Written in Time (46 page)

“Let me guess,” Ellen smiled. “Teddy Roosevelt gets together his old Rough Riders from the charge up San Juan Hill, and we take over the Lakewood time base here in 1900, then transfer ourselves back in force to their base in 1996. There’s a big battle scene, and you and Teddy Roosevelt seize control of the base.”
 

Jack laughed. “More or less.”
 

“Then what?” David inquired.
 

“Yeah. What he said,” Alan added.
 

“Kids,” Ellen remarked.
 

Jack thought for a minute. Ellen suggested, “Then we get Alan here to stay behind in the future. We set him up with his own friendlies, of course, making sure everything is secure. Then Alan works the time-transfer machinery for one last time, zaps us—”
 

“Us?”
 

“Guys are supposed to have all the fun? I don’t think so! Anyway, Alan works the time transfer machinery one last time, we all get back after saving the world and Alan destroys the time-transfer base so no one can come along and use it again.”
 

“There’s Morton Hardesty to consider,” Alan interjected. “As long as he’s alive and Bethany Kaminsky is alive to finance him, they could do it again. Hardesty and Jane Rogers were the only two who knew how to do this, and Jane is dead. With Morton alive, it’s just a hardware problem.”
 

“Then, God help us, we kill the Lakewood people,” Jack said.
 

“I never read that Teddy Roosevelt worked part time as a hit man,” Clarence volunteered.
 

Jack shrugged his shoulders. “We worry about that when we get there, to 1996.”
 

“Another problem,” Peggy offered. “What Kaminsky is doing is sheer genius, if you think about it. We’re here in her objective past. We know she’s got a time-travel gizmo that will allow her to change history, but no one in her objective present will know it. If Germany rules the world and Kaminsky’s company runs Germany, that’ll just be the way the century worked out. World War Two will have been a bloody skirmish with Japan. Soviet Communism will probably never arise because the Germans wouldn’t have any reason to help Lenin smuggle himself back into Czarist Russia, and Germany would already control Russia. She’ll be able to see just how much she’s changed history by simply going into the past where, if she’s as smart and evil as she sounds, she’ll have stored records that won’t have changed over the next hundred years because they’ll have preexisted the next hundred years.
 

They’ll read like fiction to her, but they’ll be the truth as it was, history before it was changed. No one in her time will notice a thing. With no World War Two, no Soviet Communism, probably no Chinese Communism, the world might be a much better place. We have to think about that.
 

“And, we’re assuming that Kaminsky will just be waiting around for us,” Peggy continued. “If Germany is going to be the best potential bidder for 1990s technology, and Lakewood Industries—”
 

“They have a facility not far from Ulm, I think,” Alan said somberly. “They could have a time-transfer base under construction somewhere in Germany right now. They could have people going out to Imperial Germany right now. This could already be so out of hand—”
 

“Look, son,” Jack interrupted, peering intently at his great-great-grandson. “We may already be screwed. I know that. We’re all aware of that possibility. Plans rarely go perfectly, even when you’re just writing them in a book, let alone real life. But we have to do something. Let’s say that Peggy’s idea that things might be somehow better if we let this alone has some merit. I don’t think it would be a better century. If the Germans control the world, even if there isn’t a Great Depression, Hitler might still come to power. How many so-called ‘inferior’ millions would he slaughter in the name of racial purity, if he didn’t have to worry about the rest of the world breathing down his neck and kicking his ass during a war? If he could devote full effort to it? If some things would be better and some things worse, it doesn’t mean that we have the right to alter the next century any more than Bethany Kaminsky does. We have an obligation to future history, to our own sense of right and wrong, to stop her. And preventing the Kaminsky woman from precipitating a century of what could be unimaginable destruction . . .” Jack stopped, not having any words left with which to express his feelings; he merely lowered his eyes.
 

