by Greg Ahlgren
“Without the documents, he’ll never believe us,” Paul said.
“You’re the scientist,” Amanda said as she rose from the pew. “You explain the science. I’ll cover the history.”
Paul followed her to the front of the chapel. Seeing two adults approaching, the last student moved past them toward the doors. Salisbury, who Paul estimated to be about his own age, looked up. Amanda extended her hand.
“Mr. Salisbury?”
The man’s glance moved from her to deVere, and then to the rear doors. He slowly extended his own hand.
“Yes,” he answered cautiously. “Can I help you?”
“My name is Amanda Hutch. Dr. Amanda Hutch. And this is Dr. Paul deVere. Is there someplace we could speak privately?” she asked, searching the now empty chapel. Salisbury followed her gaze before shrugging.
“This is probably as good a place as any,” he said. “Is this about my speech? I noticed you sitting in the back, and you don’t look like students.”
“Oh, no, sorry,” Paul stammered. “It’s not about your speech. Although it was very interesting,” he added quickly.
“Are you physicians?” Salisbury remained polite but Paul detected concern in his voice.
“No,” Amanda answered. “We are not physicians. Actually, we are professors. We teach, sort of, at MIT.”
Salisbury raised his eyebrows. “What does ‘sort of’ mean?”
Paul cleared his throat. “Mr. Salisbury. The information we have to share with you may seem odd. We just ask that you hear us out before jumping to any conclusions.”
Salisbury’s gaze again moved from one to the other. “So, this is not about Birmingham?”
“Birmingham?” Paul asked.
Amanda turned to Paul, clearly exasperated. “You know, the topic of his speech.”
She turned back to the lecturer. “Mr. Salisbury, your articles on the church bombings were excellent. No, not about Birmingham. Paul, why don’t you explain the science.”
DeVere took a deep breath. Salisbury had visibly relaxed when Amanda had said that they were not there about Birmingham.
“Dr. Stephen Hawking’s book, A Brief History Of Time, discussed the concepts of time and space. Dr. Hawking wrote and lectured extensively on the subject, and developed a theory of wormholes. However, he believed that time travel was not possible.”
“Hawking? Does he teach with you, sort of, at MIT?”
“At Cambridge University in England. Astrophysics.”
“Ah,” Salisbury nodded.
“Same field as myself at MIT. We’re both Astrophysicists.”
“Well,” Salisbury interrupted. “I’m not the science man at the Times. If you’re looking to get a science article written-”
“No,” deVere interrupted. Amanda frowned at the force of deVere’s interjection.
“No, I’m not,” deVere continued. “Please hear us out. Another theorist, Kip Sone, believed that wormholes could be used to connect various points in time and space, in other words, to act as time machines.”
“Like H.G. Wells?” Salisbury asked.
“Yes. Like Wells. Anyway, a third theorist, Dr. Bennett David, took Sone a final step. Hawking felt that if one attempted to travel through a wormhole the resultant disruption in the space-time continuum would make the travel impossible. In his view this explained why we can only remember the past but not the future.”
“Or sometimes neither,” Salisbury joked.
DeVere smiled and continued. “Dr. David theorized that travel through wormholes was possible if matter were sufficiently accelerated. But to keep the balance in the universe that he theorized was necessary, there had to be contrapositive wormholes, in order to get back.”
Salisbury nodded slowly. “Roundtrip ticket.”
“Exactly!” deVere thundered. “And everything that traveled back to the earlier time can return without being accelerated again.”
Harrison Salisbury leaned back against the table, pursed his lips, and nodded.
“This is interesting. I like this. It’s certainly different than Birmingham. This David fellow, can I talk with him?”
DeVere shook his head. “In his later years he kind of, how should I say this, went off the deep end. He became a full time surfer.”
“Oh? That’s too bad. He moved to California?”
“No, he spent his days on the Gorenect.”
“The what?” Salisbury asked, his brow furrowed.
It was Amanda’s turn to enter the conversation.
“The Gorenect,” she added quickly. “It’s a system linking computers so that they can all talk together.”
She looked to Paul for help.
“It was named after its inventor,” Paul offered.
“I see,” Salisbury said. “I’m not familiar with computers. Well, what about this Hawking fellow. You said he wrote a book. When was it published?”
“Nineteen eighty-nine,” Amanda answered without flinching.
