“You’re in a hell of a mood,” Tanya Ramirez said as McGregor threw himself into his chair. “Joanne on the rag?”
“Ha-ha,” he replied. He had no intention of talking about his feelings to Ramirez. She didn’t give a damn whether this was a funeral run or one of the truly upbeat correction jobs, like the times they inserted top-of-the-line medical teams to save important lives. Only jerks got involved with the subjects; she’d said that once. So now, out of pride, McGregor pretended to be as blasйas she was and of course felt like a jerk for pretending.
“Who have we got today?” he asked, trying to sound breezy.
Ramirez waved her hand at McGregor’s display screen, where separate windows showed the official correction authorization, temporal navigation charts, the latest chronal flux reports, and background data on the people in the time chamber. “We have your typical funeral-run volunteers,” Ramirez said. “Afflicted with your usual grab bag of terminal conditions, none contagious, and also afflicted with your garden-variety burning need to do something meaningful before they sink down the gravity well. If you want more details, read the History Thanks notices in Corrections Daily.”
“Forget it,” McGregor told her. He had his newsreader programmed to skip the History Thanks column. After he’d sent someone on a funeral run, he didn’t need to know that the deceased did needlework or had once dreamed of being an architect. “What time are we trying to hit?” he asked.
“Early January 1970, late December 1969 if we have to,” Ramirez replied. “The correction goes down May 4, 1970, but we have to insert them early enough to establish camouflage.”
“They can establish camouflage in only four months?”
“Prep department says it pulled out all the stops building background this time. Birth certificates, employment records, vaccinations — that Prep creep Terry Ying was in just before you got here, trying to impress me. You wouldn’t believe how bad he wants into my pants. Anyway, Ying said four months was the max for camouflage on this group because that’s the most the doctors can guarantee. Wouldn’t want the subjects to die of natural causes before their date with destiny.”
You get the idea. Time travelers dropped onto the Kent State campus for the purpose of dying. Their deaths were necessary to shape the future properly — otherwise, opposition to the war in Vietnam wouldn’t intensify fast enough and the future would go to hell. I could invent an appropriate description of such a hell if it became relevant.
I wrote the above passage on Saturday, May 5, 1990. The notion that sparked the story was, of course, that the four Kent State students hadn’t really existed before they were shot; they were dispatched from the future.
Partway through the writing, in the passage where McGregor scans the faces of the people waiting for the funeral run, I needed to know what the victims looked like. I made a quick trip to the library (only two blocks away), picked up three books on Kent State, and hurried back to the computer so I could keep writing. One of the books (The Truth About Kent State, by Peter Davies) had pictures of the four students on a page close to the front. I made note of Sandy Lee Scheuer’s dimpled chin, Bill Schroeder’s sleepy eyes, and went back to writing.
Conscience didn’t set in till later.
Look: the real students weren’t terminal patients who nobly volunteered to die — they were simply people in the wrong place at the wrong time and they died by random chance.
And they weren’t just characters of convenience, devoid of families, people with no personality apart from what I might need in a story. At the end of a day of writing, I thumbed through those books from the library and I read interviews with parents, friends, people who had known the victims all their lives. The students didn’t come out of nowhere — they came from homes and neighborhoods that mourned, prayed, lost sleep, wept, all trying to come to grips with grief.
Reading those interviews I felt ashamed.
Consider what an observer sees when an object descends into a black hole. For convenience, assume that the object is a burning candle that’s somehow tough enough to withstand the tidal forces of gravity around the hole.
As the candle falls, it takes longer and longer (from your point of view) for each particle of candlelight to climb the gravity well and reach your eye. Light particles emitted near the very edge of the black hole may take thousands of years to fight their way out to the universe at large. The result is that you perceive the candle falling for a potentially infinite length of time. Every now and then, another light particle struggles free of the black hole’s pull and reminds you of the candle’s descent.
It’s an obvious metaphor for grief. Hot and burning at the start, dimming over time... but even after many years, memory particles surface now and then to remind you of a life that’s gone.
I should point out that the candle’s infinite fall is only in the eye of the outside observer. A trick of the light. From the candle’s point of view, it drops straight down and crosses the event horizon without pause. Inside the black hole its flame may still be burning; it’s just that the light doesn’t reach the outside world anymore.
The next morning, Sunday, May 6, 1990, I reread what I’d written, wondering if there was anything that could be salvaged. I was struck by a new regret: I’d written about some guy named McGregor, not about the students.
I knew why I’d written it that way, of course. I didn’t believe I had the right to put words in their mouths, thoughts in their heads. How could I presume to speak for the real people? I could only deal with characters.
But I’d gone too far into the fiction. In my story, like the newspaper articles, the victims were only there for the body count. Without thinking, I’d started to write the story of a button-pusher who was troubled by his conscience, but who went ahead and did what he had to do for the good of history.
Sound familiar?
SECOND SCRIBBLE: THE BUTTON-PUSHER
Bannister sat in the time chamber, cradling his gun. An M-1 carbine in pristine condition. According to the antiquities database there were only five M-1s still in existence, four in museums, one in the hands of a collector who’d bought hers on the open market. You could assume another twenty or thirty still in secret collections around the world... maybe even a few in the arsenals of the Quarantined states, since most of the Q’s were too stupid to realize the black market price of a single twentieth-century firearm would buy a hundred twenty-third-century E-guns.
Call it a nice round number of forty M-1s on the entire planet. And Bannister had one.
Admittedly, this weapon could just be a replica; but he doubted it. The Corrections Institute disdained replicas. If they needed some antique, they sent back a Special Services team to steal one. Bannister had gone out on plenty of those runs himself — popping into foxholes to pull Lee-Enfields from the cold fingers of gas victims, or materializing in the cargo holds of boats shipping AK-47s to terrorist groups. But as of today, Bannister had graduated from such gruntwork. As of today, he was going to make history.
“You about ready in there?” he called to the two techies in the control booth.
The woman of the pair flicked a switch and said over the intercom, “What’s your hurry? Got a hot date waiting?”