Independence Day

by Bob Mayer

  Independence Day

  TIME PATROL

  BOB MAYER

  “Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves.” Abraham Lincoln

  The Time Patrol

  There once was a place called Atlantis. Ten thousand years ago, it was attacked by a force known only as the Shadow, on the same day over the course of six years. The last attack led to Atlantis being obliterated to the point where it is just a legend.

  There are many Earth timelines. The Shadow comes from one of those alternate timelines (or perhaps more than one). It is attacking our timeline by punching bubbles into our past that can last no more than twenty-four hours. In each bubble, the Shadow is trying to change our history and cause a time Ripple.

  By itself, a single time Ripple can be dealt with, corrected, and absorbed. But a significant time Ripple that is unchecked can become a Cascade. Six Cascades can combine to become a Time Tsunami.

  That would be the end of our timeline and our existence.

  To achieve its goal, the Shadow attacks six points in time simultaneously; the same date, in different years.

  The Time Patrol’s job is to keep our timeline intact.

  The Time Patrol sends an agent back to each of those six dates to keep history the same.

  This is one of those dates: 4 July.

  For more information on the Time Patrol Series please visit http://bobmayer.com

  Where The Time Patrol Ended Up This Particular Day: 4 July

  The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen United States of America

  WHEN IN THE COURSE OF HUMAN EVENTS, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

  Entebbe, Uganda, 4 July 1976 A.D.

  “HAVE YOU KILLED MEN, EAGLE?” Avi asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Many men?”

  “All that I’ve needed to.”

  “That is good,” Avi said. “My men are the toughest and best-trained commandos in the world. They have all killed. If you become an impediment to the mission in any way, or put any of my men in danger, I will kill you without hesitation.”

  It is 1976 A.D. The world’s population is 4.139 billion humans; The first flight of the Concorde; The Sex Pistols; Microsoft is registered with the Office of the Secretary of State of New Mexico; Frampton Comes Alive; Jimmy Carter is elected President; Some group named U2 is formed; Son of Sam kills his first victim; The Big Thompson Flood in Colorado kills 143 people; Bob Marley is wounded in an assassination attempt; the United States of America celebrates its bicentennial.

  “If I am killed or wounded,” Avi continued, “and not capable, my men have my permission to do the same. Israel comes first, the Time Patrol second.”

  Some things change; some don’t.

  Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 4 July 1776 A.D.

  THE ARROW WHIZZED BY, so close Doc swore he felt the feathers on the end of the shaft tickled his cheek. He dove forward, hoping he didn’t land in the literal crap, but he was already in it in the larger sense so . . .

  He hit dirt, then rolled, automatically reaching for a pistol, which he didn’t have.

  He stayed low and looked left, then right, not sure from which end of the alley the arrow had been launched. He spotted a figure silhouetted by the slanted moonlight at one end, with a short bow in hand, and another arrow being notched. The figure was cloaked and hooded, walking forward, less than twenty meters from Doc and closing the distance.

  He realized the figure was a woman by the contours and the way she walked. That was irrelevant because Doc knew he was a dead man. She might have missed at the longer distance, but at this range . . .

  “Wait!” Doc begged.

  It is 1776 A.D. The world’s population is a little over 900 million, of which only 3.6 million are part of the fledgling United States; Norfolk, VA is burned by the British; Thomas Paine publishes Common Sense; American Marines make an assault on Nassau, Bahamas; Adam Smith publishes The Wealth of Nations; the Presidio of San Francisco is founded; the Illuminati is formally founded in Bavaria (conspiracy theories have never been the same); angry New Yorkers cover a statue of King George III with graffiti and then topple it (New York has pretty much always been the same); the first submarine attack, by the USS Turtle, fails; Captain Cook sets off on his third journey of discovery (he’s not coming back).

  But the woman kept coming, her face hidden by the overhang of the hood and the darkness.

  Some things change; some don’t.

  Monticello, VA, 4 July 1826 A.D.

  “DID YOU READ MY LETTER?” Thomas Jefferson asked the young man, his voice frail and faint.

  The man nodded. “Yes, sir.”

  Moms was on her toes, trying to hear the words through the open transom.

  “Will you do as I ask?”

  The man glanced at Sally Hemings, then back at Jefferson. “Sir, I—” He paused. “I don’t understand what you are asking of me. I understand the words, but not the intent.”

  “You don’t need to understand the intent,” Jefferson said. “You are just to do as instructed.”

  It is 1826 A.D. The world’s population went past one billion around the turn of the century and is now roughly 1.02 billion; about 10 million live in the United States; New York City is packed with almost 150,000 inhabitants; Beethoven finishes the String Quartet in C Sharp Minor, Opus 131; the first commercial rail line, the Granite Railway, opens in the U.S.; the Eggnog Riot breaks out at West Point (Benny Havens explains this in D-Day); Varina Howell Davis, who would become First Lady of the Confederacy, is born.

  Jefferson’s gaze shifted to Sally Hemings. “Get it.”

  Some things change; some don’t.

