Time Travel Omnibus, page 880
“What’s your status?”
“I don’t know. Got an induction notice a while ago, but I burned it. Everything else is back home.”
“Where?”
It was taking a long time for the grass to wear off. “Back home. Back in Illinois. Chicago suburbs.”
The woman asked his name and address, and wrote something on a sheet of paper. “You’re not in school?”
“Flunked out of the university,” Tom said. “End of first term. Kinda lost track since then.”
“What have you done since then?”
“Hung around. Didn’t want to go back. Had some bread, found some crash space, worked a bit.” Tom looked at the woman. Her eyes drilled through him. The coffee hadn’t helped much. His mind still wasn’t working, like a car that wouldn’t catch when he cranked the starter. It was October now; getting toward a year.
She asked more questions. Had he passed the physical? Had he refused induction? Was he sure the induction date had passed?
Tom nodded, shook his head, and shrugged. “I don’t know. I just can’t face this. My best buddy, I grew up with him, and he went into the Marines and went over to ‘Nam and they made him a killer and now they killed him. I don’t want to fight their dirty war. I don’t want them to make me a murdering monster.”
“That’s sad,” she said, then asked him about his religion, and if he’d filed for conscientious objector status.
“Tried. Didn’t work,” he mumbled. “I’m no Quaker, just a stoned Methodist who flunked philosophy. You try to tell them war is wrong, and they say what about fighting Hitler?” He shook his head. “I tried to say killing is wrong, and they said why? I spent a week writing a five-page letter quoting the Bible and Gandhi on turning the other cheek and nonviolence. I said my conscience wouldn’t let me just follow orders like Adolf Eichmann. All they sent back was a form saying ‘no.’ Taught me the difference between law and justice.” Tom shivered, chilled though Berkeley autumn was not cold for a Chicago kid. He felt bitter and crushed, like a sharecropper doomed to a lifetime in debt. Too many more questions, and he was going to split.
The woman looked down at the paper. “You poor boy. They have you in a bad place. How bad do you want to get out?”
“Bad,” Tom said. “Real bad. Maybe I’ll split for Canada. Wouldn’t do any good to rot in jail as a draft resister. Nobody would listen.”
“Have you ever been arrested?”
“Nope.” Worried a couple of times when cops had walked by when he was stoned, but never got busted.
“Do you care if how you get out is legal?”
Nobody had ever asked Tom a question that way before. Was she an FBI agent trying to trap him? Talking to her was playing chess stoned and not knowing the rules. Were there women in the FBI? Did she have the shiny black shoes FBI agents always wore? He couldn’t see her feet behind the desk. He hadn’t done anything really illegal before. Just smoking dope, and everybody smoked dope. Maybe swiped a couple of highway flashers with some of the guys. He’d lifted some food from a store once, when he was hungry and broke. How honest could he be when he was trapped by a stupid, ugly system that wanted to send him to fight a stupid, evil war? “Not as long as I don’t have to hurt anybody.”
Her old teacher face tried to grin. “You won’t. It’s not really legal, but it’s not really bad, and it can get you out.”
“Okay.” Tom didn’t feel as relieved as he thought he should. This wasn’t like anything he’d ever heard. Guys went to Canada or Sweden. They went underground, put sugar in their urine, faked bad backs, got jobs in defense plants, or paid somebody off. “What?”
“We have someone replace you.”
“What?” he said again.
“Replace you. We can have someone go into the Army in your place, using your name.”
“Never heard of that.” Tom had heard of guys gaining fifty pounds or getting braces, plenty of other tricks.
“You’re not supposed to know about it. Nobody in 1969 is supposed to know about it.”
“Doesn’t make sense. Any fool can enlist under his own name.” The Army would pin a medal on the man.
“Suppose these men aren’t here legally. Suppose they shouldn’t be here at all, and don’t want anyone to know they are.”
“Wetbacks?” Tom couldn’t see why illegal Mexican immigrants would want to get into the Army.
