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little like a man reading a very grim book. A Thomas Hardy novel, say. You know how it’s going to
end, but instead of spoiling things, that somehow increases your fascination. It’s like watching a kid
run his electric train faster and faster and waiting for it to derail on one of the curves.
“As for 9/11, if you wanted to fix that one, you’d have to wait around for forty-three years. You’d be
pushing eighty, if you made it at all.”
Now the lone-star flag the gnome had been holding made sense. It was a souvenir of Al’s last jaunt
into the past. “You couldn’t even make it to ’63, could you?”
To this he didn’t reply, just watched me. His eyes, which had looked rheumy and vague when he
let me into the diner that afternoon, now looked bright. Almost young.
“Because that’s what you’re talking about, right? Dallas in 1963?”
“That’s right,” he said. “I had to opt out. But you’re not sick, buddy. You’re healthy and in the
prime of life. You can go back, and you can stop it.”
He leaned forward, his eyes not just bright; they were blazing.
“You can change history, Jake. Do you understand that? John Kennedy can live.”
4
I know the basics of suspense fiction—I ought to, I’ve read enough thrillers in my lifetime—and the
prime rule is to keep the reader guessing. But if you’ve gotten any feel for my character at all, based
on that day’s extraordinary events, you’ll know that I wanted to be convinced. Christy Epping had
become Christy Thompson (boy meets girl on the AA campus, remember?), and I was a man on his
own. We didn’t even have any kids to fight over. I had a job I was good at, but if I told you it was
challenging, it would be a lie. Hitchhiking around Canada with a buddy after my senior year of
college was the closest thing to an adventure I’d ever had, and given the cheerful, helpful nature of
most Canadians, it wasn’t much of an adventure. Now, all of a sudden, I’d been offered a chance to
become a major player not just in American history but in the history of the world. So yes, yes, yes, I
wanted to be convinced.
But I was also afraid.
“What if it went wrong?” I drank down the rest of my iced tea in four long swallows, the ice cubes
clicking against my teeth. “What if I managed, God knows how, to stop it from happening and made
things worse instead of better? What if I came back and discovered America had become a fascist
regime? Or that the pollution had gotten so bad everybody was walking around in gas masks?”
“Then you’d go back again,” he said. “Back to two minutes of twelve on September ninth of 1958.
Cancel the whole thing out. Every trip is the first trip, remember?”
“Sounds good, but what if the changes were so radical your little diner wasn’t even there anymore?”
He grinned. “Then you’d have to live your life in the past. But would that be so bad? As an English
teacher, you’d still have a marketable skill, and you wouldn’t even need it. I was there for four years,
Jake, and I made a small fortune. Do you know how?”
I could have taken an educated guess, but I shook my head.
“Betting. I was careful—I didn’t want to raise any suspicions, and I sure didn’t want some bookie’s
leg-breakers coming after me—but when you’ve studied up on who won every big sporting event
between the summer of 1958 and the fall of 1963, you can afford to be careful. I won’t say you can live
like a king, because that’s living dangerously. But there’s no reason you can’t live well. And I think
the diner’ll still be there. It has been for me, and I changed plenty of things. Anybody does. Just
walking around the block to buy a loaf of bread and a quart of milk changes the future. Ever hear of
the butterfly effect? It’s a fancy-shmancy scientific theory that basically boils down to the idea that