Ch. 10 - The Turning Point

{AUTHOR'S NOTE: This is one chapter out of The Hiroshima Agenda, my semi-autobiographical Sci-Fi novel. It's about my year in Vietnam. It follows through my assignment but adds a science fiction scenario to it. All the names are changed, but most of the people are real. The story is science fiction . . . or is it? I worked for ASA the military branch of NSA. This novel is for anyone who thinks deeper than the typical person, who wonders regularly about the BIG questions, who wants to understand why it's sometimes hard to pin down exactly what reality is, who wonders about life, death, destiny, free will, justice, philosophical ideas of all kinds. You can sample it and/or buy it easily from Amazon.com or other major book dealers. Buy it at Amazon in paperback or E-Book simply by clicking www.amazon.com/dp/B00XXCVODO and following a few simple ordering instructions.}

As exciting and revealing as my Vietnam year began, the next few months were fairly humdrum. I’ll spare you the many false leads, dead ends, and boring details I learned in those 3 months. I made friends, became proficient at my cover job and my undercover mission, and wrote many letters to Abigail about how much I loved her and missed her. I established a routine of subtle investigations in every locale of Saigon that I sensed might hold clues as to the whereabouts of the time traveler or any evidence of his technology. I frequented a growing number of local clubs and other businesses and formed somewhat close relationships with various Vietnamese locals. Nothing very exciting happened for the first three months as far as my mission was concerned. However, my world took on a whole new level of drama and responsibility really fast, around the end of October.

My best friend in Saigon was Todd Crews, a brilliant young man from Natick, Massachusetts. Todd was a good guy. He was 6 or 7 years older than me, and he was very knowledgeable over a broad range of subjects. He had a master’s degree in international relations from Harvard, and he knew a great deal about Southeast Asian history and about Vietnam in particular. He spoke several languages. Most importantly for me, he took me under his wing. He had no idea of my true mission and I had no idea of his. I was pretty sure his outward work was a cover job as well, but neither of us knew what the other really did for ASA or NSA. That’s the way it was for all of us in our unit. Fortunately for me, Todd served as one of my earliest and most important professional mentors.

At the time I assumed he never knew where I was when I disappeared for whole evenings only to be in my bunk when we awoke at 6:00 each morning to go to work. When I told him I had to work late, he seemed satisfied with that answer. I needed a friend like that, but I found out later he knew more about me than he let on.

On those evenings when I was able to just relax in the barracks I watched the Armed Forces TV station with Todd on the portable TV he bought from the PX the first day he arrived in country. Availability of signals receivable from a local TV station, via rabbit ears antenna, was one of the perks of being assigned to Saigon. Our favorite program to watch together was Star Trek. The series ran for three seasons, from September 1966 until June 10, 1969, when it was canceled just a month before I arrived in Vietnam. That was a shock to all of us who loved the show. Happily, for people like Tom and me, the Armed Forces Network showed all the reruns of the original series over the 12 months we were in country. They showed an episode every night.

The evening of 30 October 1969, began like many others, but took a dramatic turn after the show. Todd made a comment that seemed off the cuff to me at the time, that was the most helpful lead I had gotten since beginning my mission. It enabled me to find and make first contact with the physicist who served as the time traveler’s right hand man and project manager for the construction of the Japanese machines.

The next four days changed my life and reoriented my worldview. If you believe what I’m about to tell you it will rewire your brain as well, regarding the nature of reality. What was about to happen to me that night would put me on the fast track to achieving my childhood dream of becoming a true hero, or, more negatively, ending my short life due to unfortunate violence before my 21st birthday.

We were watching the episode of Star Trek where Dr. McCoy blunders through a time portal in a state of confusion brought on by an accidental injection, and ends up on earth a few years before World War Two begins. Kirk and Spock go through the portal in order to find and rescue their friend. Kirk falls in love with a social worker destined in her original timeline to be killed in a traffic accident. He saves her, inadvertently changing history, with disastrous consequences. It was one of the most creative shows in the series.

When it was over, as Todd and I discussed it, he said in his friendly and big-brotherly manner, “You know, it really wouldn’t work that way with time travel.”

That got my interest, of course, and I asked him what he meant.

“Well, you know, everything is going to happen the way it’s supposed to, and no one can change it.”

“What about free will,” I asked.

“No such thing, my friend,” he said. “Free will is just an illusion! We’re merely playing our roles. The future is already written in every detail, and we’re simply living into it.”

