Fugitives of Time: Sequel to Emperors of Time (4 page)

Henry
Cabot Lodge Jr.

The place where the four teens now stood was much livelier
than Julie’s backyard.  They had not materialized into the middle of the
crowd, but an endless multitude of people started about 10 feet from the space
they suddenly occupied.  Their abrupt appearance certainly would have
shocked the thousands of people milling about within shouting distance if they
weren’t all facing in the other direction.

Tim quickly got over his initial relief at seeing nobody
looking at them and became immediately curious to see what so many people
were
looking at.  He turned in the general direction they were staring.

He knew that the postcard had been from Washington DC. 
Washington was only a couple hours from the house where Tim had grown up in
Southern Pennsylvania, and he had even been there a couple times.  He had
seen the major buildings that defined the DC skyline in his timeline, the
Washington Monument, Lincoln Memorial, the Capitol, and the White House, for
instance.  He scanned the night sky now, wondering which ones were there
and which ones weren’t.

“Well, there’s the Washington Monument,” Julie said,
apparently doing the same thing Tim was.  She pointed to the humongous
obelisk.

“It makes sense it would still be here.  I visited it a
couple years ago, and I remember construction on it started in 1848, well
before the Civil War,” Rose said.

“But where’s the Lincoln monument?” Billy wondered. 
Rose looked at him and cocked her head.  Billy got slightly
defensive.  “What?  I like Lincoln!”

“Well, he wouldn’t have a monument in this timeline, would
he?” Tim asked after a moment’s hesitation.  “No Civil War means no
Lincoln Monument.”

“He wasn’t even president, was he?” Rose asked. 
“Didn’t we just find out Stephen Douglas took his term in 1860?”

“What, so now my favorite president was never president at
all?” Billy demanded.  “Now we
have
to change the timeline back.”

Tim wondered what building would have replaced the Lincoln
monument he’d visited as a child and looked around.  They were on a flat,
mostly empty, plain of grass crisscrossed with a network of sidewalks. 
This plain had a few large buildings laid out on it, with the more developed
part of the city glowing in the form of a large number of lit windows in the
not-so-far-off distance.  He assumed that the buildings close by were
monuments.

As Tim surveyed the scene, he remembered that the postcard
had featured the “Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. Memorial Dedication,” and it was for
this reason that he quickly concluded that the building which was apparently
the focus of everyone’s attention must be this very monument. 

The structure jutted out of the ground with sharp angles and
high walls, the fresh marble glaring in the light of about a dozen large
spotlights that were trained on it in the darkness of night.  Tim racked
his brain to think of who this Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. guy could have been to
deserve such a monument, but he couldn’t come up with any kind of
association.  He guessed this wasn’t too surprising.  They had
already discovered that history in this timeline diverged from their own way
back before the Civil War.  It wasn’t shocking that someone who Tim had
never heard of had risen to prominence in this new timeline, but Tim was still
dying to know what he had done to do so.

Someone cleared their throat behind where Tim stood. 

The teens whipped around in unison.  In the dimness of
a few nearby streetlights, the teens saw a harassed and tired looking Dr.
Hopkins.  His hair was frazzled, his clothes were wrinkled, and his eyes
had bags that were increasingly visible as he approached them in the
semi-darkness.

Hopkins cracked a smile.  “You look like you have had
as long of a day as I have,” he said, after surveying their faces for a moment.

“Day or
days.
 I lost track around the third
time jump,” Julie said, with a bit of a laugh in her voice.  Tim was
slightly surprised by how confident Julie sounded as she talked to
Hopkins.  Tim was still quite in awe of this man who had helped create a
device that allowed people to travel through time. 

It wasn’t exactly that Julie’s response to him had been
disrespectful, but it seemed flippant.  On the other hand, if Julie hadn’t
said something before him, Tim supposed he would have responded to Hopkins’
observation with something like, “Yes, sir.”  And Tim wasn’t the sort of
person who addressed people as “sir” too often.

“Yes, that will happen when you engage in Time Travel,” was
all that Hopkins said in response. 

No one could argue with that.  Rose shrugged and said,
“So I gather they’re dedicating that monument tonight?”  She pointed at
the same building that Tim had noted earlier. 

