Message-Id: <199410310621.WAA10591@beasley.cisco.com> Date: Mon, 31 Oct 94 8:06 +0300 From: Yapha Schochet Subject: Thanksgiving part two Thanksgiving Part Two Eventually, everyone seemed to forget about Sam's strange behavior during those few days, however. Everyone except for Sam. Or maybe they were just being kind enough not to remind him, he thought uncomfortably. He was ashamed of his behavior during that time, as reported back to him by his parents and Katie. He gathered from what they told him that he had made some pretty dire predictions about them. In addition to claiming that Tom would be killed in Vietnam, he had also predicted that his father would die of a heart attack and that Katie would elope with a no-good drunk who would mistreat her. It must have hurt his family terribly to hear him predicting such a dismal future for them. He couldn't think why he might want to hurt them like that, even subconsciously. On the contrary. Sam loved his family dearly and they all loved him. It was true that when they were younger, Sam had always wanted to tag along with Tom, and Tom sometimes prefered to hang out with his own older friends without his younger brother around. But there were other times that Tom did let him tag along and taught him how to ride a bicycle or took him to the movies. Katie could be a pain sometimes, even now, but as kid sisters went she wasn't so bad. She was his best audience for guitar playing, she could be counted on to cheer the loudest at his basketball games, and she was always willing to listen to his scientific theories even when she couldn't understand them. His parents did scold, but they had always been lavish with hugs and praise as well and they were reasonable on the whole. The guys at school often grumbled about their families but when Sam joined in he did so half-heartedly. He simply didn't have much to grumble about in that department. In fact, knowing that he would have to leave the family next year worried and scared him. Caltech and M.I.T. were both farther from Elk Ridge than he would have liked. He almost wished he _could_ take that basketball scholarship at Indiana University where he would still be close enough to come home for a long weekend or his mother's birthday. But Tom was right about his need to go where he could best develop his intellectual abilities and interests. His greatest interest was in physics, especially relativity and time. Caltech or M.I.T. were the best places to pursue that interest, and like all the best universities, both schools had made him offers. His tuition would be payed with scholarships so he could go anywhere he chose without that being a concern, but the family simply didn't have the money to bring him home for frequent visits. Sam wasn't a bit worried about the academic side of college. He could have breezed through that years ago and he knew it. But he also knew that he would be homesick and and that he was going to miss his family terribly. He even suspected that he might be reluctant to make a final decision between the two schools because that would make his leaving seem more definite. So why would he have wanted to hurt his family like that? He just couldn't understand it. Perhaps his memory block was due to not wanting to remember his hurtful behavior toward the the very people he least wanted to think he had hurt. His first worry, connected to those mysterious three days, had been that there was something seriously wrong with him physically, but that had turned out to not be the case. Now he worried that there might be something terribly wrong with him as a human being. There were no tests for this at the hospital lab, however. All he could do was hope that he would never again lose control again and hurt the people he loved, whether he remembered doing so or not. Sam's soul searching led him to a decision. Whatever he ended up doing with his unique mind was going to have helping other people and making the world a better place as it's main purpose. Sam didn't mention this decision to anyone because he was embarrassed to sound corny, but the decision felt right to him, as if it was what he was meant to do. Besides Sam was planning to be a physicist. He now knew that he himself had the capacity to be hurtful if he didn't monitor himself, and he believed that the invention of nuclear weapons had proven where physics could lead if the good of humanity were not its prime goal. The last thing he wanted was to end up inventing an even more horrific tool for mass destruction. But perhaps, after all, he had not done those things, reported back to him, during the days he could not remember. Unlikely, he knew, but still he couldn't remember doing them. When he tried very hard to remember that time, he came up with vague, dreamlike memories of having been somewhere else altogether. He hadn't taken those memories seriously at first because to Sam memories were always as clear and accurately detailed as replays on a film, a film that had three dimensions and included taste, smells and tactile sensations as well as visual and auditory ones. His memory could recreate anything that had ever happened to him since, as his mother put it, before his second birthday. So he had dismissed the vague memories that he did have of those three days as having occurred in a dream. Still, it was a pleasant dream and so he tried to recall it now. It seemed to him that he had been sitting in a large, bluish room, with little furniture except for a table such as doctors use to examine their patients. A man about the same age as his parents, but