“So you believe in predestination,” I said.

“No doubt about it,” he exclaimed! “Everything happens the way it’s supposed to, just like it says in Daniel and Jeremiah.”

“I didn’t know you were so much into religion.”

“I’m not really. I’m a believer, but seriously, the Bible was written thousands of years ago, and the world and our knowledge and understanding of how nature works has advanced a lot since then. I referred to the Old Testament reference, because I knew that you’re a believer too, and I’ve seen you reading your Bible.”

“Then, why do you believe predestination is real?”

“Well, you were the one who brought up the word predestination, and I repeated it, because I knew what you were talking about, but that’s primarily a religious word in the sense that it’s stating that God predetermined everything that’s going to happen, as I know you understand. The thing is, Christians are divided on what the term really means and have several interpretations of it and different degrees of acceptance or rejection of the concept. As a Christian myself, I reject the idea that God predetermined, before we were born, whether we’d each go either to Heaven or Hell, and what would happen in the day to day affairs of our lives.”

“Alright, now I’m confused, do you or don’t you believe in predestin . . . I mean, that everything in our future is set to happen in a certain way?

“Yes, I do, but not for religious reasons. I believe it for scientific reasons.”

“Explain, please.”

“We’ve talked about Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, and about quantum theory a few times, and I’ve been impressed by your understanding of it, so I’m fairly sure you’re going to agree with this and enjoy the idea when you hear it.”

“Well, don’t keep me in suspense.”

“Okay, you know that Einstein says that dividing time into past, present, and future, as though they were completely separate rooms in a three room building, is a misleading idea, totally from the human point of view. We’re taught early in our educational process to see things as before, now, and after. Right?”

“Yes, of course.”

“Of course, because it would be totally confusing for us to see everything happening concurrently.”

“Right.

“But you know, if you understand what Einstein figured out, that past, present and future do happen currently. And we can agree on that just by thinking carefully of other facts we know.”

“Such as?”

“Einstein stated that time travel is possible under certain conditions. Do you agree with that?”

“I’m leaning that way.”

“Okay, suppose you go back in time to any date you choose, for instance, to the day you were born. How could you go there if it no longer exists?”

“So, maybe it doesn’t. Perhaps time travel is not permitted by the universe. Maybe as each second or portion of a second passes, the whole universe disappears and is instantly replaced by a duplicate of it in every way except that it’s one second older.?

“Well, aside from the fact that I don’t think you really believe that, how would it even work within the laws of physics that all of us accept; you know, like matter is neither created nor destroyed, entropy and inertia are well-established facts of nature, there’s only a limited amount of energy in the universe . . . etc.?”

“Okay, sure, but we still don’t know if time travel is actually possible. We’re not even smart enough to prove Einstein’s conjecture that all tenses of time are concurrent.”

“Fair enough, but consider this. If we possessed a telescope that was powerful enough to view objects on the surface of a planet in the Alpha Centauri system, which is around four light years away from Earth at any given time, would we be viewing how it looks in our present time?”

“I see what you’re saying, Todd. Since that star system is four light years away, then we’re looking at the planet as it appeared four years ago rather than how it is in it’s current, local time. So, we’re looking through our telescope in our present time at that planet as it existed four years ago . . . our present and its past are concurrent. If there are intelligent beings on that planet looking at Earth, they’re looking four years into our past from their present. Even more bizarre, if we had a telescope so powerful that we could see them looking at us, we would be looking at them in their past, they would be looking at us in our past and each planet’s team of astronomers would actually be in the other team’s future according to their own sense of local time.”

“Correct. Because if we’re looking at their past, in that moment of our time, they're living in their future, and from their point of view, as they look at our past, we're living in our future, in contrast to the past they're viewing. Also, if at some point in the last four years, that planet was totally destroyed, I don’t know . . . maybe by Emperor Ming of the planet Mongo . . . our telescope would still be looking at it as if it still exists in our time. Finally, in accordance with Einstein’s time dilation formula, if we could be transported there at the speed of light, we'd be transported to their past from the perspective of our friends who remained on Earth.”

“So amazing to think about the peculiarities of time and space when one really looks carefully at what scientific observations tell us.”

