Tesla's Time Travelers

by Tim Black

  “Do you watch Jeopardy!, Minerva?” Victor asked her.

  Well that certainly wasn’t, “Are you available Saturday night?” she thought.

  “Yes, I watch it a lot,” Minerva replied as they walked down Arch Street.

  “Me too. I watch nearly every night. I’d love to watch it with you.”

  Wait a minute, Minerva thought. What am I, a cheap date? She wanted to say, “Victor, your brother is taking me to the Homecoming Dance and you want me to watch Jeopardy! with you. What do you think I am, a nano-nerd?” But she smiled, for that was exactly what she was underneath her Homecoming court façade: she was a nerd. Victor was a nerd. What am I doing going out with Junior? she wondered. I’m just using him, basking in his popularity. Is that what you want, Minerva? Is it? Suddenly, the Homecoming Dance didn’t seem very important to Minerva Messinger.

  “Well?” Victor persisted.

  Minerva realized she hadn’t answered Victor and he was expecting a yes or no to his question about Jeopardy!.

  “That might be fun,” she replied, surprised how deeply she meant it.

  “Tonight when we get home?” he asked.

  “I’ve got a date with your brother Junior, Victor.”

  “Oh yeah, I forgot,” he smiled.

  She looked at Victor and thought, Sure you did, Victor. “You’re a lousy liar, Victor,” she said, adding, “But that’s a good thing.”

  Victor blushed. Minerva felt a sweetness in his presence, a gentleness she hadn’t found in any boy before. Is this what the word gentleman really meant? It was refreshing, it was invigorating and it was infatuating.

  “I’ll break the date with Junior,” she finally said. Relief came over her. She felt like she had broken the chains of a façade, the false face she wore around school. With Victor she could be herself and not try to be someone else. With Victor it wasn’t important to be popular, it was only important to be herself. That, she realized, was a form of women’s liberation. This wasn’t just a field trip, she told herself—this trip was a self-discovery.

  Minerva’s thoughts were interrupted by Mary Beard, who returned and started chattering about what she had found.

  “There’s a sedan chair in back of Christ Church only a block or so away,” Mrs. Beard said. “The bearers left it unattended. I think their master or mistress is in church praying and the bearers went to City Tavern for a snort.”

  “Snort?” Minerva said.

  “A drink,” Victor explained, and Minerva nodded.

  “Follow me,” Mary Beard said, and floated away down the street to Christ Church.

  “The church of the American Revolution,” Victor said as he and Minerva stood on the sidewalk outside the house of worship.

  “Over here!” Mary Beard called.

  Minerva chuckled. The ghost was inside the sedan chair, pretending to be sitting on the chair. The chair had a little door with a window and a pair of parallel poles that lifted the device.

  “Front or back?” Victor asked Minerva.

  “Back I guess,” she said. “You realize we are stealing, don’t you, Victor?”

  “Yes, but I would rather use the term ‘borrowing,’ because we aren’t taking it back to school with us.”

  “Wasn’t stealing a capital offense?”

  “In England I think, but I’m not sure about the colonies. Probably just a stay in the Walnut Street Prison.”

  “Great,” Minerva said, but she felt a rush of adrenaline. I am doing something bad, she thought. I never do anything wrong. This is fun!

  Minerva was surprised by how light the actual chair was, but then Mr. Greene wasn’t sitting in the little coach. They would probably need four students to carry chubby Mr. Greene to the portable’s landing area in the wheat field on the outskirts of Philadelphia.

  It was nearly 4:30 P.M. when Minerva and Victor returned to the Ross home with the sedan chair; Mrs. Beard waved a ghostly arm from the sedan chair window as if she were a fairy tale princess on her way to the ball. The twins had carried Mr. Greene onto the sidewalk in front of the house and Bette Kromer was holding Caesar Rodney’s riding crop. Ben Franklin’s cane was helping Mr. Greene stand up.

  The twins helped Mr. Greene into the sedan chair. Bette handed him the riding crop and the cane. “We have twenty-seven minutes before the classroom reappears, everyone,” Mr. Greene cautioned. “The wheat field is a good half mile to the west. I estimate we can make it there in fifteen or twenty minutes.”

