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

by David LaVigne

  He sat down at a big desk and opened the huge tome. Almost every other line, it seemed, was blacked out. In the entire book, which covered from God’s creation of earth and the heavens through the beginning of the Nazi regime in the 1930’s, there was not one single mention of the United States of America. Nor could he find any references to World War 2 with the exception of a brief explanation on how much of a pushover France was.

  Obviously something had happened that changed the past. At first he thought back to all that research he had been doing on time travel and he thought he must have stepped on a bug that changed world history. Ok, maybe the bug thing is a little ridiculous, but I must have done something.

  He tried to think of what he could have done that would have affected the course of time. There was the first time he traveled accidentally. Perhaps those Native Americans weren’t supposed to get into that fight, maybe one of them died and he was supposed to have kids that went on to help stop the Nazi’s. But that couldn’t be it because he would have noticed the change right away. There was all the time he spent in ancient Rome. Maybe meeting Marcus and convincing him to work for that senator prevented an assassination that was supposed to happen. That seemed a bit more likely.

  He made a list of all the things it could have been and started cursing the day he bought that old desk. He hadn’t even been planning on visiting the swap meet that day, he just wanted get out and do something to try and convince himself he didn’t have a hangover for the fifth day in a row.

  He was staring at the list when he heard a noise in the lobby. There was a male voice, speaking in German. Campbell got up and walked around the aisle to get a look at the entrance.

  There were four men, all in grey uniforms. Three of them had rifles slung on their shoulders. The fourth wore a long grey coat draped over his shoulders like a cape. He was wearing black leather gloves and was holding what looked like a riding crop in one hand. It appeared as though he was interrogating the lady behind the desk.

  From his vantage point Campbell couldn’t make out what was being said. The voice was loud enough but the echoes in the huge building made it hard to make out the words.

  The librarian said something and pointed to the back corner where Campbell had found the book and the four soldiers started to walk that way. Campbell had been reading at a table between two aisles, a few rows over from where he found the book and he tried to hide as the soldiers walked toward the corner. He watched them through the crack between two books and when they had their backs to him he tried to look casual and walked out towards the front door.

  He didn’t know why these men would be interested in him, but they obviously were. Though he was curious, he really didn’t want to risk getting caught and having the device fall into the hands of Nazi soldiers, leaving him stuck in an alternate 1955.

  Campbell made it to the front door when he heard the librarian shout, “There he goes.” When he stepped outside he started to run. He got down the street and around a corner and darted into a store.

  He took a second to catch his breath. It was a liquor store and the man behind the counter looked a little concerned at having an out of breath man run through his front door. Campbell looked back out the window to see if he was being pursued but it looked like he had turned the corner in time. He took a look around the store.

  There were aisles of candy bars and snacks and a line of refrigerators on the back wall full of canned beer. Campbell went up to the clerk and asked in his broken German if he had any maps. He was able to get an atlas of Europe for ten marks. He took the map and a can of some weird soda with a German label and after a quick glance up and down the street he left the store and hailed a cab.

  He told the cabby to drive and he gave the name of the hotel. In the backseat he opened the Atlas and tried to figure out where to go.

  Dr Hans Richter took a look around. There were cobble-stone streets and quaint wooden houses with thatched roofs. People wandered to and fro, guiding horses that pulled wagons loaded down with everything from hay to wooden boxes full of vegetables to crates of flintlock rifles. A group of blue-coated soldiers marched in a tight line in the distance.

  He pulled the little cylinder out of his pocket and looked at it again. He wasn’t quite sure what had happened but at least he was now in a time he recognized. When he built the device he didn’t really have any idea of what it was he just knew it looked intriguing and put the parts together.

  His first twist of the top half of the cylinder had put him on top of a hill, staring into a valley and watching a bunch of oddly dressed men run around in the mud. After a closer examination he realized it was a group of early Celtic tribesmen running around half naked hitting each other with wooden sticks and he got a little freaked out. And a little curious.

  He twisted the thing again and nothing happened. Now he was getting a little worried. The dials read 01 01 0101. He messed up the dials and switched to another random date and continued to bounce around through time until he had arrived in the Berlin of 1774 and his device stopped working.

  It had to be a power supply issue, he thought. The plans were half complete and although it explained the coil system used to boost the power up to what the device needed to operate, it didn’t explain where the power was coming from in the first place. Because he hadn’t built in any sort of battery he didn’t expect anything to happen when he tried to operate the device and was therefore very ill equipped to deal with his present situation.

  The people around him had stopped moving and were staring at him. They’re probably a bit freaked out by that giant ball of lightening that brought me here, he thought. He figured his first priority would be to get out of there and find somewhere safe, and probably get a hold of a new set of clothes, before these people burned him for witchcraft.

  It wasn’t too difficult for him to find an unattended clothesline and he grabbed a pair of pants and a shirt that were a few sizes too large. He used a pocket knife he had with him to cut some of the excess string from the clothesline to tie around his waist and hold his pants up. He was at a farmhouse and he saw a barn in the back of the property which should provide a quiet working space. He crawled up to a loft, which was filled with piles of hay, dug out a little section in which to hide and began trying to pull apart the cylinder.

