The Theta Prophecy (12 page)

“Sir,” Dulles said again. “There are things better left unsaid.”

He didn’t want to lie because he knew Kennedy’s reputation, knew he would be out a job if the president found out he had been deceived, but he also didn’t want to be the one to let a man known for being brash, known for thinking it was better to tell the public more rather than less, in on a secret that could destroy the country.

“Excuse me?” Kennedy said, not with an air of indignance, but really wanting to know if he had heard the director correctly. “But I haven’t even gotten to ask if time travel is possible!”

When the president said this last part, trying to make a joke, not realizing that he was bringing up the only other topic that would make the director wish he were already with his wife someplace farther south, someplace warm and quiet, the director actually groaned.

“Sir, I’m here to help. Honest, I am. But I would urge you to focus on matters of national interest—the communists and what our boy Hoover is up to—instead of wasting time on these other things you have mentioned.”

Dulles expected Kennedy to break into a roar. Maybe scream something like, “Who are you to tell me what to spend my time on? I’m the President of the United States!” Maybe throw the stapler across the room, along with any other office supplies within reach. But there was none of that.

Kennedy simply looked the director in the face. Neither of them blinked. Dulles knew what question was going to come next. He should have known as soon as he said there was life on other planets. Why hadn’t he just lied from the start, or at least not offered information, and kept his mouth shut?

“What?” Kennedy said.

“What do you mean,
what
?”

“I may not be a trained spy like the people you hang around with, but I did play an awful lot of poker at sea. You would be surprised how good some sailors can get at discerning when someone is bluffing.”

“And?”

“And your eye is twitching.”

“Oh?”

“Yes.” They stared at each other for another moment. Then Kennedy said, “Is time travel possible?”

“Some day, I’m sure anything will be possible. Of course, we have no concept of how it might work.”

He watched the president think about the answer he had been given. Of course time travel was not possible today. Man had not even gotten to the moon yet. But the response had been too general, as if he were testifying before Congress.

“Have you ever seen proof that time travel might one day become possible?”

“Sir?”

“Do you want me to ask again?” The New England accent became more distinct when he grew angry. “Have you ever seen anything to indicate that time travel will become a reality?”

Dulles closed his eyes. He kept them that way when he answered. “Yes.”

“Well, don’t be shy. What was it?”

Dulles could tell from Kennedy’s tone that he honestly had no inkling such a revelation could mean the end of the country they knew. To the young man in front of him, interested in fantastic stories rather than actual global threats, time travel was something magical to keep boys awake at night.

“A book.”

“A book?”

“Yes, Mr. President. Written hundreds of years ago by someone from the future.”

“Where is this book?”

“I don’t know, sir.”

“You’re the Director of Central Intelligence and you don’t know where this book is?”

“I’ve never actually seen it, sir. Only heard about it.”

“And that’s enough to make you believe it exists?”

“Yes.”

Looking back, the next thing he would say would end up being one of the greatest mistakes of his career.

He could have left the conversation where it was, let the president know that a book—such an ordinary object, certainly nothing dangerous!—had been discovered. But he saw JFK’s face contort with interest and stupidly thought that if he explained what was in the book he and the others working with him might have a new ally. And not just any ally but the person that the public thought of as the most powerful man in the world.

“Not only do I know it exists,” Dulles said, “I have men all over the world, in every segment of society—some in Hollywood, some in academic and news circles—all on the lookout for a sign that someone they know might be from the future.”

The president smiled, but it wasn’t convincing. “Well, that sounds very ominous. Why on earth would you do that?”

“I assure you it’s necessary. The book tells how people from the future are set on changing our way of life.”

“How so?”

“They want to do away with our form of government. They think they know better than the leaders of this country what is good for everyone. Can you believe that? It sounds crazy, I know. But when you hear some of the things that are supposedly in it, you know it really is from the future. That’s why we’re determined to find anyone who might appear from the future, so we can stop them from changing the course of history. And it’s why we make sure no one finds out time travel will be possible one day.”

“Why would they want to change our way of life, though? We have a democracy. We’re the freest country in the world.”

“That’s exactly why we have to stop them,” Dulles said, hoping he had said enough to win over the new president.

Something didn’t make sense to Kennedy, however. Why was Dulles willing to have people on his payroll trying to spot and stop this very thing when it made no sense? Who was in possession of this book if it wasn’t the director? He kept these questions to himself, though, and let the matter drop for the time being.

The meeting only lasted another few minutes. Then the president excused himself so he could have dinner with the First Lady. Alone again, Dulles sat back in his chair and let out a long sigh. Nothing good would come from the things Kennedy had mentioned. Dulles knew there was probably a microphone in his office. Everyone in this god-forsaken city was recording what everyone else said.

Two years later, he would watch the television coverage of Kennedy’s assassination and would suspect that the attempt on JFK’s life had probably begun that very evening, the newly elected president meeting with the Director of Central Intelligence, asking questions he never should have asked.

Year: 1956

“What’s your name?”

