ennedy walked to the door, cracked it open, and asked for his K case. An agent handed it to him and he shut the door. He brought it to his chair and sat down with it in his lap. As Casey got up to move in for a closer look, Kennedy dialed in the combination and opened his case. He reached in and removed a pad. He handed 88
it to Casey saying, “Here, this is the first one.”
Casey reverently accepted the pad and turned it so he could read it. It took a second for his brow to knit together in puzzlement.
He flipped one page over, looked for two seconds, and flipped to the third, then the fourth and fifth. “Well this,” he said slowly, still flipping pages, “this is gibberish, scribbling! It’s not even a language! Is it?”
“No. I sent photocopied samples out to several experts. Damn.
I was hoping… Casey, sit down with it. Look closely. Are you sure you see nothing? Take your time, relax your mind and let it just, wash over you.”
Casey sat and stared at the first page again while Kennedy sat holding his breath. After a full minute, still staring at the page, Casey said, “Jack, I wish I could see something here. I really do. But I can’t.” He flipped to other pages in the pad, studied each for a few seconds. “Nope. Nothing.”
“Ok, try this. Hold the pad off to your left, out of your line of vision, and focus on that large white candle on the hearth. Now, keeping your focus on the candle, move the pad into your line of vision. Don’t shift your eyes or look at the pad, keep looking at the candle, even when the pad gets in the way.”
“Ok,” Casey said. “I get what you’re saying. Let’s give it a try.”
For the next several minutes, Casey tried the method, to no avail.
“Damn,” Kennedy said. “I hoped our mutual experiences would have rendered you able to comprehend this text the same way I do.”
“Jack, you saying you can read this?”
“This’ll sound weird. There’s not another soul I would risk telling this to. You know what I mean?”
“Understood, Sir. It stays in this room.”
“I was wiped out when I finished writing the pads. Had to sleep for a long time. I never looked at them, just locked them away. I honestly didn’t know what I had written, and no one else saw them.
After I caught up on my sleep, I was alone in my office, and I took the first pad out to have a look. You might think I was surprised at 89
what I saw, but I wasn’t. I knew I had written it, and it made me feel good, looking at it, even though I couldn’t read it. I felt it was good, and comprehending it was something I’d have to learn, or earn, perhaps. I spent about twenty minutes flipping through pages, staring at them, turning it sideways, upside down, looking for even one character I could recognize. The phone rang. They put through a call I’d been waiting for from ML King. We’re putting together a piece of legislation, and we need to work out a few problems. I talked to him for fifteen minutes. When I hung up the phone, I picked up the pad again, but I thought about the legislation. Staring at the pad, staring through it, not seeing it. At some point, I realized there was a slight glow, just noticeable, coming from three or four lines on the pad. I don’t know how long it had been there. The damn thing is, I started seeing mental images, like I was on a high-speed train, looking out the window. It alarmed me, and I flinched, blinked to focus my eyes on the page, and the glow was gone, the images stopped.”
“Wow,” Casey said, shaking his head. “You’re right about one thing. That would-a qualified as weird where I grew up.”
“You ain’t seen nothin” yet,” JFK said, sitting up straighter, pleased now with his decision to tell-all to Casey.
“You’ve learned how to read them, haven’t you?”
“No. I think I’ve learned how to use them. Looking directly at the pad doesn’t work. I must force myself to look through it, to focus on a point behind the pad. I was fortunate to have stumbled on the method by accident that first time, because it’s difficult to do.”
Casey sat on the edge of his chair, fascinated by Kennedy’s tale. “So, what happens when you do that?” he asked.
“I’m getting to that. Now follow this. I’m looking through the pad, and I’m thinking. It can be anything, a problem, or an issue that isn’t a problem at all. If the pad has something to offer, one or more segments of text will glow, just enough to stand out. I must move my eyes over a glowing segment, but stay focused behind the pad, and I’ll start seeing mental images. They come a mile a minute, but they speak volumes about the issue. These pictures make a story I 90
can understand, or at least interpret. I’m certain I’m shown what the future has in store as regards that issue.”
“Jesus.”