  The Anderson twins grabbed the poles in the front of the sedan chair and Minerva joined Victor in the back, taking the pole on the left. On the count of three, the four students raised the sedan chair onto their shoulders, and Minerva realized this time that the chair, which included the portly Mr. Greene, was more than she could handle. Bette Kromer, sensing Minerva’s dilemma, came over and lent her shoulder to Minerva’s pole as well. Minerva hated to admit it, but she wasn’t as physically strong as the boys.

  They were off down Arch Street to the west, receiving an occasional glance from an inhabitant at the five people carrying one sedan chair. Mary and Charles Beard floated ahead to look for soldiers.

  “He’s a fat one, he is,” said one man to another at the corner of Arch Street and 4th Street. “Takes five to carry his arse!”

  “Bet his fart would clear a room,” the other replied.

  “Must be his children carryin’ him,” the first added. “Poor devils.”

  As they passed 3rd Street, Minerva looked to the left and spotted two soldiers a little more than a block away. Mr. Greene noticed them as well.

  “Two soldiers down at Thomas Bond’s boarding house on 2nd Street,” Mr. Greene said. “Keep your eyes open for others. They won’t be looking for a sedan chair though.”

  Minerva was glad she had visited the outhouse, because her fear returned, but she didn’t have anything left in her bladder. They only had a few blocks to go before the outskirts of town and the summer wheat field. She glanced over at Victor, who was smiling at her. Minerva smiled back.

  “Whoa, you two,” Bette Kromer intervened. “There’s no time for frangipani now,” she said.

  Minerva laughed. Bette always seemed to use frangipani instead of hanky-panky even though frangipani was a flowering Florida plant.

  “I’m serious, Minerva,” Bette said. “Or you can carry this by yourself. It is digging into my shoulder.”

  “Stop your whining, Bette Kromer,” Minerva smiled at her friend. “Woman up!”

  “Woman up!” Bette laughed.

  Victor gave the girls a confused look.

  “It’s a girl thing, Victor,” Minerva said by way of explanation. Victor remained clueless.

  At 4:56 P.M. they arrived in the summer wheat field. A few deer were nibbling at the crop. Mary and Charles Beard were floating about the wheat field, seemingly impatient. Did they have a séance scheduled back at the Cassadaga Hotel? Minerva wondered.

  The students set the sedan chair on the ground and the twins helped Mr. Greene from the contraption.

  “Is this the spot?” Bette asked.

  “We’re close,” Mr. Greene said. “Remember that oak tree over there?”

  “Yes,” Minerva said. “It was close to the portable.”

  “Close is right, I nearly landed on it,” Mr. Greene replied. “Let’s stay right where we are until the classroom reappears.”

  That made sense to Minerva. She moved away from Bette Kromer and next to Victor. He offered her his hand and she took it. She wasn’t dumb enough to kiss him in front of her classmates, but she felt the urge.

  Just as Minerva was thinking sweet nothings, Mary Beard and her taciturn husband reported in.

  “Some soldiers are headed this way,” Mary said.

  “What? Why?” Mr. Greene said.

  “I think taking a sedan chair into a wheat field kind of raised a few eyebrows,” Mary said. “One woman reported you to the militia and they are headed this way.”

  “The portable will be here
in one minute,” Mr. Greene said, looking at his iPod.

  Minerva was the first to see the soldiers perhaps two hundred yards away.

  “Soldiers coming!” she shouted and heads turned.

  “Oh Lord!” Bette said, adding in prayer, “Please help us.”

  Their answered prayer appeared in the wheat field only five yards from where they stood huddled in fear. Minerva had never been so happy in her life to see an old portable classroom, complete with handicap ramp. It materialized in the air above them, before their eyes, and Mr. Greene, using Caesar Rodney’s riding crop as a wand, guided the classroom to a safe and smooth landing, even if he was off a bit on location.

  “Windage,” Mr. Greene began to explain about the deviation in the landing area, but the students weren’t listening to him. The twins grabbed him and carried him up the ramp as Mr. Greene waved Caesar Rodney’s riding crop above his head like the winning jockey at the Kentucky Derby. The other students dashed into the portable, literally on the heels of the twins.