She shook her head. “No, these men come from the future, a couple hundred years from now. It’s a better time, with no more wars. You have to believe that; it really can happen.” Her words had the fire of belief, like the Movement people.
She was crazy. You dropped a couple tabs of acid last night, grandma, and you’re still eight miles high. Nobody travels in time except in their head. Tom knew the paradoxes, but he kept quiet. Old lady probably was crazy, but he could hope. Men had walked on the moon, and that was supposed to be science fiction. With nothing left to lose and no other options, Tom was ready to try it. “Why?” he asked.
“They want to be heroes. They think war brings glory and makes them men. I think they’re crazy. Our society up then thinks they’re crazier than your society thinks you are. Sending them down now is a compromise, a way to let them do what they want to do, without hurting anyone up then. We hope they learn how bad war really is.”
Tom shuddered. Mike hadn’t said much about the war when he enlisted after high school. He said it was his duty, like their fathers fighting the Nazis, and Mike wanted to get it over with. Tom hadn’t understood that, and he couldn’t understand this. His father never talked about duty; he had said Hitler was evil and war was horrible. Men who wanted to go to ‘Nam had to be really crazy, not just strange like Berkeley people. “Okay, ma’am. If they want to go, they can get their heads blown off. May be stoned, but I’m not stupid.” He hoped she wouldn’t ask him for money.
“Good. We want to help boys like you who can’t get out any other way. You go see Juan. He arranges the substitutions.” She wrote a note on the paper before her. “Here’s his address. Usually he’s there from nine until six every day. Tell him you saw Marie at the Draft Aid Center. Tell him what you told me.”
Before she handed Tom the paper, she reached into her desk drawer. He was surprised when she handed him two dollars along with the note.
“Go get something to eat. You look like you need it.”
Shaken, Tom took the money. He wondered how bad he looked and how dumb he had sounded.
A note at the apartment said his father had called. Tom trashed it, and was glad the mail pile had nothing from his parents or the draft board.
A shower helped clear his head; he stood under it until the water ran cold, then wrapped the towel around himself and walked down the dim hall to his room. He found clean underwear and a flannel shirt that wasn’t too dirty. He was eating crackers in the kitchen when the phone rang, and he answered it automatically.
“Tommy?” It was his father. “I called, and the draft board said if you enlist now they’ll put you behind a desk. They need men who can type. It will be three years, not two, but they won’t send you to Vietnam, and you won’t have to fight.”
“Fuck off!”
“Tommy, I don’t want you to end up like my brother. If they draft you, you’ll have to go—”
Tom slammed down the phone. He’d heard too many times about the dead brother his father had named him after. He wouldn’t be a part of their war machine, even if he could stay safe behind a desk shuffling papers. Leaving the cracker box on the counter and a knapsack of dirty clothes on the kitchen floor, he stalked out. He walked down the hill, toward the bay.
Juan’s address was an aging concrete block building behind a barber shop, with white paint flaking from worn gray cement. It had been an auto-repair shop, with two pairs of swinging garage doors, both locked shut, and a single white door marked “OFFICE.” Tom knocked, and turned the handle when a voice invited him in.
A round-faced man with very dark hair and brown skin sat behind a gray metal desk in a surprisingly neat little room. A copy ofLife magazine lay open before him. “Marie sent me to see Juan,” Tom announced.
“That’s me,” the man said. “You got draft trouble, kid?”
Tom felt uneasy; the man looked Mexican, but his accent wasn’t right. Maybe it was an FBI trap. He was glad he didn’t have any dope on him.
“Don’t be afraid, kid. Marie called and told me about you. She always does that.”
Tom nodded. “Yeah, got draft trouble.” Admitting it wouldn’t hurt. Almost everybody had draft trouble.
“Okay. We may be able to help.” His dark eyes appraised Tom. “Are you willing to vanish for two years? Just disappear? Nobody will be able to find you, and once you go, you can’t change your mind.”
It didn’t sound right. “Canada?” Tom asked.
