Fugitives of Time: Sequel to Emperors of Time (2 page)

“What?  That’s absurd!  How do they get a
conviction?  I thought they needed two witnesses to convict someone of
treason!” Billy said, running a hand through his short blonde hair.

“No, not here,” Jane said.  She considered.  “Not
in this timeline, I mean.”

“Well, don’t they have The Constitution in this timeline?”
BIlly asked.

“Sure, but we also have the 25th Amendment.  It allows
for conviction in a treason trial by agreement of a special committee of seven
congressionally appointed federal jurists. Sorry if it sounds like I’m quoting
from the constitution.  They made us memorize all the 20th century amendments
when we were in school.”

Tim knew this wasn’t what the 25
^th
Amendment said in his timeline, but was also painfully
aware that the current constitution was what mattered now.  Billy shook
his head and muttered something about how absurd their new government seemed to
be.

They reached an upstairs room.  Jane opened the door to
reveal that it was full of books of different varieties and also a bunch of
newspapers, including both some old yellowed ones and some that seemed fairly
current. 

As they waded into the room past the stacks of papers and
volumes of history textbooks, Aunt Jane remembered another fact from her
schoolgirl days.  “Of course, now that you’re fugitives, they don’t have
to wait for a conviction.  Since you were accused of a serious crime and
fled from justice rather than defending your own innocence, you’re now
considered guilty until proven innocent.”  She waved away another
objection from Billy.  “It’s all there in the 25th amendment.  If
they catch you now, they won’t bother arresting you again, they’ll just shoot
you on sight.”

Books

As distressing as it was to hear that there were orders for
them to be shot on sight, the four teens had plenty of other concerns that
afternoon.  Jane left them in the room and went off, probably to discuss
the tale that Rose had just told her with her husband.

There were five bookshelves in the room.  Two entire
three foot long shelves were stuffed with haphazardly organized books on
American and world history.  It was Rose who found these particular
shelves in the first place, one on top of the other on a bookcase at the far
end of the room.  Both she and Tim dove into these books, eager to see how
history had turned out differently in this new timeline and to try and figure
out what the Emperors of Time had manipulated in history to make the change
happen.

Meanwhile, Julie and Billy browsed around the room. 
Tim assumed that this was mostly because they had less interest in history than
he and Rose did, but that didn’t stop Julie from making a quick and interesting
discovery as she began shuffling through the newspapers laying on a desk in the
corner of the room.

“Geez!  There’s our pictures again,” Julie exclaimed
moments after starting to mess with the pile of paper.

“I feel like this is as famous as I’m ever going to be and I
can’t enjoy it because I’ll be shot on sight if anyone sees me,” Billy
complained, as he looked at the front page article where mugshots of the four
of them were lined up one after the other. 

“The paper’s from Tuesday,” observed Rose, as she abandoned
her search through the bookshelf for a moment to peer at the newspaper as well.

“And it says that we escaped from our cell on Monday
evening, around 8 o’ clock,” said Billy, who had begun to read the article.

“So, the same time that we did our jump back to 1916, from
our own timeline,” Tim said.  He didn’t look too closely at the
newspaper.  He didn’t like how he looked in pictures under the best of
circumstances.  He would have to remember to never get in trouble with the
law again, because he felt that mugshots were especially unflattering.

“Right,” Julie said slowly.  “That makes sense. 
We couldn’t have been both in 1916 and here at the same time.  So we must
have vanished from here at the same moment we vanished in our original
timeline.”

There was silence for a moment as the others tried to let
this sink in.

“I mean…  I’ll buy it, but I’m not going to think too
hard about it or I’m going to get a headache,” BIlly said. 

“We can ask Hopkins when we see him,” Julie said. 
“It’s not a bad working hypothesis for now, though.”

“All right,” BIlly said.  “But why aren’t we just going
to talk to Hopkins now?  I mean, I get that we can’t just call him on the
telephone, and he can’t even travel to this year again because the time travel
device won’t let him go to the same year twice, but why don’t we get the ball
rolling awhile?  We could go to the oak tree and check if he’s left a
letter there for us, or leave one for him, right?  And he could answer our
questions.”

“I don’t want to go back to him empty handed.  We can
find out what the differences in the timeline are, then we’ll have something to
contribute to the conversation when we see him,” Tim said.

“Empty handed?” Billy asked, in a slightly high-pitched
voice.  “We just stopped the Emperors of Time from changing the 1916
election.  Whatever’s going on in this timeline is happening because the
Emperors are scrambling to get things back on track after what we did.”

