He walked a little closer to one of the buildings, cautiously. It was a log cabin about sixty feet long and maybe twenty-five feet wide. There was only one story but the roof was high. The timber looked relatively fresh.
Campbell checked the numbers on the dials and they read 05 20 1831, 23 14 34. It didn’t take long for him to see men again only this time they were white, and fully dressed. They had beards and wore wide brimmed hats and dark pants and coats. On the ones without coats he could see white shirts with puffy sleeves. It made him think of an Amish commune.
They had all run out of their houses to check out the loud noise and bright lights. Most of the men had muzzle-loading rifles in their hands and a few of them pointed their barrels at Campbell.
A lot of things ran through his head at that moment, but his archaeologists mind quickly connected the clothes and buildings with a time and place and he knew what to do. He looked down and quickly changed the dials to 12 16 2011 and twisted the disk. The lightning started up just as the men fired their muskets and before he knew it he was standing in an empty parking lot a few blocks away from his house in Boston. A musket ball smashed into the brick building a couple yards behind him.
He ran like hell until he was back inside his house, where he locked the door behind him and slid to the ground panting. He stayed there like that for a few minutes, catching his breath, staring at the little disk.
“What the fuck?” he said out loud.
Chapter 2
Campbell looked out the window and saw sunlight. He had been pacing back and forth across his living room for the past few hours. He couldn’t believe what had happened. It wasn’t possible. He told himself he hadn’t had much sleep in the past few days, he was just dreaming, hallucinating. But then why was he covered in mud, and why was there a giant scorch mark on his hardwood floor.
There was an explanation for this. There had to be. He went in to the kitchen and grabbed a beer. He twisted off the cap as he walked over to the couch and sat down, staring at the disk. He spent the next few hours trying to piece everything together. He checked history books. His book shelves were full of them. He found sketches of Native Americans in the sixteenth century and they matched the men he saw in the woods. He looked up nineteenth century Boston and found log cabins and Amish looking men with muskets.
“OK,” he said aloud. “Last night I ran for my life from some of North America’s earliest inhabitants and then got shot at by a bunch of angry farmers in the nineteenth century. That is simply not possible.”
He downed his beer in one shot. By noon he was passed out on the couch with the disk in his hand and an American history book sliding off his lap. Six hours later he jumped awake with an idea.
He ran into his bedroom and rummaged through the closet. It wasn’t there. He ran out to the garage and started cutting open boxes and throwing them around haphazardly until he found a yet another box marked tools that was filled with something very different from tools.
Years ago Campbell had been big into historical re-enactment and spent a lot of his time dressing up in medieval clothes and running around with swords. He took the box inside.
He sat on the couch and pulled garment after garment out of the box and tossed them on the floor. He settled on a red linen tunic, hand made by an old friend of his, that fit the commonly accepted dress style of the late Viking period. He was going to perform an experiment.
When he was finished getting dressed he looked at himself in the mirror. He was six feet tall, so height-wise he would fit in with Scandinavians of the 10th century. The tunic reached down to below the knees and bellowed out below the waist. There was black trim about four inches thick around the bottom of the tunic and the bottoms of the sleeves.
He had a sword hanging from the simple leather belt at his waist. It was a hand made Viking long sword he bought for re-enactments and though it was probably not as ‘battle-ready’ as the makers claimed he figured it would look the part well enough. He had a dagger on his belt as well, and a leather pouch because tunics had no pockets.
He chose somewhat puffy black linen pants that tied at the waist with a draw string. He tucked the pant legs into a pair of black leather boots that came halfway up his calf and had large cuffs that flipped down around the top. Ok, the boots were late renaissance but it would draw a hell of a lot less attention than sneakers.
He messed up his hair a little. He hadn’t taken a shower recently, which he figured would help him blend in. When the image in the mirror looked as good as it was going to get he walked back into the living room and picked up the little metal disk.
He turned the dials to read 07 01 0950. He glanced at his watch, which read 4:45pm, as he put it into the pouch and turned the second dial to 16 45 00. A one hundred and eighty degree twist of the top and the bright white flashes started and he covered his ears. The lightning began to fry the air around him and form the big ball of electricity and all of a sudden he was standing in the middle of a forest.
The ball of lightning had cut into a hundred foot tall pine tree and as it subsided the tree began to creak and sway. The ball of lightning had created cut into the trunk of the tree and there was now a huge semi-circular chunk missing. The trunk began to crack where it was now thinner. Campbell ran out of the way of the tree as it crashed down where he was standing, taking branches off of other trees as it fell.
He jumped behind another tree and curled in the fetal position until the crash was over. Then he stood up and looked around. It was a dense forest of pine and oak and he couldn’t see very far so he listened but he heard nothing except for a few birds singing.
“Well,” he said to himself, “now what?”
Campbell spent an hour or so walking around exploring the forest, but he found no signs of civilization. He was confused until it occurred to him that he was probably still in Boston.
