But something in Jeff rebelled against this logic—something in his nature which said, look, you’ve gotten this far, it’s not good, but you may never get this far again, so you better take what you can of this chance to save the space program…
But how?
He’d have to improvise.
He thought about the endless careful plans his team had made for him to avoid getting caught up in some paradox—keep the loop clean, don’t do anything in the past that might undermine the very foundation of this project. Steer clear of everyone’s great-grandparents… Jeez, how the hell was he supposed to do that back here, twenty-three years earlier than he’d planned to arrive, when he had no idea where everyone he was supposed to avoid was?
Jeff rubbed under his head. Every second that he stayed here was a knife at the throat of his future. He was off the screen, way out of equation-range—a single word to a wrong person, some land-mine of the past, could set in motion a chain of events that erased his colleagues, maybe even him, from existence. True, he had no close family, no one that he really loved deeply anymore—well, maybe still Rena, in a way—but he certainly hadn’t undertaken this job to kill his friends, make himself a martyr to a reconstituted future that might never know he’d existed in the first place.
On the other hand, how likely was it that he’d fun into such a land-mine? Painstaking tests had shown that the effects of most interjections in the past were sooner or later washed out in the myriad of everything else that remained the same. And how could anyone from his vantage point truly know what was intended all along? Maybe he’d always been supposed to arrive here back in 1963—maybe he was ordained to help the space program, or humanity, in some way other than stopping the Challenger. Maybe that’s why the Challenger blew up after all, because there was no way he could influence events this far back to stop the explosion that took the heart and soul out of the space program, had set up the 21st century to be little more than an age of commentary looking back on the Golden Age. His head spun. He could feel the sweet buzzing vortex of paradox whispering in his brain, drawing him in… No, I have free will, I’ll do what I damn well choose, I don’t have time for paradox now, I only have time to act.
He looked at the clock on the wall. Twelve minutes after twelve. Too much lead time for the Challenger—the shuttle had barely been conceived of in 1963. He supposed he could live the next twenty-three years in normal time here, and devise a new plan to thwart the explosion. Thiokol Chemical Corporation had been awarded the NASA contract to build the shuttle’s solid rocket boosters on November 20, 1973—just about ten years from where he was now—so if he could hang on for a decade, he might even be able to begin doing some good then. Leroy Day had been picked to head planning for the shuttle in 1969, a few years nearer.
But this didn’t seem appealing. Ten years, even five, was a long time to stay out of trouble. And he couldn’t even be sure that the Artificial Worm Hole would remain operational that long. The most their tests had confirmed was safe return after eighteen months in the past.
He, of course, knew exactly what else he might try to do on this date. He knew its obvious significance. He didn’t have to be a cultural historian by training to know it. Jeez, he’d arrived at the edge of the oldest cliche in the science fiction CD. Everyone and their great-aunt Martha had written a story about it.
What was the likelihood that some error in the team’s calculations, some unexpected flux in the AWH, had landed him here on this of all dates? Maybe it wasn’t an accident that he’d somehow been dropped at the doorstep of what Time, nearly a century in his past and thirty-seven years from now, had dubbed one of the top five murders of the millennium.
But if so, what was its deeper purpose?
Surely not to stop the events in Dallas tomorrow—there really wasn’t enough time. He was in New York City, after midnight, on November 22, 1963. Way too soon for Challenger. All but too late for JFK.
All but too late… But what else could he could do back here, then? What else had he perhaps been meant to do here?
He shook his head.
Did they even have air service to Dallas this late at night? He didn’t know. What kinds of planes? Propellers? No, probably jets already.
Dallas was a thriving city even back in the 1960s, and at the very least he would probably be able to get a businessman’s flight early in the morning. But would that leave him enough hours? What was the point of flying all the way to Dallas just in time to hear that JFK had been shot?
But what was his alternative if he didn’t use the AWH to return to his starting point? Sit around like a jackass and wait for Walter Cronkite’s tear-choked voice to announce the assassination on TV?
Blondie arrived with his tea. Fortunately it was lukewarm, and Jeff was able to drink it down in two gulps. He pulled a crumpled bill out of his wallet and left it on the table. Some bank clerk in the next few weeks would be stunned to see a 1981-issue ten-dollar bill with Donald T. Regan’s signature, but he had no other money, and had to take a chance that such a minor anonymous anachronism wouldn’t disturb the time-line. Loops could be perfectly clean only in theory. The bill would likely be dismissed as a clumsy counterfeit or a joke. Maybe it would be lost before it even got to a bank teller.
He walked out onto Sixth Avenue and surveyed his options yet one more time. The city was harsh, the air stank, he didn’t belong here. The sensible thing to do was return to 2084. And yet…
He flagged down a passing cab. “Kennedy, uh… Idlewild Airport. On the double, Chief.” As the cab pulled away, Jeff recalled George Bernard Shaw’s line that the reasonable man adapts to his surroundings, the unreasonable man attempts to change his surroundings to suit himself, and all progress depends upon the unreasonable man.
There had to be something more to this than Dallas, but at this point Dallas seemed the only way to get to it.
Inside the coffee shop, the waitress stuffed the bill in her bosom pocket and laughed. “I tell ya,” she said to the fat man stuck behind the cash register like a melon, “these actor types are all the same. They never remember to wait for their change. I’m gonna keep this for good luck.”
“Tunnel or Bridge?” the cabbie grunted through chewing gum.
Jeff wasn’t completely sure what he was talking about. “Do what you think best, Mac. Just get me to the airport as fast as you can.” He shifted his weight on the springy seat and looked through the dirt-caked window…
“Just got off the late shift, right? My brother-in-law does the midnight-to-eight shift for Helmsley. You gotta do what you gotta do to make a living these days, right? What’s the use of talking.”
“Yeah, the inflation’s impossible,” Jeff agreed. Can’t go wrong in any century griping about inflation. And he made a note to himself to get out of the janitor’s outfit as soon as he got to the airport.
“Yeah,” the cabbie growled, “ain’t it the truth.”
Jeff felt in his pocket for his reassuring puterwafer but got no comfort from it. He was fully on his own now, plans pertaining to twenty-three years in the future all but worthless. In a worst-case scenario, if all he could catch was an early-morning flight, he’d have maybe an hour or two to get to the Book Depository Building in Dealey Plaza after his plane arrived in Dallas. If he could somehow get to the Building by eleven, he’d stake out the upper floors and try to intercept the gunman… or gunmen… or gun-women. He wondered whether he’d find Lee Harvey Oswald up there by those windows. Historians would give their right arms to know. A hundred and twenty years of theorizing had left them no closer to knowing who had killed Kennedy than the unsatisfying “lone nut” explanation of the Warren Commission.