Virtual Fire

by Mendy Sobol

  I’m too stunned to breathe, tears and throat suddenly dry. I stare at the screen.

  Somewhere, somehow, in some subatomic way, have I sent a message back in time to a still-living Toby? Is this possible?

  Wait. What about Thoroughbred? Did the past performances data reappear all those years ago because I sent it from the future?

  Think like the computer nerd you are, Tesla, not like some old-fart programmer!

  Okay. Take a breath. Someone’s messing with you, right? A practical joker. Sure, it’s unlikely anyone could hack their way into HYDRA and monitor my work, but not impossible. That could explain this—some IPI young gun’s idea of putting one over on the Old Man. Or maybe it’s a late-night Wellston prankster.

  But Toby’s reply didn’t come after a pause like it should if someone had read my message and typed a response. It simply appeared in the old Bruin memory as though it had always been there, with no time lag between my entry and Toby’s reply.

  And no one, no one except Toby, ever called me Tesla.

  All right, one more test. Something simple, straightforward.

  Toby— Is that you? Where are you? What are you working on? Tesla

  Tesla— You were expecting Harpo Marx? I’m at the Physics Department working on the computer-linking program. Where else would I be? The question is, where are you, and how are you sending these messages? You’ve been holding out on me, Tesla! Toby

  I sit back, reading Toby’s reply again and again, wondering what’s going on, picturing Toby waiting for an answer. If some bizarre confluence of HYDRA, Bruin, the Internet and who- knows-what created direct access to the past, science just took one of its rare giant leaps.

  But I’m not thinking about science. I’m thinking about Toby. Toby with the black beret and red star. Toby with the wizard’s eyes and quick smile. Toby on his way to Franklin Hall to stop a crime. Toby on his way to die.

  I can save him. One small change and I can save him.

  The dangers of messing with history? Hell, I’ve read all the science fact and fiction ever written on that subject. For all I know, my Thoroughbred hack and first two messages already changed history! And if history has changed, would I be aware of it? As my favorite Star Trek engineer, Myles O’Brien, once said, “I hate temporal mechanics!”

  But this isn’t like saving President Kennedy from an assassin’s bullets. Toby was a guy who wanted nothing more out of life than a pizza, a free game, and a powerful computer. And oh how Toby would love this world! The world where our computer dreams came true!

  The choice is simple. If what I think is happening is really happening, I can save my best friend’s life. If I wait, and think, and consult, this doorway may close forever.

  Early morning here in California, but for Meg, in New York, the day’s half spent. How I wish I could ask her what to do. But I know what she’d say—Help him. Save him. Give Toby back his life.

  There’s really no choice at all.

  The keyboard’s touch is so familiar I’m barely aware of it. Scrolling back, I look again at the message I left directing Toby to the ROTC action meeting decades ago. Without hesitation I delete the words Franklin Hall, filling the empty space before my blinking cursor with a lie. I type a new location, Burnside House.

  Won’t Toby be surprised when no one shows up!

  PART TWO

  NIGHTMARES

  Chapter Ten: Paul

  Last night the dream came again. It woke me in a new world, the world my actions helped create, woke me shivering despite Meg’s familiar touch, gentle on the rutted scars, despite her warmth and the sweltering Mekong night. I’ve had the dream ever since that cold, May night. Sometimes a year or more passes without it, sometimes it comes two nights running. Lately it comes whenever I close my eyes, even for the briefest naps.

  So many years since that cold May in Butler. In all that time no one has admitted storing flammable CS tear gas in Wellston’s ROTC offices. But when our gasoline-filled Molotov Cocktails shattered the building’s windows, it exhaled a flaming wind into our young faces.

  They say Matt Purdy and Alison Field, the graduate students who joined us, died instantly. Yet as I burned, I saw them fight the flames and lose. Miraculously, their bodies shielded Meg. Otherwise she never could have kicked my legs from under me, rolling me down a grassy knoll, saving my life while burning her hands and singeing her hair.

  Campus rent-a-cops arrived first, followed by Butler police. They threw blankets over the bodies, cuffed Meg and me to the chrome bumper of a Plymouth black-and-white. Meg screamed at them, “Take him to a hospital!”

  They didn’t.

