Rewind

      Former ace reporter Joe Stillman walked slowly along the Assateague Island beachfront deep in thought about the eventful life he had lived prior to his retirement to Maryland’s beautiful Eastern Shore. 

      Suddenly, however, as he approached a little too close to a herd of the island’s wild ponies, one of them kicked him in the head and knocked him out.

     After what seemed like an eternity Joe woke up in a daze. He found himself transported back to Elizabeth, NJ, the city where he had spent his childhood.     

    One afternoon during his pre-teens his mother, Marie, had asked him to pick up dry cleaning from Allstate Cleaners, situated on Trumbull Street, about a half mile from his Court Street home. As he walked home from the cleaners Joe heard a startling noise from the bushes behind him on the side of the street.

     A large, surly-looking teenager appeared and hit him hard in the stomach with an empty Coke bottle. Although Joe doubled over in pain the bottle didn’t break and he escaped down one of the side streets.

    Joe thought he had rid himself of the mugger and the terrible return to his past life. However, he had not escaped his nightmarish rewind by a longshot.

   As the former newspaperman remained lost in his mental rerun of his past, the tough guy appeared in front of him as he walked through his old neighborhood.

    Suddenly, a big guy in a large Cadillac grabbed Joe’s mugger off Court Street and the car disappeared in a cloud of purple haze.

 At the time of the incident, nobody else had reported and Joe didn’t recall any mention of it in The Daily Journal, the daily newspaper covering local news in Joe’s hometown during his youth. 

     Two weeks later, Joe remembered he had gotten a phone call at his parents’ house telling him to meet a fellow named Marvin Sebastian outside Liberty Baptist Church on Court Street the following week. The caller had heard about Joe and his reporter friend “nosying around” the Cadillac situation and he wanted to meet with the youth.

   Marvin had shown up a half hour late for the meeting, looking very nervous and disturbed. He said he would give Joe information on the disappearance, but he could not tell anyone where he got the information and they would run into some “very dangerous people.”

    Marvin said “some very important people” from the future were “out to get” Joe and prevent him from becoming a reporter and “standing in the way” of a building project they wanted to “ram through” the Elizabeth City Council in 2000.

      Even though Joe expected to hear from the “dangerous people” from 2000 they didn’t know, however, that Stillman would wind up on the edge of disaster in the future.

       Joe eventually earned a degree in journalism from Rutgers University in New Brunswick and became a reporter for The Daily Journal.

      His “beat” would include Elizabeth City Hall and he would write a number of very incisive articles about threats by Sam Solonski, a local building contractor, and a few unsavory characters he associated with who wanted to build a marina on the Elizabethport waterfront despite zoning prohibitions and strong neighborhood opposition.

     Zenon Saturnski “spearheaded” the efforts of this mob in pushing for the marina. Zenon also had some unusual powers that enabled him to transport through time and prevent others from “messing with his projects” in the future.

      Saturnski wanted to prevent Joe from even being in a position to write about the behind-the-scenes manipulation by he, Solonski and their friends in getting the undesirable and unauthorized marine approved in an area totally unsuited for it.

      At the same time, Saturnski did not want his name directly associated with any “unfortunate happenings.” He, therefore, hired Jupiter Jones, the local tough who many years before had mugged Joe in that Elizabethport back street, to be his “ambassador to the past.” 

      Saturnski told Jones to “relay a strong message” that Joe would have no future if he even had the slightest ambition to become a reporter.

      Jones, therefore, had returned to the Court Street neighborhood of the 1970s in the Cadillac and took Joe on “ a little trip” in the disappearing car. They crossed the timeline and entered Saturnski’s mansion 30 years later.

     Saturnski warned Stillman to abandon his pursuit of his career and the story or “face the wrath of myself and my powerful allies.”

     Joe had no intention of changing his career plans, but evaded giving Saturnski a direct answer. 

    He began devising a plan to put a stop to the future mobster’s plot against the reporter’s life.

    Saturnski, of course,  had no intention of allowing Joe’s “fake news” to put the kibosh on his plans to extract a small fortune from the future Elizabethport Marina.

    He decided to send one of his most experienced henchmen, the renowed time traveller,   Roberto Faszmartski, to “resolve” the Allen matter in the 1970s once and for all.

In addition to Faszmartski and a “hit squad” of the most notorious time-travelling villains of the 21st century, the squad included Jason Capone, the grandson of one of the most infamous villains of the 1920s. Capone itched for the chance to avenge the capture of his grandfather and the destruction of his criminal empire. 

      Capone said, “Our family must avenge the shame brought upon our heritage by the so-called Fourth Estate in the United States. They made Elliott Ness into a national hero and paved the way for the destruction of my grandfather.”

     Saturnski told Fazmartski and Capone, “You will go back in time 30 years and remove all traces of this ‘aspiring journalist’ before he even has a chance to think twice about completing, or even starting, his education in ‘the written arts.’ After this mission you will become my partners in one of the most profitable construction ventures of the 21st century. Should you fail, however, the world’s only memory of you will lay inscribed on obscure headstones in the 1970s in an Elizabeth cemetery.”

    Meanwhile, Stillman began assembling a  clandestine “strike force” of some of the most talented private investigators, retired New Jersey troopers and retired military from throughout the Eastern Seaboard of the United States.

      Strike force leaders included David Pinkerton, great-great-grandson of Allan Pinkerton, who headed one of the top private securities and law enforcement agencies in United States history, and Jeremy Schwartzkopf, grandson of H. Norman Schwartzkopf, who led the New Jersey state trooper investigation of the kidnapping of Charles Lindbergh’s baby in the 1930s.

     Although only a teenager, Joe had stashed away a little “nestegg” from his father’s financial interest in Greater Jersey Consolidated Transit, one of the chief providers of public transportation in the state of New Jersey.

     In addressing the first meeting of the strike force, Stillman said, “We don’t know exactly when or how these time villains will strike, but they won’t succeed. My future and the future of a free press throughout the world depend on it.”

      Meanwhile, Faszmartski and Capone mapped out their plans to cut short Joe’s career plans—and possibly his life.

   They believed they had the advantage—access to technological weapons not even conceived of in the 1970s and entrance to the most advanced time portals to make delivery of these weapons possible.

     They didn’t realize, however, that Joe and his supporters had accumulated some of the most effective research tools of their era and the young reporter, during his short journey into the future, also had familiarized himself with much of the technological advances made in the 30 years since his youth.

     They also read everything written by some of the most prominent “futurists” and entrepreneurs of the 20th century.

   The villains assembled an armada of weapons that, they felt, would destroy Joe and his career while allowing them to control the Elizabethport waterfront.

     The Saturnski crew launched its attack with a 200-decibel blast from a supersonic cannon, fired at Stillman as he walked through Elizabethport on a quiet Sunday afternoon.

     Many highway construction officials in the 20th century. responding to complaints about traffic noise, had greatly advanced the science of noise abatement.

     The aspiring reporter’s team had constructed a 200-foot long wall along Court Street using the most noise-resistant material available to them.

   Therefore, after the 21st century villains launched their attack, Joe and his allies had  successfully repelled it.

       The courts had sentenced Solonski and Saturnski to 30 years each in Central Jersey State Prison and their allies each would serve 10 years as co-conspirators.

      Joe Stillman had won a Pullitzer Prize in journalism for his stories on the Elizabeth Marina scandal and New Jersey Governor Hugo Simpson presented state medals of honor to Pinkerton and Schwartzkopf for their roles in defeating the Saturnski crew.