Untimed: A Time Travel Adventure

by Andy Gavin

  CHIME. “If we get Bréguet free, can we please go uptime and let my dad sort it out?”

  CHIME. Her smile’s cute even under the grime. “Deal. But I’m still holdin’ you to your Billy promise.”

  CHIME. “Fair enough.”

  CHIME. Yvaine screams. A battered riding glove grabs at her ankle.

  CHIME. I jump on the hand, trying to wrestle it loose. I feel the unyielding gears under the leather. It twists in my grasp, snakes into my jacket, and gropes for the brass page. I bend the fingers backward.

  CHIME. Through the gaping ceiling, the sun dims. A time-hole opens beneath the Tock, who tumbles into nothingness. As it closes, I can’t help noticing the bits and pieces of debris don’t follow him down but settle into his now vacated space.

  We pull Monsieur Breguet out of the rubble. I think the old watchmaker broke an arm, and blood is smeared across his battered face, but he’ll live.

  “Thank you.” He glances around. “Where’s the Marquis?”

  “He’s history,” I say, “but unfortunately, history repeats itself.”

  The room — or what remains of it — is in shambles. Through a half destroyed pair of French doors I see the garden choked with powder smoke. Bodies are all over the boxwood paths, but a handful of living men crawl amongst the corpses.

  Yvaine wraps Bréguet in a hug. He grimaces in pain but forces it into a smile.

  “No need to torture yourself over smashing my mechanisms,” he says. “Whatever the reason—”

  “Your younger son, Phillipe,” she says, “he was my father. So you—”

  CHIME! CHIME!

  The sound comes from outside. Two figures stride from the carnage.

  Longshot looks like he stopped for a tune-up, his uniform repaired with spit and polish, his rifle cradled in front. Next to him is the shorter Tock, the one from London. His sword is in one hand, so my comic-book brain can’t help but rechristen him Rapier. His cracked face turns to us, then to what he holds in his other hand, a shiny brass page.

  Not one Tick-Tock, but two. If my mom hadn’t taught me better, I’d be summing up the situation with a word that rhymes with trucked.

  “We have to go!” I yank Yvaine back, keeping a firm grip on her.

  She glances from the Tocks to Bréguet and back again. The older man seems confused by the sudden return of his patron — as well he should be.

  “It’s us they want to kill!” I point at the watchmaker. “Him, they like!”

  Yvaine reaches out with her free hand and touches Bréguet.

  “Goodbye, Grandpapa,” she says.

  His eyes widen just before she grabs my hand and we’re sucked up in-between.

  Chapter Eighteen:

  Sideways

  Philadelphia, uptime

  AS WE FALL UPWARD THROUGH THE IN-BETWEEN, I realize the light of the sun orbits around us. Bright on bright, it stands out against the galactic tapioca smear of stars behind. Its feeble warmth weaves through the distant swirling, turns from warm to cold, into green glow and back to reddish brown then chill white and back into green.

  I count the years as marked by the rotating light — 1808, 1809, and so on — but when I get to 1900 I’m frazzled and I think I missed or skipped some. I expect the trip to be over but it keeps going and going. At 2000, Yvaine’s expression grows unnervingly intense.

  She winks at me.

  We pop out onto the Philadelphia street right in front of Independence Hall, which looks more or less like it should except it’s grungy and covered in graffiti.

  The park is much smaller than I remember, but the familiar short brick structures of old Philly crowd around us. The skyline looks weird and it takes me a second to realize why: no Comcast Center. No Liberty Place towers. There’s only one building more than ten or fifteen stories, and it stands about twice that height, a Big-Ben-shaped monstrosity. It’s not a stone tower, more like a metal cage filled with gears and clock parts so big I can see them a mile away. Scrawled across the big dial at the top is a huge logo: Edison-Bréguet Engine Company.

  I take Yvaine’s and my hands, still clasped, and raise them toward the tower.

  “If it makes you feel any better,” I say, “I think your grandfather did just fine after we left.”

  She stares and stares.

  “That weren’t here before?” she says.