  I spent the night naked, untreated, on the concrete floor of a Butler jail. At the 7:00 a.m. shift change, the new sergeant on duty walked by my cell, and seeing me, turned pale, retched, and barked orders at a patrolman.

  Later that day, Toby sat by my bed in a windowless room at Butler General Hospital. Images of his visit remain jumbled with pain, delirium, waking nightmares. But I remember the wetness on Toby’s cheeks. I remember thinking it must be raining again. I remember Toby, reaching out to touch me, and realizing I was bandaged everywhere, withdrawing his hand. Then, in a hoarse whisper, “I’ll get ‘em for this, Paul. I swear I’ll get ‘em.”

  How strange, I thought, he didn’t call me Tesla.

  The District Attorney dropped all charges against Meg and me the moment my lawyer mother arrived in Butler, demanding the heads of the arresting officers, promising the biggest lawsuit in state history. Recovering from injuries caused by my own actions and the authorities’ inaction, took longer.

  Meg went straight from jail to my bedside, and except for one weekend when she flew home to see her parents, stayed there until I was discharged a month later. On June 6, a mild, sunny graduation day, she helped me down the hospital stairs and out to Hope Street where Broadway Joe sat barking happily in my parents’ waiting Buick. I was going home. Home to Applewood, where Meg and my parents spent the summer taking turns feeding me, washing me, and changing my bandages. By Independence Day, with Meg’s help, I could sit on my parents’ sun porch watching Broadway play with the neighborhood kids, chasing a Frisbee on Grant Avenue. On August 14, my twenty-first birthday, we celebrated with a carrot cake Meg baked and my first long walk. By Labor Day, I joined the kids on Grant Avenue, tossing my gold Championship Model Wammo Frisbee to Broadway Joe, and on the first cool night of September, Meg said “I love you,” and I said “I’ve loved you since that day at Narragansett when you kissed me before kissing the horse,” and she leaned across my family’s white Formica kitchen table, kissing me for the second time.

  The next morning a friend from the Physics Department called. He told us that after graduation Toby used his old military school connections, landing a computer programming job at the Pentagon. We were shocked, but not angry. There was no anger left in us.

  All summer, letters to Toby came back unopened, marked Return to Sender. His parents responded to my long-distance phone calls with polite promises—“We’ll tell him you called.” The wedding invitation we mailed wasn’t returned, but neither was the RSVP card on which we wrote, “We love you, Toby. Please, please come!”

  On an autumn morning so beautiful it filled us with wonder to think God could make such a day, Meg and I were married beneath the rose trellis in my family’s yard. Meg, in cascading white satin, night-black hair dotted with late-blooming rosebuds from the garden, without makeup, without doubt, without hesitation, said, “I will.”

  Even as we promised ourselves to each other forever, the looks on the faces of Meg’s parents seemed to ask, How could our beautiful daughter marry this hideously scarred boy? But the smiles of the neighborhood kids we’d invited to join the ceremony, the touch of our hands as we slid the simple gold bands on each other’s fingers, the pastel blues of the high New Jersey sky, and the deep blue of Meg’s eyes washed away all that, leaving only peace.

  While our guests ate platters of antipasto, la
sagna, and oven-baked Chicken Murphy, Broadway Joe worked the crowd, begging scraps. Kevin, down from Butler with his battle-scarred Epiphone, strolled from table to table taking requests. He serenaded us that day with everything from Brown Eyed Girl to White Rabbit. And when he came to where Meg and I sat cross-legged on the grass eating scoops of Gruning’s French Vanilla ice cream covered with fresh south Jersey blueberries, he sang a slow, soft, Sugar Magnolia.

  Everyone applauded. Kevin bowed deeply, sliding the guitar to his hip, touching its neck to the hem of Meg’s gown. Her father proposed a toast, “To Meg and Paul. May they stay out of trouble!” And before anyone could drink, my father, raised his glass high, adding, “And never stop trying to change the world!”

  In the early evening when the last guests said goodbye, Meg and I sat together on the grass beneath the rose blossoms, breathing their delicate perfume, holding hands, talking. Sunset behind maples and elms highlighted the fire on their turning leaves, while Broadway chased after the last of the season’s fireflies calling each other with flickering light. The evening grew chill; we held each other closer. And we talked about Toby. His black beret and wizard’s eyes, quick smile and endless teasing. Meg cried when I told the story of Toby’s Academy Award guerilla theater performance during our marshals training practice parade the night we met Meg on Hope Street. “His acting was only good because of my directing!” she said, and we began laughing, brushing away tears with grass-stained hands until it was time to go inside my gold and brown New Jersey firebrick house, saying, “Good night,” and “Thank you,” to my parents who’d waited up for us in the kitchen.

