The Third Day (7 page)

A few people walked quickly by, heading toward the east where the President’s motorcade was turning onto Houston Street, but the others – I counted nine – seemed content to remain where they were.  One even had a movie camera. 

“OK.  Here we go.” 

Five seconds later, three shots rang out – audible, though not obvious in the midst of the crowd noise.  Then came the screams.  Still, the camera did not move, but remained focused on the fence and the trees marking the edge of the slope. 

Despite the chaos nearby, the camera recorded nothing of consequence. 

“The Grassy Knoll?” asked Bergfeld. 

“Nothing but grass,” said Bryson.  “No hidden gunmen at all.  I’m sorry to disappoint you.” 

She didn’t reply.  Like most natives of Dallas, Sharon felt the faster that memories of Kennedy’s assassination faded, the better – something that was easy for her anyway, since she had been born over a decade after the event. 

“So who did it?” asked Markowitz. 

“How would I know?” Bryson replied.  “You’ve read the books; you’ve seen the web sites.  There are dozens of those nutty theories.  This only disproved one of them.” 

“Why didn’t he try to stop it?” asked Sharon.  “He could have called the police.” 

Juliet shook her head.

“Suppose he had made that call.  Suppose he found a pay phone earlier that morning: 
There’s someone on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository waiting with a rifle to shoot the President
.  Let’s suppose he had said that.  Then what?” 

“Someone would have checked,” replied Sharon. 

“Yes,” said Juliet, “with information that specific, someone certainly would have investigated.  But as you know, Oswald was quite willing to kill police officers; he did, in fact, murder one after shooting Kennedy.” 

“So,” she continued, “it’s likely that he would have killed at least one policeman or Secret Service agent as they tried to apprehend him.  Afterward, as with any police shooting, the rest of the force would have been very angry.  One of their own had gone down.” 

“They’d look for others,” said Lavon; “other conspirators.” 

“Beginning
exactly
with the person who made that call,” said Bryson.  “They could easily trace the pay phone as well as the precise time the call was placed.  Other witnesses could identify the person on the phone.  Ask yourself, as the Secret Service surely would have, who else would have known the gunman was hiding in the building besides a co-conspirator who had gotten cold feet?” 

“That’s how a lot of conspiracies come to light,” I added.  “Somebody chickens out at the last minute.” 

“He could have explained,” said Sharon. 

“How?” asked Bryson. 
“I’m from the future and I’m here to help?” 

“No,” she said, shaking her head, “he could have done nothing without risking a long stretch in either prison or the lunatic asylum.  Besides, if Kennedy had not died in Dallas, someone else may have gotten him at his next stop.  The what-if games are endless.” 

“He could have changed history,” said Markowitz. 

Juliet’s expression grew solemn.  “Yes; and you will all have to be careful that you do not.  It’s time I explained some ground rules.” 

The Brysons had debated the subject endlessly among themselves:  could a single event or individual really change the future in a meaningful way? 

Juliet had leaned toward the perspective that one could.  In her view, people tended to look at the broad sweep of human affairs without imagining how close some of the most important turning points really were. 

What if, she had argued, the wind had shifted direction on that fateful August day in 1776, allowing the British fleet to sail up the East River and trap George Washington on Long Island, snuffing out the American Revolution before it could truly be born? 

What if a young Hitler had lingered a minute longer in a bunker on the Western Front instead of departing, as he did, just before an Allied shell struck, killing everyone? 

The possibilities were endless. 

Her husband had started with the opposite view.  Humans for the most part went about their business and then died; and the next generation did the same.  Even the seemingly grand events were inevitable in their own way. 

Had Grant been in command in 1863 instead of the more cautious Meade, Union forces might have trapped Lee’s Confederates after Gettysburg, thus shortening the American Civil War.  But whether the conflict had ended then, or as it actually did two years later, the North still would have won. 

Henry considered this principle even more self-evident in scientific endeavors.  Alexander Graham Bell had beaten his rival Elisha Gray to the patent office by only a few days – and though little known today, the controversy over who invented the telephone had dragged on for years, complete with sordid tales of the bribery of an alcoholic patent clerk. 

Had the Wright Brothers never been born, he argued, someone else surely would have invented the airplane, an assertion bolstered by the fact that the Wrights themselves spent much of the decade after their initial success in the courtroom, fighting infringement litigation against other aircraft manufacturers. 

“How did you resolve the issue?” Sharon asked.

“We agreed to disagree,” said Bryson, “though in the end, I could tell that he was coming around to my point of view.” 

Sharon smiled, and the two women exchanged surreptitious glances, as if to say that even the most dim-witted men eventually did the same. 

“Practically speaking, what did you end up doing?” I asked. 

“Since we couldn’t answer the question with certainty, we decided that except for the camera, Henry would take no other modern implements back with him:  no weapons, no explosives, not even a flashlight.” 

We all agreed with the logic, although Juliet must have sensed my discomfort with the notion of having no real means of self-defense. 

She looked me squarely in the eye. 

“Henry agreed to follow this protocol,” she said, “and I’m going to insist you do likewise, even under our current circumstances.  Do you still want to go?” 

After a moment’s reflection, I gave a half-hearted grunt, in the affirmative. 

“We’re not going to pick fights,” Markowitz added.  “We’ve got nothing against any of those people.” 

This prompted Lavon to repeat his earlier warning. 

“Just because we don’t have anything against anyone two thousand years ago doesn’t mean that the reverse will be true,” he said.  “I still don’t think any of you grasp what we might be getting ourselves into.” 

