by Dan Garmen
I was also a little suspicious about the song Campbell had been singing on the fantail, Uncle Kracker's “Follow Me,” a song from both a long time ago for him, since he traveled here from 2048, but also a long way from here, 1991. Before we went our separate ways, after planning to meet again on the fantail in two days (officers and enlisted personnel don't tend to mix unofficially in the Navy, so we'd have to be careful not to be seen talking too often), I asked him about the song. He said he collected vintage music and had owned that album on “optical,” as he called a CD, which are apparently a dead format in 2048, mostly collected by enthusiasts by then, like vinyl in 2007.
I remained a little uneasy about the coincidences involved.
Jefferson Campbell had fallen down the stairs of his daughter's house in Chicago, hit his head, and woke up in his bunk at the Great Lakes Recruit Training Command, in Basic Training. Like me, he played along while trying to figure out what the hell had happened, and eventually figured out he was going to be here awhile. In our talk on the fantail, he didn't ask about what ends the experience, but I have a sneaking suspicion he knows. For him, it would mean returning to 2048, a 77 year old widower living with his daughter, a grandmother herself. I, on the other hand, would return to the middle part of my life, looking forward to several more decades of life. Ours were very different situations.
What thrilled me, however, was that Jefferson Campbell's history is my future. The decades he lived between 2007 and 2048 are unknown to me. Much like I'd flippantly told Thelma on the evening she revealed to me she too had traveled in time, to “buy stock in Apple and real estate in Phoenix and Las Vegas,” Campbell had information that could be important to me and my family. Or families, because for the most part, these two timelines (or three timelines, when you include Jefferson's, since I don't believe he is from my other one) are virtually identical in how they play out, at least that was my assumption.
I swung my legs around, sitting up on the bunk, got up and walked to the small desk Wyndom and I shared. I opened the small personal compartment above the desk, took out a notebook and pen and started a letter to Amanda.
There was nothing special about the letter I wrote to my wife, which contained the usual “I miss you and the boys,” “I love you and can't wait to see you again,” kind of stuff. I wrote a couple pages of non-specific day to day things about life on the boat, and signed it. I also included a section about “one of the guys on the ship who had a background similar to mine,” a hobbyist stock trader, had some tips for us. I told her if she couldn't find some of the stock symbols, to keep looking. They would show up, eventually. I hoped she understood my meaning, and the intel-types who occasionally scanned our mail for security leaks wouldn't.
After finishing the letter to Amanda, I lay back down, and managed to drift off to sleep, wrapped in the muffled, but constant hum of the ship at sea.
TWELVE
Overboard
Two days later, I found myself on Ranger’s fantail again, looking forward to talking again with Seaman First Class Jefferson Campbell, but he didn't show.
I waited half an hour, growing uneasy about the whole thing, wondering if meeting him had been some kind of joke or prank. I couldn't imagine how, since only one person in the Navy had any idea about my situation, Walt Steinberg, not in any way a practical joker. The 'Follow Me' element was unexplainable any other way, since Uncle Kracker wrote the song written in 2000. Ranger's library had a copy of the book Billboard's Greatest Hits, listing thousands of songs, including at least four other songs by the same name, but not the Uncle Kracker tune.
I left the fantail, deciding to come back every day until I ran into Campbell again.
The young sailor had been detained by some extra duty, and he apologized two days later, when I rounded the corner on the fantail, almost running into him as he stood, looking out at Ranger’s wake, smoking a cigarette.
“I thought you planned to give those up, 'Master Chief,’” I said loudly enough for him to hear, but not so loud anyone more than a few feet away would understand.
Jefferson turned around quickly, pulling the cigarette from his mouth quickly, but out of respect for an officer close by, rather than because he was embarrassed being caught smoking. He stood to attention for a brief, respectful moment, then chagrined, looked down at his right hand, holding the offending cancer stick, and said, “Small steps, sir. But, I was thinking about it last night and I realized at 77 years old, I wasn’t dying from lung cancer, heart disease or diabetes.”
“What was killing you?” I asked.
“Multiple Sclerosis,” he answered, shaking his head. “Can you believe it? I smoked all my life but MS was getting me.”
