Jill rocked back and forth, back and forth, in the old chair as she spoke, soothed by its rhythmic creak.
“King led nonviolent protests that illuminated, on television, how bestial the resistance to desegregation was. Over a quarter of a million people came to the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in 1963, during which he spoke at the Lincoln Memorial to a sea of listeners. That speech became famous all over the world; he won the Nobel Peace Prize; he—he—”
Jill wiped tears from her eyes and smiled. “It’s kind of strange, isn’t it, for me to cry when here, he’s alive? And had a slightly different past? But I was there. I heard it. People believed in him.”
“What about when King was killed?” asked Megan.
“Assassinated. Shot while he was on a hotel balcony in Memphis. Oh, there was an uprising all over the country. He was a magnificent speaker—as he is today. The reaction was pure rage, for a lot of people. He’d kept the Civil Rights movement nonviolent—”
“Civil Rights?” asked Brian. “As in the Civil Rights Act that Truman signed in 1950?”
Jill sighed. “Yes, but that
did not happen
in the … other world. In that timestream, in D.C., peaceful gatherings and vigils turned into riots quite suddenly. Johnson—”
“Who?” asked Megan.
“JFK’s vice president his first term. He deployed National Guard tanks; they were everywhere, and you couldn’t go anywhere because of blockades. Brian, you and your friend went on a bike tour to the most dangerous places and when Dad found out he grounded you. The city was on fire. Looting, violence, clashes. Marines guarded the Capitol with machine guns. Several people were killed, but mostly in fires. It lasted for days. And, of course, the destroyed businesses were all black-owned; all this happened, as in most of the cities, in black areas. We heard that people in the suburbs were terrified that blacks would go out into Virginia and Maryland and burn down all the Tall Oaks subdivisions and shopping centers. Detroit was destroyed.”
Megan said, “I think Brian and I remember that. Not the big picture, just the local scary stuff. All the neighbors afraid. So there must be some kind of … bleed through. Like the memories are there, in our brains, just not accessible.”
“Hmm. Interesting,” Jill continued, “I was pretty torn up, and it was therapeutic to use that energy to work on the Poor People’s Campaign. We got people to contribute plywood for shacks, a sewage system was set up, and about five thousand people were living on the Mall. Not just blacks, but American Indians, Puerto Ricans, poor mountain people. In June, fifty thousand people marched. But by then, Bobby Kennedy had been assassinated too—he was even more liberal than his brother.”
“Incredible,” said Megan. “Really different. Stunningly different. But things changed. Somehow. You still remember all this. If we were there, why don’t we remember it?”
Jill thought for a moment. “I can’t tell you that. Maybe because I hogged the Game Board, and touched it, and used it, for years, to get my comics, like an addiction. And when everything … changed, it was kind of like a different past slid in, like a slide in a projector, with whole new events and meanings feeding into and out of them. I remembered the last slide, and if you superimpose them, some of the things in the two histories are the same. This one seems better, I must say, although not as exciting. In 1968, a lot of people were taking LSD—”
“Like today,” said Megan.
“Yes, but—well, let me continue. The mayor of Chicago cracked down on protests at the Democratic National Convention. I went to that too. Got clubbed in the head by police.” She smiled. “I survived. Nixon was president.”
“
Richard
Nixon?” asked Brian. “People voted for him? That’s bizarre.”
“I thought so too. In 1970, Nixon escalated the Vietnam War and invaded Cambodia. Students protested all over the country. Back then, there was a draft lottery, so all these young, college-age men were in line to fight and die—but for what? It was completely different from WWII, when Dad volunteered.”
Brian nodded. “That’s my nightmare, Jill. I’m dropping something called napalm on Cambodia, and then—” His breath got sharp; jerky. His face paled, and sweat popped out on his forehead. He wiped it off.
Jill’s eyes softened in compassion. She said in a very soft voice, “It wasn’t a dream.” She got up and rummaged through the pile of comics, pulled one out. “Read this.”
Megan sat on the couch next to Brian. Finally, Brian looked up. “So I—died? In a plane crash?” He turned pale.
She said, “Maybe. If that other timestream had continued. I saw from the Game Board that it would. I really don’t know the mechanics of all this. I’m not sure anyone does, not even Hadnzt.”
