Justification For Killing (31 page)

“
Less than seven years
later the U.S. was embroiled in yet another war, this time with
Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Jordan, Egypt, Syria and a couple of other
smaller nations. This was the Southwest Asian War. This war killed
millions of people too. It lasted from 1991 until 2008. You,
unfortunately, were one of the casualties Bud. You had been in the
National Guard, and your unit was activated and deployed to the
Middle East. Later, while your unit was fighting in Iraq, you
fatally succumbed in one of Saddam Hussein’s poison gas
attacks.

“
Bud, the Purple Heart
Award and the Death Certificate - both, from that Parallel
Universe, sadly I have to say were truly yours. Bud you cannot
believe how devastated we were when the Army Chaplin personally
delivered the news of your death to Trey and Krista.”

Krista spoke up, “Captain,
wait! I don’t remember any of this - I never saw an Army Chaplin.
Bud killed! I definitely would have remembered something as
devastating as that!”

“
You’re correct Krissy -
you have no memory or knowledge of this other Universe, just like
you have no memory of hundreds or maybe thousands of other
Universes you may be in at this very moment.”

“
Captain,” said Krista,
“this is all so confusing it sounds like science
fiction.”

“
When Anhur approached me
yesterday, he allowed me to use an alien device, they call the
Visiondome, to see what our world would be like if President
Kennedy had not survived the assassination in Dealey Plaza, Dallas,
Texas on November 22, 1963.

“
In this
Alternate Universe world that I was shown there was no Viruchi War,
no Southwest Asian War. Without this war, Bud you did not have to
die... this alone convinced me to try
Pegasus
myself for the fourth time.
Even if I never returned, I had to try to change our future. I had
to insure President John F. Kennedy WAS assassinated at 12:30 p.m.
on November 22, 1963, AND I DID!!!

“
I left this meeting with
you all, carried my duffle bag and camera downstairs to the lab. At
exactly 2:30:00 I dematerialized from the Universe of yesterday and
materialized forty-nine years earlier to attempt to change our
Universe onto a different Universal path.

Anhur had informed me the
split in the Universe must occur at exactly 12:30 p.m. November 22,
1963 at Dealy Plaza, Dallas, Texas. The trigger was the
assassination of President John F. Kennedy. I will tell you now it
worked. I left from one Universe and returned one day later to an
entirely new world – the world we are living in today.

Gabby the change in the
Universes explains why the items in my bag seem so strange. Those
items of yesterday represent a Universe where President Kennedy was
only wounded, the Universe of today is a world in which he died,
but remember, I kept my bag with me the entire time I was gone so
the items in my duffle would not have changed. They would be the
same today as they were yesterday. As I crossed between the two
Universes, the duffle bag and its contents crossed with
me.”

Gabby spoke again,
“Grandpa, I hear the words coming out of your mouth, and I have
never heard you tell us a deliberate lie, but Grandpa you sure are
stretching the truth with all of this. I’m still not convinced you
left us in that Lightening Bug thing from one world and then
returned in the present world we now live in. This is all very,
VERY confusing to me.”

“
Bolt! Gabby, not ‘Bug’.
Okay,” Grandpa said clicking his remote control. “Take a look at
this picture on the screen. The one I took after walking across
this room, but before I opened the door to go
downstairs.”

Instantly the screen on
the front wall was covered with a scene of the group sitting around
the table staring at Captain Scarburg taking their
picture.

“
Gabby, look at this
picture - you all are sitting at the conference table – notice
again the seat between Lou and Olive Marie is empty!! Don’t you see
Gabby? Bud was not present when I left!!

Gabby said. “But no, wait
a minute Grandpa! Bud got up and went to the restroom.”

“
You’re right
granddaughter, but AFTER I left. He should have been at the table
WHEN I left.”

