Emperors of Time Read online

  “Correct, or at least in your timeline. It was Northwestern, by the way, in his home state of Illinois,” he said. “And Lincoln was succeeded by..?”

  “Colfax? I think it was Colfax, anyway. First name was Schuyler or something? I remember reading that they were really tight during Lincoln’s second term. Really hit the South hard during Reconstruction, I think. Was there somebody between Lincoln and Colfax?”

  “No,” he said. “And who was next?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “After Colfax, I am pretty hazy until Theodore Roosevelt. Roosevelt was America’s first three term president. He got the U.S. involved in The Great War and won us our first European colony… Austria, I think, but I get our European colonies confused.”

  “Yes,” said Steven Hopkins, the frustrating middle aged man spinning his coin on the table. “And all of those things you have mentioned happened because my erstwhile colleagues -- I believe they call themselves the Emperors of Time -- prevented John Wilkes Booth from killing Abraham Lincoln. Admittedly, they still had to do some tweaking. They killed Joseph Stalin when he was three years old and fixed a couple of elections in the late 21st century… Still, detaining John Wilkes Booth and preventing his crime was the first cause for all of it. If that’s undone all the other changes will go with it because this first change made the other ones possible.”

  My head was spinning with names, dates and places as he rambled on, and then it occurred to me I had to figure out how I was going to get from where ever I was right now to my kitchen back home. I was certain my parents would be starting to worry about me. It was just beginning to occur to me that maybe the weirdo had kidnapped me.

  “Find someone you trust and ask them the names of the Presidents. Pick him or her carefully, because you’ll be relying on this person in matters of life and death very soon. Once you are convinced history has been altered, tell this person about the medallion. Actually, it might be easier to show them. If you touch another person when you go back, they will travel with you. But for now, be careful not to change any events. I happen to know-- pardon me, but I have read your biography-- that by the time you are in your thirties, you will have three lifelong friends and confidantes from your hometown, who are about your own age. That is why I chose to give the package to you in your junior year, so they would all be close at hand to assist you. Hopefully they will be more or less the people they grow up to be in my timeline. So find two more confidantes, after the one you ask about the changes in American history tomorrow. I did not want to do this to you much later in life, because… Well, let us just say that you have some very impressive things to do when you grow up. It would be irresponsible to distract you from them by having you galloping across time.”

  I’m pretty sure that by this point in his monologue, I was literally gawking. Or at least I’ve heard that’s what people do when they’re lost in complete disbelief. I didn’t have anything to say, so he continued.

  “Aside from recruiting your friends, you need to know more information about the Emperors of Time and how you must help stop them. I cannot send you another letter, for reasons I will explain later, but I will bury a guidebook for you. It will be in your backyard, about two feet to the right of that lovely oak tree. I have a feeling that whatever those so called emperors think of next, they will do nothing to prevent that tree from growing. I, unfortunately, am now obliged to free a certain Mr. Booth from a band of corrupt policemen. Would you be so kind as to wait here?”

  Hopkins didn’t give me time to say no as he waltzed out the front door. I looked out the window, debating whether to go after him or not, when a covered horse-drawn carriage approached, down the dusty road on which the building I was in stood alone. For just a second, I registered that if I hadn’t gone back in time, someone must have put a lot of effort into getting a horse-drawn carriage to approach at just that time, but my mind was now oddly more concerned with Hopkins’ safety. As the carriage approached, it made no sign of stopping as the driver kept spurring the horses toward Hopkins, now standing in the middle of the street.

  Hopkins took a metal stick out of his pocket and raised it in front of him. He pushed a button on it and there was a flash of red light. The horses stumbled, the driver dropped the whip, and the carriage spun out of control. A moment later, Hopkins stepped calmly over the fallen horses and into the carriage. Soon, he pulled out a bag and an immobile man who he laid on the ground. Hopkins raised his metal stick and pressed another button, flooding the new man’s face with green light.