Hopkins nodded. “You gather correctly,”

“Dedicating it to Henry Cabot Lodge Jr.?” Rose
prodded.  Tim could tell by her tone of voice that she had never heard of
him either.

“Yes,” Hopkins said.  “And you need not worry about the
fact that you have not heard of him.  He did not factor into your timeline
much at all.  He
was
a politician in the original timeline, the one
that we are trying to get the world back to, but he was never as influential as
he has become in this one.”

“So what’d he do?” Rose asked, impatient with
curiosity.  Tim was curious, too, although he was pretty sure he caught an
exasperated sigh from Billy.

“Well, people have written books about him…  In both
timelines, come to think of it,” Hopkins said.  “But I will give you a
severely abbreviated version.”  Tim hid a smile.  He respected
Hopkins for a lot of reasons, but brevity wasn’t his strongest suit.

Hopkins continued.  “In the original timeline, he was
just a Senator from Massachusetts and diplomat who had a failed run at the Vice
Presidency as a Republican in 1960.”

“I thought you’d’ve at least
heard
of that, Tim,”
Julie teased.

“It did not happen like that in your timeline.  No, in
your timeline, he was fated never even to be defeated in a run for the vice
presidency,” Hopkins said, as if he felt for the man.

“Oh,” Julie said.  “Then maybe you would
have
heard of it, after all.”

Hopkins went on.  “In this timeline, however, he was
president from 1957 to 1969.  By the time he took office, the United
States already owned all of North and Central America, and had a protectorate
over South America.  But he was the one who expanded American power into
the Eastern Hemisphere by waging a long war against Russia that finally forced
Russia into what they ended up calling a ‘treaty of obedience’ with the United
States.  It was more or less as humiliating as it sounds.  Basically
he made it so that, today, in 1986, the United States, Germany, and China are
the only world powers worth knowing about.”

Julie’s eyebrows were raised in what looked to Tim like a
combination of curiosity and confusion.  Billy’s eyes were a little bit
glazed over.  Rose looked like she was trying to formulate a question to
ask, but Tim spoke first.  “And all of this is just the latest way that
the Emperors of Time have thought of to manipulate world history to force all
of the world’s governments into a single-empire system by their own time? 
I guess it makes sense that there would only be three world powers by now.”

“Exactly,” Hopkins said, nodding distractedly in a way that
suggested that in his mind he was already several steps ahead in the
conversation.  “At any rate, he died only three years ago.  Planning
immediately went into overdrive on this project.  A way to offer tribute
to the man who saved the Americans from the Russian threat and brought us onto
a level playing field with Germany.”

“And China, from what you’ve said,” Rose supplied, when
Hopkins trailed off for a moment.

“Well, yes, but today’s Americans would never admit that the
Chinese are on the same level as the Americans and Germans.  Eurocentrism
is pretty rampant in this timeline.”  Hopkins shrugged.  Tim’s head
spun.

“Right, so what are we going to
do
about it?” Billy
asked emphatically.

In the distance, past the crowds of people gathered nearer
the monument, fireworks started to go off and a band had started to play. 
It seemed that the dedication had begun.

“We need to set the first cause straight.  I brought
you here to meet you.  I think we can get into the specifics of our plan
tomorrow.  I had originally planned to let you figure out how to negate
the changes the Emperors make, so I could focus on gaining back the Domini
Temporis.  But when you fixed the 1916 election…  or rather, when you
prevented
it from being fixed... I was only able to collect three more
of the Domini before the Emperors became careful enough that I am unable to get
any more.  I have six now, out of the twelve.  With the extra time I
had, I did a little research and planning of my own, although executing the
plan will require your rather committed assistance, if you choose to offer it
once again, of course.” 

Suddenly, Tim thought Julie looked rather tired as she said,
“Yes, sure, we’re still in, just tell us what to do.  We did a good job
last time, didn’t we?”

“Indeed, you did,” Hopkins confirmed with a smile, patting
Julie on the shoulder.  “But like I said, we shall deal with the details
tomorrow.  In the meantime, I want to take you to a place where I know
we’ll be safe.  Not that I think the Emperors would have followed us to
this place and time.  They have little way of knowing we are here unless
we do something conspicuous.  But it is always a bit of a danger to stay
in a place and time where you have no identity and no money.”

