by Andy Gavin
“This for you.”
The sirens are getting louder.
“What?”
“Master Li give to me in Shanghai when I young girl. He say give to boy who come in year of rabbit. Boy who say he Ms. Ren’s son.”
I take the box, which weighs almost nothing. She hurries away without a word.
Inside is a folded sheet of rice paper. The letter is written in my dad’s cipher.
Dear Charlie,
If you’re reading this, you must know what we are. I’m sorry I was unable to tell you myself on your birthday. Sophie and I overshot — something she’s prone to do — and arrived to find you gone and your mother in a tizzy. But as you’re probably aware, she isn’t fretting about it anymore. We hope you weathered the big quake safely. It caused more than a little excitement for Sophie and me, and unfortunately one of our metallic acquaintances forced me to undertake an unexpected journey without her.
I find myself alone and writing this letter in a Shanghai guest room, June 10, 1948. They speak more English here than I remember, so I plan to stay for a bit, hoping you might join me. Desperate times call for desperate measures, and so I arranged for little Sung to be sent to your grandmother with very specific instructions. Sad business, really, but trust me, she’ll have a better life in Philadelphia than here.
On the first of every month, I’ll visit a place in Shanghai we once spoke of, the old place where your mother might find her favorite beverage. Look for me there.
But first, find Sophie. She should be close, in a timely way, to where we last met.
Remember, Man is not God,
Your loving father
“Charlie!” Yvaine shakes my arm.
I’ve been so focused on the letter that even she ceased to exist. But I look up to see red and chrome fill the mouth of the alley. Sirens blare over a high-pitched hissing whistle. Steam fills the air.
We turn the other way only to see men in long red coats hustling toward us.
“Crap!” I pull Yvaine back into the yard.
“We be stuck here on cooldown for two weeks,” she says.
I start pounding on the door to my house. There’s no answer.
“You two!” One of the officers waves a billy club. “Lie down on the ground and spread ’em.”
The letter is still in my hand, but I can’t let anyone else get it. If a Tick-Tock finds it, he’ll know where to go.
So I eat it.
I’m swallowing the paper when the burly men in the round red caps force us to the ground.
One of them grabs my hair and pulls my face toward his.
“This is them.”
He’s holding a paper of his own. On it is a blurry photo of Yvaine and me looking down at something. Underneath, the caption reads, Wanted for High Treason.
Chapter Twenty-One:
Bighouse
Philadelphia, March, 2011
“NAME?” THE BOOKING OFFICER ASKS, his fingers poised over a manual typewriter straight out of a movie featuring a hard-drinking and suicidal depression-era writer — if it then went and mated with an alarm clock. “Name?” he repeats before I can even answer.
The big cop who holds me in a vise grip — as if the steel manacles around my wrists and ankles aren’t enough — punctuates the question with an elbow to my kidney.
“Charlie Horologe.” It never hurts to be honest with the police.
The desk guy squints at me then taps the keys, hunt-and-peck method.
“John Doe. Charge: high treason.” His eyes narrow again. “Officer Roberts,” he says to the vise grip at my elbow, “how would you describe the male suspect?”
Officer Roberts tugs on my arms and twists me around to face him.
“Ordinary.”
The pencil pusher nods, then consults his pocket watch.
Yvaine — Jane Doe — is processed the same way except for one difference.
Description: attractive.
Taking our mug shots is quite the procedure.
The camera is roughly the size and shape of a jukebox. It rolls around on shopping cart wheels and has — surprise! — lots of cogs and levers. The backplate reads: Eastman Dry Plate Company, Daguerreotechnic series V, powered by genuine Edison-Bréguet Springtorb.
The photographer wears a green visor. He spends a few minutes winding the camera with a ridiculous oversized key. An officer jams me into a stiff wooden chair. Another turns some knobs on the wall, and the gas lamp’s flames leap higher.
“Hold still,” the photographer says.
As if Officer Roberts leaves me any other choice.
The photographer loads a soda-can-sized wax cylinder into the side of the machine and spends an awfully long time alternating between adjusting his knobs and dials and peering through what must be the viewfinder. The thing must be a son of a bitch to focus.
Yvaine is being held a few feet away by a female officer I christen Big Bertha.
“Is time making it hard for him to take our picture?” I ask her. Yvaine, not Big Bertha.
“I dinna ken—”
She gasps when Officer Roberts smacks me upside the head so hard I see stars.
“No talking.”
I blink and lift my chained hands to my face.
The photographer presses a button. “I’ve got it.” CLICK! Yellowish bulbs flash and the camera gears whirl. We hear a ratchety clacking noise for a good two minutes as the protruding wax cylinder rotates. Finally, the machine rings like a kitchen timer. The photographer pulls out the cylinder and examines it.
“Perfect.”
Interesting. He pressed the shutter at the exact moment my hands were cradling my face. And he doesn’t take Yvaine’s photo until Big Bertha has a momentary urge to stand between her and the camera.
The fun stops when they shove Yvaine through one door and me through another.