  When Campbell left the liquor store in Rome he noticed a black car following the cab. He had the cab driver turn a few times on random streets to make sure he wasn’t just being paranoid. He wasn’t. The cabby quickly caught on to the fact that Campbell was running from something and confronted him about it, threatening to stop the car. Campbell was able to learn that, as a foreigner, he couldn’t travel in Germany without papers. Germany in this case apparently meant all of Europe. His accent and his questions in the library must have raised suspicions and the librarian probably called the secret police. That’s who was chasing him.

  The cab driver actually turned out to be surprisingly helpful. He was involved with an underground network that was trying to raise a resistance to Nazi rule in Italy. He was able to lose the tail and, after getting Campbell’s things from his hotel room, took him to a disused part of the subway system where the resistance group met in a small office just off the tracks.

  The group, there were four of them in the room, through Campbell in a chair and grilled him for nearly an hour about who he was, where he came from, what he was doing, and hundred other questions he couldn’t answer. He told them he had gotten lost and he was trying to get out of Italy. They assumed he was English and he went along with that. The fact that he was obviously confused by almost everything they asked him convinced them that he wasn’t secret police. In the end they agreed to help him out if he would carry a message into France for them.

  The cabby went back to work and Campbell spent the next six hours with other four, all of whom identified their self as Fabio for the sake of secrecy. They made him a fake passport and traveling papers. They even forged him a train ticket. They kep
t asking him questions he couldn’t answer. They refused to answer any of his, saying it was too risky if he know too much. Eventually he gave up and just decided to go with the flow. He figured he was probably fucked.

  When the rebels had finished getting everything in order they showed Campbell up to the street and gave him his papers. The message was written in code, and in disappearing ink, on a small scrap of paper which they put in the pocket of a brown jacket. He was told that a man would meet him at the train station in Nice. The man would walk up to him and say, “Its cold outside.” Campbell would give him the jacket. Then he was on his own. It seemed simple enough.

  He was able to find the train station and board the train with no problems. He was a bit nervous when the attendant came and checked his ticket, but he was fine. The fake ticket worked. “Great,” he said quietly to himself as the attendant walked on down the aisle. “Now I’m a spy.” He leaned back in his seat and closed his eyes.

  The train ride was uneventful. When he got to the station in Nice he disembarked the train and was almost immediately approached by a man in a dark suit and a grey fedora. The man looked plain. Campbell would never have thought twice about him if he hadn’t walked right up and commented about the cold weather. It wasn’t actually very cold.

  “Here,” Campbell said, holding the jacket out. “Take this.”

  The man in the grey hat took the jacket and walked away without another word. Campbell lit a cigarette and took in a long drag. “That was it?” he said. The whole train ride he had thought about James Bond and Mission Impossible. “Being a spy is nothing like the movies.”

  He had chosen a bad spot. Campbell was standing on the top of a hill looking down on a row of small biplanes surrounded by military personnel.

  He had hopped back on the train in Nice and kept going west until the train had stopped at a station in a small town that seemed to be in the middle of nowhere. He walked out into a field where he was sure he wouldn’t be seen and decided that was as good a travel spot as any.

  When he arrived in 1914 he was looking straight at a French Army Air Corps base. Luckily it was pouring rain so the ball of lightning he arrived in wouldn’t have drawn any attention. But that left him getting soaked, standing in a field with nothing as far as the eye could see except a bunch of French soldiers desperately trying to tie down their lightweight biplanes before the wind messed up their wood and canvas wings too badly.

  He thought back to stormy nights in 30,000 BC and how he saw the Neanderthals build lean-tos out of branches and leaves. He made himself a little shelter from the rain and tried to build a fire but couldn’t find anything dry enough to burn. So he just sat and watched the airplanes and their crews, waiting for the storm to die down.

  The next morning the rain cleared a little after sunrise and a very soaked and unhappy Dr Campbell walked out of his shelter and took a look around. The French countryside looked gorgeous in the little pockets of light that seeped through the clouds.

  There were a lot more people at the small military base than he had realized the night before. They were running around again, this time untying ropes instead of tying them and pulling tarps off of airplanes to examine the damage.

  Campbell had been using his toga as a blanket in the night and it was soaked through. His nose was running slightly. He needed a change of clothes and a hot meal, and probably some fresh water because who knows how clean the rain was.

  He wrapped up his roman clothes in his toga and buried it next to the tree where his shelter was. He tore down the shelter and stuck one of the branches into the soil at the base of the tree so that it stuck up a foot or so above the ground. His chalk wouldn’t stick to the wet trunk but this would at least give him a marker.

  He figured his suit wouldn’t really fit in either so he did what he could. He took the jacket off and stuffed it with the roman clothes in the toga before he buried it. He kept what was left of his gold in his pants pocket. He undid the buttons at the cuffs of his shirt and rolled up the sleeves a little. He should be able to pass for a farmer or something.