“Yeah, and it gets better,” Kennedy continued. “If I think about changing something, now, today, a policy shift or sending a bill to congress, the images reset and start telling a different story. I’m convinced the new story is the one that will be written if we implement the change as I envision it. And it changes. From day to day, problem to problem. A solution that appeared elegant for one problem gets tangled and distorted when I’m scanning through the text for a solution to another problem.”
“Are you saying the text changes, right there on the page?”
“The text doesn’t change. I’ve confirmed that. My interpreta-tion of it changes.”
Casey rose from his chair and paced in front of the fireplace.
“Sweet Jesus!” he said. He paced a little more, then turned to face Kennedy, pointed at him and said, “You’ve got, it’s… It’s like a blank check, the Holy Grail, the keys to the kingdom. Someone, or some thing, went through a lot of trouble to save you, but that wasn’t enough. It went on to give you this, this blueprint for success, that shows you every mistake we will make as a species, possibly hundreds of years into the future, and it also shows you the outcome of every action we might take to change those mistakes?”
“Simply stated, I suppose that’s accurate, Casey,” Kennedy said. “But it’s not simple. It’s laboriously difficult, just to follow a thread for a few months, a year or two. After that, it often tangles with actions taken by others, or a reaction from the natural environment. At times I have believed I succeeded, imagined an action, and followed it through decades with positive outcomes, only to find later, when following the thread of another action, that the second action has an unintended effect on the first, negating it, or reversing it, or even creating an altogether new problem, worse than both of the originals.”
“I’m beginning to see. Geez, you could spend one hundred percent of your time with your pads, only to find in the end that it was 91
“You just pointed out another problem. If I spent that much time with the pads, I think I’d die. It takes a lot out of me. A long session, say an hour, takes me about twenty-four hours to recover from. I’ve looked in the mirror. Jackie’s noticed it too. I appear to have aged a decade or two. No way could I appear in public, or even to my staff. I must cancel appointments, sleep it off. So far, I seem to be recovering well enough, but I can’t cancel a whole day too often. Some have already noticed, and I’ve had only a few sessions since Nov 22. Twice more in Hyannis Port. It was a little easier with only family to notice. But even that’s problematic. They’re even more insistent on knowing why I need so much sleep. Puts a lot of weight on Jackie, too, covering for me.”
“Jackie? You’ve told her about all this?”
“Most of it. There hasn’t been time to go through all the details.
But she surprised me. I thought she might have a hard time believing me, but she didn’t bat an eye. Asked a lot of questions, but then I could see it in her eyes, the moment she resolved to believe. Since then, she’s been a rock. Sticking a lot closer to me, determined to be there when I need her, determined to be a positive element, as opposed to the added burden she could have become if she didn’t believe. When I think of that enormous show of trust, that’s something else I haven’t been worthy of, something else I will earn, from here on out.”
JFK stood and walked behind his chair, resting his forearms on the back. “Something you mentioned earlier. I wanted to ask you about it. What was it? Give me a second,” he said, then turned and walked back toward the old desk, twice saying, “yes, yes,” barely audible. Then he turned to Casey again. “Do you think maybe there are two entities? The first one is the voice, and the second one isolated you from the voice, for those 20 seconds when you blacked out?”
“I might-a been thinking along those lines.”
“Hm. And it was probably the second one made the body, rifle and rubberized tarp disappear?”
92
“Hard to say,” Casey said.
Remaining behind his chair, Kennedy said, “What if the evidence hadn’t disappeared, Casey?”
“Um. I don’t…”
“With real evidence of an assassination attempt, think how the dynamics of this might have changed. Those unintended consequences again, hm? You’d have received the recognition you deserve. Don’t get me wrong, I wish that had happened. But what also would have happened is a large, public, investigation. In dozens of ways we could think of, and dozens more we can’t, things could be very different now.
“My staff, for instance. They know I have these legal pads.
They’re considered an eccentricity, not worth more than casual gos-sip. Most important, no one ties them to a larger issue, the assassination attempt. If they were tied to that larger issue, they could become evidence in the investigation. I might have to fight to keep them. My use of them could become marginalized. Maybe, under those circumstances, the legal pads disappear too. You see what I’m saying, Casey?”