  The soldiers were within a hundred yards. Even at that distance, Minerva could see the startled looks on the four men’s faces. They probably thought the portable was a U.F.O., Minerva mused, if they even knew what that meant. Whatever they thought, three lined up and pointed their muskets at the portable, and the fourth gave the sequence to “ready…”

  “Get down everyone,” Minerva shouted.

  “Aim…”

  “Down! They’re going to shoot,” Minerva screamed.

  “Fire.”

  A musket ball tore through a window of the classroom; the other two shots were wide. “I’m glad they shot muskets and not rifles,” Bette said, reminding everyone once again that, “Muskets aren’t accurate at a hundred yards.”

  “One out of three is accurate enough for me,” Minerva said.

  Mr. Greene was at his computer. His hands were shaking, Minerva noticed. The Anderson twins were starting to cry. She shook her head in disbelief at the Anderson twins: mama’s boys. Bette was fine and so was Victor, who seemed the calmest of everyone. He helped steady Mr. Greene’s hands at the computer. Victor held Rodney’s riding crop. Victor was taking charge, Minerva realized. Was that the difference between a man and a boy?

  “Everyone sit down and brace yourselves,” Victor ordered. Mr. Greene sat at his desk and bolted himself down, as did the others.

  “They’re charging!” Minerva said.

  But they were too late. Mr. Greene had reset the coordinates and Victor, with a nod from Mr. Greene, tapped the computer with Rodney’s riding crop.

  Chapter 15

  The portable classroom shook and rattled. Outside the classroom, three members of the Pennsylvania Militia dissolved into the ether of a receding past, a last musket ball seeming to stop, frozen in mid-air. The portable’s flight reminded Victor Bridges of Dorothy’s flying house in The Wizard of Oz, although no cranky old lady bicycled past the windows of the classroom. Victor clenched Mr. Greene’s podium and held on for dear life. He felt that if he lost his grip he would be deposited somewhere along the space-time continuum from 1776 to the present, maybe even in the 1830s, which was really a boring decade, except for the battle at the Alamo in 1836.

  Why couldn’t they have a cool chrome time machine like the movie version of The Time Machine? No, they were stuck with this Tesla prototype, a chrome plated thumb drive that the Wizard of Menlo Park, Thomas Edison, Tesla’s technological rival, had placed in a locked wooden box that he hid in the basement of the Cassadaga Hotel after a visit to nearby Rollins College, where he was awarded an honorary degree. Mr. Greene had bought the old wooden box containing the device at a yard sale at the hotel in 1996, fifty-three years after its inventor, the forgotten scientific genius, Nikola Tesla, passed away, penniless.

  No one knew what the device was in 1996, before thumb drives were common, and Mr. Greene had purchased the locked wooden box for seventy-five cents. The most amazing thing, Mr. Greene told his class, was that the Croatian immigrant Tesla left notes, albeit in his native Croatian—notes on how to install the device into a USB port, decades before a USB port was developed. Mr. Greene had the instructions translated into English and was astounded to discover that the thumb drive was actually a prototype for a time travel device. It seems that Edison, Tesla’s rival (Tesla’s invention of alternating current made Edison’s direct current obsolete), may have stolen the invention from Tesla and hidden it in the Florida town famous for its mediums and psychics—which was a tad ironic, Mr. Greene explained, because none of the psychics knew that a time machine was in the basement of their favorite hotel.

  Of course, Victor realized the portable classroom was the perfect cover for a time machine’s force field. Who would ever suspect an old school portable could go back in time? But still, why couldn’t they have a cooler model? He always let his thoughts digress when he was nervous, and he was very nervous now. Everyone was depending on him. Mr. Greene was incapacitated. In a quick fifty more years they would be back. A mere minute and a half if he could just keep the portable on track. He held the podium steady. Don’t let it veer off course, he told himself. We aren’t dressed for Woodstock and the Sixties.

  As he held the podium firmly, he stared longingly at Minerva Messinger, a vision of loveliness in her pretty colonial dress. She had her beautiful blue eyes firmly closed. In fact, everyone in the room had their eyes closed. The behavior reminded Victor of being a little boy and hiding under the bed during a hurricane—as if by hiding under the bed nothing bad could happen, especially if you shut your eyes while under the bunk. Of course, crazy historian Mary Beard was floating about the portable, giggling and screaming “wheee” as if she were on a roller coaster while her husband Charles, a dignified ghost historian, sat disdainfully atop a filing cabinet, shaking his head at his late wife, who, Victor admitted, was pretty lively for a dead woman.