The time traveler blinked awake. The pain in his head made him wish he could go back to sleep. He tried to bring his right hand to his temple but it wouldn’t go anywhere. Confused, he looked down at his arm to see why it wouldn’t obey his commands. Handcuffs. He was handcuffed to the wooden arm of the chair he sat in.

His other hand was free, though, so he brought it up and touched his hairline. Dried blood flaked away. Searing pain shot behind his eyes. He touched the very tip of his nose. The same result.

“Here,” the man in front of him said, and tossed him a bag of ice.

But instead of catching it, the time traveler watched it bounce off his handcuffed arm and land on the floor. The man who tossed it crossed the eight feet to the other side of the dank room, picked the bag up, and put it in the time traveler’s free palm.

After a quick moment of dazzling pain, the ice numbed the time traveler’s entire face, making him feel like he was on some serious drugs. It was wonderful.

“What’s your name?” the man said again.

The time traveler looked first at the man, then at the room he was being held in. The man appeared to be around sixty years old or thereabouts, with close-cut gray hair and a gray beard with flecks of black to show what color his hair had been when he was younger. The guard could have been standing over his prisoner, barking threats and yelling just to hear how loud and ferocious he could sound. But instead, he sat back in his chair with his feet on top of his desk, a pleasant smile across his face as if this whole thing—a man appearing on the rocks outside a federal penitentiary—offered some excitement to an otherwise dull daily existence.

From the objects littered around the room—certificates of merit, letters of recognition from the governor—along with the framed photographs of the man with various celebrities who had been in town and wanted a personal tour of the infamous prison, it was obvious to the time traveler that this man in front of him wasn’t a guard at all but the warden, Paul Madigan.

“I’m sorry,” the time traveler said. “What?”

The warden smiled again, but this time there was less friendliness behind it, replaced by a hint of annoyance.

“Three times now I’ve asked what your name is.”

A man knocked twice on the warden’s open door, then stepped into the office without waiting to be invited. Unlike the warden, the man wore a guard’s uniform just like the man who had kicked the time traveler in the face.

“Yes?” Madigan said.

“We’ve searched every cell, sir. There are no missing prisoners.”

The warden frowned. But somehow, a remnant of the earlier smile still remained even as he looked confused.

“Check again. Go into every single cell.”

The guard opened his mouth to say something, probably that they had already gone into every cell during the first check and so he had no idea what they hoped to find during a second search, but instead he closed his mouth, nodded, said, “Yes, sir,” and left the room.

The time traveler didn’t bother trying to say he hadn’t been trying to escape, that he wasn’t a prisoner at all and that the guard who kicked him across the face was lucky he wasn’t the type to bring legal action. The prisoner count that the guards were performing would confirm that he wasn’t some convict trying to escape back to the mainland.

Instead, he thought about how best to answer the warden’s question.

He could give his real name. The only problem was that he hadn’t yet been born when Alcatraz was still in use, so no matter what year it was, he knew it was a year in which giving his real name would only create more questions—questions he couldn’t answer.

He could give a fake name. But giving a fake name was no better than his real name. There would be no record of who he actually was, no record for the authorities to verify. The same problem would still exist: the police would have no record of his existence.

He could give them his code name, the name he had been given, months earlier, at the first meeting of the Thinkers. But when he told them his name was one of the fifty states they would think he was playing games with them. How many people in the middle of the twentieth century knew someone named North Carolina or Delaware or Vermont? They would assume he was trying to hide his real identity and would hold him until they could pin some unsolved crime on him.

There was only one response he could give that made sense and that was the one he offered.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I can’t remember anything.” As if to emphasize the point, he repositioned the bag of ice on his temple and grimaced.

“What do you remember?”

“I came to in the water, saw the lighthouse in the distance, and swam to it. I don’t know anything other than that.”

“How’d you hurt your nose? Lewis said it was already broken before you tried to get away and he had to bust you one.”

“I wasn’t trying to get away,” the time traveler said. “And I have no idea how my nose got broken. It was like that when I came to.”

Madigan tapped his fingers against his desk, one after another. “Quite the mystery,” the warden said.

“Is there a doctor here? My nose—”

“Yes,” the warden said before his anonymous guest could say any more, waving away the request with the back of his hand. “As soon as we figure out who you are, we’ll take you to the infirmary.”

“I already told you, I don’t know who I am.”

“Yeah, yeah. You told me, all right.”

The time traveler let out a long sigh as he slumped in his chair and let the drops of cold water from the melting ice run down his face and onto his shirt.

His shirt?

Madigan saw the look of confusion and said, “We got you into some clothes after you were subdued. Couldn’t have you sitting in my office in just some soggy pants. Nobody wants that.”

“I must have lost my clothes,” the time traveler said.

“You lost a whole lot more than that. Lost your name, too.”

If only the warden knew the half of it. The time traveler hadn’t lost just his name, but his entire identity. He would never be able to go back to being the man he had been, a man who lived in fear of what the Tyranny would do next and whatever reason they would come up with to carry out their next war or set up more checkpoints. He gave up the children he taught history to. The dog that wandered his street, seemingly without an owner, sleeping on whichever doorstep he happened to be nearest to when it rained. Even that dog.

