Out of Time: A story of archaeology... sort of

by David LaVigne

  Marcus took the knife that had fallen to the ground and slipped it into a pouch he wore on his belt. Then he dropped a few coins on the table and dragged an unconscious Lunicus to the street.

  “Come on,” he said back to Campbell, “it’s not good to stick around after a fight.”

  “You knew him?” Campbell asked as they headed down the street away from the alehouse.

  “We were in the legion together, fighting in Germania.”

  “Not such good friends now?” Campbell asked.

  “He was always a piece of shit. One of those guys who thinks he’s above everyone, like he’s entitled to everything. He’d always do everything he could to get out of work, and he used his family’s friendship with the general as an excuse for everything. You know he kissed so much ass in the army he made centurion from nothing in less than three years?” He spat. “The only worse person I can think of is Flavius. That piece of shit Senator was in my legion too.”

  Marcus went on to explain how Lunicus had built up a pretty bad gambling habit a few years back and lost all of his money. These days whenever he could scrounge together enough cash for a drink and a round of dice he’d visit a place like the Phoenician, which at night doubled as a gambling house, and piss it all away. A few weeks ago he had lost a few months soldiers pay to Marcus and was a little bitter about it.

  “He thinks I cheated him,” Marcus said as they turned a corner and came upon one of the many markets in the city.

  “Did you?” Campbell asked.

  “Never,” Marcus said with a wink and a sly smile. They had stopped in front of the entrance to the market and looked out to see a thousand people in tunics and dark colored togas weaving their way in and out of storefronts and booths set up around a few city blocks worth of open space near one of the big gates in the city wall. You could find anything you wanted in one of these places.

  “Now,” Marcus said, “What do you want for dinner?”

  After that night Campbell and Marcus would visit the Phoenician at least once a week. Campbell got to know some of the undesirable characters that frequented the place and he thought about how he would have made an effort to avoid a place like that in his modern life. It surprised him how easily he adjusted things that should have shocked and terrified him. He still had the feeling that what he was experiencing wasn’t real.

  Every day for the first week when he woke up it took him a minute to remember that he was in ancient Rome. He found a vendor from Turkey selling coffee in one of the markets and he would make a cup of coffee every morning. Aside from the lack of computers and cell phones and cars, none of which bothered him in the least bit, life in ancient Rome didn’t seem too different. Once he had adjusted to the bathroom habits of the Romans he almost didn’t want to go back.

  One day in his third week in Rome Campbell was in the Forum, practicing his much improved Latin with some of the local citizens, when he heard the heralds announce a Triumph was to take place. He rushed home to tell Marcus, who wasn’t excited in the least bit.

  “I’ve marched in half a dozen Triumphs,” Marcus told his friend. “It’s really not that exciting.”

  “It’s going to be tomorrow,” Campbell said. “I want to see it.”

  “Very well,” Marcus sounded annoyed, but Campbell could tell he was happy to see his friend happy. The next morning they woke early and headed down to the Forum to get a good look.

  The troops would enter the city through the northern gate and march a couple of miles, twisting their way through the streets until they reached the Forum where the General would march up the steps of the Senate to receive his award from the hand of the emperor. Marching in between the legions would be cages of exotic animals from the recently conquered lands, rows of young slaves and the vanquished enemy warriors.

  Campbell loved it. He had hated parades in his own time, but now he found himself cheering along with the rest of the Romans as the armored legions marched past. Marcus was trying to seem bored, but Campbell saw the glint in his eyes as the Centurions barked at their men to stay in step. He knew how much his friend missed the glory days.

  When the general and his guards reached the steps of the Senate Campbell tried to weave his way through the crowd to get a look at the emperor, but there were too many people packed too close together. The ceremony was over in a minute and the emperor was gone. Then the party started and Campbell quickly forgot about studying the history and got lost in the fun.

  Before he realized it Campbell’s intended three week stay had turned into more than three months in ancient Rome. He had gotten so caught up in everything he nearly forgot he wasn’t actually Caius from Britannica. One day however he picked up his time machine and though about all the other pasts he wanted to see. He decided it was time for a change of scenery and there were other times in this area he wanted to explore. He wanted to go further back and see ancient Greece. He also wanted a look at medieval Europe, maybe even the crusades.

  At first he thought of telling Marcus that he was leaving but he decided it wouldn’t matter. He could always just come back to the exact moment he left. He was still getting used to the whole idea and kept thinking that he would have to get back before the summer ended to go back to work. But of course that didn’t matter: to everyone in 2011 he wouldn’t even have left.

  Marcus had been offered a job working as a guard for a senator and Campbell encouraged him to take it. After all he didn’t exactly have a pension from the army and he possessed few marketable skills other than war. Without Campbell helping on the rent he would find himself on the street so being a bodyguard would be good for him.

