Fugitives of Time: Sequel to Emperors of Time (13 page)

Of course, first he had to decide which one to talk
to.  There were a lot of choices, since there were thirty-three
Representatives from New York, more than from any other state, and twenty-one
were Democrats.  He’d learned a few of their names already, and there were
a couple who seemed friendly enough to not mind talking to him on the way home
from work.  The first one he saw as he was exiting the Capitol that day
was John Taylor.

Tim caught up to him with a few running steps and stopped
him on the Capitol steps. 

“Good evening Mr. Taylor,” Tim said.  He mentally
kicked himself for calling the man Mr. Taylor.  There was no good reason
for him to call a fellow congressman Mr. Taylor outside of the chamber, but he
figured the sign of respect still worked.  Besides, Taylor was still eight
years Sage’s senior.

Taylor smiled politely at him and said.  “Greetings,
Sage.  How goes it?”

“Fairly well,” Tim said.  “But I can’t help but be
worried about this bill we’ve been debating.  It’s as if it’s tearing the
state of New York apart.”

Taylor raised an eyebrow at him, and Tim was afraid that
he’d gone too far.  But then Taylor gave a more authentic smile and said,
“Well said, my friend.  I too have begun to have misgivings about the
bill.” 

“Oh, yes?” asked Tim, deciding that the least he could
afford to say at this point, the better.

“Well, yes.  I was in favor of it, originally, of
course, just like most good Democrats would be.  If you have a question
about something, be it taxes or slavery, you ought to let the people decide,
not the government.  But tensions run so high on this issue, there could
be bloodshed.  Perhaps with Kansas and Nebraska, the government should
arbitrate,” said Taylor.

“Well, it seems reasonable to me,” Tim
agreed, cautiously.  He didn’t want to spook Taylor if he was hesitant to
share the information he had, or especially to corner him if he was one of the
Emperors’ pawns.  But, there was time pressure now that Billy had been
exposed.  Tim decided to push just a little bit.  “Have you given any
thought as to what that government arbitration should look like?”

“There’s a compromise being floated, as you probably know,”
said Taylor, although he was clearly hedging.  He looked around a
bit.  Tim wasn’t exactly sure where they were going.  At this point
he was basically following Taylor home.  But there didn’t seem to be any
other congressmen within earshot, just some horse-drawn carriages rolling down
the street beside them.  There might have been some congressmen in those
carriages, but Taylor seemed satisfied, because he said, “Well, I don’t think
he’d mind me telling you.  He warned me to be discreet, you see…  But
he shouldn’t mind, as you’re a fellow New Yorker.  And I’ve always said
you’re one of the more reasonable Whigs…”

Tim mentally thanked Russell Sage for whatever it was he had
done to make this particular Democrat think he was a reasonable man.  “I
like to think that myself,” Tim said, with what he hoped was a winning smile.

“Theodoric Westbrook approached me earlier this week,” said
Taylor, confidentially.  “He suggested that we, as Democrats, could
potentially back off on this issue, if we knew that it wouldn’t mean that the
slavery question should
always
be decided by the government.  There
would have to be a clause in the compromise that the slavery issue should be
decided for each state individually, usually by the people themselves, even if
not in this instance.”

“I see,” Tim said, wanting to hear more and trying to keep
his tone neutral while he was doing mental cartwheels over potentially having
another name of one of the Emperors’ mind drones.  It sounded like the
specifics of the compromise were still up in the air, but it was generally the
same thing they had read about back in the 21st century on their last visit.

“Yes, well, basically it’s like you said.  We cannot
have New York or the nation be divided by this issue.  We need a strong
and united America to take our place as one of the greatest nations of the
world,” Taylor declared.

Tim knew this was exactly the Emperors’ plan, to bring the
United States into global prominence decades before its time to speed the
unification of the whole planet into their one world government.

An
Unexpected Visitor

Tim was glad not to run into Miss Peinture on his way up to
his room that afternoon.  He figured any further conversation with her
would be at least slightly awkward because of the blackmail.

He took his key out of his pocket and put it in the lock,
turned it, and opened the door.  When he saw the inside of the room, he
actually jumped a couple inches off the floor.

There was a pretty blonde woman sitting on the edge of his
bed.  She was wearing a dress, but it was a drab gray and a lot less poofy
than those that he’d seen Rose and Julie wear.  She seemed to be in her
mid-twenties.

But none of this explained why she was sitting on his
bed.  Sage’s wife, after all, was about a decade older and in New York.