  “Never even heard the name Breguet until two weeks ago,” I said.

  Yvaine looks different too. Her hair is cut short in a punk style, different lengths on each side, with a cluster of hot pink dreadlocks on the right. She’s barefoot as usual, but wearing a skintight dress with a skirt so short that an inch less might get her arrested. It’s ornate, too, with all sorts of buttons and a high frilly collar. The real shocker is the color — exactly the same shade as her weird bundle of hair.

  Bizarre as the look is, it suits her. She looks neater. Hot. Well, she was always cute, and now, after ignition followed by two weeks of pressure buildup, everything about her is habanero hot.

  She notices me noticing her.

  “The front of your hair be orange!”

  So are my jeans.

  A peculiar horn honks and a unicycle whizzes past us. I spin around. The park is full of unicyclists. Yeah, that’s right, at least a dozen wannabe clowns, minus the white face paint and red noses.

  “Do you know what year it is?” I say.

  Stupid question. Of course she doesn’t.

  “Before meetin’ you, thirty-one years be me limit,” she says. “But somethin’ about travelin’ together changes the rules.”

  Things look — and smell — all wrong. The air is sooty, gross, worse even than stinky London though in a different, more industrial, way. This Philadelphia is filthy for the most part, even the park full of litter.

  I chase after a page from a newspaper the breeze is toying with.

  It’s the Philadelphia Inquirer, Wednesday, March 23, 2011. About eight weeks after the fateful field trip to this same park.

  The version without the circus sideshow cyclists.

  Gulp. Another bike passes close. This guy’s riding a two-wheeler, but it’s one of those old-timey ones with the giant wheel in front and the little one in back. He looks freaky tall up there in his Abe Lincoln-style outfit and stovepipe hat. Except the whole thing is turquoise — and so is the guy’s beard.

  Hmmm. I glance back at the paper. The left headline says, “Mine strike spikes coal prices.” On the right a black and white photo — the Inquirer I knew has a color front page — shows a handsome black man being dragged up a set of stairs by official-looking types. “ARA leader, Joe Fairfax, apprehended by Crown Red Coats,” the caption reads.

  Crown Red Coats?

  “What’s it say?” Yvaine asks.

  “Aided by an anonymous tip,” I read, “Crown forces capture CRC’s number one most wanted, the alleged leader of a murderous American Republican Army cell.”

  I glance at the flagpole by Independence Hall. Three standards flutter in the wind. A navy blue one I don’t recognize, another with a red lion on a yellow field, and the familiar double cross of the Union Jack.

  The British flag.

  “Between us letting Ben die and the Tock’s private funding for your grandfather’s research…” I can’t even bring myself to finish.

  Yvaine leans against me. “At least we both be alive.”

  I give her a quick hug — every cloud does have its silver lining. But we need to figure this out, which I have a horrible feeling I already have.

  “Let’s go inside,” I say.

  We’re about halfway to the entrance when she yelps, balances on one leg, and picks at her foot.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Stepped on somethin’ sharp.”

  I didn’t notice before, but mixed in with the papers and trash are empty glass cylinders about half the size of a roll of dimes.

  “Dinna worry yourself.” She tugs me forward. “I’ve got tough feet.”

&nb
sp; It occurs to me that Chestnut Street with its carts and carriages in some ways looks more like eighteenth-century London than the Philadelphia I remember.

  Then again, maybe not.

  A few carts are drawn by horses but most seem to be pedaled. They look like what you’d get if you mated a pickup truck with a bicycle, except the drivers seem to be pedaling really fast and easy, like a ten-speed going downhill. Which must have something to do with the gears, because these bike-trucks and bike-cars have lots of those. Gears, cogs, belts, whirling things — you name it, they’ve got it.

  Most people are dressed Titanic style but in bright colors, and both men and women wear hats. The younger ones dress more like Yvaine and me, rejects from some Italian runway show mixing period and punk.

  “Amazin’,” Yvaine says. “I’ve never seen the like.”

  “Me either, and this is my hometown.”

