Time Travel Omnibus, page 798
He sighed. It didn’t really matter. If by some wild luck he could stop the JFK assassination in Dallas, nothing that he did now would make much difference. If not, well . . .
The plane was a sardine can, and Jeff sat white-knuckled in a window seat waiting for takeoff. Finally it began making taxiing noises, the comforting rumblings of some great beast’s innards, and Jeff leaned back and tried to relax. The stewardess had a tight skirt on, pitching her derriere right at him, better view than the window.
Well, so far his rating of 1963 was food and decor not too good, women a distinct possibility. This seemed in line with that refrain from the classic Woody Guthrie song about the social fallout of relativity: Can’t go North, can’t go South, or up, down, anymore. But I can still go in and out, Mr. Einstein, I can still go in and out.
It remained to be seen whether he could get in and out of the Book Depository in time.
The 707 pierced like a needle through the remnants of haze over Dallas. Jeff peered through his peephole at the airport below as the captain announced they’d be landing momentarily.
He had so little time. Everything depended on his getting to the Book Depository as quickly as possible. He’d shove through lines, jump over turnstiles, knock people down if he had to. No gesture of asinine civility could be allowed to slow his exit.
The screech of the aircraft hitting the ground hiked his pulse. He felt the seconds ticking, each in phase with his pounding blood. He braced for the performance. He could see nothing but the taxi at the end of the tunnel, the taxi that would bring him face-to-face with God-knew-what at the Book Depository.
The plane shuddered still. Its doors grumbled open. Debarking passengers spilled like mindless ooze into the terminal. But one of their number was more minded than he’d ever been in his life: single-minded in his determination to dive into that cab. Get out of my way, you goddamn fools. I don’t have time to say sorry.
Jeff swam in powerful strokes through the current, halfway through the terminal, now three-quarters through and almost out. Every shred of his being, every ounce of his purpose, was focused on closing this last little gap to the exit. He was almost believing that maybe he would stop the assassination after all, maybe this was the way indeed that he was destined to save the space program. He saw JFK’s face before him, superimposed on the Challenger, superimposed on the flames, superimposed on innumerable stars.
Which was why he never saw the towering cart of luggage that fell upon him less than three feet from the glass doors, and knocked him unconscious.
He opened his eyes to a throbbing headache and blurry white of what must have been a hospital room. Fumes of formaldehyde hung in his nostrils and made him gag. “I see you’re awake, Dr. Harris,” a lazy Texas accent jarred him. “You ran into a rack of luggage at the airport and sustained a moderate concussion, but you’re going to be just fine.”
Jeff leaned up on an elbow to get a look at the nurse. “Where am I?”
“St. Paul Hospital. We’ll need to run a few tests on you, and if everything’s all right you’ll probably be able to leave in the morning.”
“I. . .” Jeff fell back on the pillow and tried to breathe slowly. He felt cold and clammy and slightly in shock. He took several deep breaths, and tried to focus more clearly on the nurse. Her eyes looked red and puffy. Outside his room he heard what sounded like a radio or holocenter blaring in the corridor—a tumult of loud talking and wailing. “What’s going on out there?”
Nurse K. Arthur burst into tears, and Jeff got a sudden feeling in the pit of his stomach that he knew exactly what the ruckus was about.
“They killed the President,” she sobbed. “I really shouldn’t disturb you with this. They rushed him to Parkland Memorial, but he was too far gone.” She heaved with tears. “He was so young, so beautiful. Why would anyone want to do something like that?”
Jeff reached out to comfort her. “Ow!” Pain cut through his back like a stiletto.
“Here, let me help you.” Arthur leaned over and gently eased Jeff back into bed. “You probably wrenched a muscle or two.” She puffed up the pillow and smiled. “There. I’ll tell the doctor you’re up and I’m sure he’ll look in on you a little later.” Her smile suddenly wavered and tears welled up again in her eyes. “They wounded Vice President Johnson and killed Governor Connally. They say it was one of those Communists. What’s going to happen to the country now?”