  Marcus’ first day on the job coincided with the opening day of the Coliseum, which was the last thing Campbell really wanted to see before he left. Marcus and Campbell had been planning on being there and Campbell had even bought them both tickets a couple months in advance, but Marcus had to go to work and he told Campbell to go on his own.

  Campbell arrived at the Coliseum early but the streets were already packed. It took nearly two hours for him to get in and find his seat. It was another hour or so before anything actually happened.

  There were elaborate opening ceremonies and some sacrifices. The games would go on all day, and Campbell stayed for the entire thing. He even joined in on the gambling. The tattooed man that he had seen practicing was in one of the first fights and Campbell bet on him. The man won and got Campbell three times his money back, which he put towards more bets. Campbell was never much of a gambler, but he had a little money he could afford to lose and he was having fun.

  The thought occurred to him about halfway through the day that he was cheering people on as they killed each other and it made him feel a little weird for a moment. In his modern mind he thought he should feel bad for these people, that this whole event was barbaric and wrong. But then he thought about going to a movie theater to watch the same thing on a screen and thought it really wasn’t any different. Yeah, the people on the movie screen aren’t actually killing each other, but the idea is the same and really just as barbaric. He debated with himself for a while, but quickly forgot about his internal moral dilemma when three men and a very unhappy lion entered the ring.

  “Sure you’ll be alright without me, Caius?” Marcus said as he was preparing to head out the door. “Maybe we should find you a job too. That gold of yours won’t last forever, you know.”

  Campbell had come home late after the Gladiator fights the night before and he was still a little sleepy. He was going to leave in the night but he had a few too many drinks at the Coliseum and decided to hang around till the morning.

  “Maybe I’ll go look for one today,” Campbell replied.

  “I’ll be back around sundown,” Marcus said. Then he turned and headed out the door.

  Campbell waited for an hour or so after Marcus left, soaking up the sights and sounds of ancient Rome a little more before leaving. Then he threw on his toga and headed out. He left most of the stuff he had
acquired over the past month because he planned on heading back to Boston after World War Two when they had reliable airplane service across the Atlantic and he didn’t want to cart ancient artifacts all that way.

  He walked out the northern gate and hitched a ride into the country with a farmer who was driving a new ox-pulled cart back to his homestead. When they reached the little trail that led into the woods where he had arrived he bid farewell to the farmer and hopped off the cart.

  It took him about a half an hour to find the right tree and dig up his clothes. He changed into his 1930’s suit and stuffed the Roman garb into the duffel bag. He had purchased another small leather pouch and he stuffed most of the denarii he had left in that and buried it at the base of the tree for when he returned. Then he pulled out the little disk and thumbed the dials towards himself until the year read 1955 and walked three paces straight in front of the X, as he had written below his mark on the tree.

  Before he twisted the disk and activated the time machine he stared at it for a second and laughed. November 5, 1955. Ha. He got the chuckle out, turned, shook his head and twisted.

  When the lightning ball died down Campbell was standing in the middle of a forest like none he had ever seen. The trees towered hundreds of feet above his head and the leaves were gargantuan. He heard a loud throaty rumbling noise and the breaking of branches behind him and he turned around and saw something that he told himself wasn’t a mastodon walking through the woods.

  He froze, staring at the giant furry elephant for a moment thinking for the second time in his life that he was seeing something that was physically impossible.

  When the big monster passed, Campbell turned around a few times, examining the forest.

  “What the fuck?” Campbell said, more than a little surprised. He stared down at the disk in his hand which read 11:52 and 49 seconds, Nov. 5th, 1955.

  “What the fuck?” he said again.

  Chapter 5

  It took Campbell nearly an hour of jumping between times to figure out what had happened. Until now every time he had changed the date on the device he had thumbed the dials away from himself, essentially counting up. Somehow the disk must have bounced around in his pocket and rubbed against something that turned the date to zero so that when he turned the dials towards himself it counted down, BC. The number of times he moved first year dial past 0 sent him another ten thousand years before or after.

  This opened up a slew of new possibilities for him. He thought before that he could only travel in positive numbers but now, he realized, he could witness the birth of Christ, see the battle of Thermopylae, even the burial of a Pharaoh.

  At the moment he was watching early man try to make a fire. It was fascinating. There was a small group, most likely a family, gathered around the entrance to a cave. He had once again marked the tree nearest to his travel spot and headed off through the woods trying to find some form of human life.

  He had come across this family group carving up the carcass of some sort of large rodent and dragging the hide and meat and bones into the cave. There were six of them, of various ages, that he had seen so far. He took care to keep himself hidden in the woods.

  He watched them as they tore up the carcass. It was rough work, yet rather precise. Their tools were just stones that they had chipped into the shapes they needed but they seemed to know anatomy fairly well. They quartered the creature and bled it. They skinned it with practiced ease. The largest of the males was huddled over a pile of damp twigs and brush. It was raining pretty heavily. He was rubbing a stick between his hands that he kept twisting back and forth and it only took a few minutes for a small amount of smoke to start seeping up from the pile.

