The security guard inside looked at Jeff, then at the picture of Jeff he somehow already had on his desk, and motioned Jeff to the flight of stairs in the far left corner. The building only had two stories, and there was nothing but the pantomime guard on the ground floor, so Jeff assumed that the second floor would have what he was looking for.
It did, and more.
“Been a while, hasn’t it,” George G. Landry said and extended a calloused hand.
Jeff took it, and tried not to wince from the vise-like grip. “I appreciate your seeing me,” Jeff replied. He didn’t say “on such short notice,” because it had in fact taken two months of intense hounding of Sam to make this happen.
Landry pointed to a chair. “Make yourself comfortable,” he said to Jeff. “And let’s get down to business. You’d like my thinking about the space program.”
Jeff nodded. The chair was indeed comfortable, but nothing else about this meeting was. The office itself looked wrong—like Landry had just put it together for this meeting. But Jeff reminded himself that although he was an historian he was certainly no expert on 20th-century office decor—certainly not what passed for it in late 20th-century California.
“I’m going to be blunt,” Landry said. “You wanted this meeting—here I am—I’m going to tell it to you like it is—as some of my current colleagues like to say. You’re an amateur. You don’t know what you’re doing. You’d be better off keeping the hell out of this.”
Jeff knew better than to ask Landry who he was. He remembered Landry’s non-answer at their last encounter. Nor did he ask just what this Western Coordinating Sciences Institute “coordinated”—he had a feeling he would find out soon enough. “Go on,” Jeff said.
“I told you last time that you were barking up the wrong tree trying to remove Nixon on the hope that Agnew would be better for the space program. The problems with space run deeper than that. And Nixon and Agnew are both the source of other threads that need fixing.”
“Some of them would have been fixed with Nixon gone,” Jeff said.
“True,” Landry said, “but you went about it the wrong way. You can’t make history go your way by blowing away presidents—hell, you can’t make history go your way by attempting to stop presidents from being blown away either. You of all people should know that.”
Jeff reddened. “Who the hell are you?” Now he couldn’t stop himself from asking.
Landry sneered. “I’m someone who knows how to get things done in this business. We do it quietly, in little ways, when no one is watching. You know, the nail that fell off the shoe of the horse and the damn nag broke its leg and the army lost the battle and the war and the empire collapsed and all that. Except we remove the nail, or slip in a defective one—a little break-in in a hotel room, a little tip-off to a lucky security guard, that’s the way you get rid of a president. Get my drift? No bullets, no bullshit, no bloodshed.”
“I’m a fan of none of that,” Jeff said. “But Nixon’s gearing up to beat McGovern in a landslide, and still hasn’t ruled out nuclear weapons in Cambodia or North Vietnam.” Upset as Jeff was, he still realized that he was better off not revealing certain explicit brutal facts about the near future. Nixon’s nuking of Cambodia in 1976 was the only use of nuclear weapons other than Hiroshima and Nagasaki. That secret devastating mission, no secret to Peking, had come razor-close to starting a full-fledged nuclear war—only the death of Mao that same year had sown enough confusion in China to forestall it till the crisis had passed. “Even without the space program, there are a dozen reasons Nixon should be out of office,” Jeff confined himself to saying.
“And what I’m telling you is that that’s going to be taken care of,” Landry’ said. “Nothing we can do about the landslide, but we’re on top of the nukes in Cambodia. That won’t happen—I can assure you. Nixon will be preoccupied with other things. And he’ll be long gone—via legal means—by the time the next election comes around. You’ll just have to take my word for it. Watch the news next month.”
“ ‘We’?” Jeff asked.
“Never mind who we are. You and your girlfriend just stay out of our way, let us do our work. You understand?”
“What about the space program?” Jeff insisted.
“You’re going about that the wrong way, too,” Landry replied, tiredly. “No one’s going to pay any real attention to your concerns about the shuttle’s safety. You’ll get through to a few intelligent engineers, they’ll look into it and see what you’re saying is right, but their reports will be ignored. They’ll be filed away somewhere. That’s the way that can of worms works. Too much political pressure on NASA.”
“So what are you saying?” Jeff asked. “It’s all hopeless? No real chance for space after all?”
George G. Landry gave Jeff a long, cool stare that seemed to cut not only through Jeff’s eyes, his brain, his soul, but through the past nine years that Jeff had been here, years of fog in fast retreat now from the sun.
Finally, Landry spoke. “Are you willing to do what’s necessary?”
Jeff stepped out on the balcony of the Century Village apartment he had managed to sublet in West Palm Beach. The weather was gorgeous this Sunday—sunny and warm and just what one would expect of a late January morning in Florida. Jeff squinted at the sky, in the direction in which the Challenger would be taking off. Today would be a perfect day for the launch. Unfortunately, it wouldn’t happen until Tuesday, when the weather would be cold enough to prevent the crucial expansion of the O-rings.
Jeff wished there was a way he could heat up the sky. Converge the requisite lasers over a suitable area—shunt the sun’s energy from warmer climes. But those techniques were nearly a century away from being invented. Much like Jeff himself.
But here he was. Gone from 1972 to 1986, with barely a call goodbye to Laura, via a time travel device that made the Thorne look like a Model T. Except “don’t let the glitz fool ya,” Landry had advised, “the chassis may be sleeker, but the vehicle obeys the same underlying laws, the same physics of time travel, as your Thorne.” Meaning it was just as subject to powerful basins of attraction. Rena’s Thome, attempting to move forward to 2084 from 1970, had been sucked back to 1963—as had Jeff’s and Laura’s Thornes, travelling back from 2084 and 2094, in the first place. “The pull of the 1963 basin is almost irresistible to vehicles travelling back from anything approaching a century or more in the future,” Landry had told him. So Laura and he had essentially been right in what they’d concluded in w’hat seemed so long ago now, in 1964—when they had first realized that perhaps their presence in the past could make a difference, and mitigate the worst of the Challenger disaster.
But the fall of 1972 was apparently just far enough away from November, 1963 that a time-travel device attempting to move forward could break free—as Rena’s in 1970 apparently had not. That was Landry’s theory, anyway. For Jeff, to have been drawn back to 1963 again would have been a nightmare so agonizing that he was by no means sure his sanity could have survived it. But he’d held his nose, clutched his hopes, and put Landry’s machine and the theory that came with it to the test. He’d been willing to do what was necessary to get this far. And here he was.
But as Jeff looked at the sky-blue as a newborn’s eyes—that would soon see, hold, so much fire, so much pain, he couldn’t say with certainty that he had what was necessary to finish the job.
“Small things,” Landry had stressed, over and over, “that’s the only way to get around the universe’s damned resistance to time tampering. You can’t do it by assassination, by preventing assassination, by causing a shuttle to blow up on television, by preventing it from blowing up. That’s all beyond our reach. The most you can do is redirect the explosion—cause it to happen a little sooner, over a different area, with a different result…”