“I’m not.”
He took a deep breath. “What’s the United States Time Program?”
“Why were you flying to Russia?”
“Alright,” Jeff said, holding up his hands. He pointed to Fisher. “I flew to Russia because he sent me there on a mission. I went back in time to help assassinate a Russian general who, in an alternate reality, would become Premier and institute a time travel program in the Soviet Union that would be used to harm the United States.”
“The Soviet Union?” Dexter asked.
“Yes. Without this man’s murder, the Soviet Union would not fall and would remain a world power. Since we failed on our first attempt to assassinate the general, I had the chance to see first-hand what the present-day world looks like with the Soviet Union still in existence.”
Fisher leaned forward. “Dr. Jacobs, with all due respect, that’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard.”
“No, no,” Dexter said, holding up his hand to Fisher, telling Jeff that his friend had some authority here. “Let’s hear the rest of it.”
Lean on science, Jeff reminded himself. The one thing he was sure of was that in this reality the assassination of Belochkin and the scenario in his backyard had actually taken place. “We were able to return to the past and complete the assassination before I returned to Russia in this present time. Which is not my own present time, mind you. But the assassination is in the history books. You can look it up.”
“You keep saying ‘we,’” Dexter said. “Who’s ‘we’?”
He smiled. “I was sent to Russia – by Agent Fisher here – in the company of the woman who was the general’s original assassin. Well, actually, with a younger version of herself. It’s confusing. She was a time traveler herself who had gone back to 1983 for the express purpose of murdering the general. But the Soviets’ time machine offered no way to return to the present. So this woman lived thirty-some years – the last seven in a mental hospital in the Bronx – watching her country fall and waiting for time travel to be invented in this reality so that the job could be completed.”
“So she could go back and assassinate the general again? Why would she have to do that?” Though the story was convoluted, Dexter was following.
“You have to remember, the philosophy of time travel at this point is made up of only theories. She and I shared a common belief that if time travel is responsible for a change to the past, someone in the future has to ensure that that change is fulfilled. I’ve called it ‘fulfillment,’ as a principle. It’s turned out not to be true.” As he said it, he had a sudden sense of doubt as to whether he and Evelyn had actually shared that belief, or if she’d allowed him to believe it, sending him into a crash course. It immediately terrified him. He tried to not let it show on his face.
“No?”
“No. Had we not gone back in time to assassinate the general after the woman had already done it, he would’ve remained dead in our original reality. I was wrong. We were wrong.”
“How do you know that?”
“Because it’s in our history. Right now. I went back from an alternate reality and witnessed the murder of the Soviet general. In this reality, that assassination took place. Doesn’t matter where the time traveler came from – if it’s in our history, it’s in our history.” His mind flashed for a moment to Erica Danforth, wondering, with all the changes that had taken place, if her place in history was still secure. Logically, since the earliest change they’d made was in 1983, she would be intact in 1849.
Both men sat back simultaneously. “We’re expected to believe a Russian mental patient tells us to go back to 1983 and re-kill a Soviet general, and the FBI jumps?”
“I said the same thing,” Jeff said. “But you made me do it.”
Fisher scowled at him, then looked at Dexter. “Do we need to verify his story about the general?”
Dexter shook his head. “No, that’s accurate. It won’t tell us anything.” He looked back to Jeff. “Do you want me to tell you what we know?”
“As long as it includes you telling me about the U.S. Time Program.”
Dexter smirked. “You don’t know the USTP?”
“Never heard of it.”
“That’s strange, because it’s your technology that built it.”
“Well, enlighten me.” He’d drifted into defiant, feeling a change in the tenor of the conversation.
“You ran, Jeff. You made the rules forbidding anyone from unauthorized time travel, and then you ran.”
“How’d I do that?”
“You gained unsupervised access to the time device and took an unauthorized mission.”
Now Jeff started laughing. “Where’d I go?”
“We found you in Russia,” Fisher said. “You want to tell us what you were really doing?”
Jeff looked back and forth between them. “I really have no idea what you’re talking about. Can you please explain to me the Time Program?”
Dexter was starting to look confused, but he spoke. “The U.S. government used your time travel technology to create a program that allows people with the wherewithal to support the program to travel back in time. Not ringing a bell?”
“No, and it sounds horrible.”
“Well, it’s not, if people follow the rules we’ve set. One-to-three hour supervised trips. No historical connection to the person’s present life. Really? None of this is familiar to you? How is that possible?”
He was trying to figure it out in his own mind, not having much luck. Knowing he wasn’t leaving until he came up with an answer, though, he crafted an idea. “Do you have a piece of paper? Something I can write on?”
