Rhapsody In Time

As soon as Jensen, Camille, and I materialized with our equipment inside the recovery room in Cedars of Lebanon, Hollywood, at three a.m. on 11 July 1937, we injected cortical nanos into George Gershwin’s brain. The procedure would take roughly twenty minutes. If everything went as planned, we would be rescuing one of the twentieth century’s most beloved composers from the jaws of death, the first of what we hoped would be many missions toward excising malignant tumors of injustice from history. All of this was illegal, of course, but the risks, I insisted, were worth it. My partners in crime weren’t so sure.

“But why Gershwin, Gil?” Jensen wanted to know. “Of all the greats throughout the ages, why launch our temporal rescue program with him?”

We had been over this before. “Isn’t it obvious? A charismatic musical genius who captured the soul of an age, snuffed out by brain cancer at the height of his astonishing creativity.”

“We understand that.” Camille was hastily re-tying her hair that had unraveled after our jump “But why not Mozart, then, also charismatic, who died even younger?”

“Because Mozart produced more great works than composers who lived to be twice his age.” I took a deep breath; heading up a project like this demanded saintly patience. “There is even a more compelling reason, Camille: Gershwin was haunted by the gathering storm of the Second World War.”

“With all due respect, Gil, I don’t think that warrants the terrible risk we’re taking,” Camille persisted.

I weighed my words carefully: “I’m convinced that Gershwin, with his worldwide fame, has the potential to help prevent the slaughter of thousands if not millions of civilians during that horrific war.”

Jensen and Camille still looked skeptical, but now was no time to quibble. We put our minds to implementing the task at hand, and to confronting the temporal watchdogs who had immediately discovered us when we launched a test probe into 1937. When we retrieved the probe, a warning appeared on the com screen:

Abandon your experiment at once or face arrest.

--The Protectors.

******

“The Protectors aretracking us,” Jensen said. He pointed to the telltale blip on his screen.

“I doubt that they’ve worked out our precise coordinates,” I countered.

“Yet,” Camille said. “They’ve tracked us to Hollywood in July 1937, a dead giveaway. We’ve got to wrap this up now.”

“The nanos are still active,” Jensen said.

Three more minutes passed.

“Nano surgery complete,” Camille announced. “Check to see that those bots have cleaned up the mess left by the Cedars surgeons.”

Jensen tapped a key. “Affirmative.”

A window on Jensen’s screen flickered. “He’s regaining consciousness!”

“I’ll build a stairway . . .”

“‘Stairway to Paradise!’” I proclaimed. “From George White’s Scandals of 1922 . Lyrics by DeSylva and Francis. George hadn’t even begun collaborating with Ira yet.”

Jensen raised an eyebrow. “Impressive, Gil.”

“Good thing the sound is off, or we’d all be singing,” Camille said.

“Are you monitoring his cortical functions?” I asked.

Jensen flashed me a what-else-would-I-be-doing glance and pointed to one of the readouts. “Ready for testing,” he said to Camille; she tapped out a command.

“Let the miracle assert itself,” Camille said, tapping the last bit of command code with a flourish. We all used that word, “miracle,” as if to hide the fact that we were committing time-crime: opening up a Pandora’s black box of unforeseeable temporal-paradoxical horrors.

George Gershwin twisted his head from side to side. He opened his large amber eyes and immediately shut them tightly. Spittle had gathered in the corners of his mouth.

“Please relax, Mr. Gershwin,” said Camille. “We are rescuing you from Fate.”

“What?” Now he reopened his eyes and began darting them every which way. “Where in God’s name am I?”

“You’re in Cedars of Lebanon Hospital, Hollywood. You were suffering from a malignant brain tumor.”

Gershwin struggled to sit upright, winced, and flopped back down. He brought a hand to his head. “No bandages?”

“We don’t have time to explain everything,” I said to Gershwin, for whom fear was rapidly replacing confusion. I looked at Camille and Jensen for quick assurance (they both nodded) and continued: “We are being pursued by a group who insists it’s dangerous to disrupt history for whatever reason, however well-intentioned. They insist that your premature death, tragic as it was, must not be prevented, no matter what wonderful things may result from enabling you to live another four or five decades. Of course we disagree. The premature death of a creative genius like you deprives the world of—”

Gershwin clasped my arm. “You’re trying to save my life?”

