Written in Time (3 page)

The third level was the smallest. There was an office, smaller but otherwise somewhat similar to his father’s office in the house, minus windows, of course. On this floor as well there were three bedrooms—the sleeping accommodations for the family. There was a gymnasium, small but efficient, with free weights, a heavy bag and a treadmill.
 

“Okay, son. Where do you think the entrance to the fourth level is?”
 

“What?”
 

“Where do you think I put it?”
 

“Why would we have a fourth level to begin with, Dad?”
 

James Naile didn’t smile. “You’ll know all of that.
 

Where’s the entrance, son?”
 

John stood in the smallish hall, the office in front of him, the gymnasium to his left, the sleeping accommodations to his right and behind him. “Secret stuff there, right?”
 

“Right. Come on, son. We don’t have a lot of time.”
 

“I know—we’ll miss the commercial.”
 

“At the very least.”
 

John turned around. “Your office would be too obvious a spot. Yours and mom’s bedroom. Right?”
 

“Right.” James smiled, evidently pleased. He led the way into the bedroom. It was a pretty standard room; a chest of drawers, a dresser with a vanity mirror, a large double bed. John started toward the dresser, but stopped, looking intently at the large headboard of the bed. “Bingo, John! That a boy! Help me move this sucker.”
 

Actually, moving the bed was relatively easy, a matter of merely pulling on the footboard, and the bed’s headboard pivoting away from the wall. Behind it was a vault door. James spun the dial through its combination and unlocked it. “Your mother and I are the only ones who know the combination. I’ll give it to you to memorize.” James reached into the darkness beyond and flicked light switches. The staircase beyond was like the ones connecting the other levels.
 

“This place must have set you back a small fortune, Dad.”
 

“Not too bad, really; it helps owning your own construction companies and concrete plants.” At the bottom of the stairwell, John Naile found himself standing beside his father in what looked like a library or study, book-shelves lining paneled walls. There was a television set—a big one—and there were pieces of unfamiliar electronic equipment. “Here we are, son.”
 

“The Russians will never get you here, Dad.”
 

“Russians, maybe; Soviets, no way, unless future history is to be radically altered. That’s why only your mother and I knew about the fourth level until today.” As James Naile went over to the television set, almost as an aside he said, “And, by the way, the Soviet Union will officially cease to exist twenty-eight years from now, in December of 1991.”
 

“You mean there’ll be a war, then?” John Naile was starting to question either his own sanity or that of his parents. “But you just said there wasn’t—”
 

“Not a war; just evolution, son. The leadership of the Soviet Union will finally realize what folks like us have been saying all along: Communism flat out doesn’t work. Economics, son, not philosophy will win out. But that’s a long story. Just thank God for Ronald Reagan.”
 

“The ACTOR?”
 

“That’s a long story, too. Anyway, when you feel it’s appropriate, John, the secrets I’m revealing to you can be shared with your wife. Someday, that baby Audrey’s carrying will need to be told, but not until he or she is an adult and you can be absolutely certain the knowledge won’t be abused. That child will someday be the head of Horizon Industries. Unlike you or me, though, during the greater part of his or her tenure, the future will be a mystery.”
 

“The future’s a mystery for everybody, Dad.” John Naile leaned against the wall, blinked his eyes.
 

“Not for us, John, thanks to your great-grandparents moving west to Nevada. It’s from them that I—and now you—have inherited the records of future history. I don’t know if they realized what a moral burden it would be, despite all the care that they took. On the other hand, that knowledge of the future has made Horizon Industries what it is today. I’ve often considered—but subsequently dismissed—the idea of going to have a chat with your great-grandparents, of trying to tell them that bringing data from the future into the past is more dangerous than they suspect, despite the potential for positive change.
 

“In the records you’ll be reading, John, mention is several times made of eight million Jews being killed in the death camps, for example, but six million were killed according to our perception of recent history. So, maybe the effort Horizon made during the war wasn’t for naught. Who can say?”
 

“Are you alright, dad? You’re talking like—well, I don’t know what you’re talking like. Jack and Ellen, and your Dad and your aunt Elizabeth—they moved to Nevada seventy years ago. So how could you go and talk with Jack and Ellen Naile now? It’s my fault. I should be taking on more responsibilities in the company so you and Mom could—”
 

“Actually, it was sixty-seven years ago that Jack and Ellen Naile moved west, or a little over three decades from now, depending on your perspective.”
 

John Naile stared at his father, then glanced about at the strange trappings in the underground room. Without looking at his father, he said, “What?”
 

“Ever wonder why I had you learn building and carpentry skills even though you’re a rich man’s son?”
 

“Well, I guess you thought it was good for me. Right? Okay, why?”
 

“Someday you might have to fit out a secret room like this, John, so you’ll need to know how. There’s a box on the bookshelf there beside you. Take it down carefully, open it and tell me what you see there sealed under the glass inside.”
 

John Naile took the box from the shelf, opened it and looked at the object beneath the glass. Two pages from a magazine article, including a photo of a streetscape from turn-of-the-century Nevada. There were several storefronts visible, one of them reading “Jack Naile—General Merchandise.” John Naile looked up from the photo and at his father. “Great-Grandpa’s store.” He looked more closely at the picture, his eyes drifting down to the bottom of the page. There was a date: 1991. “This date must be screwed up, Dad. You ever notice it?”
 