The woman on the bed clearly registered his confusion. 
She gave a sweet little giggle and asked, with an air of apology, “Did you
forget it was Friday, my dear?”

Tim registered that his eyes were ridiculously wide as he
tried to decipher what was going on and just what he should do about it. 
Clearly, the most important thing was to not break character with whatever Sage
would do.

Tim mustered a smile.  “Well, yes…  I just lost
track of the days.  You know how boring it can get in Congress.”

The woman giggled again.  She crossed her legs, leaned
back a bit, and responded, “Yes, well, that’s why we leave all that politicking
to you men, isn’t it?”

Tim laughed.  He now had a pretty strong working theory
about why this woman might be here, but he had to be sure in order to avoid
some pretty catastrophic embarrassment.  He decided to test his
theory.  “And then there’s girls like you…” he trailed off.

“To keep your minds off of it, yes,” said the woman. 
She uncrossed her legs and reached to allow Tim to give her a hand up. 
Tim obliged.

“Awfully considerate of you, isn’t it?” Tim asked.

“Quite,” she said.  They were now standing face to
face.  She put her arms around him, placing her hands on his back and
pulling herself close to him.  She gazed up at him with admiring
eyes.  “Shall I begin now?”

She moved one of her hands from his back to the back of his
head, pulling him toward her lips.  Without really thinking about it, Tim
allowed himself to kiss her back.

Unlike his kisses with Julie, this one wasn’t sweet and
soft.  This kiss was fierce and passionate.  Tim couldn’t pretend he
didn’t enjoy it.  He didn’t really see anything wrong with liking a kiss with
this woman.  After all, he didn’t have a girlfriend.

But when she started to pull him down onto his bed with her,
he realized he couldn’t let it go any further.

“We need to stop this,” he said, with a bit of regret.

The woman looked up at him, clearly surprised and
hurt.  “Why?”

Tim hesitated.  He could think of dozens of valid
reasons, not the least of which was Sage’s own wife back in New York, but he
knew none of these would likely satisfy her.  “There’s someone else,” he
said after a moment.

The woman’s eyes widened.  “You have a
second
mistress?”
she practically roared with anger.  She hesitated for just a moment, then
slapped him across the face.  Tim was more shocked about the fact that she
slapped him than by how much it hurt, although it did smart quite a bit.

“I’m afraid so.  It’s not that I haven’t cared for
you,” Tim lied.  At least, he was lying in the sense that he personally
had no sort of emotional connection with her.  But he assumed that the
real Russell Sage actually did care about her and probably also knew her
name.  He couldn’t get himself worked up too much about ending this
adulterous relationship for the man, though.

“I once thought you did,” huffed the woman, who was now
heading toward the door. 

A few hours later, when he got to the MacPhearson house, Tim
threw Julie a disgruntled look after she opened the door and he walked over to
a chair in her living room.

“It looks like your lady MacPhearson’s diary isn’t as great
a source of information as you thought it was,” he said. 

“What?  Why?” Julie asked.  Billy looked as
perplexed as Julie sounded.

“Well, Sage is having an affair,” Tim revealed.  “I
found a blonde woman sitting on my bed this afternoon.”

“I’m not sure I understand why you’re upset,” joked Billy,
with a wink.

Julie paused for a second, then blushed.  “Oh,
crap
! 
You’re Russell Sage!”

“Well…  Yes,” Tim said.  He’d expected a different
reaction than this.

“Okay…  Don’t be mad, but--” Julie said, then stopped
herself.  “Wait, first let me run and get the diary.”

As she fled the room, Tim and Billy exchanged an amused
glance.

“What’s going on?” Billy asked, as she returned a moment
later, out of breath and blushing quite a bit.

“Maybe I already sort of knew that Russell Sage was having
an affair, I just kind of forgot that Russell Sage was… well… you,” Julie
said. 

Billy laughed.  “So you forgot his name, or what?”

“I still think of Tim as Tim!  Plus, I’m mostly
skimming over the parts where it talks about the stupid affairs anyway. 
It doesn’t much impact our mission who’s having an affair with who, does it?”
she asked, her voice ringing out almost an octave above normal.

“Well, it mattered to me today!” Tim said, slightly
angry.  It really would have helped him out to not have been struck out of
the blue with this situation.  He rubbed the spot on his face where he had
been slapped earlier that evening.

