Written in Time (56 page)

David glanced over at him and shrugged, a gleam in his brown eyes. “Never can tell, Clarence. Never can tell. William Jennings Bryan has some interesting views, though.”
 

“If your father liked the Democrat, you’d like the Republican, David.”
 

David made no response.
 

The ground Clarence walked was, indeed, familiar in the extreme. While Jack and Ellen had been off finding Teddy Roosevelt, David and he had clambered up along this nonpath on a daily basis, monitoring the progress of the time-transfer base. When the helicopter had arrived, Clarence had seriously considered taking action, despite Jack’s warning not to.
 

It would have been easy to cripple the machine while the main rotor blades were being positioned. But David had declared, “If we tip our hand, we could really fuck things up. We need to wait and see.”
 

Clarence, despite the seventeen-year gap between their ages, took his cousin’s judgment quite seriously in certain categories, interpersonal relations not among them. But when it came to logic—so long as the issue at hand did not involve David directly, either emotionally or financially—David could have passed for that fictional alien species noted for having arched eyebrows, pointed ears and green blood.
 

So they’d waited.
 

The helicopter took off eventually and vanished toward the eastern horizon.
 

The following day, a number of crates had arrived, but no more anachronistic aircraft.
 

Reaching the height of the trail—they would have to move crouched over the rest of the way, which played havoc with Clarence’s back—Clarence found himself wondering what might be arriving from the future today. He didn’t wish to find out.
 

There would, of course, be tanks by the time World War I would begin in 1914. Brave men on horseback would hurtle themselves against the great mechanical contrivances and die for their trouble. But there would not even be tanks such as what Jack saw at the time base until well after World War II.
 

These were not M1 Abrams tanks from the U.S. inventory, but their Soviet counterparts, acquired on the post-Cold War black market, red stars still intact. Had his reference books been handy—they were on microfiche at home—he could have detailed the exact model, armament and capabilities.
 

All Theodore Roosevelt said was, “My God!”
 

“In World War I, which is well over a decade away, Mr. Roosevelt, Imperial German military belt buckles will be inscribed Got mit uns.”
 

“God can’t be with them; He’ll be with us. What are those things?”
 

“Steel-armored motorized battle vehicles with their own built-in artillery and automatic weapons capabilities, capable of rolling over almost unimaginably rugged terrain, impervious to any weapon of the current epoch, short of maybe a couple of cases of dynamite at the right spot.”
 

“Then, by God, we’ll get dynamite!”
 

“Mr. Roosevelt, it won’t be as simple as that.” There were three tanks, more than enough to provide an ample firepower demonstration for Lakewood Industries’ gleeful potential customers. There was another rumble as of thunder and a flash of electrical energy like lightning. The capacious cratelike affair that was the focal point of the time-transfer base shimmered. Its enormous door opened and, under its own power, out rolled an aircraft Jack had never known existed, a Soviet-marked version of the vertical takeoff/landing fighter plane concept, most commonly exemplified by the Harrier jump jet. There were far more sophisticated fighter aircraft to be had in the world of 1996, but nothing like such a machine in an era before the Wright Brothers had made their first powered flight.
 

“That’s a jet engine-powered fighter plane, Mr. Roosevelt, which is capable of a vertical takeoff, then shifting the vectoring of its engines for conventional fixed-wing subsonic flight.”
 

“If I understood only half of what you just said, Jack, we are witnessing something at once anomalous and deadly.”
 

“Unlike the tanks, sir, an ordinary rifle bullet hitting in the right spot could incapacitate it, bring it down, however unlikely such a scenario might prove in actuality. You’re quite right about the deadly part, Mr. Roosevelt.”
 

Jack had to congratulate Lakewood Industries for its foresight. What technology Lakewood planned to “share” with its customers was not state-of-the-art for the objective future, but equipment and ordnance that could be easily acquired if one knew the right people who knew where to look, comparative bargains on the international arms market. Jack found himself wondering how Lakewood Industries would handle getting a decommissioned Soviet nuclear submarine into the subjective past . . . .
 

