Time Flying (29 page)

The laughing won, and for half a minute, we laughed, breaking the tension brought on by the fact we both were living in the middle of a strange, unbelievable...something...that had thrown us, not physically, but our minds, our beings, back in time, and if that wasn't enough, into a shooting war. My war meant flying every day and night against Iraqi ground defenses (since the Iraqi Air Force had fled to Iran - much to Pat's chagrin) and Seaman Jefferson Campbell stuck on a crowded ship not fighting, but making sure the military assets on board had the support they needed to fight. His, was, in many ways, an even more stressful job.

For some reason, the thought of an old version of this young man, after a lifetime sailing around the world on fighting ships, falling down the stairs of his daughter's house, was hilariously funny to both of us.

When we had both recovered from our laughing enough to speak, I asked “Head first, or feet first?”

“The damn cleaning woman had just waxed the stairs,” he answered, his laughter replaced by a hint of anger at the memory. “I mean who in the goddamn hell...Sorry, sir...uses floor wax on wooden stairs?” We both shook our heads, laughter returning to his eyes.

Then he looked up at me and said, “You know what my last memory is?”

I shrugged.

“My ass hitting the top stair, and passing gas so loud it sounded like the Vulcan AA gun amidships,” he said in a clear, loud voice, kicking off another fit of laughter from both of us.

The laughter again subsided, and Campbell asked me “What about you, sir? How did you get here?”

“Car accident in 2007,” I answered, lowering my voice a bit and looking around like he had a few minutes before.

He nodded. “Makes sense. I figured it had to be a bump on the head...Or else we're dead.”

“We're not dead, Chief, this is bona fide time travel we've somehow managed to engage in,” I replied.

Campbell's eyes narrowed as he considered what I said. “How can you be sure?”

“You haven't met any other time travelers?” I asked, surprised, until I reminded myself he'd only been back here a few months. Then again, I had learned the truth, from the former time traveler Thelma, my sister's nanny. I guess I hadn't realized how lucky I had been to be able to benefit from her experience, so early in my time back here.

Campbell shook his head in answer to my question, “You have?”

“My little sister's nanny in 1976. She had some sort of stroke that put her back to when she was about 20. By the time I met her, she had returned to her life, but she explained a lot to me.”

The sailor considered this, looking off into the gray distance while he did so, and then asked “Were you still in when your accident happened, or had you retired?”

“I wasn't Navy the first time around,” I answered simply.

Campbell hadn't expected this answer, and looked puzzled. “Really? You changed things that much?” he asked.

“I was 47 years old when I had the car wreck, and woke up in ’76. My sister's nanny told me her story, and I decided to do things differently, to make different choices this time around, both for myself and for a couple of other people,” I explained, condensing my story into a few lines.

“Damn,” was Jefferson Campbell's reply, as he shook his head in disbelief. “Damn.” I could tell this impressed him, because he hadn't apologized for his language.

I figured it was time to tell him. “You may be here for a long time, Chief,” I said.

“Yea,” he replied, thinking it through.

Thelma had lived in the past for almost 30 years. Jefferson Campbell had returned to age 20 from a time when after he retired, and his trip back may have been 40 years. It dawned on me that this man had lived well beyond 2007. But how far?

“Jefferson,” I said, “what year was it when you fell down the stairs?”

“Twenty-forty-eight, sir,” he replied. Then, I saw in his face his thought process catching up to what I was getting at. “That’s way in the future for you, isn't it, Commander?”

My eyes had widened, my face betraying how shocked I was. “We've got to talk, Chief.”

“Absolutely, sir,” Jefferson replied, a smile on his face as he realized the situation. “And by the way, it's 'Master Chief,' but I'm not sure you should use that here,” he continued, conspiratorially glancing around.

I laughed, agreeing, “Probably not.”

Later, I lay on my bunk in the stateroom I shared with another B/N, Bill Wyndom. Sometimes pilots and their B/Ns shared a room, sometimes not. Pat and another pilot, Tom Grover, both such loud snorers, no one within a 30 foot perimeter could sleep, so they bunked in together.