I nodded sympathetically. I'd had an aunt with MS. Not pretty, what the disease can do to you.
“Yea, the slick stairs didn’t make me fall,” he admitted. “My leg gave out and I took a bad tumble.” The cigarette went back into his mouth. “I’m still going to stop this, though. It’s a nasty habit.”
“So, how's the war treating you, Master Chief?” I asked, a small smile on my face at using the rank he'd achieved his first time through this life.
“Same as last time, Commander,” he replied, a slightly bigger smile on his face, or at least what he tried to pretend was a smile. The sailor seemed distracted, but relaxing a bit, he replaced the cigarette in his mouth and turned back toward the water.
“You OK?” I asked, stepping toward the railing and looking out at the ocean behind, at a sky much bluer than the last time we met on Ranger's fantail.
“I’m fine, sir,” he replied, flicking the cigarette through the railing into the sea. “This thing is up and down...I don't need to tell you,” he continued. “One minute I'm filled with the excitement of living all of it again, making different choices, becoming someone else, someone I had been afraid to be the first time, and the next, I’m feeling like I'm looking up at Kilimanjaro, dressed in gym shorts and shower sandals, not sure I can climb so far.”
I nodded in understanding. There was the loyalty you had to those who you left behind in the time stream you came from, but you knew (or at leas strongly suspected) they were fine and you'd be reunited with them. What about those you had left behind here when you chose a path leading away from them? My biggest motivator here had been just that, making a life with Amanda, keeping her safe, unconnected in every way from Steve Collins, and most importantly, alive. Before you suggest I could have easily changed history by keeping her away from the party they had attended on the night of the car crash, then with her premature death averted, gone on about my life reconnecting with Molly, and doing my best to build the family I had before, please understand I tried to work that idea out in any number of ways. The root of the problem that killed Amanda would have remained whether she and Steve went to the party or not. The only way for me to change history was to change history.
But, I don't blame anyone for making the argument. When I made it myself, I kept coming back to two major problems. First, how would I know the only time Steve would drive drunk with Amanda in the car was that night? He was poison, and I had to make sure they disconnected completely and forever. Second, who is to say the me I had become would be someone Molly would be interested in? I was no prize when we met. I was broken, but had promise, and I think the combination of those two things was what interested Molly in me. She helped fixed me, and we built a life together, in addition to creating the most wonderful child in the world. I'm not sure if I went to Croce's to hear whatever band performed on the night in the late 80s when Molly and I met, in or out of uniform, but everything about me screaming “Navy,” I'd get a second glance from her. Which means the campaign needed to initiate and join our lives together in this timeline would have, in all probability, been almost impossible, and would have ended badly.
“You know, Jefferson,” I began, “you can't look at it like a mountain to climb. Follow the path that seems right. Fix the things you regret from the last time you went
through these years, the things you broke, or let stay broke, and take the path which opens in front of you.” It's what I'd done, what Thelma had done and was the best advice I had.
“To put tracing paper over a picture of what you remember of your previous life and try to recreate what you had is impossible,” I continued. “No matter how good a tracer you are, you can't see everything you need to reproduce the life you had. It will never be the original, at best a bad copy. At worst, you'll break the hearts of everyone involved.”
Jefferson nodded at this. He'd been back long enough to understand the wisdom in this, and I could tell my words helped him. After another minute staring at the sea behind the ship, he relaxed a little bit, pulled another cigarette from his pocket and lit it, drawing the smoke in deeply and exhaling contentedly. His body language had changed. He had made a decision, one he could live with.
“Thanks, Commander. You have no idea how much you have helped.” Cigarette in the side of his mouth, he held out his hand and when I grasped it, he shook it warmly. “Seriously, thank you.”
I smiled. “No worries, Jefferson.”
“OH! Hey, I almost forgot,” he said. “I did some more thinking and came up with a few more stock symbols you need to be aware of. Half of these companies don't exist yet, but keep looking for them.” Jefferson dug a small square of paper with a dozen three or four letter stock ticker letter groups written on it, out of his pocket and handing it to me.
