Three days later, Lavon wheeled in four large boxes and stacked them in an unoccupied corner of the conference room. One of his old colleagues had recently left an Israeli dig to open a Biblical study center in rural Georgia, where he had meticulously recreated a first century Palestinian village. Lavon had gone there to borrow clothing and replica artifacts.
He could see that none of us had changed our minds, though he did have an unanswered question.
“Juliet, you never explained how can we signal this, um, device to return?”
She didn’t immediately respond, which we all found disconcerting.
“We can signal it to come back, can’t we?” he asked.
“Yes,” she finally said, “you should be able to initiate a transfer on your end.”
She reached into her pocket and pulled out four thin plastic wafers that resembled the flash memory cards in digital cameras.
“The system is programmed to return you to the present time automatically after a pre-set interval, but if you run into a more urgent situation, squeeze this for ten seconds, and you’ll bring back all mammalian life forms within a two meter radius.”
Unless we got tangled up with rabid dogs, that sounded easy enough; too easy, in fact.
“What’s the catch?” I asked.
“The catch is that the transport process requires a tremendous electrical surge. If we schedule your arrival in advance, we can have the capacitors charged ahead of time. But we can keep them in that state for only one hour. After that, we must shift to a stand-by function.”
“How long does it take to go from standby to fully operational?” asked Markowitz.
“We’ve narrowed the time required to thirty minutes.”
“I see. So if we end up running for our lives?”
“You’ll have to keep running for half an hour. I’m sorry. It’s the best we’ve been able to do.”
***
The others grew quiet as they considered this, but in the end, they didn’t lose any of their determination to proceed. Still, one more issue nagged at me.
“Juliet, given that all new technology goes through a gestation period, so to speak, where the kinks are worked out, I assume you tested this before Henry ventured back?”
She nodded.
“Once we developed the capability to transmit three dimensional objects, we conducted a number of experiments using dogs. The automatic recall apparatus proved successful, and more importantly, we could detect no ill effects on the animals’ biological systems, either at the time or several weeks later.”
Bryson opened a cabinet under the credenza to her right, pulled out a remote control, and pressed a button to lower a screen from the conference room’s ceiling.
“For the first human trial, Henry simply went back to the previous hour. Once we confirmed that success, we decided to run a second experiment, to a place and time where he could easily survive and earn a living in case he could not, for some unexpected reason, return to the present.”
“Makes sense,” nodded Markowitz. “Where did he go?”
“Dallas; November 1963. Had he been trapped there, his scientific talents would have proven useful. I doubt he would have had trouble finding employment, and as you’re already aware, he would know exactly where to invest any money he happened to earn.”
Markowitz chuckled. “Don’t tell me he was a conspiracy theorist!”
She shook her head. “Not at all. He considered them unbalanced souls with overly active imaginations and too much time on their hands.”
“So why that particular moment?”
She smiled. “If we were going to perform a test anyway, why not clear up some other mystery while we were at it?”
She opened a cabinet and removed a DVD. Then, she dimmed the lights, dropped the disk into the machine and pressed ‘play.’ For a brief moment, the screen remained blue, with only the date and time stamp showing at the bottom right-hand corner. 1963 11 22 12:27:31.
“Two minutes,” she said.
The image that came to light was that of a long, narrow grass-covered slope about thirty yards long and bounded at the top by a low wooden stockade-style fence and a concrete pergola.
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.”