Wyndom had left to grab some “mid-rats," the mid watch rations served for sailors going on or off watch, before briefing a mission, so I was alone, thinking about my chance encounter with Jefferson Campbell earlier in the afternoon. I couldn't help feeling the irony of the fact that the only two other time travelers I had met in 15 years here, both were black. Coincidence, I figured. Thelma was there all along, a time traveler who I only found out about when my future consciousness returned to my 17 year old body. She was the Thelma who had traveled to her past, but was she the Thelma I knew growing up the first time? Would the Thelma who took care of my sister the first time I lived those years have had any idea of what I was talking about if I'd suggested time travel to her?

I was also a little suspicious about the song Campbell had been singing on the fantail, Uncle Kracker's “Follow Me,” a song from both a long time ago for him, since he traveled here from 2048, but also a long way from here, 1991. Before we went our separate ways, after planning to meet again on the fantail in two days (officers and enlisted personnel don't tend to mix unofficially in the Navy, so we'd have to be careful not to be seen talking too often), I asked him about the song. He said he collected vintage music and had owned that album on “optical,” as he called a CD, which are apparently a dead format in 2048, mostly collected by enthusiasts by then, like vinyl in 2007.

I remained a little uneasy about the coincidences involved.

Jefferson Campbell had fallen down the stairs of his daughter's house in Chicago, hit his head, and woke up in his bunk at the Great Lakes Recruit Training Command, in Basic Training. Like me, he played along while trying to figure out what the hell had happened, and eventually figured out he was going to be here awhile. In our talk on the fantail, he didn't ask about what ends the experience, but I have a sneaking suspicion he knows. For him, it would mean returning to 2048, a 77 year old widower living with his daughter, a grandmother herself. I, on the other hand, would return to the middle part of my life, looking forward to several more decades of life. Ours were very different situations.

What thrilled me, however, was that Jefferson Campbell's history is my future. The decades he lived between 2007 and 2048 are unknown to me. Much like I'd flippantly told Thelma on the evening she revealed to me  she too had traveled in time, to “buy stock in Apple and real estate in Phoenix and Las Vegas,” Campbell had information that could be important to me and my family. Or families, because for the most part, these two timelines (or three timelines, when you include Jefferson's, since I don't believe he is from my other one) are virtually identical in how they play out, at least that was my assumption.

I swung my legs around, sitting up on the bunk, got up and walked to the small desk Wyndom and I shared. I opened the small personal compartment above the desk, took out a notebook and pen and started a letter to Amanda.

There was nothing special about the letter I wrote to my wife, which contained the usual “I miss you and the boys,” “I love you and can't wait to see you again,” kind of stuff. I wrote a couple pages of non-specific day to day things about life on the boat, and signed it. I also included a section about “one of the guys on the ship who had a background similar to mine,” a hobbyist stock trader, had some tips for us. I told her if she couldn't find some of the stock symbols, to keep looking. They would show up, eventually. I hoped she understood my meaning, and the intel-types who occasionally scanned our mail for security leaks wouldn't.

After finishing the letter to Amanda, I lay back down, and managed to drift off to sleep, wrapped in the muffled, but constant hum of the ship at sea.

TWELVE

Overboard

Two days later, I found myself on
Ranger’s
fantail again, looking forward to talking again with Seaman First Class Jefferson Campbell, but he didn't show.

I waited half an hour, growing uneasy about the whole thing, wondering if meeting him had been some kind of joke or prank. I couldn't imagine how, since only one person in the Navy had any idea about my situation, Walt Steinberg, not in any way a practical joker. The 'Follow Me' element was unexplainable any other way, since Uncle Kracker wrote the song written in 2000.
Ranger
's library had a copy of the book Billboard's Greatest Hits, listing thousands of songs, including at least four other songs by the same name, but not the Uncle Kracker tune.

I left the fantail, deciding to come back every day until I ran into Campbell again.

