<\/p>\n
Our drinks came and macho guy, who\u2019d said on the way over to just call him Jim, leaned in across the table.\u00a0 He told me I wasn\u2019t going to believe what he was going to tell me.\u00a0 He seemed to be amused by that possibility, which I frankly found a little annoying.<\/p>\n \u201cOkay, shoot\u201d, I said, bracing myself for crazy.<\/p>\n And here came crazy, all right.\u00a0 They were from the future, he confided.\u00a0 He was actually Captain James T. Kirk of the U.S.S. Enterprise<\/i>, a \u201cstar ship\u201d.\u00a0 His companions were Dr. McCoy, ship\u2019s physician, sitting beside me, and Lt. Uhura, Communications Officer.<\/p>\n Oh, crap, I said, to myself. \u00a0Just when I was starting to like these guys.<\/p>\n I should note here that I\u2019d made sure I was sitting on the outside of the booth, in case I needed to make a run for it.\u00a0 I\u2019m not completely stupid.<\/p>\n Jimmy boy held up a hand, as if anticipating my protests, which I didn\u2019t voice, although my face may well have been muttering them.\u00a0 He began to spin a tale that, however unbelievable, I had to admit was, as he promised, interesting<\/i>.<\/p>\n There wasn\u2019t enough beer in the bar to make that tale go down easy.\u00a0 I was never a big drinker, anyway.\u00a0 One beer made my already spinning head pound.\u00a0 I switched to soda.\u00a0 It was becoming evident very fast that I needed to keep my wits about me.<\/p>\n They had been chasing a war criminal, he said, a devious and ruthless man who\u2019d been sent to a prison colony for crimes against civilization.\u00a0 Unspeakable crimes, on a scale that was almost indescribable.\u00a0 The things this man had done to an entire planet were beyond the scope of human understanding.\u00a0 Things done with deliberation, plotted over time, instigated with cool disdain, even enjoyment, for the suffering he caused.<\/p>\n The man had manipulated his jailers, resulting in many more deaths, had broken out, hijacked a freighter and made his escape.\u00a0 \u201cCaptain\u201d Kirk, with his crew, was sent to recapture him.<\/p>\n But just as they were closing on the freighter, it unexpectedly entered what he called a time anomaly; a kind of eddy in the space-time fabric that allowed their quarry to make a temporal jump, from their time to mine.<\/p>\n All this action had taken place, for them, within the past few hours.\u00a0 But through the time disturbance, the man had actually appeared on Earth exactly 20 years ago.<\/p>\n I don\u2019t know if this is where I started feeling the hair on my neck standing up.\u00a0 I don\u2019t know where my own over-stimulated imagination started connecting dots.\u00a0 I held my breath.\u00a0 It felt like I knew what he was going to say next.<\/p>\n That man, that war criminal, had come to Earth, ready to start doing what he was so good at, wreaking havoc, manipulating from behind the scenes.\u00a0 He arrived out of nowhere, and took the name Lester Worsham.<\/i><\/p>\n And he had not only the advantage of his own superior, though psychotic, intellect.\u00a0 While in the time disturbance, he was able to collect glimpses of Earth\u2019s future.<\/p>\n In other words, he knew what governments and politicians were likely to rise and fall, what corporations thrive and fail, what inventions would remake the world, what natural disasters would strike, and where, and when.<\/p>\n An astounding advantage for a master manipulator.\u00a0 It was all his for the taking, child\u2019s play for someone whose pleasure in life was the challenge of seeing civilizations and worlds crumble under his touch.<\/p>\n Captain Jim made the decision to follow Worsham into the time anomaly.\u00a0 In telling me this, he said nothing about the dangers, although, as loosely as I was following this all, it seemed to me pretty foolhardy.<\/p>\n Worsham changed the timeline of Earth, Jim told me.\u00a0 Just when our culture was on the verge of major breakthroughs, destined, in its original path, to begin the upswing toward democracy, peace, universal human rights, toward successfully addressing the environmental damage to the planet while there was still time to turn things around.<\/p>\n The early 90\u2019s.\u00a0 When there was all the promise of Communism crumbling, the Berlin wall falling, the green shoots of democracy springing up around the globe.\u00a0 It should have been the start of a planetary renaissance.\u00a0 Then everything started going to hell instead.<\/p>\n When Worsham stepped in.<\/p>\n What did Sherlock Holmes say?\u00a0 That when you eliminate all the impossible explanations, what remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth?<\/p>\n I found myself doing a kind of running mental collation, holding up this space case story against all I knew of Worsham, all I knew of what was going on in the world.\u00a0 Jim\u2019s story might be fantastical, but it more or less fit with the real facts, as I knew them.<\/p>\n For some reason, I flashed back to the night I\u2019d talked with Patty, the night I first heard the framework for the path of consciousness I now walked.\u00a0 Then, too, I\u2019d been struck by the weird way in which, by somehow standing at some higher, broader vantage point, things that had never made sense before… started to.<\/p>\n Oh, god, Hani<\/em>, I snapped at myself, you are so being played.<\/em><\/p>\n To Captain Jim, I said only, \u201cPlease, go on\u2026.\u201d<\/p>\n Jim went on.<\/p>\n Within the time anomaly, he said, their own ship\u2019s computers went crazy, yielding constantly shifting information.\u00a0 Time and energy interacted, almost as if a lightning-like strike of energy would spark a new time line, and everything from that pinpoint of new energy began to inexorably branch out, fractal-like, forming probabilities that didn\u2019t have\u2026 well, time\u2026 to form into actual new alternate realities before some other strike set off a different pattern.