Juan shook his head. “You don’t need us to go to Canada, kid. Hop a train tonight and you can be in Vancouver on Friday. If you’re broke, go thumb a ride; you’ll get to the border inside a week. Draft resistance isn’t a crime in Canada; they won’t send you back. But you’re stuck there. The Feds bust kids who come back to their grandmothers’ funerals.”
“Marie said somebody would take my place.” Tom tried to read the man’s expression.
“That’s right, kid. Somebody comes down now to spend two years in the Army under your name. When their tour is over, they go back up then and on paper down now you’re a veteran, entitled to all the benefits thereof. It’s not a bad deal. It’s a damned better one than the Army will give you. You got a birth certificate, draft card, or ID?”
“Driver’s license and draft card. Burned the induction notice.” Rolled it up and lit a joint with it, but Tom knew better than to say that.
“The card is what matters. License doesn’t have a photo, does it?”
Tom shook his head.
“That’ll do. Uncle just wants bodies to fight; he doesn’t care if they’re yours. All you do is bring your papers back here, tell the substitute what he needs to know to pretend to be you, and zip into the machine. When you walk out two years from now, the substitute gives you his discharge papers and mustering-out pay, tells you where he’s been, and you’re off scot free.”
Something didn’t add up. Tom’s mind grabbed at a question. “So where do I hide for two years?”
“Smart kid.” Juan paused. “What did Marie tell you?”
“Time travel, mumbo jumbo, didn’t make sense.” Tom wanted to hear what the man had to say.
“It’s not mumbo jumbo, kid. It’s future technology. I was born in the year 2162 in Nashville. Up then, we’ve got technology that would look like magic to you. One bit of techno-magic is that we can send people back in time. We can’t go back to exactly our own past; but your world is close enough that we don’t get into trouble. You know why we come back now?”
Tom shook his head. The congestion in his nose still smelled faintly of pot smoke, and he didn’t want to say something stupid.
“We know how bad war is, kid, and we’ve managed to stop it, but some crazy fools up then still want to play soldier. You’ve got the wars they want, so we send them down now. Slogging through a real war is good therapy; most of them get over it. You stay out of the war. Everybody wins.”
“Why?” Tom asked.
Juan chuckled. “Sometimes I think you freaks are the only sane ones down now, kid. You’re harmless. Your heads are messed up, but war would only mess them up more. We help you, and you help us. That’s the way the world is.”
Maybe the man was crazy, but Tom didn’t want to go to war or to jail. “What do you do?”
“Find somebody from up then who can pass for you. It’s easy in 1969; nobody has DNA profiles. Your friends wouldn’t recognize you with a shave and a military haircut. What’s your height and weight?”
“Five foot ten, one-fifty-five.”
Juan moved the magazine to look at a sheet of paper on his desk. “We’ve got a few who can do you. Brown hair, brown eyes, medium build. Tom Jackson is a common name; nobody could track you down that way after the war. Black kids have it easier; they all look the same to Whitey.” He chuckled. “You’re in if you want it, kid.”
“Where do I go for the next two years?” Tom worried that Juan was evading his question.
“You skip them, kid. We send you two years into the future.”
“You’re putting me on.”
“You just pop in the time machine and walk out two years later a free man. Like you’re in an elevator, kid. The doors close, you feel a little something funny, and the doors open two years from now. You think you spent maybe a minute going up then.”
“Have you done it?”
Juan shook his head. “I came down now in it, but I can’t go back up then until I leave for good. Once I go forward in this time line, I can’t come back to now. It violates causality. You can only go forward, to a time where you weren’t before. Don’t worry about it kid; I don’t. I stay here, down now. They pay well, and it’s interesting. I’ve been down now almost two years; after three more, I head back up then, with a pile of money waiting. Don’t ask me how the time machine works, kid. I don’t know.”
It sounded stark raving mad, but Tom had nothing left to lose. “Is that all?”
