Fugitives of Time: Sequel to Emperors of Time (8 page)

The
Golden Watch

The four teens, three of whom now looked like adults, had
been standing and watching the clock for the last several minutes.  They
knew they had to wait six hours from when they saw Hopkins leave, as he jumped
back in time to 1854 to make preparations for their jump back to the 19th
century.  Finally, now there was only one minute left.

The teens now looked like the four people they were going
back in time to impersonate.  This was really weird for Tim.  Even
though he knew consciously that he was standing in the room with three people
who he would consider his best friends, he felt like he was looking at strangers.
 The nanobots had done a great job, as the four of them looked exactly
like the pictures they had seen of their 19th century targets and nothing like
themselves.  

It was absurd to see Rose with long straight brown hair and
green eyes.  Julie looked about fifteen years older than she normally did
and had thick dark-blonde hair.  Billy’s hair was now dark brown and
graying, but at least his beard was closer cut than Tim’s.  Tim still
hadn’t gotten over the huge dark-brown beard he was now sporting.   

But of course, all this would only work if the people who
they were supposed to be weren’t also running around.  So Hopkins’ current
mission was to go around 1854 Washington DC, on the same day that they were
preparing to visit, and kidnap the four people they were going to impersonate.
 

He was then going to take these people back to his own time
and look after them there, so that he could return them to their own time when
the teens had completed their mission.  He’d have to persuade them to
trust him and follow his instructions, because he himself would be unable to go
back to that year, so he’d have to loan them one of the Domini Temporis.

The idea that they would be traveling back in time was
brought a little closer to home by the outfits that the four of them were
wearing.  The girls’ costumes looked most outlandish.  When they had
first tried their costumes on the day before, they had been quite the topic of
conversation.

“So… why does it look like you’re wearing an upside down
ice-cream cone below your waist?” Billy had asked Rose.

“It’s called a frocked skirt,” said Rose impatiently.

“Calm down, there, Rose,” advised Julie.  “Not everyone
grew up with an aunt and uncle in the antique business.”

Rose sighed.  “It means it’s bunched up to make it… you
know... poofy.”

“That’s the technical term, eh?” teased Billy.

“Well, it’s what my Aunt Jane calls it,” said Rose, sticking
her tongue out.  “Besides, the technical term was ‘frocked.’  It’s
not my fault if you couldn’t understand the technical term.”

“And, just in case it comes up in conversation, what’s
you’re uh… shirt… called?” Tim had asked.

“In conversation with who, your fellow congressmen?” Julie
asked with a laugh.  Then she gestured to her top.  “And did you just
call this a
shirt
?”

“I never claimed to know anything about fashion,” Tim shot
back.  He would have assumed this was obvious to Julie, who would have
seen him wearing jeans and one of about a dozen t-shirts he liked just about
every day they had known each other before this whole time traveling habit had
diversified his wardrobe.

“You can just call it a jacket,” Rose said.  Tim would
call it whatever he was supposed to, but it didn’t look like any jacket he’d
ever seen before.  It looked almost like a multi-layered cape, with big
ornamental sleeves.  The overall effect, when combined with the dress, was
that each of the girls’ heads appeared to be poking out of the top of a
miniature tent.  Rose’s dress was pink, and she wore it with a jacket in
different shades of red.  Julie’s dress was light blue, and her jacket was
a variety of shades of purple.

“All right.  Jacket I can remember,” Tim said, with a
self-deprecating smile.

But Julie wasn’t finished with him yet.  “All right,
and can you tell me what this is?” she asked, gesturing toward what she was
wearing on her head.  “I’ll give you a hint, I’d better try not to get a
bee in it.”

Tim rolled his eyes.  “It’s a bonnet, and I could have
gotten that without a hint.”

“Sure you could,” Julie said with a sly smile.  Tim
thought it was annoying how cute he found that smile.

