“So who’s going to make sure you don’t do something foolish? If you get yourself arrested, and the police start asking questions, looking into who you really are, where’s that going to leave us?”
“That’s exactly why I want you to stay back here,” Jeff said. “I won’t do anything foolish. I just want to ride down with the demonstrators in one of the busses—get a feeling for who they are. I can’t just hang around here waiting another decade for the eighties to come along. But if something should happen to me, it’s key that you be out of it, safe back here in New York. You’re the only one, other than me, who has any inkling of what’s going on.”
Laura laughed, without joy. “We’re worse than the blind leading the blind.”
I’m just rapping with my friends, Ron…
“True,” Jeff said, and hoisted himself out of bed. All too true. But maybe something still could be done to change that. Up until these past months, he had been thinking of his role, and Laura’s, solely in terms of bow they could change specific events known to have happened—IFK’s and the other assassinations, the Challenger explosion. Jeff was tired of just reacting, of trying to disinvent the tragedies that psychos, idiots, and god knows what else had made.
Today, he would try something more direct. He had no idea how many chances he would get to influence events back here, but directly doing something, rather than attempting to prevent something, seemed a surer way of getting what he wanted.
The bathrooms on the Jersey Turnpike and the inside of the bus all blended into one for Jeff. He looked at the blonde napping next to him, felt the gun in his pocket, and shivered. Easy enough to get a gun in Harlem, even in 1970, even for a white man. This was the world his ancestors were making for this girl. Drugs in the bloodstream, death on the street, people crowded with despair on a dirty planet with nowhere to go but down. The kids deserved more. The Earth deserved better. Could Jeff, with an act of violence that was anathema to all he had been until now—with a gun which was itself part of the illness he was trying to cure—make it all not happen? The girl opened her eyes for a moment and smiled at him… He believed he could.
Are ya lis’nin’ Nixon? Mercifully, there was no tear gas in Washington today. Just an echo of Pete Seeger’s voice, questioning Nixon in song as it wafted across the lawns, a refrain from an earlier demonstration, emanating now from a kid with a banjo. History had been right about all those earlier protest marches—Nixon hadn’t listened, the politicians never did. But what did it even mean to think that history was right, when the thinker was about to change it? Jeff was determined to make this demonstration of May 9, 1970, a little different…
He walked for hours, taking in the shifting, gathering crowds, until the light began draining from the sky. Would that the soldiers could be so easily coaxed to leave Vietnam! Would that Nixon could be made to see that he was slamming the door on the sky, bleeding it dry, with every budget cut he inflicted on the space program.
“Hey, you were sitting next to me on the bus, right?”
Jeff turned to see the blonde girl, who was holding a boy’s hand, a good-looking guy with skin the color of coffee.
“Yes,” Jeff said, and smiled at them.
“I think it’s gonna go pretty good tomorrow,” she said. “Reports on the radio say the crowds are huge already.”
Jeff nodded.
“They’re handing out cokes and pretzels over there.” She pointed to a knot of people, far away.
“I’m OK,” Jeff said. “You two go get something to eat. I’m gonna spend a little more time here.”
“OK,” she said. “You take care. Hey, I don’t even know your name. You said you were a professor, right? Who knows, maybe I’ll take a class with you someday.”
“Arthur Bremer,” Jeff replied. The name just popped out of his mouth. He hadn’t given it any thought—but he didn’t feel good about saying Jeff Harris. Bremer seemed an appropriate name to use under these circumstances. He, or someone else using his name, would take a shot at George Corley Wallace in just a few years, after having allegedly stalked Nixon…
Jeff walked faster, then slower, back and forth, edging closer to the Lincoln Memorial. Nixon was still many hours away—if the historical re-enactments were right, he wouldn’t show until 4 a.m.—but Jeff wanted to be in position. He cursed his inability, as he had so many times, to consult any records of his history—his history, the future from the perspective of here, the one he used to have at his fingertips when he lived and worked in the second half of the 21st century. He had to assume that Nixon could appear any time now. It was already dark. He’d watch for the black limousine pulling up to the steps of the Memorial.
Jeff thought again about his life, his former life, as an historian in a world that didn’t exist yet—a world he had come back to change. He’d had no idea when he’d stepped into the Thorne in 2084 that he’d ever wind up at this time and this place. Just as he had no idea he’d be sucked back into 1963…
To be knocked unconscious at the airport in Dallas when he was minutes away from perhaps saving JFK. Who—what—the hell had done that to him? Didn’t matter, Laura said. Whoever, whatever, just rotten luck. It was an act of the Universe—a Universe with a stubborn streak, determined in some profound way to keep its timeline unmolested by time travellers.
But who could tell the difference between what was, and what was supposed to be?
Jeff looked around him. The memorial steps were almost empty. Good. Fewer witnesses…
Whatever happened, he had to do better here than he had with Kennedy.
He thought back to the Kennedy-Nixon debates of 1960, also immortalized in any screen that could show anything audio-visual. Kennedy looking so cool, Nixon sweating, shifty-eyed like Mephistopheles. Neither man could have had an inkling then of the transcendent roles history had consigned for them—or the role, in Nixon’s case, that Jeff had planned for him and history now.
Jeff kept walking, around and around. Eventually he pulled out a sandwich he had acquired some time in the afternoon, a long time ago, and wolfed it down. His eyes scanned the people, the trees. For the first time since he’d been here, the trees were in the clear majority. He saw a woman walking alone. She looked like Rena. Why did so many women look like Rena to him? He had loved her and left her in 2084. And she had come looking for him in the past. And had died in 1964.
The sky was much darker now. He looked at his watch—it was 3:25 in the morning. Nixon would be here very soon. He felt his gun. It turned his stomach.
A car pulled up. A man got out. Then another.
God, it looked like Richard Nixon…
Jeff squinted—why hadn’t he thought to bring binoculars?
Who was the other man? Manolo, Nixon’s valet. Had to be. No Secret Service anywhere.
The two men were slowly walking up the steps.
Jeff touched his gun. He could run over to them right now. He could fire. And do what? Shoot Nixon in the back?
He felt his hand sweating on the weapon. He wondered if the wetness could ruin the firing mechanism. His breaths cut like little knives—
“Jeff…”
He jumped, nearly pulled out his gun and fired.
“Please.” Laura put her hands on his arm. “You can’t do this.” Her voice was desperate.
“I have to,” Jeff said.
“No,” Laura pleaded. “You’re not a murderer. You’re better than that. Don’t let… whatever it is we’re in, don’t let it do that to you.”
“You’re wrong,” Jeff insisted. “I’m the one who’s doing this thing—nothing’s doing anything to me!” He kept his eyes on Nixon and Manolo. They were up the steps now, inside the Memorial, under Lincoln’s shadow. He tried to move a little closer—