Time Twisters

by RABE, JEAN

  “The rabbi. And what do you know of Adonai’s will? What have you seen of it?”

  Yeshua smiled. “I have seen more of it than you, enough to say to you that—”

  Eleazar turned away, already exhorting the crowd as he did.

  “We are guilty of such sins that we deserve what punishment is ordained. We know this, for Adonai would not mete out punishment unjustly. And so I say let us not take our just deserts at the hand of the Romans—let them not be Adonai’s executioners!”

  The crowd came closer, and some on the edges began to murmur in agreement, though Yeshua could see they weren’t sure what they agreed to. Others shook their heads in confusion.

  “Eleazar,” Yeshua said, “how do you know the will of Adonai? Has he spoken with you?”

  He asked so seriously that none dared laugh.

  “Do I know the will of Adonai? No! I am his humble servant. And I say that we have earned his wrath, for he would not visit it upon us if we hadn’t.” Swift, like a snake, his fervor took another path, as it did, he turned to his people again. “My friends, I can only tell you what I have seen. I have seen how the Romans treat captives, how they use our women, how they use our men for sport in their arenas, feeding them to wild beasts.”

  Now the men among them grew loud in their agreement, though Yeshua wondered how many had seen what Eleazar claimed to have seen.

  “Listen! We will not let the Romans do Adonai’s work!”

  The crowd held it’s breath, and storm came creeping nearer.

  “We will do it ourselves!”

  From that moment, Eleazar spoke madness, telling them that each man must take his wife children aside and embrace them, kiss them, and in the next swift moment become their executioner.

  “For we will not let the Romans have them! We must not!”

  Then fell the storm, fed by the winds of madness and fear.

  Many in the crowd took up his cry as though it were a battle shout: “We must not! We must not! We will not!” Women wept, children sobbed, and Yeshua murmured, “Fear not.”

  To whom? He didn’t know, perhaps only to himself as he waded into the crowd.

  They parted for him, so many knew him as the rabbi who had sheltered their children and helped put out the fire.

  “Now,” he said, and he spoke in the voice of his youth. “Hear me. Adonai has declared no doom here. He has asked for no blood. My Father,” he said, “would weep to see the murder of children at the hands of their parents.”

  Abba! Beside him, Abba stood; Abba, the breath in his lungs, the beat of his heart.

  “Each man put up your knife and look into the face of your wife! Kiss the cheek of your child! Find your wit and your heart there and think of what this man asks you to do.”

  Like a pillar of white fire, Eleazar raged. He threw in front of their eyes the most horrific images he could summon. Some had heard of the terrors in Yerushalayim, the killings, the rapes, and the torture. Others had been there and did not need imagination to summon what Eleazar wanted them to see. As fire had spread in the night, so did fear now.

  They shouted down the words of the strange rabbi. “Yes!” Eleazar shouted. “Why fear death? We do not fear sleep. Death is no worse, only more! Am I speaking to brave men who will protect their wives and sisters, their children? Or am I speaking to cowards?”

  Knives glinted in the sunlight.

  Fear not . . .

  In his heart, Yeshua cried, Abba! Abba! They will slaughter the lambs!

  Fear not, my Son.

  The voice of his Father was the beat of his heart.

  Yeshua turned and found Marta nearby. He waded through the crowd, trying to get to her. She met him, her fine-boned face changed into that of a warrior. Such a face must have been D’vorah’s, she who led the armies of the Israelites in the age of the Judges, tear-streaked and sobbing. Around them grew a storm of shouting and weeping, and suddenly came the smell of blood.

  “Listen,” Yeshua said. He took her by the shoulders. “Take what children you can and bring them to the caves in the place where the water feeds the wells. Hide there. Hide until this madness is over.”

  Fire had not bellowed as this crowd now did, and yet around the two a calm settled. Marta clung to his hands. “Come with us. Reb Yeshua, come!”

  Abba, the blood singing in his veins: Fear not!

  Abba beside him, Yeshua shook his head. “Go. I am where I must be.”

  She hung on her heel, then ran, leaving him, leaving her husband. Yeshua saw her grab the hand of another woman and saw them snatch what children they could, their own and a few others.

  He watched them vanish into the crowd, and when he looked back into the compound, he saw that the storm of exhortation had ended. Women sat on the bricks of the dusty courtyard, they stood their children in front of them. Men came and knelt beside them. Some took their babies in their arms, others kissed their wives, and tears rolled down their cheeks.

  In his heart, Yeshua said: Abba, make it stop!

  But his Father did not answer but to say that the will freely given to all mankind is not to be gainsaid by the Giver.

  Fear not . . .

  Abba!

  Fear not. Go among them.

  And so he did, for it had been always what he’d been destined to do. Go among men, minister to them, help them, teach them.

  Eleazar, too, walked among the people, quiet now, and sometimes he touched the dark curls on the head of a child, or the shoulder of a father while, here and there, like small silver flames, light danced on the blades of knives.

  And where Eleazar walked, Yeshua came after, his eyes the last a weeping mother saw, his step the last a grieving father heard when he ended his own life.