I protest eloquently but Officer Roberts is unmoved. They even take Yvaine’s dried thistle from me, crumbling it into a trashcan as I watch. But on the plus side, they don’t know what to make of her dad’s brass page. They let it clatter to the floor and don’t even notice when I grab it up and shove it into my scratchy new set of striped pajamas.
We traitors have our own cell ward. Or at least male traitors, because there’s no sign of Yvaine. Her absence after our weeks together is like a stone on my chest.
I glance around. A single concrete wall forms the back of all the cells — no windows — and the other three ‘walls’ are just rows of iron bars. The door is more bars, with a big solid lock. Not that opening the cell would do any good, since the short hall leads to another door thick enough for a bank vault. The only furniture is a stained mattress and a steel chamber pot. Unfortunately, I’m now an old hand with chamber pots.
“Are you okay?” the man in the next cell asks.
I lift my head to see the handsome black guy from the paper, the supposed murderous terrorist leader. He sure doesn’t look homicidal. In fact, with his little round spectacles and short beard, no doubt due to lack of a razor, he looks like my seventh-grade math teacher.
“Not really,” I say.
“Joe Fairfax.” He offers his hand through the wall of bars between our cells.
“Charlie Horologe.”
His grip is firm but gentle.
“Would that we met under better circumstances.”
“Are you really a rebel leader?” I ask.
He laughs. “I’m a Republican, and an American, and a colored man, but a free man. If that makes me a rebel, then I’m pleased by the label.”
“I’m a fan of due process and government by the people myself,” I say.
“You look young for all that, but looks can be deceiving.”
“What’s going to happen to us?” I’m hoping the write-up and mug shots indicate at least some kind of justice system.
“They’ll try us,” he says, “find us guilty, and if we’re lucky, hand us off to the firing squad.”
“What if we’re innocent
?”
“The Court of High Treason isn’t familiar with that term.”
“How long does this take?” Hopefully, longer than I have left on my cooldown.
“Justice is swift. Less than a week.”
That’s bad, but it isn’t what bothers me most.
“I was arrested with a girl,” I say. “Do you know where they’ll have put her and what’ll happen to her?”
“Same charge?”
I nod.
“She’ll be in the female wing of the facility,” he says, “but the good news is they don’t usually execute women.”
“They keep them in jail?”
He shakes his head. “The colony can’t afford it. They’re sold and someone pockets the silver.”
Whichever movie character said prison time is slow time was right. I have a lot of time to think about Yvaine and entertain Joe with stories about a ‘hypothetical’ United States of America, complete with separate executive, legislative, and judicial branches, elected presidents serving no more than eight years, and all the rest.
To say he’s interested is an understatement.
“For your age,” he says, “you’ve an unprecedented level of political scholarship.”
I shrug. “Just kind of absorbed it bit by bit. How’s your knowledge of history?”
“I read my share.” He pushes his glasses up on the bridge of his nose.
“You know what happened to Ben Franklin?” I ask.
“Who?”
I guess dying early didn’t do for him what it did for Tupac Shakur.
When I grill Joe about the broad strokes, it turns out the French economy never rebounded after the Continental Wars, and the stinking Brits — his words, not mine — have things so buttoned up that European politics are totally different.
Which has at least one upside: The Germans are still a bunch of tiny kingdoms, and Joe’s never heard of Adolf Hitler.
Our on-and-off dialogue continues for what I think is two days, but it’s hard to tell. The only thing that breaks up the monotony is the periodic arrival of really awful food.
Eventually we turn to topics of a more personal nature.
“You’re clearly in love,” he says after I finish an enthusiastic monologue about Yvaine.
I guess I am.
“It feels like fate threw us together for a reason,” I say. “Like a one in a million shot in the dark that just has to be.”
“When it’s right, it always feels that way.”
My lawyer comes the third day. He’s fat, he has on a ridiculous wig, and his suit is canary yellow.
“I’d recommend a guilty plea,” he says. “The evidence is rather damning.”
He holds up a little wax cylinder, pretty much a miniature version of the one the photographer used in the camera.
“What’s that?” I ask.
He shrugs, inserts the cylinder into his double-sized pocket watch, and presses a knob. An eerie little voice recording plays, full of static.
“This office has incontrovertible evidence that the suspect, one Charles Horologe, is part of a conspiracy to assassinate his majesty. Verified, supervisor for the prosecution, undersecretary Fusée, office of the Lord Proprietor of Pennsylvania.”
“There you have it,” my lawyer says.
“But none of it’s evidence! No jury would buy that.”
“Jury?” His wig bounces. “Parliament abolished juries over a hundred years ago. The magistrate will have no choice but to convict on this basis.” He shakes the cylinder. “Undersecretary Fusee is a very important man.” He pats my shoulder through the bars. “I sympathize. I really do, but I’d plead guilty.”
“Is there any other way to plead?”
He looks confused.
“What was my name on that recording?” I say.
“John Doe, of course.”
Only a time traveler could remember my name long enough to record it. My favorite crack-faced Tick-Tock made that cylinder — and he even signed it.
“It’s funny that the Lord Proprietor’s office should accuse you of plotting to assassinate the king,” Joe tells me after the lawyer leaves.