“It’s Q, of course,” said Megan. “I guess if Q is self-aware … but how did you know about these alternatives?”
Jill said, “It came in images, from the board. Pictures. That’s the way it always was; that’s why I did comics. I believed in the pictures the board showed me. They had a certain … imperative quality. That’s one reason I hid it from everyone, and I didn’t tell anyone about it. But I didn’t think, or know, that
I
could do anything.
“That year, 1968, was wild. The Soviets cracked down on Czechoslovakia, sent in tanks; it seemed like repressiveness was spreading. All over the world, student protest escalated. Nixon seemed terrified of the protests here. I don’t think he believed in freedom of speech. He believed he could do whatever he wanted to just because he was a president. Then, in early May 1970, four students were shot and killed by the National Guard at Kent State University in Ohio. They were having a peaceful protest about the Cambodia escalations.
“That was a flash point. Students and professors occupied university buildings, just like in 1968; a lot of schools shut down, National Guard everywhere. It seemed unbelievable—unacceptable—to a lot of us that our own country, the Land of the Free, was so repressive. Before, when mostly blacks were killed during protests and riots, it hadn’t been so apparent to white America that this might apply to everyone who questioned or opposed the government.
“Kent State was the last straw. As soon as I heard about it, I realized that the only way to change all that, to keep Brian from joining the Navy and getting shot down, to prevent JFK and King and RFK from being assassinated, to prevent the Vietnam War from escalating, was to thwart the first assassination, in Dallas. JFK had been for civil rights; JFK had a plan on his desk to draw down American advisers in Vietnam the very day he was murdered. Mainly, though, I was really, really furious.
“Back then, a lot more students hitchhiked. I guess they didn’t all own cars, like they do today. I threw some things in a backpack and headed for Dallas, November 22, 1963. The board turned into a map, kind of, and while I was hitchhiking, time just seemed to turn back from 1970 to 1963. Every time I got a new ride, it was in an older car, and the roads were smaller. The brands were different, the clothes were different, and I stayed mad, and then Hadntz picked me up in Arkansas. I’d been sitting by the side of the road for about ten hours, eating dust, and listening to men yell nasty things out the window at me when they drove by. I was ready to call Mom and Dad. But by then, I think they’d already started on their own way back, to find me, Mom and Dad and Wink. They’d been involved in however the Game Board came to be—which I don’t know anything about—and they knew how to get to Dallas too. I think they came in some kind of plane. One thing Dad told me, before he clammed up, was that the plane had grown from one of the HD versions. So it
does
grow. But—according to what rules?”
“It grew in the Oberammergau Messerschmitt caves,” Brian said, nodding. “When we went there—remember?—I thought there had been some recent activity.”
“Right,” said Jill. “My question is: After all this happened, why didn’t Dad tell me?”
“I’ve wondered about that a lot,” said Megan. “I think they were trying to protect us.”
“They knew that Hadntz could go from one time to another.” Jill looked at Megan. “I guess she still does too.”
“I don’t think I like her very much.”
“Why?”
“Because she plays with people’s lives.”
Brian said, “She doesn’t think of it as playing. I’ve read her papers. She believes quite strongly that she is improving all of humanity. She talks constantly about the possible causes of war, and how to biologically modify that tendency.”
“How?” asked Megan.
“The latest modification papers I’ve found in her notes implicate males, I’m afraid. I guess history bears this out.”
“So what’s her solution to that?” asked Jill. “A world of only women?”
“No. Let’s see. Behavior modification, emphasis on education, learning, science, for women as well as men, women equally involved in government, getting to the biological roots of patriarchal control, or reproductive control, removing the profit from war, in particular giving young men another purpose in life besides gangs … lots of vectors. I guess Mom and Dad believed in what she was doing, and her methods, at least at one point. Or maybe that was their friend, Wink. His timestream split from Dad’s in August 1945, and he lived in a world where everything
had
improved in those ways. He couldn’t get to—to that old world, where you lived, Jill, where
we
lived, very often. All that stuff is in the notebooks. They called that time-shift a nexus. So it had happened before, but I don’t think Wink could control it. He just knew when it might happen. For instance, the first time it happened—when Dad saw Wink after Wink’s parents told Dad that Wink had died—was at a veterans’ reunion, and that’s when they started to piece together what was going on. There’s a lot about quantum splitting, and consciousness, and the Many-World theory—you’ve both heard of that.”
