The three men on the mat stood there staring at the four newcomers, speechless. Marcus was stunned. Mary just looked around her curiously. Richter jumped to his feet and Campbell snatched the disk out of his hand and ran to the closest table and picked up a rapier with a long slender blade and an elaborate hilt of round bars that curled around the hand. He pointed it at Richter, stopping him in his tracks.
Richter grabbed a sword off the table and used it to knock Campbell’s blade away. He thrust in at Campbell’s gut, but Campbell parried with the hilt of his sword and brought his tip up towards Richter’s throat. Richter sidestepped and the point of Campbell’s sword flew by his head.
“Answer my question,” Campbell said, recovering his blade. As he attempted another thrust he said, “why ancient Rome?”
Richter parried Campbell’s sword with his, and slid his blade along Campbell’s, pushing the tip toward Campbell’s face. But Campbell dodged.
“Why not?” Richter replied. He pulled his blade back and reset his stance. “When I realized your machine actually worked properly I saw an opportunity to explore the past. Who wouldn’t want to see ancient Rome?”
Marcus recovered from his awe enough to see what was happening and he grabbed the little metal cylinder that was on the ground where Campbell had been standing and crawled over to Mary.
“How does it work?” he asked her.
“You can’t use that one,” she said, “It will only work once and we need it to get Richter back to his time and get us all back to ours.”
Marcus understood half of what she said but it was enough. He looked up at Richter and Campbell and watched the duel for a few minutes, trying to come up with a plan.
Campbell’s previous sword work with Lunicus was helping, but not much. Richter was raised in a boarding school where he had been forced to learn fencing. Campbell was holding his own, but he wasn’t sure how long he could keep it going. The three men on the other side of the mat got over their surprise and two of them ran out the door while the other man just stood there watching them.
Campbell attempted another thrust at Richter but it was parried. Richter took a step forward, thrust, and then stepped back, keeping his empty hand behind his back like an Olympic fencer.
“Why didn’t you just go home?” Campbell said, parrying another thrust.
Richter adjusted his stance again and started to get a little more aggressive with his attacks. After three failed attempts to stab Campbell in the gut he replied. “I did. But after all that time, and the imprisonment, and you stealing Mary from me, I couldn’t just go back to work.”
Richter was staying in a straight line with every lunge and retreat and Campbell used that to his advantage, stepping to the right and bringing his sword in from the side. It worked, Richter was slow on the defense, but Campbell’s aim was off and he just grazed Richter’s shoulder. It wasn’t enough to slow him down and Richter reacted quickly, mimicking Campbell’s side step and bringing his point towards Campbell’s belly.
Campbell reacted by pushing Richter’s blade to the side and stepping in close and hitting Richter hard in the face with his elbow. Richter stumbled back a few steps and Campbell thrust out with his sword, but he was out of range.
“I went to future and saw that we had lost. Everything seemed pointless, so decided to go somewhere else.”
“Why Rome?” Campbell asked, recovering.
“Why not?” Richter said. He took a step closer but Campbell stepped to the side and back out of range.
“Why impersonate an emperor?”
“I could,” Richter said, matching Campbell’s footwork.
“Do you realize how many terrible things in history have been done by some scientist, just because he could,” Campbell said through his teeth as he moved in with a lunge to Richter’s gut. It caught Richter off guard, but he was quick with the parry and stepped to the side, jumping back a little.
“As the emperor of Rome, what the hell do I care?” He stabbed again.
“You’re not Titus now,” Campbell said. He parried and took a step forward, but Richter moved out of range again. “You’ve been caught.”
“Will you stop dancing around and die?” Richter said as Campbell avoided a lunge.
“It’s time to go home, Hans,” Campbell said.
“I do not want to go home, Dr. Campbell,” Richter replied and moved to thrust his sword at Campbell’s throat.
Then there was a shout in Italian from the other side of the room. Richter and Campbell looked over to see the instructor still on the mat, holding a whip. The man was yelling at them. Had they understood Italian they would have heard him tell them that they were inept simpletons with no concept of form or civility, I offer classes on Monday, now stop wrecking my studio. But neither of them understood.
Marcus took that as his opportunity to step in and he rushed Richter and brought him to the floor. Mary ran over to help and Campbell quickly scrambled the date on the device and twisted and again they were surrounded by lightning.
When the device shut off they were standing in the middle of a street surrounded by tall, run-down buildings covered in weeds and vines. The pavement was cracked and tall grass was growing up in places all around them. A herd of wild boar was roaming the street to their left and they heard a rumbling sound far off to the right.
Campbell turned to see what looked like a truck with no wheels hovering about a foot above the ground. It was moving towards them and on either side of it were vaguely human shaped robots holding what appeared to be very large weapons.
“Ok,” Campbell said. “That’s definitely not right.” He looked down at the device and the date read 3354.
Richter, lying on his back under Marcus, looked over at the robots and then up at Campbell and said, “Can you maybe turn that thing back on again now?”