“You can’t bring much gear with you. Just a pack you can carry into the time machine. We’ve got no room to store things. If you know anybody else who wants out, send them to Marie, but don’t tell them what it is. They’d think you’re crazy. Same thing for friends and family. Tell them you’re splitting for a while, or enlisting, but nothing about us. They’d think you’re nuts.”
Tom nodded. It was better than waiting for the FBI to knock on the door. His parents deserved to worry for a while. “When?” he asked.
“Monday,” Juan said. “Get here by 10 A.M.”
Thursday night Tom missed a person-to-person call from his father. The operator left a note to call collect, but Tom ignored it. On Saturday, Tom told the bakery he wouldn’t be back; the owner thanked him and gave him $40 cash instead of a paycheck. That evening, he told the guys in the apartment he was splitting. They knew better than to ask where. They’d watched him burn the induction notice, and they didn’t want to know if the Feds came asking. He sold his sleeping bag and mattress for $20, and his cooking gear for $10. He told the guys they could have anything else he left.
Sunday morning his father woke him up with another person-to-person call. He was still trying to sell Tom on enlisting to be a clerk. “It’s not fun, Tommy, but it’s safe.”
“They’re lying to you. I won’t be part of the war. I’m splitting.”
“You’re going to get in trouble.”
Tom hung up. He’d let them worry while he was gone. They’d tried to run his life too long. That evening the guys offered him a farewell joint, but he turned it down for the first time in a long while. He wanted a clear head for the future.
Tom knocked on the office door just after 9:30 on Monday. Juan was there, and a tall black kid with wary eyes who introduced himself as Joe. Three white guys showed up together just before 10:00, looking stoned. The five sat nervously on metal folding chairs in the office while Juan went into the back of the building. The lights flickered as a high whine came from the back. Tom fidgeted until Juan returned with five more young men with very short hair.
One was black and tall. Three matched the other three guys, one short and blonde, the others a shade darker. The fifth had to be the substitute for Tom. Juan introduced them, and told them to sit down while he explained things.
“These guys are going to be you kids for the next two years. They need your paperwork; they need to know enough about you to pass muster. They don’t need to know all your girlfriends, but they have to know your parents’ names and addresses, when and where you were born, where you went to school, that sort of stuff.” He turned toward the substitutes. “And you’ve each got note pads, so you write it down. No army down now will take you if you’re too dumb to remember your mother’s name. You want the sergeants to think you’re smart as well as gung-ho. Make sure you memorize it all; that’s why you don’t go down to enlist until tomorrow.”
Juan paused and looked back and forth between the two groups. He looked toward Tom’s group. “Kids, these guys come from over 200 years in the future, so their questions are going to sound weird. They have to pass for you to the Army, but they will never talk to your families. If somebody writes a letter that reaches them, they’ll ignore it. That’s the deal. After they get out, they’ll tell you what they did, so you don’t sound like idiots when somebody asks you about the war.”
He turned to the others. “Like they told you up then, down now doesn’t have much in the way of identification technology, just photos and fingerprints. As far as we know, these kids don’t have any prints or photos in police records. All you’ve got to do is learn a little about them, and look a little like them. The draft boards just want bodies; they don’t care whose.”
When he was done, Juan paired them off, and sent each pair to separate small rooms.
Claude was Tom’s substitute. He asked eager, nervous questions in a voice with an odd accent. As he answered, Tom felt he was undressing himself, shedding details like clothing.
They got down to particulars. “No shop,” Tom said when the questions turned to high school classes. “I was college prep. Wanted to be an astronomer. Didn’t want to push paper like my father.”
Claude looked up from his notes. “Why don’t you want to go? You have the chance to be a hero. We have nothing like it in my time. We have no more heroes, no more wars, no more risks. There is no courage left in our world.”
Tom stared at Claude, speechless. He had always preferred physics and math because the correct answers were always beyond argument. He knew right and wrong, but he didn’t know how to debate them. He had wanted to eloquently denounce the whole war machine in front of the draft board, but the words had never come. He had no words for the depths of Hell he had seen in Mike’s eyes when Mike talked about battles he had fought in.
