Chapter 9

The next morning I got out of bed with a splitting headache. It was depressing to think of Solomon as a terrorist and a murderer, but it was even worse to know he was doing it with money I had earned. Okay, I could not possibly have accomplished so much, maybe nothing at all, without Sol’s time machine and list. But I had done pretty darn well on my own once I had gathered that initial capital. And nothing, nothing at all gave him the right to use that money to create death, destruction and chaos. My dreams had been reruns of those grisly scenes.

I thought about how quickly the scenes had come and gone, especially after the first one. They hadn’t really given me any time to evaluate the actions, only to react emotionally to what I had seen. It was one thing to watch a movie with bloody, violent action. But to know those recordings were real, that people had actually been killed and mutilated, was terrible. And to know that one of the leaders of the villains was my own great, great, great, great, great, great grandson, disturbed me infinitely more than any horror movie could.

Still, I could not resolve the picture of him in my mind – very professorial, kindly, gentle, sensitive, trying to develop a sense of humor – with the cold-blooded monster I had seen last night. There was no doubt it had been Solomon, of course. The figures had almost seemed to be tiny people right in my living room! But there must be some other explanation to what I had seen.

Logic said the Numbers Brothers really were government agents. Who knew about the documents, which could be easily faked? Certainly no one in this century would know the difference. But access to the time machine must be pretty closely guarded. I was sure only truly authorized people could obtain and use one. Or, of course, very determined terrorists who understood how it worked.

I imagined for a moment the Numbers Brothers were somehow the real bad guys. What were they after? They already had a time machine, so they didn’t need the small one they took from me. They only wanted to keep it out of Solomon’s hands. They only wanted me to let the future cops know about the inheritance so they could monitor Solomon. They didn’t want to prevent him from getting it or try to take it away from him. They evidently didn’t intend any harm to me, or to Solomon if he didn’t do all of the bad things the future said he had done. They even emphasized I was welcome to write the trust fund in such a way that the government couldn’t take it away from him – as though I wouldn’t have done that anyway! So what could they possibly want if not exactly what they had said?

I worried that bone for quite a while, but could never get down to the marrow of it. Maybe it was actually made of plastic, but I just didn’t have enough information to get to the real substance of the matter.

Anyhow, I figured it was time to get that trust fund in place. I already had nearly two billion dollars, so didn’t need or miss the responsibility of having the time machine. But I was uncomfortable about letting the future cops know all about how I would leave the estate to Solomon, which might give them the power to send my future heir to a life in prison and perhaps even somehow appropriate the fortune. That’s why I told them I couldn’t set up the trust fund until all of my corporations were in order, which was total bull. All I had to do was include specific language as to exactly what parent corporations and their subsidiaries were included, plus all earnings. Finally, I didn’t want to tell them everything because something just didn’t quite ring true about this whole business, but I just couldn’t put my finger on it.

Naturally, I did what all intelligent people do when faced with an unsolvable dilemma: I hedged my bets. Instead of leaving Solomon the money at age eighteen, as intended, I made sure he couldn’t touch any of it until he was twenty-five. By then, he might be more mature and understanding of the ways of the world. He would be less susceptible to being swayed by fancy rhetoric and idealistic thoughts. Those things sounded great in theory, but in practice had always proven to be no more effective than the strength of the biggest bully or the greed of the average man or woman in the street.

To further this hope, I wrote him a long letter the young Solomon would certainly find very pedantic and conservative. But then, he said he’d scored very highly on those traits on some test or other, hadn’t he? The letter was all about the trap of acting without fully thinking out the consequences of your actions, especially when they might hurt others. I specifically warned him about fanatical groups like the Revos, who preyed on impressionable young people, especially intelligent, sensitive ones. Most especially the ones who had a lot of money to spend on their radical causes. I wondered if he would know who Patty Hearst was?

I set up the trust fund so that the money couldn’t be used to buy weapons, stock in any companies that manufactured weapons or otherwise had anything to do with them. The language prohibited certain investments and activities I thought might be related to terrorism. A determined and clever person could eventually find ways around those restrictions, but they were the best I could do.

