I want to tell you all a story 'bout a Harper Valley widowed wife
Who had a teenage daughter who attended Harper Valley Junior High
Well, her daughter came home one afternoon and didn't even stop to play
She said, "Mom, I got a note here from the Harper Valley PTA"


- Harper Valley PTA (Jeannie C. Riley)

Carmen came to the launch bay to see Rick off - this was not a normal occurrence, “I get the feeling that these are larger changes than our Manifesto friends were planning on.”

“Maybe,” he allowed, “Any progress on Otra?”

“None. I think the trail’s gone cold.”

“Do you, uh, do you think she’s contributing to the problem at all?” he asked.

“Definitely not,” she said, “Else, why would they have taken her? If I were trying to really do a number on the Temporal Integrity Commission, I’d keep her here.”

“Going with that theory - assuming you’re right, and I think that at least you’re on the right track - who do you suppose they’re keeping here?”

She thought for a moment, “I wish I knew.”

One thing they had not seen was that an engineer had nicked the dark matter collector line. That engineer had also fiddled with the on-board replicator, making it unreliable. Rick would still be able to get to 1968 Prague, no problem.

But getting back was not as guaranteed.

HD got up. The three Calafan women were still sitting with him in the cafeteria, “Uh, we gotta go,” he motioned to Tom to get up. The women flicked their fingers at the two men as they departed.

Once they were out of the cafeteria, HD said, “That’s a little unnerving, to be looked over like that.”

“I guess women - or at least some women - are used to that. It is strange,” Tom agreed, “Then again, how do you know you were the one they were, uh, flicking at?”

“Huh? Don’t tell me you’re throwing over the Daniels honey for one of ‘em.”

“No, I’m not. But you gotta be wondering about your options,” Tom stated.

“I dunno. I hear they, uh, they bond easily. Might be, you know, awkward.”

The other two Calafan women went back to work. Yilta, the silver one with hair, sat by herself. Kevin came over, “You know, you keep doing that to that kid, he’s gonna get ideas,” he imitated the gesture.

“Maybe I wasn’t doing it to him,” she replied.

“Then it was Tommy.”

“No,” she said, “It was you.”

The Wells lifted off without a hitch. It was over a millennium to 1968 Prague. Rick steered the ship to an orbit over Dawitan, which was where Otra’s mother was from. It was in the Delta Quadrant, and they had had Warp Drive longer than most Milky Way species, so it was a good place to do the bulk of the temporal traveling.

Once he hit the twenty-first century, he’d fly spatially as well as temporally. Once he got to the Asteroid Belt - at around 1980 or so - he’d switch on the cloak. Then, once he’d gotten to Earth, he would get the time ship into a synchronous orbit above the dark side of the moon. The irony of that location, and the name of the missing album, was not lost on him.

But for now, he was over Dawitan, and could see its four oceans and its two huge continents. As he retreated in time, the number and brightness of evening lights slowly began to dwindle. There was no reason to monitor anything, so he threw the ship into auto. It was late, and there had been too much departmental togetherness and too much to try to figure out. He stripped down and crawled into the bed in the back. It was a king-sized affair, with black satin sheets. More than one woman had joked about it looking like a brothel chamber. And most of those women had then shared it with him.

But this time around, it was just him. He was part-Calafan, which meant that, if he hadn’t been temporally traveling, he could have shared his dreams with any Calafan or part-Calafan. Those dreams could often turn erotic - he could have picked up, say, Yiria, and then the following morning they either would have further pursued things, or not, and it would not have affected anything that had happened that night, or that could have happened on any given future night.

But he was traveling through time, so any sort of a hook-up like that was impossible. Even so, he said, out loud, the traditional Calafan nighttime wish: be with who you desire.

As to who that was, that part remained unclear.

“Me?” Kevin was incredulous.

“Don’t look so shocked,” Yilta said.

“I told you, a few months ago. I’m not, I’m not available.”

“Still too soon?”

“It will always be too soon,” he said. His eyes cast about, searching for any escape he could possibly find, but they were the only people left in the cafeteria.

“I’m sorry,” she said, “Tell me, can ya, how old are ya?”

“Uh, I’ll be seventy-one in a coupla weeks.”

“And your average life expectancy is what, exactly?”

“C’mon,” he said, a bit annoyedly.

“I’ll check, then. Looks like it’s about one hundred ninety years for humans, two hundred twelve for Gorn, let’s split the difference, so, uh, it’s just over two hundred years. You’re sure you’re comfortable goin’ about a good century and a third bein’ alone?”

“Don’t talk to me about this,” he said, “I am, I’m trying not to get angry with you.”

“I, I see,” she said. Then she changed her tone, “Look, I’m not saying these things to hurt you. And I know I’m bein’ crude about it. I got no finesse at all sometimes! But it’s not, please, I hope you’ll understand, it’s not done outta malice.”

He sighed, “I know.”

“I just want you to know, she may be gone, your wife, but you are still entitled to be happy. You can laugh, you can hold someone’s hand, and you can kiss. You can even make love again, yanno.”

“Ready?” Tom asked as he got the Jack Finney up to speed.

“I am,” HD said, “Onward to 1973, eh?”

“What’s the plan?”

