I knew why I’d written it that way, of course. I didn’t believe I had the right to put words in their mouths, thoughts in their heads. How could I presume to speak for the real people? I could only deal with characters.

But I’d gone too far into the fiction. In my story, like the newspaper articles, the victims were only there for the body count. Without thinking, I’d started to write the story of a button-pusher who was troubled by his conscience, but who went ahead and did what he had to do for the good of history.

Sound familiar?

SECOND SCRIBBLE: THE BUTTON-PUSHER

Bannister sat in the time chamber, cradling his gun. An M-1 carbine in pristine condition. According to the antiquities database there were only five M-1s still in existence, four in museums, one in the hands of a collector who’d bought hers on the open market. You could assume another twenty or thirty still in secret collections around the world... maybe even a few in the arsenals of the Quarantined states, since most of the Q’s were too stupid to realize the black market price of a single twentieth-century firearm would buy a hundred twenty-third-century E-guns.

Call it a nice round number of forty M-1s on the entire planet. And Bannister had one.

Admittedly, this weapon could just be a replica; but he doubted it. The Corrections Institute disdained replicas. If they needed some antique, they sent back a Special Services team to steal one. Bannister had gone out on plenty of those runs himself — popping into foxholes to pull Lee-Enfields from the cold fingers of gas victims, or materializing in the cargo holds of boats shipping AK-47s to terrorist groups. But as of today, Bannister had graduated from such gruntwork. As of today, he was going to make history.

“You about ready in there?” he called to the two techies in the control booth.