Chapter 3
He got back to the hospital and asked the doctor if the patient could
leave. "Yes!" the doctor answered, "But he is to be engaged
in no strenuous activity. I have never seen anyone as physically
drained! The man virtually has no strength. It is little
wonder he collapsed. He must have high protein meals, plenty of
carbohydrates. We're not worried about him gaining weight until
he has reached a satisfactory level."
"I understand," Davis answered. Davis gave the doctor the uniform
he had brought and asked him to have the patient dress. A few
minutes later he joined him, and they departed. The General
ushered his guest into the back of his car, snapped to his driver
"Home, Martin!" He opened the control panel on his side of the
seat and closed the privacy shield. "How did you know these
things were going to happen?" he snapped.
"Because they're part of history," his guest answered. "The
circumstances of this terrible day were what led to the war with The
Chinese. The Supremacist Movement was so crippled by this
incident that it never recovered completely. They became tiny
scattered groups of only two or three individuals that nobody paid any
attention to. Unfortunately no one ever suspected the depth of
their insanity. One of them got into the highest levels of the
military, got the codes that launch our missiles. Three of them
broke into a launch facility, and fired twenty missiles at the most
sensitive targets in China to eliminate the Asia threat. The
Chinese considered it an unprovoked first strike and retaliated with
everything they had left. Then for five years while the
provisions lasted it was just an ordinary war with conventional
weapons. By the time I left nobody was doing much because nobody
had anything left. There wasn't enough land to grow food, the
fuel supplies were gone, what there was couldn't be transported.
Everybody in China was already dead, and the rest of the world was
going fast. This time line is simply unstable. That it
lasted as long as it did was miraculous! We have to find the
point of diversion, the time when the true history split off and you
have to go into the past and contact somebody, and have them go the
rest of the way and fix the damage. And I only have forty eight
hours, then I will automatically return to my own time."
"I still don't understand," Davis argued, "why can't YOU go into the
future?"
"The technology. The slip molecules will only let us go back one
hundred years. I barely made it here."
Davis looked at him . "Look! You couldn't have come from
the future! If you were actually my grandson how old would you
be...in your sixties, your seventies? I'd say you're twenty five,
thirty at the most. Explain that!"
"That's why I can't go any further into the past,"
the man answered. "The slip molecules make you younger the
further you go back. If I went back another hundred years I
wouldn't exist! I would merely be a small amount of chemicals
that would arrive at the destination. The molecules work by
altering the genetic structure. We fit in the period of time
where we belong because of our genetic state.
I know it's difficult, but I assure you, it's completely true!
There's some other things that will happen today. Somebody drunk
in a light plane will try to land at a military base in
Tennessee. He'll hit a big transport taking off. It'll
crash into a school. There'll be nearly one thousand
casualties. There'll be a horrendous automobile pileup in one of
the subterranean Boston tunnels. A van carrying some illegal
substances will blow up, causing the cars behind it to pile up on each
other, before the traffic can be stopped. I've been given as much
as I can to prove to you what I say is true. You have to believe
me, because the slip molecules have already been transferred to
you, and when I go back to the future you'll be transmitted into the
past!"
"What?" Davis snapped.
"They were programmed," his guest continued, "to automatically go to
the person I meet with the genetic inheritance closest to mine.
It has to be a near relative in order for them to bond and function."
"Did you ever think," Davis complained, "that it might be appropriate
to get the person's consent first?
"There's no time for niceties like that!" his guest
answered. "We HAVE to succeed, there's no argument! If you
were to refuse we would be dead. It didn't matter! So they
were simply programmed."
The General stared out the window. "I suppose under the
circumstances," he finally managed, "I have to realize ya'll thought
you were doin' right. You mean I'm just going to disappear?"
"For 48 hours!" his visitor answered, "Then you will
reappear....hopefully! The system's never been tested. We
had no reserve capability. Either it worked, or, it didn't."
"Well, if what you say is true," Davis moaned, "I certainly hope
it works! My son....your father, is a history buff. We can
barely keep him off the computer after he's got his homework
done! He's got every film that was ever made about the war of
Union aggression. We'll have to see if we can find this point of
diversion of yours. But how will we know?"
"We'll know," the visitor answered, "or, I will, when I find something
that diverts from what I've been taught. Then we'll know that's
the point where things started to go wrong, when the south started to
win."
"That part really bothers me," the General moaned, "that if we succeed
the Confederacy will lose. Isn't there any way we can fix things
and still have the south survive?"
The General's visitor shook his head. "Well, when I introduce you
to the family," the General snapped, "we've gotta call you
something! What's your name?"
The young man smiled. "Jefferson Davis!" he answered, "I
was named after my grandfather."
"Well around the house I'm called Jeff, or, Dad." the General
snapped. "We'll call you Jeffrey. That will make less
confusion."
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