“We’ll figure it out,” the warden said. “We can tell who most people are by the pattern on their fingertips.”

The time traveler nodded. He tried to remember when a database of fingerprints became popular. While he couldn’t be positive, he was pretty sure that even though they had been around since the early 1900s, they hadn’t been in widespread use during Alcatraz’s time. It was something that law enforcement was just now learning to use as a bluff in order to scare possible lawbreakers into confessing things they might otherwise try to conceal.

After the time traveler didn’t reply, Madigan shrugged and went back to his paperwork. Page after page, he signed at the bottom, flipped to the next sheet or paper, signed where he was supposed to, until he had amassed a stack of completed papers without having read any of them.

In a few years, whenever it was, reporters would begin to question the living conditions of the inmates at Alcatraz. The warden would start by laughing off the reporters, at one point even telling one, “Living conditions? These are the worst of the worst that our country has to offer. They’re lucky we haven’t lined them up and shot them.”

Those investigations, combined with the cost of operating the prison and the raw sewage it released into the San Francisco Bay, would ultimately lead to the prison’s closure. And the warden, clueless as to most of what had been going on in his own prison, would die a jaded man, claiming that because he hadn’t known about any of the wrongdoing, he shouldn’t be held accountable for it. As if ignorance was a plausible defense.

The time traveler had a hard time believing the man in front of him would end up that way. He seemed so good-natured.

Madigan saw the time traveler watching this procession of ink to paper and said, “Who’s your team?”

“What?”

“Your team. Who are you rooting for?”

His first instinct, the truth, was to say he had always been a Bayern Munich fan. But, the warden was probably referring to a specific sporting event in the near future. Perhaps the World Series, and any response that didn’t possess this common sense knowledge would only make the time traveler seem all the more suspicious. Not to mention that no one in the middle of the twentieth century in America gave two shits about soccer. The warden wouldn’t even know what a Bayern Munich was. And after he found out it was a soccer club, he would likely think the man handcuffed in his office was some kind of perverted weirdo.

“The underdog,” the time traveler said instead. “I always root for the underdog.”

The warden laughed. “A man after my own blood. You know what the only problem is, though, right?”

“What’s that?”

“How can you call either team the underdog? The Dodgers are the defending champs and the Yankees are there every year, it seems.”

“Yeah.”

“So how can people like you and me root for either team?”

“I don’t know.”

The warden laughed. “Damn right. But I’ll tell you one thing: it oughtta be a great series.”

“Sir?”

The time traveler looked behind him at the guard who had re-entered the warden’s office.

“Yes.”

“We checked the roster and there are no missing prisoners.”

Madigan’s smile completely vanished. And right as the time traveler watched, in the time it took for the man to let out a long sigh, the warden seemed to age ten years. His hair looked thinner, his wrinkles deeper.

“Every cell?” the warden said.

“Yes, sir.”

“
Every
cell?” he repeated, saying
every
as if the guard were so incompetent that he might have taken
every
to mean
every other
.

“Yes, sir.”

“Every single prisoner was in every exact cell he was supposed to be in?”

“Sir, yes.”

Madigan shifted his eyes and took a long look at the time traveler, which caused the guard to take a tiny step forward so he could sneak a look at their guest’s face as well.

“Who are you?” the warden said, as if testing the still-handcuffed man.

“I don’t know.”

Madigan turned to the guard. “Uncuff this man.”

“But, sir, we still don’t know who—”

“Do you think a man who almost drowned in the ocean, and who isn’t an escaping prisoner, would do anything dumb while inside a federal prison?”

“No, sir,” the guard said, already reaching down to his belt to the assortment of keys stationed there.

“That’s all,” the warden said once the cuffs were off, and the guard disappeared.

The time traveler looked down at his wrist and the marks the cuffs had produced. Where he came from, many of his friends had disappeared wearing similar cuffs. Some were then shot in the back of the head, the Tyranny claiming that the deceased had tried to grab for a weapon, or else they were taken to secret prisons where no one could find them, visit them, or hope to see them ever again.

Madigan stood up and said, “Well, it’s certainly been an exciting night.”

“Where am I going?”

“We’ll have one of the guys take you over to the mainland. The people there will be able to deal with you.”

“Can’t I see a doctor before I go?”

The warden’s smile returned. “Trust me, you don’t want our doctor. They’ll let you see a real doctor once you get over to the mainland.”

The bag of ice sagged in the time traveler’s hand. His shirt—the shirt they had dressed him in—was soaked from the neck down to the waist. To add to that, his head wasn’t as numb as it had been an hour earlier. Pain cascaded from temple to temple.

“Can I at least get a fresh bag of ice?”

Madigan patted the time traveler on the back as he escorted him down a dark hallway. “Of course. For a guest, we have all the ice in the world.” And then, as the warden handed him off to one of the guards who would theoretically take him by boat across the bay, the warden offered his favorite joke: “Now, make sure we never see you here again.”

The time traveler didn’t bother with an answer.