Fifth Gospel:The Odyssey of a Time Traveler in First-Century Palestine Read online

  Next Ike spoke. “O’Brien, we’d be less than candid if we didn’t tell you that although every last equation checks out, it may not work. Jankor and the other physicists will tell you that it’s no more dangerous than crossing a street or riding in an elevator, but remember that this is their lives’ work. Quite understandably, they may play down the risk involved. They don’t want to spook you.”

  “I understand, sir. But where are you sending me?”

  Ike leaned back in his chair, and, putting his index finger alongside his nose, suddenly looked remarkably like Kris Kringle, twinkle in the eye and all. “Ah, now that’s an interesting question, is it not? One that we wrestled with for weeks—especially because of the cost in terms of money and resources. Aside from the magnitude of the scientific breakthrough and the secrecy, that’s something else that this operation has in common with the Manhattan Project—tremendous cost. We needn’t go into the specifics here. I’m sure that columns of figures bore you at least as much as they bore me. Let it suffice to say that for the foreseeable future, we can afford only one trip. This made an already difficult decision a thousand times more so.

  “I convened a very small and very special task force to consider the question.” The President shook his head sadly in reminiscence. “The Director of the CIA wanted to send you back to 1917 Russia so that you could somehow prevent the Bolsheviks from coming into power. He also expressed a great deal of interest in the possibility of your assassinating, in order of preference, Marx, Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, and Engels.” Ike had been ticking off the names on the fingers of his left hand, “and a host of others. The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff wanted to send you back to December 6, 1941, so that you have a whole day to warn of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Had our Pacific fleet not been so thoroughly crippled at the very outset of the war, he argues, the war would have been considerably shortened, not to speak of saving the lives of the more than 2400 people killed. The Director of the Smithsonian, a man whom I greatly admire, was certain that the only thing to do was to send you back to prevent the assassination of Lincoln. The Secretary of State, on the other hand, insisted that you be sent back to kill Hitler when he was nothing more than a two-bit paper hanger … pretty heady stuff, isn’t it?” I could only nod in agreement. Ike had stopped smiling that tired smile, and he now leaned forward. “It surely hasn’t escaped you that there’s a common thread running through all these scenarios?”

  “Revolution, assassinations, violence …”

  “Precisely … you know, this is a great, I might even say a miraculous, opportunity for the human race. It would be a shame; it would be criminal to use it to kill people. I refuse to use it to send out an assassin, even an assassin who would assassinate evil people. By the same token, it would be a waste or could even be a mistake to use it to alter a single isolated event—if history can be altered at all, but we’ll get to that later. What if, for example, you prevented the sinking of the Titanic? On the surface, you’ve saved more than 1500 lives. Good. But good enough to justify the terrific national effort to carry out this project? Then too, what if one or more of the 1500 you saved turned out to be an evil person? What if you saved a potential American or British Hitler? Or a Jack the Ripper? You begin to get the idea.

  “Panic reigned over western Europe in 1348 and 1349. Over one-third of the entire population died from the Black Plague. What if we shipped you and some crates of vaccine back to exactly the right time and the right place to prevent the epidemic before it even got started? A good idea? I don’t really know. Perhaps the only thing we’d achieve would be to hasten all the problems brought on by an overcrowded planet.

  “No, I’m afraid that whole line of thinking is barking up the wrong tree. No one on that task force could see the forest for the trees. So I’ll put it to you as I finally put it to them. What was the single greatest event in human history?”

  Inside my head swirled a kaleidoscope of views at fantastic speed. Images appeared, dissolved, and were replaced with others in a totally haphazard fashion. Some cavemen crouched around a fire. The Gutenberg press, the Wright brothers at Kitty Hawk. Christopher Columbus … the snow outside, Christmas carols over the car radio, the birth of … “Jesus Christ?” I asked. The President nodded vigorously, beaming from ear to ear.

  “Clarence, I think you may have found us the right boy.” My mind reeled.

  “Sir, Mr. President, do you mean that you want me to go back to …”

  10

  “Meet Jesus Christ,” Ike finished for me. “Yes, that’s precisely what I mean.”

  “But what do you want me to do?”

  “Listen to Him, observe Him, speak to Him, follow Him. Then report to us. If at all possible, I want you to approach Him in private, to tell Him who you are and where you come from. And then ask Him … I scarcely know how to put this … ask Him if we, the United States, if we are on the right track. Write down everything about Him that you see and hear, put it in your report, and when your report is finished, seal it in the vacuum canister that we’ve provided and bury it. We’ll show you the exact place on a map.”

  “Bury it?” A gigantic apprehension was beginning to loom over me.

  “Of course,” the President replied nonplused, “unless you can think of a better way to protect your documents.”

  “Oh, you mean you’re afraid that the documents may not survive the trip back with me, so …” I stopped dead when I saw the look Ike and Clarence exchanged. Clarence looked at me with distress.

