Written in Time (45 page)

Alan’s eyes closed involuntarily; in the split second while they remained shut, the images of—how long had it been since he’d been abducted outside Morton Hardesty’s house?—his torment coming back to him in a wash of near nausea. “My wife and family—they could be in terrible danger.”
 

“You’re a good man; that was to be expected. You should never have helped Clarence and Peggy to join us here. We all love Clarence, and have come to love Peggy. But now that the time-transfer process is duplicated, nothing and no one may be safe anymore. My mother used to quote her father, that ‘the road to Hell is paved with good intentions.’ Consider this a possible way station, Alan. Who was that man?”
 

“Lester Matthews, the security guy for Bethany Kaminsky’s Lakewood Industries.”
 

“I’ve heard of Lakewood—almost as big as Horizon Enterprises. Are they the ones who’ve built the new time transfer base?”
 

“Yes. She wants—Bethany Kaminsky—to sell 1990s technology to the highest bidder in 1900, become the power behind whatever government buys in, change history so Lakewood Industries will, will—”
 

“Be in charge of the world. Can’t fault the woman for thinking small, can we?”
 

“We’ve gotta stop her.”
 

“Indeed. ‘I have no spur to prick the sides of my intent, but only vaulting ambition, which o’erleaps itself and falls on the other.’”
 

“Macbeth?”
 

“Uh-huh. The lady in question here, although I don’t know her, strikes me as someone who uses daggers quite skillfully, perhaps gleefully. Good character analysis?”
 

“Yes.”
 

“Rest. We’ll talk about this soon, son.”
 

Alan Naile saw, felt Jack Naile’s right hand as it gently patted his left cheek. There was a smile on his greatgreat-grandfather’s face, but one of love, not happiness. And, deep within Jack’s eyes there was something that was at once like determination and dread.
 

***

Eight days had passed since Alan’s rescue from his would-be murderers. Technically speaking, Jack was, once again, Marshal of Atlas, Nevada, but the day-today policing of the town was something in which he had no interest; he’d appointed two deputies, both of the men cool-headed and good with a gun when need be.
 

Helen was recovering nicely in town, along with both her father and her mother. Sympathetic neighbors tended their stock. When all were well enough to return to their homestead, the deputies were under instruction that one of them should accompany the Bledsoes and stay on-site for a few days, just in case any of the “outlaws” had escaped and might want revenge.
 

With David and Clarence back from a more-thansuccessful trip to San Francisco, Jack, accompanied by one or the other of them, had made several nocturnal forays to the time-transfer base. David, a fine hand with a camera and armed with his mother’s advice, had taken more photos.
 

An assemblage of over four dozen photographs of varying quality, but with fully discernable images, now existed, documenting the activity—growing nightly—at the time-transfer base.
 

The time-transfer base, perhaps as a result of the rescue of Alan Naile, was more heavily guarded than before. Tarp-covered emplacements at each corner of the fenced area were, almost certainly, hiding machine guns. The guards themselves bristled with H-K MP5 submachine guns and M-16 rifles; each was also armed with a handgun. An outer perimeter had been established to foil observation of the base as much as possible, it appeared, and to guard against the chance encounter with someone just drifting past over the mountains.
 

The guards at this outer perimeter had horses rather than golf carts and pickup trucks, Colt (or Italian replica) revolvers on their hips and weathered-looking cowboy hats rather than baseball caps. A few horses were corralled nearby. Curiosity was a marvelous thing, the way it could lead to terrible trouble. Jack and David and Clarence had, each of them independently, considered riding down and feigning innocence just to hear what sort of story these disguised Lakewood Industries security personnel would offer. But since there was an at-least-as-likely possibility that the guards’ only response to a question might be couched in lead, discretion prevailed.
 

Peggy had reviewed the photos; Alan, still limping and slow to move, but clear headed, examined them as well.
 