“I don’t know,” Jeff barely answered, too tired to tell her that although her information was wrong, her sense of impending catastrophe was all too on-target.
He slept fitfully the rest of the day, pestered and punctured by a procession of interns and orderlies bent on waking him up, taking his temperature, and telling him he needed more sleep. He asked for a TV or radio at least five times and got nothing. The phone by his bed was broken. He couldn’t tell whether the morguelike atmosphere was standard or a consequence of the assassination. The assassination—every time he thought of it, he felt like retching. A leaden, queasy thickness of despair seemed to hang over everything.
He fell asleep at last into something deeper that let him dream. He watched a team of 19th-century surgeons, long hair and whiskers with a bittersweet alcohol smell in the room, work over what must have been a very important patient. Straining his head closer, he could see that the patient was a fish, cut open and spread apart down the middle. The chief surgeon produced a mallet and began pounding the fish, while others cut off pieces and put them in little bags. “Oh, I’m only joking, old boy,” the surgeon turned to Jeff and said in a crisp British accent, “this is dinner, of course!”
Jeff sat up sharply in bed, awakened by yet another nurse come to stick something in him. “What do you want now?” he rasped, wincing from the pain that came as he propped himself up.
“Just some intravenous for the evening, Dr. Harris. It’ll help you sleep.” She wheeled some torturelike contraption over to him. She was a big-boned, handsome, light brown woman, about thirty-five, who spoke with a lilting accent.
He shook his head to clear some of the cobwebs. “I already ate your lousy supper. Why do I need intravenous?”
“Pity the nurse who has a doctor for a patient,” she said in the mildly scolding tone of voice that seemed a part of every nurse’s repertoire. “Now why don’t you just lie back like a good boy and let me get this working.” A strong arm pushed Jeff back gently but firmly, and she began applying alcohol to his skin.
Once again the door flung open, this time admitting two burly black men carrying an impossibly fat TV set.
“I tell you what, Nurse, ah, Daniels.”
Jeff freed himself from her grip. “I’ll take this intravenous only if it’s prescribed and administered by an intern or resident. So you want me on that, you call in a doctor, fair enough?” This should buy him a little time to think this through. There was something he didn’t like about this nurse, not to mention that he wasn’t particularly partial to the prospect of being festooned with intravenous needles and tubing, 1960s style, carrying who knew what kind of viruses and sub-vees they didn’t even know about back here, and he might not have been inoculated against.
Daniels looked at the two men hooking up the TV set and then back at Jeff. “No meat off my behind, honey,” she said, and abruptly wheeled the equipment out the door.
Good—she’d apparently decided it wasn’t worth making a scene in front of the techies. “Thank you, gentlemen,” Jeff told them as they finished up. “See? It’s not true what they say about the media always causing problems. Sometimes a TV can be very helpful.”
They looked at him as if he was crazy, and left.
Jeff pivoted gingerly in the bed, placing his feet on the floor in slow, exaggerated motions. Pushing himself up shakily from his seated position, he found he could stand. He walked unsteadily to a chair by the window, and sat himself down with the utmost caution. The pain he expected in his back was mercifully slight. He reached for the suitcase lodged neatly against the window and fished inside for his clothing. Thank God the case wasn’t lost at the airport. And a good thing, too, that it had been programmed to open only in response to his and no one else’s sweat. Otherwise he’d have had some explaining to do about some of the contents.
He had to get out of here right away. He had to get back to New York, back to the student lounge. He reached deeper inside the suitcase. The rough fiber of the janitor’s uniform finally chafed his fingertips. He doubted that an NYU janitor looked anything like the hospital variety, but this was still his best choice. He dressed very carefully, praying that his body would hold up long enough for him to walk out of this horror-movie of a hospital—this horror-show of a world.
