It opened! He leaned against the inside of the door, thankful and quaking, until the entourage passed. From what he could hear, they seemed to be just a team of porters.
Relaxing a bit, he groped for the light switch to see whose room he was in. This was an extremely stupid move, he realized just as his hand flicked the switch, for the patient might well begin screaming. Fortunately the room seemed to be some sort of storage facility.
He looked around and stopped on a lumpy something stretched out in a far corner. Again his heart started pounding, for he suddenly was sure he was looking at a dead body. He forced himself to walk over and focus. The lumpy something was a long bag of stained linen.
He resumed his journey down the corridor, this time with a bit more assertion in his gait. He turned randomly down several connecting passages, passed several orderlies and nurses and made a point of not avoiding their gazes, and eventually wound up at what looked like a service elevator. The doors were open. He walked in, pressed Lobby, and hoped for the best.
The elevator wobbled its way down, Jeff envisioning himself a dead man dangling from a slowly descending rope. The doors finally opened on a poorly lit hallway that said Ground Floor. He walked a few feet, and was glad to see the hospital lobby. He wondered why the act of leaving a hospital always felt like escape from a high-security prison.
He hailed a cab and told him take me to the airport. The cabbie talked Kennedy, but Jeff was too tired to give more than grunts in response.
He sank into bed in the motel room, utterly drained. He closed his eyes and saw again the lumpy bag in the hospital laundry room. It was a woman’s body, face down, wearing only a 20th-century bra and shiny beige panties that clung tightly to her rear. She looked familiar. He turned her over and found eyes staring blankly up at his. He tried to scream, but his throat stuck. The eyes were Renas.
He sat up in bed, broken out in a cold sweat, and shuddered for a long time…
I guess I’m not as cut out for time travel as I thought, he said to himself. But how could anyone know that beforehand? You had to actually live through these loops, bristling with serrations, to know the toll they took.
Twelve hours later, he was on a plane for New York. Staring out the window as the engines revved up, Jeff realized he was losing a golden opportunity to stop the killing of Lee Harvey Oswald. He looked at his watch. That would happen tomorrow. He toyed with the idea of making a last-minute dash from the plane and calling the Dallas police. He’d have plenty of time and… no! For once he’d do the cautious thing and return to New York and then 2084. No chance the police would take his call seriously anyway—just another crank come out of the now festering assassination woodwork.
Of course, a crank who knew about Oswald’s murder would be someone Jeff would want to meet. Wasn’t there some story that the Dallas police were indeed warned by someone about the shooting of Oswald? Was that someone Jeff? Or someone else on trespass from the future?
He fidgeted with his seat belt. Maybe the attempt on his life in the hospital last night—if that nurse with the intravenous was indeed trying to kill him—was intended precisely to stop him from interfering with Ruby’s murder of Oswald. No, that sort of reasoning would get him nowhere. It was paranoid nonsense. Yet he was here on this plane leaving the scene of the crime of the century, when there were plenty of things he still might do…
The plane’s lift-off ended his reverie. Jeff tried to direct his thinking to what awaited him—going back to 2084 with the Thorne, then in it once again, through a new AWH, and out again in 1985, the time he should have arrived in the first place, to stop the explosion of the Challenger. He stared steel-eyed out the window. No one could help JFK—that should have been obvious all along. You can’t change history on that major a level. But the Challenger—that was more mechanical, presumably an accident of technology, not of sick human intention, more amenable to the time traveler’s ministration.
That was what he kept telling himself, but it gave him little comfort. Obviously, traveling back to 1985 wasn’t as easy as he and his team had thought—if it was, why was he here? There were things about time travel they didn’t understand.
He laughed bitterly. The last thing he wanted to be was a “Fourth Magi”—that additional wise man from the East who had gotten a late start in his journey to give the infant Jesus a gift. The potentate then spent the next thirty years in a vain search for Jesus, always arriving in places a few hours after Jesus had left. When he finally caught up it was too late—Christ was already on the cross. Just as Jeff had been with JFK. Would he be that way with the Challenger too? Arriving just in time to see that horrendous explosion that took so much else with it? Impotent witness wasn’t the role Jeff had trained for.
He landed at Idlewild in the early evening. The sadness in the air was thicker than pollution. Soon it would harden into the cynicism and outrage that disrupted the sixties and deformed a good deal more of the times that came after.
It’s not my fault, Jeff kept telling himself. My job was to stop the Challenger tragedy—I never really had a chance to stop what happened in Dallas. I wasn’t properly prepared. It was crazy even to try.
He took a cab back to the Village, the same trip he had taken forty-eight hours ago, in reverse. Everything was different. It was Saturday night, and throngs of people were out, but the sounds and colors were drained of vitality—as if someone had pulled the plug on the watercolor, and all of its light had leaked away.
His cab pulled up to the Student Building. Three green-and-black police cars huddled like ugly roaches near the entrance. Students were milling about, five or six officers were conferring on the side, and the night air crackled with the sound of police bulletins and the glare of pulsing lights.
“What’s going on here, Officer?” Jeff demanded, more sharply than he’d intended.
“Who the hell are you?”
Jeff fumbled for his faculty ID, crafted to look like a 1985 edition, and hoped it would get by the beefy, florid-faced policeman. “Sorry, Officer. I teach at the College of Liberal Arts and Science here.”
The cop eyed the ID, Jeff, and softened. “You’re a teacher from another division?”
“Right,” Jeff said, not really knowing what that meant.
The cop nodded. “The student lounge was broken into two hours ago and severely vandalized. These kids got no respect for property. Hey, Professor, you OK?”
Jeff felt his knees buckle. He reached out to the police car for support. “Officer, I’ve got to get up there right away. I… there are some important papers that I must get a look at.” He was pleading.
“Out of the question.” A big arm restrained Jeff, already in motion towards the building. “The place is a mess. Glass and garbage all over. Someone torched that whole floor—probably some kid didn’t like his grades. Believe me, Professor, it’s not safe.”
Jeff pulled free of the blue arm. For a second he considered making a run to the building. But he knew it was hopeless. He hadn’t the vaguest idea what was really going on, what had happened in the lounge. But he knew with cloying certainty that his life was now seriously derailed.
Maybe the AWH had imploded, maybe some kid had torched the place as the cop had said, but whatever had happened there was no way that soft shimmering light would be there for him—surely no way he could code it for use and enter it even if it was there now, without a dozen witnesses looking on. A few dozen bills out of time he could take a chance on leaving back here; walking into the AWH with 1960s people as an audience, maybe even trying to follow, was insane. He couldn’t risk what that would do to reality—might do to his very existence.