Jack surveyed his assembled family as he asked, “So, guys? How can we stop the Kaminsky woman and Lakewood Industries from ruling the world?” Jack addressed the question to no one in particular, rather to all who were seated or standing in the central room of the house. This hidden room was the perfect setting for such a question. It was the only room in the entire house, likely the entire county, perhaps the state—other than the time-transfer base—that had electricity of even the most primitive sort. He was no authority on rural electrification in Nevada, but Edison had only perfected the light bulb in 1878, just twenty-two years in their objective past. There was a laptop computer, but the Internet did not exist and would not for all practical purposes for a century.
 

Jack’s eyes drifted to the security monitor—recently installed—that was jerry-rigged to one of the small video cameras Clarence and Peggy had brought with them from the 1990s. The possibility of attack originating from the time transfer base was very real. Jack asked again, addressing all but looking directly at Peggy and at Alan, “How do we stop Kaminsky and Lakewood?”
 

Peggy spoke, avoiding his eyes when he looked at her. “Clarence’s loving you guys is why this happened. Maybe the last time you guys went through the time loop, Clarence didn’t exist.”
 

Alan, his voice weak, strained, said, as if thinking aloud, “My father told me that in the last cycle, before you guys—I mean the actual two of you, Jack and Ellen, this Jack and Ellen, you guys—went into the time loop, you—the earlier you—wrote that D-Day was on June fifth, not the sixth. The horrendous rains over the English Channel screwed things up so badly that Allied casualties were vastly higher. Just two changes—and there must have been hundreds, thousands, maybe millions of other changes, all for subtle reasons we can’t foresee—but they affected millions of lives that affected millions of other lives. Maybe Clarence’s dad didn’t survive the Korean War the last time, never came home to father Clarence in 1957. Maybe, what if, who knows?”
 

“So, if I went back to the 1990s—”
 

“It wouldn’t do any good, Clarence,” Peggy interrupted, looking at her husband. “You’ve already done this, and going back to 1996 wouldn’t change any of that. It isn’t your fault, or anybody’s fault, except this Kaminsky bitch.”
 

“Let’s say,” Alan began, “that we tracked down Clarence’s grandfather. He was a coal miner in West Virginia, right, Clarence?”
 

“Yeah.” Clarence nodded, looking at Alan rather oddly, suspicion in his brown eyes. “What are you saying?”
 

“Let’s say we tracked down your grandfather and killed him—”
 

“Just one fucking minute—”
 

“I’m not suggesting that we do it, Clarence,” Alan insisted. “But hear me out—just hear me out, huh? It’s an example, alright?”
 

Clarence nodded, stood up and began to pace.
 

Alan went on. “So, if—catch the word ‘if’—if we murdered Grandpa Jones before he fathered Clarence’s father, then Clarence wouldn’t exist, right?”
 

Jack was beginning to suspect the punch line to Alan’s thesis, and didn’t like it: They were helpless.
 

“Okay,” Alan continued, “so we kill Grandpa Jones. Clarence never exists. If Clarence never exists, we don’t know that we have to kill Grandpa Jones, right? So we don’t kill Grandpa Jones. So Clarence exists. So we do kill Grandpa Jones; but, maybe he’s not killed or we killed him for no purpose at all. You need more math than I’ve got in my head to explain this, or even think about it properly. If we knew enough to prevent Clarence from coming into the past, and somehow were able to keep him from coming into the past, we wouldn’t be faced with the problem, therefore we wouldn’t have taken the steps to alleviate the problem, therefore the problem would still be with us. Perhaps manifested in some other way, granted, but we’d still have the same situation. We’re stuck in a conundrum from which there is no logically discernable escape.”
 

David addressed the man who would become his greatgrandson. “So, you’re saying we can’t do shit about this, then?”
 

“Well, not really. We can’t give up, but we have to think way outside the box. It’s just that there are certain things that might seem obvious to do which would have no effect whatsoever to alter the situation.”
 

“Helpless?” Jack suggested. “I don’t think so.” He caught Ellen’s eyes on him. She hated discussing time-travel theory, hadn’t even liked movies about time-travel. He always had. But movies didn’t help. “We know that Lakewood is going to peddle 1990s war machines to the highest 1900 bidder they can find. That’ll likely be Germany. There seems to be pretty general agreement on that. If I remember my history correctly, the United States will almost go to war with Germany over Venezuela in the next two or three years, sometime in Teddy Roosevelt’s first administration, I think.
 