Then, Julie’s eyes widened, as if the information was
hitting her for the first time.  “Wait, you didn’t…  You
aren’t…  What did you do with her?!”

Tim was a bit ashamed of himself, but he was a little
pleased with the jealousy he heard in her voice. 

“She kissed me, and then I broke it off,” Tim said. 

Julie sighed in relief.  Billy chuckled.  “I’ll
bet the real Sage won’t be too pleased with you when he comes back.”

Julie had been flipping through the pages of her diary, and
now she spoke up.  “Well…  Sorry I didn’t get the information to you
sooner.  But… turns out her name was Sally Oswald.”

Tim laughed.  “That would explain something that
Abercrombie-- one of my fellow congressmen-- asked me on Monday.  He
mentioned her name.  But speaking of Congress, we’ve got more important
things to be talking about than the sordid love lives of the people we’re
impersonating.”

“Only yours is sordid,” Julie countered in a mock-defensive
tone.  “MacPhearson’s been quite the prude since her husband died,
seemingly content to just judge everyone else’s love life.”

“Fair enough,” said Tim, who then launched into an account
of what he had found out from Taylor, his fellow representative from New York,
that afternoon.

“That’s great!” Billy said, when he finished.  “That
means we have another lead on where we can look for the Emperors’ drones.”

“Right,” Tim said.  “I’m starting to get the vibe that
things are going to start moving quicker in the House.  There are
substantial rumblings about this compromise idea, and someone even got up and
spoke about it today.  I think we want to destroy the mind control
machines before it gains any more traction.”

Julie nodded.  “So you’re thinking before Monday?”

“Yeah,” Tim said.  “Does that sound like a good idea?”

“It sounds like it would get us out of 1854, at least. 
No offense to you, Julie, but I’m not sure how long I can stay in the Widow
MacPhearson’s house with only you for company,” Billy said. 

Julie laughed.  “I get to go out and meet Rose, but I’m
getting plenty bored, too.  I’ll be ready to get out of here.  But do
you think we’re prepared?  We only know two of the people being
controlled.”

“That might be enough,” Billy decided.  “If we can
figure out where this Theodoric Westbrook guy lives, if he really is being
controlled, we can destroy his machine.”

“Right, but just his,” said Julie.  “Hence, the
problem.”

“But if we go after them, won’t they come after us? 
Unless the system the Emperors are using is so unsophisticated that they’re not
going to know when we get rid of one of them, they’ll at least start getting
really agitated when we smash one of the machines.  If they don’t start
chasing us outright, they might do something to reveal themselves,” Billy
argued.

Julie thought about this for a moment.  “We’re not
going to do anything about it tonight, so why don’t we sleep on it?  Rose
wants us all to meet her tomorrow.  Why don’t we decide then, as a whole
group?”

“She’s able to get out?” Tim asked.

“Yeah, apparently she’s allowed to go riding by herself on
Saturdays, so she’ll be able to get away from the family.  She says she
knows of a meadow not so far from her house, just outside the city,” Julie
said. 

“We were talking about it earlier today.  We figure if
we shave my facial hair and I wear one of the wigs Julie and I found in her
house today, I can probably get away with going out in public, just for a
bit.  We can hire a carriage to get us to the edge of the city where she’s
talking about, and walk from there.”

Rose
in the Meadow

The next day, when Tim, Billy, and Julie sat in the grassy
clearing, they heard hoofbeats on the track leading up to it. 

“Hi there, Joanna,” Billy said, as she approached.

Rose looked around from horseback before she said, “There’s
no one else here, so you can call me Rose.  In fact, please
do
call
me Rose.  I’ve been pretending to be Joanna non-stop for a week now, and I
think I really got the short end of the stick having to play a kid on this
mission…  I hardly get any time on my own at all!”

“All right,
Rose
,” Billy revised emphatically as Rose
led her horse over to a tree and tethered it there.  “We’ve got quite a
few things to tell you.”

“Okay…  But wait a second, ‘cause I’ve got something
that’s going to blow your mind,” said Rose.  This was the sort of thing
that Rose might just say for no reason, so Tim wasn’t quite sure what to
expect.

“All right,” Billy said.  “I’ll bite.  What
happened?”

“Yesterday evening, completely unscheduled, a well-dressed
man comes to the house.  Turns out he was a congressman,” Rose said. 
She paused for dramatic emphasis.

“Yeah, whatever,” Tim teased.  “I see congressmen every
day.”