“Well, it looks like the band made the album but then they abandoned it. I’m figuring they lost their nerve. It was kinda out there. Maybe they were scared no one would buy it,” HD guessed.

“Oh, yeah, money. It might’ve been, maybe they were paid not to release it.”

“That could be it, too. They got a track called Money on the album. Wanna hear it?”

“I guess so. Not too loud,” Tom said as he piloted the Jack Finney.

Rick’s dream began the same way that most Calafan-style dreams do, if you don’t have a set dream partner.

He was walking down a long corridor.

Whereas in the standard Calafan-style dream, the corridor would be filled with people, this time he was alone, a fact that made sense, given the temporal trip he was on.

Then he suddenly was no longer alone. He saw various women he’d been involved with, both on trips and at home, during the present. They were in no particular order.

The Empress Hoshi Sato smiled at him but instead paired off with another - Brian Delacroix, a young Security Crewman from the mirror universe and that time period. No matter.

Then Phillipa Green, alluring and shaking her hips - but leaving with Jim Horan.

Lucretia Crossman dropped her handkerchief, but it wasn’t picked up by Rick. Instead, it was a man from her time period - 1699 - Roger Allgood.

Betty Tyler was standing at the edge of a dance floor, looking for someone. But it turned out not to be him, and she instead found a tall man with a pencil-thin moustache, and they began to Charleston together.

Dana MacKenzie left with an eager and perhaps overly confident First Officer Martin Madden on the Enterprise-E - and not Rick.

Windy Bradley was drinking a beer at a fraternity party in 1970, but she didn’t leave with him. Instead, she left with some football player.

Carmen narrowed her eyes and, oddly enough, left with Von, the Ferengi engineer. Sheilagh winked at him but departed with HD, and then Tina April looked past him, into the eyes of a guy he conjured up out of his subconscious, an Asian fellow piloting a shuttle. Tina got into the shuttle, flashed a little leg, and was gone.

And so on and so forth, as his mind even scrolled through women he hadn’t bedded, like Crystal and Deirdre and even Polly and Otra. But the results were the same - they were close, almost within reach, and friendly enough but elusive, and they all left with others, matched to far better pairings than he could possibly provide.

He was finally, completely, alone, and so he woke up.

“I’m not so sure I liked it,” Tom said, once the song had ended, “It’s … odd.”

“It’s supposed to be unique. There’s a 7/4-4/4 time signature, which is really rare,” HD said, “It’s a masterpiece of engineering. You listen to it with earbuds and there are all these quadrophonic separations. Sometimes it’s in one ear, and sometimes the other.”

“There’s also the swear word in the lyrics.”

“C’mon, it’s not bad.”

“It’s not something I care to listen to,” Tom said.

“You’re such a Boy Scout!”

“And why not? It’s a proud tradition in my family. It goes back, well, I think it goes back to when we were still on Earth.”

“Your family’s on Titania?” HD asked.

“My parents, yes. I’m born and raised there. But not everyone’s there. I got cousins on Iapetus. You?”

“My folks are on Krios Prime. Almost everyone else - at least everyone I know about - is on Nereid or Miranda.”

“We still got some time,” Tom indicated the instrument panel, which said 2416.

“Yeah. I, um, I think the best way for me to prep is to listen to the rest of that album. And watch any interviews on file that the band did.”

“I’ll check out the interviews, too,” Tom said.

“Okay. Gonna go listen to Brain Damage and Eclipse now,” HD said, easing back into the co-pilot’s chair and closing his eyes as the music started up again, but only as a feed from his implanted Communicator, straight into his left ear.

I hope you don’t get any brain damage from that, Tom thought to himself, as he began to search for any interviews with David Gilmour or Roger Waters or their bandmates.

Rick got up and checked the instrument panel on the Wells: 2095. Time to break orbit and head to the Solar System.

“Computer, tell me about the Bratislava Declaration.”

“In 1968, Communist Party leaders in Czechoslovakia voted on whether to request Soviet assistance in ending a mostly peaceful uprising subsequently referred to as the Prague Spring.”

“What was the vote? Break it down by who voted for, who voted against.”

“Records show that the voting was done by means of secret ballot. The names and the split are not available in the master time file,” Replied the computer.

“Great. Uh, hmm, were there any party members who publicly talked about their votes, either before or after the meeting where the voting took place?”

“There are none.”

“How about known reformers and known hard-liners? Tell me who they were.”

“The following are known reformers: Alexander DubÄÂ�ek, Josef Smrkovský, OldÃ…â„¢ich ÄŒerník, and František Kriegel.”

The computer paused a moment, checking its records, “The following are known hardliners: Vasil Biľak, Drahomír Kolder, OldÃ…â„¢ich Švestka, Alois Indra and Antonin Kapek.”

“Any others?”

“All other party members were undecided or their intentions cannot be readily ascertained.”

“That’s an awful lot of swing votes,” Rick said as he engaged the cloak just off Ceres. The instrument panel read 1989 - the same year as the Velvet Revolution.

The note said, "Mrs. Johnson, you're wearing your dresses way too high
It's reported you've been drinking and a-runnin' 'round with men and going wild
And we don't believe you ought to be bringing up your little girl this way"
It was signed by the secretary, Harper Valley PTA

- Harper Valley PTA (Jeannie C. Riley)