“Well, to get from there to the real point of your question about predestination, if as we're going through the process we just described in detail, and the past is still there, the present is still here and the future already exist somewhere, then it’s already written in detail. It’s even possible that the whole universe of time and space is on a constant circle of beginning to conclusion to beginning in an infinite circle of existence. If that’s true, then we're, over and over, simply living through what has already happened, perhaps trillions of times, from Big Bang to Big Contraction and back, over and over with no end.”

I was really enjoying the conversation . . . I think we both were; however, the next words out of Todd’s mouth instantly brought it to an end and changed the course of my night, and ultimately my life.

“It’s just like a guy said in the bar last night,” Todd went on, “A time machine could never be used to do something like change who won World War Two.”

At that point my attention was riveted on whatever he had to say, but I let it go by for a couple of minutes, before I said as casually as I could muster, “So you were at the bar last night?”

“Yeah, I would have asked you to go, but you know, you pulled a real late night at work again.”

“And you were talking to some stranger about time travel, huh?”

I tried to make my words sound like bored politeness.

“Yep,” he said. “Japanese guy, I think.”

That made me want to jump out of my bunk and grill him energetically, to dig out every scrap of information he was holding about the night before, but I couldn’t take a chance on appearing too interested in this particular subject. There was no telling what the future held for me, and I couldn’t afford to take a chance on spoiling my whole cover identity three months into my mission.

By the way, it was years later before I discovered that Todd not only knew my mission, he was specifically assigned to the same barracks as I, by design. Part of his mission was to monitor my performance as a new agent, and to point me in the right direction from time to time. That’s what he was doing that evening. He realized that the conversation of the man in the bar was something that needed investigation, and he knew that was my job.

“Japanese guy, huh?” I said. “What’s a Japanese guy doing in Vietnam?” 

I opened a book and turned a few pages.

“I don’t know,” he said, “but he’s been there every night for the last three nights.”

“Are you sure he’s Japanese?” I asked. “How can you tell them apart from Vietnamese?”

“Well, there are several ways one can distinguish Japanese from Vietnamese,” he said, talking as the scholar he was. “But I didn’t need to know any of them last night, because I heard him say he was from Japan before I actually saw him.”

He couldn’t suppress a short laugh. It took all my self-control to chuckle in response and say, “Ah, that gives it away every time.”

I allowed a couple of silent minutes to tick by, then I asked, “And he was talking about trying to change the outcome of World War Two, did you say?”

“Yeah,” Todd said, “I think he was just trying to impress the very sexy girl he was hitting on. He told her he was a government physicist and that he was working on big things. She was smoking hot, by the way! I don’t think she was wearing any underwear.”

“Are you talking about the bar you usually go to on the main drag through Saigon,” I asked.

“Yeah,” he said. “The one that Hoai Nhung owns – you know – the guy that always calls you dien-cai dao GI.”

(Note to non-Vietnam Vet types: dien-cai dao is pronounced something like “dinky-dow”. It means crazy. The Vietnamese thought all the GI’s were crazy).

I knew the guy, and I needed to go there immediately. I excused myself by telling Todd I was going to do some running and probably hit the mess hall for a nighttime snack afterwards. It seemed highly unlikely that I could get so lucky, but it was the kind of lead that I couldn’t pass up

I entered Hoai Nhung’s at about 7:00 p.m. and ordered a bottled Tab. One of the peculiarities of being a Dormant is that alcohol screws up the transmissions from signal and, in general, short circuits whatever programming makes it through to your brain. I didn’t touch a drop that whole year, except when Todd insisted that it was impossible to celebrate my 21st birthday without drinking at least a sip of the peach wine he was offering. (By that birthday my tour in Vietnam was nearly over anyway.)

I sat down and began studying the other customers in the bar. It wasn’t difficult to listen in on most of the conversations, as the room was not that large.

I was there for about an hour when two beautiful oriental women and an unusually tall, slender, oriental gentleman, in a cream colored suit, came sauntering in. They sat several tables away from me and were obviously negotiating financial terms related to the rest of their evening together. The women, by their dress and manner, appeared to be prostitutes.

The man was speaking a very rough, broken form of Vietnamese with interspersed Japanese words. This had to be the man Todd told me about.

“But I do not have enough to give you two thousand pi apiece,” he said. “Why not be kind to an old man and accept 2,000 together? Do you want to go home empty-handed?”

His voice whined in a high-pitched, sing-song voice, through a pleading smile.

He continued, “I was here with two girls last night who were glad to take what a government employee can afford. You need to be more reasonable. It will be easy money.”