When I had done about as much as I could to protect the future, I had the documents drawn up so tightly not even Melvin Belli could have squeezed a word in edgewise. It would become effective on the day of my death, and my law firm would act as the executors. They would dole out an allotted annual amount to all of my other direct descendants over the course of the decades. When Solomon finally inherited the bulk of the estate, their instructions were to withhold up to five percent of the cash assets in interest bearing accounts to still have something left to give to my other descendants. That is, those not in Solomon’s line. If he lived to have a direct descendant, of course.

Because my gut feeling told me Solomon was not quite the evil traitor those security guys made him out to be, I hadn’t included any instructions to the executors to inform the police about Solomon. I don’t know, maybe I was waiting for a sign as to what I should do in that regard. From what Sol had told me, I figured I still had plenty of years left to make up my mind on that score. I just had to trust my instinct on this one, and change the will before I died if I decided that was best...

Over the next few months I had a hard time keeping my mind on business. It seemed a lot easier to throw myself into my charity activities. Here, I was helping people. I was insuring that people who didn’t have food, clothes or a place to sleep would have all of those basic needs. Less people in the world would be in pain and desperation. Experiencing that first-hand was much better than thinking about earning money so that my future heir could use it to buy guns and bullets, or laser ray guns, or whatever.

In case something did happen to me, Betty was officially put in charge of all charity activities, including financial decisions. I made her an executive vice president of my parent corporation so she could have control over the budget and sign checks. She had remained incredibly active and dedicated to the cause, and would do a terrific job. The charities coordinator now reported to her. All I intended to do from now on was attend functions, and maybe drop in on my favorite people and places once in a while.

As for the businesses, I began giving more authority to the people who had actually been running them for years. These included a couple of my former colleagues from the bank. They were highly qualified and knew their business, and I had learned enough about them while working with them to trust their judgment, as well as their honesty. We hadn’t really been friends back then, but that was because of my feelings of inadequacy about my relatively poor background and lack of confidence in myself. They had always been pretty friendly, and we had grown closer as the years passed and my trust in them had grown. Then there was one of the young lawyers from the firm I retained who had impressed me with her sharp mind and a very keen business acumen. These people formed the nucleus of the group into which I put the fate of my growing conglomerate, essentially being my ‘Board of Directors’.

It took nearly a year after the Numbers Brothers’ visit, but I began to feel very good about the state of my affairs. Once more, I was sleeping very deeply every night. That’s why it took me quite a few minutes to rouse myself to the point where I realized someone was frantically ringing my doorbell.

As I was muddling around trying to decide whether or not I should bother answering it, it suddenly hit me: who the hell could have gotten that far through my security this time of night to be ringing it? Instantly, I was fully awake and pulling on my robe while hustling to the bedroom monitor. As I hit the switch for the front door cameras, incredulity hit me in both eyes. It was Solomon, and he looked liked he was trying to escape demons from hell. But what really amazed me was studying his face again very carefully, because I could have sworn it was me at the door! Oh, my God, I thought, has it really come to that? I made a mental note not to look in the mirror any more.

I sprinted clumsily for the door. Without any thought this might be some kind of trick, I threw open the door and leaped to embrace him.

“Solomon! I thought I’d never see you again!”

“And I’m damned lucky you are able to see me,” he said accusingly.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“The Security Force nearly nabbed me. I was only minutes ahead of them when I teleported.”

“Well, if you wouldn’t join revolutionary groups and go around killing people, maybe you wouldn’t have to worry about the cops being on your tail!” I responded indignantly.

“Killing people? I’ve never killed anyone!”

“So you deny you’re a member of the Revos?”

“No, of course not, but –”

“But nothing. I don’t condone any radical, violent groups.”

Solomon gave me that look again. The same quietly determined, professorial look he had given me after I insulted him during our first meeting. This time, it had an added trace of forced patience about it.

“Can we go inside and talk about this?”

Once again, there was nothing else for me to do but to calmly sit down and listen to what he had to say. “Of course. Please come in.”

We walked into the living room and sat down, but the atmosphere was nothing like our first meeting. Obviously panicked when he had appeared in my front door monitor, Solomon was totally in control of himself now. There was not one hint of the nervousness he had displayed during our first conversation. I was very impressed in spite of all of my doubts about him. This time, he waited me out.

“So you don’t deny you’re a member of an anti-government group called the Revos?”

“Not in the least.”

