Timestream One
1963
Bette
DALLAS IN 3/3/ TIME
November 22, 1963
ON NOVEMBER 22, 1963, Bette was in Dallas, Texas. She wore a suit she’d bought in downtown D.C., hem exactly at the center of her knees. White gloves. Pillbox hat. A suit worthy of an ambassador’s party or a Junior League soiree.
Grasping her briefcase with her left hand, she followed the railroad track, which was on a rise above Kennedy’s motorcade route through Dealey Plaza, and bordered by a parking lot.
Spotting the pickup truck she knew would be there, she put everything out of her mind: that she was about to try to change history—one history, at least—to save, not the world, not the country, but her daughter Jill. And that she was enraged with not only Eliani Hadntz, but herself.
She stepped from the tracks and walked on the grassy verge so as not to alert the men by crunching cinders or gravel beneath her low-heeled shoes. Approaching from the back, she reached into her holster with her right hand and drew her silenced Luger. At the same time, she crouched, setting her briefcase on one end to partially disguise her action—from any viewers on that side, at least, but everyone seemed intent on the approaching motorcade, just rounding the Elm Street curve below the Texas School Book Depository.
Anson and Mac, standing in the bed of a pickup, raised their rifles as the motorcade approached. They were all part of the international espionage community. People were known by reputation, or by code names. The best were not known at all.
Bette remembered Mac the instant he sensed her presence and turned; the instant she shot him. She had made a drop to him in Prague in 1943. When Mac collapsed, Anson Konrad swung around and smiled ironically, in recognition, and without surprise, as he too died. She’d come out of nowhere, but someone was bound to, someday, somewhere. People in their line of work rarely died in their beds, after all. She probably wouldn’t either.
She’d met Anson Konrad in Copenhagen during the war, before he had been remade into an American. His oldest son, a member of the Hitler Youth, had died in the Battle of Berlin. His German wife and only other child, a boy, had been given an American small-town past by the OSS in exchange for secrets.
In Copenhagen in 1943, Konrad had been blond. He died bald. Bette reholstered her gun, rose, grabbed her briefcase, and hurried down the low hill to Elm Street.
Sirens drowned out the crowd’s cheers as two images rose before her, superimposed: Kennedy splayed back in the speeding Lincoln as Jacqueline crawled onto the trunk of the open limo. And then the ghostly overlay of cheering crowds, the waving President, and safe passage beneath the overpass as the President headed toward the Trade Mart, where he was to give a speech.
The second vision strengthened to reality. Bette stopped for a moment, astonished, and a quick tremor ran through her, a cold snap of the spine.
Her vision darkened. A period of time passed, but she had no idea how much. Sight returned gradually. Her arms ached; she embraced a lamppost as tightly as if it were a lover. Trucks and cars flowed smoothly down the motorcade route. Gingerly, she let go, reeled, and grabbed the lamppost again. The crowd dispersed, having glimpsed the President, and headed back to work. But one man, prone on the sidewalk across Elm Street, an umbrella lying next to him, was drawing a crowd.
At the same time, a familiar figure hurried, limping, toward the underpass. She almost called out “Wink!” but bit her tongue. Wink had been stationed down among the crowd to take care of the Umbrella Man—so-called because he was armed with an umbrella that fired poisoned darts to pick off Kennedy should the other snipers fail.
By the time she reached the underpass, Wink had vanished. In fact, in those few moments, many things had changed. Here, now, she was one of just a few people out for their lunch break. No crowds. No assassination. No attempted assassination, apparently.
The Texas School Book Depository was a block east, square and anonymous looking. The sky was blue and bright. She smelled exhaust. No pickup truck, no dead men, were in sight.
Where had it all gone?
She staggered a few steps in her low heels. A bum ambled past, giving her a glance of commiseration. Keeping her balance with great concentration, she vomited behind one of the pillars of the underpass and wiped her mouth with a hank of weeds she yanked from the ground. Then she straightened, walked to the Texas School Book Depository and went inside.
She did get a few looks as she found her way to the elevator. After all, this was a warehouse, she wore a fancy dress suit and smelled like vomit. She took the elevator to the sixth floor; stepped out.
Piles of lumber, boxes of nails, and open toolboxes filled the open space. She prowled through the room, checking behind each pile of lumber, peering into corners. No Jill, no Sam. Which, of course, was good. They were not lying there dead.
