The Gatespace Trilogy, Omnibus Edition

by Alan Seeger

Turning on CNN, they came to the realization that the attack had not been limited to the Maine coast or even New England, but affected more than half the globe. Looking at what local area news was available, both men came to the terrible realization that Portland as they knew it was essentially gone, and with it most likely their wives, their children, their parents… their entire families.

  “Jesus wept,” said McClure.

  CHAPTER 43

  1960

  Time Team Delta had reached a strategic point in Los Angeles. They thanked Jake Benson and disembarked from the semi-truck, having changed into contemporary clothing that they had stopped and purchased along the way.

  Terry had bought a newspaper from a boy who was hawking them on the street corner: The Los Angeles Mirror. The headline: RUSS SATELLITE LANDS ANIMAL CARGO SAFELY. Terry peered at the story, which went on to explain that this was in regards to the Soviet Union’s Korabl-Sputnik 2 mission which had carried two dogs, Belka and Strelka ("Whitey" and "Arrow"), forty mice, two rats and a number of different plants into orbit. His eyes flicked up to the date on the newspaper: August 20, 1960.

  CHAPTER 44

  2802

  “Is it done?”

  The words came from an uncharacteristically jovial man in a deep violet business suit, one of five similarly dressed men seated on a dais at one end of a long, richly appointed room. The room was near the center of the Capitol Complex on the outskirts of the city of Rome, New York. Few people in the present society were in any way cheerful; this man, in contrast, seemed as if he might have just been given some sort of amazingly good news. His hair and beard were snowy white, but despite his wide, brilliant smile, his blue eyes were shrewd. He looked like Santa Claus with a sinister agenda.

  “Yes, Minister. The first wave of attacks has commenced.” The subordinate who responded to the question was slight, bald and had a wispy moustache. He looked like the sort of fellow who might drop dead if one of the Five so much as said boo to him.

  The Five made up the World Guidance Council as the High Representatives of the Five Continents — Eurasia, Afrique, Oztralia, Northam and Southam.

  As the Representative of the largest continent, Eurasia, the man with the white hair and beard was considered the most senior of the Five. His name was Charles Hyde-Stephens and he had grown up in New London, the city that had been rebuilt in the aftermath of the Third World War, which had occurred in 2020 and which, paradoxically, he and his four associates were now in the process of instigating.

  For 3.8 billion people, it was the end of the world, and yet it was occurring seven hundred and eighty-two years in the past.

  The Council of Five was the highest authority on New Earth, the society that emerged after what was known in the history databases as The Transition, but commonly referred to as The Yesterday War.

  In 2020, a massive nuclear attack had taken place that had decimated all the major cities of the western world. Following the war, which lasted only a single day, the governments of the world’s nations seemed to sit back in horror, unsure of what had just happened or how it had occurred.

  Unbeknownst to any of the marionettes that were part of what had happened in 2020, the puppet masters who were pulling the strings were these five men sitting in conference in what was properly considered a part of Bosnywash, Northam, in the year 2802.

  As events began to unfold, the Five looked back and forth at each other and nodded in satisfaction… all except one.

  Hyde-Stephens sat in the center of the group of five seats, at a long conference table which faced a video wall displaying a summary of virtually every imaginable statistic regarding Planet Earth.

  On his left were Peter Mjembe of Afrique and Benjamin Wilson of Northam; on his right, Miguel Santoros of Southam and Franklin Carson of Oztralia.

  As they gazed at the screens, waiting for the events they had set in motion to begin to transform their world, Carson cleared his throat nervously.

  Hyde-Stevens turned toward him. “You have something to say, Frank?” he said, raising one eyebrow.

  Carson hesitated. He knew that, despite his exalted position in the government of his continent, Hyde-Stephens had as much power over him as he had over the most menial worker in the smallest town in Oztralia.

  “I…”

  “What is it? Speak up, if you have anything worthwhile to say.”

  “Are you certain that we’re doing the right thing?” Carson blurted out.

  “Doing the right thing?” Hyde-Stephens barked back at him. “The right thing? Tell me, Mister Carson… do you enjoy the lifestyle you live? Living in the big house, eating the fine food, having the best of everything?”

  “Well…” Carson said, “Yes. Of course I do.”

  “Well, then, you sanctimonious little piece of shit,” Hyde-Stephens hissed at him, “You had better understand that while you may be the senior government official of your fucking little island continent, the only reason you are in that position is by my pleasure and you stand or fall by my whim. Do you understand?”

  “Yes…” Carson said hesitantly. “Yes, I understand.”

  “Very well, then,” said Hyde-Stephens. What we have set in motion will be as if it always was, and will make our present what it is. Who knows what would have become of us had we not manipulated yesterday? You should be glad that we have the ability to remake ourselves in our own image, gentlemen. We are gods. Gods.”

  CHAPTER 45

  1960

  “It’s ridiculous that we have to fly all the way from Los Angeles to Shanghai to deal with this,” said Sarah. The five members of Time Team Delta were standing in line at the Pan Am ticket counter. They were dressed in the typical garments of air passengers of the day — suits and ties for the men, with overcoats and Fedoras; dresses and sensible cloth coats for the two women. They planned to purchase airfare on a trans-Pacific flight from L.A. to San Francisco, then across the ocean to Honolulu and finally to Shanghai, China. “We couldn’t find anyplace closer to Gate to?”