  There’s a big tricycle parked nearby. The brass clockwork engine block mounted behind the seat is engraved with the same Edison-Bréguet logo as the giant tower.

  This place is way weirder than the past. Sure, Ben Franklin dying is a big deal, but that and a few watch inventions couldn’t make all this happen. Could it?

  Man is not God, my father would say, but that just leaves one question: who is God, and why’d the creator allow my little screw-ups to change everything?

  A deep rumble and a hideous clanging siren knock me out of my thoughts. What I can only describe as a fire-truck-cum-steam-locomotive shoulders its way onto the street. The smaller vehicles flee in apparent terror. The thing is huge, about the size of a hook and ladder truck, and it is painted red. But the front is all train, down to the cow-catcher grill, cylindrical boiler, and belching smoke stack — although this last is ringed by red and blue lights.

  Another whistling blast, and a column of white smoke streams skyward. Uniformed red figures cling to the sides.

  “What in hell is that?” Yvaine says.

  “Police, fire truck, military,” I say. “I’ve no idea.”

  “Then we ain’t wantin’ t’find out.”

  I nod and lead her up the steps to see if Independence Hall is still open to the public.

  Inside, the hall is lit by flickering yellow lamps. It’s still a museum, but there the resemblance to the one I remember ends.

  I stop at a painting of George Washington offering a sword to a fattish older man in red. Yvaine reads the little plaque next to it with the diction of a fourth grader.

  “A victorious Lord Cornwallis accepts the surrender of General Washington at Yorktown, 1781.”

  “It was the other way around,” I say. My sinking feeling hits rock bottom.

  “With this crushing defeat the traiti…traitorous colonial rebellion begun in this room came to an end. His majesty King George III later elevated Lord Cornwallis as the first Duke of Virginia in gratitude for his services.”

  The next painting shows fifteen or so men hanging from the gallows.

  “The signatories of the so-called Declaration of Independence,” I read, “are executed here in Philadelphia after being convicted of treason. King George graciously commuted their sentences from drawing and quartering to hanging. From left to right: Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, John Hancock…”

  No Ben Franklin, of course. In this world, he didn’t live to sign — or rather, be hung. It makes me sick to my stomach. Call me a sappy patriot, but I was proud to be born in the country those guys made, and hell, I liked Ben before I met him. Knowing I screwed the whole thing up really bites the big one.

  “This is all so wrong,” I say. “We won this war. America is a free country. A democracy with no king.”

  “That not be what it say here.”

  She points at a big glossy photo of a middle-aged man in an ornate suit holding a crown and scepter. His hair and jacket are dyed red, white, and blue in the pattern of the British flag!

  “His majesty Charles III,” Yvaine reads, “King of Great Britain, Ireland, Scotland, America, India, China, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and Ceylon, head of the Commonwealth, Defender of the Faith.”

  I recognize Prince Charles from the tabloids. I guess he got to be king after all.

  Back to the plaque. “The exhibits in this chamber commemorate the divine right of the Kings of Great Britain, and illustrate the folly of radical and democratic socialism. By the wisdom of the people and the grace of God.”

  Thank God there’s no more to read. I press my thumb and forefinger against my eyelids. “Even in the movies, no one screws up this bad,” I mutter.

  “Dinna think that way.” Yvaine draws my hand away from my eyes and kisses the tips of my fingers. “Your da will know how t’fix it.”

  I don’t know if she believes that or if she just wants to.

  “Need some juice?” A whisper from the shadows startles me.

  Standing by the wall is a young guy wearing a dark suit with a scarlet tie that more or less matches his red mohawk and ruby nose ring. A fancy brass pocket watch dangles from a chain on his vest.

  “I said, want some juice?” He holds out two tiny glass cylinders of brown liquid.

  I know a drug dealer when I see one.

  “We don’t have any money,” I say.

  He looks us over. “You’re a pretty one, miss. Ditch the loser and maybe we can work something out in trade. I’ll even throw in a pair of shoes.”

  I step between them. “Hey—”

  “Show time!” Yvaine whispers.

