Shift (ChronoShift Trilogy) (9 page)

“Well, anyway, I’ll look up the symbol for you.  I charge a 5% commission.  How many shares did you want?”

“About $60.00 worth.”

He pulled three $20 bills from his pocket and handed them to Harrington.  Harrington took them and then stared at the bills.

“Is this some kind of joke?” he said.

“I’m sorry.”

“What kind of stunt are you trying to pull?  Did somebody put you up to this?”

“What do you mean?”

“These bills.  They aren’t real, that’s for sure, but it’s the best job of counterfeiting I’ve ever seen, except for the fact that some idiot made Jackson too big and printed him off-center.  Probably wouldn’t have spotted it if it weren’t for that.”

Mark mentally slapped himself on the forehead.  Of course, the $20 bills he’d gotten out of the ATM in 2010 would look different than currency in 1970.

“Uh, yeah.  Tom put me up to it, but you caught me.”  Hastily, he snatched the bills from the broker and rushed out of the office. 
Tom put me up to it?
  Well, he figured the guy must know somebody named Tom.  Mark ran back to the courthouse and ducked into an external stairwell at its back, where he shifted forward to 2010.

It took some effort, but after visiting a number of different shops, he was able to exchange the twenties for some beat-up $1 bills.  The style of those had not changed over those forty years as the bigger bills had.  If the broker were suspicious and examined them closely enough, he’d probably notice the $1 bills had been printed in years after 1970.  That is...
if
he were suspicious.  Mark would shift to one month prior to his first meeting with Harrington to avoid suspicion.

He spent another $10 on food and an outfit from Goodwill which would fit in better with the styles of the 1970's.

This time, Harrington didn’t bat an eye.  Mark gave the broker only $40 this time, holding the last $10 for other unexpected expenses.  Harrington took his information, and promised Mark the Wal-Mart shares would arrive in a couple of weeks if he wanted the physical copies.  Mark did.

He shifted forward two weeks into the future and collected his shares from Harrington.  Then, he walked across the street to Brand Bank, a bank he knew would still be around for decades to come.  He opened a safe deposit box and left the shares inside.

Next, he opened a savings account, deposited his $10.00 with the teller, and then went outside.  He slipped behind the building, away from the eyes of traffic, and shifted forward to September of 2011, his original present time.

Jumping around through the years could easily become disorienting.  He needed an anchor, an unchanging reference point from which he could measure everything else.  This time, right now, September of 2011, was his actual present.  As he explored the labyrinth of time, he would need to come back here every now and then and just live his normal life.  He would call this his home time.

September 17
^th
, 2011 – Lawrenceville, GA

One more glitch stared him in the face.  A driver’s license.  He’d left his driver’s license behind with everything else he’d abandoned earlier in the summer.  Of course, he’d need that license to retrieve his possessions.

It took a bit of finagling, but he reported his license stolen and got a replacement.   When he finally returned to the bank, he was twice disappointed.  First, over the past forty years, his original $10.00 had only turned into $44.67. 
Goes to show you what a savings account at a bank is worth
, he mused.

The second disappointment was that his safe deposit box had long been closed out and the contents confiscated for failure to pay the annual fee for the box.  40 years of payments was apparently a little over $1,600.

Good grief.  Why did this have to be so difficult?
 You’d think making money with a time machine would be easy.

Instead of using the safe deposit box, Mark could have just shifted from 1970 to 2011 with his Wal-Mart shares in hand, but then they wouldn’t appear to have aged at all and probably would have been treated as a forgery when he tried to cash them in.  The Securities Exchange Commission might be suspicious of someone showing up with four original Wal-Mart stock certificates that looked like they’d just been printed.

Frustrated, Mark withdrew his $44.67 in 2011, shifted back to the day after he’d opened his savings account in 1970 and redeposited the money.  When he returned to 2011, his account now had a balance of $244.18.  Still not enough, but it was better.

He contemplated doing the savings account trick again, but that would mean he would have to deposit almost 250 one dollar bills at the bank back in 1970.  Such a quantity would greatly increase the chances somebody would notice many of those bills were printed forty years after he was depositing them.  It was very likely the federal bank which maintained the cash reserves for the community banks in the area would notice and they would trace the funny bills back to Brand Bank.  It wouldn’t take Brand Bank long at all to remember who had deposited so many one dollar bills into their account.  Tellers had memories and that kind of thing stood out.

Nope, he had to think of something else, and he had an idea that might just work.  Mark withdrew some of his savings and walked seven blocks to the closest Wal-Mart where he purchased a number of potentially very useful items.

Ironic.  He was using Wal-Mart to make money off of Wal-Mart.

***

April 16
^th
, 1918 – Lawrenceville, GA

Mark pushed the glass door to the drugstore open and went inside.  A tiny bell tinkled overhead as he entered.  To him, the drugstore looked old-fashioned, though it was truthfully quite contemporary for 1918.  Rows and rows of antique-styled glass medicine bottles lined the shelves along one wall and behind the counter.  Other shelves and tables displayed common household items made of glass and iron, which again looked dated to him, but were correct for the period.  He guessed this pharmacy simultaneously served as a sort of convenient store.

The floor was real hardwood, the kind of thin-slatted floor only found in older buildings, but this wood was of course not aged, did not creak, and smelled faintly of the linseed oil used to preserve it.  The style of the entire decor was early 20
^th
century, but none of it showed the wear and tear age brings.  Of course, this was exactly as it should be, but Mark’s mind was still assimilating the reality of the years he was traversing and the new, fresh feel of all the older-styled items still struck him as odd.

