The phone buzzed in Maddy’s hand. ‘Sal?’
‘Did you feel it? The dizziness?’
‘I felt sort of nauseous about a minute ago. Thought it was my asthma,’ she said,glancing down at her inhaler.
‘I think… I think… that was a… that was IT.’
Maddy sat up. ‘What?… You mean a shift?’
Sal hesitated. ‘Yeah… there’s something else.’
‘What?’
‘On the big screen here…’
‘What?’
‘There’s a rocket on its way to Mars… I think.’
Maddy nearly splashed some coffee on to the keyboard. ‘You serious?’
‘I’m watching it right now… on CNN.’
Maddy looked up at the row of monitors in front of her. At first glance none of them appearedto be showing anything out of the ordinary. One showed Fox News and some dull political story,the second was tuned into MSNBC and a weatherman promising a warm sunny day tomorrow, the nextwas tapped into the stock exchange, another showed BBC News 24 and was running a story aboutthe Spice Girls’ forthcoming world tour and the tickets selling out within anhour…
‘Oh my God,’ she wheezed, suddenly short of breath.
But here they were promoting their seventh album!
‘You’re right! Something’s changed, Sal.’
She felt the burden of responsibility beginning to settle on her shoulders, rememberingFoster’s quiet pep talk, that it was down to her to pull the strings together, to makesense of the data…
…
She looked at the wall of screens in front of her and wondered where exactly she was supposedto make a start.
‘Thanks, Sal. I’ll call you back,’ she said quickly, and snapped her phoneshut. She tapped the keyboard and pulled up the CNN news feed. And there it was, a grainyimage of the crew inside some cramped vehicle broadcast from God knows how many hundreds ofthousands of miles away, and a computer graphic showing how far they’d gone, and howmuch further they’d yet to go.
‘Bigger than a freaking Spice Girls tour,’ she muttered.
She did a Google search on the Mars mission, quickly reading the results before her. Not forthe first time in recent days her jaw slackened and dropped open.
There was an
She dug deeper into the history of the programme.
Archived newspaper articles from 1983 described a conference of nations discussing thefunding of a ‘permanent lunar outpost’, to build an ‘orbiting missionplatform’ for ‘future projects further afield’.
She found even older newspaper articles, dating from the 1970s, a meeting of minds betweenthe Russian Premier Brezhnev and NASA’s goodwill ambassador John F. Kennedy…
She looked at the name again.
Her history wasn’t great. But she’d seen enough movies and read enough books tobe certain the guy died back in the sixties sometime.
She saw Kennedy’s name suddenly flash up on the CNN ticker-tape feed. A moment later anold man appeared on the screen, a very old man, frail and snowy-haired.
‘No way,’ she whispered, ‘that’s not him… is it?’
+++
Maddy stared at the old man on the screen. ‘Hang on. You should be dead,’ shesaid. ‘You should’ve died ages ago.’
She was almost certain it had happened sometime in the sixties. She vaguelyrecalled old news footage of an open-topped car, his wife wearing a pink dress in the backseat and Kennedy in a suit sitting beside her, both of them waving to crowds gathered at theroadside.
She remembered seeing old news footage from a shaky hand-held cine-camera…
The name of the place where this happened came to her out of the blue.
‘Dallas, Texas,’ she uttered.
She typed a search phrase into Google:
[+Kennedy +Dallas +assassination]
The search returned only one link that featured all three words. It was from a newspaperarticle dated 22 November 1963. It was an article about a ‘suspected aborted attempt onthe president’s life’. She clicked the link and a newspaper article appeared onscreen.
… a.41 calibre rifle found abandoned on the sixth floor of the School BookDepository overlooking Dealey Plaza. The man suspected of owning the gun, a Mr Lee Oswald,was later arrested at his home. He claimed to have made plans to kill the president duringhis visit to Dallas, but said he changed his mind at the very last moment. The story isfurther complicated by sightings of three strangers in the same building at the time the president’s motorcade was passing, who staff described as‘being dressed like vagrants’ and were certain had no reason to be inthere…
Maddy slapped the bench and yelped. ‘Yes!’
She knew exactly where and when Foster and the others had gone back to.
‘Found you!’ she screamed triumphantly.
1963, Dallas, Texas
The three of them watched the president’s car slowly roll past them and uptowards the overpass in the distance.
‘Information: time contamination is increasing,’ announced Bob in a calmemotionless voice. ‘Mission priority: correct time violation.’
Liam looked at Bob. ‘Um… how are we going to do that?’
‘Recommendation: kill John F. Kennedy.’
‘What?’ gasped Liam. ‘
Foster shook his head. ‘Not this time, Liam. Relax.’
Bob’s deep voice chimed again with an increasingly insistent tone.‘Recommendation: kill John F. Kennedy immediately.’
