Free 11/22/63: A Novel by Stephen King

of Double-O and spend two hundred thousand dollars or so on Al Gore’s behalf?”
    “Couple of problems with that,” I said. “First, I don’t have two hundred thousand dollars. Second, I’m a schoolteacher. I can tell you all about Thomas Wolfe’s mother fixation, but when it comes to politics I’m a babe in the woods.”
    He gave an impatient flap of his hand, which almost sent his Marine Corps ring flying off his reduced finger. “Money’s not a problem. You’ll just have to trust me on that for now. And advanceknowledge usually trumps the shit out of experience. The difference in Florida was supposedly less than six hundred votes. Do you think you could buy six hundred votes on Election Day with two hundred grand, if buying was what it came down to?”
    “Maybe,” I said. “Probably. I guess I’d isolate some communities where there’s a lot of apathy and the voting turnout’s traditionally light—it wouldn’t take all that much research—then go in with the old cashola.”
    Al grinned, revealing his missing teeth and unhealthy gums. “Why not? It worked in Chicago for years.”
    The idea of buying the presidency for less than the cost of two Mercedes-Benz sedans silenced me.
    “But when it comes to the river of history, the watershed moments most susceptible to change are assassinations—the ones that succeeded and the ones that failed. Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria gets shot by a mentally unstable pipsqueak named Gavrilo Princip and there’s your kickoff to World War I. On the other hand, after Claus von Stauffenberg failed to kill Hitler in 1944—close, but no cigar—the war continued and millions more died.”
    I had seen that movie, too.
    Al said, “There’s nothing we can do about Archduke Ferdinand or Adolf Hitler. They’re out of our reach.”
    I thought of accusing him of making pronounal assumptions and kept my mouth shut. I felt a little like a man reading a very grim book. A Thomas Hardy novel, say. You know how it’s going to end, but instead of spoiling things, that somehow increases your fascination. It’s like watching a kid run his electric train faster and faster and waiting for it to derail on one of the curves.
    “As for 9/11, if you wanted to fix that one, you’d have to wait around for forty-three years. You’d be pushing eighty, if you made it at all.”
    Now the lone-star flag the gnome had been holding made sense. It was a souvenir of Al’s last jaunt into the past. “You couldn’t even make it to ’63, could you?”
    To this he didn’t reply, just watched me. His eyes, which hadlooked rheumy and vague when he let me into the diner that afternoon, now looked bright. Almost young.
    “Because that’s what you’re talking about, right? Dallas in 1963?”
    “That’s right,” he said. “I had to opt out. But
you’re
not sick, buddy. You’re healthy and in the prime of life. You can go back, and you can stop it.”
    He leaned forward, his eyes not just bright; they were blazing.
    “You can change history, Jake. Do you understand that?
John Kennedy can live.
”
4
    I know the basics of suspense fiction—I ought to, I’ve read enough thrillers in my lifetime—and the prime rule is to keep the reader guessing. But if you’ve gotten any feel for my character at all, based on that day’s extraordinary events, you’ll know that I wanted to be convinced. Christy Epping had become Christy Thompson (boy meets girl on the AA campus, remember?), and I was a man on his own. We didn’t even have any kids to fight over. I had a job I was good at, but if I told you it was challenging, it would be a lie. Hitchhiking around Canada with a buddy after my senior year of college was the closest thing to an adventure I’d ever had, and given the cheerful, helpful nature of most Canadians, it wasn’t much of an adventure. Now, all of a sudden, I’d been offered a chance to become a major player not just in American history but in the history of the
world.
So yes,