“And hopefully that means that Hopkins will have been able to
capture one or two more of the Domini while the Emperors were vulnerable,”
added Rose.

“Right, but…” Julie said.  “We could have gone there in
the first place, right?  To my house and the oak tree?  Except that
probably the Emperors have my house staked out now that we’re missing.  So
the best thing to do will probably be to go back in time to before we were
missing to dig.  And if we’re going to time travel to get there, we might
as well take a couple minutes to get our bearings first.  I don’t feel like
we’re done with that yet, do you?”

“Besides, I’m curious,” Rose opined.  “Before we go
jumping through time to dig holes next to an oak tree, let’s take a minute to
figure out what’s going on here.”

“Whatever, I’m outvoted, anyway,” Billy said with an eye-roll
and a shrug.

Tim had never stopped his search through the bookshelves
during this conversation.  He was now sitting on the floor, thumbing
through the table of contents of a big high-school textbook with worn binding
and an American flag on the cover, called
The American Journey
.

He narrated what he saw  on the page.  “Well, of
course, there is the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, Andrew Jackson… 
Wait.  Where’s the Civil War?”

“No Civil War?” Rose asked, eyes wide.  She plunked
herself down next to Tim as he opened the book about a third of the way
through, trying to find where the timelines might have diverged to prevent the
deadliest war on American soil.  Rose had a more beat up volume called
American
History in Brief
that she also began flipping through.

“Germany just launched a manned shuttle to Mars,” announced
Julie, who had continued to read the newspaper that had their own mugshots on
the front.

“So, Germany isn’t ruled by France in this timeline?” asked
Billy, who sounded not so much curious as annoyed by the change in
geopolitics. 

“I can’t even process that right now,” said Rose.  “But
here’s something:  The fact that there was no Civil War seems to have
meant slavery didn’t end until 1898, when President…  Oh man! 
William Jennings Bryan becomes president in this timeline?”

Julie and Billy looked puzzled, so Tim explained, “He ran
for president three times around 1900.  I guess it makes sense that if he
was able to run three different times in our timeline, he would find a way to
run in this one, too.  He always was one of my favorite failed
presidential candidates.”

Rose laughed.  “Mine, too, I guess.  So maybe
that’s one good thing about this timeline.  But that’s crazy that slavery
lasted an extra three decades.”

“Right,” Tim agreed.  “Well, in this timeline, Lincoln
was never president.  In fact, I’m seeing Democrats as presidents from
Pierce until… in 1880 James G. Blaine served as a New Federalist?”

“Was that a question or a statement?” Julie asked..

“A statement,” Tim shrugged.  “The question was, ‘what
on earth is a new-federalist?’”

“Like the regular Federalists, but newer?” suggested Julie,
whose smirk suggested that she knew she wasn’t being helpful.

Rose flipped through her book with great
concentration.  “Let’s think about this logically for a minute.  What
could have stopped the Civil War from happening?”

“Or maybe we should be asking what caused the Civil
War.  Not the big things, like slavery or economic factionalism, because
those must have still existed, but even things like that don’t trigger wars
without a spark,” Tim reasoned.

“That makes sense,” said Rose excitedly.  Tim noticed
that Billy and Julie shared an eye roll.  Tim wasn’t surprised they
weren’t quite tracking the conversation.  But then, he and Rose were the
ones who had a shot of figuring it out anyway.  Tim had sat through enough
math lessons that were over his head that he had limited sympathy for Billy or
Julie. 

“Right, so what would it have been, I wonder?” Tim asked,
looking directly at Rose now and ignoring Billy and Julie, since he knew they
weren’t really interested in the conversation. 

“Maybe the Missouri Compromise.  Its failure led to the
war,” Rose said.

Tim flipped through his book to a promising chapter, scanned
some of the pages and announced, “No, can’t be the Missouri Compromise, that’s
in here.”

“I don’t suppose it’s worth asking what the Missouri
Compromise was?” Julie asked.

“It was a law passed in 1820, and it was the foundation for
determining which states could enter into the Union as free states and which
ones would be slave states.  It helped preserve peace for the four decades
between 1820 and 1861.  Still, it clearly wasn’t a good enough compromise
to keep the nation together any longer.  But it happened in this timeline,
too, and apparently it stuck,” Tim said.

Billy looked at Julie with a single eyebrow raised. 
Julie shrugged.

Rose thought for a moment.  “Wasn’t there one after the
Mexican-American War?  It admitted California as a free state, established
Texas’s boundaries, but kind of pushed off the problem as far as New Mexico and
Utah were concerned?”

Billy shook his head again.  “It’s like a freaking PBS
history special.”

