“Snaps,” I echo. “But what’s a park in the scheme of things, I suppose? I doubt that’ll change the big picture. Maybe it all settles down and the park was just part of the temporary perturbation.”
“And your wife. Bess?”
“She was definitely a perturbation. Every fucking day.” Gallie laughs and I do, too. “But then, so was I.”
I hadn’t seen Gallie laugh before. Not a real, convulsive laugh. Her face folds in on itself, her shoulders shake and she radiates.
“Anyhow,” Gallie continues, “if we’re right, Asmus is no petty time vandal. He’s going for gold–a mass destruction of the timeline.”
“But he’d be his own victim more likely than not, wouldn’t he?”
“He’s a psychopath. The power outweighs the risk for someone like him.” She swirls the liquid in her cup.
“So what’s he’s doing? What nuclear-grade vandalism is he up to?” Gallie goes quiet. I sense she’s giving pause to what she should tell me, maybe even regretting what she already had.
“A theory?” she says.
“I’ll settle for a theory.”
“We know where your team wound up. Late eighteenth century, Pennsylvania.” Gallie looks for my reaction, which turns out to be a gormless stare. “Maybe just coincidence, but that time and place give the clue.”
Even my thin knowledge of history yields a result. “The Revolutionary War?”
“If you wanted to shake things up just for the sake of shaking them up, you could do worse than mess with the founding of today’s most powerful state.”
“Shake up? How?”
“I’m balancing theory on top of more theory, but say you wanted a different outcome to that war. How would you do it?”
I ponder this and know my answer is banal. “Kill George Washington?”
“Maybe. But that’d take some luck. What we’re thinking is that you’d load the dice.”
“Load? How?” Now some of the dots start to connect themselves. “The bastard who was about to put a bullet in me. It was a semi-automatic handgun.”
“Seriously asymmetric warfare, wouldn’t you say?”
I shake my head. “You’re kidding. That’s crazy.”
“Oh yes. Majorly crazy.”
“You think Asmus is in the arms trafficking business?”
“Not so much a business. He’d be in it for the chaos, not the money.” I lie back and close my eyes. The room threatens to rotate so I open them quickly. “This is all theory, Joad. We could be way off.”
I wish I were sober to think this through. “And why kidnap the TMA team?”
“Don’t know. Perhaps a cherry on the chaos–killing the capability to detect and stop accelerations. Maybe he just held a grudge.”
“I believe that. I should have inserted some of his theory papers into his windpipe.”
“And what his plans are, don’t know. That’s what we’re going to find out.”
“We?”
Gallie shrugs. “It’s what you’re here for, right?” I take a deep breath. There must be a hundred questions in me but they’re drowned in fine single malt. I look at the wall clock and it’s gone midnight.
“Don’t you have a family to get home to?” I ask, bracing for seismic disappointment. Now is when I’m going to hear about the successful businessman husband and three beautiful kids in private school.
“I left my cat with a can opener. He’ll be fine.” Her head is tilted and she’s curling her hair around a finger in contemplation of something.
“Thank you.” I say. “Thanks for telling me all this.” She shrugs an of course. Bill Withers begins to lament that there ain’t no sunshine when she’s gone and I turn up the radio. “I dance to this. It’s just what I do.” I stand and begin to sway. Gallie stands looking like she’s about to join me, but then lurches sideways and I catch her by the shoulders. Eyes lock for an instant then she pulls away.
She exits without ceremony and “need to lie down” are her trailing words.
TWENTY-ONE
I’m not built for hard liquor and never have been. And I only ever remember this when I’m hugging porcelain. It’s a long night of thought, punctuated by unconsciousness, Saharan desiccation, and a nuclear headache. What Gallie told me seems insane even by recent standards. Loading the dice in the American Revolutionary War? Chronistically asymmetric warfare? A TMA team abducted to the eighteenth century? And Kasper Asmus behind it all? Is this really the most straightforward explanation of what’s happened to me? If it is, what would be the far-fetched explanation?
The pounding inside my skull is not helping. So, is Asmus giving twenty-first century arms to British loyalists to change the outcome of the war? Goodbye US of A? A thought hits me as I lurch forward. Did his tampering cause the patriots to win? Is that it? Am I just like the kids in the Risley park who were oblivious to the fact that everything had changed? But for Kasper Asmus, we’d all be British. We all were British until he vandalized the timeline?
This doesn’t seem like the place for analytical thought. Newton was sitting under an apple tree and Einstein in a patent office when they had their epiphanies. Not a single scientist I can think of was recorded as being draped over a toilet bowl during their eureka moment. I walk back to my cot and lie down with care.
No answers. No answers that don’t double the number of questions. Gallie’s laugh. Tom. My mother. Her husband. George Washington. Gallie’s laugh. I pass out.
TWENTY-TWO
“C’mon, we’re moving,” I hear as I come to in a brutal jog. “Fifteen minutes,” Zhivov says and vanishes. I walk dizzily to the sink, stopping midway to question the wisdom of even this short journey. I down a glass of water.