“I don’t know. Got an induction notice a while ago, but I burned it. Everything else is back home.”
“Where?”
It was taking a long time for the grass to wear off. “Back home. Back in Illinois. Chicago suburbs.”
The woman asked his name and address, and wrote something on a sheet of paper. “You’re not in school?”
“Flunked out of the university,” Tom said. “End of first term. Kinda lost track since then.”
“What have you done since then?”
“Hung around. Didn’t want to go back. Had some bread, found some crash space, worked a bit.” Tom looked at the woman. Her eyes drilled through him. The coffee hadn’t helped much. His mind still wasn’t working, like a car that wouldn’t catch when he cranked the starter. It was October now; getting toward a year.
She asked more questions. Had he passed the physical? Had he refused induction? Was he sure the induction date had passed?
Tom nodded, shook his head, and shrugged. “I don’t know. I just can’t face this. My best buddy, I grew up with him, and he went into the Marines and went over to ‘Nam and they made him a killer and now they killed him. I don’t want to fight their dirty war. I don’t want them to make me a murdering monster.”
“That’s sad,” she said, then asked him about his religion, and if he’d filed for conscientious objector status.
“Tried. Didn’t work,” he mumbled. “I’m no Quaker, just a stoned Methodist who flunked philosophy. You try to tell them war is wrong, and they say what about fighting Hitler?” He shook his head. “I tried to say killing is wrong, and they said why? I spent a week writing a five-page letter quoting the Bible and Gandhi on turning the other cheek and nonviolence. I said my conscience wouldn’t let me just follow orders like Adolf Eichmann. All they sent back was a form saying ‘no.’ Taught me the difference between law and justice.” Tom shivered, chilled though Berkeley autumn was not cold for a Chicago kid. He felt bitter and crushed, like a sharecropper doomed to a lifetime in debt. Too many more questions, and he was going to split.
The woman looked down at the paper. “You poor boy. They have you in a bad place. How bad do you want to get out?”
“Bad,” Tom said. “Real bad. Maybe I’ll split for Canada. Wouldn’t do any good to rot in jail as a draft resister. Nobody would listen.”
“Have you ever been arrested?”
“Nope.” Worried a couple of times when cops had walked by when he was stoned, but never got busted.
“Do you care if how you get out is legal?”
Nobody had ever asked Tom a question that way before. Was she an FBI agent trying to trap him? Talking to her was playing chess stoned and not knowing the rules. Were there women in the FBI? Did she have the shiny black shoes FBI agents always wore? He couldn’t see her feet behind the desk. He hadn’t done anything really illegal before. Just smoking dope, and everybody smoked dope. Maybe swiped a couple of highway flashers with some of the guys. He’d lifted some food from a store once, when he was hungry and broke. How honest could he be when he was trapped by a stupid, ugly system that wanted to send him to fight a stupid, evil war? “Not as long as I don’t have to hurt anybody.”
Her old teacher face tried to grin. “You won’t. It’s not really legal, but it’s not really bad, and it can get you out.”
“Okay.” Tom didn’t feel as relieved as he thought he should. This wasn’t like anything he’d ever heard. Guys went to Canada or Sweden. They went underground, put sugar in their urine, faked bad backs, got jobs in defense plants, or paid somebody off. “What?”
“We have someone replace you.”
“What?” he said again.
“Replace you. We can have someone go into the Army in your place, using your name.”
“Never heard of that.” Tom had heard of guys gaining fifty pounds or getting braces, plenty of other tricks.
“You’re not supposed to know about it. Nobody in 1969 is supposed to know about it.”
“Doesn’t make sense. Any fool can enlist under his own name.” The Army would pin a medal on the man.
“Suppose these men aren’t here legally. Suppose they shouldn’t be here at all, and don’t want anyone to know they are.”
“Wetbacks?” Tom couldn’t see why illegal Mexican immigrants would want to get into the Army.