  “Well,” said Nigel in a whisper, “there were no Gates available that would deliver us any closer to a Chinese location at the appropriate point in history. So sorry for the inconvenience,” he grinned.

  A blonde woman in a Pan Am uniform greeted them from behind the counter. Terry stepped up, requested the appropriate tickets and counted out the money.

  The five time travelers waited patiently for their flight to be called and filed onto the Lockheed Constellation.

  Three stops and some thirty-one hours later, they disembarked, setting foot for the first time on Chinese soil.

  After checking into a hotel that catered to Westerners, the five went out for a walk, ostensibly sightseeing. In reality, they were aware that even at this stage, thirty-four months prior to the establishment of the People’s Republic of China, there was a distinct possibility that the government might perform surveillance on visiting Westerners; it would be rather difficult to explain things if they were overheard discussing their having traveled back from the future, or their plans for a surgically precise intervention into events that would affect that future.

  They stood in a beautifully manicured park, looking out over the banks of a shining lake, talking softly among themselves.

  “So what’s the plan?” asked Geoff.

  “There is a young man by the name of Xue Ang-Mu,” Terry said. “If left to the course of events as they played out in our original timeline, he will be encouraged to become a researcher in Chairman Mao’s nuclear weapons program, which will result in the first Chinese nuclear detonation in 1964, and an increasingly escalated nuclear program which, as we have seen, will result in a space-based nuclear attack on the west in 2020.”

  “So what are we going to do?” asked Janelle.

  Over the course of the next thirty minutes, he explained.

  CHAPTER 46

  1960/2020

  Nigel accessed the ever-changing Time Team Future History database in his Gate device, which, no matte
r how many years might separate the Time Team from its home time, could still access the computer records at Headquarters. It was a neat trick that Nigel couldn’t explain, apart from it having something to do with quantum physics, as the team that created the technology was dead, their bones having crumbled to dust five hundred years before… or at this point, since they were in 1960, they would crumble to dust some 300 years from now. It was enough to make one’s head spin, even for Nigel. Every time the enormous gulf of years between Terry and Sarah’s home time — 2016 —and the time they now called their home — 2802 — was mentioned, Terry thought he felt his bones crumble to dust, just a little. After the attacks of 2020, the world population was reduced from roughly eight billion people to an estimated 4.2 billion. The Western powers, principally the United States, the UK and France, recouped what assets they could and threatened an all-out retaliatory nuclear strike on the Asian nations, but the representatives of the PAA emphatically denied any knowledge of who had authorized the strike and requested time to do an internal investigation. After ten days had passed, they marched out a short, balding, elderly man with glasses, announcing his name as Xue Ang-Mu, with an announcement being made that he had been investigated and tried for crimes against humanity. A further announcement was made that Xue and a group of his subordinates were responsible for the October 29 attacks. He was executed by firing squad live on the air, in high definition, transmitted by the very satellites that had borne the warheads that had caused all this destruction, before the horrified eyes of the entire world. Most people rationalized away Xue’s death by choosing to believe that he was responsible for the deaths of nearly four billion people, and therefore deserved his fate.

  Despite the fact that the war lasted but a single day, it took quite some time for the dust to settle, literally and figuratively. The American presidential election was less than a week away when the attack occurred. The remnant of the government rallied to make sure that the election was still held, even though both of the major party candidates, Ferguson and Winter, were dead. Substitute candidates were hurriedly added to the ballot, and in a controversial vote, the Libertarian Party candidate, Leroy Atwater, won the election with 87 percent of the popular vote. The limited number of pundits who had survived the attack seemed to take pleasure in pointing out that less than three million Americans voted in the election, the fewest since 1868. Of course, this was partly because of the deaths of a large part of the populace and partly because of the chaos generated by the attacks.

  In light of the controversy, on November 8, the three surviving Supreme Court justices ruled that the Electoral College would have the final word on the outcome of the election. That body met in an emergency session on November 10, and, after a protracted debate, ruled that Atwater had been properly and fairly elected.

  Between November 11 and 17, there were steadily increasing numbers of protests accompanied by violence across the U.S., and on November 18, Atwater, who had been sworn into office early because of the deaths of everyone else who had previously been in the line of presidential succession, declared martial law across United States territory.

  Widespread rioting broke out the same day, and President Atwater immediately declared a unilateral withdrawal of all American troops from the Middle East so that they could return home to maintain the peace.

  Instead, the history books recorded November 25, 2020 as the beginning of the second American Civil War as roughly half of the troops that were brought home stepped off the plane and declared their refusal to enforce the state of martial law.

  Unlike its predecessor, CW2, as it later was designated, lasted only ten days, but ended up, in many ways, being even more devastating than the War Between the States of 1860-64.

  Between November 26 and December 6, pitched street battles occurred in major cities all over the country.

