Robert Sawyer - Triggers

And a thought came to him. He opened the document containing his speech and highlighted everything from the beginning to the point at which he’d been shot; he’d seen the clip repeatedly now on the news (and found it oddly compelling to watch—Kadeem had seen the news coverage before he had, and so Seth remembered it the first time he saw it; it felt an awful lot like he was viewing it from outside his own body). He searched the menus until he found the word-count command. “Words: 281” appeared on the screen along with some other statistics. Oh, well. It had been a good thought, but—

But he’d marked it from the beginning, including the title and other things. He scrolled back to the top of the document and redid the highlighting starting after the words “Speech to be delivered by POTUS at Lincoln Memorial re the Chicago bombing. Check against delivery.” Then he issued the word-count command again. “Words: 247.”

Tell Gordo to aim for 2-4-7…

He went down to the end of the marked block and read aloud the last sentence he’d said before the bullet hit: “If my students could take away only a single lesson, I always hoped it would be the famous maxim that those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.”

Repeat it. Like an echo.

Tell Gordo to aim for 2-4-7 for the echo…

Lots of people had access to his speeches before he gave them; it would have been easy for Secret Service Director Hexley to have seen the text in advance and have gotten copies to other people, including Gordo Danbury—copies marked up with each word numbered so they could plan precisely. Hexley had been telling someone to convey to Danbury that the perfect echo—the perfect blast from the past—would be to take down the current president, as he was standing in front of a statue of the first president to have been assassinated, while he was reflecting on history repeating itself.

And, Seth thought, history almost had.

Just then, Susan Dawson entered. “Good afternoon, Mr. President. Bessie Stilwell and Agent Hudkins are in the air. They should be at Andrews by 10:00 P.M.”

“Andrews?” asked Seth. “Not Reagan?”

“No, Mr. President. They’re taking an Air Force jet back.”

“I said they should travel on a civilian plane.”

Susan’s eyebrows went up. “Um, sorry, sir—what you actually said was they should fly out to L.A. on the next commercial flight. You didn’t say anything about the return, and Darryl figured you wanted Bessie to be protected as much as possible, so they’re coming back on an Air Force plane.”

“Damn,” said Seth.

“What’s wrong, sir? I apologize if—”

“No, no. What’s done is done. But… damn .”

Nikki Van Hausen was driving home from her meeting with Jan Falconi; she hoped the poor girl could find some peace. In her trunk were a couple of “Open House” signs that she’d need tomorrow; Sunday was a big day for such things.

Open house.

Letting strangers in, letting them poke around, letting them imagine their own lives superimposed on the bare bones of a building: this place, but with their furniture. People would come in and try to decide whether this was a suitable spot for laying down years of new memories.

It was snowing. Nikki turned on her windshield wipers. As she drove along, she was distracted by Eric’s memories—a press conference this afternoon, the surgery yesterday morning. So much had happened in such a short time!

And those were just his new memories. Eric was fifteen years older than Nikki. It was strange to think that she now had more memories in her head of his life than of her own—a decade and a half more, to be precise: another fifteen Christmases, a dozen more vacations, the big bash when he’d turned forty, the more subdued one when he’d turned fifty, splitting from his wife, burying his parents, watching his son head off to college.

Despite the fact that the streets were slick and wet, the traffic was sailing along. She had her radio set to DC101. The current song was “Don’t Cha” by the Pussycat Dolls, and she realized as it played that Eric didn’t know it at all; it didn’t conjure up any memories for him—he was the wrong generation.

A car cut in front of Nikki, bringing her attention fully back to the road. She hated aggressive drivers at the best of times, and when it was snowing, there really was no excuse for it.

The Pussycat Dolls sang their final refrain and a traffic report came on. Things were moving surprisingly well, and—

And another maniac came careening past her, cutting in and out of traffic, and—

And the car in front of her, a white Ford Focus, swerved to make room. Nikki hit her horn, two other cars veered, she heard the squeal of tires and the sound of a high-speed impact, and she saw the Focus roll over as another car plowed into it. She pumped her brakes, but—

Damn! She hit the car in front of her, and her air bag deployed. She pitched forward into it and heard more groaning metal plus the sound of shattering glass, and, muffled by the air bag, screams.

She was dazed for a few moments, then the air bag deflated, and she saw a red carnation bloom of blood on it as it pulled away from her face. She reached a hand up and it came away wet; she looked down and saw blood dripping onto her pantsuit.

Nikki turned off her car, then flipped down the visor and looked at herself in the mirror on the back of it. Her nose didn’t seem to be broken, thank God, although it was certainly bleeding.

Her back hurt, but not severely. Her windshield had cracked in a thousand places, and that made it almost impossible to see what was in front of her. She went to check her rearview mirror—and saw only the stem that had attached it to the window; the mirror itself must have gone flying in the impact.

She used her sleeve to wipe the blood from her nose; she really needed something to stanch the flow, though, and her purse had gone flying, too, apparently.

Nikki looked out her side window. Another crashed car was right up against her door—she couldn’t get out that way. And so she undid the seat belt and hauled herself across to the passenger seat. As she made her way over the center hump, she saw her purse way in the back, on the shelf beneath the rear window. She continued across the front and tried to open the passenger door. It was stuck and she was afraid that it had been damaged in the crash, but—

But no; it wasn’t stuck—it was just locked. She never used this door, and it took her a second to find the release, blood falling like rain from her nose onto the tan upholstery.

The door opened. She hauled herself out into the early-evening darkness and surveyed the damage to her own car. The front end had accordioned. She had the presence of mind to worry about whether the gas in the tank was going to explode, and she bent down—an action that sent daggers of pain through her—and looked underneath to see if gasoline was leaking out. It was hard to tell in the darkness, but she didn’t think so.

And then, hands on hips, she surveyed the scene. In front of her, all three lanes of traffic were blocked by smashed vehicles that were now skewed across the road. The asphalt glistened in the streetlamps, and snow continued to sift down. She went over to the guardrail on the right side and climbed on it so she could have a better view.

Another wrecked car and a smashed pickup truck were blocking the road in front of the three cars she’d already seen. Some of the other drivers and passengers were out of their vehicles now, too. She looked behind her and saw cars backed up as far as she could see. Horns were blaring, and there was another sound: someone screaming, “Help! Help!”