Gregory Benford - Timescape

“That’s what these guys said his name was. Me, I didn’t ask.” Hayes grinned. Someone laughed.

“I start over toward this guy and boom he fires again. I can hear somebody yelling outside. I didn’t think about it, I just went for him. Dove over this crate and slammed into him. Just then the rifle goes off again, just as I hit him. I used to play some football, y’know, an’ I know how to take a guy out.”

“You got the rifle away from him?”

Hayes grinned again. “Hell no, man. I mashed him up against that window sill. Then I leaned back to get some room an’ I gave him a good one up side the head. He forgot all about that rifle, right then. So I hit him again and he went all glassy-eyed. His number was up , man.”

“He was out cold?”

“Sure was. I do good work, fella.”

“Then the police arrived.”

“Yeah, once this guy was out, I looked out the window. Saw all these cops lookin’ up at me. Waved to ‘em and called down to tell ’em where I was. They got up there right away.”

“Could you see the President’s Lincoln speeding away?”

“I didn’t know there was any President. Just a lot of traffic, that’s all. Some kind of parade, I thought. For Thanksgiving or somethin’, y’know. I came down here because Mr. Aiken, our physics teacher, sent me on down.”

The crowd around Hayes was utterly silent. The boy was a born performer, beaming straight into the camera and playing to the audience. The off-camera questioner asked, “You realize that you may have prevented a successful attempt on the life of the—”

“Yeah, that’s amazin’. Great. But y’know, I didn’t have any idea about that. Didn’t even know he was in town. Woulda gone downstairs to see him and Jackie if I’d known.”

“You had not seen Oswald before? You had no sign that he had a rifle and—”

“Look, like I said, I was down here to get some magazines. Mr. Aiken is doin’ this special twoday extracredit project in our college level physics course, the PST one. It was on the stuff in this magazine, Senior Scholastic . Mr. Aiken, he had me come down here to get ‘em for the class this afternoon. There was somethin’ about y’know this ah, signal from the future an’—”

“The shots—how many of them hit?”

“Hit what?”

“The President!”

“Hell, I dunno. He got off two of ‘em okay. I socked him good just before the third.”

Hayes grinned, looking around, beaming. The plainclothesman tugged at his arm. “I believe that’s enough, Mr. Hayes,” he said, using another tactic. “There will be a press conference later.”

“Oh, yeah,” Hayes said affably. His momentum was spent for the moment. He was still transfixed by being the center of attention. “Yeah, I’ll tell it all later.”

More shouted questions. A blur of motion as the police formed a wedge for Hayes. Clicking of cameras. Calls to clear the way. A rumble as a motorcycle started. Flickering images of men in overcoats pushing, mouths twisted.

Gordon blinked and for a moment he seemed to lose his balance. Senior Scholastic . The rec room swam in its pale, musty light.

Then Cronkite was talking again in that reedy voice. At Parkland Memorial Hospital a brief press conference had just concluded, while Hayes was speaking. Malcolm Kilduff, assistant press secretary to the President, had described the wound. A bullet had entered the lower back of the President’s neck. It had passed through and left a small exit wound. The entry wound was larger and bled freely. The President had received several pints of O RH negative blood as well as 300 mg. hydrocortisone intravenously. At first the attending physicians had inserted a tube to clear the President’s breathing passage. This failed. The senior physician, Michael Cosgrove, elected to perform a tracheotomy. This took five minutes. Lactated Ringer’s solution—a modified saline solution—was fed into the right leg via catheter. The President began breathing well, though he was still in coma. His dilated eyes were open and staring directly into a glaring fluorescent lamp overhead. A nasogastric tube was thrust through Kennedy’s nose and fitted behind his trachea, to clear away possible sources of nausea in his stomach. Bilateral chest tubes were placed in both chest pleural spaces to suck out damaged tissue and prevent lung collapse. The President’s heartbeat was weak but regular. The exit wound was treated first, since the President was on his back. Three doctors then rolled the body onto its side. The entry wound gaped, larger than the exit wound by more than twice, and was the principal point of blood loss. It was treated without difficulty. Kennedy was still in Trauma Room No. 1 of Parkland as Kilduff spoke. His condition appeared stable. There was no apparent damage to the brain. His right lung was bruised. His windpipe was ripped apart. It appeared that, barring complications, he would live.

Mrs. Kennedy was not hit. Governor Connally was in critical condition. The Vice President was not hit. The attending physicians could make no comment on the number of shots fired. It was clear, however, that only one bullet had struck the President.

The crowd around the television murmured and stirred. The sensation of lightness and pressing heat had gone. Objects no longer swayed as though seen underwater, refracted. Gordon shouldered his way through the close-packed students. Speculations buzzed around him. He slid aside the glass door to the wooden deck and stepped through. Without thinking he vaulted over the railing and out onto the parking lot. He got his running gear out of the trunk of the Chevy. He changed in the nearby men’s room. In shorts and tennis shoes he looked as young as many of the students still flocking to the rec room in search of news. He felt an airy sense of liberation and a humming, random energy, almost pleasurable. He did not want to think just now.

He began to run on the flat, watery sand. A steady breeze came in, blowing strands of black hair across his eyes. He ran with his head down, watching his feet strike. When his heel hit the sand a pale circle leaped into being as the water rushed out, driven by the impact. The beach hardened under each step, upholding him, and dissolved back to a gray slate sameness behind him. A helicopter passed whump whump whump overhead.

He skirted the town and ran through crescent coves, heading south, until he reached Nautilus Street. Penny was grading papers. He told her the news. She wanted to turn on the radio, learn more, but he tugged her away. Reluctantly she went with him. They went to the beach and walked south. Neither spoke. Penny fidgeted, face cloudy. The sea breeze scuffed the tops from the whitecaps and furled a banner of foam from each. Gordon looked at them and thought about them coming across the Pacific, driven by tides and winds. They were shallow out in the ocean and moved fast. As they neared the land the sea bed reared up beneath them and they deepened and slowed. Coming in, a wave moved faster at the top than at the bottom and they toppled forward, the energy from out of Asia churning into turbulence.

Penny called to him. She was already charging into the shallows. He followed. It was the first time he had tried this but that did not matter. They swam out beyond the waves and waited for the next big one to come in. It moved with stately slowness. The dark blue line thickened and rose and Gordon looked at it and estimated where it would break. He pulled forward, stroking fast and kicking. Penny was ahead. He felt something picking him up and the water ahead fell away. A rushing sound, and he moved faster. He flung out his arms and leaned to the left. Spray hazed his eyes. He blinked. He cut down the face of the wave, cupped in a wall of water, curling and churning toward the shore.