Chapter 26

We landed with a bump that was as much physical as it was mental. The coordinates were almost two feet above actual grade level, so we got more than the normal jolt as we landed in spite of the ‘grav unit. Although the mental lurch of going from one Time/Space Continuum to another was no worse than usual, my shock at nearly having been killed made it seem that way. I felt an unusual oncoming migraine, and hoped it wasn’t one of those ‘minor’ concussions from time travel slowly beating my brain into a mass of gelatin equivalent.

I had no idea where or when we were. Dallas, Solomon had said? I tried to think of a connection. I looked around for a clue, but we appeared to be in another storage room. For a moment, I was disoriented enough to wonder if we had just teleported to another storage room in the same building, but immediately recognized everything as being of a much older style and far dirtier. This also eliminated being in another one of Solomon’s secret labs. All I knew for sure was it was very quiet.

“Hey, Solomon. You mind telling me what exactly we’re doing in this particular spot?”

“Do you remember me telling you I had preprogrammed a number of potential destinations in Time?”

“Uh, yeah. When we first went from my place to your place.”

“Right. I had intended to visit them someday, but hoped it wouldn’t be on an emergency basis. Like this is,” he said with a note of resignation in his voice.

“So you had already programmed in all the coordinates and what not?”

“Well, not completely. I had ‘previewed’ them, of course, although more as a ‘marker’ in time than actually trying to see exactly what had happened. As I said, I meant to visit them when events in my own life quieted down and I could use the TDM for historical purposes, which was my original intent for building the machine. That’s why the programming to take me, and naturally now you, to that period is not nearly as time-consuming as traveling to a totally new location. Although I had not in advance pin-pointed the exact time and coordinates where I wanted to land, I had a very clear knowledge of when and where I wanted to go and what I wanted to witness.”

“History? That was your motivation for building this?” I asked incredulously.

“Yes,” he insisted. “The idea of time travel wasn’t just the thought of a glorious scientific accomplishment, you know. There was originally an historical interest on my part.”

Historical interest? Okay, so he had a passion for the past. I guess I could understand, even though I was no more interested in history than what the stock market had closed at on the day before. What the heck in Dallas would Solomon have intended to visit someday? The Alamo was in San Antonio, wasn’t it? Wait a minute...

“What’s the date?”

“November 22, 1963. It should be approximately 12:15 pm.”

I felt sick to my stomach. I had been a very young boy on this date, but I still knew what happened. Or was it what might happen?

In spite of my lack of interest in history in general, I couldn’t help being curious about witnessing a major event. In fact, in many ways this was one of the most significant impacts to the American political scene in history. At least, the history I was aware of.

“You weren’t planning on stopping it? I mean, the Kennedy assassination.”

“Kennedy? Don’t be ridiculous,” he snapped, giving me a withering look before returning to his work. “You know I wouldn’t even think of impacting the events of history directly if I could possibly avoid it.”

Whoa, were we getting a little testy! On the other hand, with the Security Force playing peek-a-boo with us and using fairly deadly toys in the game, I really couldn’t blame him too much. For me, I’d just be dead. For him, he would feel like he had let down his entire society.

“Sorry,” I said sincerely. “I know you’ve got a lot on your mind.”

“So am I,” he said instantly, again looking up from his calibrations. “I didn’t mean to take my irritation out on you.”

“No problem,” I said. “I deserved it.”

He didn’t say anything more as he returned to his efforts. There wasn’t anything I could do here, so I thought I’d just get out of his way. In fact, maybe there was something positive I could do outside, I thought hopefully. As I opened the door to the room we were in, Solomon again glanced up quickly.

“Don’t go too far,” he said tersely. “This won’t take more than half an hour, maximum.”

“Right,” I agreed, intending to stick to the timeframe religiously.