shorter than his father and garishly dressed, had come into the room, grinned at him and said, "Hi there, kid." The man looked fondly at Sam, making Sam wonder if he were an unknown uncle or cousin, and continued, "I always did want to see what you were like when you were a teenager." Sam had been confused, because, of course, he _was_ a teenager, he hadn't yet had time to be anything else except a little kid. And the man was being awfully friendly for someone he had never seen before. "Excuse me, sir, un, I don't think I know who you are." "You will, kid. You're going to meet me in about fifteen years, and the two of us are gonna be buddies. I'm Admiral Albert Calavicci, but you'd better call me Al and start getting used to it." Sam wasn't accustomed to calling people who were his parents' age by their first names, certainly not a naval officer of such high rank, although this man was most definitely not in uniform. But everything was so strange and dreamlike that he had decided to go along with it. "Admiral, un, Al, what did you mean about fifteen years from now? Am I in the future?" "Well, I shouldn't be telling you this, kid, but it is _you_ and you won't remember anyway. From your point of view you are in the future, a future that you created in order to go into the past. Right now you and your future self have traded places and the older you is on your farm in Elk Ridge, Indiana, while you're at the project that your older self built. And if you didn't follow that it doesn't matter because when you return to your own time you probably won't remember a thing I said." But Sam had followed perfectly. He had a very quick mind and he was especially interested in time travel. He followed Al just fine, but he had trouble believing him. "Don't believe me, hunh, kid? Well, take a look at this." Al pointed to the mirrored surface of the table and Sam looked. What he saw was his own face but older, adult. His reflection still didn't look very old, it was several years younger than Al, but it was old enough to have a streak of white in the hair and smile lines around the eyes. Sam looked at the reflection in wonder. "Well, kid," Al interrupted him, "your older self has run into some trouble and needs me to help him, so I'll have to leave you now. But I wouldn't have missed this for anything. You were a sweet kid, Sam, don't let anyone ever tell you otherwise." That was all Sam remembered, and the usual clear detail was missing from the memories. They might very well be from a dream. There was nothing Sam wanted so much as to travel in time and he had read that dreams were sometimes a form of wish fulfillment. Probably that was all it was, but - suppose it were true. If it were true that meant he would one day realize his dream of traveling in time, and that was good to know. But it also meant that it was not his present self who had made the dismal predictions during those fateful three days, but his future self. And his future self was in a position to actually know. As much as he didn't like to think himself capable of wantonly hurting his family by making terrible predictions about them, he prefered to deal with a defect in himself as a person, than for those awful, terrible predictions to be true. Sam decided to put the matter to a dreadful test. One of the predictions was that Tom would be killed in Vietnam on the eighth day of that coming April. He would wait for that date and see what really happened. But he prayed with all his heart that he had only been hurtful to his family. April came and the tension in the Beckett household mounted. No one said anything, everyone pretended that nothing unsual was going on, but no one slept well either. The days seemed to creep by more slowly than Sam could ever remember. Finally the eighth and ninth of the month came and passed. "There, you see," said Sam's mother with little attempt to disguise her relief, "nothing happened. It was all in your imagination, thank God." Sam wasn't convinced until a letter actually arrived from Tom, dated on the ninth of April, and then he thanked God, too. That settled the matter he thought, there were serious flaws in his character, but he could work on them, and Tom was alive. He could live with that. Of the two possible explanations this was by far the better one. But a week or so later, Sam came across a photograph in a news journal, a photograph that would win the Pulizer prize. It was a picture of an American prisoner of war in Vietnam, being led away by his captors. The man in the picture looked exactly like the man who had called himself Al in what Sam had now convinced himself was only a dream. The man was younger, of course, but the face was definitely Al's. He felt bad for the prisoner in the photograph, but seeing that picture led Sam to think of a third explanation for the problem that had been bothering him since those strange days in November. And the third explanation was so wonderful that he found himself feeling happy, truly happy and lighthearted for the first time since he had been on his way home from school on that Tuesday before Thanksgiving. Suddenly, Sam discovered that he no longer had trouble deciding about college. He had read the work of a Professor LoNigro at M.I.T., on the possibility of time travel, and had been impressed. So he decided on M.I.T. in order to study with LoNigro. He would indeed miss his family, but now he knew that he would also welcome the life that lay ahead of him. As he had done with the mirror in that dreamlike blue room, Sam found that he could look his future squarely in the face.