Given the last experience with the disk it was obvious that it was a time machine so he thought that he would be taken to the Viking age, which he was. He was standing in Boston in the year AD 950. He had just assumed that he would be taken to Europe because that’s where he wanted to go, but it hadn’t occurred to him that he would need to be in Europe to travel to the Europe of the past.
He changed his strategy. He turned the dials back to the date he had left, adding a few seconds to the time to make sure he didn’t come face to face with himself, and walked back to the spot where he had come out. He climbed onto the fallen tree as close as he could judge to the exact spot that would bring him back to his living room and twisted the device.
When the lightning subsided he was about four feet in the air above his kitchen floor. He fell to the ground and his feet slipped out from under him and he smacked his head on the cabinet under the sink. He looked up and saw that the lightning had cut holes in his ceiling and walls, and water was gushing out of the severed faucet.
“Well,” he said to himself after touching the back of his head and feeling blood, “that didn’t go quite as planned.”
He was going to try this again but he was going to put a little more thought into it this time. He was still thinking he wanted to see some Vikings but he didn’t want to buy a plane ticket until he was positive he knew what he was doing, so he picked something that was a little closer to home. Boston 1776.
After capping off the leaky pipe he sat down with his computer and hopped on the internet. He was able to find a fairly accurate map of 1776 Boston that he compared to a modern map. He figured out that his living room would be right in between two houses in the middle of the city and decided that was a bad idea. He looked a little further out and found a spot of wilderness that was unoccupied in either time, only a twenty minute drive away.
The box of costumes didn’t contain anything for eighteenth century North America except a British Redcoat uniform and that was probably not appropriate dress for attending the declaration of independence.
He called up a costume store he knew pretty well and it turned out t
hey had a minuteman outfit that he figured could pass well enough and he headed over.
The costume fit well enough, and looked good enough, but the material was all wrong. Upon close inspection he would stand out like a sore thumb but he figured he could keep his distance from the general populace. After all he just wanted to look around for a minute.
He rented the costume for $25 a day with a $100 deposit, used the store’s changing room, wore the outfit out to his car, and drove out to the woods.
It took over an hour to walk to the town, but it was worth it not to have anyone see him show up in a giant ball of lightning.
The town surprised him slightly. Aside from the overwhelming stench of manure everywhere the whole town seemed amazingly clean. Historians have a very good picture of what Boston would have looked like back then, and it wasn’t too far off. At first he thought he was walking into a living history amusement park and half expected to see port-a-potties and a parking lot out back. Instead he saw empty streets. There was no one in sight except for two men sitting on the front porch of a house smoking pipes and drinking from wooden cups.
He walked past them into the town and down the street ahead of him. There were the docks on the right hand side where he expected to see big wooden sailing ships lined up against the boardwalk, instead the only ships at the dock were smaller, with only one or two masts and less than a hundred feet long. Twenty or so of the big sailing ships lay at anchor a hundred yards or so into the bay. There were many small boats lying around to bring people and goods back and forth but very few of them were at work.
He watched a few men on the docks help a dozen men in a longboat unload huge casks of whale oil. He could see the whaling ship at anchor in the bay. Huge plumes of smoke rose up from the try-pots on the deck as blubber was being melted down. The stench wafting over to the docks was almost unbearable. For a second he wondered if that was why the waterfront seemed so deserted, but he figured something else must be up.
It took until he reached the middle of the city, at the old courthouse, that he found any of the city’s occupants. He had tried to travel to a day when nothing of importance happened and he could witness the people’s average daily life, but it seemed there was something going on.
He moved a bit closer to the crowd and tried to hear what the people were talking about. He focused in on one man’s voice and just started to hear him saying something about a war when he saw a young woman who took his breath away.
She looked to be about the age of most of his students and she was standing at the edge of the crowd talking with a group of other women. She wore a blue dress that was a little puffy in the shoulders and a tight corset embroidered with images of dolphins jumping in the air was wrapped tight around her mid section, pushing her chest up just enough to be enticing without being revealing.
Campbell stared at this woman for a moment until the crowd started to break up. The people all walked off in various directions, the woman walked over to a man standing at the edge of the courtyard with a musket resting against his thigh.
He wore a blue coat with white trim and Campbell easily figured the man for a Continental Army soldier and by the look of it a high ranking one. There were white feathers sticking out of his brown tri-corner hat and a thick gold medallion hung from his neck, which would signify that he was an officer of some sort.
When he was sure no one was paying attention to him Campbell walked casually up to the little platform the crowd had been standing around. There was a large board with a number of handwritten notes on it but one in the center stood out.
It was larger than the other pieces of paper by more than double and it was pinned up covering many of the notes. It read in large letters across the top ‘Declaration of Independence from England announced.’
It made sense that it would take a couple days for the news to spread, he thought. He looked around and saw that young woman walking up to him.
