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“Where are you going, NaCumbea?”
Martin Fields watched the woman he had fallen in love with put on her skin-tight temporal transfer suit. Both of them were reluctant time travelers, recruited by extra-dimensional beings for the purpose of correcting time anomalies in their little corner of time-space.
She’d gone through hell and was just now beginning to come to terms with her new life. First of all she had died at the age of fourteen, but that was over 700 years ago. She was resurrected by “them” as one of their time travelers, but a rogue “them” named Vanir had captured and tortured her in an other-worldly realm for centuries.
She finally escaped with Martin’s help only to discover that “them,” namely her “control” Amun along with Martin’s “control” Isis had set her up so they could finally capture the renegade of their species, something they couldn’t accomplish on their own.
“I’ve had it with the 21st century. I thought I could take anything, but this is just too much.”
“NaCumbea, be reasonable. There’s no point in history that’s perfect.”
“Maybe, but your entertainment industry seems to become more crazy with each passing second, and unless I live on a deserted island with no communications access or in a different time period, I can’t escape it. I’m going to 1966. That should do it. ‘Star Trek’ premieres on September 8th, ‘Bonanza,’ ‘Combat,’ hell even ‘Captain Kangaroo’. They’ve all got to be better than this. Do you know ‘The Milton Berle Show’ was still on the air?”
“Oh sure,” Martin rolled his eyes. “Bloody military coup in Nigeria, an American B-52 collides with a KC-135 Stratotanker over Spain laying three 70-kiloton hydrogen bombs close to the town of Palomares and one in the ocean, Johnson increases the number of troops sent into Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War, race riots in Watts, any number of air disasters and infamous murders, Castro declares martial law in Cuba. Should I go on?”
“The Soviet Union launches Luna 10 and it enters the Moon’s orbit. They also crash the Venera 3 probe on Venus, which makes it the first spacecraft to land on another planet. The Rolling Stones release their single ‘Paint it Black’ and the Beatles release the ‘Revolver’ LP.”
Martin gently takes her by the shoulders. “You know we can live wherever and whenever we want. If you want to live in 1966 and then forward, I guess you can. I want to say I’ll miss you, but I can visit you at any time, literally. But 2017 is my home. This is my native era.”
“My native era is marked by poverty, hardship, starvation, and disease, Martin. You have your home. I can never go back to mine. I just want live in some time and place halfway sane.”
“I’m not sure that’s 1966.”
“It’s better than Stephen Colbert wanting to bare his butt at the Emmy Awards.”
“I’m sure that was a joke, NaCumbea.”
“With these modern comedians, it’s hard to tell. At least Milton Berle is funny and Jerry Lewis is still alive in 1966.”
“Okay, how about this? Let me put on my suit and we’ll spend some time in 1966. Then we come home and deliberately keep the TV off during the Emmys. Awards shows are pretty boring anyway.”
“You’ve got a deal, Martin.”
They’re both speaking softly now. He embraces her and they kiss. It’s the first time in a long time that it feels like she’s ready to give her heart to him and to take his for herself.
Martin has become an expert at dressing quickly and in a few moments, his suit is on. He powers up the temporal controls. “When to first, NaCumbea?”
“Grace Slick performs live for the first time with Jefferson Airplane on October 16th. Let’s start there.”
“Okay, as long as we can watch the original theatrical release of Fantastic Voyage afterward.”
From the 1966 film “Fantastic Voyage”.
“You’re on.”
The two time travelers simultaneously activate their suits and vanish to their latest adventure into history and with each other.
Sometimes, okay a lot of the time, I agree with NaCumbea. The entertainment industry has gone way, way too far. When it comes down to Colbert showing his butt, whether he was kidding or not, I definitely am not interested. Give me “Star Trek,” “Mission: Impossible,” “Combat, “I Spy,” and Johnny Carson’s “Tonight Show” anytime.
The most recent Martin Fields adventure before this one is On a C-130 Flying into Puerto Rico.
For the next Martin Fields and NaCumbea adventure, go to Footprint.
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I think the suggestion was well taken to simply turn off the TV and ignore types of presentations that are likely to be offensive, trite, moronic, or otherwise unedifying. Better programming can be selected from the internet, these days, including programs from the 60s like the original StarTrek, and even splashed onto big-screen TV monitors if desired. If the sponsors’ ratings evaluators (Nielsen and others) notice the decline in viewers, they’ll be quick to pull advertising funding from worthless shows. The entertainment media are in a state of flux, with a lot more competition than ever before. The trick is in persuading enough people to value their viewing time sufficiently to select only worthwhile shows, deliberately rather than just letting the “tube” drone on pumping out whatever drivel the networks throw at it. Other events in the real world, however, are a bit harder either to fix or to ignore. Escaping to another time period, of course, doesn’t really solve anything — though it does increase the likelihood of inadvertently changing something that propagates an altered timeline.
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I think if you’re a time traveler, it might be a tad more appealing to escape 2017 entirely, even if futile. Martin tried to point out that for every good point NaCumbea brought up about 1966, there was an equally bad point.
For NaCumbea, it’s not just a matter of killing the TV, it’s a matter of the overall social environment. Since her native time is 700 years in the past, and since she’s spent centuries either traveling up and down the timeline or being trapped and tortured by an extra-dimensional being, it might be difficult to assess where and when she’d feel “at home.” Probably the suggestion that Stephen Colbert would publicly doff his pants would be considered offensive to her.
On the other hand, the whole story could just be a metaphor for how, at least seen through the eyes of nostalgia, prior decades seem a lot more appealing than today, at least as far as television is concerned.
Oh, as far as offensive, trite, and moronic programming is concerned, the general public seems to eat it up with a spoon. Go figure.
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