Suitcase under his arm, he tiptoed to the door and opened it a crack. His room seemed to be in the middle of a long, orange-pink tiled corridor that stretched in either direction with no one in sight. Peering out a bit more, he could see what looked like a nurse’s station down to his right. He hesitated. His mind felt swollen and paranoid, he had no confidence in his judgments. He didn’t feel good about just walking out, but he felt much worse about staying. He opened the door and strode as casually as he could to the left.
He slowly became aware of voices ahead of him. He took a few more steps, then stopped and listened. They were definitely moving closer. He looked down the corridor the other way. Too long a distance to try returning to his room. He glanced quickly around at the rooms within reach and tried the door of the nearest one.
Locked!
He tried another one.
Same result!
His hands grew moist and his head light and the voices louder. He felt nauseated, as if he was about to vomit and pass out. He breathed deeply, steadied himself, and tried another door.
It opened! He leaned against the inside of the door, thankful and quaking, until the entourage passed. From what he could hear, they seemed to be just a team of porters.
Relaxing a bit, he groped for the light switch to see whose room he was in. This was an extremely stupid move, he realized just as his hand flicked the switch, for the patient might well begin screaming. Fortunately the room seemed to be some sort of storage facility.
He looked around and stopped on a lumpy something stretched out in a far corner. Again his heart started pounding, for he suddenly was sure he was looking at a dead body. He forced himself to walk over and focus. The lumpy something was a long bag of stained linen.
He resumed his journey down the corridor, this time with a bit more assertion in his gait. He turned randomly down several connecting passages, passed several orderlies and nurses and made a point of not avoiding their gazes, and eventually wound up at what looked like a service elevator. The doors were open. He walked in, pressed Lobby, and hoped for the best.
The elevator wobbled its way down, Jeff envisioning himself a dead man dangling from a slowly descending rope. The doors finally opened on a poorly lit hallway that said Ground Floor. He walked a few feet, and was glad to see the hospital lobby. He wondered why the act of leaving a hospital always felt like escape from a high-security prison.
He hailed a cab and told him take me to the airport. The cabbie talked Kennedy, but Jeff was too tired to give more than grunts in response.
He sank into bed in the motel room, utterly drained. He closed his eyes and saw again the lumpy bag in the hospital laundry room. It was a woman’s body, face down, wearing only a 20th-century bra and shiny beige panties that clung tightly to her rear. She looked familiar. He turned her over and found eyes staring blankly up at his. He tried to scream, but his throat stuck. The eyes were Rena’s.
He sat up in bed, broken out in a cold sweat, and shuddered for a long time.
I guess I’m not as cut out for time travel as I thought, he said to himself. But how could anyone know that beforehand? You had to actually live through these loops, bristling with serrations, to know the toll they took.
Twelve hours later, he was on a plane for New York. Staring out the window as the engines revved up, Jeff realized he was losing a golden opportunity to stop the killing of Lee Harvey Oswald. He looked at his watch. That would happen tomorrow. He toyed with the idea of making a last-minute dash from the plane and calling the Dallas police. He’d have plenty of time and . . . no! For once he’d do the cautious thing and return to New York and then 2084. No chance the police would take his call seriously anyway—just another crank come out of the now festering assassination woodwork.
Of course, a crank who knew about Oswald’s murder would be someone Jeff would want to meet. Wasn’t there some story that the Dallas police were indeed warned by someone about the shooting of Oswald? Was that someone Jeff? Or someone else on trespass from the future?
He fidgeted with his seat belt. Maybe the attempt on his life in the hospital last night—if that nurse with the intravenous was indeed trying to kill him—was intended precisely to stop him from interfering with Ruby’s murder of Oswald. No, that sort of reasoning would get him nowhere. It was paranoid nonsense. Yet he was here on this plane leaving the scene of the crime of the century, when there were plenty of things he still might do.