Campbell started to move the dials to 1936 but laser beams starting coming towards them from the direction of the robots and the hovering truck and he just flipped all the numbers with his thumb and twisted.
This time they showed up in the middle of a forest. It was the dead of night in 0000 and there was no civilization in sight. Richter pushed Marcus off of him and grabbed Campbell’s feet, pulling him to the ground. He managed to get the device out of Campbell’s hand and started to run into the forest. Marcus scrambled after him, but Richter kicked him in the face and took off.
The others chased after him but Mary was having trouble keeping up and they were starting to get separated. Campbell fell back, and soon Marcus realized that Richter had gotten away and his friends were no longer in sight so he turned back.
“Now what?” Marcus asked as Campbell and Mary came jogging up to him.
“We’ve got to go after him,” Campbell said.
“He could be anywhere by now,” Mary said. “He could be any time.”
“We still have this,” Marcus chimed in, holding up Richter’s cylinder.
“But it’s only good for one more shot,” Mary said.
Campbell sat down on the limb of a fallen tree and rested his head in his hands. They had to do something, but what? Mary was looking at the ground and she saw footprints. It must have rained recently because the ground was very moist and Richter’s sandals had left very clear prints in the mud.
“Look,” she said, pointing to the prints. “We can follow him, if he hasn’t activated it again yet.”
Campbell remembered how the Neanderthals had tracked the animals they hunted through the woods and figured he’d be able to follow Richter even if he tried to hide his tracks. They headed out at a slow pace and pretty soon the footprints disappeared, but Campbell noticed some bent twigs moving off in another direction and they hiked up a hill in pursuit.
The trail took them up the hillside for an hour, moving over fallen trees and through tall grass and a few times they could see where Richter had zigzagged over hundreds of yards to try to lose them, but as they reached a clearing where they could see almost all the way down
the mountain they heard the distinctive crack of lightning and knew that he was gone.
Between Campbell’s rapier and Marcus’ gladius they were able to cut up enough branches to make a small shelter for the three of them and they built a fire and curled up next to it.
They were all exhausted. Marcus offered to take first watch. He stayed up to keep the fire going and keep an eye on their trail as Mary and Campbell cuddled up to sleep. But Campbell couldn’t sleep.
After a half an hour or so he sat up and told Marcus he’d take over the watch but Marcus was too busy thinking to sleep as well.
“We only have one more use, right?” He asked Campbell.
“Yeah,” Campbell said, depressed. “And we can’t use it to go home because we all have homes in different times and that would still leave all the things that Richter changed.”
“That’s the thing,” Marcus said, a light bulb almost visible above his head. “We’ve been going about this all wrong.”
“What do you mean?”
“You said that in 1776 things had already changed. That’s because Titus going back to my time started changing things then. So you tried to stop him in Rome, but that wouldn’t have worked either.”
“Because we went back to a time after he had already started to change things,” Campbell was starting to get the picture. He had been trying to stop Richter as history was getting changed but what they needed to do was go back and stop him from leaving his own time in the first place.
“When I first met Richter in 1936,” Campbell told Marcus, “he was on his way back to Germany from New York. He said he had been there on a lucrative business trip.”
“And?” Marcus said.
“In 1936 Nikola Tesla was selling patents to try and make up for his lack of funds. Tesla built my time machine.”
“I don’t understand the majority of what you just said,” Marcus said, “but I’m guessing you think that’s where he got his time machine.”
“Must have been. He had a briefcase with him. The designs must have been in there.”
“So, 1936.”
“We go there and stop him from building his machine, therefore fixing all the damage.”
“How do we know that’ll work?” Mary said. She was curled up on the ground next to Campbell and she had been listening to the whole conversation. “If we go to 1936, how do we know it will be the same 1936?”
“Do we have a choice?” Campbell asked.
“We only have one shot,” Marcus said. “If the device will only work one time then we’ll be stuck in 1936.”
“No,” Mary answered, “we don’t have a choice.”
Chapter 9
It took Campbell, Mary and Marcus nearly a month to make it from Cisalpine Gaul to Germania. They only had one chance at using the time machine and it had to count, so they decided to travel as close as they could get to what would in 1936 be Frankfurt, Germany before using the device.
Most of the area they had to travel through was Roman controlled and there were paved roads, or least what the Romans called paved roads, which made traveling easy. They had hijacked a lone traveler early on the journey and commandeered his two horses and what cash he had on him, which made the journey even easier.
They would come across a town every few days and spent their stolen denarii on food to keep them going. When it was longer between towns Marcus and Campbell would hunt. Every night they would find a place a little ways into the woods, or at least a way from the road, to camp.
Without having maps available Campbell had to cross check where people told them they were with what he could remember of maps of modern Europe. When he thought they were as close as they were going to get they found a spot that Campbell assumed would probably outside of town to travel. The three of them stood close together, Mary holding Campbell tightly around the waist, and Campbell activated the device.