“We’ve already saved it.”

“But how . . .?” His lips tried to summon forth the rest of his question, but he fell silent.

“We injected specialized cortical nanobots into—what I mean is, we used highly advanced medical technology to disintegrate the malignant tumor in your brain without doing damage to the surrounding tissue and repairing the tissue damage inadvertently caused by the surgical team at Cedars.” I paused, searching for additional words that would be comprehensible to someone who lived before antibiotics, let alone intelligent microscopic machines programmed to disintegrate brain tumors. “However, by, ah, changing your destiny, we have automatically opened a new timeline. In essence, we have created a new reality.”

Gershwin dropped his head back and closed his eyes. “I have to be hallucinating.”

“We need to get out of here, Gil,” Camille said tightly.

“Jensen, check the field sweep.”

“Two Protectors have entered the hospital,” said Jensen. “We must evacuate to the buffer room at once.”

“I need just a few more seconds.” Camille placed a quality-control sheath on George’s head (to ensure that the bots had done their job properly), pressed DISPLACE and the hospital vanished; that is to say, all of us—Camille, Jensen, I, and George, vanished from the hospital, and the timeline in which George Gershwin had died two months shy of his thirty-ninth birthday.

******

We rematerialized inside our buffer room, a drab apartment we’d rented for the occasion. We even included an upright piano. Here we would remain for fifty hours, the time it took for the new timeline to “set”(Time-jumping into the past did weird things to the quantum electrodynamics of spacetime; but like a thermostat, equilibrium would eventually be reached; it just took slightly more than two days). George Gershwin gasped, probably from the colors swirling on his retina,one of the few physiological effects of temporal shifting, then tried to get out of bed—and was about to yank off the quality-control sheath when Camille stayed his hand.

“Not yet, Mr. Gershwin. We’re still testing to make sure the nanosurgery was successful.”

“What does that mean?” Gershwin made yet another effort to get up.

“Surgery without knives or having to be anaesthetized, sir,” Camille said.

Jensen, who was running the transference-checker diagnostic program, looked up at us, grinning. “New proto timeline confirmed.”

“Great,” I said. “Two days of waiting, and we’re home free.”

“The quality control checks out,” Camille said. “I’m going to remove the Sheath.”

The three of us stared at George’s head, amazed by the complete absence of any sign that brain surgery had been performed.

We now had to weigh the three options available to us going forward:

Option One: return “home” to 2170. It would no longer be the same 2170, of course; and after fiftyhours elapsed, there would be no way to return to the former timeline: Too risky, I thought.

Option Two: remain in this altered 1937, do whatever we could to ensure that Gershwin would continue writing jazz symphonies, concertos, deliciously sentimental love songs, musical-theater extravaganzas. He would resume his razzle-dazzle social life, maybe get married for the first time, become a father (legitimate or otherwise), thereby continuing the Gershwin lineage, and his music would help keep the world dancing and singing, hopefully proving to be enough of a distraction to foster brotherly love and impede bellicose urges.

Option Three: surrender to the Protectors. We knew all too well the penalties of time-crime But surely rescuing George Gershwin would constitute a mitigating circumstance . . .

We decided to remain in this new1937—this new timeline—and assume the responsibility of steering history in a new direction.

******

George Gershwin was devouring a barbeque beef sandwich that Jensen had brought in from a nearby diner. The rest of us were eating sandwiches as well, savoring the exotic taste of meat, actual animal flesh, inside a toasted baguette. It was while he was licking the last remnants of sauce from his fingers that George noticed the piano. He excitedly wiped his large hands on a napkin and leaped jubilantly to his feet. “Good heavens, you folks thought of everything!” A moment later he animated the keyboard with “Someone to Watch over Me.” We all sang along.

Toward evening the four of us opted for a walk. Alas, we would not be any less safe outside than inside when it came to a temporal-law enforcement brigade.

“Tell us how you write your songs,” Camille said.

“Tunes pour out of me like sweat in a Turkish bath.” George inhaled deeply. “I’ll plink out the melody, scribble out a couple bars . . . Some songs I can work out in twenty, thirty minutes.”