“All right, good point, sourpuss,” said Rose, sticking her
tongue out.  “Anyway, I actually got a good chance to eavesdrop on this
one.  It was George Vail, Democrat from New Jersey.  He wanted advice
from my pretend father about-- okay, sorry, I’m going to need a drumroll here.”
Julie grinned, and then gave a verbal drumroll. 

“Thanks,” Rose said.  “He wanted advice on what to do
about being approached by Harry Hibbard about his plan to compromise on the
Kansas-Nebraska Bill.  He’s a Democrat from New Hampshire.  I found
his address in my father the Justice’s desk last night.  So…  I think
that’s one of our guys, no?”

“It really might be!” Julie said excitedly.  “Now,
listen to what we have for you!”

They briefed her first on their lead on another one of the
Emperors’ drones, but she seemed especially intrigued by Tim’s account of his
meeting with Sally Oswald.  They told it to her because they decided Rose
could use a mental break before they decided what to do about their new leads.

“Oh man, that’s
perfect
!” Rose said.  “She
slapped you!”  She looked at Tim’s face, and seemed disappointed when
there was no real sign of the red mark the slap had originally left.

“It wasn’t perfect from where I was standing,” Tim
complained.

Rose laughed merrily.  After she stopped, she said,
“Okay… at some point, we’re going to have to stop reveling in Tim’s tawdry
romances and decide what to do about this Theodoric Westbrook dude.”

“Yeah, okay,” Billy said.  “Well, I think we should
find out where he lives and take action tomorrow night.”

Rose rubbed her hands together.  “Sounds good to
me!  I can’t wait to get out of here.”

“Yeah, but that can’t be the reason we do it,” Tim
said.  “There’s a lot we don’t know yet.”

“But you’ve said yourself, things are starting to move in
Congress, and we need to move before they do, right?” asked Billy.

“Yes,” admitted Tim.  “I wouldn’t mind another day,
though, just to make sure we plan everything well enough that nothing will go
wrong.”

“But if we can’t figure something else out Monday, we’re in
the same spot but a day later and closer to the end of the game.  Right
now, they’re winning.  We’ve got to make a play.  Something could go
wrong no matter what, and delaying isn’t going to get us any yardage,” argued
Billy, clearly agitated.

Tim wasn’t really ready to make a commitment, in spite of
the abundant sports metaphors.  “What do you think?” he asked Julie.

Julie thought for a moment.  “I think it’s time. 
We’ve got to take the first move now.”

“That’s the vote, then,” said Tim, a bit grateful that he
didn’t have to make the call.

“So what’s the plan?” asked Rose.

A couple hours later, Tim was looking over the stack of
papers in Sage’s desk.  He knew that congressmen didn’t have secretaries
in 1854, not even Senators did, but he did wish there was someone he could call
on to sort through these hundreds of papers for him.

He assumed that since Theodoric Westbrook was a
Representative from the same state, there was at least a good chance that Sage
would have his Washington address somewhere, but an hour and about five hundred
assorted documents later, he hadn’t found anything.  He finally decided
that he should attempt to ask his fellow boarders for assistance tonight. 
Both of them were fellow representatives and might have been to Westbrook’s
residence before.

Tim was never the most talkative person under normal circumstances. 
He was also afraid he might give away the fact that he wasn’t really Russell
Sage if he talked too much to people who knew him well.  Thus, he hadn’t
talked much previously at the common meals at the house.

“Theodoric?  Why would you want to talk to that old
windbag?  Even his name is atrociously boring,” proclaimed Henry Bennett,
a fellow New York Whig, when Tim explained that evening that he wanted to be
reminded of Theodoric’s address so that he could pay him a visit before session
reopened on Monday.

“I have the address in my room,” stated Edwin Morgan,
another Whig from New York who lived in the house.  It seemed that
Representatives from the same state and party tended to live together a lot of
the time.  “But I
would
ask you to relieve our uncouth colleague’s
curiosity, as it is a burden I myself share.”

Tim couldn’t believe it.  The two sounded like they
were still making speeches in front of the House.  If these two thought
Theodoric was a windbag, the poor guy must really have quite a reputation. 
Tim reflected for a moment on what would be safe to reveal, and he decided that
if his colleagues were going to talk as if they were still in the Chamber then
he had better do his best impression of 19th century formal speaking, too. 
“It’s this matter with the compromise some of the northern Democrats have been
lobbying for as of late.  I have heard that he may be intimately involved
in the proposal and I would like a bit of clarification.”