  The man stirred, opened his eyes, and looked around. After a moment’s hesitation, he got up from the ground, shook Hopkins’ hand, and ran back up the street.

  Hopkins came back in after that and said, “Do not worry, the horses and the men in the carriage will wake up shortly. Now it is time to get you back home, or at least to a reasonable variation of what you think of at home. Simply squeeze hard on the Dominus Temporis-- the medallion-- and think of the place and time you came from. It is as easy as that.”

  I decided that instead of arguing, I might as well give what he said a try. So I did, and I was back in my kitchen without so much as a blink. Except that it wasn’t my kitchen, or at least not exactly. The microwave was a different color, and there was a dog in our fenced backyard, even though my parents never had a dog or a fence. But the weirdest thing has to be this morning’s newspaper. It was sitting on the counter (my family doesn’t buy the newspaper by the way, but at this point it seems almost nitpicky to mention that) and I notice the headline talking about the ongoing war against Russia, like it’s something I should know about. But we’ve never been at war with Russia. They’ve been our allies against China for years!

  I’m writing all this down so I don’t forget it, although I’m convinced it has to be a hallucination or something. I figure I can get you to read this, if what you tell me about the presidents makes me think something is actually up. Don’t get me wrong, I still don’t necessarily believe all this. But I do need to talk to you about it, and maybe even take Hopkins’ advice and try to prove it to you. On the bright side, maybe once I convince you, you can convince me. Not that I’m particularly eager to believe I have the ability to travel through time and an obligation to save the world. But the alternative is that I am going insane. Because I swear to you that this desk in my room was not here this morning. My Dad and Stepmom looked at me like I had two heads when I asked them if they had just gotten it today. Not to mention that the desk is full of homework assignments I don’t remember doing and pictures of me in places I have never been to.

  So that was my Monday. I hope you’ll still walk me home after school today, ‘cause, well… honestly, I really need someone to talk to about this.

  That was all that was written. Tim closed the book, put it down, and shook his head in bewilderment.

  Chapter 2

  Mrs. Chapman

  About two hours later, Tim was in the lobby looking for Julie. He figured the likeliest scenario was that this was some kind of trick. Perhaps Julie just wanted to get a laugh out of standing him up and making him miss the bus. But Julie had never seemed cruel before, so Tim decided he would take the risk. After all, there really had been something up with her at lunch.

  Still, Tim was halfway surprised to see her waiting in the lobby.

  “Hi,” he said, awkwardly.

  “Hi,” she said as she opened the door and began leading the way toward her house. Tim had never been to her house before, but figured it must not be too far. “Did you, um… did you get a chance to read my… my letter, I guess is what you’d call it?”

  Tim stopped himself from saying, “Or science-fiction,” and instead just said, “Yeah. During study hall.”

  Julie frowned. “Well, you’re still here. I guess that’s a good sign.”

  “I mean, I know it didn’t really happen,” Tim clarified as Julie led him across the grassy patch of ground that separated the school from a housing development.

  J
ulie nodded, “I could just be going crazy, I guess. You happen to know any good psychiatrists?”

  Tim didn’t have a good answer to that, so he just kept walking beside her, searching her face for any sign of a joke. Her green eyes were serious, with no sign of her usual humor or kindness. It looked more like she was trying to solve a really hard math problem. He remembered how she sometimes worked on her calculus homework at lunch, doing math way more advanced than Tim had ever done. Sometimes, she would get this look then.

  “Seriously,” Tim said. “Are you okay?”

  “I guess we’ll find out. When we get to the house, I’ll either convince you that I’m not making it up, or we’ll find out there really is something wrong with me and go from there,” she said. Her eyes softened a bit as she said, “I really do appreciate you coming with me. I know I sound crazy, but I really do trust you. And I appreciate you being here for me.” Her eyes said she was telling the truth.

