Fugitives of Time: Sequel to Emperors of Time (11 page)

A
Sleepless Night

The next night, after he met Julie and Billy on Tuesday
evening, Tim lay awake in bed, sweating and wishing that they could have chased
the Emperors to a time when air-conditioning had already been invented.

The heat was only about half of what was keeping him awake,
though.  Tuesday night’s meeting of the Impostors’ Society, as Rose had
dubbed it, had given him a lot to think about.

Julie had sounded out her neighbor, Felix Zollicoffer.

“So what did our future general friend say?” Tim had asked.

“Just enough to make me curious,” Julie said. 
“Something is definitely going on, but I don’t know what.”

“What do you mean?” asked Billy.

“Well, when I brought up the topic of the Act, he was
evasive at first, but then he said he’d had a change of heart.  Something
about the preservation of the Union being worth more than deciding whether new
states could have slaves,” Julie said.

“That’s definitely a weird thing for a future Confederate
general to say,” observed Tim.  “Do you think he’s one of the ones who is
being controlled?”

Julie had shaken her head.  “I don’t think so.  It
sounded like he didn’t really know all the details of the plan himself, not
just that he wasn’t going to tell me.  And I guess that could be a sign
that he was being manipulated, but it just didn’t feel that way to me. 
Besides, at one point, accidentally, he let slip something about how the
Northern Democrats were willing to compromise now.”

“But Zollicoffer’s a Southern Whig,” said Tim.

“Right,” said Julie.  “So it sounds like we have some
kind of secret compromise in the works.”

“Well, it’s not much, but it’s more than I found out today,”
admitted Billy.

“Yes, me too.  What about Rose, any news from her?”
asked Tim.

“I visited her twice today.  The second time was this
evening, right before coming over here,” said Julie.  “She was able to
write a brief note about the dinner company Curtis had tonight.”

The note read:

Skelton, Lilly, and Stratton, were here today, as
planned.  As I’d pessimistically expected, though, I wasn’t actually
invited
to the dinner.  Me and the two little boys ate beforehand, so that we
wouldn’t have to pester the adults while they were eating.  The men and
their wives got here around 6:30.

I was expected to take care of the baby while they all
ate dinner, but I managed to get her down for a nap before too long. 
Better yet, I got the boys to play hide-and-go-seek so I’d have an excuse to be
skulking around the house and looking all weird.  It sounded like mostly small-talk
until about 7:15 when the men went over to the parlor to smoke cigars.  I
mean, you hear about things like that happening in the olden days, but
honestly!

Anyway, I’m afraid I’m not too great at
eavesdropping.  That’s mostly because, as it turns out, I’m not as good at
hiding
as I’d expected.  I had to pick the room just upstairs from
the parlor, because otherwise I wouldn’t have been able to hear.  But see,
I’m listening for two minutes before Jonathan comes and finds me, like,
immediately after he’s done counting.  I figured he’d at least find
Randall first because Randall usually hides in the hallway behind the
one
piece
of furniture there.  But no, he comes almost straight into the room I
picked.

Basically, all I got from listening in was that the
Jersey Democrats told Curtis he wouldn’t have to worry about whether the
constitutionality of the bill now in Congress would ever come before the
Supreme Court because it wasn’t likely to even be
passed. 

They mentioned something about how a compromise was in
the works, but they didn’t mention whether they had anything to do with it, or
at least, if they did, it was after Jonathan came romping on in and found me
hiding under the desk with my ear pressed against the floor.  By the time
we’d found Randall together (he picked this
one
time to actually have a
proper hiding place, inside one of the travelling chests in Curtis’ bedroom)
and I got the chance to be the seeker next, the men were done with their cigars
and had resumed their stupid chitchat over tea in the kitchen.  So that’s
what I know.

“Well, there’s definitely something going on, then” said
Billy, after he had finished reading the letter from Rose.

“Well, we knew that,” Julie said.  “We wouldn’t be here
if there wasn’t something going on.”