DeVere watched as the expression on Salisbury’s face stiffened. He looked at the pair and then his gaze drifted to the closed chapel doors behind them. Paul was aware of how alone the three of them were, and realized that Salisbury felt it too. His heart sank.
“I see,” Salisbury said. He cleared his throat. “This has been very interesting, but I’m not your writer.”
He stood up off the table and reached to the podium for his notes. “However, there are several writers in the New York area-“
“Wait!” Amanda’s sharp command startled even Paul. Salisbury halted, his hands poised to close his briefcase.
“Listen,” she continued. “We didn’t ride up from the Waldorf in New York City just to track you down to tell you time travel was possible. We come from Cambridge, Massachusetts in 2026. Cambridge, Massachusetts, A.S.S.R., not Cambridge, Massachusetts, U.S.A. From a world in which the Soviet Union has won what you call the Cold War. All that’s left of the U.S.A. are three semi-autonomous trade zones. The rest of the old United States is all Red. With a capital ‘R.’ Straight up Communist, blindly following orders from Yeltsengrad, which used to be Minneapolis. I risked my life to come back here and you WILL at least hear us out!”
Salisbury stood frozen, his hands clutching his case. His eyes, however, darted from one to the other.
“Minneapolis?” Salisbury asked. “My home town. Are you guys John Birchers?”
“What?” Paul asked. He looked to Amanda.
“John Birch Society,” Amanda answered impatiently. “John Birch was an American missionary in China who was killed by Communist forces. He was considered the first American casualty of the Communist expansion, or at least of the Chinese Communist takeover. A group of right wingers in the United States formed an organization called the John Birch Society that was popular in the 1960s.”
She turned back to Harrison Salisbury. “No, we are not John Birchers.”
“She’s a history professor,” deVere added lamely.
For the second time that evening Harrison Salisbury hesitated, and then he leaned back on the desk behind the podium.
“At MIT, right?” Salisbury asked. “So, tell me the rest of your story. Who’s our next president?”
Amanda nodded. “Bobby Kennedy.”
Salisbury snorted. “Not very inventive. Everyone knows he has aspirations.”
Amanda ignored him. “There are two things going on right now. In October 1962, last fall, President Kennedy declined to invade Cuba during your so-called Cuban Missile Crisis. That was against the advice of just about everyone in his circle. Curtis LeMay, Senator Fulbright, Senator Richard Russell, everyone.”
“And how do you know what the advice of these people was last year?”
“Kennedy secretly tape records all oval office conversations. They’ll become public eventually.”
“I see,” Salisbury said. “So obviously you listened to them in the future. At MIT.”
“Cuba is even now working to undermine Central America,”
Amanda continued, ignoring Salisbury’s soft sarcasm. “Eventually, Southern and Central America will come under Cuban influence. Right up through Mexico. It will become another Soviet Union, right on our southern border. And Communism will expand over all of Southeast Asia and down the Malay Peninsula by the late 1960s.”
“During Bobby Kennedy’s administration?” Salisbury asked slyly, still eying the rear doors.
“Yes,” Amanda answered. “It gets worse. The Soviet Union makes a grab in the Balkans and Europe. But long before all that we’ll be threatened right here with weapons of mass destruction along the Mississippi Valley.”
“Interesting. Are you saying it’s too late?” Salisbury asked.
DeVere shrugged. “We don’t know. Our plan was to come back to the summer of 1962, approach you, and tell you our story. We had newspaper articles to prove we are real time travelers. We wanted the New York Times and the Washington Post to push for a Cuban invasion last October. The United States would have won that war.”
“Yeah! But at what cost?” Salisbury asked. “It wouldn’t have stopped there. Russia would have grabbed Berlin in a heartbeat and it might have been atom bombs on the Hudson after that.”
“Do you want to know the cost of Soviet occupation of most of the United States by 2026?” deVere asked quietly.
“How could the Soviets ever take over America?” Salisbury scoffed. “That whole Soviet philosophy would never be accepted here.”
“Philosophy?” Hutch asked incredulously. “Political philosophy? Political philosophy had nothing to do with it. It was all about power. The Soviets re-invented themselves as neo-Soviets. They pandered to fringe political and religious groups unrelated to traditional Soviet values. Not that the neo-Soviets really gave a shit about these people. But they convinced enough ordinary Americans that they cared about their issues. Finally, they had a majority that supported them. But it had nothing to do with politics. Once they got into power they were able to make money, lots of money, in this country. And that’s all they really cared about.”