“At any event, World War One is scheduled to start fourteen years from now. Germany would snap up even Korean War-vintage fighter jets in a heartbeat. Imagine just what something as simple as a couple of hundred M-16 rifles could do in no-man’s-land in France a decade and a half from now? Change history on the cheap. But not this Kaminsky woman. She’ll get a bidding war going between the United States, England, Germany—maybe even France’ll get in on it. Germany will be the one, has to be. The United States wouldn’t buy the technology to use it for aggression, not unless Lakewood gets rid of McKinley and Roosevelt and replaces them with their own man. The same with England, I think. The French are a wild-card, but Germany would just up the ante until it got the technology. Only the United States could outbid Germany, and Lakewood Industries doesn’t just want a sale, it wants the products put to use. From what you say, Kaminsky isn’t looking to just be richer than Sam Walton and Bill Gates combined; she wants to be the power behind whatever nation rules the world.”
 

“And?” Ellen suggested.
 

“In times of trouble, who do you go to?”
 

“A friend?” Lizzie supplied.
 

“A friend, yes, because that’s someone that you can trust,” Jack agreed, smiling at his daughter. “Present company excepted, the only person I know in detail— so to speak—in this period in time is Theodore Roosevelt.”
 

“What?” David gasped, sounding incredulous. “You’ve never met Teddy Roosevelt, Dad!”
 

“I’ve read a lot about Roosevelt, son. Teddy Roosevelt was a brilliant man. A man of letters, a man of action, someone who studied every aspect of a situation before making a decision, someone with the courage and tenacity to see a situation through to the end.” Jack cleared his throat. “And he was well aware of the fact that this was a modern age, a new age. He was the first President of the United States ever to ride in a submarine, the USS Plunger.”
 

“You’ve gotta be kidding, Daddy!” Lizzie declared.
 

“That’s the name, kiddo. My point is, he was accepting of new things, things other people might have dismissed or ignored. We go to Teddy Roosevelt with incontrovertible evidence of what’s going on. The photos, everything. We don’t have enough manpower—and I’m using the word in the generic sense—to do what we have to do.”
 

“Which is?” Clarence asked.
 

Before Jack could answer, Ellen interjected, “You sound like you’re plotting a novel, Jack.”
 

“Not much different, kid. We know that Lakewood has a time-transfer base here in 1900 that shares the exact space as a base in 1996.”
 

“They may even be using the same machinery,” Peggy pointed out, “existing in the same place in two different times, just like you told me that this house still existed, but in ruins, in 1992. The Japanese did some interesting experiments in quantum mechanics. They proved in experiments with electrons that, however illogical it sounds, it is possible for one particle to be in two places at the same time. Its actual position is determined by observation, observation determining reality. Two different observers would detect the same particle in two different states. Subatomic particles can exist as either particles or as waves, but in reality as both. Jane Rogers explained it all to me. She’s the one who knew the math and the physics. So, the time-transfer equipment is in the same physical location, observed in 1900 and in 1996, because it was brought to 1900, built here. The wave pattern Jane discovered and we blindly duplicated, which precipitated the original time-transfer, somehow served as the medium. The time transfer mechanism, the whole base Lakewood Industries set up, exists in two separate epochs, observed differently, but the same thing.”
 

“Headache,” Ellen supplied.
 

Jack smiled, went on. “It would seem logical that Lakewood Industries hasn’t probably taken over the Horizon Enterprises time-transfer facility just yet, but it’s also pretty obvious that Lakewood Industries has the heavily armed manpower to take over the Horizon facility or destroy it at will. I’m proposing that we take our photographic evidence and hard evidence—”
 

“Like my battery-operated CD player,” Lizzie offered, her face lit with its customarily beautiful smile.
 

“Perfect,” Jack agreed. “Future stuff that Teddy Roosevelt will have to realize isn’t faked, is real. Some of the books we have that haven’t yet been printed, like that. Everything that’s necessary to prove to Theodore Roosevelt that this isn’t bullshit. We get him to go to President McKinley.”