“It won’t be so funny when they shoot me and sell my girlfriend into slavery.”
“True, but with a little luck, I intend to do just that.”
“Shoot me and buy my girlfriend?”
The flickering gas lamps gleam in his dark eyes.
“No, my friend. I intend to kill the king.”
Chapter Twenty-Two:
Unexpected
Philadelphia, March, 2011
LYING ON THE SMELLY PRISON MATTRESS, I dream Yvaine and I get frisky on a bearskin rug in front of a roaring fire. The James Bond theme song blares out of nowhere — Tick-Tocks burst into the room and suddenly we’re on snowboards, hurtling down an alpine slope with the Tocks in hot pursuit. They’re on gear-and-cog snowmobiles, blasting away at us with clockwork Uzis—
I wake in my cell. In the low-burning gas light I see Joe sitting cross-legged on his bed, eyes fixed on the ward door.
What I don’t see are any guards.
The distant popcorn sound of gunfire is punctured by a bigger explosion. The floor vibrates ever so slightly. Sirens begin to wail.
Joe walks to the door of his cell and rattles it.
Suddenly someone else is in his cell. Someone in a tan uniform with knee-high boots who flies up out of the floor, back-flips through the air like an acrobat, and slams face-first into the wall of bars separating us. The impact knocks a military-style cap off shiny blond hair. A thin pink scar runs across a sharp-featured face I’d recognize anywhere.
“Aunt Sophie?”
“Charlie, what the hell are you doing here?”
“Major?” Joe says. “Where’d you come from?”
Sophie ignores him. I feel almost naked under the gaze of someone who really sees me.
“God, Charlie! What luck! I thought you were lost downtime for sure.”
“How—”
“You two know each other?” Joe says. “And how’d you get the ward door open? I thought it would take explosives.”
“It will, Colonel.” She slips off her backpack and hands it to him. “Four sticks of dynamite and detonators.”
Two big pistols are tucked into her belt. She pulls one out and hands it to Joe, butt first.
“Let me get to work on this lock.”
She unzips the backpack, removes a soft leather case full of tools, and kneels before Joe’s cell door.
“Aunt Sophie, you came for him?”
“Don’t worry, I’ll get you out too. But I have to open this door before the guards come back or the Tocks find us.”
She works two metal sticks into the lock and wiggles them around. If we survive, I have to learn how to do that.
“Thanks for the uniform, Major,” Joe says, pulling a red jacket from the knapsack.
“Charlie, you know about us, right?” Sophie says. “Did you only hop back a short way? You don’t look much older.”
“London, 1725,” I say. “But I met a girl.”
“Double wow!” I can’t see her face but her voice cracks.
Joe pulls a guard-style shirt over his head.
“This girl you’ve been talking about,” he says. “She’s a Brit?” He looks awfully confused.
And no wonder. He’s a smart guy, but this morning I told him I was a time traveler and he thought I was talking about the best time of year to vacation.
“Colonel Fairfax, get those detonators ready,” Sophie says.
He pulls more stuff out of the pack.
Despite the muffled sound of gunfire in the distance, hope is starting to filter back into me. Sophie seems to know what she’s doing, and with this kind of firepower, maybe we can grab Yvaine and get out of here.
“Aunt Sophie, I got a message from Dad. Did he send you one too?”
She drops one of her lock-picks. “Damn! Not since the Tocks forced him to jump. With history so fubared
, I was trying to distract myself from never seeing him again with helping out the ARA here, but now that I’ve found you—”
“I know where he is!” I’ve always loved being the bearer of good news.
She stops with the lock-picking and leaps toward me, reaching through the bars.
“Screw this place — drop us downtime and we’ll get him right now.”
God, I’d like to see him. But I can’t just leave with Sophie.
“I’m on cooldown for at least ten more days.”
She frowns. “What’s cooldown?”
“What Yvaine and I call the time between traveling.”
Joe holds up a stick of dynamite. “Stop yabbing about the temperature and get that door open.” He lays the explosives in a row on his bed and fits each one with a clockwork mechanism.
“Let’s just get out of here.” Sophie grabs for my arm.
I leap out of reach. “I can’t leave without Yvaine.”
Sophie sighs. “I respect that.” She goes back to work on the lock. “So you’re normal — a couple of weeks between jumps? Hah! I’m the family freak.”
“What do you mean? Aren’t all travelers freaks?”
“My refractory period — what you call a cooldown — is only ten minutes.”
“Wow!” I say. “That’s great. You’re ready to go already?”
“In about two minutes, but my range is only a couple days and I never end up where I want. I’m not much of a time traveler, more a time tiptoer.”
I didn’t realize it varied so much.
“I’m almost ready with this door,” she says. “Once I open it, Joe can escape and history will change. That’ll bring the Tocks down on us fast.”
“How will they know? Timequake?”
“Right,” she says. “We won’t feel it, being in the same present, but we’ll feel whatever they do downtime to screw us over.”
The whole thing is hard to get my head around. Opening the door is like letting the Tiny-Tock get away. The Tocks must have gone back in time to manufacture the treason charge and tip off the goon squad.