“Why, yes…  I would be interested in having that as well,”
Morgan said.  “From the whiffs that I have caught in the Chamber, I
haven’t been able to make heads or tails of the thing.”

“Would you like some company?” Bennett asked.

“No!” Tim said, a smidge too emphatically.  He calmed
down a bit and added, “I believe it will be better if we can talk one on
one.  No need to intimidate the man.”

“Right you are,” Bennett observed with a nod and another
bite of his dinner.  “Why, Theodoric wasn’t one of the gentlemen living in
that house where the homeowner went missing now, was he?”

Tim opened his mouth to answer, but was soon glad he didn’t
get a chance before Morgan began.  “No, no, those were some of the Maine
Democrats.  Thomas Fuller told me about it yesterday.  He thought he
might have been in danger himself, and so he spent Thursday night at the house
of that David Disney from Ohio.  He told me he was going to go back to his
own place last night, after some other congressmen assured him it was both safe
and ethical to do so, even without the owner there.”

Tim had to make an effort to only act the proper amount of
intrigued by this news.  He had just been told that the man out of whose
room Billy had noticed the strange green light was now back in Billy’s
house.  Maybe he thought that Billy had been frightened off for
good.  Not only that, but Tim also had a lead on a possible fourth member
of the Emperors’ brain-warped crew. 

After dinner, Tim got the address of Theodoric Westbrook
from his housemate and couldn’t resist going immediately back to Julie’s house
with the news.

He got there at around 9, and Billy and Julie were both as
astounded as he was with their luck in finding out another possible lead. 

When Tim got home that evening, in spite of being exhausted
from the amount of walking and mental exercise he’d been throughout that day,
it took him hours to get to sleep.  He couldn’t believe that in less than
24 hours, they’d be trying to foil the Emperors’ latest plan.  He only
hoped they would succeed.

They had decided that in order to avoid suspicion, they
should all go to church that Sunday as the people they were impersonating
usually would.  For Sage, that meant going to the Second Presbyterian
Church, out on New York Avenue.

Tim had gone to church in the 21st century, but noticed
heavy contrasts between the experiences he’d had there and what this church was
like about a century and a half before.  Although he recognized a lot of
the features of the sanctuary, like the pulpit, the stained glass windows, and
the pews for the parishioners, there were a lot of features that were strange.

First of all, the candles throughout the sanctuary actually
served a purpose, rather than just being part of a tradition.  In fact,
there were many more candles, to make up for the fact that there were no
lightbulbs, and of course none of them were those electric fake candles like
some of those at Tim’s church back home.  Another thing that Tim noticed
was that the pastor, who didn’t have a microphone, was still able to make his
booming voice heard throughout the large worship hall without a problem. 
This feat required a different type of personality than that possessed by Tim’s
pastor back in his own time, a rather soft-spoken man with a lapel-mike.

Incidentally, the Widow Macphearson attended the same
church.  Tim and Julie had decided the night before that they shouldn’t
talk to each other during the service, though, since it didn’t seem like it was
something they would have done any other week.  They would be seeing each
other again soon enough, after all.

For all the differences in the church itself, Tim was a
little bit surprised how much of the layout of the service was the same. 
They still said the Lord’s Prayer, sang hymns, and listened to a sermon. 
The familiarity comforted Tim a bit.

After the service, Tim went back to the boarding house and
found himself exhausted after not having slept much the night before. 
Since he had some time to kill before he would meet the others to begin the
next phase of their current death-defying mission, he figured he might as well
be well-rested for the action of the night.  There wasn’t really much prep
work to be done anyhow.  He climbed into bed unsure whether it would be
any easier to get to sleep this afternoon than last night

When he woke up in the evening, he gathered the tools that
he’d need for that night’s mission.  He brought the taser-contraption that
Hopkins had given them as well as the Dominus. 

Because of the development work that the Widow Macpeharson’s
husband had done for the city, there were plenty of maps lying around her
house.  They had already plotted the spots of all four potential Emperors’
drones on one of those, so Tim didn’t have to bring any more information with
him. 

Even though they had agreed the day before that there was no
reason to meet before nine, Tim was antsy enough after his last meal at
Peinture’s boarding house that there was no reason to stay in his own room,
either.  At seven o’ clock, he patted his pockets to make sure he could
feel the Dominus in one and the taser in the other.  Satisfied, he left
the house and walked toward Macphearson’s home.