Then, on the floor near one of the windows, she spied the small Army pack Jill had bought at Sonny’s Surplus on M Street.
In her haste to grab it, Bette stumbled over an open toolbox and cut her knee on its edge as she fell.
She lay on the floor for a second, surprised. Her coordination was excellent; she generally moved in perfect tune with her surroundings, a part of her mind constantly gauging and adjusting, helping her run or drive through the most irregular kinds of places, sometimes while shooting at people. Maybe she had suffered a concussion? She did have a headache, which worsened by the second.
She gazed straight ahead and saw the gray metal of the toolbox, a hammer’s wooden handle. She carefully got to her feet. Blood seeped through her ripped nylon stocking and ran down her leg. She ignored it, caught up the pack, unzipped it.
A copy of Gypsy Myra, Jill’s comic. A pair of ragged jeans, a T-shirt, some underwear.
And the Infinite Game Board.
She held it in both hands for a moment, watching images skitter across the flat surface, seemingly random, so fleeting that they were almost subliminal, tempting the user to touch them. She understood that they were possibilities, rendered visual, an interface between the mysterious quantum realm, which rooted and infused everything, including human consciousness, and the “slower” level of reality that humans believed was absolute and immutable, because that was what their senses told them. It was indeed a phenomenon that humans could only attempt to define, yet Hadntz’s Device drew its energy from that level, sorting, sifting, linking with untold numbers of conscious minds, conscious lives, to bring forth something new. Rough analogies might be radio, sorting coded signals from the atmosphere and turning them back into spoken words or music, patterns. Hadntz had hoped to somehow access the best in humans and distribute that; lock, transmit, and then unlock those signals of altruism and peace, transmit them, move them into historic reality.
But obviously, something was missing. Perhaps, Bette thought, altruism did not exist. Or if it did, it was in tiny, rare amounts, and needed some kind of massive magnification in order to overwhelm all that was evil and take hold, result in decision, resolve, action.
The board was the offspring of Sam’s, Wink’s, and Hadntz’s efforts, during the war, to bring a new world to fruition. And her efforts too, of course. How often she and Sam had wanted to throw the resulting H-3, H-6, H-23, various self-manifesting incarnations of the Hadntz Device, into the ocean, into a volcano, blast it into space.
They should have tried harder.
Her dizziness returned as the images grew stronger, more insistent. She sank down to a pile of lumber, pulled off her hat, loosened her bobby-pinned hair, and ran her fingers through it, desperately needing a drink of water. The board pulsed in her hands.
“Damn it!” She flung it like a Frisbee across the room, where it clattered to the floor. Vision wavered again. Another nexus? She couldn’t stand another!
There seemed to be as many ways to switch timestreams as there were people. Bette and Sam had known for years that Hadntz moved through times with conscious intent and control. She called the nodes where one could traverse the timestreams easily “nexes.” Wink, who had navigated them, always described them in a different way, but timestreams in general were like constant jazz improvisations by humans who were changing and learning instant by instant. She’d asked him how he recognized a nexus. He looked puzzled, then said, “It’s kind of like getting close to a traffic jam. The traffic gets dense. Cars slow down. Or … maybe it’s like seeing a twister up ahead. Ever see one of those? Or—the end of a rainbow? Some anomaly, a shimmer in the fabric of reality, if you want to get fancy, an off-note that gives rise to a whole new way of playing a tune. Hell, Bette, I don’t know. I just know I have to head in that direction.” When she raised her eyebrows, he shrugged and said, “I helped start all this. I have to do what I have to do.”
“And that is?”
“Help. Help you and Sam and your kids. We’re all in this together.”
“Hadntz’s vision? What about all that? Ending war forever?”
“There’s that too.”
Yes, she thought. There’s that too. Maybe. Isn’t it pretty to think so.
Getting to her feet, she retrieved the board, shoved it back inside the dusty pack, and ground her teeth during the interminable elevator descent.
She was in a parking lot. No one was around. In front of her was a Buick Skylark convertible, top down, in the shade.
She had slung her bag, briefcase, and Jill’s pack across the vast, plastic turquoise seat, slid in, hotwired it, and nosed out onto the street before she saw that the car she had stolen was not a Buick. A metal insignia above the radio claimed the car was a Durant, a car she’d never heard of. Stylistically, though, it was identical to a 1962 Buick Skylark. She’d owned one.