“Were you composing any songs in your head since we, ah, awakened you?” Jensen asked, interrupting his unwavering surveillance as we walked.

George gazed skyward. He stayed somberly silent for a couple minutes, and then said, “No, I was thinking back to some of my earliest songs; but then I felt a strange shifting of my musical selves.”

“Sounds mysterious,” I said.

George frowned. “There’s always a tug of war between my risqué musical comedy self and my so-called highbrow composer self. Only once did the two selves combine harmoniously —well, not harmoniously in the conventional sense but energetically, and that was in—”

“—in your Rhapsody in Blue!” Camille exclaimed.

George’s face lit up. “I’m delighted you could tell, love.” Then his countenance darkened. “Back in twenty-four, when Whiteman premiered Rhapsody at Aeolian Hall, the audience was mesmerized. The critics, though, unable or unwilling to let the music work its alchemy on them, accused me of trying to demolish the tradition of classical concert-hall music.”

Camille laughed. “After the first five seconds, with that delicious opening clarinet glissando, I was in ecstasy.”

“Bless you, darling!” He clasped her arms.

“Will you compose more operas?” I asked. “I adored Porgy and Bess.”

A brooding silence clouded over the composer. Maybe he wasn’t as clear about his future musical intentions as we thought. He pressed his hands to the sides of his head. “There’s a part of me that wants to save the world through music. Call me naïve, but I was convinced that my Porgy would help improve racial relationships in this country.”

“I’m sure it raised consciousness a lot,” Camille said.

Back inside our buffer apartment, George began pacing back and forth, repeatedly opening his mouth and shutting it as if struggling to find the right words for what he needed to express what was eating away at him. “Listen, you guys,” he said, “I’ve never mentioned this to anyone, not to my producers, not to my closest friends, not even to Ira . . . but every time I keep hearing about the terrible things those Nazi bastards are doing in Europe, like confiscating Jewish businesses, burning down synagogues, beating people to death in the streets, I see a black curtain falling, not just on my people, but on the entire human race.”

Jensen was nodding vigorously. “Your instincts are spot on, George. Two years from now—that is, from the old 1937—the Nazis will begin the Second World War, cause suffering too horrible to— “

“Jensen!” I yelled. “Did you forget how dangerous it is to divulge anything about the future, as long as it is still technically the future?”

“But we’re practically at the moment when the new timeline takes hold.” He stared morosely at me and Camille, absorbing our stern expressions for a long moment, then finally said “Mea culpa.”

But the cat was out of the bag. After a long silence the composer said, “Let me get this straight: you’re saying we’re still not in the new timeline?”

“Not yet, Mr. Gershwin,” Camille said, “Things are still in a high state of indeterminacy, and they will be . . .” she checked her watch “for another eleven hours. Crazy as it sounds, it takes a while for the new timeline to stabilize.”

Anguish filled George’s eyes. “But knowing what you know, we can do something to help prevent the worst from happening, right?” He looked fiercely determined to seize an opportunity he could never have dreamed possible.

“Yes-s-s, it’s possible,” I ventured. “Although the Protectors would argue that such interference would make matters worse.”

George shook his head fiercely. “We’ve got to try anyway. It’s our moral obligation.”

“We’ve been considering possibilities,” I said.

“Stop considering! Let’s do whatever it takes to keep thousands of people from dying horrible deaths.”

I was tempted to say, not thousands,millions, but held my tongue.

He flopped down on the sofa and pressed his hands to his balding head. After a moment, he shot to his feet. “Don’t you see? We can prevent a catastrophe!”

“‘Prevent’ is a pretty tall order,” I said, glaring at Jensen.

George seemed to be struggling for words. “Tell me: why did you come back in time to rescue me? What was the larger purpose?”

“Because,” said Jensen, “time travel should be devoted to rescuing all that never should have been lost in this otherwise barbaric world.”

“If everything goes as planned,” added Camille, “you will not only have a chance to compose to your heart’s content, but you’ll be able to use your celebrity status to promote peace.”

“Celebrity status is useless! Music is useless!” He collapsed on a chair. “Look: people—especially my people—are going to be slaughtered; isn’t that what you were saying, Mr. Jensen?”

“Well . . .” Jensen began sheepishly.