When they appeared in 1936 they were standing in the middle of an empty road. They looked around and saw nothing in but straight road as far as they could see, so they picked a direction at random and walked for nearly an hour until they found sign that told them they were about twenty miles outside of Luxemburg, which put them nearly a hundred and fifty miles away from Frankfurt. It was a good thing Campbell had the foresight to give them some breathing room, he had set the date to give them three days until he and Richter would land in the Hindenburg.
They had each acquired a cloak along the journey from the Alps and though it looked a little odd for three people to be walking through 1936 Germany wrapped up in capes it would look a lot less odd than the Roman tunics underneath.
A few hours later they were looking at the outskirts of the city of Luxemburg trying to figure out how to get a hold of contemporary garb, and how they were going to travel a hundred and fifty miles in less than three days.
Against Mary and Campbell’s wishes they resorted to theft. Marcus still had his gladius and Campbell had hung on to the rapier from his duel with Richter and though the swords would look as out of place as the clothes, they would probably be intimidating enough. Campbell convinced Marcus it wasn’t necessary to kill a man in order to take his clothes and the two of them hid in the bushes while Mary stood on the side of the road with her thumb out.
Pretty soon a sleek black car came along and pulled over next to Mary. When the passenger rolled down his window Marcus and Campbell burst from the bushes with swords in hand. Campbell rushed around to the driver’s side, Marcus ran up next to Mary at the passenger window, and they pointed the tips of their swords into the car.
The two people in the car were dressed in black Nazi SS uniforms. Without flinching the passenger pulled out a gun and pointed it at Marcus. Marcus had no idea what it was, but he figured it was a weapon of sort so he hit the back of the pistol with his blade and knocked it from the Nazi’s hand, and then he reached in and dragged the man from the car through his window and slammed the guy’s face into his knee until he was unconscious.
The driver handed his pistol and car keys calmly to Campbell. Campbell and Marcus swapped clothes with the Nazis in the back seat of the car and then left them tied up behind the bush they had sprung from. This is going to end badly, Campbell thought as he donned the Nazi officer’s uniform. He knew it was a bad idea as soon he saw who the occupants of the car were, but at that point it was too late. They were committed to the robbery. There wasn’t much of a choice.
When they were satisfied that they’d done a decent enough job tying and hiding the two Nazi’s Campbell climbed into the driver’s seat of their newly acquired car and Mary climbed into the back. It made more sense for Marcus to ride shotgun. He gave Marcus a quick rundown on how a gun works and they took off towards Frankfurt.
They ran into a checkpoint about fifteen miles down the road, which worried them at first, but the guards immediately saw the uniforms and waved them through without saying a word. That made Campbell let out a huge sigh of relief since he didn’t know nearly enough German to pull off the disguise. Another fifty miles down the road they hit another checkpoint, and another twenty miles after that. Though they continued to get waved through every time, they decided it wasn’t worth the risk. They planned to ditch the car and try to find another one in the next town.
Lucky for them the officers had been planning on a long trip and they had suitcases in the back. They found civilian clothes that fit the men well enough and a pair of slacks and a nice shirt that hung loose on Mary. Marcus urged Campbell to hold on to the uniforms. He thought they might come in handy later. Between the two wallets there was over two thousand Deutschmarks so they bought train tickets in the next city and took an overnight train to Frankfurt.
Since leaving ancient Rome they had been so busy worrying about what they were going to do next that Marcus hadn’t had a chance to get freaked out about the whole time traveling thing. But now that they were sitting on a train with nothing to do a thousand things ran through his head and for the first time since his first sight of
battle he began to panic a little. Every new bit of technology he came across made him flinch and a few minutes into the train ride he asked Campbell where he could get a drink. The three of them headed for the dining car.
Three glasses of wine later Marcus’s panic turned to curiosity and Campbell spent most of the train ride answering questions. Campbell had spent a few months pumping Marcus for information, now it was his turn to explain everything they came across. Mary just stared out the window most of the time, excited to be back in the future.
The train pulled into the Frankfurt station the morning of the Hindenburg’s arrival. The three time travelers stopped in a café for lunch and then headed for the airfield with one other stop along the way. Campbell took the remainder of their money and bought a cheap used car they would use to tail Richter as he left the airfield. They wanted to make sure they were early enough to scout the area and make sure that they didn’t run into the other version of Campbell, so they got there an hour and a half before the Hindenburg was due to land.
They had about half an hour to get a good look at things before people started showing up. Campbell remembered how busy the airfield was the last time he was there so decided to stake out a viewing spot early, somewhere they would have a good vantage point to see the passengers disembarking, but not a place where they would get stuck in the crowd.
Mary and Marcus found a place at the fence on the edge of the airstrip near the gate, a little distance from where most of the crowd was gathering. Their plan was to keep an eye on Richter and follow him to whichever car was waiting to pick him up. Campbell was in their car sitting in the line of vehicles waiting to pick up passengers. They would follow his car until they found a place where they could run him off the road. Then they would steal his briefcase and make it look like a mugging.
Out of Time: A story of archaeology... sort of Page 21