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EVADING HISTORY

by Hank Davis



Being able to travel back in time wouldn’t necessarily rule out also being able to travel sideways to parallel Earths. And if one were used as a weapon, the other might be able to counter the attack.


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Mulling over her impending speech, the President walked down the hallway toward the door leading to the big room where the press awaited, likely with hostilities simmering. Her high heels clicked on the polished hallway floor in counterpoint to the steps of the three Secret Service agents, one on either side, and the third walking behind. Their concealed weapons were loaded, naturally but holstered, not immediately at hand.

The Commander in Chief expected trouble, but that would come after she had given her speech, and then only the political sort, with words as the weapons; and that would be from the opposition and from the media, who were much the same thing.

So, when a slender figure in an odd face-covering helmet and what looked like some sort of body armor stepped forward on one side, as if through a door, a door that wasn’t there, said, “I’m sorry, guys,” and raised what turned out to be a weapon and began firing, the guards never had a chance.

The President froze, though not in fear. She had seen military service two decades earlier and was thinking rapidly, evaluating the situation . . . which looked hopeless.

“Madam President,” the intruder said, “you are in danger but not from me. We only have minutes—” The intruder stopped talking as a second figure appeared, again stepping forward into the hall as if from a door that wasn’t there. The first intruder fired with a different weapon, this one causing a glowing hole to appear in the midsection of the second arrival, who dropped something that looked like some futuristic movie’s idea of a rifle, then collapsed to the polished floor.

The President fought off shock as her old battle habits awoke, and tried to catch up with what had just happened. Even so, an idiot part of her mind was still running on autopilot, still going over the speech she had been about to give. At the same time, still seeing no escape from this impossible assassin, she caught up with the moment enough to think that the second intruder had been larger, stockier, dressed oddly, but still seeming to be in a uniform, while the first intruder was shorter, more slender, and—seconds after she had heard that one speak, the President realized that the assassin had spoken with a woman’s voice, a familiar woman’s voice . . .

“Madam President,” that familiar voice was saying, “you have to believe me that I’m not here to harm you—”

She paused as two more armed uniformed figures stepped from nowhere into the hall and attacked the first arrival. She dropped them both, but one had managed a grazing shot that made their target’s shin glow dull red and sent a curling wisp of smoke into the air.

With a growing feeling of being disconnected from reality, the President wondered if the rising smoke would mar the paintings sprawling across the ceiling. And she noticed that the stranger didn’t seem to be in pain from the shot that had grazed her leg, nor was she having any trouble standing on that leg. And that the part of the wall which had received most of the weapon’s fire was blackened with flames licking about that part’s edges.

The part of her mind that had written, then edited, then rewritten and reedited the speech during the past week was still running it through her consciousness, like a mindless playback machine. My fellow Americans, as President Lincoln once reminded his countrymen, “We cannot escape history . . .”

“Madam President—Jaybird—you must escape history. Right now,” the first unauthorized arrival said.

Hearing a variation on the quotation in her speech brought her into focus. She realized that only a few seconds had elapsed, still long enough for her world to collapse into violent death and chaos, and that the stranger’s voice was as familiar as her own. She had heard that voice speaking from innumerable soundbites, campaign ad clips, from interview playbacks. It was . . .

The intruder removed the helmet as she stepped forward, showing the familiar Roman nose, the green eyes, the red hair with the familiar invasions of gray . . .

. . . her own voice. Her own face.

“Jaybird,” her own voice said, using the stranger’s mouth, “I’m finished, but you’ve got to get out of here. You have to make that speech.”

President Rachel Jaye Carlyle had stopped running over the speech in her head, and now the stranger had started the recording running again, bizarrely, insanely, with the stranger—her twin?—addressing her by the nickname her father had given her. Her father was long dead and nobody else had ever called her that, not even her late husband . . .

. . . until now.

Stepping forward, the intruder was now standing only a meter away from her, and the President stepped backwards, only now becoming conscious that her guards, not just guards but each a friend, all friends outside of duty, were lying dead on the floor. But she couldn’t look down, couldn’t look away from this insane woman’s face, from her own face, her own green-eyed gaze.

Then she saw motion, barely visible at the bottom of her field of vision, and did look down. One of the Secret Service agents—Trevor—was stirring slightly, moving an arm aimlessly.

“They’re not dead; or at least they shouldn’t be,” the strange woman said. “But snooze darts don’t always work as advertised.” She grimaced, then returned those mirrorlike green eyes to the President’s face. “They’re my friends, too, in another, uh, location, and I’m sorry to steal their last few moments of consciousness, but they would have been dead in a few minutes anyway, just as you will be, if you don’t listen to me. So snap out of it, Jaybird!”

Then the intruder fired her gun over the President’s shoulder. The sound of something or someone falling to the floor came from behind the President, who did not turn around.