Megan turned to Jill, “What happened when you met Hadntz? What did she look like?”
Jill laughed. “She was dressed like a cowgirl. You would have loved her truck, Brian. She was drinking a beer. I realized who she was, and that’s when she told me her name. We talked. She told me to turn around and go home. She said that no matter what happened, she thought that in the long run it would all average out. But she didn’t try very hard to discourage me. She gave me a pistol.”
“What kind?” Brian asked.
“I have no idea. We stopped and she showed me how to use it, had some target practice with all the beer bottles rattling around in the back of her truck. She dropped me off in Dallas in front of the book depository. Oh, you don’t know. John Kennedy was murdered during a motorcade, from the sixth floor of that building, or so everything that I’d read about it and everyone claimed. After the murder, there was the Warren Commission report, all kinds of studies. I’d read them all before I went to Dallas.”
“Who did it?” asked Megan.
“They said that a guy named Lee Harvey Oswald did it. He had some connections with the CIA. He’d been a Marine, officially defected to the Soviet Union, and some people—they were called ‘conspiracy theorists,’ or just plain nuts—claimed that he’d gone on behalf of the CIA, or else how did he get back into the U.S. so easily with J. Edgar Hoover, a virulent anti-Communist, heading the FBI? Some witnesses also said that they heard shots coming from a nearby rise that they called ‘the grassy knoll.’ Oswald was arrested in a movie theater in Dallas, and—now this is the weirdest thing—he was being moved from the jail a few days later, all on national TV, and a guy named Jack Ruby, who owned some strip clubs, rushed up and shot him right in the stomach. I saw it. You guys saw it too. Right on the living room TV. It was pretty shocking. And extremely suspicious. Ruby died soon after that from cancer or something.”
“We saw
that
on TV?” Megan was incredulous.
“We were living in Germany then, so it wasn’t live, but Mom was furious that we saw it; she thought Dad ought to have known it was going to be broadcast. Whoever set it up made damned sure it was on TV, in the middle of the day, when everyone was glued to their sets. When we got back to Washington, everybody was still devastated. Everybody loved Kennedy.”
“Not everybody,” said Brian. “That certainly isn’t true here.”
“Lots, though. I remember being in Peoples Drug and a man looking at magazines picked up one with Kennedy on the cover and just exploded, coughing and crying. You guys watched his funeral cortege on TV too. It had a black horse in it, with no rider, and the boots in the stirrups faced backward. Solemn. Eerie. Dignified. Just hoofbeats, drums, bagpipes. And so sad. The whole country was in mourning. He was so hopeful. He talked about landing on the moon, improving education, all kinds of things.”
“He obviously angered someone.”
“Well, the Mafia was high on the list of suspects, because his father, a pro-Nazi during the time he was our ambassador to England, made his money in the bootlegging business, and Kennedy didn’t get Cuba back for them, which was where they were making a ton of money. Bobby Kennedy was the attorney general and was really cracking down on the Mafia. But, I don’t know. Hoover said ‘We’ve got to convince the American public that Oswald killed Kennedy.’ Why? People suspected the CIA and even Lyndon Johnson, his vice president.
“So. This is what I did. When Hadntz dropped me off, I went upstairs to the sixth floor of the depository and hid behind some stacked boards they were using for construction. I knew all the details about it, like I said, I’d studied it, it had happened seven years earlier. Then two men showed up, not Oswald, with some old rifle, and they hung out and smoked and joked and waited. When Kennedy came around the corner in his convertible, they were supposed to fire, but I jumped up and shot at the one poking the gun out the window and rather surprisingly wounded him. Dad came out shooting from behind some boxes. I was astonished. The one I’d shot shouted, “Make the decoy shot!” The other guy picked up the rifle, but Dad then—he told me, I don’t remember—Dad carried me downstairs and took me to the car.” She was talking now as if in a trance. “I had a bullet graze on my forehead.
“We drove out of town to a little airstrip where the plane had been, the plane that brought them there. Mom and the plane were gone.” Tears welled in Jill’s eyes. “Just … gone.” She leaned her head back in the rocker and the tears rolled down her face. She got up, grabbed some tissues, blew her nose.