  Finally, after more than two hundred and thirty-five years, the portable classroom came to rest on its normal site on the back lot of Cassadaga Area High School, replacing the façade of the holographic image that had taken its place in its absence. The other students opened their eyes and began to cheer along with Mrs. Beard, who was now wearing a cheerleader’s uniform with a big “H” on the front and waving holographic pompoms. “Give me an H,” she demanded. “Give me an I, give me an S-T-O-R-Y. What’s it spell?”

  “History!” the students cheered. Victor noticed the word had escaped his lips as well. Mrs. Beard was so cheesy. He looked at Caesar Rodney’s riding crop as if it were Dorothy’s ruby slippers, which were of course silver slippers in the book, and were only changed because of Technicolor, which was developed by M.I.T.—hence the name for the colorization. Mr. Greene had taught the class about the allegory of The Wizard of Oz. The story was about the 1896 presidential election: the Emerald City was Washington, the Wizard was McKinley, a proponent of the gold standard, and Dorothy was actually Mary Elizabeth Lease, a Populist who wanted silver to replace gold as currency—hence her “silver slippers” in the book, as well as the “yellow brick road.” Frankly, Victor had been able to live with the demythologization of Betsy Ross, but when he found out that Dorothy was really a Populist, he was crushed, for The Wizard of Oz had been his favorite childhood story. Well, at least Toto was still a dog, he mused. Okay, Victor, you can turn off the anxiety; you’re back, he told himself. Finally he exhaled.

  Mr. Greene unbuckled his seat belt at his desk and stood up. How could that be, Victor pondered, for Mr. Greene had hurt his ankle and wasn’t ambulatory.

  “Now there’s something,” the teacher smiled, able to walk. “Seems time healed my ankle.” He began to dance a little jig. Victor noticed the girls raising their eyebrows simultaneously as their portly teacher quivered like a reject from Riverdance. Victor scanned the classroom: Justin’s black eye was gone, as were the bruises on his twin brother Heath’s face, as if the time travel had healed the wounds received in the 18th century. Surprisingly, any signs of intoxication in the An
derson twins were gone as well, as if the trip through time had sobered the boys. The Dunlap broadside of the Declaration of Independence was back on the bulletin board. There was a musket hole through a window, which Mr. Greene could explain away as a rock thrown by a student. But the opposite wall of the classroom, which displayed a map of the United States that covered holes in the drywall, had a small round perforation in Missouri where a musket ball had ended its trajectory, and already Justin Anderson was digging the lead out of the Show Me State (which Victor knew, along with Alaska, was a leading lead producing state) with the point of a scissors. Minerva and Bette were hugging, a sight that Victor hadn’t quite gotten accustomed to yet, for they had begun the trip hating each other. Then Victor noticed something amiss on the map of the United States as Justin finished retrieving his souvenir ball of lead from the trip. Tennessee was missing.

  “Mr. Greene,” Victor commented. “There’s no Tennessee on the map.”

  “What?” Mr. Greene said. “Justin, on the map, what is in Tennessee’s space?”

  Even a blockhead like Justin would know where Tennessee was, Victor realized, remembering his first test in Mr. Greene’s class when all of the students had to draw the contiguous forty-eight states on a blank piece of paper from memory, forever imprinting “the nation in the their noggins” as Mr. Greene was fond of saying.

  “Um,” Justin said, looking at the map. “Franklin is where Tennessee should be,” he said.

  “Franklin?” Mr. Greene said. He thought for a moment then replied, “There was a portion of western North Carolina that tried to become the state of Franklin, but it didn’t fly…or maybe it did. Okay, no one leaves the classroom. We have to find out why Tennessee is now Franklin.”

  “Wow!” Justin exclaimed. “Look, Mr. Greene, the capital of Franklin is Greeneville. I bet they named it for you.”

  “Probably General Greene from the American Revolution,” the teacher replied. “We have a lot of work to do, students, before anyone goes home.”