Chapter 25

(Back in Brooklyn again in 2019)

“Hey ... Buddy! Wake up, it’s the last stop.”

I opened my eyes to an elderly black man in a train conductor’s uniform tell me we were at Manhattan Beach and it took me moment to realize we were no longer in the eighteenth century.

The sharp odor of cleaning bleach and faint hint of urine tickled my sensitive nostrils and I looked up at the older gentleman with what I was certain was the uncertainty of a person not quite sure of how he had arrived at the end of the line and feeling a good five or six years younger than when he had made the jump back in time to the dangerous days of the American Revolution.

I was beginning to think that I was visiting the older battlegrounds rather than the ones that I had actually been in during my normal lifespan because I had studied them for examples of successful strategy and tactics against a dedicated foe.

At least I didn’t have any bullet holes in me this time and I felt reasonably good about my overall stamina and general health.

I had wanted to have a lengthy sit-down pow-wow with Mister Franklin about a whole range of subjects but he had postponed it twice already and I got the distinct impression he was avoiding me like he knew I was a soul out of place in that time and location. He had something of the “Merlin” mystique about him and I had no doubts that his reluctance was due to his inability to read me in the way that he did with everyone around him.

My canvas pack was filled with clean clothing and a pair of handguns that I suspected was illegal anywhere inside the city limits. I made certain the pack stayed closed and put the guns under a thick layer of underwear to keep them out of view. As long as I did not pass through any metal detectors like at an airport or in a federal building that secret would be safe for the time being provided I did nothing to attract attention.

Since I was not totally a virgin in returning to my proper time frame, I was able to quickly assemble my thoughts and made a transfer to the right train to take me up to my temporary quarters in Brooklyn Heights. I was able to go from my hotel room paid for quarterly from my deposits in a Wall Street commercial bank that thought I was from the UK and spent a lot of time in New York City. That bank had inherited the management of my accounts deposited at a well-known San Francisco bank that had continued to add my interest premiums from the mid nineteenth century right up to present day. My modest deposits had grown into huge sums of money and I used some of that money to maintain the alternate residence during periods of absence for my unplanned time travels.

According to the calendars, I had been away from New York for almost six years.

Just like in the previous trip, my body had reversed the aging process and I was now almost six years younger than I was when I departed unexpectedly.

The combination of time spent in the past now added up to nineteen years of DNA reversal and my original starting age of my fifties had now caused me to be biologically a man in my early thirties instead of a seventy year old on full social security.

Another aspect of the DNA changes was the fact that my ability to create offspring during my sojourns in the past were totally nullified by the changes and that was actually a plus factor because it helped prevent a time-space conundrum of existence in the wrong place at the wrong time. My lack of knowledge in this area was the best fail-safe because I was not aware how close I came to creating a black hole for all of humanity on Earth to the end of time. I have to admit I have no idea what that means exactly but my scientist friends assure me that I was lucky to be in total ignorance the entire time.

It was my fond hope that I would be able to make one last travel into the past and I wanted it to be into the period of the 1930s to the 1940s in the Pacific theater of the war. I had grown up reading an encyclopedia of “War in the Pacific” that had filled me with all these facts and details about the great battles of World War Two at sea with the United States and Japan as the opponents. I had studied the ebb and flow of the tides of war and saw how the Japanese were doomed to defeat from the very beginning because they had underestimated the production power of a growing industrial nation with access to natural resources right inside their own territory. It was the lack of steel and fossil fuel that tagged Japan as a loser and the atomic bombs were just icing on the cake to shorten the timeframe and reduce Allied losses. I wanted to be there when General MacArthur returned to the Philippines and I wanted to see that bloody invasion of Okinawa that destroyed the core of the Japanese Imperial Army.

I could see myself in some “Teahouse of the August Moon” scenario with Geisha girls attending on my every need and impulse.

I think the reason for my urges was the relationship I had at the time with a Japanese Doctor that was treating me at the VA for my DNA problem and she was the one that took periodic sperm samples from me in such a non-professional manner.

Doctor Ho’s cute petite ass cheeks never failed to bring me to a state of supreme hardness and a feeling of great power whenever I flooded her hindquarters with my enthusiastic juices. She would blossom with vociferous shouts of unladylike joy at being taken with such resolute finality and with little attention to the sensitivities of a delicately formed female.