“All right,” Billy said, “and there’s no surprises in what
all this is called, is there?”  He gestured to his costume, a motley
collection of light blue slacks, a blue dress shirt, and a brown jacket.
 This ensemble was completed by a bow-tie that, to Tim, looked
particularly outlandish, with its loose ends trailing off around his neck.
 

Not that Tim felt more comfortable in his own outfit, which
was, perhaps befitting his character’s higher status in society, a more formal
looking combination of black slacks and jacket with white jacket and
neatly-tied black bowtie.  They had put on the costumes with help from a
picture Hopkins was able to produce of each of their marks, but that hadn’t
helped with the process of tying a bow-tie, which Tim felt to be unnecessarily
difficult.

“Nope…  Men’s clothing seems to have been almost as
boring in the 1850s as it is today,” Rose said, then flinched slightly.
 “Er… and by today, I mean, a few hundred years ago.  I don’t mean to
impugn the fashion sense of our illustrious hosts in this underground bunker.”

The four teens laughed at this, because they had all seen
the jumpsuit-like outfits that were apparently the preference of their
subterranean hosts.

But right now, this was all in the back of the teens’ minds.
 It was only a minute before they would be jumping back in time, and Tim
could only imagine that the others were feeling the same kind of butterflies
that he was.  It was surreal to know that he was about to move from this underground
bunker in the 23rd century to 19th century Washington DC.

And all this because of the microchip he was holding and the
golden watch in his hand.  The watch, according to Hopkins, had once
belonged to Russell Sage, the man he was preparing to impersonate.  Hopkins
had acquired it at a museum sometime in the 20th century, and now Tim would be
able to use it to get into Sage’s boarding-house room in 1854.

Each of the other teens was holding a memento from the life
of the person they were about to impersonate.  Rose had a doll, Julie had
a necklace, and Billy was holding a set of keys.  

They weren’t bringing much modern gear with them.  Of
course, nothing with electricity would be any help, since they were traveling
to decades before the first electrical outlet.  And cell phones would be
useless even before they ran out of battery.  Besides, they didn’t want
anything too obtrusive that would be a dead giveaway that they were from the
future if they happened to be found.  

Still, Paul and Hopkins had given each of them an
electric-pulse gun that could temporarily knock out (but generally not kill) a
person.  They worked at high distances, up to about thirty feet.
 They had all been prepped on how to use them, but currently this was the
furthest thing from Tim’s mind as his thoughts became ever more frantic.  

A backup of some of the information that the four teens had
memorized was in a small notebook Billy was carrying in his pocket.  He
would take it to his inn, where he would have a lot of space that no one would
be able to get into.

Paul had come to see the four teens off, and now, with just
a few seconds remaining, broke the awkward silence that filled the
anticipation-wrought air.  “Good luck, guys.”

The teens looked at each other nervously.  Finally,
Billy broke the silence.  “Okay, you all remember the place we’re
meeting?”

“Yeah.  At your inn at the corner of South Carolina
Avenue and East Tenth Street, at Ten PM, tonight,” answered Tim.

“And I will get there if I am able to sneak out of the
house.  Which I cannot guarantee.  But you guys can fill me in
whenever and however you get the chance,” Rose reminded them.

“You four are going to want to remember that you need to
talk in the 19th century vernacular once you get back there.  I know you
were doing okay with it when you were practicing, but you can’t let yourself
forget,” Paul reminded them.

“Oh, yes, of course,” said Tim, remembering that ‘Yeah’
wasn’t part of their approved vocabulary.  It was going to be weird to
monitor everything he said before he said it.  The other three nodded.
 

Tim felt antsy, and he could tell the girls did, too.
 Only Billy seemed not to be nervous, which was weird since he was always
freaked out by time-jumping.  Still, Tim was beginning to appreciate that
Billy was cool under pressure.  He wondered if this had something to do
with being on the school basketball team.

After a moment, Billy said, “Time to go, then, I think.”