I scanned the paper, but recognized none of the companies.
“I circled the ones to buy at IPO and sell within, say, three months,” he explained, as I noticed the first circled group of letters. “You'll make some good money on those.”
“I can't thank you enough, Jeff, really,” I said. “I want to return the favor. What can I do to help you?” I asked.
“You've already helped more than you know, Commander,” Campbell's responded, a knowing smile on his lips. I felt good about the change that had come over him in the past few minutes.
“You know, you've done the Master Chief route before,” I said, “what about college? Becoming an officer? Shit, you could eventually command a boat like this,” I said, waving my left hand out toward Ranger's distant and unseen bow. By 2007, Ranger had been tied up at a pier in Bremerton, Washington for 14 years, awaiting being converted into a floating museum, something we both knew.
“Wow, that would be something!“ he replied smiling, and inclined his head in respect. “I’ll have to think about it, Commander.”
“You need a recommendation, you've got it. I'll get you a bunch of them,” I said. Pat, a couple other aviators and intel guys. Hell, Commander Coleson would write him a recommendation letter, if I asked him to.
“I gotta get back to my section, Commander,” Jefferson said, looking at his watch. “Thanks again, sir.”
“No problem...Take care, Jeff,” I said as he double-timed around the corner and through the hatch leading to the maze of passage ways that led everywhere in the ship you'd need to go.
I turned back to the fantail railing and put my right foot up on the lowest horizontal bar, taking a deep breath of sea air, looking at the beautiful sky, blue water and off to the left and right, the faint outlines of other ships in the carrier group, ships whose job was to keep Ranger, and by extension me, Pat and Jefferson Campbell, safe and secure and able to engage the enemy. We all have our jobs, our duties, our responsibilities. Sometimes, what we were doing was clear. Other times, not so much. We were and are all pieces in a big jigsaw puzzle that from our perspective, doesn’t look like anything we can make out, but from high enough, is a complete picture.
By the time I found myself standing on the fantail of Ranger, looking out at the ocean, remembering my just-finished conversation with Seaman Jefferson Campbell, I had lived on the earth for 62 years, though I inhabited a 33 year old body. For every day most of my shipmates had lived, I had lived two. In those 62 years, the list of regrets I carried with me was long. You might have thought living these years again would mean the number of regrets per month lived would be a lot less the more I'd lived, but I'm afraid if I did the math, I'd find that wasn’t the case at all.
The next couple of days would show me doing the math wasn’t necessary, because the next couple days would be a bitch.
A complete bitch.
I was annoyed, but Pat’s mood was deeply grim as we climbed down the ladders from the cockpit of Rustler 314. He wanted to fly, but that didn’t seem possible on this day. The mission scrub put the knife in Pat's attitude, but what wiggled it around had been the reason for it. When problems affecting the performance or operation of a Naval Aviator's aircraft present themselves, the airplane's “Plane Captain,” the senior enlisted member of the crew ultimately responsible for the care, maintenance and inspection of the equipment, assigned each problem a rating of “up-gripe” or “down-gripe.” An “up” meant a problem was recognized, but wouldn't hurt the overall combat performance of the aircraft. A “down” however, meant the aircraft was in a condition where its safe operation couldn’t be guaranteed. You don't fly airplanes with “down-gripes.”
The thing is, if you ignore ups long enough, they become downs, which was what had Pat Maney steamed on this particular day. A problem had with the vacuum system powering 314's gyroscopes had developed. The system drove the essential devices that helped the aircrew maintain the airplane's attitude when visual reference wasn't available, and helped the targeting systems do their job, too. We had started seeing a problem with the system about a week ago, when it would fail to maintain the proper pressures right after engine start. After a few minutes of the engines turning, they created enough heat and pressure to seal the fault in the system. Now, the problem had progressed to the point where no stabilization would occur no matter how long the engines ran, whig was a big problem. Without the ability to reliably determine the aircraft's attitude in flight without good visual reference, the “up-gripe” had become a “down-gripe” followed by a severely pissed off pilot. We'd reported an up-gripe three times, and to be honest, as hard as our crews worked, this was a bad, bad thing. I could live without getting shot at today, but Pat...Well, Pat wanted to fly.