His heart raced. He couldn’t talk to this woman. If he did it would be obvious to her that he didn’t belong here. He never should have come this close. He should have stayed on the outskirts, in the shadows. All this ran through his head in the moment it took her to take a few steps until she was right next to him, looking at the note.
“Good afternoon ma’am,” he said. Fuck, he thought.
“Crazy to think isn’t it?” she said, her voice soft and sweet but there was a bit of something mischievous to it, “That we are actually going to war with England.” Her eyes got a little bigger when she said it.
“Indeed ma’am,” he said, almost stuttering as it came out. His heart was pounding so hard it seemed as though it would jump right out of his chest.
“I’m Mary McCormick,” she said and extended her hand daintily. He took the hand by the fingers and gave a little bow. It was what they did in the movies.
“John Campbell,” he said.
She eyed him with a quizzical look on her face for a moment, gently biting the side of her bottom lip. He was entranced.
“You’re not from here,” she said. It was half statement and half question.
“No, I’ve traveled a great distance you could say.”
“I take it then you arrived on the Mary May last night?”
“Yes, on the ship,” he assumed that would be the name of a ship.
“It must have been a long voyage from France.”
“Um, yes, quite long, couldn’t stand it,” he said
“The Mary May arrived three days ago from Barbados mister Campbell.”
Just then Campbell saw the soldier she had been talking with moving in their direction and decided this would be a good time to leave. He’d seen what he wanted to see, proof that he understood how to operate the time traveling device and that that’s what it really was.
“I’m afraid I must be going miss,” he tried to say in a dignified fashion. “We must continue this discussion at a later date.”
He casually stepped back, bowed, turned around and started heading back the way he came.
As soon as he was out of sight of the soldier he picked up his pace and when he hit the woods he started to jog a bit. He made good time getting back to the travel spot.
That’s the name he decided to use for the place from which he leaves his own time. The travel spot, it seemed as good as any name. He had marked a tree with a small X in white chalk when he arrived so that he would know the precise spot to stand when he turned the machine on again.
He put his back to the X and took two steps forward, then stopped and pulled out the device. He took a quick look around to make sure there was no one around to see this happen and then he twisted the disk.
When the lightning subsided he was standing in a little patch of parched grass thirty yards or so from his truck, which was parked behind a tree another thirty yards or so from the highway.
He put the device in his pocket and walked over to his truck.
When he arrived back at his house it was just starting to get dark. He was tired, he needed to sleep but he had a few things to do first.
He pulled a blank notebook out of a stack on the small desk in his office and grabbed a pen out of the coffee mug full of writing utensils next to his crappy old Mac.
Next he placed the disk in the bottom drawer of the file cabinet and made sure it was locked. Then he took his notebook and pen back into the living room and wrote down what he knew so far about the time machine.
Item 1 The machine’s dials only allow for travel to dates between 01/01/0000 and 12/31/9999. And the time dial operates on a 24 hour clock
Item 2 Wherever you are geographically when you start the time machine is the same location you will appear in the time you wish to travel to.
Item 3 The lightning ball created by the device will destroy anything in its area when it forms.
Item 4 I need to work on my cardio.
Chapter 3
After his first intentional experience with time travel Campbell spent the next few weeks doin
g research. He ordered every movie Netflix had that dealt with time travel. He read The Time Machine and Timeline. He made notes on parallel universes and time paradigms and how killing a mosquito a thousand years ago could drastically change future events. He watched Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure, just for fun.
A lot of people had thought about time travel over the centuries and there were a lot of similarities in the stories and theories, but there were also drastic differences.
He tried to weed out what was obviously total bullshit and what seemed like grounded hypotheses.
After four days solid in front of the TV with a notebook he ran out of coffee and beer and was very tired of Pizza Hut delivery so he decided he should go back to work. He called the Dean and told him the substitute was no longer needed, he was feeling better and he’d be back to work in the morning.
For the next few weeks he would get up every morning, go to school and teach his classes. After that he’d visit the library and research. He made a list of every historical event he wanted to witness first hand.
When he got home he’d spend some time grading, though he cut down his homework assignments, then he’d spend a few hours on the internet looking up clothing styles and materials, hair styles, languages. He brushed up on his Latin and Greek and French.
He spent his weekends cleaning out and organizing his garage. He made room for outfits and artifacts that he thought would help him blend in to the past.
When he decided it was time for another go at time travel he thought he would stick with something close. He went to his computer and looked up a map of Boston circa 1928, in prohibition America.
He called around to tailors and costume shops and found a grey double breasted suit with subtle pin stripes, a wide black tie and a wide brimmed black fedora. He wanted something that would make him appear as an average businessman of the period and wouldn’t stick out. He didn’t want to appear rich or poor. He wanted something that would allow him to go pretty much anywhere without raising eyebrows.
Out of Time: A story of archaeology... sort of Page 3