The papers bypassed the reality of the victims, their lives, the grief of their friends and family, as if those things had nothing to do with the "real" story.

As if the four dead students were only there for the body count.

As if the students had no reality either before or after the shootings, but only in the moments when they lay bleeding on the pavement of a parking lot.

FIRST SCRIBBLE: THE FUNERAL RUN

McGregor grimaced as he reached the door of the time chamber. Inside, the lights had been muted from their usual glare to a moody brown tint. Dimness meant a funeral run: the group going out this morning would not be coming back.

If he'd been in charge—McGregor spent much of his time dreaming how the Corrections Institute would change if he were in charge—if McGregor ever got to be in charge, he'd scrap the gloom and doom, maybe put in something extravagant like orange flashers or a circus-holo show. People going out on a funeral run were depressed enough already. They didn't need the brooding browns, and the staff talking in hushed tones. Why not throw a bash instead? Crack open the booze, crank up the music, give the poor bums some last good memories of the twenty-third century. But the Executive Board were all tight-collars, sending out memos about "good taste" and "appropriateness," and they never, ever had to push the button that sent people off to die.

McGregor passed an eye over the four people in the chamber—not lingering long enough to fix the faces in his memory because he had enough bad dreams already, thank you very much—but he wanted to see whom he was dealing with. His subjects. Two male, two female. Apparent ages somewhere between 18 and 24. No way to tell if they'd been sculpted for the run or if these were their actual faces. Some correction jobs had specific requirements, some just needed bodies.

None of the people, the subjects, looked familiar. McGregor prided himself on his knowledge of history. A good grasp of history was what distinguished a professional from a mere button-pusher. He'd recognize faces taken from history if they were important. These weren't; they were just faces. And he'd spent far too long looking at them. Tonight in his dreams, he might remember that dimpled chin, those sleepy eyes. He didn't need that crap, especially not when Joanne already complained how restless he was in bed. Grunting, he turned away from the door and stalked to the control booth.

"You're in a hell of a mood," Tanya Ramirez said as McGregor threw himself into his chair. "Joanne on the rag?"

"Ha-ha," he replied. He had no intention of talking about his feelings to Ramirez. She didn't give a damn whether this was a funeral run or one of the truly upbeat correction jobs, like the times they inserted top-of-the-line medical teams to save important lives. Only jerks got involved with the subjects; she'd said that once. So now, out of pride, McGregor pretended to be as blasé as she was and of course felt like a jerk for pretending.

"Who have we got today?" he asked, trying to sound breezy.

Ramirez waved her hand at McGregor's display screen, where separate windows showed the official correction authorization, temporal navigation charts, the latest chronal flux reports, and background data on the people in the time chamber. "We have your typical funeral-run volunteers," Ramirez said. "Afflicted with your usual grab bag of terminal conditions, none contagious, and also afflicted with your garden-variety burning need to do something meaningful before they sink down the gravity well. If you want more details, read the History Thanks notices in Corrections Daily."

"Forget it," McGregor told her. He had his newsreader programmed to skip the History Thanks column. After he'd sent someone on a funeral run, he didn't need to know that the deceased did needlework or had once dreamed of being an architect. "What time are we trying to hit?" he asked.

"Early January 1970, late December 1969 if we have to," Ramirez replied. "The correction goes down May 4, 1970, but we have to insert them early enough to establish camouflage."

"They can establish camouflage in only four months?"

"Prep department says it pulled out all the stops building background this time. Birth certificates, employment records, vaccinations—that Prep creep Terry Ying was in just before you got here, trying to impress me. You wouldn't believe how bad he wants into my pants. Anyway, Ying said four months was the max for camouflage on this group because that's the most the doctors can guarantee. Wouldn't want the subjects to die of natural causes before their date with destiny."

You get the idea. Time travelers dropped onto the Kent State campus for the purpose of dying. Their deaths were necessary to shape the future properly—otherwise, opposition to the war in Vietnam wouldn't intensify fast enough and the future would go to hell. I could invent an appropriate description of such a hell if it became relevant.

I wrote the above passage on Saturday, May 5, 1990. The notion that sparked the story was, of course, that the four Kent State students hadn't really existed before they were shot; they were dispatched from the future.

Partway through the writing, in the passage where McGregor scans the faces of the people waiting for the funeral run, I needed to know what the victims looked like. I made a quick trip to the library (only two blocks away), picked up three books on Kent State, and hurried back to the computer so I could keep writing. One of the books (The Truth About Kent State, by Peter Davies) had pictures of the four students on a page close to the front. I made note of Sandy Lee Scheuer's dimpled chin, Bill Schroeder's sleepy eyes, and went back to writing.

Conscience didn't set in till later.

Look: the real students weren't terminal patients who nobly volunteered to die—they were simply people in the wrong place at the wrong time and they died by random chance.

And they weren't just characters of convenience, devoid of families, people with no personality apart from what I might need in a story. At the end of a day of writing, I thumbed through those books from the library and I read interviews with parents, friends, people who had known the victims all their lives. The students didn't come out of nowhere—they came from homes and neighborhoods that mourned, prayed, lost sleep, wept, all trying to come to grips with grief.

Reading those interviews I felt ashamed.

Consider what an observer sees when an object descends into a black hole. For convenience, assume that the object is a burning candle that's somehow tough enough to withstand the tidal forces of gravity around the hole.

As the candle falls, it takes longer and longer (from your point of view) for each particle of candlelight to climb the gravity well and reach your eye. Light particles emitted near the very edge of the black hole may take thousands of years to fight their way out to the universe at large. The result is that you perceive the candle falling for a potentially infinite length of time. Every now and then, another light particle struggles free of the black hole's pull and reminds you of the candle's descent.

It's an obvious metaphor for grief. Hot and burning at the start, dimming over time…but even after many years, memory particles surface now and then to remind you of a life that's gone.

I should point out that the candle's infinite fall is only in the eye of the outside observer. A trick of the light. From the candle's point of view, it drops straight down and crosses the event horizon without pause. Inside the black hole its flame may still be burning; it's just that the light doesn't reach the outside world anymore.