“Interesting. So why didn’t you come back last year?” Salisbury asked.
“The CA,” deVere answered. “The American version of the KGB. They were onto us and we had to leave earlier than we planned. This was the closest wormhole we could find but it landed us back in 1963, and not 1962.”
DeVere closed his eyes as he pictured the scene in the lab, the Russian with a gun and the fire alarm blaring. Why had the fire alarm gone off? Ginter had said there was no fire.
“Nice story,” Salisbury said. “So, isn’t it too late now? Why would Kennedy invade Cuba now? Assuming your story is, eh…true.”
“It’s got to be stopped some place,” Amanda said. “With the Communists moving up through Central America and Mexico and down through the Malay Peninsula, the United States will be helpless to stop it all. After that, it’s all academic. Just like falling dominoes.”
“Dulles,” Salisbury answered. “His containment theory.”
Amanda nodded. “Dulles. But worse than he ever thought. The Soviet Union and China will fight two huge wars. Millions die. The United States will get sucked in on the side of China, a bad choice, and when China goes down the U.S. will be threatened with weapons of mass destruction, not what you think of as hydrogen bombs but chemical, and what will be called dirty weapons. Some will cause massive casualties. That blackmail, combined with the million man army on our Southern border, missiles in Cuba with chemical warheads, will lead to a series of appeasement treaties.”
“War between Russia and China?” Salisbury thundered. “They are both Communist! But I’m not even the foreign affairs guy any more. If you had a plan to recruit a drum beater last year, why me?”
“You will be,” Amanda answered. “Starting in about 1964 or so you will be the foreign affairs guy at the New York Times.”
“Flattering,” Salisbury said, but Paul detected a flicker in the man’s eyes.
“So tell me, if you’re from the future, who will win the World Series this fall?” Salisbury asked mischievously.
“Dodgers,” Paul answered immediately. “In four.”
“Sweep the Yanks?” Salisbury scoffed. “There is no way.”
“Way. Sandy Koufax will be Series’ MVP. Cards in ‘64, Dodgers again in ‘65 over the Twins in seven, Orioles in ’66 over the Dodgers in four. Sweep. Write it all down.”
“He’s a baseball fan,” Amanda offered helpfully.
“So I see,” Salisbury said dryly.
“And my Mets,” Salisbury continued suddenly. “When will they ever win more than they lose?”
“Not until 1969 when they’ll win the World Series. They will go from next to last place in 1968 to winning the World Series in 1969.”
Salisbury laughed out loud. “World Series? This decade?” He chuckled again. “There’ll be a man on the moon first.
“Look, you two seem nice enough,” Salisbury continued. “Your story is entertaining. When you walked up here I was afraid it was about Birmingham and you were southern reactionaries. The Klan or something.
“But, I don’t believe one word of your story,” Salisbury continued. “As you probably know.
“Say, wait a minute,” Salisbury said, his face brightening. “Now I get it. Did Joe Spinelli put you two guys up to this? He did, didn’t he? That rascal.” Salisbury began laughing again.
Paul straightened up. “Amanda, it’s time to go.”
Hutch wasn’t ready to give up. She leaned forward and jabbed her finger on the table.
“What we said is true. This country is in danger.”
Salisbury stood up off the table. “Look, if the Mets win the ‘69 Series, I’ll believe you. Come back then.”
“It’ll be too late then,” deVere said flatly. “Cuba is already plotting Central American adventures. By the end of this year, the United States will have decided to pull out of Southeast Asia. If you won’t listen to us, at least keep your eyes and mind open.”
Salisbury nodded, picked up his briefcase, and took a step toward the front of the chapel. He turned back briefly.
“I will do that . . . Dr. deVere. Thank you both for coming.”
“You don’t have to run out, Mr. Salisbury,” Paul said. “We’re leaving.”
With a nod to Amanda he turned and strode out the rear doors to the Syracuse University quad, Amanda right behind him. As the wooden doors swung shut behind them deVere heard Salisbury laughing softly and muttering, “The Mets in ‘69.”
“I told you,” Amanda hissed as they walked down the steps, “that he’d never believe us.”
“You told me?” he asked incredulously. He stopped and looked at her.
“I now realize,” deVere sighed, turning and continuing his descent, “that it wouldn’t have mattered who I married.”
Chapter 21