“They can establish camouflage in only four months?”

“Prep department says it pulled out all the stops building background this time. Birth certificates, employment records, vaccinations — that Prep creep Terry Ying was in just before you got here, trying to impress me. You wouldn’t believe how bad he wants into my pants. Anyway, Ying said four months was the max for camouflage on this group because that’s the most the doctors can guarantee. Wouldn’t want the subjects to die of natural causes before their date with destiny.”

You get the idea. Time travelers dropped onto the Kent State campus for the purpose of dying. Their deaths were necessary to shape the future properly — otherwise, opposition to the war in Vietnam wouldn’t intensify fast enough and the future would go to hell. I could invent an appropriate description of such a hell if it became relevant.

I wrote the above passage on Saturday, May 5, 1990. The notion that sparked the story was, of course, that the four Kent State students hadn’t really existed before they were shot; they were dispatched from the future.

Partway through the writing, in the passage where McGregor scans the faces of the people waiting for the funeral run, I needed to know what the victims looked like. I made a quick trip to the library (only two blocks away), picked up three books on Kent State, and hurried back to the computer so I could keep writing. One of the books (The Truth About Kent State,  by Peter Davies) had pictures of the four students on a page close to the front. I made note of Sandy Lee Scheuer’s dimpled chin, Bill Schroeder’s sleepy eyes, and went back to writing.

Conscience didn’t set in till later.

Look: the real students weren’t terminal patients who nobly volunteered to die — they were simply people in the wrong place at the wrong time and they died by random chance.