David watched in silence, hearing the occasional murmurings of his father and his father’s hero, Teddy Roosevelt.
 

Lakewood had irretrievably altered the course of human history. Stupid cowboy-style firearms would be no match for what David witnessed appearing at the time-transfer base. Whoever controlled such technology in the year 1900 would effortlessly master the entire world. No army, however mighty and numerous, could stand against such tanks and even one such aircraft.
 

The sound of thunder, the flashing of light from electrical energy, the shimmering effect, as if the great metal box that existed in two times simultaneously were shifting in and out of reality—and the door opened and another of the fighter planes emerged.
 

David told Clarence, crouched beside him, “This is kind of like they used to say at the end of those dumb 1950s sci-fi movies Dad likes. It’s ‘the beginning of the end.’”
 

“That Bethany Kaminsky bitch is out of her mind.”
 

“She’s brilliant. She’ll rule her past and her present simultaneously and control the direction of the future. She’ll be the only person ever to rule the entire world.”
 

His dad was suddenly beside him, had obviously heard him. “Go slow, son. She hasn’t won yet.”
 

“Are you nuts, Dad? What’s going to stop shit like this in 1900, huh? Going to shoot it with that .45-70 rifle of yours? What’s Roosevelt going to do? Charge up some fucking hill and get it?”
 

“You remember more history than you credit yourself with, Davey. San Juan Hill. Just remember. He and a bunch of wildass guys charged the Spanish guns and won. That’s the same spirit that defeated Lord Cornwallis, burned inside Bowie and Travis to hold the Alamo until Sam Houston’s army was ready to fight at San Jacinto, raised the flag at Iwo Jima. No, it’s not ‘the beginning of the end,’ son—it’s just another tough battle that Americans are going to win, somehow.”
 

“It’s that ‘somehow’ part, Dad, that kind of gets in the way, doesn’t it? You believe in UFOs. What if UFOs landed in fucking Washington right now—what used to be now—in 1996? What the hell do you think all that gung-ho patriotic crap would do against a damn laser weapon or some shit like that?
 

“Nothing! That’s what. This isn’t some damn movie or one of your’s and mom’s adventure novels. You and Teddy Roosevelt and all of us aren’t going to do squat to stop real tanks and real fighter planes. No cool guy in a tuxedo with a Walther PPK is going to pop up and stop them. No guy with a tacky looking leather jacket and bullwhip is gonna be doing it, either. No. Sure, we’ll all fight, and we’ll all be dead or worse. But don’t lie to yourself and tell yourself we’re pulling this one out of the fire, because we’re fucked.
 

“Those red stars on the tanks and the planes mean they’re Russian junk,” David continued, “shit they sold after that guy with the spot on his head—”
 

“Gorbachev,” his father supplied.
 

“Yeah. Him. After he said Communism was shit-canned. You know how much of that stuff is probably right there for Lakewood Industries to buy—and dirt cheap? Just by bringing it here, they’ve changed everything. Everything! Who are those two guys?”
 

“What two guys?” Jack asked, looking around.
 

“No! Those two guys,” David insisted, “who invented flying.”
 

“Wilbur and Orville Wright,” his father whispered.
 

“You can’t really be worrying about Teddy Roosevelt overhearing you! Shit, Dad, the future is here! By the time we hit 1996, if Lakewood Industries doesn’t bring a fucking atomic bomb back here to sell, this technology will be junk. Like the stupid powered kite those Wright Brothers guys flew!”
 

For some reason David didn’t understand, except for the fact that his father was overly emotional at times, his father hugged him and said absolutely nothing at all.
 

They kept their horses to a brisk trot, the gloom that had overtaken their thoughts deeper and darker by far than the nearly starless night surrounding them. Jack cupped his hands around the match he struck on the pommel of his saddle, the flickering yellow flame brilliant against the blackness through which they rode. He lit a cigarette, one of fewer than two hundred filterless Camels he had left; in some ways, they were his last personal connection to the world of the future that he had left behind.
 