We were evidently in the lower levels of a very large building, so it seemed to take forever just to get outside. As I walked out the front of the building I noticed there were a lot of people on the streets, as well as hundreds of people hanging out the windows of the surrounding buildings. This was not surprising, of course. The presidential cavalcade was due to be driving through here in a matter of minutes, as I recalled.

As a boy when the event happened, I really had no idea of the details. At the moment, I was more curious than nervous. Or maybe, having lived through a few life-threatening situations myself in the not-too-distant past, I was more calm than I would normally have been.

Anyhow, when I crossed the first street I stood on a thin patch of grass separating me from another street, which ran straight. The one I had just crossed kind of curved away to my right, and the next one curved away from me to the left.

To my left was a large group of trees. The sign on the straight road in front of me said Main Street, which led to a triple underpass to my left. There were a lot of people milling around, so I instinctively made my way towards that area. Quickly getting close to my destination I became aware the motorcade was also approaching the underpass. As I crossed Main Street and got on to the little strip of grass separating it from Elm Street, it struck me how truly lax the security was – or it certainly seemed that way. But then, the setting really did look like it would be pretty hard to adequately protect someone riding in an open car.

The first of the presidential cars was approaching me by now. I saw someone jump from a convertible five or six cars back in the procession, run onto a grassy knoll on the other side of Elm Street, and point a camera at the President’s car. The grassy knoll! Instinctively, I looked at the top of the knoll where a Roman-looking wall was flanked by a picket fence. Behind the picket fence I could see three figures. They looked suspiciously like they might be those Security Force guys, even though they were wearing blue suits in the style of the current era. No, it had to be my paranoid imagination. As the first shot rang out, which presumably had been fired by Oswald, I could see one of the three point a finger – directly at me!

The other two aimed what looked like normal rifles and took a couple of shots, but not at the President. As a bullet plowed into the grass by a manhole cover practically at my feet, I distinctly got the message that I was the target. How the hell could the Security Force have arrived so close on our heels, and how had they gotten modern-day rifles? Then another bullet whizzed in my general direction and whanged off the pavement close to another man, who looked totally stunned by the possibility that he may have been a target. I took off as fast as I could fly towards the building I had exited not twenty minutes before. In all the confusion, I don’t think anyone really paid attention to me or my futuristic costume.

Although it could only have been a matter of minutes, it seemed to take hours to fight my way through the frightened onlookers and back into the building. Frightened and desperate myself, I had a hell of a time finding my way back down into the basement where Solomon and his machine held promise of another escape from the killers who were hounding us through time.

“Solomon!” I yelled as I burst into the room, “they’re here!”

“Well, I’d sure love to go out and see them, but I’m afraid I haven’t quite finished with the settings.”

“Not the Presidential cavalcade! Well, yes, they’re here too, but I meant the Security Force.”

“What! They can’t be!”

“Well, tell that to them! They certainly think they’re here, and unfortunately they found me, so they know where we are, too.”

“How do you know they saw you?”

“They were shooting at me – and they almost got me!”

“What!” Solomon seemed downright shocked. “They were shooting photon guns in public here in the past?”

“No, not photon guns. Regular guns. Rifles. Where the hell did they get rifles?”

“I don’t know,” he said thoughtfully. He was still confused by my news, but certainly not as shocked as when he had thought they were using futuristic weapons. “But at least they went to the trouble to get them, rather than taking a chance on screwing up everyone’s future by introducing photon guns.”

“Well, for me, dead would have been dead, to paraphrase a wise man I know.”

“Very true. And we both still may be if I can’t get us out of here pretty quickly. Although,” he said grimly, “they obviously have the ability to track us much faster than I ever would have thought possible. But, as I said before, they must be sacrificing an incredible amount of personal physical distortion in order to jump so quickly.”

“You’ll forgive my saying so, but you seem awfully concerned with the well being of people trying their best to make the two of us become history. Maybe we’ll get lucky and they’ll distort themselves into blobs of plasma. Then we won’t have to worry about them killing us anymore.”

