“You shouldn’t be out yet. How are you feeling?”
She held up her palms in an I-don’t-know gesture. “I think pretty much better. I was going crazy in the house, and you were gone a long time. I was worried.”
Jeff pulled her close. “Oh, Laura, Laura,” he said softly, sadly. “What’s going on?”
They parted and held hands, looking down at the lights that slid upon the inky water below. “I don’t know,” she said. “Do you?”
“I think so,” Jeff said quietly.
“Tell me,” Laura said.
“I think you know.”
“No.” Laura’s face furrowed in confusion.
Jeff dropped her hand and turned to face her. “You look very nice in those shorts.”
Laura patted the light red shorts she was wearing on this humid summer evening and looked even more confused. “What do my shorts have to do with anything?”
“For God’s sake, stop playing games with me, Laura!” A nearby elderly woman with blue-tinted hair glared at Jeff. He glared back and lowered his voice. “Try being honest with me for a change.”
She turned and looked out over the water. “I think I have been honest. I’ve told you how much I love you.” Her voice was husky.
“I don’t suppose you remember much of what you did when the DMT first hit you?” Jeff continued impassively.
“No, I don’t remember much of anything. The whole experience was horrible. You know that.” She started crying.
“So you have no idea what song you were singing when I took you home in the cab?”
She shook her head. “I can’t believe I was singing in that state—”
“Well, would it surprise you to know that you were singing a few lines of the Beatles’ ‘Yes It Is’ over and over again? ‘Please don’t wear red tonight…
“And you place some sort of significance on this?”
“I’ve been driving myself crazy, wandering around here for hours, trying to figure out what’s been bothering me ever since I heard you singing those lines. I didn’t even know until I saw you and your red shorts a few seconds ago that that song was the problem. But now I’m starting to understand. You still want to claim you have no idea what I’m talking about?”
“I haven’t the foggiest notion.” For the first time, annoyance was in Laura’s voice. She had stopped crying.
“I think you do. Do you know what today’s date is? June 29, 1964. Now the Beatles have released two albums in America so far, Meet the Beatles and The Beatles’ Second Album. Actually, they also have a third album on Veejay Records with some early songs. There’s also an album with songs from their Hard Day’s Night movie and a few new songs, Something New, which will be released here in a couple of weeks. You see I know all of this because I taught history of rock for five years when I first got my Ph.D.”
“I know all about your past and future,” Laura said tartly.
“Good.” Jeff grabbed her arm and raised his voice again. “And do you also know that ‘Yes It Is’ is on none of those albums? None of them! And in fact it won’t be heard in America until an album called Beatles VI is released sometime late next year?”
Laura pulled away and laughed sarcastically. “And that’s what all this is about? That when I was stoned out of my mind on some Brazilian drug maybe intended for you I sang some song that won’t be released in the US for another few months? There are a thousand explanations for that. I might know some English guy who heard Lennon and McCartney perform that song in a personal appearance. You yourself might have sung the song in your sleep. What’s the big deal?” Her voice was rasping, and she started to cough.
“Your life’s at stake,” Jeff said. “That’s the big deal. Don’t you get it?”
Laura just looked at him, eyes wide and brimming with tears. She started to walk away.
“Listen to me, goddamn it!” Jeff caught up to her, spun her around, put his hands heavily on her shoulders. “Rena died. I think I was almost killed. You were almost killed. These are serious forces we’re playing around with here.”
She turned her head away, as if from the intensity of his reasoning.
“Tell me the truth!” he demanded.
“I love you,” Laura said.
“We need more now,” Jeff insisted.
Laura exhaled, squeezed close to Jeff, then pulled away. “It’s getting windy out here,” she shivered. “Let’s go back to the apartment and I’ll try to tell you as much as I can.”
The kettle whistled. Jeff carefully poured the water into the porcelain teapot, let it warm a bit, then added two servings of Darjeeling tea and the extra one for the pot.
Laura was on the couch, arms around her knees and legs tucked under, talking. “We knew there was danger right after the arrival, but we didn’t think it continued years after.”
“None of the little expeditions before mine ran into any trouble at all,” Jeff said. “As far as I know, I was the first not to return—the first whose AWH self-destructed, or was destroyed by something else, after my time jump.”
“None of those little events before yours were intended to seriously alter history,” Laura said. “Your Challenger attempt was the first big-scale operation.”
Jeff felt cold, and touched the teapot for warmth. The number of lives lost in the Challenger explosion—if only he hadn’t been funneled back here to the 1960s… “Suppose you start at the beginning,” he said, “though it still bothers me to talk of beginnings that in one sense haven’t even happened yet.”
“The gist is this,” Laura said. “My team was—will be—situated about fifteen years after yours in the future. We knew about your team. Knew about you, Rena, her getting killed here. When your team uncovered her death in a cache of old microfiche, they stopped the project. Sealed all the files. My team found out about it and decided, secretly and illegally, to reopen it. My job was to—”
“Don’t tell me—to stop the killing of JFK.”
“No,” Laura said.
“But you’re here in the 1960s,” Jeff said.
“My job was to keep an eye on you—assuming I could find you,” Laura said.
Jeff’s mouth hung open. “They sent you back here to find me?”
“Actually, not back here—to 1985,” Laura said.
“But—”
“Right,” Laura said. “But I wound up back here, just like you, and just like Rena. My team didn’t understand that at first. Neither did I. But I think it’s clear what’s going on now. The Thorne operates by creating basins of subatomic attraction, at both ends of the artificial wormhole. But if you create enough artificial basins, all in one place, that in effect must begin to operate like one hugely powerful natural basin, attracting all out-of-time units in its temporal vicinity. Like a well-worn ditch attracting rivulets of water.”
“Three were intended to go back to 1985…” Jeff mused.
“Yes,” Laura said, “and they all ended up here more than twenty years earlier. Think about it. Your team perfected time travel, tried to bury it, my team dug it up—you can’t as a society, a species, unlearn a kind of knowledge. There must be thousands of time travel operations throughout the future. And a likely place for many of them to focus is JFK—first assassination on film, on tape, copied onto digiscan, holoscan, mirrorims, and who knows what new media. It’s the cultural icon of assassination, the beacon against which all others are measured.”
“The glittering prize for time travelers,” Jeff said, bringing Laura her tea.
“Yes,” Laura said, gratefully sipping.