“You’re saying, let’s see… It’s possible the legal pads could have been lost or rendered unusable if the assassination attempt became known. So…
“Yes, keep going, Casey.”
“Um, so, we can assume the Voice Entity wanted you to live, and made it possible for you to create the legal pads. You couldn’t use them if you were dead. So, holy cow, you’re saying it’s the Voice Entity that arranged for the disappearance of the evidence, as a way of ensuring you can keep and use the pads?”
“Exactly,” Kennedy said.
“Whew! Interesting. Still doesn’t tell us who or what these entities are.”
“Hm. I just thought of something. If this entity we’re talking about could vaporize a human body, a rifle and a rubberized tarp, why didn’t it do that without involving you?”
“Christ! I never thought of that. It could have vaporized the 93
shooter in the parking lot, or before he left home that morning.”
“Indeed,” Kennedy said. “It would have been simpler, easier.
Vaporize a live body or a dead one. What’s the difference?”
Both men looked at each other then, as the same thought occurred to them at the same time.
“Jeez,” Casey said. “You don’t suppose…”
“Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”
“It can’t vaporize a live body?”
“Can’t, or won’t,” Kennedy said.
“What? You mean like an ethics directive? Like they can’t directly kill a human?”
“Who knows? As absurd as this entire event has been, anything’s possible. It would explain why you had to make the kill.”
“They can’t kill, but they can maneuver me to kill for them. As ethics go, it’s a little weak,” Casey said.
The two sat for a time then, reclining in their chairs, alone with their thoughts. After a few minutes, Casey broke the silence. “I’ve been wondering about those mistakes you mentioned. Mistakes the country, the world, makes, from the viewpoint of a historian, I think you said.”
“Um, yes. I don’t think that statement was accurate. I didn’t see mistakes as we made them. I only saw results. I saw the way things will be. The reason I mentioned mistakes is, well, some things I saw are so bad, it seems they would have to result from a mistake. Or many such. I’ve been able, in a few cases, to find the thread, follow that bad result back, to where it began. Therein lies one problem.
That bad outcome rarely starts in any one place. It begins in many places, evolving over years or decades, involving many people, from the public, from government, from any or all levels of society.
From this country or from many. It’s as if everyone is bent on doing his or her own little part in reaching some horrid outcome. Then everyone wonders how this could have happened, not even aware, in most cases, of the role they played.”
Casey thought about that for a while, then said, “I know I’ll 94
regret this. Give me some examples. Of the bad outcomes.”
Kennedy scoffed. “Where would I even start?”
“Well,” Casey said, sitting up straighter in his chair, “how about… 2001, the first year of the twenty-first century. What’re things like then?”
“Ok,” Kennedy said, sitting up straighter, warming to the task.
“Let’s see. Actually, you might like this. By 2001, the Berlin wall has come down. Berlin, all of Germany, reunites as a democracy.”
“No shit?”
“The Soviet Union is no more. It’s fallen, broken up into its separate states.”
“Holy Christ Jack! That’s, that’s… like the best thing that could happen! The world’s a lot safer then, right?”
Kennedy looked sadly at Casey. Such optimism was painful for him to see, knowing, as he did, the realities that lay in wait. “You’d surely think that, wouldn’t you?” Kennedy said. He understood the world-changing possibilities that could result from the things he had been shown, but he was terrified by the awesome responsibility placed upon him by whatever entity had summoned Casey to save his life.
Regardless of the trust demonstrated by the entity, Kennedy felt inadequate to the task. He had hoped to find, in Casey, an ally. He’d even hoped the entity had endowed Casey with an ability to glean something—insight, feeling or any other form of comprehension—
from the legal pads. That burden, however, appeared to be JFK’s alone to bear. He accepted that. But his journey through the coming years and decades would be more productive and less frightening with a trusted equal at his side, or at least a phone call away. Someone with no secrets to hide, someone with an instinctive, natural sense of right and wrong, who Kennedy could rely upon to be there, so he wouldn’t be alone. Someone like the young man from Wisconsin, described in the report Kennedy had in his briefcase.
He had to be fair though. Full disclosure. He had to tell the kid what he knew of the coming decades.
95
