Laura was blocking his way. “You can’t just kill someone—even Nixon!”
“No? Would you stop me if I had a chance to kill Hider as a child?”
“I don’t know,” Laura said in quavering voice. “But Nixon’s no Hider—”
“Four students were shot dead at Kent State because of him!” Jeff said in a low growl. “He calls them ‘bums’. They’re just kids—they take my classes, I rode down on the bus with them. That’s good enough reason for me.” And Jeff was close to tears too.
“You don’t know that Agnew will be any better,” Laura said.
“You sound like… ah, that’s who told you about this. That’s who told you I’d be here. What’d he do? Phone you? George G. Landry?”
“Doesn’t matter,” Laura said. “What matters is I’m not going to let you kill anybody.”
Jeff shook his head and looked at the Monument. A bunch of kids were in there with Nixon already…
I’m just rapping with my friends, Ron…
“So who says I’m going to kill the son of a bitch?” Jeff rasped. “Maybe I’ll just disable him so he’ll have to resign. Agnew supports the Mars proposal—hell, he’s Chair of the Task Force that presented it.”
“You don’t shoot well enough to know how to wound him,” Laura said. “You’re liable to kill somebody else. You don’t know shit about guns.”
“She’s right, Jeff,” another female voice said from behind him. “Didn’t you pay any attention at all in the training we received? Guns are stricdy a no-no.”
“Rena…”
A thousand questions screamed in Jeff’s skull. Rena was killed in 1964—he’d held the damn Daily News with her face and the article right in his hands—how could she be here now? Was the newspaper wrong? Had Rena somehow come here first? But why? And how? Laura and he had figured out the irresistible magnet that 1963 was to time travellers… or thought they’d figured it out…
The only thing Jeff was sure about was that this wasn’t a dream, he was so glad to see Rena… that, and his time somehow had passed to shoot Nixon. It was a subtle thing, but Jeff knew it was over.
He looked at Lincoln. The entourage was still there, but Jeff felt sapped, almost drugged, his circuits too overloaded with questions about Rena, with joy at seeing her again, to even pull out his gun, let alone shoot anyone.
He was a very different person, a detached part of him realized, than he had been just a few seconds ago.
Which one was the more real?
Rena tugged on his arm. “Forget him, Jeff. That’s not you. You were meant for other things.”
Laura took his other arm.
“I’ve got the car nearby.” Jeff thought he heard Rena say. “The pickup on these 20th-century models is amazing.”
The car seat felt comfortable indeed after this long day. Jeff’s head felt muzzy. Rena drove, Laura gave him some tea.
He had so many questions. Had Rena come here in a Thome? That opened up all sorts of possibilities. His Thome had disappeared in that vandalized student lounge. Laura’s had vanished a few days after her arrival, sucked back at the behest of who knew what force or command into its Artificial Worm Hole…
Like the nothingness his brain felt it was being sucked into right now… His eyelids put up a desperate rear-guard action to stay in touch with what was happening. But they were hot pasty lead…
The last thing he heard before he gave in to sleep was Eddie and the Cruisers singing “Season in Hell” on the radio…
Jeff woke up the next morning, his mind clearer than it had been in years.
Laura was in the kitchen making breakfast in their New York apartment.
“You drugged me last night,” Jeff said.
Laura looked at him, nodded.
“Twice,” Jeff said. “Once when you first grabbed my arm near the Lincoln Memorial.” Jeff touched his arm with his fingertip. “I can still feel a little puncture mark here—what was it, some sort of contact needle? And then in the tea you gave me in the car. Tea’s supposed to keep you awake, not put you to sleep.”
Laura said nothing.
“How the hell am I supposed to trust you at all now?” Jeff barked.
Laura stared very hard at him. “You can trust me to drug you and do anything else to stop you from murdering someone—even Nixon. You can count on my not letting you become the very people you despise. You risked your life and even the Challenger plans once to stop Lee Harvey Oswald. You’ve been miserable about not trying to stop Sirhan. Yesterday you were this close, this close, to becoming one of those monsters yourself!”
Jeff looked away. “Where’s Rena?” He wheeled around, saw the bathroom was open and no one was in it. He could see the foyer and living room were empty too.
Laura took a shaky breath. “She’s gone.”
“What? You let her go—”
“It was what she wanted, insisted on doing,” Laura said. “The Thome only has room for one. Who else could have been the one to get in that? Your going back would cause much more of a disruption at this point—remember in my reality, my future, in which the Challenger doesn’t crash into the schoolhouse, you never returned to 2084. And as for me… I just couldn’t… I mean, I didn’t want to go and just leave you here.”
Go and leave me nice and cuddly with Rena you mean, that’s what you didn’t want, a voice in Jeff said. But he said nothing aloud. Laura’s reasoning was not wrong. “Why did she have to leave so soon? We could at least have talked this over.”
“She wanted to get to 2084 as soon as possible,” Laura said. “She was back here looking for you—one of the ads you placed in the papers a few years ago made it through to the future after all. So she knew your address. When she showed up yesterday, I knew who she was. I told her about your being in Washington, and she realized immediately what you might be up to. I guess I knew it too, but didn’t want to admit it. But as soon as Rena said it, we got on a plane, and I caught a cab to the Lincoln Memorial, and she got the car—”
“OK, OK, I know that already,” Jeff said. “Why’d you let her leave today?” He slammed his fist on the table.
“That’s what she wanted. I couldn’t stop her,” Laura said. “She thinks she’s going to 2084, and then to 1986, to stop the Challenger.” Laura put down what she was doing. “For all we know, maybe she is. What was I to tell her—don’t go, don’t ever get into a damn Thorne again, because, if you do, it’ll bring you back to 1964, where you’ll be run down by a goddamn bus? Is that what I should have told her? Would she have listened?” Laura was sobbing.
Jeff found himself consoling her. “I guess we can’t know that for sure.”
“We don’t know a damn thing for sure,” Laura said. “Maybe we were wrong about the 1963 magnet…”
“I don’t think so,” Jeff said. He closed his eyes, tried to picture himself standing near the Lincoln Memorial yesterday, Laura and Rena rushing to him from two different directions, bent on stopping him from doing what he was surely about to do.
“You two were like antibodies plunging towards me yesterday, set upon me by the Universe’s immune system to protect the status quo. You were pulled out of New York, Rena out of the time flux. That’s part of what’s going on at the end of 1963 too—why the terminus there for time travel is so deep, so well worn. So many people going back to try to prevent the assassination of JFK. But even more, I’d bet, a lot more, pulled into there to make sure the assassination takes place.”
“That’s horrible,” Laura said. “Why must the status quo be Kennedy’s death?”
Jeff shook his head. “I don’t know.”