  Hemings reached behind his pillow and pulled out a leather pouch. She handed it to Jefferson. With shaking hands, he untied the strings, revealing an iron rod a quarter-inch in diameter and eight inches long. There were brass knobs on both ends. The rod went through a number of thin wooden disks, two inches in diameter and a sixth of an inch thick. They slid along the rod as Jefferson cradled it in his hands.

  “There are twenty-six disks,” Jefferson said. “I have thirteen here. John Adams has the rest. Take this to him. He is the one who must complete the Cipher.”

  The young man took the incomplete Cipher. “What does the Cipher do?”

  “It leads to a document. One we all signed along with the Declaration.”

  “What does the document do?”

  “Everything, Mister Poe. It will change everything.”

  Gettysburg, PA, 4 July 1863 A.D.

  “MAMA. PLEASE COME GET ME, MAMA!”

  Roland lay between two cold corpses and tried not to listen to the plaintive cry from someone close by. A man who’d put on a uniform, whether it be gray or blue, so proudly, eager to go forth and be a hero. Pretty much the way all wars began for the young who would be the cannon fodder, with the fantasy sold to them by the old men who started the wars.

  This was the reality. It always devolved to a broken man lying on the ground, crying out for that most instinctual need.

  “Mother!”

  Roland could hear other voices now. There was a tree to his left, shot up, its branches splintered by artillery and grape shot, but still something of a tree. Unlike the men, it might recover from this battle. In time. A cluster of about twenty men lay underneath its bony branches. Blue and gray mixed together. Just as dogs who know they’re going to die crawl under a bush, men on battlefields tended to group together und
er trees.

  Dying Trees. Edith’s download informed Roland the practice was so prevalent there was a term for it. They were scattered across every Civil War battlefield. Afterward, when one side retreated, or a temporary truce was signed, and the burial parties were sent out to clean up the mess so it could start all over again, they inevitably found the bodies of those who hadn’t been killed outright, clustered together.

  It is 1863 A.D. The world’s population is roughly 1.2 to 1.3 billion humans; the population of the United States is 31,443,321 according to the 1860 census, but two years of war have taken a toll on that and the death toll will eventually reach 700,000; the first section of the London Underground, from Paddington to Farringdon Street opens; the French intervene in Mexico, bombarding Vera Cruz; Jules Verne’s first adventure novel, Five Weeks in a Balloon is published; The 54th Massachusetts, the first African-American regiment, leaves Boston for the front; West Virginia becomes the 35th State; Between 2,000 and 3,000 people celebrating the Feast of the Immaculate Conception in a Church in Santiago, Chile, die when it catches on fire; Gerard Heineken buys a brewery; Abraham Lincoln signs the Emancipation proclamation.

  Were they afraid God might see them? Roland wondered about the wounded. Were they hiding?

  Some things change; some don’t.

  The more practical victims were found clumped around ponds or streams, where they crawled, desperate for water.

  “Help me, Lord. Help me, Lord. Help me, Lord.”

  Roland had to tune that chant out. The only way God, as Roland envisioned a Higher Power, could help these men was to kill them faster.

  Vicksburg, Mississippi. 4 July 1863

  “GOOD. ‘CAUSE IF YOU WAS A SPY, I’d have to gut you right here with my knife.”

  “You have a knife?” Ivar asked.

  The young boy, Joey, revealed a silver pocketknife in one hand. It had been there all along and Ivar hadn’t seen it.

  “It’s a good one,” Joey said. “Engraved and everything.”

  “Your father’s?” Ivar asked.

  Joey’s head drooped. “No, sir. My daddy, he got his’self killed at Shiloh. At least we thinks so. He went off with the great General Sidney Albert Johnston and the Army of the Mississippi and never did come back. In ’62, that was. Spring. Bunch of dads went off and never come back. Word is damn Yankees wouldn’t allow the decency of claiming the dead. Just tossed our mensfolks’ bodies into a trench.” Joey held out the knife, with his fingers on either side of the blade, the handle toward Ivar. “Here. Take a look-see.”

  Ivar took it, then angled the blade so he could read the engraving in the moonlight.

  He felt a rush as he read the name: John C. Pemberton. The Confederate Commander of Vicksburg.

  It is 1863 A.D. Thomas (Stonewall) Jackson dies (mistakenly shot by his own troops); Harper’s Weekly publishes Thomas Nast’s drawing of Santa Claus; the Idaho Territory is organized by the U.S. Congress; the National Conscription Act, the first draft in the United States is passed; the Football Association is formed in London (stealing the term from the U.S. but they really meant soccer); linoleum is patented and kitchens will never be the same; Henry Ford is born (when he’s older he’ll make some cars).

  “You know Pemberton?” Ivar asked.

  “He’s in our cave a lot,” Joey said, his tone indicating he didn’t like that one bit.

  Ivar knew he was in the right place and the right time. He just had no clue what the problem was since the surrender of Vicksburg had already been negotiated between Pemberton and Ulysses S. Grant. What monkey wrench could the Shadow throw into that?

  Some things change; some don’t.

  “The General,” Joey said, taking back the knife. “He aint acting right in the head.”

  Mantinea, Greece, 4 July 362 B.C.

  “HAVE YOU HAD VISIONS of other timelines when traveling back to your own time?” Pyrrha asked Scout.