The young sailor had been detained by some extra duty, and he apologized two days later, when I rounded the corner on the fantail, almost running into him as he stood, looking out at
Ranger
’s wake, smoking a cigarette.

“I thought you planned to give those up, 'Master Chief,’” I said loudly enough for him to hear, but not so loud anyone more than a few feet away would understand.

Jefferson turned around quickly, pulling the cigarette from his mouth quickly, but out of respect for an officer close by, rather than because he was embarrassed being caught smoking. He stood to attention for a brief, respectful moment, then chagrined, looked down at his right hand, holding the offending cancer stick, and said, “Small steps, sir. But, I was thinking about it last night and I realized at 77 years old, I wasn’t dying from lung cancer, heart disease or diabetes.”

“What was killing you?” I asked.

“Multiple Sclerosis,” he answered, shaking his head. “Can you believe it? I smoked all my life but MS was getting me.”

I nodded sympathetically. I'd had an aunt with MS. Not pretty, what the disease can do to you.

“Yea, the slick stairs didn’t make me fall,” he admitted. “My leg gave out and I took a bad tumble.” The cigarette went back into his mouth. “I’m still going to stop this, though. It’s a nasty habit.”

“So, how's the war treating you, Master Chief?” I asked, a small smile on my face at using the rank he'd achieved his first time through this life.

“Same as last time, Commander,” he replied, a slightly bigger smile on his face, or at least what he tried to pretend was a smile. The sailor seemed distracted, but relaxing a bit, he replaced the cigarette in his mouth and turned back toward the water.

“You OK?” I asked, stepping toward the railing and looking out at the ocean behind, at a sky much bluer than the last time we met on
Ranger
's fantail.

“I’m fine, sir,” he replied, flicking the cigarette through the railing into the sea. “This thing is up and down...I don't need to tell you,” he continued. “One minute I'm filled with the excitement of living all of it again, making different choices, becoming someone else, someone I had been afraid to be the first time, and the next, I’m feeling like I'm looking up at Kilimanjaro, dressed in gym shorts and shower sandals, not sure I can climb so far.”

I nodded in understanding. There was the loyalty you had to those who you left behind in the time stream you came from, but you knew (or at leas strongly suspected) they were fine and you'd be reunited with them. What about those you had left behind here when you chose a path leading away from them? My biggest motivator here had been just that, making a life with Amanda, keeping her safe, unconnected in every way from Steve Collins, and most importantly,
alive
. Before you suggest I could have easily changed history by keeping her away from the party they had attended on the night of the car crash, then with her premature death averted, gone on about my life reconnecting with Molly, and doing my best to build the family I had before, please understand I tried to work that idea out in any number of ways. The root of the problem that killed Amanda would have remained whether she and Steve went to the party or not. The only way for me to change history was to change history.

But, I don't blame anyone for making the argument. When I made it myself, I kept coming back to two major problems. First, how would I know the only time Steve would drive drunk with Amanda in the car was that night? He was poison, and I had to make sure they disconnected completely and forever. Second, who is to say the me I had become would be someone Molly would be interested in? I was no prize when we met. I was broken, but had promise, and I think the combination of those two things was what interested Molly in me. She helped fixed me, and we built a life together, in addition to creating the most wonderful child in the world. I'm not sure if I went to Croce's to hear whatever band performed on the night in the late 80s when Molly and I met, in or out of uniform, but everything about me screaming “Navy,” I'd get a second glance from her. Which means the campaign needed to initiate and join our lives together in this timeline would have, in all probability, been almost impossible, and would have ended badly.

“You know, Jefferson,” I began, “you can't look at it like a mountain to climb. Follow the path that seems right. Fix the things you regret from the last time you went through these years, the things you broke, or let stay broke, and take the path which opens in front of you.” It's what I'd done, what Thelma had done and was the best advice I had.

“To put tracing paper over a picture of what you remember of your previous life and try to recreate what you had is impossible,” I continued. “No matter how good a tracer you are, you can't see everything you need to reproduce the life you had. It will never be the original, at best a bad copy. At worst, you'll break the hearts of everyone involved.”