  Then at last, holding each other, holding each other all night in my old single bed, until the fiery New Jersey sunrise bathed us through the bedroom window.

  Chapter Eleven: Paul

  I spent that fall and winter volunteering at WFMH, the Hilversum College radio station, and Columbus Elementary School where I’d begun my education. At Columbus, I tutored seventh and eighth graders in math and science. At WFMH, I repaired and upgraded tape decks and turntables. Broadway, who followed me everywhere, quickly became the unofficial mascot at Columbus and Hilversum.

  My parents suggested that Meg finish her English degree at Hilversum, but she came home from a visit to the registrar’s office with an application for nursing school. “I want to learn something real,” she said, and began volunteering at the Applewood Veterans Administration VA hospital the next day. She added a full load of nursing courses in September, but found time to organize fundraisers for WFMH and sit in the Columbus library surrounded by giggling wide-eyed children, as much acting out as reading passages from Dr. Seuss and Winnie the Pooh.

  We watched the war on the evening news every night, and we grieved with neighbors whose sons returned from Vietnam burned, broken, and strung out, and the ones whose sons would never come home again. But while the war continued, we came to believe our war was over, our life together safe and happy in my childhood home. We woke each morning to the aroma of my father’s percolating coffee and went off to bed at night serenaded by the theme from Hawaii Five-0, All in the Family, Bonanza, or whatever hit TV show my parents were watching. We fell into a rhythm, a state of harmony that would last until the following spring, until the day Toby changed the world.

  Toby spent his year at the Pentagon rapidly gaining promotion to the highest security clearance levels, learning everything about the government’s computers. Coworkers would later recall him as pleasant, hard working, cooperative. On May 7, 1971, one year to the day after the ROTC fire, he wiped clean the memories from the Pentagon’s mainframes and disappeared.

  Decades later, some call Toby a hero. Most consider him the worst traitor in American history. Perhaps he was neither. Because even though he did it to end the war, did it to save lives, I knew he also did it for me. And Toby couldn’t possibly have foreseen the events his act of sabotage would trigger. No one could.

  In 1971, the most important function of the Defense Department’s computer system was managing material support for soldiers in the field. Controlling from Washington every logistical detail of a war on the other side of the world had been a mistake from the beginning. Now, it was a disaster.

  Within days everything began running out. While warehouses in San Diego and Pearl Harbor overflowed with supplies, infantrymen stationed all over South Vietnam in places like Da Nang, Dak To, and Nah Trang had no toilet paper for their latrines, no bandages for their wounds, no bullets for their M-16s. President Nixon called an emergency meeting of the Joint Chiefs, telling them, “Get those fucking supplies to our fucking troops, or I’ll have your fucking heads!”

  The Joint Chiefs returned to the Pentagon, commanding their computer technicians to take charge of the war’s complex logistics. The techs, trained only in how to follow computer-generated orders, began frantically giving orders. With no access to stored data, and using only yellow pads, pencils, and adding machines, overworked, sleep-deprived techs shouted garbled instructions into telephones and cabled contradictory messages to bases and depots around the globe. In seventy-two nonstop hours of work, they dispatched thirty fully-loaded C-5A Galaxy transport planes to Camranh Bay, the giant U.S. airbase in Vietnam, and another thirty empty Galaxies to pick up Vietnam-bound supplies at NATO bases in Europe.

  When the first Galaxy landed at Ramstein Air Base in Germany, Air Force ground crews rushed to begin loading the giant plane, only to find its cavernous cargo bay already full. At Camranh Bay, Galaxy after Galaxy touched down with cargo bays that were completely empty.

  General Giap, the North Vietnamese Army’s strategic genius, seized on the confusion, launching a two-pronged attack. Veteran NVA troops swept southward, while in a repeat of Giap’s 1968 Tet Offensive strategy, Viet Cong irregulars struck savagely inside the walls of every southern hamlet and city, including the capital, Saigon. South Vietnam’s ARVN soldiers broke first, deserting in panic before the rapidly advancing NVA. U.S. troops fought on, often hand-to-hand, desperately buying time, screaming into their field phones for supplies that never came. Finally, they too began fleeing. But with the NVA pushing south and VC everywhere behind the lines, there was nowhere to run.