I was walking between the seconds so that I would in no way distract him. I studied his face, his mannerisms, and his dialect, such as I could ferret out, as he tried to speak another language than his own. I decided he looked approximately the right age to have been a trained physicist during the decade of the forties, somewhere in his late fifties, maybe even 60 years old, and he interposed several Japanese words in the context of his mostly Vietnamese sentences. But he really didn’t strike me as someone three centuries beyond the present time. He actually seemed pathetic to me with his begging and immature behavior.

As the girls were rejecting his monetary offer, and walking away, he lost his temper.

“You don’t know who you’re dealing with!”

“Oh, you’re some big cheese, huh?” the taller girl mocked.

“I am an important scientist! I know secrets that will change the world!”

“Oh yeah, well I know a secret too,” the shorter girl said. No nookie for you tonight,” she squealed with laughter as she swished out of the bar, briefly lifting her mini-skirt to show the man some of what he would miss, I suppose. Todd was right. She was wearing no panties under her very short skirt. I could still hear them laughing through the closed door.

He shouted at the door, in Japanese, “I can get rid of you so completely even your own parents will not remember you ever lived!”

His former sickeningly sweet demeanor was replaced by an angry scowl that didn’t improve a bit with the beer he gulped down.

When he left I followed him. He ordered a rickshaw that headed toward the outskirts of the city. I hired the next one, and told the driver to tail him, but stay out of sight. We followed them for a couple of miles to a little village. I had the driver stop a few hundred yards behind the Japanese man and watched him enter a hut on the edge of the village. Then I paid the driver and walked the rest of the way.

I crouched down under an open window hoping to hear whatever was going on. All I could hear was what sounded like whispering and mumbling.

“Get up slowly and hold your hands out beside you,” a steady female voice said behind me in English.

That was followed by what felt like the cold round metal at the end of a pistol barrel shoved hard into the center of my neck. All I could do was stand up.

“Start walking,” she said.

We walked into the hut and joined three other people who were waiting for us. I was totally surprised: one of the girls from the bar and the tall, slender oriental man were two of them. Another oriental man was with them. About that time the girl with the gun on me walked around to join the others. It was the shorter girl from the bar. She handed the gun to the other fake prostitute. I was beginning to realize the whole thing had been a set up to lure me out, and I couldn’t have been a bigger sucker. I felt pretty damn stupid at that moment.

“How are you doing Agent Delacroix?” the new guy asked in Japanese.

He had black hair with some grey in the temples, about the same height as the first man, but with wider shoulders and a more muscular physique. He was dressed very casually; a Hawaiian style shirt, white linen trousers and the bamboo flip-flop like things the Orientals are so fond of.

“Do I know you?” I asked, lamely, in English.

“I doubt it, but you’re looking for me, aren’t you,” he said, as he changed smoothly into English.

“Well, since you know so much, why am I looking for you,” I asked.

“Because you believe we have something to do with the TMD,” he said.

“I don’t even know what a TMD is,” I said. “Oh, is that short for ‘The Money Depot,’ because I sure could use some. You know, Uncle Sam really doesn’t pay us Army grunts enough to live on. My poor Abby, back home, barely has enough to make our car payment and . . .”

“Temporal Manipulator Device!” the woman that now held the gun on me interrupted in a real ugly tone. I don’t think she appreciated my nervous humor any more than Miller or Sophie did.

“What did you think it was called, something corny like the time machine,” she looked at the other girl and laughed. The other woman just stared back at her with a lascivious smile. Then the first girl’s expression changed to match hers. I thought they were going to go find a room right then.

They were both movie star beautiful. The one that caught me outside the window had a long, black ponytail. She was about five foot two, and very sexy. She was still dressed in her fake prostitute outfit. She had gorgeous legs with the kind of muscles that proved she was no stranger to regular workouts.

I figured she was some kind of martial arts expert and an agent, protecting the scientists, but she really was smoking hot. It would be difficult for any man or woman not to notice her.

The other was a looker as well, but dressed more conservatively in the traditional, black pants and silk ao dai most Vietnamese women wear. She had a short, chic hairdo, and was at least six inches taller than the girl in the mini skirt. She moved like a trained warrior as well. And she seemed real serious every time she turned her eyes to anyone but her girlfriend. Both of them were fluent in Vietnamese, Japanese and English, and when they spoke in English they did so with very noticeable Japanese accent as did the oriental gentleman from the club.