  On December 7, the 79th anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor by the Japanese, the world was shocked as nuclear weapons were detonated in the already ravaged cities of New York and Washington. President Atwater was one of the many unfortunate government employees in the vicinity of the Presidential Manor, a Georgetown mansion which had been selected to temporarily replace the heavily damaged White House, who were killed when a 10-kiloton weapon was detonated a short distance away.

  The 10-kiloton nuke was not a large weapon, as nuclear devices go — tiny, really, compared to the massive ICBM warheads that the world was used to hearing about, but deadly enough.

  The blast was only about two-thirds the size of the one that destroyed Hiroshima, Japan in August of 1945. It was detonated at ground level, having been delivered to the center of the city in the bed of a pickup truck, concealed under a canvas tonneau cover and parked as closely to the substitute White House as possible.

  The blast resulted in about 15,000 immediate deaths, including that of President Atwater, and another 15,000 casualties from the blast, thermal flash and initial radiation release.

  Another quarter of a million people found themselves at risk of lethal doses of radiation from the fallout drifting downwind towards them after the blast.

  A few savvy citizens who were familiar with Civil Defense basics managed to save themselves by practicing “duck and cover” as it was taught in the frightening days of the 1960s, when the Soviets were always just about to turn the Cold War hot by attacking the U.S. for one reason or another. Instead of impulsively rushing to the nearest window to see what that bright flash was that just occurred, just in time to meet the blast wave as it shattered that window and cut them to pieces, they had been taught to get under their desks or other heavy pieces of furniture, protecting themselves from glass and other flying debris. The fact that Washington was still putting itself back together after October 29 kept the possibility of another attack fresh in their minds, and for hundreds, it paid off.

  Even for those who were outdoors, in locations that offered no shelter, simply lying flat on the ground greatly reduced the chance of their being struck by flying debris from the shock wave.

  The radioactive fallout left by the bomb would lose 90 percent of its lethal intensity in the first seven hours after the attack, and 99 percent within 48 hours.

  Soon news outlets began receiving messages from a group claiming responsibility for the attacks, calling itself the April 19th Coalition, signed by someone calling himself Timothy Murrah. The message identified the Coalition as a white supremacist group headquartered in Little Dixie.

  Killed along with President Atwater were his vice president, Richard “Forest” Greene; the Speaker of the House, James Bolinger; the President pro tem of the Senate, Peter Lee; and Secretary of State Alexander Dickinson, all of whom were located in one of the many Washington office buildings that had been selected as temporary substitutes for the ravaged Capitol building, House and Senate offices and other government office facilities.

  This meant that the Presidency fell to the Secretary of the Treasury, Leonard Calhoun, the bespectacled bureaucrat who’d sat with President Sanford Williams in that rusty pickup truck in Montana what seemed like so many years ago. He was still in place from the Williams administration, the incoming President not having been in office long enough to select a new Cabinet.

  Timid and hesitant but possessed of a brilliant mind, those in the know said privately that Calhoun might yet be the last best hope for America. He had narrowly escaped death twice in the series of attacks on Washington; on October 29 he was, ironically, in Beijing for an economic summit with the Chinese, and on December 7 he was in Berlin discussing the possibility of the war-torn United States receiving financial assistance from the European Union.

  Two days following the attacks, he gave a speech over the newly nationalized Federal News Network:

  “December 7, 2020 – another date which will live in infamy. Today the United States of America was attacked by forces whose identity is as of yet unknown, but who we will soon identify. Preliminary sources tell me that a group known as Saddam’s Revenge
may be behind these cowardly acts of terrorism. For decades, these extreme radicals have sacrificed their own lives as what they think of as holy martyrs in order to further their demonic cause and extend their reach. The events of the last six weeks on Washington cost the lives of so many; not one but two presidents, Sanford Williams and Leroy Atwater, who lost their lives while defending the freedom that we all hold so dear, along with thousands of others.

  “Today I am proud to announce that, as unworthy as I am to fill their shoes, I took the oath of office on the evening of December 7 while still in Berlin. I will strive to live up to the legacy my predecessors have left behind. Good night and God bless you all, and God bless the United States of America.”

  Calhoun was sitting behind the Resolute Desk, which had been a gift from Queen Victoria of England to President Rutherford B. Hayes in 1880. It had been salvaged from the ruins of the White House after the October 29 attacks. In front of the desk was an automated video camera on a stand that had been used in lieu of a live cameraman since 2016. Through the use of this system, the president could address the nation at a moment’s notice, any time, day or night, without the need to call in a broadcast crew. Since the nationalization of the FNN following the October 29 attacks, he could also simulcast on every channel on all American cable, satellite and broadcast television systems by the push of a single button.

  Calhoun waited for the red broadcast light to go dim, then looked down at the desk, which was scarred and burned from the damage it had incurred during both attacks on Washington. He’d only been in office two days, but already he felt as scarred as the old wood. He ran his hand over its rough surface.

  He turned to his bodyguard. The Secret Service agent stared blankly at him. “I’m all done.”

  “Yes, sir… you are done.” The man stood looking at him. Calhoun cast him a look of annoyance. This particular Secret Service agent was unfamiliar to him; he wasn’t someone Calhoun remembered having met in all his years of working with President Williams. And why was he staring at him like that?