The ambiance evoked images right out of a Normal Rockwell painting.  An elderly woman chatted with the pharmacist, who stood behind the counter.  A teenage boy sat with two pretty girls close to the soda fountain sharing some milkshakes.  It felt homey.

The pharmacist was neatly groomed, his hair peppered with even mix of black and gray, and he wore a white coat as a uniform.  He paused his conversation with the woman long enough to greet Mark warmly.  His smile implied he would be the kind of man who would be popular around town.

Mark took a stool at the counter and ordered a soda, listening carefully to the different conversations around the store.  Before long, the youngsters left and two middle-aged women came in chatting about everybody and their dog’s business.  He’d only been here for a few minutes and already Mark was learning a good bit about social life of Lawrenceville in the 1910's.

Then, a lone mother in her early forties entered.  Her face bore a look of desperation that seemed all too familiar with its lines, wrinkles that were as yet still faint, but surely weathered deeper each year by some great burden life had heaped upon her shoulders.

She asked the pharmacist for more of her son’s pills — she’d run out.  He retrieved a bottle from the shelf behind his head, and, with an air of panic in her movements, she paid and rushed out the door.

After she’d left, Mark inquired about her.  In this age, the concept of privacy in medicine was non-existent and the pharmacist was more than happy to share his concerns for the poor woman and her family.

Her name was Lucy Henderson, the wife of one of Lawrenceville’s most prominent and wealthy businessmen, Thomas Henderson.  Their son Jeffrey had suffered from a lung disease since he was a young child, and it only seemed to get worse every year.  They had tried all kinds of medicines and remedies, but nothing seemed to work.  Young Jeffrey just kept getting worse.

            It was worth looking into.  Mark bought a few random glass medicine bottles from the pharmacist, paid for his soda, tipped his hat, and left.

***

“May I help you?” 

Her beauty was not flirtatious, nor glaring, but a regal beauty as one would expect from the wife of a prominent businessman.  Her auburn hair was swept into a bun, a couple of streaks of gray in it the only sign of her real age.  If she used cosmetics, she used them modestly.

“Yes, ma’am.  I heard that your son Jeffrey has some difficulty with his lungs.  I don’t mean to be presumptuous, but I think I may be able to help him.”

She was taken off guard, which was understandable.

“I’m sorry, sir, but I don’t understand.  Are you a doctor?  I don’t know you.”

“Of sorts.  Please, I heard about your predicament.  I am not sure if I can help, but if you will let me examine him, I may.”

She was not sure what to do.  She sized him up for several seconds. 

“Wait here,” she finally breathed.  “Thomas!”  She receded into the house.  After a minute, she returned.  “Please come in.  My husband is waiting for you in the study.”

He was a solid, sturdy looking man.  As he and Mark shook hands, his no nonsense grip communicated an honesty one could respect.

“I’m Thomas Henderson,” he introduced himself.

“Mark Carpen.”

“Lucy says you’re offering to help my son.  What do you know about him?”

“Just that he’s sick with a lung disease and no medicine has worked for him so far.”

“And why you think you can help?”

“I won’t know if I can until I examine him, but I wouldn’t have come if I didn’t think it were possible.”

“What are your qualifications?  Have you been to medical school?”

“My qualifications aren’t important.  I have some medicines that may help him.  What do you have to lose?”

“Well, it occurs to me that you may be a quack out to make a quick buck preying on desperate families, sir.”

“I won’t ask you to pay me until you’ve seen the medicines work.”

“What if these “medicines” hurt Jeffrey?”

Mark shrugged.  Henderson stared him in the eye for a full minute weighing the man and his offer.  In the end, he either decided to trust Mark or desperation just won out.  They clearly believed their son was on the road to death if they didn’t find a new treatment that worked.

“Come this way please.”

He led Mark to a bedroom in the back of the house.  Jeffrey looked to be about seven years old.  He lay on his bed motionless, covered with blankets in spite of the heat of the day.  His skin was pale, his breathing labored.  He seemed very ill, and Mark understood why they thought he might die if his sickness was not remedied

After they explained the history of the boy’s illness, Mark was relieved.  For a moment, he’d worried the boy might actually have some serious disease for which Mark could not help, but he’d gambled that little Jeffrey might simply be suffering from some ordinary ailment that the medicines of 1918 just could not handle.

From the description of the symptoms, Mark believed the boy had asthma, which was probably allergy induced.  Yet, since the asthma and the allergies had gone unabated for so long, heavy mucus dripping into Jeffrey’s lungs had probably since turned it into a case of pneumonia.

In 2011, Mark had purchased a plethora of over-the-counter drugs while he was at Wal-Mart, rightly figuring that Extra Strength Tylenol might be a big hit in 1918.  He’d stuffed his backpack with everything from Sudafed to Pepto Bismol.  Before coming to the Henderson home, he’d emptied the old-fashioned, glass medicine bottles he’d bought at the drugstore, throwing the useless 1918 pills into the woods, and peeled off the labels.  Then, he’d removed several of his Wal-Mart drugs from their aluminum packaging and poured those pills into the empty bottles so his modern medicines wouldn’t appear futuristic to the people from this age.

He went to the boy and laid his hand on his forehead.  He had a strong fever.  Definitely an infection in the lungs.  Mark pulled out a Primatine Mist asthma inhaler.  He sat the boy up and told him to breathe out deeply.  The poor boy didn’t have much breath to give.  Mark depressed the inhaler in the boy’s mouth as he breathed back in.  After a couple more times, the boy seemed to be breathing easier.

His parents stood astonished with their mouths agape.  They hadn’t expected any quick improvement.  Mark handed them a bottle filled with antibiotics he’d had in his backpack since when he’d first gone to live off the mountains.  They were strong ones and would likely handle this infection okay.