She shook her head. “No, these men come from the future, a couple hundred years from now. It’s a better time, with no more wars. You have to believe that; it really can happen.” Her words had the fire of belief, like the Movement people.
She was crazy. You dropped a couple tabs of acid last night, grandma, and you’re still eight miles high. Nobody travels in time except in their head. Tom knew the paradoxes, but he kept quiet. Old lady probably was crazy, but he could hope. Men had walked on the moon, and that was supposed to be science fiction. With nothing left to lose and no other options, Tom was ready to try it. “Why?” he asked.
“They want to be heroes. They think war brings glory and makes them men. I think they’re crazy. Our society up then thinks they’re crazier than your society thinks you are. Sending them down now is a compromise, a way to let them do what they want to do, without hurting anyone up then. We hope they learn how bad war really is.”
Tom shuddered. Mike hadn’t said much about the war when he enlisted after high school. He said it was his duty, like their fathers fighting the Nazis, and Mike wanted to get it over with. Tom hadn’t understood that, and he couldn’t understand this. His father never talked about duty; he had said Hitler was evil and war was horrible. Men who wanted to go to ‘Nam had to be really crazy, not just strange like Berkeley people. “Okay, ma’am. If they want to go, they can get their heads blown off. May be stoned, but I’m not stupid.” He hoped she wouldn’t ask him for money.
“Good. We want to help boys like you who can’t get out any other way. You go see Juan. He arranges the substitutions.” She wrote a note on the paper before her. “Here’s his address. Usually he’s there from nine until six every day. Tell him you saw Marie at the Draft Aid Center. Tell him what you told me.”
Before she handed Tom the paper, she reached into her desk drawer. He was surprised when she handed him two dollars along with the note.
“Go get something to eat. You look like you need it.”
Shaken, Tom took the money. He wondered how bad he looked and how dumb he had sounded.
A note at the apartment said his father had called. Tom trashed it, and was glad the mail pile had nothing from his parents or the draft board.
A shower helped clear his head; he stood under it until the water ran cold, then wrapped the towel around himself and walked down the dim hall to his room. He found clean underwear and a flannel shirt that wasn’t too dirty. He was eating crackers in the kitchen when the phone rang, and he answered it automatically.
“Tommy?” It was his father. “I called, and the draft board said if you enlist now they’ll put you behind a desk. They need men who can type. It will be three years, not two, but they won’t send you to Vietnam, and you won’t have to fight.”
“Fuck off!”
“Tommy, I don’t want you to end up like my brother. If they draft you, you’ll have to go—”
Tom slammed down the phone. He’d heard too many times about the dead brother his father had named him after. He wouldn’t be a part of their war machine, even if he could stay safe behind a desk shuffling papers. Leaving the cracker box on the counter and a knapsack of dirty clothes on the kitchen floor, he stalked out. He walked down the hill, toward the bay.
Juan’s address was an aging concrete block building behind a barber shop, with white paint flaking from worn gray cement. It had been an auto-repair shop, with two pairs of swinging garage doors, both locked shut, and a single white door marked “OFFICE.” Tom knocked, and turned the handle when a voice invited him in.
A round-faced man with very dark hair and brown skin sat behind a gray metal desk in a surprisingly neat little room. A copy ofLife magazine lay open before him. “Marie sent me to see Juan,” Tom announced.
“That’s me,” the man said. “You got draft trouble, kid?”
Tom felt uneasy; the man looked Mexican, but his accent wasn’t right. Maybe it was an FBI trap. He was glad he didn’t have any dope on him.
“Don’t be afraid, kid. Marie called and told me about you. She always does that.”
Tom nodded. “Yeah, got draft trouble.” Admitting it wouldn’t hurt. Almost everybody had draft trouble.
“Okay. We may be able to help.” His dark eyes appraised Tom. “Are you willing to vanish for two years? Just disappear? Nobody will be able to find you, and once you go, you can’t change your mind.”
It didn’t sound right. “Canada?” Tom asked.