“But it seems like they’ve already gotten started on
things.  They’re forming alliances, making compromises.  Do you two
think we even really have time to change things back to the way they were
supposed to be?  Or if we stop the mind-control now, will the people who
changed their mind because of it still think the compromise is a pretty swell
idea and keep going with it?  They’re American Congressmen after
all.  If they see a way to avoid conflict between the states, shouldn’t
they take it?” Billy asked.

“Well, we’ve still got to try, regardless,” said Julie, but
her shoulders were slumped like she really didn’t think it was worthwhile
anymore.

“These guys’ minds are being controlled right now, right?”
Tim asked.

“Yes, that’s the point,” Billy answered slowly.

“But if we destroy the machines, then that will stop pretty
soon, right?” Tim continued.

“I’m still following, but the point I was making still
stands,” Billy said.

“Well, what would you do if you woke up one morning and
realized you’d been planning something for several days that wasn’t your idea
and you didn’t want to even happen a week before?” Tim asked.

“Ah…  I’d probably go back to doing what I wanted to do
in the first place,” Billy conceded after a moment. 

“Well, that or you’d think you were certifiably crazy. 
Either way, I’d imagine you’re not going to fight for the idea anymore. 
So, on the balance, they’re probably not going to be supporting the
compromise.  Maybe they’d just be no-votes,” said Tim.

“That’s an awful lot of maybe’s and probably’s,” said
Julie. 

“Sure, it’s no guarantee,” agreed Tim, “but it’s better than
just throwing up our hands and saying we’re defeated.  Besides, without
the leaders, the whole compromise is likely to derail.  After all, the
plan is going to lose credibility if the leaders jump ship.  And, what,
figure there were four or five people who were going to lead the compromise who
instead are no-votes…  That would make the vote something like 108-100,
and that would be good enough.”

“So there’s still hope,” Julie concluded, half-heartedly.

And now, laying in bed, covered in sweat, Tim was debating
that same question in his own mind.  They knew of four congressmen who had
been heard of the compromise.  They figured that Zollicoffer was probably
not the one who started it, but they didn’t know whether the New Jersey
Democrats had started it or were just giving secondhand information to Curtis.

To have a good chance at success, they needed results quick,
but it’d been two days and they had nothing solid to show for it.

He was anxious to be able to do something useful.  So
far, he hadn’t even been able to provide any leads to which Representatives
might be behind a compromise, even though he was seeing most of them on a daily
basis.  He felt bad not just because they weren’t making quick enough
progress, but because he personally didn’t feel like he was making any
contributions to the team. 

He kept trying to put these thoughts to bed, so that he
could get some rest, too, but this was apparently impossible to do without the
aid of air conditioning.  So he just lay there, hoping against hope for
any sort of breeze to come through the window and cool the heavy still night
air.

He stayed awake for what seemed like forever, working
through the conversations he’d had or overheard in the House and rehashing the
speeches the various congressmen had made, seeing if there were any clues he
could piece together, any words that seemed out of place.  He began to
realize that eight hours in bed could really seem like an eternity if you couldn’t
fall asleep.

And then he was waking up to his alarm clock, with sun
already streaming through the window.  He felt downright fatigued and
wanted more than anything to pull the covers over his head and sleep in.

Instead, he stumbled to the closet, got dressed, and headed
downstairs to the kitchen where Mrs. Peinture, the owner of the boarding house,
was still serving breakfast.  He nearly fell asleep in his eggs, but
instead settled for trying to wake himself up with three cups of coffee.

He tried all day to figure out what the four congressmen who
he knew had heard about the compromise were thinking.  He tried to
eavesdrop as best as he could without being conspicuous, and throughout every
part of the debate they had that day he tried to figure out if there was
anything that sounded even slightly off.

The three Democrats from New Jersey who had been at the
Curtis house never got up to speak that day, nor did Zollicoffer.  Nobody
said anything about a potential compromise at all, either during official
speeches or in the chatter between them.  Tim was starting to think that
whatever discussion was brewing was happening in actual smoke-filled rooms like
the one that Rose had eavesdropped on.

Much to Tim’s disappointment, he learned just about nothing
that day except the fact that no matter how much coffee you drank in the
morning, there was no bathroom in the Capitol.  He had to leave the
building twice within the first two hours to use a nearby privy.  The
second time he left, after deciding that, no, he could
not
make it any
longer, he found himself cursing the president.  He got a bathroom in his
house / office, but here there were, almost 300 elected officials working in
this building and not a bathroom in sight.  And this was supposed to be a
democracy.