“You may be more accurate than you know,” he muttered, and I couldn’t tell if he felt happy or sorry at the prospect. I sure know the thought made me cheer up!

“So how do you think they did it?”

“I don’t know. Guns seem so readily available in this society they could easily have broken into some gun shop that was closed to go see the president and...”

“No. I mean how the SF followed us so quickly.”

“Oh, that. Good question.” Solomon seemed to give the matter some thought as he continued to adjust the settings. From what I could tell, he was getting pretty close.

“This much is clear: the government has also developed their variation of the energy gauge. The Council must have refined the black hole detector I built into a ‘tracker’ that can receive and copy the signals being sent out by my machine. They obviously have their version of the TDM – maybe several – standing by with a crew for when the tracker indicates we’ve made a jump. Their machine then very quickly replicates the destination. This makes it possible for their TDM to follow ours, arriving in virtually the same place, obviously only a matter of minutes after we have arrived. The trade off is not having all of the calculations and settings actually computed exactly for the machine, and certainly not for the occupants. That’s why I keep mentioning the distortion they must be experiencing. The SF agents must know the consequences of their actions, but are so dedicated to serving the Zaibatsu they’re willing to take those risks.”

I think I got it. Solomon wasn’t just soft-hearted about the people who were sacrificing their minds and bodies to have a chance to kill us. It was more the repulsion he felt as a scientist at the acceptance of grossly inaccurate time travel techniques merely to give the SF guys a better shot at killing us! Purism over practicality above all. Sheesh! Scientists.

“Unfortunately, if this continues, their rapid arrivals may also give us very little time to jump to another locus, at least without the possibility we may also have to sacrifice something in the way of accuracy.”

“You mean we might...”

“I hope it doesn’t come to that.”

Uh-oh. Now he wasn’t being enough of a purist, as far as I was concerned. Now he was talking about us possibly having to suffer some of that ‘physical distortion’ in order to keep one step ahead of the Security Force goons. I suddenly had that queasy feeling all over again, like the first time Solomon had told me about this potential consequence of time travel.

“I hope it doesn’t come to that, too. I don’t know which is worse, the thought of looking like some monster out of a grade ‘B’ sci-fi flick, or looking like some corpse in a grade ‘B’ splatter film. Some option, looking like Jabba the Hut’s little cousin or being dead and red.”

“Gosh, Barney, you have such a poetic way of presenting alternatives.”

“Oh, yeah, great alternative.”

“You have to remember I made a lot of refinements to the teleportation device itself. As I’ve said, theoretically it should take hundreds of jumps for a body to suffer any serious consequences from using my current machine.”

“Theoretically. Oh, great. That’s sort of like, ‘Golly, Barney, if you’re real lucky you won’t end up looking like the Elephant Man’s ugly brother.’”

“I’m not exaggerating, Barney. Our machine is much more sophisticated than the version the SF is using, and infinitely better than the rather primitive teleportation devices we use to transport cargo. As I said, I kept a lot of my improvements secret, which makes their machine a lot more dangerous than this one.”

“Well, if you’d chosen to be a little more devious in hiding your other secret developments, maybe we wouldn’t be faced with our current ugly alternatives, would we?” I said snidely.

“Yes, you’re right,” Solomon lamented. “I wish I could have better hidden my notes on the energy detection gauge, but it was so obvious it would have drawn too much notice to its omission.”

“Maybe obvious to you, but the rest of us bozos aren’t really as clever, you know? I think it was more your damned innate sense of honesty than real worry about being too obvious.”

“Yes, you’re probably right again,” Solomon sighed. “It’s just very difficult to justify cheating the system to one’s self, even when you know how false they’re being to the rest of society.”

Ouch. Attacking me with ethics. What a low blow!

“Bloody hell, Solomon, do you always have to take everything so much to heart? Can’t you just yell at me and let me feel better about being such a jerk? Man, you make me feel lower than a freshly squashed slug on a hot driveway. I didn’t mean to be so mean, you know what I mean?”