  The U.S Commander, General William Westmoreland, boarded a helicopter on the roof of the United States Embassy in Saigon, evacuating to the safety of the USS Enterprise cruising offshore in the South China Sea. Making one last call to the White House, he begged the president’s chief of staff, H.R. Haldeman, to do something. In the background he heard Secretary of State William Rogers angrily shouting at National Security Affairs Assistant Henry Kissinger, and Kissinger screaming hysterically at Rogers. Then Nixon came on the line, shocking the four-star general with his order.

  “It was an option we hadn’t discussed since Khe Sanh,” Westmoreland would write in his memoirs. “But there was so little time in which to decide, we began the operation without giving it a code name. President Nixon loved code names.”

  From the bridge of the Enterprise, Westmoreland ordered the arming and deployment of four B-52 bombers based in Okinawa. As they crossed into Vietnam’s airspace thirty-five thousand feet above the South China Sea, two banked north over the Gulf of Tonkin, laying in a course for the communist capital, Hanoi, and the northern port city of Haiphong. Another flew directly inland for the U.S. airbase at Da Nang, now overrun by North Vietnamese soldiers. The fourth, bound for half-occupied Saigon, was shot down on the outskirts of the southern capital by friendly fire from a panic stricken ARVN surface-to-air missile battery. The three remaining bombers dropped their payloads. Mushroom clouds rose heavenward as nuclear fireballs incinerated Hanoi, Haiphong, and Da Nang, and every living creature within a vast radius of destruction. Radioactive ash rained from the sky.

  After that, history changed. While an outraged Congress prepared articles of impeachment, rioting protesters occupied and burned government offices in Washington, San Francisco, Boston, New Orleans, Madison, Memphis, Chicago, and a hundred other c
ities and towns.

  In Butler, students stormed the John F. Kennedy Federal Building. As police and guardsmen fell under a terrifying sleet of rocks and bottles, someone lost control, opened fire. Associated Press newswire photos made two of my old friends briefly famous. Kevin McCabe on the Kennedy Building roof waving an upside-down American flag; Ray Constantino in front of his newsstand, cradling Sarah Bramwell, a Wellston freshman, trying, failing, to stop the flowing blood.

  At the barricaded White House, Nixon spent the night of May 17 listening to the sounds of sirens, gunshots, and breaking glass echoing down Pennsylvania Avenue. Henry Kissinger, leaving the State Department in search of the president, found him pacing the White House gallery, talking, arguing, with impassive portraits of Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln.

  At dawn, Nixon convened his cabinet, demanding support for a declaration of martial law and suspension of the Constitution. Instead, led by Health, Education and Welfare Secretary Elliot Richardson, the cabinet unanimously refused. Rising to his feet, screaming at astounded Secret Service agents to “Arrest those traitors!” Nixon, pressing the palms of both hands against his temples, crumpled into his chair. Blood clots from phlebitis in his right calf, shaken loose by age, by stress, by insanity, tiny assassins too small for any Secret Service agent to intercept, end the President’s life. The entire drama, down to his last word, “Fuck….” is captured on secret White House tape recorders that Nixon had ordered installed to preserve his every utterance for posterity.

  Within the hour, Supreme Court Chief Justice Warren Burger swore in Vice President Spiro Agnew as the 38th President of the United States. Agnew nominated House Minority Leader Gerald Ford, Republican from Michigan, to take his place as Vice President. Agnew’s first executive order proclaimed the remainder of May a national period of mourning for the fallen President. His second replaced Henry Kissinger with General Alexander Haig. In response to condemnation from America’s allies, threats from the Soviets and Chinese, and violent demonstrations throughout the country, Agnew dispatched Haig to the Paris Peace Talks. His instructions: “End this thing.” Vietnam’s communists vowed to fight on, but on September 1, Haig and Le Duc Tho, North Vietnam’s chief negotiator, signed the papers, shook hands for the photographers. These simple, civilized actions earned them each a share of the Nobel Prize for Peace, a prize Le Duc Tho refused.