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

by David LaVigne

  Campbell read on. He found an article that talked about him in length. It said Hans Richter was a German immigrant to the colony of Massachusetts who joined the continental army and, as an educated man was given a position as colonel. He led forces in the brief engagements at the start of the conflict and proved himself to be an incompetent leader, losing more than half of his forces in the opening moments of one engagement after having placed the bulk of his infantry in direct sight of British artillery forces. He had also gotten many of his friends appointed to high ranking positions. It was largely the appointment of such incompetent men to high command that led to the fall of the short-lived rebellion in the early spring of 1777.

  “Well fuck,” Campbell said again.

  He was going to need to get back to America but he was in 1914 and no man would cross the Atlantic by air for another thirteen years. Ok, a ship then. Of course that’s going to take weeks, and that’s assuming he can even get a passenger ticket on a ship going from France to North America.

  Perhaps I should just go back to 1776 now and hop a ship then, he thought. Of course that crossing would take even longer and there’s a lot more danger in it. I suppose I could steal a zeppelin, if the Germans are still working on them, and fly it myself. No, that would require knowledge of how to actually pilot a dirigible. Alright, ship it is.

  From the librarian he found out that there was a train station about ten miles away and he figured he could walk that. The train ride to Marseille where he could hop a ship to New York would take two days.

  It started to rain a mile into his walk, which made the next few hours miserable. He couldn’t risk the device getting wet since he didn’t know if water would mess with the circuits or whatever made it work. He placed the device in the leather bag with the gold and made sure it was sealed up as best he could.

  The train station was at another little town in the middle of nowhere but at least they had a money exchange and he converted a little of his gold into francs. He found a clothing store where he bought a pair of brown trousers with suspenders and an off-white collared shirt which allowed him to blend in a little better.

  The train ride took a little over two days and brought him into Marseille around sundown. It was a busy city, which made him feel a little better. It’s always easier to hide in a big city. He went straight for the docks and found that the next ship across the Atlantic wouldn’t leave for two more days, which left him stuck in 1914 France.

  As he walked the streets of Marseille Campbell really felt that something was off. Not that he would have known if it was right, but everything just felt wrong. He had imagined that there would be soldiers everywhere, but he saw none. He imagined that people would be holed up in houses, fearing the coming war, but the streets were alive.

  He found a café and decided to have lunch. It had outdoor seating on a little patio and it was pretty busy. The patrons were mostly men, sitting on the patio drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes. He ordered a sandwich and sat down.

  The coffee was a lot stronger than he liked and the waitress looked at him is if he were insane when he asked for milk, but the sandwich was good. He watched the people walking around the streets. There were more top hats and tail coats than he thought there should be but everyone seemed happy and the stores were obviously doing well.

  After lunch he went in search of a place to stay the night and found a cheap motel near the waterfront, in a part of the city that looked a lot more like what he had expected. There were women on the streets in makeup and frilly dresses, leaning against the walls and showing off bits of leg to the dockworkers passing by. The streets were muddy and trash was loosely piled into heaps by the gutters. There were no top hats here.

  He had gotten used to the prevalence of prostitution in ancient Rome, but the noises coming through the thin walls of the run-down motel room kept him up most of the night. He even debated with himself hiring one of the girls to keep him occupied, but he thought better of it.

  The next day he explored the city and found a quieter motel for not much more money. After an evening of chitchat with some dockworkers in one of the local bars and a decent nights’ sleep he got up the next morning, packed his things and boarded the Etoile de la Mer for the three week journey to New York.

  “I’m Alec,” the tall, thin man said as reached out a hand toward Campbell.

  “John,” Campbell said, shaking the hand.

  Alec stood nearly a head taller than Campbell and had to slouch to stand in their room. Campbell wanted to avoid spending money as much as possible and booked third class accommodations on the ship, which meant he’d be sharing a cabin with this man for the next three weeks.

  “It’s good to meet you,” Alec said. He had a heavy accent but his English was very good. After getting settled in the two decided to go explore the ship together.

  His first glimpse of the ship reminded him of the titanic and he had to tell himself that most ocean liners back then were perfectly safe. Inside the ship was lavish. Teak and oak panels made up the walls which were lined with expensive paintings. Even the carpeting was expensive. Once they got up to the main decks anyway. Campbell and Alec’s third class cabin was below the waterline and the only decoration on their walls was plumbing.

  It took half an hour to walk the main deck, stopping to admire the artwork and the eye candy along the way. They were barred access to the main lounge because of their low class tickets but they found a smoking room on one of the lower decks with a bar and got to know each other over a drink.

  Alec was on his way to Virginia where his wife was staying with her family. Like many of the other passengers on the ship, he was worried about the coming war. He sent his wife ahead and worked until he had enough for another ticket. That was six months ago. Campbell told Alec he had been in France on business and was headed back to Boston. He’d spent so much time using aliases and coming up with cover stories he was starting to feel like he was in a James Bond film.