Ellen spoke, and Jack raised his eyes to look at her. He’d studied the toes of his boots for an instant, but the exercise had neither enlightened nor soothed him. “Unlike a book, none of us can make the ending come out the way we want a hundred percent, because we don’t control the actions of the characters. Bethany Kaminsky might already have people pitching Germany, promising them nuclear weapons or something. Who knows? Jack’s right. Trying is all that we can do. So let’s stop talking about it and get started.”
 

Ellen was never idle, Jack mused. At times, when all he wanted to do was sit down and have a cigarette and Ellen started doing something or other that he should help her with, he found that trait just a little irritating. But those wonderful aspects of her character that defied description overwhelmed him. One thing that he had never done, in what had become the objective future, was to get Ellen to give a silent jukebox a slap in just the right spot, thus making the jukebox play. Secretly, he’d always believed that his wife and best buddy might well be capable of such a feat. She was so cool, after all, that it was like being married to a female version of the Fonz.
 

CHAPTER
SIXTEEN
 

The waves crashing against the seawall at the base of the Adler Planetarium were as high and wind driven as if it were a blustery evening in January, rather than the first week in November, but the breeze was only pleasantly cool, not bitterly cold.
 

It was, almost precisely, nine in the evening. Less than an hour earlier, Morton Hardesty—the man’s timidity disgusted her, but he was cute in his own way, so proud of the bedroom triumphs she engineered for his benefit— had told her that the time-transfer facility being built in Germany would not be ready for its initial testing for another several weeks.
 

Lester Matthews had insisted to her, after his return from 1900, that Alan Naile had to be dead. Yet Lester could not confirm that Alan was dead. And the description of the mysterious gunman who had “ambushed” Lester and his men sounded suspiciously similar to photographs she possessed of Jack Naile, the man whose son, David, would found Horizon Enterprises.
 

Bethany, who had majored in business and economics, knew only enough higher math to realize that she didn’t know enough. She had been standing beside her car for several minutes; bored with that, restless as she always was, she began to walk, her eyes on the crashing waves. Lake Michigan was not an ocean, of course, but it was vast and powerful, and it was here. That was enough, and driving to this place allowed her to think when knotty problems presented themselves. Since embarking upon her plan to alter the past to Lakewood Industries’ advantage, she had come here progressively more often.
 

Time-travel theory was like a Chinese puzzle box; Morton Hardesty was the only one who could open it. She gave him that, the ability to answer her questions without reminding her that her knowledge of mathematics was insufficient for understanding. “If Jack Naile were to die, chances are still excellent that David Naile would go on, make the family store thrive, and initiate Horizon Enterprises, especially since, unlike previous time loops, this time David knows what he is supposed to do in greater detail than ever before. Even if Alan didn’t survive, Clarence Jones and his wife can give—probably have given—David a pretty good picture of what Horizon Enterprises will become.
 

“Now, if David were killed, we’d have a problem, because Horizon Enterprises would probably never get started, and your relatives, between the two world wars, without Horizon’s competition, might not have accrued the wealth and power that they did. So, Lakewood Industries might be some third rate company, or not even exist anymore. They needed Horizon’s competition in order to thrive, as something to fight against.
 

“So it’s pretty safe if Jack and Ellen fall out of the picture. Elizabeth, too. We’d be vastly better off if Clarence and his wife were eliminated. Mrs. Jones is the only other person on earth, I believe, in this time or in the past, who might be able to reproduce the time-transfer mechanism. There are plenty of people who know pieces of it, but she and I are the only ones who know all the pieces. She wouldn’t understand the theory perfectly, doesn’t have the requisite skills, but she has the practical knowledge to duplicate the process by rote, if the budget and the hardware and software were available to her.
 

“So if you feel like it, kill them all except for David. You can’t even try to control him. You need him to do his thing, as they say. Do his thing. His thing makes your thing possible.”
 

Bethany kept walking, feeling a faint touch of spray on her cheek, smelling the water, hearing the reassuring click of her high heels beating a tattoo on the concrete sidewalk, barely audible but somehow empowering, reassuring beneath the keening of the wind.
 