  “I’m sorry, Lightfoot. It’s all my fault. I thought it would have been evident from my explanation of the process. The fact is you’re not coming back.” I sat frozen while he continued. “You see, in order to send you back, there’d have to be an installation on that end, which would have to be a sister of Oak Ridge’s L-2 Facility, super cyclotron and all, so that another tachyon beam could be generated, amplified, and focused, and expansion and polarization of your constituent particles effected …” He spread his hands eloquently.

  “So,” the President picked up, “we’re providing you with a very special canister. When your records are complete, you put them in the canister, lock it, and throw away the key. Actually, come to think of it, destroying the key by melting it down would be better. At any rate, after locking the canister, you flip a red toggle switch on the lid. That automatically evacuates the interior. Next, you flip a yellow toggle switch. That releases pure nitrogen gas inside to further protect the documents. Bury the canister at a spot we’ve predesignated. Just to cover our bet, in case of a little navigational error on your part, a quantity of several radioactive isotopes with extremely long half-lives will be embedded in the outer cover of the canister, so we’ll be able to use a Geiger counter to locate it. The isotopes will also aid in dating the canister. We’ll be running a lot of tests besides the old Carbon 14 to determine and to prove how long the canister’s been buried.

  “After you’ve completed your report, sealed it in the canister, and buried the canister, your mission is completed. Go anywhere in the world, pursue any occupation. The only thing we ask is that you don’t attempt to alter history, whether by violence, the introduction of advanced technology, becoming politically active, becoming a prophet or seer, or anything else that might affect history.” I sat in mounting horror as I listened to the President’s calm, reasonable, and well-modulated voice. I was simply unable to respond. After a long silence, Clarence spoke.

  “Another very important point, Lightfoot. When you delve this deeply into theoretical physics, you reach the point where philosophy and science seem to converge. There are, as you know, a number of classic time-travel paradoxes. What happens if you go back and through design or accident, cause the death of your great grandfather before your grandfather was conceived? Or, is that, by virtue of the fact that you have traveled back, impossible? What if … well, there are a lot of what ifs. One of the most important, and this is why, during your training phase, we want you to bone
up, not only on the history of the world during the first half of the first century, but on world history in general,” he stopped to tap the ashes from his pipe into the large glass ash tray. “Time is an invention of man.” He extracted a pipe tool from his pocket and began to methodically ream out the bowl, seemingly with great concentration.

  “Time is an invention of man. There is a school of thought that compares time to a river. We are on a boat traveling down that river. As we pass certain landmarks, or activities, and they fade from our view, well, that doesn’t mean they cease to exist. A time traveler is a man who leaves the boat, swims to shore, and walks back upstream. Everything is still there, just as it was when he passed it in the boat. And he can go to any chosen point and see it again. It’s not a bad analogy, as far as analogies go, and can serve to illustrate a few points: first, can you, from the bank of the river, so to speak, influence anything, or are you merely an observer? You’re no longer in the boat. The great-greatgrandfather paradox again. If you go back, will you be able to physically interact, or will you be nothing more than a ghostly shadow viewing things from a nether world? Or, perhaps time travelers, perhaps even you, have already changed some historical events and we just don’t know about it.

  “Second, some highly respected people postulate that, just as there are whirlpools and eddies in the current of a river, so there are in the river of time. Events which are so powerful and have such monumental importance that they act as vortexes. You could be drawn to and sucked into a vortex. A vortex could be viewed as a navigational hazard on the river or as a stupendous opportunity to change history at some crucial pivotal point. In short, in spite of our best efforts to send you back to the time of Christ, you could be diverted along the way and find yourself in Ford’s Theater moments before John Wilkes Booth pulled the trigger. You could find yourself at Philadelphia in 1776, at Hastings in 1066, on board the Lusitania in 1915, sailing with Christopher Columbus in 1492, or, as we profoundly hope, and pray, at the side of Jesus Christ at the height of His ministry. But the plain fact, Lightfoot, is that just about anything could happen,” he said, quietly laying his pipe in the ashtray.

  “Including me not getting reassembled at all. Including …”

  Jones shrugged. “It’s very easy indeed to get yourself killed as a test pilot or as an astronaut, and you were more than ready to sign on the dotted line for those jobs. You flew twice as many combat missions as you had to in Korea.”

  “That was different,” I turned to Ike, “With all due respect, sir, you’ve got the wrong man. What you want is a man who’s … more … religious than I am.”

  “That’s exactly what I don’t want, Captain. I want the closest thing to a totally objective man that I can possibly find. I do not want to send a man dedicated to proving that Christ was God. I do not want an apologist; I want a witness. I want a man who’ll report exactly what he sees and hears. No more and no less. We did our homework; long before Clarence interviewed you, we had reviewed everything that had ever been committed to paper about you—school records, military records, a special psychiatric profile prepared by a panel of the three best psychiatrists in the CIA. We know you’re not a Christian. It doesn’t matter; if anything, for the purposes of this exercise, it’s a plus.

