Bick clenched his jaw. He didn’t need his life rationalized.
Dee paused. “So you see, he hates the establishment as much as the rest of us.”
8:15 PM – EDT
Sutherland pecked at a computer terminal in Johnson Hall at Lehigh University. Zimmerman had relocated his operation to the campus police station in this building, making it his command center. Radios squawked as officers bustled about trying to look busy, mainly concerning themselves with avoiding the colonel’s increasing wrath. The captain watched his superior’s machinations as he continued the grounds search, although it was obvious that his quarry had eluded capture.
Under direct orders, Sutherland had tagged the Governet to notify him of any suspicious border crossings, or anyone accessing information on the renegades. If they had help, someone could be monitoring their status. Zimmerman had not, however, dispatched an All-Points Bulletin on the missing persons, preferring to deal with the dilemma privately.
Sutherland jerked back in surprise when he heard a beep alerting him to a search on all four traitors from the same node. A hit! He hopped up to inform his superior officer, who was currently insulting a group of security guards, calling them campus clowns. It took a moment to tear the colonel away from his diatribe.
When they returned to the workstation, Zimmerman saw the intel on the screen and celebrated by whacking his underling between the shoulder blades. “That’s it! Someone knows about our pesky little quartet. I need the identity and whereabouts of the government official who conducted the inquiry. Either we’ve uncovered another subversive, or they’ve been detained.”
The captain typed furiously to determine the source of the search, and then his heart sank. “Colonel, I’ve hit a snag. The request came through an unauthorized terminal, and I’m afraid it may be difficult to trace its origin.” He cursed himself for not checking it before.
“Well you had better find a way. I’m holding you personally responsible. If you fail to find them, it’s your ass that will pay.” Zimmerman pounded the desk.
Sutherland was drowning. He simply didn’t have the technical expertise to hack through the Governet. His career was effectively over. “I’ll do my best, sir.”
8:30 PM – EDT
After suffering through a tedious discourse on Anti-Matter, Anti-Time, and time travel, Bick decided he’d had enough. They were insane. “So what you’re telling me is this.” He leaned back and concentrated on inflecting his voice with as much singsong sarcasm as he could muster. “Your mission is to travel fifty years back in time to 1963, prevent the assassination of Jackie Kennedy—thus averting the ’64 Nuke War and the hostilities that ensued, of course—and return safely to a new and improved world of 2013. Preposterous! Everyone knows time travel is impossible.”
Frank dramatically thrust his arm in the air. “I agree.”
Bick gaped. “I thought you were one of them.”
“Oh, I’m not here by choice. I got roped into this just like you did.” Frank noted Bick’s astonishment with satisfaction. “But think about it, folks, if time travel were feasible at any point in the past, present, or future, where are all the time travelers? Surely we would have encountered them in history, especially in the pivotal moments.”
“What laws of physics preclude it?” Iggy narrowed her eyes.
He didn’t respond.
“Right, none. Time travel is absolutely achievable, and we’ve done it.”
He shook his head in disgust. How had he gotten himself into this mess?
“Frank, you said earlier today that it would be physically impossible to break out of the Gulag, which we clearly have done. Both of you maintain that time travel is also impossible, which we declare we have done. I suggest we demonstrate that marrying the two is the only explanation for our escape. Sera?” Iggy motioned to a desk globe the size of a softball on the bookcase.
“I’d like to see it.” Dee glanced between Bick and Frank. “Give them a chance.”
“Great,” Jay began, while Sera retrieved the globe. “You have to realize that science fiction authors and screenwriters have given us false impressions of time travel. Characters climb into a time machine, press a button and arrive on precisely the same street at a different time. Maybe the houses are newer or older, or the mall hasn’t been built yet, but that’s the basic premise. In reality, it is true that you would move in time, not space. However, the earth would have shifted during the interval. So in addition to not being on the same street, you wouldn’t even arrive on the surface of the planet.”
“It’ll be easier to show you.” Sera suppressed a laugh at their perplexed faces. “Let’s assume we are observing the solar system from above, meaning we’re looking down at the North Pole.” She plunked the mini-orb onto the coffee table. “First, rotation. The earth spins on its axis to the east, which is counterclockwise from our perspective.” She spun it. “Say you time-jumped to the future from New Jersey like we did.” She pointed at the Garden State. “You would stay exactly where you were, but in the future, the planet would have rotated east.” She again twisted the globe counterclockwise, but allowed it to slide past her finger across the US. “You would wind up in Pennsylvania or further west, depending on the length of the jump. Make sense?”
Dee nodded, riveted, while Bick sat dazed. Frank pretended to not pay attention.
“Second, orbit.” Sera centered Dee’s empty Diet Coke can on the table. “Call this our sun. Again, from our vantage point above, the orbit is counterclockwise.” She swept the globe around the can in a wide circle to demonstrate. “Jumping to the future,” she pointed to New Jersey, “you would stay where you were, but the earth would be further along in its orbital path.” She held her finger static while sweeping the globe in a counterclockwise arc around the can. “In effect, you are behind the planet, because you remain where it was in the past. Thus, it is critical to consider the day part when you jump.”