Juan shook his head. “You don’t need us to go to Canada, kid. Hop a train tonight and you can be in Vancouver on Friday. If you’re broke, go thumb a ride; you’ll get to the border inside a week. Draft resistance isn’t a crime in Canada; they won’t send you back. But you’re stuck there. The Feds bust kids who come back to their grandmothers’ funerals.”
“Marie said somebody would take my place.” Tom tried to read the man’s expression.
“That’s right, kid. Somebody comes down now to spend two years in the Army under your name. When their tour is over, they go back up then and on paper down now you’re a veteran, entitled to all the benefits thereof. It’s not a bad deal. It’s a damned better one than the Army will give you. You got a birth certificate, draft card, or ID?”
“Driver’s license and draft card. Burned the induction notice.” Rolled it up and lit a joint with it, but Tom knew better than to say that.
“The card is what matters. License doesn’t have a photo, does it?”
Tom shook his head.
“That’ll do. Uncle just wants bodies to fight; he doesn’t care if they’re yours. All you do is bring your papers back here, tell the substitute what he needs to know to pretend to be you, and zip into the machine. When you walk out two years from now, the substitute gives you his discharge papers and mustering-out pay, tells you where he’s been, and you’re off scot free.”
Something didn’t add up. Tom’s mind grabbed at a question. “So where do I hide for two years?”
“Smart kid.” Juan paused. “What did Marie tell you?”
“Time travel, mumbo jumbo, didn’t make sense.” Tom wanted to hear what the man had to say.
“It’s not mumbo jumbo, kid. It’s future technology. I was born in the year 2162 in Nashville. Up then, we’ve got technology that would look like magic to you. One bit of techno-magic is that we can send people back in time. We can’t go back to exactly our own past; but your world is close enough that we don’t get into trouble. You know why we come back now?”
Tom shook his head. The congestion in his nose still smelled faintly of pot smoke, and he didn’t want to say something stupid.
“We know how bad war is, kid, and we’ve managed to stop it, but some crazy fools up then still want to play soldier. You’ve got the wars they want, so we send them down now. Slogging through a real war is good therapy; most of them get over it. You stay out of the war. Everybody wins.”
“Why?” Tom asked.
Juan chuckled. “Sometimes I think you freaks are the only sane ones down now, kid. You’re harmless. Your heads are messed up, but war would only mess them up more. We help you, and you help us. That’s the way the world is.”
Maybe the man was crazy, but Tom didn’t want to go to war or to jail. “What do you do?”
“Find somebody from up then who can pass for you. It’s easy in 1969; nobody has DNA profiles. Your friends wouldn’t recognize you with a shave and a military haircut. What’s your height and weight?”
“Five foot ten, one-fifty-five.”
Juan moved the magazine to look at a sheet of paper on his desk. “We’ve got a few who can do you. Brown hair, brown eyes, medium build. Tom Jackson is a common name; nobody could track you down that way after the war. Black kids have it easier; they all look the same to Whitey.” He chuckled. “You’re in if you want it, kid.”
“Where do I go for the next two years?” Tom worried that Juan was evading his question.
“You skip them, kid. We send you two years into the future.”
“You’re putting me on.”
“You just pop in the time machine and walk out two years later a free man. Like you’re in an elevator, kid. The doors close, you feel a little something funny, and the doors open two years from now. You think you spent maybe a minute going up then.”
“Have you done it?”
Juan shook his head. “I came down now in it, but I can’t go back up then until I leave for good. Once I go forward in this time line, I can’t come back to now. It violates causality. You can only go forward, to a time where you weren’t before. Don’t worry about it kid; I don’t. I stay here, down now. They pay well, and it’s interesting. I’ve been down now almost two years; after three more, I head back up then, with a pile of money waiting. Don’t ask me how the time machine works, kid. I don’t know.”
It sounded stark raving mad, but Tom had nothing left to lose. “Is that all?”