The others, though, had ceased paying attention. 

“We’ve been over that – time and again.  I’m going, and that’s final,” said Markowitz. 

“Me, too,” said Bergfeld.  “Don’t try to stop us.” 

***

Lavon did, however, make one last attempt. 

“What about the time paradox?” he asked, “the notion that we could accidentally kill one of our ancestors, and thus never be born.” 

“We debated that for a while,” Juliet replied, “but we never came up with a good answer.  Given that both of our families originated in northern Europe, we decided that the possibility of Henry encountering one of our ancestors in ancient Judea was so remote that we shouldn’t worry about it.” 

Lavon gestured towards Markowitz. 

“What about him?” he said.  “His ancestors –”

Markowitz cut him off. 

“By the first century, Jews lived all across the Mediterranean world,” he snapped.  “The odds are extremely remote that I could do myself any harm in that regard.” 

Whatever the outcome, the paradox struck me as something easy to test. 

“Couldn’t we take a handful of newly hatched chicks back a few days with their mother, kill the hen, and watch whether the chicks disappear?” I asked. 

The others, though, greeted my contribution to scientific progress with stony silence.  Either they considered the idea cruel, or most likely, they realized that such an experiment would only delay our departure. 

Finally, Juliet shrugged. 

“I can’t tell you what to do,” she said.  “But I’d think about it – at least one more night.” 

Of course, no one reconsidered, so at five o’clock the next morning, we followed Juliet – coffee in hand – down narrow corridors whose eerie green-glow reminded me of a movie set’s haunted house. 

We had gone about a hundred meters when she finally stopped and opened an electrical box that looked old enough to have been installed by Thomas Edison himself. 

A gleaming metallic panel popped up.  Juliet punched a code and placed her right eye on the scanner.  A second later, the panel light turned green, and we heard a whoosh as a section of the floor in front of us dropped, exposing a ladder leading to a chamber below. 

“We need to keep the prep room away from prying eyes,” she said by way of explanation.  “Our staffers are very bright; curiosity is part of their job description.” 

Fluorescent lights came on automatically as we descended into a room about twenty-five feet square.  The ubiquitous industrial tiles made up the ceiling, while several wooden benches had been bolted to the floor.  Apart from a few spots of exposed cinder block, a variety of lockers and storage cabinets covered the walls. 

I helped Lavon lower the boxes he had brought from Georgia.  Once we had climbed down and closed the entrance above, Lavon opened the nearest box and removed three thigh-length brown tunics.  He kept the darkest one for himself, then handed the others to Markowitz. 

“Take your pick.” 

“Does it matter?” 

“No.” 

Markowitz selected the tan one, and after he had put it on, Lavon opened a second box and extracted a long brown-striped robe.  Markowitz donned it, shook a couple of times to adjust the fit, and then stood in front of the mirror, quite pleased with himself. 

“We’ll fit right in,” he said. 

Lavon warned us that he couldn’t entirely be sure.  Even with years of training and field experience, he had to admit that much of what he “knew” about the ancient world was more informed conjecture than a true comprehension of the facts. 

So few articles of clothing from the first century had survived that he couldn’t help but wonder whether we could suffer the fate of the occasional tourist in Miami or Los Angeles who got murdered because he unwittingly wandered into the wrong part of town wearing the colors of a rival gang. 

“Hey, what about underwear?” asked Markowitz.  “All I have are my Fruit of the Looms.” 

“That should be fine,” Lavon mumbled as his eyes dropped to the floor. 

“One more unknowable,” he said to me, out of the earshot of the others. 

I glanced over to Sharon, who had laid out five different robes and head coverings, and sat in deep contemplation trying to pick the one she liked best. 

“What about her?” I asked. 

The modern notion of an independent single woman was inconceivable in the time of Christ.  A woman
belonged
to someone – to a father, a husband, or to some other male relative.  As for those who didn’t, who were truly alone in the world, they didn’t call it the oldest profession for nothing. 

“I’m working on it,” he said.  “For her own protection, she needs to be noble.” 

“Makes sense.” 

“The trouble is,  – ”

“Hey, what about this one?” Markowitz interrupted in a loud voice. 

We looked up to see that he had opened another box and taken out a gleaming white robe, bordered with a deep purple stripe. 

Lavon shook his head.  “No, Ray, leave that one here.” 

“Why?” he asked as he held it up to the mirror.  “It makes me look dignified.” 

“We’re not trying to look dignified.  We’re trying to blend in, as best we can.  We don’t want to draw attention to ourselves if we can help it.” 

***

While Lavon checked on the others, I waited until Juliet’s back was turned and then stuffed a few items – well, maybe more than a few – from my gym bag into my travel pouch, just in case we had to stay longer than we had planned. 

I also took a more careful look at my traveling companions.  For obvious reasons, we’d have to defer to Lavon’s judgment; and I took comfort in the fact that over the past few days, he had struck me as competent and efficient. 

Still, I couldn’t be sure who would fall apart if our venture didn’t proceed according to expectation – if, for instance, the others had to witness a man being eviscerated in front of their own eyes, as I once had. 

Our modern world is so incongruous in this regard. 

On one hand, our televisions beam a constant barrage of twenty-first century atrocities into our living rooms, ranging from mass rape as an instrument of policy in parts of Africa, to youthful militias routinely hacking off the limbs of members of rival tribes, to women, even to this day, being stoned.