“Why?” Dee thought she understood until the last part.
“Because you don’t want to end up buried in the center of the planet. Say you are in New Jersey again, at a point during the day when the orbital path is directly in front of you—picture that you are driving the earth forward. Six o’clock in the morning for instance.” She placed her finger on the globe in front of its forward motion. “If you make a short jump to the future, you stay in the same location, but the planet has moved forward in the direction you were driving it.” She pushed the globe, removed her hand, and the globe stood in the spot where her finger was. “Deep core of the earth. Fire and brimstone stuff, as per bible predictions. That’s why we chose six o’clock at night instead.”
“Oh.” Dee contemplated this. It seemed plausible. “How far, or rather how long did you jump to escape from the Secaucus facility?”
“Excellent question.” Jay slid his glasses back over his ears. “Thanks for the segue. When Iggy and Sera broke out of the Gulag, we had to bear in mind both rotation and orbit to ensure they didn’t land in the middle of the planet or in the vacuum of space. Of course, the calculations were quite complicated, but let me see if I can simplify things.”
“Yes,” Bick growled. “Dumb it down for us non-scienticians.”
Jay ignored him. “We’ll cheat and use some cocktail napkin type of assumptions.” He pulled the globe toward him and yanked a credit-card sized calculator from his jeans pocket. “First, rotation. The circumference of the earth is approximately 25,000 miles.” He traced around the equator. “And there are twenty-four hours in a day, or one rotation of the axis. Easy math there. So from Secaucus, a one-hour jump to the future would place you a little over 1000 miles west, about one time zone away. Second, orbit. The earth traverses 584 million miles to revolve around the sun.” He swung the globe around the Coke-sun. “Divide that by 365 ¼ days per year”—he punched keys on the calculator—“and the pretty blue ball hurtles 1.6 million miles a day. Divide that by twenty-four hours and the velocity is about 66,600 miles per hour.”
Bick gasped, amazed at the incredible speed.
“As an example, this is what would happen in a one-hour jump. As Sera said, we left at six o’clock in the evening, when we would be positioned at the taillights of the planet, to keep with the driving analogy.” Jay touched New Jersey. “The earth would spin and orbit”—he twisted and moved the globe—“and the traveler would end up here.” His finger hovered behind the planet over the American Midwest. “1000 miles west and over 66,000 miles into space. Way too far, as Frank will attest. That’s a quarter of the distance to the moon. Obviously, the final computations were more intense. We had to take into account the circumference of the earth at 40 degrees latitude, and the fact that the rotation and orbit happen simultaneously. In the end, all we needed was a jump of less than one-third of a second to the future, which put our physicists about two miles west and six miles up. It was fine, really, because they had parachutes and oxygen for the upper atmosphere skydive.” Jay peered at them, satisfied.
Frank had wearied of holding his tongue through this charade. “Fine. You did some high-school-level math, but that still doesn’t prove anything. Humans have been trying to invent a time machine since H.G. Wells, but I’ve never met any time travelers.”
“You’ve met us,” Sera retorted.
Bick checked himself. On a quiet September night in 2013, he was sitting in Dee’s WB apartment with a bunch of weirdos who purported to have built a time machine. He was in a surrealistic fantasyland.
“I have an idea.” Iggy brightened. “We’ll prove it. I need an object.”
Sera’s brows lifted. “Hey, Frank. Lend me your watch.”
He unsnapped the clasp and flung it toward her. “I expect to get this back after your magic tricks.”
“Don’t worry, you will.” She grinned.
Iggy reached into her backpack and pulled out an eight-inch-diameter sphere coated in aluminum. She placed the watch inside, showing off the brass interior. Grabbing the barbell control unit, she began tapping buttons.
Frank viewed the device with concern. “What’s in there?”
“Anti-Matter.” Sera enjoyed his horrified expression. “Don’t be a wuss. It’s a contained, microscopic amount.”
“Are you out of your mind?” Frank fought a hysterical urge to back away. “AM is the most dangerous substance known to humankind. Even if one particle touched regular matter, the explosion would reduce WB, rather, the entire state of Pennsylvania, to a distant memory.”
Bick felt alarmed. Was that true?
Jay huddled over his calculator. “I’d say one two-thousandths of a second to the future ought to do it.”
Sera and Jay sprang up and went to a west window. Dee and Bick congregated around them, baffled.
As Iggy hit more buttons, Frank followed. “Now hold on a doggone minute.”
Outside the window, an object fell from a considerable height and crashed to the street, smashing into a thousand shards.
“My watch! You bastards!” Frank ran out to the road to retrieve his shattered timepiece.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 19, 2013
8:50 PM – EDT
While Frank fretted over his disintegrated watch, Dee’s eyes sparkled. “Wow, this time machine is fantastic. When do we leave for 1963?”
A dumbfounded silence greeted her.
“No, Dee.” Bick’s apprehension mounted. “You’re not going anywhere. Especially with these mental patients.”
“Forget it. You’re not coming. Don’t even think about it.” Sera knew this girl would be a nuisance.
“But I thought you needed me. Isn’t that why you’re here? I’m the authority on Jackie K., after all.” Dee hunched her shoulders toward Jay. “I don’t understand.”