  Tim hesitated, and then decided to go all in. “Just so you know, I’m here for you no matter what. Whatever’s going on, I’ll do what I can to help.”

  Julie smiled at this and took a deep breath. “That means a lot. But since we can’t solve anything until we get to my house, what do you say we talk about something else until we get there?”

  “Okay,” Tim said. He thought for a second, trying to think of a complete non sequitur, and came up with, “Which is the better planet, Mars or Venus?”

  Julie laughed sweetly and said, “Hmmm, well… Mars, obviously.”

  “Why?”

  “Well… Mars has two moons and Venus has none. Obviously two is better than none, so it’s Mars. Why? Did you think it was Venus?” she asked, as if he had just gotten a really easy math problem wrong and she was embarrassed for him.

  “Well of course Venus is better,” he said.

  “Well pardon me. Why?” asked Julie, feigning an intense intellectual curiosity.

  “Because the ancients used to call it the ‘Evening Star’, but they also called it the ‘Morning Star’, since you can see it really well at both times. It wasn’t until the sixth century BC that they figured out it was the same thing, and it still confused people way after that. Basically, Venus is better because it’s two things, the Evening Star and the Morning Star, but Mars is just one thing. The god of war.”

  Julie nodded. “We’ll call that one a draw then. Okay, how about this: What’s the best type of bird?”

  “Oh, that’s easy. A penguin.”

  Julie burst out laughing. “No way. That’s mine, too! Why for you?”

  “The poor things can’t fly, and they look ridiculous.”

  “Right! But they always look so smug about it. Like, I went to the zoo not too long ago, and I swear they looked at me like they know they’re short, fat, and have stubby little wings, but they still think they’re the coolest thing on two legs. Simply adorable.”

  Tim nodded, chuckling. If this whole business about time travelling had been an elaborate ruse to get him to talk about penguins, it had succeeded. But as they turned the corner into a cul de sac, Julie’s face became serious again.

  “Well, that’s my house there, the blue one,” Julie said. “My parents don’t get home until about 5:15, so we’ll have enough time.”

  “Yeah, okay…” said Tim hesitantly.

  Julie unlocked the front door and opened it, motioning for Tim to go inside. “My room’s at the end of the hallway. You can go on in.”

  “Thanks,” said Tim, although discussing time travel wasn’t exactly his ideal reason for being invited into a girl’s bedroom.

  “Okay, first things first,” Julie said once they got in the room. “Here’s the 1865 coin I told you about.” She picked it up off her desk.

  Tim looked at the coin and let out a whistle. It was the best preserved coin he’d seen that was more than sixty years old. It was a century and a half old and looked fresh from the mint.

  “I thought you said Hopkins had it in his hand when you saw him?”

  “Yeah, but when I got back, it was on the floor right where I’d been standing. Like it had dropped from my hand when I vanished,” Julie said.

  “Hm, okay...”

  Julie shrugged. “I know how it sounds. And here’s that thing Hopkins kept calling a microchip.” It was a little metal disk, no bigger than a half dollar. It was shiny, unmarked metal. Tim wasn’t entirely sure what he thought it was, but he was confident that a super powerful microchip that could manipulate space-time was a possibility he could safely eliminate.

  After a moment of silence, Tim looked at her, “You weren’t figuring it’d be enough to just show me the coin and the disc, were you? Because all that proves is--” Julie held up a hand to stop him. Tim stopped because, really, he wasn’t trying to be mean. But there was only so long you could be fed the kind of nonsense he was hearing and not get impatient.

  The worst part was that Julie honestly didn’t seem like she was insane, aside from the belief that she had visited nineteenth century Washington DC. The conversation on the way to her house had been so normal, or at least quirky in Julie’s normal style.

  As Tim pursued this train of thought, Julie scanned the room. After a moment, she pointed to an old wooden wardrobe. “That closet has been in this room my whole life. It’s one of the few things in this room that I actually recognize. My grandfather, who was a carpenter, made it for me,” she said.