  They walked, the two, Eleazar and Yeshua, each aware of the other, until all the deed was done but one part. The last of his people left alive, Eleazar took a sword and wiped it clean.

  “Rabbi,” he said from across the vast, bloody courtyard. “Help me.”

  Yeshua shook his head. “You know the law as well as I know it: I shall not kill.”

  “And you will not defend yourself.”

  “No. If you do this, you do it of your own will.”

  The man walked away, his sword clean of all the day’s blood, and Yeshua, weary, weary, took himself to the pallet of blankets and lay himself down.

  He didn’t hear Eleazar die, but he felt it.

  Like the draining of my own life, Abba, my own blood seeping away.

  “And I don’t know what it has all been for. I have saved no one, redeemed nothing. I was, for a while, filled with your Spirit. And then . . .”

  And then, My Beloved Son, you were not. For a woman worked her will upon her husband, and the promise I made to all of mankind that their will would be free has been kept. If I had not kept that promise, what worth the promise of Redemption?

  Sickening in the reek of smoke and blood, Yeshua said, “But there was no Redemption. All is as it was.”

  It is true that all is not as it would have been with the world had you died Barabbas’ death. Yet all is not as it would have been here, had you not come. Five children live, and two women. Can you tell me, Yeshua, what will come from those seeds in ten years, a hundred, more?

  The last chance of Redemption has not passed, for the promise has not been fulfilled. The time will come again, one day. And we shall see again what may happen.

  Rest.

  No more did Abba say, but weariness became something else, something sweeter, like the assurance of peaceful sleep.

  Old man, old man. Yeshua stood and took a blanket from the pile that had been his bed. He folded it carefully, making sure the creases were even and straight. Then he went and put it at the threshold, laying out the old message.

  The work is complete.

  THREE POWER PLAY

  Wes Nicholson

  Present day:

  “It’s not right,” the hooded and cloaked figure said ‘to no one in particular, as it
watched the events unfolding on a screen. “It shows that the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, and the Americans built the atom bomb. It wasn’t supposed to be that way.”

  A clawed hand reached out from beneath the cloak and twisted a dial. The movement on the screen slowed, stopped, and began rewinding—faster and faster. The clawed hand reached out again and brought the screen to a stop. A small counter on the bottom read: “local date, June 6, 1941.” The picture on the screen was of a tranquil palace, definitely oriental in origin but otherwise not remarkable.

  The figure did something inside its cloak and then flowed from its chair and into the screen. A shimmering something slid silently through the gardens of the palace and flowed into a spot in midair.

  A moment later the cloaked figure reappeared in front of the screen. The counter now read: “local date, June 7, 1941.”

  “Now then, let’s see how that looks,” the voice rasped, and the clawed hand reached out to turn the dial forward, just a little.

  June 9, 1941:

  The Imperial Japanese War Cabinet was meeting to discuss Japan’s options with the war in Europe and Africa.

  Should they stay out of it?

  Should they take the opportunity to subjugate China while the rest of the world was otherwise occupied?

  Should they enter the war on one side or the other?

  One of the cabinet members, an admiral, spoke his mind. “The time is right for the sons of Nippon to take our rightful place in the Pacific. We must kick the western influences out of our waters, beginning with the Americans in Hawaii. A strike on their fleet in Pearl Harbor will make any entry into the war on the part of the United States almost impossible.”

  There was much discussion about the wisdom of attacking a country that had so far shown no inclination to join the war, and was weighing options about which side to come in on—if it came in at all. After some debate, the cabinet members turned to the Emperor Hirohito.

  “I had a vision of the fires of destruction that will come of this action,” the Emperor said. “You should not send the Imperial Navy to Hawaii; there is a better way. Send the ships to Singapore and Malaya, and take those countries in the name of the Chrysanthemum Throne. The Americans will leave Hawaii soon enough, and then you may send the Navy there to take control.”

  The cabinet began making plans to invade Malaya and Singapore, and remove the British and Australian forces from those countries.

  Meanwhile, in the United States, debate raged about whether supporting the British in their struggle against Hitler was a good thing. For now, most accepted that the debt being built up by Britain was worth the effort—the economy was still recovering from a terrible recession, and anything that got money flowing and people working had to have at least some good points. In the press and on the radio, the far right argued that Hitler’s Aryan policies were correct and that the United States should be joining with the Germans to ethnically cleanse the country of all the inferior races.

  In the desert of Nevada, a group of American scientists worked alongside Jewish scientists who had fled Europe just before Hitler’s jackboots ground their homeland into submission.

  In Britain, the war cabinet struggled to come up with a plan that would rock Hitler back on his heels, and the people of Britain worked long and hard just to stay alive. Those who could left the big cities and went to the rural areas where the bombings didn’t happen every night. In the moors of Scotland, a group of scientists worked around the clock on weapons and technology that might defeat the Axis powers.

  Present day:

  “Hmm, better” the voice croaked. “Let’s look a bit further.” The dial got a sharp twist, and then wound back until the counter stopped at . . .