“Yes, that’s why we came to you. For your wealth of knowledge. We need details on the KGB and their movements so we can prevent the assassination.” Jay motioned for her to sit down, but she declined. “But we didn’t intend for you to come. It might be dangerous.”
Bick strode forward. “Darn right it’s too dangerous. This contraption runs on Anti-Matter, which according to Frank is the most powerful explosive ever created. I cannot permit you to be part of this lunacy.”
“Sera and Iggy have already time traveled, and they’re okay.”
“Well, they say they have,” muttered Frank.
“Of course we have!” Iggy instantly regretted being drawn in by his bait. “That’s not the point. We just need Ms. Doherty, I mean Dee, to give us the facts. We’ll handle it from there.”
“But facts don’t complete the whole picture. I can’t simply type up a memo for you and expect you to be ready. You don’t have a clue about sixties clothing or customs. For instance, your tie, Frank.” Dee touched his brown-and-beige-striped accessory. “They didn’t have polyester ties back then.”
He grabbed it indignantly. “It’s one hundred percent silk!”
“It’s also too wide. Early sixties ties were narrow. And Sera, those hiking boots have got to go. No respectable woman would be caught dead in public wearing men’s work boots.” Dee ignored Sera’s murderous glare. “Women wore dresses and pumps. Men wore suits and hats. Gentlemen opened doors for ladies. The term housewife was not a demeaning slur. You have to blend in. You can’t hop out of a 2013 time machine and expect to assimilate in 1963.”
Iggy looked at Sera in surprise. “We hadn’t considered that angle.”
“Well, it’s imperative that you do. And I’m the person to teach you.”
“Fine, teach us.” Jay nodded emphatically. “But do it safely here in 2013.”
“I refuse. Not unless you take me with you.” Dee folded her arms in an obviously childish stance, but she remained steadfast. This was too important.
Jay slowly exhaled. “Anti-Matter isn’t the only jeopardy. We are attempting to stop the KGB. The K. G. B.,” he enunciated. “Trained killers. Professional killers. With no regard for American lives, I might add.”
“I don’t care!” Dee stamped her foot, again feeling juvenile. “I want you to succeed, and you need my help. Both before and during the trip.” She took a deep breath and tried to calm down. Dee’s intuition told her that Iggy held a power position. She turned to the senior scientist and steadied her voice. “We can each benefit. You want my expertise, and I want your time machine. It’s a once-in-a-millennium chance to go back to 1963 and see Jack and Jackie Kennedy. In exchange, I promise only to offer advice and not to interfere with your mission.”
Iggy studied her sincere countenance and marveled at the conviction of someone so young. “Okay. You’ve made your case. You can tag along.” She barreled ahead over Sera’s protestations. “Let’s be clear. Your role is 1963 historian and cultural expert. You will not accompany us on any encounters with the KGB. And remember, we are neither tourists nor anthropologists. This is a critical enterprise. The fate of the world is at stake.”
“I understand.” Dee glowed with satisfaction.
Bick had been gazing out the window as if searching for something. He turned and faced the others. “If Dee is going, then so am I.” He spoke with certitude.
Sera sighed. Not another one.
“No, Bick!” Dee couldn’t bear to think of him risking his life for chivalry. “You said yourself it’s too dangerous.”
“That’s exactly why I need to watch your back. I’m serious, Dee. Don’t be so bullheaded.”
Frank chuckled at these folks begging to go when he’d rather be sheltered at home with a good book. “I see why we need the sixties buff. But why do we need Mr. Clean here?”
“Are you kidding me?” Bick fumed. “Do you understand what the KGB are capable of? I’ve dealt with them. They are singularly focused assassination robots.”
Jay held up his palm in a halt gesture. “Let’s not lose our perspective. You see, we have fifty years of history on them. We’ll know where they’re going to be and what they’re going to do. We can outfox them.”
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“So what’s your plan if one of them aims a weapon at you? Bore them to death with your protracted dissertation on Anti-Time?”
Jay lifted his chin. “What would you do?”
“I am a veteran of military combat. I was a fighter pilot in the Navy and a Secret Service Agent. I’ve led plenty of covert operations. Trust me, I’d react on instinct. Just look at how easily I captured all of you.”
“You had a key!”
“No one was standing guard? Surveilling the street? You’re fugitives, but amateurs when it comes to defending yourselves. The truth, whether you accept it or not, is you need me. And Dee isn’t going without me.”
Iggy threw up her hands in defeat. “Fine. Come along.”
9:05 PM – EDT
At the Lehigh campus, Captain Sutherland acted on an inspired idea. Although he lacked the skills to locate the unauthorized terminal that had monitored the escapees, he figured out a way to take advantage of people who could. He plundered the basement computer lab beneath Grace Hall and rounded up a colony of geeks who rarely saw daylight and might be in peril of developing rickets. He predicted he would have to beat them into submission with threats of Selective Service, but to his astonishment they were thrilled to have the opportunity to legally hack the Governet. All he had to promise were unlimited salty snacks and sugary beverages.
Destination Dealey: Countdown to the Kennedy Conspiracy Page 7