Panic
at Miss Peinture’s

On Wednesday night, Tim almost felt a little better once he
found out that no one else gathered any information that day.  Only
almost, though, because they actually really needed any information they could
get.  If they didn’t stop the compromise soon, it might gain enough
momentum that they couldn’t stop it or the Emperors’ plan.  On the bright
side, he was so exhausted by the time he crawled into bed that he fell asleep
before he even broke a sweat.

The next day, though, he finally caught a break. 

First thing in the morning on Thursday, before the day’s
session even started, he was approached by James Abercrombie, the balding man
with white hair who had accused him of being hungover on Monday. 

“Have you heard what your Northern Democrats are doing now?”
asked Abercrombie.

“What makes them mine?” asked Tim, legitimately confused for
a moment.  He’d only had one cup of coffee this morning and was already
beginning to think it might not have been enough.

“Well, they’re from the North.  I know you’re a Whig,
of course, but you know you Northerners all think alike,” Abercrombie smiled,
to show there weren’t any actual hard feelings. 

“Well…  what are they doing now, then?” asked Tim,
still confused.

“Right.  They think they’ve come up with a way for us
to solve the current problems and settle at least some of our nation’s
differences over slavery,” he said.

Tim finally understood where the conversation was going and
was excited to finally have a bit of political gossip.  “What are they
planning?” Tim asked.

“Well, I don’t know the specifics, but they think they can
get the Democrats to concede Kansas and Nebraska as being non-slave states if
it is agreed that all future territories, whether current or potential, can vote
on whether they enter as slave or free states.  That, and there are a
couple other perks that go well with the Democratic platform,” he said.

Tim thought about this for a moment.  “What do you mean
potential territories?” Tim knew that the United States had already acquired
all the territories that would make up the future forty-eight states of his own
timeline.

“Well, it could be anywhere, of course.  Cuba seems
ripe for the taking, and there are plenty of parts of Mexico that we haven’t
conquered yet,” said Abercrombie with a bit of a grin.

“So are you in favor of this compromise?” asked Tim.

“Me?  Of course not!  I plan to vote in favor of
the bill because my constituents want Kansas to be open to slavery in case they
want to move there.  None of them are thinking of moving to other places
that may someday be a territory, and I don’t want the Democrats getting their
special deals.  But the Democrats wouldn’t need a Southern Whig like me to
pass a bill if they had one that wasn’t dividing their own party.  They
have all the votes they need to carry it themselves.  I know there are
some Southern Whigs who might be on board, but that’s just the Northern
Democrats tossing around scare tactics about how the slavery issue, if left
unresolved, could someday divide the Union.”

Tim nodded, trying to act surprised by the idea that the
North and South could be divided.

“Well, who are the Northern Democrats offering this
compromise?” asked Tim.

“I don’t know exactly,” said Abercrombie.  “I haven’t
been approached myself.  This is rumor I’ve heard from some of the
Democrats from my state, you see.”

Tim nodded.  “I suppose that makes sense.”  It
also explained why he himself hadn’t been approached, although he wasn’t sure
why none of the Democrats from his state had talked to him about it.  He
guessed that he probably hadn’t been keeping up all the social obligations that
Sage usually would.

For the rest of the day, Tim strained to hear anything he
could about the compromise.  Again, no one who got up to speak so much as
mentioned it.

But around the chamber, unofficially, Tim heard hushed talk
about the possibility of a compromise, although he still never heard a name
attached to it.  It seemed as if the authors of the proposed compromise
didn’t
want
their names to be known but were seeing how much support
they could drum up for it. 

Still, even though Thursday seemed a little bit late to be
the first time he could really contribute something to the group’s intelligence
on the plan in the works, he was awfully excited as he walked home to have
something to share.

He was even starting to picture himself in Cooper’s Kitchen,
now a gathering spot for the three of them, telling the other two what he had
learned. 