“You know you can’t do anything to me,” I said. “The minute I disappear they’ll know you’re here and will nuke this whole place.”

I was bluffing, of course, hoping they’d remember the finale to WW II.

“On the contrary, you know that ‘nuking’ the place is the last thing they’ll do,” the new, more muscular man said.

He had a voice that was incongruent with his face, as clean and devoid of regionalisms as a high level professional TV or voice over announcer. His English and pronunciation were impeccable. He looked Japanese, but sounded like he could have been raised from birth in a region of America where there are few recognizable accents in their voices. His Japanese sounded equally like he had been raised in Japan.

He continued, “They’ve regretted their efforts to destroy the first two machines in 1945, almost since the day they dropped the second bomb.”

“Oh, and why is that,” I stalled, pushing for any information they might give freely.

“Because of something you don’t know!” the taller woman offered, and by offered I mean practically spewed out of her mouth like she was possessed by Satan.

Then she seemed to take a breath and intentionally calm herself and said, “Your country has had possession of an early model of the TMD since 1947. They’ve kept the American public confused about it, leaving clues that it’s a flying saucer that crashed on a farm, in Roswell,” (she paused for a couple of seconds) “North Dakota. Then they denied their own fake story to create the illusion that they were covering up a truth that was really the lie.”

She looked at the man from the bar with a questioning expression. He had been trying to say something as she spoke.

“Not North Dakota, Sweetie; it was Roswell, New Mexico, he said, with a really big, taunting smile.”

I could tell by the look she gave him that she didn’t like to be called Sweetie any more than she liked my sense of humor.

“Listen, Honey,” she said with a look that could skin a man alive, “You can call me Masaki like my passport says or you can call me M like my Caucasian friends do, but if you call me Sweetie again you won’t have enough teeth left to call me anything clearly.”

That was not a spew. It sounded more like the slow, guttural growl of a movie bad guy. But then she winked at him and changed her formerly hostile expression into a mischievous smile.

When I looked back at the man’s face, I saw that he was affectionately smiling at her as she talked. I realized it was just teasing banter between them. The four of them had a very easy, familiar way with each other. It suddenly dawned on me that they had been working together as a team for quite a while.

“As soon as NSA was brought into the loop, they guessed what it was and took over,” she continued, as though she had merely interrupted herself to sneeze and then returned to the conversation.

The man with the perfect American accent said, “They hypothesized that it was a test model, operated by a computer program, and sent back to the past as an experiment without putting human beings at risk, but a Temporal Manipulator Device nonetheless. Having access to all the information gleaned by American spies during World War Two, they guessed that something must have gone wrong with the program and rather than returning to its time of origin, it simply landed and sat idle. Most of that hypothesis was accurate enough.”

The girl that identified herself as M continued, “The whole thing about it crashing and them finding dead alien bodies was just part of NSA’s disinformation strategy. The ship didn’t crash at all. It landed, and no one in 22 years of efforts, has been able to find an entrance to it or break into it, and has no idea whether there are androids, aliens, or future humans in it.”

I was speechless as my brain processed all the clues that told me this was no lie. It made sense. So then, I wondered, what was the big search all about?

M said, “You still don’t get it do you? The west isn’t going to drop an atomic bomb on Vietnam, though I’m sure they’d love to. They don’t want to destroy any new development on the Quantum Control Depot (QCD) that’s paramount to the safe operation of the TMD, and they have no idea where it is,” she spewed out.

Yep, she was back to spewing, with obvious bitterness, enjoying my ignorance on the subject. And man, did I feel ignorant by that point!

“They can’t even open the TMD much less turn it on,” she said.

I couldn’t blame her for the anger I heard in her voice. After all, it was just twenty-four years earlier that my country dropped two atom bombs on her country. For all I knew, she had family in one or both of those cities.

“Okay, hold on a minute,” I said, temporarily lost. “Go back a bit. What’s a Quantum Control Depot?”

Tall, dark and muscular said, “Before the QCD was invented, time travel was a one-way trip. We were able to travel to an age we wished to study, but we were stuck there for the rest of our lives. Nine years after we developed the TMD we perfected the QCD. The physics for this is very complex, but the short answer is this. Each quarter of the earth serves as a space-time zone (STZ). In order for the TMD to exit that zone there must be a QCD in place; one for each STZ.”