Tim thought this was a fair point.  Julie asked, “So
are we going back to your time, then?”

Hopkins chuckled.  “No, that would be far from safe at
the moment.  We are going to go to a time about seventy years before my
own.  Come now, children.  I think it is time that you should meet my
great uncle Paul.”

The
Bunker

The thing about meeting someone’s great uncle, when you’re a
teenager, is that you expect them to be a great deal older than you.  This
is why, in spite of being told explicitly they’d be going to a time in Dr.
Hopkins’ own past, they were still quite surprised when Great Uncle Paul turned
out to be a man in his early 20s.

Tim had never thought of himself as a particularly good
judge of male attractiveness, but he thought Paul looked like a younger, more
attractive, version of Hopkins himself.  He had the same face, but more
rugged; the same build, only more muscular; and the same brown hair, but a
fuller head of it.  As Paul greeted each person, Tim was pretty sure he
saw Julie blush as he shook her hand, and Rose definitely turned a shade
pinker.

Tim didn’t know if it was because he had been awake for
twenty hours that the scene felt surreal, but he was feeling a bit dazed as he
and his friends sat down around a table with Hopkins and a man who looked like
he could have been Hopkins’ son.

“There will be plenty of sleeping quarters for all of you,
assuming that you don’t mind sharing a bed with me, Steve.  I requested a
suite suitable for a family of six when I came here, because you told me you’d
be coming.  It was an odd request to have to make, but I’ve got enough
pull around here that they were more than happy to oblige,” Paul said.  It
was odd to hear someone use Hopkins’ first name, although Tim realized it might
have been even odder if the two men had referred to each other as
Hopkins.  Although, come to think of it, Tim wasn’t sure if they shared
the same last name or not.

“It will be kindest to let our young friends sleep before
explaining where they are or why you have such sway here,” Hopkins said. 

Tim agreed that sleep should be the first priority right
now.  The four teens had only been seated around the table in what Tim
assumed was a kitchen for long enough for Paul to briefly welcome them to his
home, but already Tim felt he would soon be sleeping sitting up.  He had
seen Julie close her eyes for several seconds at a time on more than one
occasion in the past couple minutes. 

“Whatever you say, Unc-” Paul stopped himself and shook his
head.  “Sorry, I always want to call you ‘Uncle Steve.’  It just
feels like you should be my uncle, somehow.  But I suppose that’s just
because there’s no word for a grand-nephew who’s older than you are.”

Tim concluded that Rose must be feeling a bit punchy,
because she began giggling hysterically at this comment. 

Paul raised an eyebrow at her reaction, but continued with
his original thought nonetheless.  “Anyway, I suppose that the boys would
like to sleep in one room, the girls in the other.  The sheets on the beds
are clean, but not fresh.  That is, they’ve been made for a few months
now, but nobody has slept in them.”

When Hopkins didn’t respond to this, Julie filled the
silence with an uncertain, “That sounds great, thanks.”

“Good then,” Paul said pleasantly.  “Let me show you to
your rooms.”

Paul led the girls to their room first.  Tim was
surprised to see that they stepped through a metallic sliding door in one wall
of the kitchen directly to their room.  As the door closed and hid Paul
and the girls from view, Tim pondered how much architecture must have changed
in the centuries since he’d been around. 

Tim and Billy waited at the table with Hopkins.  From
his seat, Tim could briefly see the girls’ beds before the door closed behind
Paul.  When he got back, the room he led the boys into through a door on
the opposite wall was rather plain, clean, and functional. 

There were two beds, two dressers, a large closet, and a
single desk with a chair.  It had gray carpet and off-white walls. 
There were two doors, one to the kitchen and one to a bathroom.  Paul
showed them how the bathroom worked, with its automatic toilet, automatic sink,
and digital shower where you could choose the water temperature down to the
degree Fahrenheit.  Tim decided a shower could wait for another time. 
What he needed now was sleep.

“We’ll get you guys some more clothes soon, but for now
there are pajamas in the closet.  They’re not particularly form-fitting,
and so they should fit both of you without measuring first,” Paul explained.

When Paul left the room, Tim turned to Billy, who was
quickly changing into his pajamas.  “I’m so tired I’m not even going to
hear you snoring before I fall asleep this time!” Tim said.