Julie laughed, but also looked vaguely interested in finding
out the answer.  Tim ignored Billy and started scanning further in the
chapter.

“That’s the Compromise of 1850,” Tim said, “And…  It’s
in here.”

“Oh,” Rose said disappointedly.

“But hey, what about the Kansas-Nebraska Act?” Tim asked.

“Could be,” Rose said.

Tim went a little further in the book and said, “Well, I’m
not seeing it…”

“Really?” Rose asked, excited again.

“Yeah, I mean, here’s Pierce.  The Kansas-Nebraska Act
was supposed to take place during the Pierce administration in 1854, and
here’s… whoa, Stephen Douglas?  In 1860.  He’s the next president.”

“Stephen Douglas?” Julie asked.  “I thought he was the
one who debated Lincoln for the Illinois Senate seat?  Don’t we get the
name of the Lincoln-Douglas debates from him and Lincoln?  I thought the
highest office he ever got was Senator?”

“Yeah, that’s true in our timeline.  And yours too, I
guess, which makes sense because yours didn’t diverge from ours until the end
of the Civil War.  But something must have changed in this one,” Tim
said.  “How do you know that by the way?”

“Oh…  you’re big into debate in my timeline--” said
Julie.

“In mine, too,” registered Tim.

“--and you told me about it, that’s all,” said Julie with a
shrug and a hint of a blush in her cheeks. 

Tim decided to ignore this as he plowed forward.  “So
that’s it then,” he said.  “No Kansas-Nebraska Act.  That’s big.”

“Why?” Billy asked.

“The Kansas-Nebraska Act,” Rose said, stepping in,
“determined that popular sovereignty on the state level, and not national
agreements made in Congress like the Missouri Compromise, was what should
determine whether a state was admitted to the Union as a slave state or a free
state.  The ironic thing is that this debate centered around Kansas, which
should have, according to the Missouri Compromise, been admitted as a free
state.  After all the debate, and after the Senators fought and yelled and
formed new alliances over this piece of legislation allowing the Kansans to
enter the Union on their own terms, the vote in Kansas to decide whether they
should have slavery in the state came back with a ‘No’ decision.”

“Right,” Tim said.  “But not before there were a crazy
amount of acts of violence in Kansas.  Both sides tried to intimidate
people into voting one way or the other.  The debate leading up to the
Kansas-Nebraska Act and the violence that followed it were a big part of what
tore the nation apart and lit the fuse for the Civil War.  The vote on the
Kansas-Nebraska Act divided both parties, and the Whig Party basically fell
with that vote.  Soon, it was replaced by the Republican Party and the nation
headed toward Civil War.”

“And it never happened in this timeline?” Julie asked.

“I’m not seeing it in here,” Tim said with a frown, as he
continued to thumb through the book to see if maybe he had just missed it.

Meanwhile, Rose was at the bookshelf.  Tim figured she
must have been looking for a book with more specifics on the time period around
the Civil War, because she came back with a book called,
Nineteenth Century
America
.  The volume was thick and looked to Tim like it would have
made for some pretty dry reading, even for someone who loved history as much as
he did.  But it would surely mention the Kansas-Nebraska Act if it went
through.

Rose spent a minute going through the book as Tim looked at
the bookshelf, trying to find another book that might be helpful.  Julie
and Billy, meanwhile, talked about how lucky it was that they were with people
who actually understood these history books so that they didn’t have to.

Finally, Rose spoke up.  “All right, here it is. 
There was debate in the Senate about a bill that would have allowed
self-determination in Kansas.  I’m pretty sure that this is the bill that
would have been the Kansas-Nebraska Act if it passed.  But it didn’t.”

“Does it say why?” Tim asked, giving up his search for
another useful book and sitting back down on the floor next to the others.

“Yeah, so get this,” said Rose, as Tim leaned forward and
Billy yawned.  “There was a new compromise instead, called the Kansas
Compromise.”

“Okay,” said Tim, filing this new bit of historical information. 
“Tell me more.”

“All right, here’s the rundown:  Kansas enters as a
free state, like it was supposed to, but any future state added to the Union
would have a choice of whether to enter as a slave or free-state.”

“So they gave the North what it wanted in this single
instance on the assumption that they could get other states in the
future.  But weren’t most places that would later become states further
north than Kansas anyway?” Tim asked.

“In our timeline, yes,” Rose said.  “This book points
out that this compromise was the foundation for adding Cuba and the four states
south of Texas as slave states over the next decades.”

“Four states south of Texas?  Wow. So maybe it was
implicit in the negotiations that there would be a more hawkish foreign policy?”
Tim asked.