A newspaper on the front seat claimed that it was November 22, 1963. Above the fold, a smiling Richard Nixon shook hands with Nikita Khrushchev.
“Damn, damn, damn!” Now something else had happened. She’d been whipped around—probably by touching the Game Board—into an entirely new timestream.
She concentrated on staying exactly at the speed limit until she reached the outskirts of the city. Then she floored the gas pedal. The Durant leaped from thirty to eighty in ten seconds. Not bad. In Texas, her speed was the norm. The newspaper whipped into the sky.
She drove away from Dallas without her usual haste—that would have been 110 mph, for her, on this straight road—to avoid police questioning, and to try and think.
The vehicle she had used to get here, bringing Wink and Sam with her, resembled an airplane, and had grown from Hadntz’s Device, as had the Game Board in Jill’s pack.
Bette did not know who might be in this timestream, what they might surmise, or how they might punish her, and her family, for what she had done. She almost laughed. Causing Nixon to be president, if that was what she had helped foster, was crime enough!
By now, Bette had moved from feeling drunk to merely feeling disconnected. She tried to think she might be dreaming, but knew, her heart heavy, that she was not.
She tried to focus. Part of her mind registered the fact that the speedometer of the big Durant had crept up to ninety. Yet, it seemed to take a full day to pass a weathered farmhouse. Her vision lingered on and analyzed every sun-bleached board, every remaining streak or chip of white paint. Maybe it was some kind of new brain state, due to a too-swift negotiation of timestreams: the whens. A hypnotic locus. Whatever it was, she felt as if she had been hit on the head. Punched in the stomach. In her spy career, she had experienced both events. Her visual abilities were acute, near photographic, so the small differences between this world and her last glared. Sun Oil gas stations rather than Sunoco; a billboard advertising the previously nonexistent Trans-America Rail Company, with windowed star roofs and fine cuisine, like the Union Pacific Streamliner cars she recalled.
A lone, low structure loomed ahead, the color of sun-scoured bone. Big Mike’s Hideaway. At the last second, she wrenched the steering wheel, slid into the dirt parking lot in a cloud of dust, and pulled up next to a telephone booth in the parking lot.
She sat still for a moment, head down, eyes closed. It had to be done.
Stepping out of the Durant, she pushed open the phone booth door and picked up the receiver. Dialed zero.
The operator answered. “May I help you?”
Bette couldn’t speak. She saw her faint reflection in the glass of the door, royally snarled hair and haggard face belying the composed, sophisticated suit.
“Would you like to make a call?”
“I—” a whisper. She cleared her throat. “Person-to-person, Sam Dance, Washington, D.C., National 5-7333.”
She heard clicking and whirring. “No such number. Are you sure?”
She repeated the number, but the results were the same.
“Try information for Samuel Dance.” She gave the address.
“No one by that name.”
Bette dropped the receiver and pushed herself from the booth. She staggered to the open door of the Durant but did not get in. She leaned back against the side of the car and looked at the sky but did not see it.
“Ma’am?”
She looked down and saw a bearded face shadowed by a brown cowboy hat, blue eyes narrowed in concern. “Ma’am? You all right? Need some water? Or somethin’?”
“A cigarette, if you have one.”
He straightened and fished one from his shirt pocket. She did not see the brand. She put it between her lips and he lit it for her. She took a deep drag.
Gone. All gone. Was it possible?
“Bad news?” He glanced at the dangling receiver, reached into the booth, put it back on the hook.
“Yes,” she managed. “Thank you. I’m all right now.”
He looked doubtful, so she thanked him again, tossed the butt on the gravel, got in the car, and pulled onto the empty highway.
The answer was definitely yes. Bad news.
They were gone.
Her beloved family may have survived, in another trajectory, but she might never see them again. Perhaps that was the price: her own exile in time.
She steeled herself, and rejected that possibility. She was jumping to conclusions.
She had brought Sam and Wink here, in the timestream-jumping—no, say it, timestream-causing plane—that had grown, from a portion of the Hadntz Device in the Nazi Messerschmitt caves near Oberammergau. In doing so, she had saved Jill. She hoped.
But maybe she had simply eliminated all of them, forever. Maybe she had caused a new timestream that did not include the Dance family at all.
She was adrift, in neither world. Not, it seemed, in the new world that she, Jill, Sam, Wink, and Hadntz had hoped to usher in by foiling the Kennedy assassination, the one they had left in 1968, in a panic, following their daughter. The year was 1963, but not the 1963 she and her family had lived through. In this world, Nixon, not Kennedy, was President on November 22, 1963.