“I snore?” Billy asked with a laugh.  “What, like every
night?”

“Unless you only snore when you sleep at the YMCA, I’d guess
so,” Tim replied without missing a beat. 

“Well…  sorry about that, man.”

“Like I said, not going to matter,” Tim explained. 
“I’m going to sleep well tonight.  Or…  whatever right now is. 
Is it night?”

“I haven’t seen a window since we got here,” Billy
realized.  “Weird.  But Paul was already awake when we got here,
so…  maybe not night?”

“Ah, well.  I’ll sleep well today then,” Tim
decided.  Then he used the bathroom.  He felt like he was in a hotel
room when he used the automatic sink.

“I’ll turn off the light when I get out then, alright?”
Billy asked as he went in after him.

Tim agreed, and barely had time to register how comfortable
the sheets and mattress were after he crawled into the bed.

Next thing he knew, Tim woke up, feeling like he had to pee
again.  As he came back out of the bathroom, he looked around the room,
noticing much of it for the first time.

With the ceiling light off, there was a dim band of light
that wrapped its way around the walls, about two feet above the floor. 
The entire room was kept in a dull gloom, much like Tim’s bedroom back home was
when moonlight came in through closed blinds. 

Higher up on the wall, there were two blank screens with
red, glowing lights next to them.  On those red lights, Tim recognized
that little incomplete circle with a vertical line on top that often adorned
on/off switches in his own time.  He remembered learning in a
computer-science elective that this symbol came from a 0 and 1 combined--
binary standing for 0 = off, 1 = on. 

Tim smiled at the realization that this symbol hadn’t
changed in the two centuries since he’d taken that class.  Tim wondered if
these screens were TVs (although why you would need two TVs in a room was a
question he couldn’t answer) or computers, or something else entirely.  He
decided not to try turning either of the machines on, since Billy was still
sleeping and he didn’t know whether they would make noise.  

Tim didn’t feel tired anymore, and he figured that there was
probably more to see outside the room than inside it.  The door was marked
by a bend in the waist-high light that traced the outline of a door.  Tim
automatically reached toward the door to grope for the knob, even though Paul
had already explained that these doors worked differently than those in Tim’s
own time, and even though he’d used the bathroom door already. The door opened
automatically as he approached it.

The door opened back onto the room with the table where they
had first spoken with Hopkins’ great uncle Paul.  There was one door on
each wall.  In the light, the doors were only apparent because of the
outline around them, as there was no doorknob on this side either.  Since
Tim knew that the place had three bedrooms, he figured that three of the doors
were bedrooms and one led out of this apartment. 

As Billy had noticed, there were no windows, just like there
weren’t any in the bedroom.  There were some cabinets around the room, a
sink, with a machine that looked a bit like a microwave over it, but the room
didn’t have much decoration or other defining features.  It was clean,
bare, and colored a vague beige.

Julie was sitting at the table, drinking something from a
straw out of an opaque cup.

“What’re you drinking?” Tim asked.  

“Actually, it’s a chocolate milkshake,” Julie responded,
apparently rather pleased by the fact.  “Would you like a sip?”

“No, thanks,” Tim said with a laugh.  “I was just
curious.  How’d you get it anyway?  I don’t see a fridge in here.”

“Paul gave it to me before he left.  It came out of
that tap over there, which can apparently also give you milk, different types
of juice, different types of soda… lots of things.”

“Hmmm…” Tim replied, slightly surprised.  He was only
slightly
surprised because once you’ve encountered Time Travel, even the most
amazing kitchen sinks are only worth a small amount of wonder.  “And of
course you went for the milkshake.”

“It wasn’t the
only
type of milkshake, mind you,”
Julie corrected while slowly moving head back and forth.  For some reason,
Tim thought she looked cute when she shook her head like that.  “I could
have gotten strawberry, vanilla, or coconut, but chocolate’s the only type of
milkshake worth drinking.”  She took another sip of the drink through her
straw. 