The imagined scene was a peaceful and happy one, which was
why it was so jarring, moments later, when he opened the front door of his own
boarding house to see an out of breath, wild-eyed, and sweaty
Billy-disguised-as-Cooper sitting at the kitchen table accepting a glass of
water from a very confused looking Miss Peinture.

“What’s going on?” asked Tim.

“Mr. Sage!” said Miss Peinture, who didn’t seem to know what
to make of the situation.  “This is Cooper.  He owns another boarding
house in town, and I had no idea that the two of you knew each other. 
I’ve met him before, of course…  You congressmen come and go, but those of
us who own houses here stay on.  I would have turned him away, but he’s in
such a state… 
Do
you know him?”

Tim had fully expected Billy to be the one who answered
Tim’s question, and the fact that he didn’t worried him a bit.  Billy was
usually not one to have nothing to say, even in a crisis.  His strange
behavior was making Tim antsy.

“Yes, ma’am” said Tim.  He wasn’t sure what it was
about Miss Peinture, but even though Tim looked like he was just as old as her,
he still had the uncontrollable urge to call her ma’am.  He wasn’t sure
how to explain Billy’s sudden appearance to Miss Peinture, so he lied
vaguely.  “I was expecting him.  We’ll go to my room, now. 
Don’t worry about us.”

“Well, all right,” said Miss Peinture.  “Only, I’ve
never seen him in such a state.”

“Right, well, thank you,” said Tim, awkwardly.  He
beckoned toward the stairs, nearer where he was standing.  Billy got up
and came over, but still didn’t say anything. 

Only once they got into Tim’s room and closed the door did
Billy talk.  When he did, he spoke in a frantic burst.

“Sorry, I just couldn’t figure out what to say in front of
her.  I’ve been caught.  They’re onto me, so I had to get out of
there.  I don’t think they know I’m here, so I should be safe right now,
but…”  Billy said all that in one breath, and then stopped again.

Tim looked at him.  He was gaping, but stopped long
enough to say, “You have to slow down.  What happened, exactly?”

“Well, I don’t know exactly,” Billy admitted.  “But all
my things have been ransacked.  They took my notebook, with all the
information from Hopkins in it…  It was in a locked drawer and everything,
but they got it…  I’m not sure they’re going to know what half of it
means, without having talked to him first, but it’s definitely going to be
enough to confirm whatever suspicions they have about me.”

Tim frowned.  “So, what do you mean by, ‘they’? 
You don’t think the Emperors themselves are following you, do you?”

“No, they’re probably out of this time already, I know
that…  But I mean the people who they’re controlling.  Since we
followed them into the past once already, it makes sense that their
mind-control protocol would include something about what to do if they found
out someone was onto them.  I think at least one of them is one of my
boarders…  Thomas Fuller,” said Billy.  He’d recovered his breath by
this point, but was still sweating far more than the weather, which was a bit
cooler today, justified.

“So, wait…  You know who one of the mind-controlled
people is?” asked Tim, excitedly.

“Yes, I do,” said Billy.

“Well… how’d you find out?” asked Tim.

“Rose’s eavesdropping the other day gave me an idea.  I
wondered if maybe the mind-control thing was something that you could hear
happening, and I had three potential suspects living under my roof.  So I
snuck into their hallway at night…  Well, I mean, it’s not really
sneaking, since I own the place, but…  Anyway I couldn’t hear anything
coming from any of the rooms.  But I thought I saw a weird green light
coming from under one of the doorways.  From Thomas Fuller’s room.”

“Really, it was something that easy to spot?” asked Tim,
surprised.  He was starting to wonder how this strange phenomenon hadn’t
already been spotted by Billy’s other boarders, or Billy himself for that
matter.

“Well, it probably wouldn’t have been anything I would have
noticed had I not been
looking
for things out of place, but I was, so I
saw it.  I extinguished the two lamps that I keep burning on that hallway
at night, and there was definitely some non-natural light coming from under
there,” Billy explained.

“You’re sure it couldn’t have been a fire or something?”
asked Tim.

“It was green, though,” said Billy.  “And steady for
awhile… not flickery like a fire or anything.  I debated whether to open
the door…  I only got it, like a half an inch open…  Just to make
sure I wasn’t imagining it, and it was filling the room.  I would have
opened it more, but I knew that if I caught him, he would have known I was onto
him.”