“You can’t bring much gear with you. Just a pack you can carry into the time machine. We’ve got no room to store things. If you know anybody else who wants out, send them to Marie, but don’t tell them what it is. They’d think you’re crazy. Same thing for friends and family. Tell them you’re splitting for a while, or enlisting, but nothing about us. They’d think you’re nuts.”
Tom nodded. It was better than waiting for the FBI to knock on the door. His parents deserved to worry for a while. “When?” he asked.
“Monday,” Juan said. “Get here by 10 A.M.”
Thursday night Tom missed a person-to-person call from his father. The operator left a note to call collect, but Tom ignored it. On Saturday, Tom told the bakery he wouldn’t be back; the owner thanked him and gave him $40 cash instead of a paycheck. That evening, he told the guys in the apartment he was splitting. They knew better than to ask where. They’d watched him burn the induction notice, and they didn’t want to know if the Feds came asking. He sold his sleeping bag and mattress for $20, and his cooking gear for $10. He told the guys they could have anything else he left.
Sunday morning his father woke him up with another person-to-person call. He was still trying to sell Tom on enlisting to be a clerk. “It’s not fun, Tommy, but it’s safe.”
“They’re lying to you. I won’t be part of the war. I’m splitting.”
“You’re going to get in trouble.”
Tom hung up. He’d let them worry while he was gone. They’d tried to run his life too long. That evening the guys offered him a farewell joint, but he turned it down for the first time in a long while. He wanted a clear head for the future.
Tom knocked on the office door just after 9:30 on Monday. Juan was there, and a tall black kid with wary eyes who introduced himself as Joe. Three white guys showed up together just before 10:00, looking stoned. The five sat nervously on metal folding chairs in the office while Juan went into the back of the building. The lights flickered as a high whine came from the back. Tom fidgeted until Juan returned with five more young men with very short hair.
One was black and tall. Three matched the other three guys, one short and blonde, the others a shade darker. The fifth had to be the substitute for Tom. Juan introduced them, and told them to sit down while he explained things.
“These guys are going to be you kids for the next two years. They need your paperwork; they need to know enough about you to pass muster. They don’t need to know all your girlfriends, but they have to know your parents’ names and addresses, when and where you were born, where you went to school, that sort of stuff.” He turned toward the substitutes. “And you’ve each got note pads, so you write it down. No army down now will take you if you’re too dumb to remember your mother’s name. You want the sergeants to think you’re smart as well as gung-ho. Make sure you memorize it all; that’s why you don’t go down to enlist until tomorrow.”
Juan paused and looked back and forth between the two groups. He looked toward Tom’s group. “Kids, these guys come from over 200 years in the future, so their questions are going to sound weird. They have to pass for you to the Army, but they will never talk to your families. If somebody writes a letter that reaches them, they’ll ignore it. That’s the deal. After they get out, they’ll tell you what they did, so you don’t sound like idiots when somebody asks you about the war.”
He turned to the others. “Like they told you up then, down now doesn’t have much in the way of identification technology, just photos and fingerprints. As far as we know, these kids don’t have any prints or photos in police records. All you’ve got to do is learn a little about them, and look a little like them. The draft boards just want bodies; they don’t care whose.”
When he was done, Juan paired them off, and sent each pair to separate small rooms.
Claude was Tom’s substitute. He asked eager, nervous questions in a voice with an odd accent. As he answered, Tom felt he was undressing himself, shedding details like clothing.
They got down to particulars. “No shop,” Tom said when the questions turned to high school classes. “I was college prep. Wanted to be an astronomer. Didn’t want to push paper like my father.”
Claude looked up from his notes. “Why don’t you want to go? You have the chance to be a hero. We have nothing like it in my time. We have no more heroes, no more wars, no more risks. There is no courage left in our world.”
Tom stared at Claude, speechless. He had always preferred physics and math because the correct answers were always beyond argument. He knew right and wrong, but he didn’t know how to debate them. He had wanted to eloquently denounce the whole war machine in front of the draft board, but the words had never come. He had no words for the depths of Hell he had seen in Mike’s eyes when Mike talked about battles he had fought in.