  “No doubt a lot of questions that seemed strange to you at the time of your interview with Clarence are now beginning to fall into place. Nevertheless, let me spell some of it out for you. We went after a fighter pilot with combat experience because such a man is trained and accustomed to assess a situation quickly and act decisively. When you’re in a fighter and moving at several hundred miles an hour, the ground below you a blur, you don’t waver and hesitate. You make judgments and you act instantly and instinctively. That attribute can turn out to be critical in this mission, especially if there’s anything to this vortex business. You may arrive at a totally unexpected but pivotal point in history and find that you have only a moment to act or not to act, as the case may be. We can’t possibly brief you on every contingency. Which, as I’ve said, is why we also wanted a man with a passion for, and a sense of history.

  “We wanted a man with an excellent aptitude for languages because you’ll have to learn first century Aramaic in a very short time. You’ll also need to brush up on the classical Greek you took in college, as well as learn as much Hebrew as you can, given the little time you have to prepare for the mission.

  “We wanted a young man in excellent physical condition, and with no dependents, for obvious reasons.

  “Your combat record and your legendary performance at survival school interested us greatly because—above all else—our man must be a survivor. He must have the will to survive, the stamina, the intelligence to improvise, and the ability to think and analyze when his subconscious is telling him to panic. He must be a man who is cool under pressure. He must also be the quintessential loner because he’s going on the mission alone, he can confide in no one, and he can never come back.

  “Above all, I say, above all, he must be an honest man. It may interest you to know that the code name for the selection and recruitment phase of the operation was ‘Project Diogenes.’ Deep down you must have been wondering why we would be so eager to recruit an obscure captain in the Nevada desert for a mission of such magnitude that it’s being run out of the Oval Office. A man with your record and your abilities should be a major, going on lieutenant colonel. But you’re on a shelf.

  “Let’s speak frankly, O’Brien. You’ve made a lot of enemies and precious few friends. You’re not academy, and you have no influential connections. You’re in a dead-end job in a dead-end squadron on a dead-end air base in the desert. You’ll stay there until you’re passed over for the third time for major, at which point you’ll be forced into involuntary retirement. Men like you are very important in wartime. You’re given medals and promotions and you belong. In peacetime, no one seems to know quite what to do with you. At best, you’re not needed; at worst, you’re an embarrassment. So they stick you in some out-of-the-way place just like they put a ship in mothballs, and let you gather crud, hoping they’ll never need you again.”

  I felt the hot flush in my face as the President’s words hit home. The truth hurt; it hurt a lot. I struggled to control my voice. “You certainly do know how to be frank, sir. If I may be permitted to be equally frank, as a student of human history, I have every confidence that another war is just around the corner. Then ‘men like me’ will be in demand once more.”

  “Cynicism,” the President nodded in apparent satisfaction, “that’s one of the other qualities we wanted as well.” That only made me madder.

  “Then may I ask why you did pick me, sir?”

  “Of course, I was just coming to that. You see, we know why you’ve been shelved, and that makes all the difference. We know about your refusal to confirm a kill supposedly made by General Parkinson’s son, Lt. Paul Parkinson. A great deal of pressure was brought to bear on you since it would have meant that Lieutenant Parkinson would have finished the Korean War as an ‘ace.’ It meant a lot to him, and it meant even more to his father. So General Parkinson leaned on your wing commander, your squadron commander, your flight commander, and all creatures great and small in your chain of command. ‘Look, O’Brien,’ they all said, ‘what’s the big deal? The kid’s probably telling the truth anyway. It’s no skin off your nose. Just say you saw him shoot down a plane. You were the only other pilot in the area at the time; otherwise; we’d get someone else to do it. Just confirm the kill and everybody’ll be happy.’ But you didn’t.”

  “I didn’t see the plane go down.” Ike nodded and continued.

  “Then there was that matter at Kadena Air Force Base on Okinawa. You had a minor accident with a jeep and insisted that you pay for the fender bending out of your own pocket because you said it was your fault. The motor pool OIC kept trying to dissuade you from that. He said to forget about it; they’d repair it. He didn’t want to fill out all those forms. You insisted, y
ou paid for it, and you also got the reputation as a screwball and a troublemaker.

  “At Clark Air Force Base in the Philippines, you refused to accept ‘gifts’ from suppliers to the Officers Club when you were a junior member on the club’s board of directors. One of the consequences of your action was the discovery of improper conduct on the part of some of the other board members; there was subsequent disciplinary action, and one of those affected was your squadron commander.

  “We know of other incidents as well. ‘This above all, to thine own self be true,’ Captain?”

  “Honor, sir. Without that, a man is nothing.”

  “Well put. ‘Duty, honor, country’ is the way MacArthur likes to put it. And as vexatious as that man has been to presidents past, I for one like him. No, Captain, you’re the man for the job. And now, to business. H-hour is set for 2019 hours Eastern Daylight Time on July 8. The unusual timing is set by technical constraints. If we miss that time window, we’d have to wait for two more years, and, in July of 1961, someone else is going to be in the White House. Whoever it turns out to be may not give the green light for the mission. Even if he does, I wouldn’t be here to see it. I want to shoot for this coming July. I know it’s a big decision, but may I have it by 2000 hours on the day after tomorrow? If it’s yes, we’ve got to get moving. If it’s no, there are two other candidates for the job I want Clarence to interview.”