Each of Jack’s companions seemed more silent than the other, lost in the implications of what they had witnessed. To Theodore Roosevelt’s credit, the man was determined that—somehow—Lakewood Industries would be stopped, that America would remain undaunted in the face of such dauntingly sophisticated military technology to be sold to the highest bidder.
 

But it was David’s remarks that gave Jack pause. Sometimes the obvious conclusion could be missed. Everyone but David—including Kaminsky and her Lakewood Industries cohorts—had missed it. “It” was the inverse of the paradox that had so confounded Da Vinci with his primitive design for a helicopter, and men before him and since. The engineering to support the idea was present, but the technology with which to bring the idea to fruition was not. Once Lakewood Industries transferred future technology into the hands of engineers from 1900, that technology would be scrutinized, analyzed, duplicated, enhanced.
 

The past would not be static, nor would the future.
 

Kaminsky would wake up some morning a few years into her future, and the fighter airplanes and the tanks and the small arms would all be different, far more advanced than they had been. But she’d almost certainly never become aware of the fact. The past she altered would have changed the future without her knowing it, despite what subjective materials she left in the past to remind her of what had been. One day, all elements would come together so that everything had changed. The demands from her customers in the past would become greater, and she would supply last decade’s technology to the past, and again everything would change. Within a century’s time, military technology would have reached a level that, without her meddling with the past, it would not have attained for hundreds of years or more into the future.
 

And this arms race would never abate.
 

The once-innocuous time loop into which the Naile family had somehow been drawn would have become the engine for humankind’s eventual destruction. And one day, Bethany Kaminsky and the billions of other people in her world would never wake up at all. The explanation was simple and would prove inconsequential in the greater scheme of things. Perhaps Russian atomic submarines, unaffected by the “divine wind” in the Straits of Tsushima, used nuclear missiles to destroy Japan and win the Russo-Japanese War of 1905. Or Imperial Germany nuked Paris in 1914.
 

Certainly, if the world survived into the era of Stalin and Hitler, when dictators pursued a genocidal path unmatched for ruthlessness of scale since the dawn of time itself, everything would inevitably end, because such men would not have hesitated to “push the button,” and Bethany Kaminsky would have given them that button to push. And she would never be born, but the reality her lust for money and power had created would still be reality. More headache-inducing time paradoxes.
 

Such might be the way in which time would lick its wounds, heal itself. Jack Naile was born in 1946, his wife in 1948. If mankind ceased to exist before he and his wife were born, then he and Ellen and the children could not travel back into time, be followed by Clarence. In that way, some might think, the technology of the future would never be transferred into the past, and the “kill your grandfather” paradox would come into play, after a fashion, and humanity might never be destroyed. Yet somewhere in the subjective middle of the paradox, billions of lives would have been extinguished or never come into being. And no one would ever conjecture that so many hopes and dreams and imaginings had vanished forever from reality.
 

And no one would have learned from the experience. Even if someone could, there would be no one left to learn. Hitler or Stalin or some other maniacal butcher would end all life on Earth, if for nothing else than spite and because it could be done.
 

Was that why true time-travel, although theoretically possible into the past, had not yet been mastered? The fluke of their transferring from one epoch to another was merely that. But was the inscrutable nature of venturing into the past some sort of divine or natural safety valve for mankind? Was true time-travel something so fraught with inescapable peril that mankind should never conquer it?
 

Jack reined back on his horse. After a second or so, the others reined in as well. Jack stared at the glowing tip of his cigarette for a beat longer, then crushed the cigarette against his boot heel as he crossed his left leg over the saddle. Smoke exhaling through his nostrils and mouth as he spoke, Jack said, “Gentlemen, we are at a crossroads in human history, as we are all well aware. What we are able to accomplish within the next few dozen hours will determine the fate of mankind forever. That is obvious to us all. Rather than concentrating our efforts on keeping secret what is now transpiring at the risk of its successful accomplishment, we must throw caution to the winds, galvanize whatever assets we can, damn the consequences and pray to God for the best outcome. How many troops can you muster to Nevada, Mr. Roosevelt, if you notify President McKinley of the exact nature of the crisis?”