Gabby, shaking her head
said, “Grandpa, I said a while ago I believed everything you said.
I now want to put an asterisk beside that statement. I now believe
I grasp what you are doing, you are trying to get us to go to
Dallas, and I’m totally against it. I bought into the whiteboard
changey thing, and I was blown away with the props concerning the
Army’s award of the Purple Heart and Bud playing the missing man
game and all that other stuff from the brown envelope. Even that
last picture with Bud’s empty chair between Lou and Olive Marie was
ingenious, still can’t figure out how you pulled it off, but it was
real good. I’ll give you credit for that Grandpa.

“
Now this talk of you
going back to Texas, I just cannot buy all of that. You were only
gone less than thirty minutes - yet you say three days?

Yeah, right!!

You’re trying to
gently lay the suggestion on our subconscious minds how exciting a
mission would be if we went to Dallas ourselves. I emphasis the
word ‘would’ - you are just telling us a make-believe story and
inserting yourself in as the main character, so we will imagine the
thrill and excitement of such an adventure. Just like I said
earlier, you’re trying to make us do something. You think we will
beg to be thrown on that ‘time-traveling’ pie in the sky, pipe
dream, hunk of junk. Oh, I’m sorry – your
Pegasus
flying machine
thing-a-ma-jig. Tell me Grandpa that I’m wrong.”

“
Gabby, I...
I...”

“
See, I told you, it is
all a fictitious story, right?”

“
Krista, load up the rest
of my pictures and tell me when they are loaded.”

“
Hold on Grandpa, I
thought you only took three pictures.”

“
Your correct Gabby –
three pictures – up HERE in the conference room. Let me begin the
slide show from the time I went downstairs.

“
Grandpa, I have been
sitting here listening to all you have said, and don’t get me wrong
some of it makes sense, but a lot of it is foggy. I can’t grasp
this Parallel Universe thing yet. Daddy, Bud, Lou, Sam Lin, Spook,
Tinker and Lei Li you are all scientists, so this probably makes
sense to you all. Mom, I guess you and Dad have been working around
these crazy people long enough that it probably makes sense to you
too. You admit I only have an Anthropology degree, so you
understand this is not my forte. Grandpa just tell me in simple
words, plain English, what do you want us to do?”

“
Thought
you would never ask - for the few minutes, to you, I was gone, I
experienced almost three days of the most unimaginable adventure.”
Pushing the button to the projector’s remote control, the Captain
said, “This is the first picture after I left you guys as I was
being ‘launched’ from our lab in
Pegasus
.” He then went into detail
of his ‘launch’. “I snapped this one looking out the porthole in
the laboratory,” he explained. He went on to tell how he had taken
the next two shots of the cow pasture in Texas after his landing.
He had to point out how
Pegasus
landed in a pasture about forty miles north of
Dallas, outside the town of Celina. He went into detail describing
the couple of problems he had, “to begin with,” he said, “I landed,
tilted at about a thirty-degree angle, on a tree stump, and, oh,
did I fail to mention it was on the wrong day! I was supposed to
arrive at 12:30 on Friday November 22, 1963; however, I plopped
down in that pasture on Wednesday the 20th, two days early.”
Captain Scarburg then explained what he saw in and around the cow
pasture.

“
Oh, almost forgot I took
this one,” he said switching to picture number four on the screen.
“This is a shot of the farmhouse where I got the red shirt and the
blue overalls; the very clothes I was later arrested for stealing.”
Pulling the shirt and overalls from the bag he held them up for all
to see.

“
Pictures five, this one,
and now picture six were taken going into Clem and Penelope’s home
they call the ‘Ponderosa’. I snapped both of these from their
driveway. Clem and Penelope were the nicest people. He was a
handyman and part-time limo driver, and Penelope was an
every-now-and-then waitress. Admirable folks, yes, admirable people
I tell you.

“
I had to have
transportation to get from Celina, Texas to Dallas. As you can see
in picture seven, we used Clem’s Nash station wagon. Here, we are
getting ready to back it out of Clem’s shed. See this is a shot of
the back of Clem’s grey car parked in the shed.