<\/p>\n They watched this erratic, chaotic playing out of time tracks through the ship\u2019s database, in which all historical data shifted before their very eyes, one moment reporting one version of events, the next, names and dates were changed, something that had \u201chappened\u201d no longer having happened, setting in motion an entirely different chain of events and futures.\u00a0 History, recorded, erased, re-written, second to second.<\/p>\n Even the rate of change was itself lurching and unpredictable.<\/p>\n They\u2019d made the decision to follow Worsham to Earth in 1990, to apprehend him at the start and prevent his disastrous interference with the planet\u2019s rightful progress and evolution.<\/p>\n But the chaotic environment of the anomaly interfered as they \u201ctransported\u201d, he said.\u00a0\u00a0 Placing them precisely 20 years\u2026 too late.\u00a0 The instability of the anomaly made the risk of trying again too dangerous.\u00a0 But based on what they had been able to observe from the shifting historical data \u2013 and future glimpses, as well \u2013 they had identified the likeliest probabilities, and now believed that just maybe, they could still, from this point in Earth time, do something to stop Worsham and at least turn the tide back in its original positive direction.<\/p>\n They just had to figure out exactly what to do before the shifting events of the past \u2013 my present \u2013 could ripple out into a potential future in which they themselves might not exist.<\/p>\n Uh huh.<\/p>\n So I\u2019m sitting there, in this dark and dreary dive, the cigarettes of the drunks at the bar starting to get to me, my head pounding, my lungs feeling thick with smoke and too much information, too many wild ideas.<\/p>\n God help me, I kind of followed the whole time warp thing.\u00a0 Bob was such a sci-fi geek and I read to him a lot, those last few months.\u00a0 The idea of other worlds somehow comforted us both.\u00a0 I felt kind of like I\u2019d already been bodily lifted off the planet myself, totally displaced, like the worst kind of jet lag.<\/p>\n I did have a few pressing questions.\u00a0 First, why did they show up in the middle of Rock Creek Park, of all places?<\/p>\n Because, Jim explained, given the shifting realities being generated, it was calculated that a natural setting ran less risk of their being beamed into the middle of some unanticipated man-made structure.\u00a0 Surely I could understand that being transported into, say, the middle of an unexpected brick wall would be hazardous to one\u2019s health?<\/p>\n \u201cOh, sure,\u201d I nodded, like I knew all about these things.<\/p>\n Second, how did they know who I was?<\/p>\n \u201cYour name\u2026cropped up\u2026in a number of \u2026scenarios, linked to Worsham\u2019s,\u201d Jim replied.<\/p>\n Okay, again, I could see that, too, like maybe they had some sort of space-Google search function.\u00a0 I did write a lot about him.\u00a0 That thought brought back uncomfortable reminders of the several hundred scurrilous emails I\u2019d just spent the afternoon deleting.<\/p>\n But here was the bigger question, the elephant in the barroom.<\/p>\n How did they explain the fact that they first managed to end up twenty years off their target, then smacked right into me, of all people, in the middle of a very big city, and a very big woods?\u00a0 Me, the one person who had made Lester Worsham my obsession?\u00a0 I mean, what were the odds of that?<\/p>\n \u201cAccording to Spock, about 1 in 50,000,000,\u201d Jim shrugged, with a \u201cwho knows?\u201d smile.<\/p>\n \u201cThat\u2019s damned imprecise.\u00a0 Spock must be slipping,\u201d the doctor quipped with a tight smile, looking oddly pleased at the thought.<\/p>\n I had too much else on my mind to ask what a Spock was.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n In the end, I did what I\u2019d sworn I wouldn\u2019t.<\/p>\n There was no rational reason to, no sane woman would have done what I did, actually invite these loony tunes strangers back home with me, after everything I\u2019d been through, after all the impossible, outlandish, wacko things they\u2019d told me.<\/p>\n So why did I?<\/p>\n Maybe I was lonely.\u00a0 Maybe I was scared of what else lurked out there in the city and didn\u2019t want to be alone.\u00a0 Maybe these three seemed like the best of my bad choices.<\/p>\n Maybe I just \u2026liked them.<\/p>\n Whatever impulse drove me, it felt like fate had simply taken over the driving, some unseen hand on the wheel.\u00a0 I found myself acting as if I\u2019d known them all for a long time, or maybe in another life.\u00a0 They needed a private place to work on their \u201cplan\u201d.\u00a0 Or maybe they were going to bump me off, eat my brain, and steal all my 21st<\/sup> century goodies.<\/p>\n Either way, I just seemed to be along for the ride now.\u00a0 So, I paid the bill \u2013 of course, they had no money.\u00a0 Space people.\u00a0 I led them home, through the Friday evening dinner crowds out for a stroll, through the balmy Washington spring evening.\u00a0 The only link I could find to normal reality was to ponder the choice between delivery pizza or take out Chinese.<\/p>\n I mean really, like I was going to cook for company myself?\u00a0 Now that would really be science fiction.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n < previous<\/a>\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 next ><\/a><\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" < previous\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 next > There we were, settled all cozy into the back booth, the table sticky and scratched from old beer and old age.\u00a0 I\u2019d been right to choose this place, I thought.\u00a0 No one … Continue reading ![\"Photo1\"](\"https:\/\/hanilives.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/Photo15-150x200.jpg\")
<\/a> There we were, settled all cozy into the back booth, the table sticky and scratched from old beer and old age.\u00a0 I\u2019d been right to choose this place, I thought.\u00a0 No one here but a motley crew of obviously regular drunks, nursing their glasses.\u00a0 Not even the bartender was interested in anyone.<\/p>\n