“Fair enough,” Tim said.  There was a pause in the
conversation after that.  Julie was looking at her milkshake, using the
straw to stir the beverage.  He caught himself staring at her, and not
just because she was so much more interesting to look at than the beige walls. 
He was remembering that this was only the second time they had been alone since
they had kissed on the dancefloor at The Palace.  The first time had been
when they were being held captive by thugs of the Emperors of Time.  For
most of the time then, they were pretty sure their conversation was being
monitored, so Tim wasn’t even sure that
that
time counted at all.

The two times Julie and he had kissed were the only two
times he had kissed anyone, and he still didn’t know if this meant they were
dating.  And even if the kitchen of Hopkins’ great uncle’s place maybe
didn’t seem like the
best
place to discuss this topic with her, it was
still way better than when they were being held captive.  Since they
seemed to be moving rapidly toward another round of pursuing the Emperors, he
wasn’t sure when he was going to get a better chance.  Besides which, he
was curious. 

He plowed ahead, “So, I had a good time with you at
The
Palace
.  Dancing, you know?”

“Yeah,” Julie said, with a smile, looking up from her
milkshake.  “That was nice.”

Tim wasn’t sure he should ask the next question.  He
was generally shy, so part of him was telling him to just keep quiet, but he
also really wanted to know where he stood.  After all, he’d had a crush on
Julie for months and had clearly made a mistake by not discussing the kiss the
first time they’d done it. 

“So does that mean, like, we’re dating?” Tim blurted,
realizing too late that he had skipped a step in his logic here.  If
anything, he was asking if the fact they had kissed twice meant this.  Now
it sounded like he thought only people who were dating could dance with each
other.  He wondered if kicking himself would make things any more awkward.

Julie’s face had a horrible looking expression on it,
something like regret, or embarrassment.  Was the prospect of dating him
really that bad?  Tim could feel himself starting to blush, but he could
see Julie blushing, too, as she said, “What?  Um…  I don’t
know…  I mean…  I just don’t think now’s a good time to have a--”

But she didn’t get a chance to finish the sentence, because
at that moment, one of the doors opened with a mechanical
whirr
, and
Rose walked into the kitchen.  She was behind Julie, so Julie was able to
take a second to compose her face and get rid of the horrid expression. 
Rose didn’t even seem to notice Tim’s blushing.  She seemed to still be a
little bleary-eyed from her nap.

“Milkshake?” Rose mumbled, rubbing her eyes as she noticed
the contents of Julie’s cup.

This made Julie smile, and she turned back to Tim. 
“She’s really not much of a morning-person.  I remember that from our
sleepovers growing up.”  Tim did his best to smile back, but was having a
hard time.  What, now they were just going to pretend that they hadn’t
been in the middle of what had quickly turned into an alarmingly embarrassing
conversation? 

Rose stuck out her tongue at Julie.  “Assuming that it
even
is
morning.  I haven’t seen a clock, but it
feels
like
midnight.”  This observation did nothing to distract Tim from his own,
rather embarrassing, train of thought.

What had Julie been going to say, anyway?  Was it that
now was not a good time to have a relationship?  Or maybe she was going to
say it was a bad time to have a nerd like Tim for a boyfriend.  Or a bad
time to have a private conversation.  If it was this last one, she was
proven right a second time at that very moment, as another door to the kitchen
slid open and Paul walked through it. 

“Ah, more of you are awake now,” Paul observed with a
grin.  “I was just out in one of the conference rooms in the complex
alerting the leadership that you’d arrived.  I’m sure you’re all eager to
know what’s going on and where you are, but…  I think it’s best to wait
until my apparently very tired nephew wakes up from his slumber to tell you
anything specific.  For now, may I offer you a beverage?”

Tim didn’t say anything, because the last thing he had said
had been such a flop. 

Rose, on the other hand, was clearly less self-conscious
than Tim as she grunted, “Sure,” in her fully non-morning person way.

“What kind?” Paul asked amicably. 

“Er…  vanilla, I guess?” Rose determined, after a
moment’s pause.

“Vanilla what?” Paul asked.  Rose looked perplexed for
a moment, then Paul said, “Oh!  I’m sorry, I forgot I only explained it to
Julie…  I can get you one of approximately 300 different kinds of drinks
from this faucet.  Sodas, juices, teas, coffee, and some of the more
popular beers and wines, although I won’t offer that to you, since you’re not
18, and yes, milkshakes like the one that Julie has, if that’s what you want.”