“
Clem and I drove into
Dallas, Thursday morning on November 21, 1963 and went straight to
Jack Ruby’s Carousel Club. Here is my picture number eight, a view
of the outside steps of the Carousel Club before we went
inside.

“
The next pictures were
taken inside Ruby’s club. Notice the guy with the brown fedora hat
sitting with his back to the wall, that’s Jack Ruby. The other
pictures are all Mafia bosses.” Captain Scarburg explained the
subterfuge he had to use to get these snapshots. And he detailed
how he was arrested for stealing the shirt and overalls, and
carried to the Dallas City Jail just a couple of minutes after
those pictures were taken.

For the next half hour, or
so, the Captain painted a word picture of his stay in Dallas’s
Finest – their city jail; he told the group how he left the message
for J.D. Tippit on the cell wall; how concerned he was Clem was not
going to arrive to get him out of jail in time to meet his 12:30
rendezvous on the Texas School Book Depository roof with the
presidential assassin.

“
Clem bailed me out of the
Dallas City Jail just minutes before the 12:30 assassination. This
next snapshot was taken as I looked north toward the School Book
building. It was taken from the sidewalk as I walked out onto
Houston Street from the jail. If you look at the picture closely, I
believe you can faintly see someone already in the sixth floor
sniper’s window. I’m going to give this photo to our lab and see if
they might be able to enhance it enough to see who is there. It
might be possible they could enlarge the image so we could identify
that person. Look down to the far end of the roof and you can just
barely get a glimpse of another assassin. He was my target.” He
proceeded to detail the movement he and Clem made from his release
from jail to his encounter with the man on the roof.

“
I was on the rooftop of
the Texas School Book Depository the exact second President John F.
Kennedy was shot. I was extremely fortunate to disrupt one of the
snipers.

“
This next photo is a
snapshot of that very same sniper. I took it standing on the fire
escape a second or two before I charged the assassin. I hit him
just as he fired his rifle.

“
As he and I were tumbling
on the roof, I distinctly heard a shot coming from the vicinity of
the sixth floor, one floor beneath me and back toward the east end
of the building. My assassin jumped to his feet and fled down the
fire escape. He only fired one un-aimed shot. As he was escaping, I
hurried to the four-foot wall surrounding the top of the School
Book building and gazed down on the macabre scene that was taking
place below me. I’m ashamed to admit, I was totally enthralled. I
was in a state of mind even I cannot describe: I was watching
history unfolding in front of my very eyes.

“
I saw the President the
moment the bullet struck him in the back, I saw Secret Service
Agent Hill jump on the trunk. This photo I snapped from the roof,
looking down on President Kennedy’s black limousine just as the
second sniper shot was being fired.

“
Here, is the most
startling thing I saw. Maybe saw is not the right word, I heard a
shot coming from the vicinity of the Grassy Knoll - it was not a
rifle shot. It sounded more like a high-powered handgun. I tried to
see the assassin, but I was running out of time and had to get off
the roof before being caught. This picture I took of the grassy
area, which is now referred to as the Grassy Knoll. I snapped it
from the rooftop before running to escape. This photo was taken
just a second or two after the shot was fired from the Grassy
Knoll. I got a picture of the assassin running away from the wooded
area.”

“
Wait a minute,” Spook
loudly interjected, “Can you enlarge that figure - that looks like
a WOMAN!!”

Suddenly the room grew
silent - you could have heard a pin drop as the Captain spoke, “Let
me say, yes, this person I saw running away from that area was a
WOMAN! And for some reason I think I have seen this woman
before.

“
What? What are you saying
Captain that one of the assassins was a WOMAN? And you have seen
her before?”

“
Yes, Spook, it was a
woman, and I really do believe I have seen her. This photo is
presently in our lab to be enlarged and also enhanced. Once they
have obtained a clear image of the assassins face they will run it
through the facial recognition software. We must find out who she
is. She is the first person, besides Oswald that has ever been
directly linked to the Kennedy assassination. Anyway, let me
continue.”