Hadntz had given Jill some sort of path from 1970, World Prime, she decided to call it, to a 1963 slightly different from the one she had lived through seven years ago. It all had something to do with that damned so-called Game Board in Jill’s pack, now in the backseat. That was what the kids had called it, back when they’d first found it, back when the Hadntz Device she and Sam had hidden in the attic had manifested in the fun toy for kids which was now in Jill’s pack, having done its damage.
She halted her mental rant. It would do no good.
Holding the wheel with her left hand, she teased a Camel from the owner’s pack of cigarettes, which was wedged in the ashtray, punched in the cigarette lighter, took a drag, and then loosened the blue scarf covering her hair. She watched it fly out the window and hang behind her, from the side mirror, for an absurdly long ninety-mile-an-hour speck of time dilation, flowing in slow, beautiful wind-driven billows.
She wrenched her attention away from that. So. New worlds would fly—had flown—out of Pandora’s box. She was in a new timestream she herself had helped create. One couldn’t think about it too much; it was impossible to trace the trajectories.
Sam was probably lost to her as well. Everything, everyone she loved.
It seemed like a very bad deal. She had made a devil’s bargain with Hadntz—with her ideas—and had lost.
But no, no. There was another way to look at it, which was, This is not finished yet. For instance, there was the matter of Wink, limping away. Injured, but alive, in the 1963 in which Kennedy was President, and had lived, before the Device had swirled her around to this present Nixon-land when she picked it up in the Texas Book Depository.
Both of which, in the shifting landscape of timestreams, were probably infinitely small threads, never to be found again, judging how easily, how wildly, she had careened into this thread.
The land rolled slightly, dun colored beneath its wash of green shrubs and occasional trees. Jill would have seen this on her way into Dallas, if she’d come during the day.
But Bette didn’t even want to know too much about that, about any of those details.
Because knowing Othertime changed Othertime. It was as simple as that. What you saw or knew was changed by the weight of your new knowing. And then all that was left was the simple hard bones of action, nouns: curved skeletons others might come across, unable to deduce the flesh, the action, the living verb of being that had grown and housed those bones. Just as the action that went into preparing to sew a dress left only the dress.
This noun was a whole new timestream.
And she, perhaps, was now one of those skeletons. At least, in her deep being, she felt like one, scoured of everything that mattered. She had thought a lot about timestreams in the past few years. Sam preferred Hadntz’s metaphor of timestreams as gardens, wisely managed by the new, improved humans to come as a result of the Device.
Bette’s metaphor was that a timestream was like a human body, previously diseased and morally damaged by violence and war. Change the concentration of some hormone, add or subtract vitamins, repress disease-causing genes, give that body the right education, and a still-recognizable but slightly different human timestream would result, one where humans might make wiser decisions.
But reality was now well beyond metaphor for Bette. This was worse than war. Simply deep, unending pain. Devil’s bargain was definitely a viable addition to the list.
Bette turned onto the thin line in the dust that led to a lone windsock, brilliant red against high blue just-past-noon. Had Kennedy, with all his flaws as well as all his good instincts, been saved, somewhen? If so, why?
For love of a thin, tall girl, Jill. That was all. It all came down to the personal, in the end—what a surprise. And what would she do now, that girl? For Bette had to assume that her family still lived, somewhere, in some time, or she would go mad. What would her other children, Brian and Megan, whom she loved as fully, as deeply, do? In 1963, they were still very young, and they would not have a mother. What would Sam do? Would another Bette be there, another mother, who would see them grow up? Bette added irrational, intense jealousy to her list of deadly sins.
She’d given up much in the war, for her war’s cause, but it had been miraculously restored by Sam, with Sam. She had sworn to him that she would leave the CIA as well, but she’d been drawn back into the tangled weave of history by something that had started a long, long time ago, and Sam had been hooked too. By daring to have a family, they had created three valuable hostages—Jill, Brian, and Megan—whose existence would force her to do anything to keep them safe. And what did the CIA, or other, more shadowy parties, want? Information about the Device, which they, and many others, knew or suspected existed.