Tim grasped his Dominus and thought about Washington DC in
1854, 4:00 pm on the evening of May 8.  It was the capital of a young
nation, a capital much smaller than Washington DC was in his own time.
 The Washington Monument was unfinished, the Lincoln Monument still
unimagined.  The Capitol was there.  The White House was too,
although the West Wing hadn’t yet been built.  The official name of the
building was still the Executive Mansion, and some still called it simply the
President’s House.  

Tucked away in the corner of this evolving city was a
boarding house where Russell Sage lived during his years as a United States
Representative.  

And suddenly, he was standing in it.  It was a rather
small room, but lavishly decorated and well-furnished.  Tim knew from the
biography Hopkins had supplied him that Sage was relatively well-off, owning an
interest in a wholesale store.  But the stuff in here looked a little
nicer than he would have expected.  It seemed Sage had treated himself
well since he was elected in 1852.

In fact, Tim wasn’t really sure how much of the stuff in the
room was Sage’s and how much came with the room.  He figured the bed was
furnished, probably the dressers…  The thing was, Tim was beginning to
feel as if, by hopping into Sage’s room, he had jumped into a completely
furnished life.  It was eerie.

The decorations and furniture were nice, though.  The
bedspread was a rich red with patterns of golden thread stretching across it,
circling like vines across the surface.  At the foot of the bed was a
large wooden traveling trunk, probably the one Sage had brought with him from
New York.  

Set into one of the walls was a fireplace, equipped with a
bellow and metal rods for tending the fire.  There was a pair of dressers
in the room, wooden with white marble tops.  There was a writing desk,
with a wooden chair pushed in underneath it.  The chair had a suit jacket
on it, just like the one Tim himself was wearing.  Apparently, the real
Sage must have taken it off at some point during the day.  Well, now he
had a spare.

The really strange part came when he noticed a mirror on one
of the walls.  It was round with a golden border, but the strange part was
looking at his own reflection in it.  He shook himself a bit and
immediately thought of Julie shaking herself before the four of them had been
disguised.  Suddenly, Tim felt very lonely.

But then he took a deep breath.  He would be seeing the
others again in a few hours.  For now, it was time to buck up and do his
job.  Which, at the moment, was to get himself acclimated with his new
surroundings, starting with this room and working his way outwards.

Tim walked over to the writing desk.  He found a letter
on the table with a return address from Marie-Henrie Sage, Sage’s wife.
 Tim wondered why it was unopened.  It certainly hadn’t come today,
since it was a Sunday.  But, Tim thought with a shrug, it was his mail
now.  

They were meant to get better acquainted with the lives of
the people they were impersonating.  What better way to start?  He
ripped the envelope open.

The letter was written in a tight, small script, and it was
dated April 3rd.  Tim began to read.

Dear Russell,

I hope this letter finds you well.  I have no doubt
that you are preparing for the upcoming and important debate on the infamous
Act pertaining to Kansas and Nebraska.  We at the church are praying for
the Lord to give you strength to use strong words to defend the moral right and
stop the spread of slavery in this great nation.  I saw a newspaper
article explaining that debate will start on Monday, but I know they have
delayed debate before.  I just hope it can be resolved finally and honorably
in a quick fashion.

I am well, although I am sometimes lonely.  I know
you are doing important work, but I do hope that there will not be too many
more years when you must split your time between your life in New York with me
and your life in Washington DC at Congress.  After all, there is plenty of
important work to be done here in New York as well as in the capital.

I am spending a good deal of time socializing with the
ladies from church.  We meet at someone’s house for tea on different
afternoons.  It feels awfully cosmopolitan and a little too British, but
it passes the time and I enjoy the company.  

You will be coming home at the end of this session,
temporarily, will you not?  If you do choose to run again, you will want
to do some campaigning, as the next election is coming up this year.  Of
course, you are still very popular here, but it can never hurt.  You know
all this, of course, but I am excited to see you.  

However, do not let me bore you with the ramblings of one
woman when you have the affairs of an entire nation of men to attend to.
 I will seal this letter with a kiss and eagerly await your next letter to
me.

Love,

Your Marie.