“It’s the first day of my new lease on life,” George continued. “This time around, I’m breaking out of my musical bubble to do all I can to keep the world from going to hell.”

I could see Jensen’s and Camille’s faces darken with dread. Their eyes were wide and pleading: What are we going to do now?

The Protectors would soon be tracking us down; of that there was no doubt. They would doeverything they could in the remaining several hours to return George to his deathbed in the original timeline and dispatch the three of us, in stasis, to a tribunal. Our equipment would be confiscated and destroyed; and we would probably be sentenced to a retraining camp. Oh, we’d be retrained, all right: Protector-instilled values would be programmed into our brains and that would be that. I would rather be horsewhipped.

“Maybe we can reason with them,” Jensen said to me that evening over a game of holo-chess.

“Not likely,” I said ordering my bishop into enemy territory. George was drafting a letter to President Roosevelt. I could hear Jensen, and now even Camille, feeding him information from the other timeline, a criminal offense from the Protectors’ perspective. “George, to convince the President you need to provide details that can be verified.” She turned to her computer: “Display details regarding Adolf Hitler’s—”

“Camille!” I snapped. “Not you, too!”

“The horse is already out of the barn, Gil. We need to do this before the Protectors arrive.”

“In case the Protectors silence us for good,” added Jensen.

Camille returned her attention to the computer. “Display details regarding Adolf Hitler’s Invasion of Poland, 1 September 1939.”

George watched in open-mouthed astonishment as Camille’s computer blossomed with the requisite documents. I wanted to shout, It’s still too soon! But I, along with Jensen, watched her with as much amazement as George. When I got a closer look at what the computer was downloading, I stopped giving a crap about the Protectors or their crusade to protect its provincial values. To hell with the original timeline and its litany of horrors.

“. . . on 3 September 1939 a German submarine will torpedo the British passenger ship Athena,” Camille was reciting to an astonished George Gershwin. “Twenty-eight of the hundred and twelve passengers who died were U.S. citizens. Here comes a photograph.”

George scribbled fiendishly. I shook my head at Camille. We’re risking dangerous temporal disruption here, Camille.

Camille called up more data. “Even more than their desire to reclaim territory lost in World War One, the Nazis wanted to rid Europe of Jews.” I couldn’t see what she brought up, but whatever it was, it made George leap to his feet, holding the sides of his head and wailing.

“Print that!” he exclaimed.

Next morning there was a knock on the door.

“Don’t answer it,” I said.

“Gil, if they’re Protectors, they’ll vaporize the door if we don’t,” Jensen said.

“Jensen’s right,” said Camille. The composer sprinted over to the door and opened it.

On the porch stood a tall young woman wearing a blue polka-dotted dress, a matching blue beret; even the small handbag strapped to her shoulder was blue. She had lots of freckles.

George shot us a what-the-hell glance, and then said to the woman, “How may I help you?”

“Er, we—I—saw you walking yesterday, and gosh, I’ve always wanted to meet you, Mr. Gershwin!” She had a high pitched, teenager’s voice. “You are George Gershwin, are you not?”

“Indeed I am.”

“I knew it! May I come in?”

“I’m sorry, young lady.”

“Then can I at least have your autograph?

“Okay, sure.”

“I’ve got a pen here . . .” she reached into her handbag.

“No!” I yelled, rushing forward.

But it was too late. In a split second the woman was aiming a weapon at us. “One wrong move and into stasis all of you will go,” she said, suddenly sounding like a SWAT team commando, “This is on wide sweep.”

The woman stepped through the doorway and was joined by another woman, gun drawn, wearing the same blue uniform. “Cleo, secure them.” The second Protector motioned with her weapon to place us in arrest mode: arms extended downward like golfers; wrists crossed. There were three flashes, and our wrists were locked. If we were to try to wriggle ourselves loose, the paralysis would spread to our entire bodies. All the while, Freckles kept her weapon trained on George.

“Why are you doing this?” George said.

“To prevent a temporal nightmare. Did you bring a valise? A briefcase? A camera?”

George shook his head.

“Did you bring anything in addition to the clothes you are wearing into this buffer room? Additional garments? Medications or toiletries? Documents?”

“Nothing,” said George, extending his arms. “You have such a lovely face, my dear.”