“How did you get the QCD in place?”

“Again, the simplest answer is this. The first time we traveled to each STZ we used enlarged versions of the TMD, each one transported equipment and materials to construct the QCD for that zone. Remember that we utilize nanotechnology, so much less space is required for the materials required to build a large structure. Several teams went back each time a new zone was equipped with a QCD. That’s the simple answer, you’ll learn as much more as you want to know through Signal. We’ll transmit that to you later.”

{AUTHOR’S NOTE: For those who are interested in the speculative hypothetical details of how all this might work, refer to the Appendices of this novel.}

The more they talked, the more everything made sense. But something still didn’t compute for me. Why did they lure me out here, and why were they giving me all this information?

“When they bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki, those in the know in American Intelligence hoped that enough of the technology would be left that they could salvage it.” The new guy with the really smooth voice was talking again. “However, after an exhaustive search, they figured the TMDs were completely destroyed, because they didn’t even find a loose wire that looked like it could have been from the future.”

M blurted out enthusiastically, “Hah. An atomic bomb the size of Little Boy wouldn’t have left a scratch on a real TMD. Fifteen kilotons of TNT would be like a fly swatter to a machine constructed by and operating through 23rd century nanotechnology.”

Smooth accent guy cleared his throat, gave M an affectionate, almost fatherly smile and exhaled a somewhat impatient sounding sigh that seemed to say it was time to focus on the rest of their story without excessive drama. She got the message and immediately changed her demeanor. He continued to explain. “When the ship showed up at Roswell, NSA had no idea as to its construction, but they recognized the shape and general look of it from various descriptions the Allied spies were able to get during the war.”

He took a deep breath, and I could tell that just talking about the machines was a more emotional event for him than for the others. I sensed a feeling of intense nostalgia and melancholy from him.

He continued, “The Quantum Control Depot (QCD) is larger than the TMD and much more vulnerable, as it can’t travel anywhere on its own. NSA's information led them to believe that both machines were assembled in large underground complexes beneath each city. Their assumption was that the destruction from the atomic blast would not penetrate beneath ground level of either city, and it didn’t. They hoped they would at least recover one complete QCD, but here’s the mystery: A thorough search of both cities revealed not a single trace of either machine.”

He paused, and looked at me with the closest thing I had ever seen to a Mona Lisa smile on a living face.

“The QCDs were not destroyed,” he finally said, “They simply were not there. And, so frustrating to your people, they have a TMD with no way to deploy it, or even open it, and some unknown party, they figure, may have a QCD, hopefully with no TMD to deploy.”

He smiled in a mocking way as he dropped those last two details on me. I was vexed as I thought that if this was true, why did Miller hide it from me? Everything I heard made sense, but something was definitely not adding up. And what the hell do these four want with me, anyway?

“You know, Jason, you’re on the wrong side,” the guy I followed said. “If we’re successful, you’ll benefit as much as we will. Those Controller bastards are the only ones that win in the world as it is. The only chance we have against them is to work together.”

“So you say,” I said. This guy seemed much more together now than during his act in the bar.

“Think about it,” he said, “Right now, they’re the real power behind every country in the world. They’ve instigated every war from all sides for at least a thousand years and controlled the world’s economy since before there was an actual world economy. They control trillions of dollars.”

“One thing I’m fairly confident of,” I said, “is that when you knock one manipulative bastard off the mountain there’s another one just itching to take his place. Whether it’s our bastards or their bastards, they’re still bastards.”

“Don’t you understand?” the man from the bar suddenly raised his voice and took on an expression that looked, to me, like honest fear. “The Controllers only want to find the machines in order to destroy them.”

“Why is that?”

“They don’t want anyone to have the ability to travel through time. They’re afraid someone will intentionally or unintentionally go back and change the nature of society in such a way that they never develop the power grip they have on the world. They don’t care about America, Japan, Europe, or any national body. And they certainly don’t care about time travel. All they care about is their own personal power which they have plenty of without the use of time travel. They don’t want to lose that.”

“Well, I would like to be free of their waking me up and putting me to sleep each time they have an errand for me.”

