve gotten this far, it’s not good, but you may never get this far again, so you better take what you can of this chance to save the space program.
But how?
He’d have to improvise.
He thought about the endless careful plans his team had made for him to avoid getting caught up in some paradox—keep the loop clean, don’t do anything in the past that might undermine the very foundation of this project. Steer clear of everyone’s great-grandparents . . . Jeez, how the hell was he supposed to do that back here, twenty-three years earlier than he’d planned to arrive, when he had no idea where everyone he was supposed to avoid was?
Jeff rubbed under his head. Every second that he stayed here was a knife at the throat of his future. He was off the screen, way out of equation-range—a single word to a wrong person, some land-mine of the past, could set in motion a chain of events that erased his colleagues, maybe even him, from existence. True, he had no close family, no one that he really loved deeply anymore—well, maybe still Rena, in a way—but he certainly hadn’t undertaken this job to kill his friends, make himself a martyr to a reconstituted future that might never know he’d existed in the first place.
On the other hand, how likely was it that he’d fun into such a land-mine? Painstaking tests had shown that the effects of most interjections in the past were sooner or later washed out in the myriad of everything else that remained the same. And how could anyone from his vantage point truly know what was intended all along? Maybe he’d always been supposed to arrive here back in 1963—maybe he was ordained to help the space program, or humanity, in some way other than stopping the Challenger. Maybe that’s why the Challenger blew up after all, because there was no way he could influence events this far back to stop the explosion that took the heart and soul out of the space program, had set up the 21st century to be little more than an age of commentary looking back on the Golden Age. His head spun. He could feel the sweet buzzing vortex of paradox whispering in his brain, drawing him in—No, I have free will, I’ll do what I damn well choose, I don’t have time for paradox now, I only have time to act.
He looked at the clock on the wall. Twelve minutes after twelve. Too much lead time for the Challenger—the shuttle had barely been conceived of in 1963. He supposed he could live the next twenty-three years in normal time here, and devise a new plan to thwart the explosion. Thiokol Chemical Corporation had been awarded the NASA contract to build the shuttle’s solid rocket boosters on November 20, 1973—just about ten years from where he was now—so if he could hang on for a decade, he might even be able to begin doing some good then. Leroy Day had been picked to head planning for the shuttle in 1969, a few years nearer.
But this didn’t seem appealing. Ten years, even five, was a long time to stay out of trouble. And he couldn’t even be sure that the Artificial Worm Hole would remain operational that long. The most their tests had confirmed was safe return after eighteen months in the past.
He, of course, knew exactly what else he might try to do on this date. He knew its obvious significance. He didn’t have to be a cultural historian by training to know it. Jeez, he’d arrived at the edge of the oldest cliché in the science fiction CD. Everyone and their great-aunt Martha had written a story about it.
What was the likelihood that some error in the team’s calculations, some unexpected flux in the AWH, had landed him here on this of all dates? Maybe it wasn’t an accident that he’d somehow been dropped at the doorstep of what Time, nearly a century in his past and thirty-seven years from now, had dubbed one of the top five murders of the millennium.
But if so, what was its deeper purpose?
Surely not to stop the events in Dallas tomorrow—there really wasn’t enough time. He was in New York City, after midnight, on November 22, 1963. Way too soon for Challenger. All but too late for JFK.
All but too late . . . But what else could he could do back here, then? What else had he perhaps been meant to do here?
He shook his head.
Did they even have air service to Dallas this late at night? He didn’t know. What kinds of planes? Propellers? No, probably jets already.
Dallas was a thriving city even back in the 1960s, and at the very least he would probably be able to get a businessman’s flight early in the morning. But would that leave him enough hours? What was the point of flying all the way to Dallas just in time to hear that JFK had been shot?
But what was his alternative if he didn’t use the AWH to return to his starting point? Sit around like a jackass and wait for Walter Cronkite’s tear-choked voice to announce the assassination on TV?
Blondie arrived with his tea. Fortunately it was lukewarm, and Jeff was able to drink it down in two gulps. He pulled a crumpled bill out of his wallet and left it on the table. Some bank clerk in the next few weeks would be stunned to see a 1981-issue ten-dollar bill with Donald T. Regan’s signature, but he had no other money, and had to take a chance that such a minor anonymous anachronism wouldn’t disturb the time-line. Loops could be perfectly clean only in theory. The bill would likely be dismissed as a clumsy counterfeit or a joke. Maybe it would be lost before it even got to a bank teller.
He walked out onto Sixth Avenue and surveyed his options yet one more time. The city was harsh, the air stank, he didn’t belong here. The sensible thing to do was return to 2084. And yet . . .
He flagged down a passing cab. “Kennedy, uh . . . Idlewild Airport. On the double, Chief.” As the cab pulled away, Jeff recalled George Bernard Shaw’s line that the reasonable man adapts to his surroundings, the unreasonable man attempts to change his surroundings to suit himself, and all progress depends upon the unreasonable man.
There had to be something more to this than Dallas, but at this point Dallas seemed the only way to get to it.
Inside the coffee shop, the waitress stuffed the bill in her bosom pocket and laughed. “I tell ya,” she said to the fat man stuck behind the cash register like a melon, “these actor types are all the same. They never remember to wait for their change. I’m gonna keep this for good luck.”
“Tunnel or Bridge?” the cabbie grunted through chewing gum.
Jeff wasn’t completely sure what he was talking about. “Do what you think best, Mac. Just get me to the airport as fast as you can.” He shifted his weight on the springy seat and looked through the dirt-caked window . . .
“Just got off the late shift, right? My brother-in-law does the midnight-to-eight shift for Helmsley. You gotta do what you gotta do to make a living these days, right? What’s the use of talking.”