  “Whiskey,” a large man said as he slammed a bill on the bar. He was caked from head to toe in black soot and he seemed exhausted. He slumped onto a stool with a bit of a thud.

  The Bartender pulled out a glass and filled it almost to the top, no ice. The big man downed half of it in one sip. Campbell and Alec were sitting at the bar. Alec was one seat away from the newcomer. They both looked at the man and raised their glasses.

  “Salute,” Alec said.

  “Cheers,” Campbell said.

  The big man’s name was Henri and he turned out to be headed to the colonies as well. Henri, however, didn’t have enough money even to travel third class. He had booked his passage by exchanging work for money, so he spent the bulk of the journey in a boiler room shoveling coal into giant furnaces and oiling the machine parts around humungous steam pistons down in the bowels of the ship.

  Henri turned out to be quite a talker, once he had a few drinks in him. Over the course of the conversation Campbell learned how miserable a life it was to work in the engine room. He asked Henri to show him around down there and he said at some point he would.

  After an hour or so Henri said goodnight, he would have to be up before sunrise to start another long day of shoveling coal. Campbell and Alec decided that sleep wasn’t a bad idea and they headed off to bed as well.

  The next couple weeks were excruciatingly boring. Alec and Campbell spent their days walking around the ship, watching the endless ocean and talking. Alec had worked on a vineyard in France and Campbell learned pretty much everything there was to know about making wine. He taught Alec what parts of history could be pretty sure hadn’t changed.

  The ship did provide some entertainment, but catered mostly to the upper classes. Some of the crew put on a play one night in first class dining hall and Campbell bought tickets for Alec, Henri and himself to see it. It was an all male stage show, including drag queens and hilarious innuendos. It was a nice break from the monotony of daily life at sea, but they couldn’t afford to do stuff lik
e that every night so the majority of the trip was just boring. Campbell decided he would never again travel by ship.

  Over the course of the trip Campbell was surprised at the lack of effort to hide homosexuality amongst the crew. This was a time when homosexuality was illegal in most of the western world and though they didn’t flaunt it in front of the guests it was very apparent. At one point Campbell tried to have a conversation with one of the crewmembers about it, but he wasn’t able to glean much information. It seemed to Campbell that in such a confined space for such a long period of time everyone had to get along. Perhaps that’s why the officers tolerated it, and why gay men flocked to a life at sea.

  Campbell still had some of his notebooks with him and he was continuing to take notes about everything new that he came across. If nothing else it was at least a way for him to keep himself occupied, and keep his mind off the whole history having been altered thing. It was only at night, when Henri and Alec had gone to bed, that his mind focused back on what he had to do.

  When he let his mind wonder he would often stay up for hours thinking about his situation. He tried to figure out how the Nazi scientist from the Hindenburg could have gotten himself back to 1776. He wondered how much of an impact his own time traveling had had on the timeline. He would confuse himself for hours on end speculating on how this whole time traveling thing worked. He tried to figure out how to go about setting things right again and he worried about the possibility that he couldn’t. Most of all he was frustrated by the fact that he was stuck on this ship for the remainder of the voyage and no matter what he needed to do he couldn’t do anything until he reached Boston.

  Campbell, Alec and Henri stepped onto the dock in New York, shook hands and parted ways. Campbell watched the other two walk away for a moment and wished that he would have a chance to see them again. Then he thought about it for a moment and decided once this adventure was over he would never touch the time machine again.

  Campbell looked out at the city. It looked quite a bit different from his last experience of New York. There were big buildings, but they weren’t nearly as tall and there weren’t nearly as many of them.

  In Marseille he saw men in top hats and tail coats flaunting their money and he half expected to see the same in New York, but the average dress looked pretty poor. There were no top hats, no shiny shoes. There were no women looking at fancy dresses in shop windows. There were bars and brothels, dock workers and construction workers and poor people begging for change. Everything was grey.

  He found Grand Central Station, right where it should be. There were British flags flying above the entrance. At the ticket counter he was informed that there would be a train headed for Boston in a few hours. Good, he thought to himself, don’t need to kill too much time. He asked for a ticket for one, but when he tried to pay they wouldn’t take his Francs. Luckily there was a currency exchange in the lobby and he switched out enough for the train ticket and a few meals.

  He saw a café and he thought he would grab a cup of coffee. He looked at the menu and it took a few minutes for him to find the word coffee in tiny print tucked in a corner, under all the different kinds of tea. When he ordered it got him a funny look.

  “It’ll be a few minutes,” the man behind the counter said, with a bit of an accent. It wasn’t British, but it certainly wasn’t New Yorker as he knew it.

  While he was waiting for his coffee Campbell took a newspaper from a stand next to the counter and sat at one of the little tables in front of the café that looked out into the huge lobby of the train station. The headline talked about the inevitable war that would soon shake Europe and whether or not England should get involved. And if they did, what that would mean for the Colonies.

