Written in Time Read Online Free PDF

your child read it someday.”  
    John asked, “Is it okay to smoke down here?”  
    “Give me one of those cigarettes, and I’ll join you.”  
    John took out the package of Luckies, shook one out for his father and one for himself. James lit both cigarettes from his pipe lighter. “How could we have records of stuff that hasn’t happened, Dad?”  
    “I read it for myself on microfiche when I was about your age, John. Your grandfather chose the day in 1929 when the stock market was going to crash, which of course he’d known about. Of course, Horizon Enterprises was fully prepared in advance, so we actually gained ground rather than lost it during the Great Depression.”  
    “That’s crazy, Dad. With this Kennedy thing—why . . . why didn’t you just tell J. Edgar Hoover or somebody if you knew that the President was going to be killed? Why didn’t you tell Jack Kennedy himself, for God’s sake?”  
    “The same reason why neither your grandfather nor I told your mother about our knowledge of the future before the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. We can’t risk changing history, and I didn’t want your Mom to share in the guilt for that. And, anyway, first thing anyone would say is what you’re saying—that it’s crazy. After I convinced them with hard evidence, they’d invariably use knowledge of the future in ways which might change the future. We can’t risk the future of all mankind in an attempt to save the life of one man or hundreds or even thousands of men.  
    “And what if Kennedy was still murdered, John?” James stubbed out the cigarette. “How can you smoke these things? What if, even if the government had alerted the Pacific Fleet, the Japs had still gotten through, somehow? What if time heals itself? Say that I’d really been able to prevent what happened just now in Dallas, but somehow in doing so I rewrote the future in such a way that we had that nuclear war we were able to avoid before history was changed? What if I caused the deaths of millions of people, maybe the destruction of all life on Earth, just by tampering with history this one time to save one man?”  
    James Naile began pacing the room, shook his head, turned off the television set. “It’ll still record. No, son, rewriting time is more responsibility than I want on my shoulders, or yours. Just because I have solid connections in Washington doesn’t mean I can go in and tell them something like this with any assurance at all that they’ll behave correctly, use the knowledge wisely.”  
    John lit another cigarette with the butt of the first one. “This is all true, isn’t it?”  
    “Jack and Ellen Naile are teenagers now, attending the same high school in Chicago. They haven’t married yet, of course, but they know one another, and a year from now they’ll start dating, and they’ll be engaged before they graduate. They’ll marry in a few years—in 1968—and they’ll have two children. One of those will be David, my father, your grandfather, who’ll be the founder of Horizon Enterprises in 1914. Even though your grandfather has yet to be born, John, you’re almost old enough to have fathered your great-grandparents—they’re only seventeen and fifteen, respectively. And their daughter, Elizabeth, will become one of the most influential women of the early twentieth century.”  
    John found a chair and sat down.  
    After a long silence, James said, “Let’s get out of here in a couple of minutes—our wives will be needing us, and lunch will be ready, anyway. You can tell Audrey if you think it’s advisable. I don’t know, son; I’d probably wait a while, but do what you think is best. Might want to wait until the night we land men on the Moon. Neil Armstrong will be the first man to set foot on the Moon. That might be a more upbeat way of letting Audrey in on things—just tell her what he’s going to say before he says it. That’s about six years from now. Think about it.”