“Do not try to distract me. Have you composed anything in this room?”
“I’m always composing . . . in my head, mostly.”

“But nothing written down, correct? This is extremely important, Mr. Gershwin.”

“Your loveliness would inspire me for years to come.”

Freckles guffawed. “As if I would fall for such malarkey . . .” She started to lower her weapon—then caught herself and brought it back level with George’s forehead. “It is my sworn duty to return you to—”

Suddenly George spread out his arms and began singing.

Embrace me, my sweet embraceable—

“That’s my favorite Gershwin song!” I whispered to Camille. “He used it for Girl Crazy—Ethel Merman’s Broadway de—”

Camille elbowed me. “Shh! I want to hear what they’re saying.”

George was still flirting with Freckles. He stepped closer to her, crooning.

Freckles tightened the grip on her weapon, but her eyes became large and molten.

George slowly reached for her free hand and brought it to his lips.

“What a heartthrob,” Camille sighed.

Jensen looked as if he were about to have a seizure.

“Let me stay here, my dear,” George continued, “I will write you love song after love song.”

Without taking her eyes off of us, Cleo said “We need to wrap this up, Elena. Return Mr. Gershwin to his authentic timelinenow.”

“We still have time,” Elena said, and quickly returned her attention to George. “No one has ever serenaded me before, let alone one of the most romantic composers of all time.”

Was I seeing things, or were there tears streaming down Elena’s freckled cheeks?

Suddenly Jensen did the unthinkable. I should have known better than to have diverted all my attention to George’s musical seduction of his captor; I should never have underestimated Jensen’s hatred of the Protectors; but before I could do anything, Jensen, despite his secured wrists, despite the consequences of moving while under arrest, propelled himself onto Elena, knocking her to the floor. Jensen’s body began spasming, as if from an epileptic seizure. A paralyzing blue glow instantly enveloped him.

Now Elena sprang to her feet and pressed a button on her sleeve; and she and George dissolved into photons.

“No-o!” I bellowed. Camille sighed as we watched the blue glow fade. Then she added after a painful silence, “He would have given the world so much more wonderful music.”

“And helped stop the Nazis from destroying Europe,” I said.

“Oh? How could he possibly have done that?” Cleo demanded.

Damn. I remembered the letters to dignitaries that George had spent the last few hours feverishly composing. They were still here.

Cleo drilled her eyes into mine. These Protector fanatics were no dummies. “Answer my question: What was George Gershwin planning to do in this buffer room?”

“He wanted us to help him work up plans for preventing the Nazis from starting World War Two,” Camille told her calmly. It never got beyond conversation.”

“That’s right, I said. He wanted to go over there and break into Hitler’s—” I clamped my big mouth shut.

“Go over there?” Cleo’s eyes narrowed and her otherwise expressionless face cracked a smirk. “Let me get this straight: George Gershwin, a Jew, was planning to visit the Chancellery in Nazi-era Berlin and single-handedly bring down the Nazi war machine?”

“Not single-handedly. Once he’s equipped with hard evidence of what will happen, he’d recruit—”

“How daft do you think I am?”

Camille once again came to the rescue: “This argument is useless! Elena already took him back and—”

“But if he left material items that he created in this new but unfixed timeline, he can’t return!” Cleo looked livid. Then she pressed something on her wrist—probably activated a retinal monitor to check for trans-dimensional messages. “Just as I suspected, his patternwill not stabilize in the original timeline unless we destroy these things.” She paused, clearly scanning. “Documents have been pinpointed in this holo room.” Cleo turned to me. Where are they?”

I shrugged.

“This is intolerable. Both of you—no, all three of you—” she stabbed a button and released Jensen from the stasis field— “must help me locate the documents.”

“Why, so you can arrest us again?” Jensen said, massaging his arms and legs as he staggered to his feet.

“Or confiscate our license to practice experimental physics?” I added. I was deriving great pleasure from seeing a Protector at wit’s end.

Cleo suddenly looked vulnerable. “Please, I won’t arrest you if you help me out of this mess.”

Camille said gently but firmly, “Then put away your weapon.”

Cleo stared at Camille as if she’d just slapped her. “Very well.”She did so and instantly began rummaging through the room, yanking open drawers and spilling out their contents. Her anxiety and frustration were almost endearing.