  As he walked down the hill towards the airfield he thought about what his cover might be. His French was good but he didn’t think he could pass himself off as a native speaker and German wouldn’t work, so he went with an American on a business trip who got lost along the way and got caught in that storm.

  There was a road in the distance, which he couldn’t see the night before. It led to the airfield and he could see about ten trucks heavily loaded with equipment headed towards the base. They were large military type trucks and many of them had a French flag painted on the door.

  When he was still a couple hundred yards away he saw another truck that was on its way out of the base. Pretty soon another and then another left. It was a convoy headed north. He decided to see if he could hitch a ride into a town somewhere.

  He ran toward the road and tried to cut off the lead truck but they were too fast. Five in all had left the compound and as he ran up along the side of the road the last vehicle stopped and a man with a cigarette between his lips stuck his head out of the window.

  “Bonjour,” Campbell said, sniffling and a bit out of breath.

  “Êtes-vous perdu?” the man said through a puff of smoke. ‘Are you lost?’

  “Pourriez-vous me prendre à la plus proche ville monsieur?” Campbell said. ‘Can you take me to the nearest town?’

  Campbell’s French seemed to be good enough because the man told him to hop in the back and they’d drop him off when they stopped for gas. The back of the truck was filled with soldiers wearing pale blue uniforms with rifles lying across their laps. They seemed happy to have someone new to talk to. They spent the next few hours in conversation, Campbell tried to learn anything he could about this 1914. When they asked him about himself he said he was from America.

  “America?” the sergeant asked. “Perhaps your translation is off?”

  “I think he means the colonies,” one of the other soldiers piped in. “You know, those Brit lands across the pond.”

  “Ah,” said the sergeant, “Sorry, we don’t get many people from the colonies around here, especially not with the threat of war all time. What brings you here?”

  “Business,” he replied, suddenly realizing he hadn’t thought of what that business might be.

  “And what do you do, monsieur John?” the sergeant asked.

  “I sell gold.” It was the first thing he could think of. He was pawing the little bag with a few ounces left in his pocket.

  “That could be a very lucrative business I imagine.”

  “The market’s slow right now.” It was what he always heard business men saying.

  “Really?”

  Oops. Idiot, he thought to himself, how could the gold business ever be slow?

  “Well, with the war coming and all they’ve sped up mining and my deposits are starting to run low.” Good save, he thought.

  He was saved from having to come up with more when their vehicle came to a sudden stop. He poked his head out of the back to see what was going on and it seemed they were on the edge of a small town.

  “Where are we?” he asked the soldiers.

  “Just stopping for gas monsieur,” one of the soldiers replied.

  Campbell jumped out and thanked the driver for the ride. He bid farewell to his soldier friends and looked around him. He was at a gas station on the edge of town. It was a small town at the base of a mountain. He could see the snow caps up in the distance. The weather was much nicer now and starting to get hot, so he wasn’t missing his jacket but he did need a change of clothes.

  The attendant at the gas station was friendly and told Campbell where he could get new clothes, but couldn’t think of anywhere he could exchange his gold for cash which left him out of luck. He walked through the town.

  The streets were mostly drying mud. There were grooves from wagon wheels set in the center of most of the roads and wooden walkways along the edges. The houses we
re all wood and moderately sized. Most were homes but there were quite a few little businesses as well.

  He found a general store with a grumpy old man for an owner. The owner told him to see the watchmaker down the way. Someone there might pay for some gold, and sure enough the watchmaker bought a half an ounce for what Campbell assumed to be a ridiculously low sum, but he needed the money and didn’t have time to haggle. Next he tried to find a history book.

  The little town had a public library that housed a small collection of semi-classic books and he found one on the history of the modern world. The soldiers’ reactions when he said he was from America were rather odd, he thought, so he looked up USA in the index and found nothing. He looked up July 4th, 1776 and found nothing.

  It turned out that the American Revolution never happened, though to this day, it seemed, there were small separatist groups who were using mostly terrorist tactics to try to push the British out. It reminded him of the situation in Northern Ireland.

  So there’s no US. “How did that change?” Campbell thought to himself. He read a little further and found that the Americans had indeed declared independence in 1776, but they couldn’t get all of the colonies to join in the war and without full support from all thirteen colonies they never got the decisive victories that got the French involved and without the foreign help the rebellion was quashed.

  “Well fuck.”

  He tried to look further back to see if there was anything else in history that had changed but that seemed to be the event that changed it all.

  OK, he thought, what caused some of the states to not get involved in the revolution and how do I fix it?

  He read through every bit of information he could find in the little library and nothing he could dig up gave him any helpful information, until he came across a name. Hans Richter. It took him a minute to figure out why that name was so familiar, but he made the connection. He knew the German scientist looked a little familiar when they met on the Hindenburg but he couldn’t place it. The man talking to that young woman when he visited 1776 Boston, it was him. But how?