  December 7, 1941:

  The Imperial Japanese fleet was well in place to support the land forces in the subjugation of Malaya, the first stop in the conquest of Southeast Asia. In the economic powerhouses of the eastern United States, opinion was swinging more and more in favor of Hitler and Mussolini, and if not for the huge debt being run up by Britain, the war supplies carried by ships would be curtailed.

  Present day:

  “Ah, now it’s looking like it’s supposed to.” The hand gave the dial another sharp twist, stopping the display at . . .

  January 18, 1942:

  Singapore had fallen to Japan three days earlier, and now the sights turned south toward Indonesia, Papua/New Guinea, and Australia. A few concerned voices in New York and Washington were howled down when they pointed out that Japan now controlled most of the world’s supply of rubber and tin. More voices joined the growing chorus of calls for the US to join with Germany. The Irish-Americans were among the loudest supporters, their historical hatred of all things British fueling their desire to see Britain crushed once and for all.

  In the desert of Nevada, the scientists still labored to uncover the secrets of the atom, but their Jewish coworkers had long since fled to Canada, Mexico, and Brazil.

  In the wilds of Scotland, the British scientists and their Jewish counterparts worked around the clock, convinced the secret to Hitler’s defeat lay in their work.

  In Berlin, Hitler’s advisers informed the Fuhrer that there were suitable facilities in Sweden for the development and testing of heavy water, a necessary part of building the atom bomb.

  In Russia, the people struggled to survive the last of winter and looked forward to the spring thaw.

  Present day:

  The hand twisted the dial to the right once more, until it read:

  June 3, 1943:

  The pressure from the media, and through it the public, finally pushed an ailing U.S. President to sign a declaration of war against Great Britain and her allies. The U.S.-Canadian border was formally closed, although in reality it had been a “no-go” zone for some months, and the Canadians moved a sizeable number of troops to each of the known border crossings. The U.S. Navy bases on the Atlantic seaboard were a hive of activity as the officers and men put the last touches to their ships before setting sail for Europe. Around the country, at airfields where new airplanes were being tested, work stepped up a notch to get the latest instruments of war ready for action. America was going to war with the British—again.

  In Tokyo, the Imperial War Cabinet laid plans before the Emperor to invade Northern Australia and take control of the mineral resources there. The Emperor liked what he saw, and with Indonesia and Papua/New Guinea already under Japanese control, he saw no reason to halt the expansion of the Rising Sun. He gave his approval of the plans and then retired for the night.

  Present day:

  “No, no, no.” The voice was totally devoid of emotion as it wound the dial back a day, and the view of the palace garden once again filled the screen. Once more the figure fidgeted inside its cloak, and once more it flowed into the screen, disappearing as it touched the grass. A few hours later, the screen shimmered and the cloaked figure reemerged.

  Then the dial wound forward one day and the screen focused on the Imperial War Cabinet meeting with the Emperor.

  June 3, 1943:

  The Emperor nodded at the plans and smiled, but the smile did not pass his lips. His eyes were as hard as granite.

  “No. To invade Australia at this time would not be wise. Better to consolidate our position in the region, and secure our supply lines. If the Imperial Navy can cut off shipping to the west coast of Australia, there will be no need to invade. The weakling Australians will come to us, begging to surrender.”

  While it was plain that not all the Imperial War Cabinet agreed with this strategy, none dared argue with the Emperor, and so it was that the plans for the invasion of Australia were shelved—for now at least.

  In the desert of Nevada, the scientists made a breakthrough and begun constructing a device to test their new theory. If it worked, this new war with Britain would be over in a matter of weeks.

  In the Scottish moors, the scientists loaded a crate onto a nondescript truck in the dead of night and dro
ve it to an abandoned coal mine, where they unloaded it and hauled it into the mine on an ore car. If the night had not been so dark, a curious onlooker might have wondered why an abandoned mine didn’t have rusted rails. But there was only one curious onlooker, and it knew the answer. A thin laugh escaped from beneath the hood as it watched events unfold.

  In Russia, the warm weather was matched by warm smiles from many of the workers in the fields. Only the ones dressed in one-piece gray outfits were not smiling, and that was because they were German POWs being forced into slave labor. A few managed the occasional wry grin, as they realized their lot was better than that of the Jews who were on “holiday” in Germany.

  June 4, 1943:

  In Scotland and Northern England, all the wireless sets suddenly stopped working at 6 AM.

  In Scandinavia, people felt the earth tremble and wondered if an avalanche was coming.

  In the British Isles, people felt the tremor and looked out their windows, expecting to see a long line of tanks or heavy vehicles passing by. But there was none to see, and the people got on with their lives as best they could—each doing his or her bit to keep Britain’s war effort going.

  Present day:

  The claw turned the dial to the right again, and the display read:

  June 6, 1944:

  For a year now the British had stood almost alone against the might of the Third Reich, and the American Navy was making sure almost no supplies got through from Canada. It was clear the Germans were massing troops on the beaches of Normandy in preparation for an invasion of England and Wales. The skies were filled with German and American fighter planes, and although the Spitfires and Hurricanes gave as good as they got, the enemy was simply too numerous. It was only going to be a matter of weeks, if that, before Winston Churchill would be forced to eat his claim that Britain “will never surrender.”