Oh, she’d had her rosy visions, all right. Advanced understanding of the neurology of learning, and of brain plasticity—neurogenesis—in children and in adults, would help every child to know the thrill of accessing written culture, art, music, and science, and enable them to contribute to more growth. It would help adults learn new skills, new knowledge: it might even help some gain wisdom. It would unite the two cultures, those of science and literature. Each scientific and literary discipline had its own code, or codes. More people would be able to decipher more codes, and cross-reference them. Humans would go to Mars, and beyond. She expected vast, accelerated change and improvement in all spheres. There might even be equality of rights and enforcement of them for all, food for all, universal and excellent education. Not just in the United States, but in the entire world.
Would that be worth division from her family, their division from her, which would be like death?
She couldn’t think like that. The power of human thought, linked by new technologies, would grow more quickly, fertilized from all directions, and perhaps there would be a nexus.
A nexus, or maybe a choice of nexes, where she could catch up with them, would appear, perhaps proliferate. She might be able to walk right back into their lives. Up the walk, onto the porch of Halcyon House in downtown Washington, through the screen door, and into the heart of the house, the kitchen. Into the arms of Sam Dance, who would give her one hell of a kiss.
Yes.
It was important to have dreams, vision, a model for what she wanted to happen.
Her thoughts were not very focused as she got out of the car and slammed the door. She had no idea what she should do.
Leonard, a man who looked like an old Texas cowhand but was not, rose from his rocking chair to meet her. He didn’t speak, just nodded, and his nod was short.
He opened the car door, and after she got out, grabbed her bag and her briefcase. His mouth quirked a bit when he retrieved Jill’s backpack, but Bette was not sure it counted as a smile.
She set the briefcase on the trunk and opened it. At least it was the same, as far as she could tell. Various weapons. Lots of cash, several passports. And—there, in plastic bags beneath some papers, were Spacies.
Spacies were small plastic figures dressed as astronauts, space workers, and other characters who might play a role in a future, fictional space program. They were a little bigger than the ubiquitous green Army men Brian hoarded, more detailed, life colored, and bright. They glimmered with the seductive lure of The Future. The Future had begun a long time ago, perhaps during the Enlightenment, but had lately picked up serious speed. Her kids watched The Jetsons. Disney’s Atomic Genie towered over the globe like a huge mushroom cloud, and was then tamed back into the magic lamp by wise humans.
This was one genie that couldn’t be stopped. Or tamed, apparently.
Spacies had been manifested by the Device. The Hadntz Device H-26, or H-27? Contact with Spacies would modify the genetic predisposition for unthinking rage and violence and render them subject to consideration of appropriate actions. Touching Spacies also stimulated controlled neurogenesis, and might result in undreamed of artistic and intellectual abilities in children as well as adults. So perhaps Spacies, or something like them, or something that might grow from them, were the mitigating factor, that which would add the missing ingredients of empathy, altruism, and hope, to humanity’s grim history.
Bette touched the helmet of the African-American astronaut, a woman—caressed it, really, though it was just a brush with her fingertips—thinking, This is what I must do now. Ensure that future. That had been the plan. Had she—had the Device—known this was going to happen? Anger and joy, like electric shocks, shot through her. Was she part of some damned plan, some kind of predetermined process? Or was she a free-willed participant in the continuing twists and turns of an evolution toward light?
She let joy—choice, power, responsibility—win. Anger, now, was useless; deadening. She did have a choice. She did have agency. She would continue the fight.
She asked Leonard, “Did—did Jill and Sam come back here? Wink?” Memories of Sam and Wink, fast buddies during the war, in England, France, and Germany, rushed into her mind. Young, brilliant, committed, reckless. Lovers of jazz. Pranksters, jokers. Marvelous men.
“You could say they did. You could also say they didn’t.”
“F*ck you, Leonard.”
“Everything go okay?”
“I guess you could say so. You could also say it didn’t.”
His pale gray eyes had seen it all and more. They sat deep in his wizened, too-tanned face like the eyes of a hawk. “It was your call.”
“Doesn’t seem like it, right now.” She looked around at scrub and high clouds, at this new-changed world, now moving, like a sideswiped billiard ball on a new trajectory. Right or not right, this was what she had, and where she was. She had to go forward. Sideways. Wherever necessary, however difficult, in this quest.
They walked toward her small plane, grown from a piece of the Hadntz Device, which made her desperately sick whenever she flew it and traversed the timestreams, two tiny figures in a vast, grass-covered field. She carried a briefcase, a purse, and, in the pack and in her mind, all that remained for her of hope and love, dream and possibility.