From: cgy@cs.brown.edu (Curtis Yarvin)
Subject: views from a grassy knoll
Organization: Brown University Department of Computer Science
Date: Fri, 10 Apr 1992 22:18:39 GMT


	"Dunce."

	"Dharma."

	"Load."

	"Loaded."

	"Safety."

	"Off."

	"Aim."

	"Fire."

	"What?  Hold it, Dunce.  I'm supposed to say that.  Aim!"

	"Yeah, yeah.  Aimed.  Shit, Sebaceous, I think he's too far alr-"

	"Fire, Dunce!"

	We fire.  A little blue flash and a puff of smoke as our
Mannlicher-Carcanos pop in for the job.  Shitty rifles.  We'd picked them up
in '48 but they coulda been the same old muskets for all the good they did.
"Fuck, Dunce.  Looks like you missed again."  He coulda told me that
beforehand.  Hundred-eighty years and we hain't hit one yet.  We might as
well be aiming at each other, it'd get us out of here faster.

	"I missed?  _I_ missed?  You ain't exactly no Buffalo Bill Cody
youself, Sebaceous.  Wait - holy shit!  There's blood all over the fuckin
car!  Don't think you hit da Man, but somebody out there ain't doin so hot."

	"Shut up, Dunce, and kindly hand me the fucking binoculars, would
you?"  Christ.  Lookit the fucker.  Can't hit a barn door for the last
hundred-eighty years, you think he'd be a little less stuck-up.  But he's a
major and I'm only a hover-corporal, what can I do?  I give him the
binoculars.

	He glares through the spyglasses for a moment, then straightens up.
"Unbelievable.  Frankly unbelievable, Onesiphorous."  He calls me by first
name when he's in a good mood, which ain't often.  Now he grins.  "He's
dead!  I blew his brains out through the back of his head.  Wahoo!"

	"Wahoo?"  Jesus Christ.  Wahoo?  When did this guy start saying
'wahoo?' "Well, Mister Wahoo, yeah, I'm real happy about it myself, I'm just
absolutely fuckin ecstatic, but I got one little question for you,
Sebaceous: if he's so dead, what the FUCK are we doing standing here in the
twentieth fuckin century?"

	"Onesiphorous!  I'll thank you not to use that kind of language
while we're on a mission.  I don't know.  Maybe he'll take a few minutes to
die.  Maybe we'll have to kill everyone else in line for the job.  Who
cares?  We finally did it.  We finally got one.  Wahoo!"

	What a dork.  I've about decided to brain him with my M-C and make a
run for it when I see a bunch of kids around us, pointing and closing in
over the knoll.  Kids seem to notice us a lot.  Dunno why.  Also, we've...
ah... well, dammit, _shrunk_ over the years, so we're about the size of
ten-year-olds now.  They never told us about that, the bastards.  Anyway we
start dodging around the twerps, trying not to bayonet any, when I see a cop
closing in.  Fuck.  She's a Negro, with this real black skin, short, fat,
and I can see by the glint in her eyes she sees us.  Ain't too many adults
that can see us, they don't have the imaginations, they blink and look away
quick, but when they do they freak out and come on fast.  So I smack
Sebaceous on the butt and point and we run.  She's faster but we're hard to
see, and it's touch and go for ten or fifteen minutes, dancing around cars
and ducking under fences until we finally slip away.  Too close for
comfort.  Then we walk around for a few hours listening to people talk - he
actually was dead, it turns out - and waiting to snap back to the
twenty-third.  But it wasn't happening.  Listen up, you fuckers, you said
kill a President, you said you didn't fucking care, any President would do,
and you sent us back to 1780 and we missed Washington and Adams and we had
Jefferson point-blank and our fucking guns misfired and we kept missing and
finally we nailed one and it doesn't look like we're going anywhere and
excuse the fucking language but I'm getting just a little PISSED OFF and I
think I have the fuckin' right... but nobody's hearing anything.  After a
while we find a nice powder-blue Cadillac looking real lonesome.  Sebaceous
likes Caddies so he breaks a window and hot-wires it and off we go.  I turn
on the radio and what do I hear?  It wasn't us.  It was some deadbeat Cuban
fuckhead name of Oswald.  Shit.  "I think maybe we got some kind of a jinx
on us, you know, Sebaceous?"  But it don't matter anyhow.  We'll keep on
missing, and about 2254 we'll show up, about seven inches high, in our
powder-blue 1962 Cadillac, and we will kick ass and take names.  Wahoo!

c