“That magazine article is what made your great-grandparents realize that they were moving west, John, going to wind up in Nevada. A friend sent it to them shortly after the article was published, kind of as a gag. Jack took it more seriously than Ellen—at least at first, anyway. And my father, David, refused to even consider that there was something strange going on. You remember what a hardhead my father always was about almost everything except business,” James Naile said. John Naile glimpsed a faint smile crossing his father’s lips with the memory. “A fine and generous man of great intelligence and foresight, David Naile. He totally refused to believe, up until the very last minute, that some sort of time anomaly was going to take place and that he and his sister and parents would be caught up in it. But, to be on the safe side, he planned for it, even though he didn’t believe in it. The business knowledge he entered the past with enabled him to become the richest man in the state of Nevada. Hell of a guy.”
 

“What the hell is going on, Dad?”
 

“Take down the copy of Atlas Shrugged. Right there on the shelf next to Jack and Ellen’s family Bible. The bible was printed next year, by the way, if you care to check the date.”
 

“How can you say ‘was printed next year?’ What’s—”
 

“Look at the Ayn Rand novel there, in the flyleaf.” John Naile took the book and opened it. His father went on. “The book is a 1957 first edition of Atlas Shrugged. But there is something stamped into the endpapers.”
 

“‘From The Library of Jack and Ellen Naile,’” John Naile read aloud. He stared at his father.
 

“Now, that volume that you’re holding in your hands, John, is one of the few actual books—most of their reference materials were on microfiche, which is like microfilm—but that book and their family Bible and only a few other works were in actual book form when Jack and Ellen Naile packed up the family and moved to Nevada.”
 

John Naile pushed himself away from the bookcase against which he’d leaned. “That’s impossible, Dad; you know that. Jack and Ellen Naile moved to Nevada before the turn of the century, and Ayn Rand’s book here wasn’t published until six years ago.”
 

“If I’d brought you down here six years ago or ten years ago or as soon as you were old enough to read numbers, John, you could have read that same publication date from that same book. You’ll have to believe something.
 

And I’ve got all the proof you or anyone could require confirming that belief.
 

“Your great-grandparents and my father and his sister, Elizabeth, did indeed move to Nevada just before the turn of the century, but the century I’m talking about was this one, this century—not the last one. When they arrived at their destination, they were not only more than half a continent away from their home in Georgia, but almost an even century back in the past.”
 

Before John Naile could think of anything to say, James Naile looked at his wristwatch and announced, “It’s nearly time for Walter Cronkite to come on.”
 

“It’s only a little after one-thirty, Dad. All that’s on television this time of the day is soap operas. Remember?”
 

“As the World Turns, to be precise, John. See?”
 

For the first time, John Naile looked at the television screen. There was a picture, all right. “How’d you get—”
 

“A picture down here? I’ve got sheathed cable running up to the roof of the pump house up above and to an antenna array. I was down here earlier checking reception. It’s perfect. It’s a color television, but CBS won’t go to color broadcasting for a while yet. Pour yourself a drink, John. You’re going to need it. Trust me. What you’re about to see is no soap opera.”
 

James Naile placed some sort of black plastic cartridge into one of the unfamiliar-looking electronic gadgets, this particular one right beside the television set. “What’s that?”
 

“It’s a VHS videocassette, which will be invented by the JVC Corporation sometime in the future. I don’t know exactly when. I have a supply of the cassettes, handmade for me at considerable expense by the boys in our research labs. Both the machine and the cassettes themselves were copied from equipment owned by Jack and Ellen Naile. Your great-grandparents had planned to bring several of these machines to Nevada with them, but the circumstances of their actual trip came up suddenly. So they only had one, which doubled as a handheld television camera. The thing was made by the Japanese, or will be, depending on point of view. Rest easy; we have stock in several companies which will be big players in this. And the Nailes had about a dozen cassettes with them when the time transfer took place. The original cassettes couldn’t be duplicated or even played until recently, because of the printed circuitry required for the machine. Getting images off those old cassettes was almost impossible. Seems the magnetic surface can start flaking off, kind of like a photograph fading in sunlight.”
 

“Printed circuitry?”
 

“Takes the place of cathode tubes—for the most part anyway. As I was saying, the cassettes were pretty deteriorated with age, but we were able to salvage some terrific footage of your great-grandparents, your grandfather David and your great-aunt, Elizabeth. Fortunately, the climate in Nevada is usually pretty dry, so that helped preserve the tapes. The technicians who helped me never got to see the entire setup, and they were told that it was top-secret government work. My dad got me started on the project. It was kind of sweet, really, watching him sit there in front of a television set, seeing his parents as they were then, seeing himself and his sister as teenagers.”
 

“So, these things play like one of the new audio cassettes?”
 

“Same principle as magnetic tape, but picture as well as sound, John. We separated the camera concept from the recorder/player, though.”
 

“Then you’re going to play a tape right now, and that’s how come we’ll see Walter Cronkite? This is almost incomprehensible! How’d they get this technology in the past when it couldn’t have been invented and hasn’t been invented yet? This doesn’t make any sense, Dad.”
 

“I’m going to record something. You can look at the copies of the old tapes later. We’re about to see history unfolding before our eyes, son, and it won’t be pretty to watch. We’re going to make a record of it. I don’t really know why we should, but maybe I’ve come to appreciate history the same way you will.”
 

A commercial for Niagara Spray Starch was just concluding. The commercial ended, and there on the screen were a man and a woman in a living-room setting. They seemed to be discussing something, but John Naile didn’t care what; his mind was sifting through the bizarre things his father had been telling him.
 

The television drew his attention again as there was a thudding sound and the words “CBS News Bulletin” flashed on the screen. As his father had predicted, it was the voice of Walter Cronkite, and he was saying, “Here is a bulletin from CBS News . . . ”
 

“Mother of God,” John Naile rasped as Walter Cronkite announced that President Kennedy had been shot. The bulletin ended. John Naile took the drink his father offered him. A single malt scotch with no ice. John Naile swallowed half the contents of the glass.