  I flail around for an idea. All I can come up with is the bit from The Princess Bride.

  I point and shout, “What in the world can that be?”

  He twists around. Yvaine darts forward, slams into him, grabs the vials from his hand and the ring from his nose.

  “Run, Charlie!”

  We do. His screams fade behind us.

  My eyes contract from the sunlight as we bolt out the hall door and around the building into an alley, where we find a big dumpster to hide behind.

  Trash in bizarro Philadelphia smells exactly like trash in regular Philadelphia.

  A few seconds later, the drug dealer lurches into the alleyway holding his bloody hands to his bloody nose, looks once in our direction, then keeps going.

  “Clean getaway,” Yvaine is squatting on the asphalt next to me.

  “That was kind of mean.” He isn’t going to die or anything, but I’m not sure he deserved a trip to the emergency room.

  “Also kind of necessary. I filched his purse.” She opens the wallet to show bright-colored bills. “Damn the cull! No coin.”

  “We use paper currency now.”

  I pull out the money. There’s been some inflation. King Charles glares from a ten-thousand pound note. And while I don’t see any credit cards, the wallet holds a brown tinted photo of an older woman. I guess even drug dealers have mothers.

  Yvaine pockets the cash and tosses the billfold into the alley.

  “Good,” she says, “the fool without a penny be the fool indeed. Besides, that man wanted your miss, so you should hate him.”

  As usual, she has a point.

  “Are you my miss?”

  She settles herself onto my lap and wriggles to make herself comfortable, which feels really good.

  “Everythin’ else be torn from me. Me folks. Billy. The grandpapa I almost had.” Her big green eyes are only a couple inches from mine. She has her arms tight around me. “I’ll hold onto what I got, if you dinna mind.”

  I don’t.

  We start kissing. Not the most romantic spot, but—

  BING! Soft yet unmistakable. We look behind us.

  A small creature is inspecting the wallet Yvaine threw away. Except it’s not exactly a creature, and now it’s eating the wallet. The thing rolls on six little wheels and looks like a cross between a Frankenstein Roomba and one of those floor robots Chewbacca barked at on the Deathstar.

  BING! It makes a high-pitched bell noise, much softer but all too reminiscent of a
Tick-Tock’s chime. The little robot doesn’t have any skin or shell. Gears and other mechanical bits whirl around inside the metal frame of its body.

  “What in God’s creation is that?” Yvaine asks.

  “I don’t know, but I know I don’t like it.”

  We run down the alley, giving the mini-tock a wide berth. I didn’t get a chance to look, but I’m betting somewhere inside that thing is a Bréguet logo.

  Chapter Nineteen:

  Changes

  Philadelphia, March, 2011

  WE MAKE OUR WAY TOWARD MY HOUSE, but after Yvaine steps on another bit of broken glass I pull her inside a J.C. Penney crossed with Old West general store.

  “No shoes, no service,” a clerk says, none too nicely.

  “That’s what we came to buy,” I say. Yvaine wiggles her toes and gives him a smile that would melt the heart of a Tick-Tock if he had one.

  The clerk shrugs and points.

  While Yvaine browses the shoe department — if you can call a ten-foot aisle a department — I interrogate the boy who works there. He looks like he’s in junior high, awfully young for a job in retail.

  “So what’s the deal with that Edison-Bréguet tower?”

  He shakes his head. I think I’m being pitied.

  “Pretend I’m from Mars,” I say.

  “Jolly. It’s their regional corporate headquarters,” he says.

  “And they do what?”

  “Besides being richer than the king? Make all sorts of machines. Like Identikeys and Springtorbs. Always have. Fine quality, too. E.B. stuff almost never breaks.”

  “Does the Edison stand for Thomas Edison?”

  “Yeah, doofus. He invented Audiocyls, then merged with the Bréguet Engine Company.” He pronounces the silent T at the end, so the word rhymes with suet. “Only the East India Trading Company’s bigger.”

  Yvaine waggles a pair of leather-soled moccasins at him, hot pink to match her dress.

  “What size?” he says.