  He made a series of guttural sounds that must have been some sort of speech and one of the two smaller males came over and started blowing on the base of the pile as the bigger man, presumably the father, kept rubbing. A few more minutes passed and they suddenly had a small fire.

  Campbell made a trip back to a more modern era and bought a few notebooks and a dozen pens and spent a few weeks tracking these Neanderthals through Europe, learning their techniques through observation and using them to keep himself warm and fed.

  The females would make clothes from the animal hides after the males had skinned them. A woman would take a piece of stone, chip into a sharp wedge with another stone, then hold an edge of the hide in her teeth and scrape the fur off with the stone. They used the same sharp stones to cut the hide into crude shapes and rub the brain on the skin to tan it into leather. Then they’d bind the pieces with sinew to make clothes. Campbell tried to imitate this, but he tired quickly and nearly chipped a few teeth trying to hold the hide in his mouth. Eventually he decided to leave the fur on and just make the hide into a blanket he would drape over his shoulders.

  He followed the men out a few times as they hunted. He noticed that all of these Neanderthals were right handed, and the men did almost everything that required force, such as throwing a spear, with their right hands. As a result they all had significantly larger right arms than their left, leaving them all looking a bit lopsided.

  They hunted with crude spears in small groups. They’d track down small game and spread out to surround the animal and try to push it towards one man who would kill it. Obviously Campbell couldn’t reproduce this himself but he also observed them making traps by bending branches and after a few attempts he was able to get a few small rodents that way. He never thought he’d find himself eating rat, but it really wasn’t that bad. The foraging tips he picked up were much more useful.

  He filled almost twenty notebooks over the next few weeks and felt that he had more than enough to publish an article in Science changing the way archaeology viewed prehistoric man. But what good would all these notes be without evidence to back it up. Did he really want to expose his access to a real live time machine to the world? Absolutely not, he decided.

  He packed up his stuff and headed to 1955 as he had originally planned. He decided he would keep the notebooks and file them away in his house.

  “Well this definitely isn’t right,” Campbell said aloud as he looked up at a giant statue of Adolf Hitler looking over the city of Rome.

  The date on the device read 02 08 1955 and he was positive he had counted the right amount of twists he needed to get back into positive dates. He looked at the statue again. It was nearly four stories high and portrayed a young Hitler in full dress uniform sticking his arm out in a Nazi salute to the people of Italy.

  All around him the city looked, for the most part, like he thought it should. He walked down the street and saw men in light colored suits going about their business, and women in colorful dresses shopping in the store fronts. Where Marcus’s favorite market had stood there was now a three-story shopping mall.

  Downtown there were large buildings that stretched into the sky and small cars and men on scooters packed every street. There were little cafes with dozens of tables and chairs out front, filled with suave looking men with greased back hair chain smoking non-filtered cigarettes. It looked like Europe.

  He turned another corner and found a little news stand were there were racks of magazines and newspapers. He picked up the daily paper and read the date just to make sure. It was correct.

  Campbell’s Italian was pretty rusty but the clerk spoke good German and with a combination of his limited knowledge of the two languages he was able to communicate a bit. He asked where he could exchange some gold for money and the man pointed out a jewelry store down the street that he said would buy the metal.

  He received a hundred marks for a quarter ounce of gold. He didn’t how much that really meant but it would have to do. He added it to the remaining Denarii coins and the 1936 Italian cash in his pocket and thought of all the questions a cop might have had if he decided to search him.

  He found himself a hotel. That was easy. The same hotel he was using in 1936 was still here in 1955. After a pasta lunch in a little corner bistro down the street fro
m the hotel he went back to the newsstand and bought the daily paper. He looked for a copy of the New York Times but there was none. The paper and most of the magazines were in German.

  The headline story today was praising the German army for a successful siege of Moscow and the long overdue surrender of Soviet forces to the unstoppable might of the Third Reich.

  “Well that’s definitely not good.”

  Campbell asked a few dozen people before he finally got directions to a library. It was large and old. There was only one other person inside and that was the librarian. She was on old lady, easily in her seventies. She was sitting behind a giant in desk in the large open entryway. Behind her there were fifty or so long, high aisles of shelves covered in books. There was a spiral staircase that led to a second floor with many more books.

  He woke the librarian up with a gentle nudge and asked her where the history section was. She gave him a weird look as if she had never been asked that before and then told him to go to the back left corner and he’d find whatever they had.

  When he got there he found they didn’t have much. There was only one large book that took both of his hands to lift. It was titled ‘The History of the World.’ The rest of the shelf was filled with variations on the history of the Reich and biographies on Hitler.