The smooth accent guy said, with a surprisingly sympathetic look, “Oh, Jason.” He sighed, now looking at me with that fatherly look. “No. That’s one of the details NSA has guessed wrongly. The Controllers didn’t invent the technology and information for the Dormant Agent program and give it to NSA. I did. I’ve been anonymously helping them and other contemporary agencies for years in order to give them the tools to quell the Controllers’ greedy, power hungry ambitions. They’ve almost destroyed the technology that enabled the people of my time to build the greatest, most peaceful civilization in human history. My greatest fear is that they’ve ruined or even erased the future from which I came.”

With my mouth gaping open in surprise, he added, “And no one controls you Jason other than what you decide to allow. Jim Miller, and my technology, far from controlling you, will enable you to use the gifts you’ve been given to live a profoundly successful and influential life. The missions ahead of you may save your world, and hopefully, the future I left behind. Within the constraints of the military, the highly classified nature of our work, and the realities of life in general, you have at least as much free will as anyone else. No one is controlling you. The times you’ve been rendered Dormant have been for your protection and to protect the secrets you already know and the ones you’ll learn and to protect all of us from the Controllers. Any future times you may be rendered Dormant will be at your own request.”

These guys definitely had me at me at a disadvantage. While I had just discovered them, they seemed to know a great deal about me; even more than I knew about myself. And they were making a lot of sense. What else could I do but see what they had in mind. For better or worse, I made an instant decision.

“OK, let’s talk.”

The Japanese man with perfect English looked at mini-skirt girl and nodded. She left, and returned a minute later in a sleek, black Mercedes. As the taller gentleman opened the door for me I said, “I would’ve thought you guys would be driving a Toyota.”

2200 HOURS, 30 OCTOBER 1969, JIM MILLER’S APARTMENT

It had been a long day and Jim was too amped to sleep. He was reading a paper on Black Holes in a recent issue of Physics Review, by his old friend, John Wheeler of Princeton University. The phone on his secure line rang.

“Miller!”

“Jim. This is going to be hard to believe at first, but don’t hang up.”

“Who is this?”

“You know you’re on a cryptographically secure phone, and that only a few sources with 'need to know' have this number, right? So, just listen for a minute before you draw any quick conclusions. I’m on an even more secure phone line than yours or anybody you know. I know the central focus of your work in Southeast Asia has to do with the Hiroshima Agenda. I know all about the TS/Chronos classification, and have it myself. I know about the suitcase you keep in the safe and what it morphs into. I know about the large round metallic craft located in the big compartment downstairs at Whitebirch, and unlike you, I know how to make it travel through space and time. Are you interested?”

Jim was silent for a minute while he caught his breath and considered all the options with his finely tuned mind. Given what he had just heard, and the familiarity of the voice on the other end, there could be only one answer.

The familiar voice spoke again, “Still there?”

“Yes.”

“I take it you know who I am. Do you need more proof?”

“Yes. If you’re who I think you are, there’s only one way you can be. You’re with the traveler we’ve been looking for.”

“That’s right.”

“And I’ll make an educated guess that Jason is with you.”

“As Jason would say, ‘Wow, you’re good!’”

“Since this is as close to insanity as the definition allows, I’ll ask for one more piece of proof. You should be able to remember what’s in my refrigerator as of today. Tell me that, and then we can talk.”

“That’s too easy. Maribel sent you your favorite birthday cake via your good friend Steve ‘Honcho’ Glisten, the Pan Am pilot. He showed up at your door tonight after delivering a Boeing 737 full of replacement Army troops fresh from Oakland, California to TSN AB this afternoon. He told you that Maribel threatened to break both of his legs if one single crumb was missing when he delivered it to you. That would be the Lemon Supreme cake that she saturates with the almost pure butter and sugar lemon glaze. That and the six-pack of Heineken, minus two bottles, are the only two food groups worth mentioning in your refrigerator right now, which happens to be your birthday. Honcho left about 45 minutes ago with one of those beers and a slice of lemon birthday cake in his belly, right?”

“So, I’m talking to myself, and I don’t think I’m crazy. Where are you?”

“You’ll see us soon enough, but I need you to make some arrangements first. Call Sophie. The two of you will need to pack overnight bags, and meet us at the hanger that’s designated for our use only. Make sure no maintenance people are there and that it’s totally secure. Lock all entrances, and shutter all windows. We need total blacked out security. How soon can you be there?”

“We’ll be there no later than 2400 hours.”

“OK then. We’ll be able to see you before you see us, so after you’re sure we’re good to go blink your headlights twice, and we’ll materialize inside within a minute or two.”

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