“Yeah, the inflation’s impossible,” Jeff agreed. Can’t go wrong in any century griping about inflation. And he made a note to himself to get out of the janitor’s outfit as soon as he got to the airport.
“Yeah,” the cabbie growled, “ain’t it the truth.”
Jeff felt in his pocket for his reassuring puterwafer but got no comfort from it. He was fully on his own now, plans pertaining to twenty-three years in the future all but worthless. In a worst-case scenario, if all he could catch was an early-morning flight, he’d have maybe an hour or two to get to the Book Depository Building in Dealey Plaza after his plane arrived in Dallas. If he could somehow get to the Building by eleven, he’d stake out the upper floors and try to intercept the gunman . . . or gunmen . . . or gun-women. He wondered whether he’d find Lee Harvey Oswald up there by those windows. Historians would give their right arms to know. A hundred and twenty years of theorizing had left them no closer to knowing who had killed Kennedy than the unsatisfying “lone nut” explanation of the Warren Commission.
One thing Jeff did know: the assassination of JFK probably did more to ultimately harm the prospects of humans in space than even the horrible Challenger disaster. His team had briefly considered sending him back here to 1963 in the first place, but rejected it on the grounds that too much was still unknown about the assassination for them to mount an effective plan to stop it. So here Jeff was without a plan anyway . . . rushing like a moth to a flame that he had little chance of extinguishing, but which was too attractive to resist.
“Any special terminal, Mac?” The grunt drew Jeff back to the real world, though this ride seemed scarcely more real than his musings. He looked at his watch and whistled. This old gasser had gotten him to the airport in under an hour. “American Airlines, Chief, and thanks.” Jeff set his watch to the time on the foolish-looking clock pasted on the cabbie’s dashboard. It we now 1:07 in the morning of November 22.
He paid in dirty dollar bills printed twenty years in the future and sprinted into the terminal—a garish but not uncharming combination of wine-red carpet and shiny chrome trimming. It reminded Jeff of early Technicolor movies. He ducked into the men’s room, unpacked clothes from his suitcase, and shortly emerged a stylish ’80s businessman. He expected this wouldn’t cause too much of a problem—if his clothes looked a little odd, people would likely chalk that up to his dressing European. There was more difference in hemispheric styles in this century.
He approached what appeared to be a mock-wood ticket desk. The pert red-headed Kewpie-doll behind the counter added to his feeling that he was in an ancient film. “Am I in time for the late-night flight to Dallas?” he asked with his friendliest smile.
“Oh, I’m very sorry, sir, but our last connecting flight left at 12:30. Our next one leaves at 10:00 this morning, and I believe that Braniff has a direct flight that leaves at 9:00. Shall I make a reservation for you?”
Damn. “Could you tell me what time the Braniff flight arrives in Dallas?”
She pulled out a paper directory and checked. “Eleven thirty-three Dallas time, sir. Shall I make the reservation?”
“Yes, please do,” Jeff said, “and could you point me in the direction of the airport hotel?” Jeff paid in cash—he had a bunch of credit cards too, but they were all hopelessly out of date, in the wrong way. She counted the money and Jeff held his breath. The bills were small denomination, suitably soiled, from the 1970s. She didn’t notice anything askew.
Jeff walked slowly to the end of the terminal. It would be ridiculously close in Dallas—even if the plane landed on time, he’d have just an hour to get to the Book Depository and stop the killing.
The bed in the International was unexpectedly comfortable though the room, like the airport terminal, had some faintly artificial smell. Jeff fell soundly asleep, and dreamed he was in a classroom giving his “Earth Was Never Room Enough” talk while Dion’s “Abraham, Martin, and John” played in the background. Rena sat in the front with her legs seductively crossed, but her face looked a lot like Sandra Dee’s. He could hear someone talking just outside the classroom, going on and on and utterly ignoring his lecture. It was James C. Fletcher, NASA administrator who had had the most to do with the shuttle program. Jeff was screaming at his students to pay attention when the phone rang.
He fumbled with the ungainly receiver and dropped it. Then he smacked himself in the mouth with it. “Hello,” he finally managed, rubbing his eyes and looking in vain for the viewer.
“Good morning, Dr. Harris! Five thirty wake-up call!” a sing-song female voice chimed merrily.
“Thanks.” Jeff replaced the receiver with great effort and sat up. He rubbed his sore lips and fought off the impulse to go back to sleep for just another fifteen minutes. He could sleep for fifteen days, the way he felt, but he dragged his body out of bed and quickly dressed. Last night’s businessman with maybe a blue knit tie to go with the gray wool suit would do fine.
The coffee house was a zoo. He hadn’t much appetite, but forced himself to eat the soggy eggs for strength. Looking around, he realized again that there was a lot he didn’t like about this place. Historians like their history from the safety and convenience of the future—the past on a platter with all the comforts of home. Not like this.
“Excuse me, sir.” The waitress startled Jeff as she leaned over with the check. “That’s an interesting bracelet you’ve got on there. My husband’s a jeweler, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything like it.”
“Uh, thank you.” Jeff glanced down at his watch, scooped up the check, and quickly left the table. “My, uh, kid’s studying electronics,” he said half over his shoulder, “and it’s something he designed for me.” Great. He’d been wearing this flector for six years now, and with all the departure commotion yesterday he’d forgotten to take it off. Hustling to Braniff Departures, he removed the silver sliver from its embed on his wrist and placed it in a side compartment of his suitcase. Then he took out the clunky Timex analog someone had given him, and stopped a moment to set it and strap it on his wrist. He shook his head in self-disgust. First the future bills he was handing out like candy, and now this. The money he had no choice about, but the flector was sheer stupidity on his part.