“But he must have figured something out anyway, right?”
asked Tim.

“I would say so.  Maybe part of how the Emperors were
controlling his mind was telling him to be on the lookout for people trying to
sabotage their plan.  We did it before, and it must have at least occurred
to the Emperors that we might be disguised.”

“Right, I guess it’s not surprising that the Emperors
somehow warned their drones to be on the lookout for us,” said Tim.

“Exactly.  And clearly, Fuller figured it out. 
This afternoon, I went into my private bedroom at the inn when I finished
cleaning up after lunch.  I have a desk in there with a lock on it. 
Well, Fuller must have taken a hatchet to it or something, because the desk was
chopped to bits when I got in there, and everything important from the drawer
was gone…  That’s even where I kept the Dominus Temporis, and it was gone
when I got in there.”

“Wait…  The Dominus Temporis is gone?” asked Tim with a
sense of urgency he hadn’t had so far during the conversation.  The whole
point of them going back and fixing the changes the Emperors had made to events
was to put them off balance and help Hopkins in re-collecting the Domini. 
Only once he possessed
all
of them would Hopkins be able to set things
right and make it so it was like the Domini had never existed and time had
never been changed, except that those who had travelled through time would
remember what had happened to them.

“Listen, Tim, I understand how important it is…  Why do
you think I’ve been panicking this whole time?” Billy asked in a rushed voice.

Tim thought for a moment.  “Maybe it’s not as big of a
deal as we think.”

Billy raised his eyebrows.  “How do you figure?” 
Tim wasn’t sure that this turn of phrase had existed in the 1850s, but the way
he saw it, they had bigger issues at the moment. Tim’s door was closed and he
had no reason to believe anyone was listening in on him. 

“Well, if they know that they’re
looking
for the
Dominus
,
then, they’ll probably have some way of getting it back to the
Emperors.  They want them just as bad as we do,” Tim reminded him. 
Tim reasoned that if the Emperors got the Dominus back, then at least Hopkins
could have a chance to steal it again.

“Well, right… which is why it’s bad that I lost it,” Billy
said, talking slowly, as if Tim only had half a brain.

“What I thought immediately was that if they had it, we
might never find it again,” Tim said, cutting Billy a break on being rude on
account of the rough afternoon he’d had. 

“And that could still happen,” Billy pointed out.  “For
all we know, they weren’t looking for anything specific, just suspected me of
being a threat.  Or they were just looking for something weird, knowing
that I didn’t quite fit in.  If they were looking for something weird,
they certainly found it,” said Billy.  “And no matter what, we were
collecting the Domini and now they’ve gotten one back, or else we’ve lost it
and may never be able to find it again.  It’s a point against us no matter
what. 
Plus
, I’m pretty sure that if Fuller finds me again, he’s
going to kill me.”

“How do you get from a missing Dominus to there?” Tim asked,
surprised.

“Well, after I found my desk torn to shreds-- not a good
sign no matter what-- someone knocked loudly at the door.  Think how
police knock on doors in movies.  I tell them I’m busy and to come back
later, because I want some time to think about what to do.  I still had
Hopkins’ taser weapon on me, so I was thinking of just facing Fuller down then
and there, if it was him at the door, but I didn’t want a situation where one
of my boarders was dead with a wound that looked like it’d come from another
planet.  I mean, I know they’re only supposed to stun people, but I didn’t
want to risk it.” Billy explained.

“Sure,” Tim agreed, seeing the prudence of that line of
thinking.

“And so then, I hear a crash and a breaking sound that can
only have been from that same hatchet or whatever it was that destroyed the
desk,” Billy said, shuddering slightly at the memory.  “And you’re not
likely to take a hatchet to someone’s door after they’ve already
told
you
to come back later unless you’re planning to hurt that person pretty badly.”

Tim nodded again, seeing little sound argument against this
point.  “Well, you can’t go back there, then.”

Billy laughed.  “Yeah, I figured that out the moment I
climbed through the window to jump out.  You ever jumped out of a second
story window, Tim?”