“And that you’re part of a terrorist plot to overthrow your government?”

“To overthrow the government, in a sense, yes. But we aren’t terrorists.”

“Yeah, I know, just like the I.R.A. You’re ‘freedom fighters’, or maybe ‘soldiers of the people’, or whatever you call yourselves. It’s all just a matter of perspective, depending on which side of the revolution you’re on, right?”

“If I wanted to waste time playing the Devil’s Advocate, I’d say ‘absolutely.’ Do you consider George Washington and the rest of the American revolutionaries as patriots, or as traitors and rebels against their government? History has dozens of examples like that. So call us whichever you like.”

“Okay, I’ve heard their side. Please tell me yours.”

“We’re revolutionaries, no doubt about it. But we would never be ‘terrorists’ or murderers. In fact, it would be pretty hard to be those things in your meaning of the words.”

“Why’s that?”

“Because there’s almost nothing to terrorize or murder anyone with in my world. Weapons of all kinds are banned, unless you consider a fork a dangerous weapon.”

“Oh, I suppose you don’t even have kitchen knives.”

“No. There’s no need for them.”

“Really? Why not?” I asked, knowing I was allowing myself to go off on a tangent again.

“Well, it’s an obvious progression from what you people have in your world. Your instant dinners and microwave oven foods eliminate most of the real need for cooking, including preparation. Imagine where we’ve gone with that. Due to special breeding and cultivation, including all meats, everything has become so tender you don’t need anything sharper than a spoon to cut anything. Tools of all sorts are mechanized and built into robotics, more or less, so there aren’t even dangerous tools used for construction or gardening. Only a few special artists are allowed to use sharp tools, and they’re carefully monitored.”

“But I was visited by a couple of guys from the Security Force a year ago and they...”

“Oh, the Security Force.”

“What? Aren’t they your version of the police?”

“Police? No, not in your sense of the word. Each Zaibatsu, or major corporate conglomerate which controls a given Region of the world, has an elite ‘Security Force’ that deals with the few criminals in our society. I guess that sort of makes them the police. They certainly have authority, but when you know who makes all the rules without ever consulting the general populace, you might equate them more with ‘corporate goons’ than true peace officers.”

“But you’re evidently not surprised they visited me and asked for my cooperation.”

“Yes, I figured they got to you.”

“What do you mean, ‘got to me?’”

“They obviously visited you some time ago and convinced you to give them some sort of information against me.”

“I never gave them any information! They wanted me to tell them all about how I would leave you the money, but I didn’t do it. In fact, I still haven’t left them any way of finding out, and I hadn’t planned on it.”

“Well, that’s a relief. And before you get all huffy about it,” he said sensing my hackles go up, “I meant the remark very seriously. That’s an extreme relief.”

“Yeah, I’ll bet it is. Then you couldn’t be funding the revolutionary activities of you and your friends, with or without weapons.”

Solomon gave me a withering look. “May I ask you to think logically? Why would these so-called good guys want you to actually leave the money to me, as opposed to stopping such a terrible villain from ever getting his hands on such fantastic assets in the first place?”

“They said they didn’t want to punish you before you had actually committed any crimes. They merely wanted to monitor your actions so they could try to guide you away from the Revos. They wanted to give you a second chance at being a good citizen, if they could.”

“Oh, sure, they wanted to ‘monitor’ my actions, all right. They needed to allow me to be born and live out my life normally until I had developed the TDM, and then they wanted to be able to take it away from me. They had to allow history to take its course, to let me inherit the money to perform a lot of the research on my own, or it may never have been perfected. Their intention was to eventually have full control over the TDM, not to give me any ‘second chance.’”

“Wait a minute! It just occurred to me. If you knew they visited me, why didn’t you just come back in time before them and warn me they would visit, and set me straight about what you were doing?”

“Well, I didn’t know they would be able to do that until they had. You should know by now we can’t know what will happen until it’s actually happened – that’s the problem with seeing the future, remember? Plus, I honestly didn’t think they could replicate the TDM well enough. Then, when I found out they not only had a working machine, but had actually started trying to find me, it turned out to be a matter of hours, maybe minutes. I got so flustered it took me quite a while to get the settings right, and I couldn’t hit the exact Time/Space Continuum I wanted, so I wound up here now instead of before their visit.”