  “Well, um… it’s a nice piece of furniture,” said Tim slowly, not sure where this was going.

  Julie rolled her eyes. “Right, so… I’m going to try to use it to travel back in time,” she said. “If we’re not transported back in time to when I was a baby, then we’ll know that nothing happened to me yesterday afternoon. And then I can just get used to the fact that my confusion over 19th century presidents and which particular communist world power the United States is at war with right now are just due to my shortcomings in social studies class instead of super-advanced micro-computing. And that I never noticed this desk before yesterday because, well… apparently I’m just not particularly observant!”

  Tim paused. “I didn’t mean to say…” But he wasn’t sure what he didn’t mean to say. It was a nice wardrobe; that much had been true. It was tall and spacious, made of wood, with a design of moon and stars cut out from the top of the door.

  “Don’t worry,” Julie said, calming down. “At least I still have science and math. I was as good in calculus today as ever, so maybe everything will still turn out for the best.” She picked the medallion up in her hand and grasped it tightly. “Now I’m going to put my hand on the wardrobe, and you put your hand on mine. It’ll only take a couple seconds to see if I’m full of it…”

  Tim obeyed, looking curiously into her eyes as she concentrated.

  The walls of the room didn’t change, the wardrobe stayed right there touching Julie’s hand, with his larger hand covering hers.

  In fact, the first thing Tim noticed was that the desk was gone, and for a split second he thought he could still believe that the time travel story was still nonsense. After all, maybe the problem was just with this transient desk, coming into Julie’s life last night only to vanish again this afternoon before Tim’s eyes.

  And then Tim saw the baby in the crib in the center of the room.

  Julie let go of Tim and the wardrobe and they stepped over to the crib.

  Julie’s hand was on her heart. She looked just as surprised as Tim. Neither of them could think of anything to say as they looked down at the baby. She certainly had Julie’s black hair. Her green eyes looked up at them with what seemed to be amusement mixed with mild surprise at seeing them.

  Tim was mentally scrambling to remember everything he could from the notebook. It took on brand new relevance now that he was being forced to believe it. Or at least parts of it. It was still possible, he guessed, that it could have simply brought them to a different place, and not changed their position in time. The bedroom still looked an awful lot
like Julie’s, though, and the wall clock (which hadn’t been there a second ago), read 1:25 rather than 3:50 like it should have. And, of course, the wardrobe was still there.

  Just when Tim was trying to figure out what it would mean if the things the notebook said were actually true, both he and Julie heard the sound of footsteps in the hallway.

  Hopkin’s admonition that they shouldn’t change events fluttered through Tim’s mind, right alongside the thought of how difficult it would be explain to somebody why you just happened to be in their house, gazing at their baby. He gave Julie a look of sheer panic, and was glad to see that, although her eyes were still wide with shock, she seemed to have more of a plan than he did. She shoved him toward the wardrobe her grandfather had made and opened one of the twin doors.

  They managed to squeeze in with enough time for Julie to close the door quickly but softly, just as the bedroom door creaked open.

  Tim could see Julie’s face by the light from the cut out moon and stars, which were about at eye level from their vantage point. Julie mouthed for Tim to “Get down!”, which made sense, given that it would hardly do for someone to see them through the carvings in the wood. Tim got down. The wardrobe was big enough so that both Tim and Julie were able to sit comfortably on its floor.

  The person who had opened the door spoke, soft and cooing, addressing the baby in the crib. Tim still had a hard time thinking of this baby as Julie, but it didn’t sound like the baby’s mother did, “Little Julie, Julie-kins,” she cooed. “Already awake from our nap? Why didn’t you call? You should call ‘mommy! mommy!’ Just like that… ready?”

  The baby, who could hardly be old enough to talk at all yet, apparently was not ready, but simply made some nonsense sounds. The baby’s mother laughed with pleasure anyway.