Helmet in his left hand Pat Maney, all five feet eight inch “Southie” rounded the airplane's nose and stormed up to 314's Captain, Chief Petty Officer Bradley Walton. All six feet four inches of Virginia farm boy, Walton, an excellent Plane Captain, lived his life for Rustler 314. But, as I said, Pat was pissed, wanted blood, and the buck stopped at Chief Walton. Pat stood about eight inches shorter and at least 75 pounds lighter than the big man. I smiled a little as I watched my pilot stalk up to the Chief, and thought yea, a pretty fair matchup, even though I knew the altercation wouldn't get physical. Walton was WAY too smart to get into a fight with an officer.
“Goddamn it Chief!” Pat's voice boomed over the almost overwhelming noise of the flight deck. “I’ve written four up-grips about my aircraft. What...The...Fuck?” Pat demanded as he reached Walton.
The Chief, puzzled, looked down at his clipboard and said, “I read three up-gripes, Commander, but that's beside the point.” He scanned the clipboard again and said, “And I know we couldn’t replicate the problem, but I’m going to have Specialist Carney's fucking ass for lunch, sir. He was supposed to have replaced the fucking gyro, tested the new one and had the bird ready to fly this hop.” His colorful language was a shock both to Pat and to the deck personnel within earshot, because Walton didn't swear, and he was merciless in chewing out sailors who did so in his, or an officer's presence. “I’m sorry, sir. No excuse for this, and it's the first time he's done something like this, but his last, too. This boy's going to spend the rest of the cruise cleaning latrines below decks, sir, I promise you.”
This took all the ill-wind out of Pat's sails, and at a loss for anything to add to Walton's tirade, reached (way) up and clapped him on the shoulder. “Thanks, Chief. But don't be too tough. Shit happens. Better it failed on deck.”
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br /> With that, Pat turned and headed toward the hatch leading down off the flight deck. Chief Walton looked over at me and winked. I smiled, shaking my head in admiration of how the Chief had handled Pat, though I have to admit I was a little uneasy about how he had done it. As I walked past him, I said, “Specialist 'Carny?'”
He shrugged. “There is no ‘Carny,' Commander Maney just needed someone to sympathize with him. I tried like hell to replicate the problem, but the combination of temperature, altitude and pressure on the deck just wouldn’t make it fail, and Fleet wouldn’t let me replace the equipment without any replication. ‘Carny’ is the name we assigned to Fleet Maintenance.”
I nodded, appreciating the tactic, but Walton was staring across the deck at 314. “I can’t figure out why we couldn’t replicate the problem. Makes no sense.”
I considered the aircraft as well. “All three times, he showed me the gauge reading faulty. The…” I stopped mid sentence as Walton stalked off toward 314. I decided to catch up to Pat, rather than Walton, who clearly had a theory, and headed off deck.
When I rejoined Pat, he had calmed down. As I said, no one would be shooting at us today, and since the backup birds were already assigned to different targets, no one would be going in our place, either. The mission would be scrubbed. Sometimes, waiting for a crew who had stepped in to fly your mission to return was as tense as flying the mission yourself. No one wanted to be the crew whose replacement got shot down.
Pat and I hit the hangar deck, always a noisy place, but amid all the mechanical noise of airplanes being worked on, and pulled here and there, we suddenly became aware of a chorus of alarmed voices, laced with fear and surprise.
We quickly tracked the sounds of alarm to see one of the tugs, a low-profile tractor used to tow aircraft around the hangar and flight decks lurching forward, out of control, an F-14's front end crashing to the deck. The Tomcat's nose gear had collapsed, snapping the hitch on the tractor and releasing all the tug's built up energy, necessary to pull the heavy fighter jet. The driver of the squat, square tractor referred to as a “spotting dolly,” a young, black sailor I didn't recognize, frantically grabbed at something, trying to stop the runaway tug, but having no success. We would learn later, he had been trying to free his pant leg which was wedged in the accelerator pedal of the tractor, both flooring the tug and trapping the sailor in his seat.