I thought about The Battle of the Bulge
the unexplained reasons why Bletchley Park
did not pass on the intelligence of the German surprise attack
in which so many Americans were killed and my father wounded.
It was almost as if a few intelligence agents
from different nations were collaborating,
and they wanted to even up the casualties.
"It is only conjecture but...
it illustrates the potential dangers of intelligence agencies
of the unchecked power that they control," Gunter had said.
Kennedy had begun to understand this, I thought,
and I remembered scibe's words:
"Suppose that I had been under constant surveillance since I was a child,
and the people stalking me were using a kind of hypertextual program
to 'write' an alternative history on my real life. If this were so, it
would be important not only to decipher and make public the imposed meaning
of my life, but also to find out who would have done such a thing and to
ask that, in the spirit of peace, such interference in all of our lives
be stopped."