  He looked through the rest of the paper and found the comics near the back. British humor in comic strip form, he thought to himself, shaking his head. Then he said aloud, “I better be able to pull this off.”

  He boarded the train and spent most of the trip trying to sleep. Everything about this alternate America was freaking him out. He had adjusted pretty well to time traveling, and he even got excited when he found things that historians had gotten wrong. But British America in 1914 was just plain unsettling.

  The streets of Boston were all where they should be, but the names were different. British flags were flying all over the place. The whole city felt off. Campbell kept stopping to stare at things he knew. Even though they looked exactly as they should, everything just felt wrong. He avoided going near his own neighborhood. He thought that would freak him out too much and he didn’t want to spend any more time than he had to in this weird world.

  He quickly hailed a cab and had the driver take him outside the city. He walked off into the forest and tried to get as close as he could to his old travel spot, but quickly got himself lost. He spent the next twenty minutes trying to get some sort of orientation.

  “Screw it,” he said eventually, “this’ll work.” He pulled the small leather bag out of his pocket and removed the device. He set the dials and twisted.

  Chapter 6

  1776 Boston looked exactly as it had the last time he was here. Campbell was walking down the street that ran along the dockside. It was two weeks after the signing of the Declaration of Independence, which was about the time the history book had said Richter got appointed colonel.

  He had purchased some older style clothes in 1914, but he had to change quickly again to blend in in 1776. He was starting to run very low on his gold supply. He had thought about heading back home before making the journey to this time, but as freaky as 1914 Boston was he was afraid of what the Boston of his own time would look like in this alternate history so he decided to just keep going. He had enough gold left to get a few sets of clothes and some cash to hopefully get him through a week or so in this time.

  Now he needed to figure out how to find Richter. How to stop him from changing time was another issue but he’d figure that out when it came to it. For now he needed to find him, and in the eighteenth century if you wanted the latest gossip you went to the town square.

  As he walked along the streets he saw a lot of activity. Everywhere he looked he saw men cleaning muskets and swords. There was a group of men standing around a blacksmiths workshop using his fire to melt lead into musket balls. Everyone in the whole town seemed to be talking at once. He had to stop at a corner to let thirty men march by in blue and white uniforms. It was a town preparing for war.

  The mood around him was mostly upbeat. Taverns were all full even though it was the middle of the day. The people seemed to be masking their worry over going to war with the world’s most powerful empire by drinking with a smile and cracking jokes and generally being merry.

  As Campbell approached the courthouse he heard rapid gun fire echo from some distance away. He walked out to the river side of town and looked across the water to where there were a couple hundred men, some in the blue and white uniform of the Continental Army but most in their everyday dress of frock coats and trousers in varying shades of brown, lined up in ranks and firing at straw dummies fifty yards or so away.

  He stood there for a few minutes watching the groups load and fire and reload. There was a tall blonde man walking back and forth behind the ranks in a pristine uniform, stopping periodically to fix a soldier’s posture or the way he held his musket or show him how to aim down the barrel then look away right before the flint sparked against the powder causing a flash of bright light and a cloud of smoke.

  The soldiers were at least a few hundred yards away but Campbell could smell the thick sulfuric smoke of the gunpowder. They had been firing by ranks, one man firing while the two behind him would reload, then stepping to the back of the line as the next men stepped forward to fire. Before long the smoke was so thick Campbell could barely make out shadows of the men in the white cloud.

  He tried to listen to what the commander was saying but he was too far away. He was concentrating hard when he heard footsteps beside him, making
him jump a little. The young woman was giggling when he turned to see who it was.

  “A little jumpy are we?” said Mary McCormick.

  “You startled me is all,” Campbell said as he calmed himself down.

  “I was hoping I’d run into you again, Mr. Campbell was it?”

  “John, please,” Campbell replied. He smiled a little at seeing her again. She looked beautiful. Her golden hair flowed about her shoulders and her vibrant blue eyes stared into his.

  “You’re looking lovely this morning,” he said.

  She smiled for a moment, and then looked out across the river to where the soldiers were drilling.

  “Exciting isn’t it?” she said. “I can’t wait to watch them do it for real. I almost tried to join up myself you know.”

  “And why on earth would you want to do that?”

  “Excitement, adventure,” she said. “It sure beats getting all gussied up to sit at some boring ball night after night.”

  He was surprised at the vigor in her voice.

  “What about you, John?” she said. “You don’t want to march off to the glory of battle?”

  “Not in the slightest,” Campbell answered.

  “Why not?” She asked. She was shocked at his answer, though not as much as her expression suggested.

  “It may seem all romantic and exciting. A dream of adventure and ideals and fighting for what’s right, but the reality to come is not going to be what you imagined.” He was staring out across the lake again. This girl may be beautiful, he thought to himself, but my god she’s naive.