July 25th, 1974

Arlington, VA

It was just after midnight, the end of a typically long and hot summer day, when Captain Paul Winthrop received the phone call. He cursed under his breath; having spent a long, grueling day investigating two drug-related shootings, he wasn't in any mood for another pointless, needless crime. There didn't seem to be much point to anything anymore, not in 1974, when the country was decaying from the inside out.

"Captain Winthrop," he answered dutifully.

"Captain, this is Sergeant Beech," came a nasal voice on the other end. "There's an accident up in Rosslyn. Somebody plowed a car into the side of a building and we think you should take a look.

"That seems pretty routine," the Captain responded, struggling to mask his annoyance. "Why call Criminal Investigations?"

"I mean, the driver seems to be pretty well-connected. Plus there are some pretty queer circumstances around this wreck. Might be worth a look."

"Who ya got there, Henry Kissinger? Julie Christie?"

"Close. One of them works for the White House."

That was enough to pique the Captain's interest. He sighed, looked down at his paperwork, then uttered a profanity and jumped in his police car.

Nothing here struck Captain Winthrop as overly bizarre. A 1970 maroon Ford Maverick had plowed into the side of a brick building, smashing its front end to pieces, shivering the windshield and engine to fragments. Gasoline and motor oil and radiator fluid leaked everywhere. Inside the car there were two bodies, barely recognizable amidst the mess.

In the passenger's seat sat a neatly-dressed young man, wearing a blue sport coat and with long but well-groomed brown hair. His neck had been snapped like a carrot, his head dangled on his shoulders. Next to him was a tall, red-haired young woman in a denim jacket, her face and upper body smashed to a pulp. She still had a pulse when the first responders arrived, but was dead before an ambulance reached the scene. It was a gruesome sight, but nothing that Winthrop hadn't seen a million times before, and nothing that seemed to overly concern him.

"We checked the ID on the male," Sergeant Beech reported. "Name is Richard Mason Anderson, age 28 - for my money, looks about half that age, but what do I know? Ran the name and he works as a special assistant to Ken Clawson in the White House press office. Must be pretty well-connected for a kid to be working for the President at that age."

"Who's the broad?" Winthrop asked, eyeing the second victim.

"Ahh, we're still trying to figure that out," Beech admitted. "She had an obviously fake ID on her - a cheap cut-and-paste job, says she's 30 years old and named Etta Place."

"Like the girl in Butch Cassidy?"

"Exactly. These guys aren't even creative any more. Used to be they'd name themselves after some Uruguayan guerrilla leader or something like that."

"Yeah, I'm well-versed in counterculture cryptography," the Captain snapped.

"Probably a hippie or a dropout or something like that. Must be a weird one, though - no needle marks, no sign of dope or anything else in the car, not even booze. Plus she looks and smells like she was acquainted with a shower."

The Captain just nodded thoughtfully.

"It is a bit odd that she'd be hanging out with somebody like that," the Sergeant said.

"Even White House staffers like to get laid," Winthrop assured him.

"Maybe in Kennedy's day," the Sergeant replied. "But under Tricky Dick? Doesn't sound right."

"Call him that again and I'll break your head with a flashlight," Winthrop barked. He'd had one too many political arguments over the past two years, was sure to have more in the days ahead, and wasn't interested in another one just now.

"Well, whatever you call his boss, I dunno. Must have fallen in with a bad crowd, or else he was living a double life his pals didn't know about."

"So basically, you called me out here in the middle of the night to show me that government gofers like sex as much as working stiffs," Winthrop said. It was growing harder and harder to disguise his annoyance.

"Well, not exactly boss," the Sergeant said, starting to feel sheepish. "There were two other things that caught my eye here. I mean, look at the car. It had to have driven straight into the side of the building to hit it at this angle. But, I mean, straight across the street is another storefront. I don't see how they could have made that unless they were parked outside."

That did seem odd, Winthrop had to admit. But still not enough to justify his coming out here.

"Also, one of the patrolmen found this by the car," the Sergeant said, pulling out a business card. Winthrop puzzled over it, wondering what it could mean.

It was a plain white card, 4X6, with nothing on it but a strange double-cross symbol. It reminded him of a Cross of Lorraine, which he'd seen many times in France during the war. Except that it had a large capital G embossed between the two arms of crosses.

"What the hell is this?" he wondered out loud.

"Beats me," the Sergeant said. "Wondered if it was some kind of company or, you know, think tank, maybe some kind of code phrase for these radical types, but nothing we could find."

Winthrop turned the card over in his hand, stared for a moment, then crumpled it up.

"So are you suggesting, what? Someone mysteriously managed to turn a car at an impossible angle into the side of the wall, or maybe teleported it through the side of an office building...then, having achieved these amazing bits of weirdness, left a calling card with a weird symbol to taunt us. I mean, I might buy that if this was an actual murder. But come off it, Sergeant, it's a goddamned car wreck. Kid was probably drunk or driving too fast and smashed into a wall. End of story."

The Sergeant scratched his head skeptically. "But sir, what about...?"

"End of story," he repeated firmly. "Now make sure to get those bodies out of here and clean up this street before anyone else comes through here, or else traffic will be backed up all the way to the Potomac. And Sergeant? Next time you call me at midnight, make sure Charlie Manson's broken out of prison or something like that, huh? None of this patrolman's bullshit. "

The Captain walked away irritated, not even waiting until he was out of sight to light up a cigarette. He hadn't quite squared all the incongruities he'd noticed in his own mind, but at this point it didn't care. Everything is weird enough if you stare at it long enough, no matter how banal or commonplace; every minor event yields some anomaly, some detail you can't account for. The only thing that bothered him was the card, but any curiosity he had over that lost out to insomnia and indifference.

Perhaps Captain Winthrop couldn't be blamed for his lack of clairvoyance, since he knew nothing of the future and less about the space-time continuum. He didn't know that the two victims of the car accident were the only things standing between the United States of America and nuclear annihilation, anymore than the delayed arrival of a Congresswoman to the Capitol Building the following morning, or the disappearance of a young man affiliated a Millenniarian sect would have piqued his interest, let alone signaled the end of the world. Certainly he knew nothing of Dipper and Mabel Pines, Wendy Corduory or Charlie Huston, who even in the correct timeline were born a decade after a plaque- and stress-riddled heart killed the Captain in a Bethesda hospital.

And even if, somehow, he had known all of those things, what could he have done about them?

Author's note: Welcome to the next big story in my ongoing arc. All reviews, reads and followers are greatly appreciated; this one will probably take awhile to write, but hopefully you'll find it worth your time. I am also trying to find a suitable cover image, suggestions are welcome.