“Listen! If we were characters in a story, here’s what they call the expository lump. I remember that from English 101, so you remember it, too. I’ve come from a parallel universe, like in that Murray Leinster story we both read in Dad’s old book, and I’m the President there, in that universe, as you are in this one. I have to give that speech—”

My speech? But—”

“No time! If you start asking questions, we’re both dead. That speech is going to have unintended and unexpected consequences, an avalanche of them. It will go around the world and be repeated by multitudes—”

“It’s only a routine speech about our commitment to—”

“No time, Jaybird. Nobody expected the impact, but that speech changed the world. So people who didn’t like those changes sent agents back in time to kill me before I could deliver it.”

“They failed? Then why—?”

“No, they succeeded. I’ll be dead in a few minutes. My world’s technology is over a century ahead of yours, but it can’t save me, so I’ve used our knowledge of time to cross the universes to get you to deliver the speech. You’re a parallel version of me. And you have nothing to lose.”

“Why did those men only shoot at you, then? Why not me?”

“They would have, if I hadn’t gotten them first. But they weren’t trying to kill me, just stop me. I’m already dead and if they take me down, the game’s over and you’re harmless. You’re the secondary target. If I go down while we’re both here, you can’t take my place. But you have to leave right now, before it’s too late.”

“Too late? Why do you keep saying that? And what do you mean that you’re already dead?”

The alternate President Carlyle grimaced, as if from a sudden internal pain. “They got to me somehow, maybe in my meals, maybe in my drinks. You know how much social drinking we have to do. Maybe even in the air I inhaled. Over a period of weeks or months, I took in nanotech devices. They lived in me, off me, invisible to X-rays, growing, separate pieces coming together, assembling inside me. By the time we found out, it was too late. The device couldn’t be removed, and it’s counting down. When it goes off, it’ll incinerate me. New meaning for ‘ashes to ashes.’ So I can’t give the speech in my world—you’ll have to go there and do it.”

“I can’t just leave, even if I believe you—and I think I do. Abandon my responsibilities. And my Vice President isn’t up to—”

“Neither is mine,” the other President said, grinning, but with a hint of pain behind it. “We both were stuck with the same bozo from the northeast. But your version doesn’t matter, either, since he’s over in the Senate right now.”

“What does that have to do with it? And why do you keep saying I have nothing to lose?”

In a few hard, ruthless words, the dying President told the living one, who took a deep breath, then forgot about breathing.

The alternate President added, “I could show you tomorrow’s headlines, but we don’t have time for more than a glance.” The offer received a headshake, and the visitor glanced down at the three fallen Secret Service agents. And said, “They have nothing to lose, either. But their counterparts are still alive in that other universe.”

This universe’s President was just starting to breathe again, when her counterpart added, “And Alfred is still alive where I come from.”

Rachel’s breathing stopped again, and she couldn’t understand why her heart hadn’t done the same. The words Alf alive were thundering in her brain, drowning out everything else for a moment.

“And he still hates to be called ‘Alfred.’ Thinks it’s a name for a butler.”

The world came into focus again, though not the same world she had known a few minutes ago. No, not even a few seconds ago. He’s alive!

“I believe you. I’ll go. But if more of those assassins come after me—?”

“We had tracked down all but four of them with our cross-temporal tech, and that’s the number decorating the floor over there. As for travelers back from the future, we’ve set up a counter-entropic shield around Washington to stop them for now. And after you give the speech, they won’t matter.”

“We must be almost out of time—”

“We are. If we can’t escape history, maybe we can evade it. Thank you, Jaybird.”

The President from elsewhen took a thick metallic belt from around her waist and clicked it in place around the President from this timeline, who said, “No, thank you,” as the visiting head of state pressed a recessed button on the buckle.

She had time to say, “Kiss him for me . . .” before the other President Carlyle seemed to shrink, with openings etched in nothingness shaped like her silhouette, increasing in number as she grew smaller, surrounding her like the concentric rings of a freshly sawn tree stump.

“ . . . in all his favorite places,” the dying woman finished her sentence. She glanced at the four dead would-be assassins. Their crosstime equipment hadn’t run out of juice yet, or they would have disappeared back when they had come. It took considerable power to go into a parallel universe, and more to remain there. Unless you changed places with a copy of yourself, as she had done. She glanced next at the three still unconscious Secret Service agents and again said, “I’m sorry, guys,” this time in a whisper.

She heard the door behind her open, turned and saw the press secretary, Ashley, a duplicate of her own, holding one of the double doors open and looking into the hall, probably to see what the delay and noise was. She could see the floor-to-ceiling windows behind him, and closed her eyes, snapping her face away from the sight barely in time, as the windows filled with a light brighter than any eyes could handle which had evolved at the bottom of a protective atmosphere.

Squinting carefully, Rachel looked back and saw the expanding incandescent fireball of plasma rushing toward those windows, outpacing the shock wave that otherwise would have sent thousands of glass daggers into the room and the hallway and through her.

Nice try, you little bastard, she thought at the humming killer inside her, but you’ve been beaten to the punch. In her last fraction of a second of existence, she realized that she had seen films and videos of the familiar mushroom clouds of nuclear explosions but never one with her own eyes. Nor would she see this one.

But she would be part of it. A tiny invisible part of inescapable history.


This one is for A. E. Van Vogt.



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