A sudden thought struck me. I cleared my throat. “Cleo?”

She looked up. Underneath her regulation beret, I sensed, was a woman with a romantic soul. “Now what?” she snapped.

“ Of thee I sing, baby—”

“Oh please. You’re no George Gershwin.”

“She has a point, Gil,” Jensen smirked.

“Shut up, Jensen.” I returned my attention to Cleo: “ You’re my silver lining . . .” I spread my arms.

I barely got the last word out of my throat when Cleo stalked up to me, hands on her hips. “Do you want to know why I joined the Protectors?”

“Not really.”

“I joined to keep insensitive louts like you from exploiting the legacies of great persons like George Gershwin.”

“Exploiting . . . But Cleo, we do want to exploit his legacy,” I said, “but not the way you assume. Imagine what forty or fifty more years of new love-infused Gershwin music could bequeath to the world.”

Cleo snorted. “How can you be so naïve?”

“Not naïve; my dear; sentimental.” Without thinking, I wrapped my arms around her and kissed her on the mouth. When I released her, she remained rigid, mouth agape—in outrage? shock? I braced myself for the worst.

“Jesus, Gil, I can’t believe you did that,” Camille said. She sounded a hundred miles away.

It took Cleo a minute to recover her wits. “The documents! You did that to distract me from finding the documents! We must find them before—”

We were interrupted by vibrations and a loud humming, and the bluish glow in which George and Elena had vanished moments ago returned.

And there, like a divine manifestation, the two of them re-materialized.

Cleo wailed.

Elena still had George in a vise-grip. “Cleo, find the source of interference! Hurry!”

“I’m on it,” said Cleo. She upturned the contents of another dresser drawer, and another.

Elena pushed George into the room. “You know what we’re looking for. Find it.” She raised her weapon at him.

George laughed. “Is that ray gun supposed to scare me? You want to return me to my death.”

“It’s not on a lethal setting, Mr. Gershwin. But it will paralyze you and cause agonizing pain. Now retrieve the documents.”

Instead, George began humming and snapping his fingers. “I got rhythm, I got rhythm . . .”

“Stop stalling!” yelled Elena.

George lunged for Elena’s weapon, but her reflexes trumped his fury, and she fired, striking the composer in the chest. He staggered backwards, struck the side of the piano and slumped to the floor. I rushed to his side; he was still conscious, but barely. “Emergency business . . . must tend to . . .”

I cradled his head.

“Before I can compose again, I must help save my people.”

Elena walked up to us, prodded me with her boot. “Move aside.”

I looked up at her; how I wanted to wrap my hands around her throat.

George whispered in my ear, “In the bottom side drawer . . .”

“What is he saying?” Elena demanded.

“That he doesn’t want to die . . . again.”

“Too bad. He must. Now step aside.”

“Documents,” George whispered. “Proof of horrible butchery . . . “

“Move away!”

I lashed out at Elena, but she sidestepped me like a prizefighter.

Elena gave us a choice: face arrest and certain incarceration or give up the documents. I nodded gravely and opened the one drawer in the chest that Cleo had overlooked, and retrieved the thick stack of printouts: photographs of starving Jews from the ghettos herded into freight cars headed for the death camps; the Einsatzgruppen executing innocent men, women, and children in front of the graves they had been forced to dig; unspeakable medical experiments on children; corpses being heaved into ovens; heaps of naked bodies bulldozed into open graves; printouts of survivors’ diaries. Atrocities committed five years in the future of the original timeline.

Elena grabbed the documents, then unclipped a device from her belt and aimed it at George. “It really pains me to do this, sir . . .” She pulled the trigger and George Gershwin fizzled away in a plume of blue phosphorescence, presumably returned to the old timeline, and to his moribund state in Cedars of Lebanon Hospital.

I wanted to cry.

Next, she activated the device that controlled her own passage through time. As she became enveloped in a bluish glow, she said, “I’ll always regret not arresting the three of you. But do you know what I’ll regret more? That I didn’t ask Mr. Gershwin to write a new song for me.”

THE END

Bio: “My fiction has appeared in Aphelion, Sky Island Journal, Drunk Monkeys, etc. I live in Folsom, CA.”

E-mail: Fred D. White

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