Her research people had dug out everything that they could on Jack Naile in order to help her to computer model a second guess as to his intentions if, in fact, he was aware of the time-transfer base and had Alan—alive— with him.
 

Jack had been born in Chicago in 1946, which meant that this summer just past he had turned fifty. He’d married his high school sweetheart. Most women would have thought that charming, Bethany realized, but she thought it would be rather boring to bang or be banged by the same person all the time. He’d apparently developed a fascination with weapons and with typing. She’d read some of the novels penned by Jack and Ellen, things with heroes and dastardly villains and heroic feats of derring-do. Where was the angst? Where was the despair? Heroes did not now exist, nor had they ever nor would they ever; Bethany firmly believed that.
 

Although Naile and his wife had never published a western, Jack, at least, had always been deeply fascinated by the nineteenth-century American West. “Duh!” Bethany exclaimed into the wind as she walked, some of the lights from the Chicago Loop visible to the far west, beyond Grant Park. Anybody who believed in heroes obviously bought into the myth of the Old West.
 

Jack was probably grooving on this macho cowboy gunslinger shit. Maybe his wife would just get pissed off about it, have enough of her husband’s goofy crap and stab his ass to death; Bethany could only hope. “Twenty-eight years with one fucking guy,” she told the wind. “She’s some kinda friggin’ nutball, too.”
 

Bethany Kaminsky wondered—absently—if Jack played chess. How to run a business and how to play chess were the only two things her father had ever taught her that were at all useful. She played chess with Morty at times. He was very good, but she was always better. Sex and chess with Morty; mostly sex.
 

If Jack was this gunman who’d bested Lester, there might be more to him than she’d imagined. Apparently, he was capable of total ruthlessness. She liked that in a man.
 

Reaching her car again—she’d completely circumnavigated the planetarium—Kaminsky had made up her mind. With the facility outside Ulm, Germany, unable to become operational for what might be several more weeks, she would utilize the time-transfer base she had. Taking out her cell phone, she leaned on the hood of her car and brought up Lester’s cell phone. “Here’s what I want you to do. Get those guys—the salesmen—ready to travel. I want them out of here and back there and ready to get the deals rolling inside of forty-eight hours.”
 

He mumbled something; she didn’t care what because he took orders much better than he could think.
 

“Two teams for each prospective client, just in case this Naile cocksucker is really good. We need at least one team to get through to each government on the prospect list.”
 

Bethany cut the transmission.
 

Her computer models all pointed toward Jack, if he knew what was going on, taking steps to do something about it, to contravene her efforts. He would be sensible enough not to take on the small army of men she’d installed at the time-transfer base in 1900. He’d be hopelessly outnumbered and outgunned. The Naile family would have to find help.
 

In school, Bethany Kaminsky had found history boring, except as it concerned the acquisition of wealth. Lots of dead people and dates, punctuated by a few daring men who’d made fortunes or acquired so much power that they were above the concept of wealth. But Naile liked history. One of the computer models had focused on Naile’s political bent. The writings of Naile and his wife showed a strong leaning toward the philosophy known as Objectivism, as promulgated by Ayn Rand in her novels and other writings. Naile had been an outspoken supporter of Republicans for state and national offices. Nevada was granted statehood without some of the usual hoops through which to jump, it seemed, because of its strong connection to the Republican Party.
 

A Republican in a Republican stronghold, in an era with a Republican President—William MacIntosh? Not like the apple. McKinley. It was an election year, 1900. That same computer model—she could almost swear that sometimes the damned machines really could think—had posited that, with Jack’s love for history, fascination with cowboys and penchant for Republican politics, the logical man for him to go to, if he could get to him, would be Theodore Roosevelt.
 

Bethany had ordered a bio punched up on Roosevelt. He’d led a cowboy life, was a military man, had organized a police department, done all sorts of macho stuff like hunting and riding and shooting and boxing and all that crap. Theodore Roosevelt was also almost universally respected for his intellectual abilities, and had a reputation for being open to new ideas.