They both looked around the room as though a piece of loose leaf was going to magically appear, then Fisher looked at the one-way glass and wrote in the air for the universal sign for “something to write on.” A moment later, the door opened and a suited man dropped a paper and pencil on the table.
“Easy,” Fisher said instinctively.
Jeff picked up the pencil. “What? Am I going to stab both of you and make a run for it? Geez.”
He started sketching a diagram, as much doing it for himself as he was for them. He needed to make some sense of the notion that they’d experienced a history completely different from his own. As he wrote, he said, “Am I the only one who’s ever run?” They didn’t answer, though, so he stopped drawing and looked up. “Am I?”
They were looking at each other. Finally, Dexter said, “No.”
He pointed at his friend with the pencil. “What’s your role in all of this?”
“I serve as the supervisor for any time travel missions. I ensure no historical relevance, and I accompany the participant on the trip.”
Grinning, Jeff glanced at Fisher and then back at Dexter. “That’s a real job?” Dexter nodded, so he shrugged. “Well, I guess you’d be the perfect person for it.” His confidence was coming back quickly. He continued drawing until he was pleased with what he’d prepared, and turned the paper toward them.
He went on to explain. “Here’s 1983, where everything skewed into a couple different directions. That’s probably the key moment. I was on this timeline, but returned to 1983, where history was put back the way it was, recreating this timeline.” He stopped and looked up. “There’s a whole backstory here that I don’t need to go into right now – the woman turned on me so we went to the future where there actually was a Soviet Union, and I ended up traveling back in time with the ‘other’ version of the same woman... I’ll go into it later. It’ll blow your mind.” Back to the paper. “Then in a hurry to escape an onslaught of Soviet guards, I jumped right past my own present time to this current time. So, I have absolutely no idea what transpired along this timeline. Which is why you have a different story of my own personal history than I do.” He looked up at Dexter, who was nodding as if it all made sense.
Dexter pointed at the “2015” on the diagram and looked at Fisher, who shook his head. “You say you left for Russ
ia in 2015?” Jeff nodded. “That’s not true. You ran about a year-and-a-half ago.”
“I can assure you I haven’t experienced anything from 2015 through 2018. That’s not saying I’ve given up on doing so, but right now that’s the case.” His mind flashed to the scene of three Ekaterina’s standing in front of him in Belochkin’s yard. “Unless there’s another me,” he said, without thinking of the consequences of saying it.
Dexter looked up from the paper, at Fisher, then at Jeff. “Yeah, that makes sense according to your diagram here.”
“What?” Fisher asked, grabbing at the paper. Dexter handed it to him and he silently stared at it.
“So what happened to the other you?” Dexter asked. “The one we’ve been waiting for to return?”
He laughed, at a loss for making any more sense of the situation than he already had, his mind far too fatigued to dig any deeper. “I don’t know. Maybe I’m him.”
“How could you be him,” Fisher asked, laying the paper on the table. “You say you don’t know any of this.”
Jeff shook his head. He honestly didn’t know. “I can’t answer that sitting here in interrogation,” he said. “It’s going to take some research. And probably some sleep.”
Dexter held up his hands. “We’ll get to that. The last thing we need is two of you running around. That’d end this program real fast.”
Leaving that topic for a moment, Jeff asked, “So you’re saying that with the Time Program, it’s basically rich people buying one to three hours in another time period? To do what?”
“Tourism. Experience it. See what it was like.”
“And someone thought this was a good idea?”
Dexter nodded with a hint of disdain, telling Jeff that they must have signed him on for a pretty penny. He leaned forward and tapped his finger on the diagram in front of him. “With all this jumping back and forth, can something that’s been changed through time travel be fixed?”
He shrugged. “We were able to pull it off, yes. But one assassination turned into three murders and almost a fourth. Me. And now I’m sitting in an interrogation room having missed the last three years of my life. So, I would say yes, it can be. But I wouldn’t go in anticipating it’s going to be clean.”
Dexter let out a long breath, then turned his whole body to look at Fisher. They made eye contact for an uncomfortable amount of time. Jeff tried to read their facial expressions, and his take was that Dexter was actually silently asking for advice, or even permission, from Fisher. After a moment, Fisher nodded reluctantly. They’d agreed to something.
He wondered what it had to do with him.
End
Continue Now with Book Three, Wilton’s Gold: Fate.
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Other Books by Craig Turner
Fortune
Fulfillment
Fate
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Craig W. Turner has worked in government, politics, PR, media and economic development in Western New York for over 15 years. He is a graduate of the University of Buffalo, and is a two-time winner of the Buffalo News Short Story Contest. Craig lives in Wheatfield, New York (near Niagara Falls) with his wife, Nadine, and their four children. While it is an admitted fantasy of his, he has never, personally, traveled through time.
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