The plane’s lift-off ended his reverie. Jeff tried to direct his thinking to what awaited him—going back to 2084 with the Thorne, then in it once again, through a new AWH, and out again in 1985, the time he should have arrived in the first place, to stop the explosion of the Challenger. He stared steel-eyed out the window. No one could help JFK—that should have been obvious all along. You can’t change history on that major a level.
But the Challenger—that was more mechanical, presumably an accident of technology, not of sick human intention, more amenable to the time traveler’s ministration.
That was what he kept telling himself, but it gave him little comfort. Obviously, traveling back to 1985 wasn’t as easy as he and his team had thought—if it was, why was he here? There were things about time travel they didn’t understand.
He laughed bitterly. The last thing he wanted to be was a “Fourth Magi”—that additional wise man from the East who had gotten a late start in his journey to give the infant Jesus a gift. The potentate then spent the next thirty years in a vain search for Jesus, always arriving in places a few hours after Jesus had left. When he finally caught up it was too late—Christ was already on the cross. Just as Jeff had been with JFK. Would he be that way with the Challenger too? Arriving just in time to see that horrendous explosion that took so much else with it? Impotent witness wasn’t the role Jeff had trained for.
He landed at Idlewild in the early evening. The sadness in the air was thicker than pollution. Soon it would harden into the cynicism and outrage that disrupted the sixties and deformed a good deal more of the times that came after.
It’s not my fault, Jeff kept telling himself. My job was to stop the Challenger tragedy—I never really had a chance to stop what happened in Dallas. I wasn’t properly prepared. It was crazy even to try.
He took a cab back to the Village, the same trip he had taken forty-eight hours ago, in reverse. Everything was different. It was Saturday night, and throngs of people were out, but the sounds and colors were drained of vitality—as if someone had pulled the plug on the watercolor, and all of its light had leaked away.
His cab pulled up to the Student Building. Three green-and-black police cars huddled like ugly roaches near the entrance. Students were milling about, five or six officers were conferring on the side, and the night air crackled with the sound of police bulletins and the glare of pulsing lights.
“What’s going on here, Officer?” Jeff demanded, more sharply than he’d intended.
“Who the hell are you?”
Jeff fumbled for his faculty ID, crafted to look like a 1985 edition, and hoped it would get by the beefy, florid-faced policeman. “Sorry, Officer. I teach at the College of Liberal Arts and Science here.”
The cop eyed the ID, Jeff, and softened. “You’re a teacher from another division?”
“Right,” Jeff said, not really knowing what that meant.
The cop nodded. “The student lounge was broken into two hours ago and severely vandalized. These kids got no respect for property. Hey, Professor, you OK?”
Jeff felt his knees buckle. He reached out to the police car for support. “Officer, I’ve got to get up there right away. I . . . there are some important papers that I must get a look at.”
He was pleading.
“Out of the question.” A big arm restrained Jeff, already in motion towards the building. “The place is a mess. Glass and garbage all over. Someone torched that whole floor—probably some kid didn’t like his grades. Believe me, Professor, it’s not safe.”
Jeff pulled free of the blue arm. For a second he considered making a run to the building. But he knew it was hopeless. He hadn’t the vaguest idea what was really going on, what had happened in the lounge. But he knew with cloying certainty that his life was now seriously derailed.
Maybe the AWH had imploded, maybe some kid had torched the place as the cop had said, but whatever had happened there was no way that soft shimmering light would be there for him—surely no way he could code it for use and enter it even if it was there now, without a dozen witnesses looking on. A few dozen bills out of time he could take a chance on leaving back here; walking into the AWH with 1960s people as an audience, maybe even trying to follow, was insane. He couldn’t risk what that would do to reality—might do to his very existence.
So he turned and walked shakily down the street. The cop might have said something but he couldn’t hear it. The off-key amusement park quality of the Village congealed now into a proper smarmy nightmare. Jeff staggered a bit farther, then grabbed on to a corner lamp pole. Then he leaned over and did what he had wanted to do for nearly two days: he threw up what seemed like every ounce of substance in his stomach.