  “Sort of.”

  “We believe those are real timelines,” Pyrrha said. “Not possibilities. They happened.” Pyrrha, in mythology, is the daughter of Pandora and the only woman to survive the Great Flood along with her husband, thus being the mother of all mankind. That’s in mythology. Right now, in Scout’s reality, she was a pain, asking questions that Scout couldn’t answer.

  “Hold on,” Scout said. It was growing warmer as the sun rose. The sounds of soldiers aligning themselves in tightly packed phalanxes, orders being shouted, trumpets blaring, horses racing back and force, echoed in the plain below them. “I thought those threads were what happened if we failed. Possibilities.”

  It is 362 B.C. The world’s population is a bit more than 100 million humans. Over half of them live in India and China. King Agesilaus II of Sparta leads one thousand warriors to Egypt to assist in battling a Persian invasion; when Agesilaus is asked how far Sparta’s rule reached, he extended his spear and replied ‘As far as this can reach’; China begins to become unified.

  Pandora, in mythology even more of a troublemaker than her daughter, spoke up. “The Shadow is trying two things. One is taking shots in the dark, trying to disrupt your timeline in order to terminate it. But it’s also taking some aimed shots. Going to places where history, the history of the timelines that reached the same point, show there were splits into parallel worlds. It’s trying to shatter your timeline at one of those key junctures.”

  Just great, Scout thought.

  “Today is one of those junctures,” Pandora said.

  Some things change; some don’t.

  But Before Independence Day And After They Came Back From D-Day

  New York City: The Present

  The Metropolitan Museum of Art

  EDITH FROBISH STOOD ON the balcony overlooking the main hall of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, her hands on the railing, nervously rubbing the metal.

  She’d checked. There was no record of the Charioteer of Delphi sculpture in Greece or in the art world. It had never existed.

  But it had.

  As far as the art in the Met . . ?

  It was all there. Nothing fading, nothing gone.

  There were differences, though. Edith had walked the museum before it opened this morning. Every place that was supposed to have art in it did: paintings on the wall, sculptures on their stands. All was where it was supposed to be. But some were different. Very slightly different.

  But different.

  “Not good, eh?”

  Edith was startled by the voice behind her. She spun about, facing Dane, the Administrator of the Time Patrol. “I didn’t know anyone was there.”

  “I read your report,” Dane said. His hair seemed grayer than before; his face etched with more worry lines. However, for someone in his seventh decade, he was in good shape, his body as trim as when he was in the Army during Vietnam; a Vietnam not of this timeline, but another Earth timeline.

  A timeline that no longer existed.

  “But you didn’t have a conclusion,” Dane said.

  Edith swallowed hard. “I don’t know what to conclude. The differences are subtle, but they are in a wide spectrum of art. Multiple eras and different mediums: paintings, sculptures. I don’t know about film or music yet.”

  “Can everyone see the differences or just Time Patrol?” Dane asked.

  “I asked a couple of people here,” Edith said. “For them, everything is the same. But the Charioteer never existed. That’s in the real world.”

  Dane asked the question somewhat differently. “When you say everything is the same, do you mean it’s the same as it was before the difference you note or do those people see the differences and its always been that way for them?”

  Edith understood what he was looking for. “It’s the same as it was before. So far. But if I see it, won’t it eventually become part of the timeline unless we do something?” Edith was the art historian and primary researcher for the Time Patrol. She was a tall, slender, very serious woman in her late thirties, whose world revolved around her job.


  Dane stood next to her, gazing out at the hall. “Yes. Eventually in our timeline, the art and probably more than the art, will change if we don’t do something about it. A Ripple. Perhaps not a Cascade.”

  “What can we do about it?” Edith asked. “Pythagoras was already dead when Scout arrived on her mission. She failed.”

  “Not yet,” Dane said. “We, you and I, those of us who have traveled in time, can see the Ripple. But until ordinary people see it, it’s still a variable. We can work with variables.”

  “How?” Edith wondered. “The Shadow’s bubble on the day Pythagoras was killed has closed. We don’t have a landing point and time tunnel to send someone back. We don’t know how to do that. We just piggy-back the missions in the bubbles the Shadow opens.” She was talking faster, her worries trumping all else. She always worried. That was why she was so good at her job, but right now, she was vibrating.

  “We have a new team member,” Dane said.

  Edith was confused by the abrupt shift in topics. “What?”

  “We lost a team member and we’ve recruited a new one.”

  “That was quick.”

  “It was in process before we learned we lost Mac,” Dane said. “To think we would never take casualties was never part of our process.”

  “That’s rather cold,” Edith said.

  “It’s realistic,” Dane said. “Same as knowing that eventually we’d fail on missions. Even with our ‘home court’ advantage, the Shadow had to prevail sooner or later. The key is Mac was successful on his mission.”

  “That’s even colder.”

  Dane looked her in the eyes. “Cold is when a timeline is destroyed. Like mine was. This is a war, Edith. There are casualties in war. Your timeline’s Dane was a casualty in a war that accomplished nothing. The war we’re fighting against the Shadow in the Time Patrol is for our very existence.”