Emperors of Time

by Penn, James Wilson

  “Of course. Yeah, I’m not trying to sell you on it or anything… We can sell the flapper stuff, no problem. The question is what I have from the mid 1910s…” Jane said. “Oooh… here, this could be something… Yes, look at the buttons!” said Jane.

  “That is pretty awesome,” admired Rose, as they looked at the outfit Jane was showing them. It consisted of a white blouse, a long black skirt, and a gray wool jacket with large golden, round buttons on one side. It was rather plain, but nice, Tim supposed. Even though he didn’t know too much about early 20th century clothing, he figured the fact that it looked really old-fashioned to him was promising.

  “You’ll need a hat, of course” said Jane. “But let’s find you another skirt and top first. Oooh, what about this one?” This was another black skirt, white top combination, but the black and white plaid jacket that went with it was longer.

  “Do you think it would fit me all right?” asked Julie.

  “Well, of course, it might run you a little bit large, because you’re not quite eighteen… But, you said that Rose was about the same size as the other girl? I could let you try them on if you like. Should we outfit the guys first?”

  In ten minutes, they had found clothing for the guys and hats for the girls. The clothes for the guys looked a lot like the sort of fancy suits that would not be out of place at prom. The hats for the girls’ outfits, however, were clearly out of a different time period. The one that went with Julie’s outfit was black with a short, stiff brim. It had a bow made out of red and gold ribbon. The other, for Rose’s outfit, had a rim that was a bit floppier, and was white and fuzzy.

  There were no changing rooms in the antique store, since clothing was only a small part of their business, but Jane took them into the back to their offices. The girls changed in one room while Tim and Billy changed in another.

  The room Tim and Billy were in had stacks of papers that looked like receipts piled on a desk, and an old calculator with a spot for a roll of paper to keep track of the work you did. Billy laid his small pile of clothes on the chair, Tim set his on the desk, and each of them set about changing into their suits.

  “The girls always seem to get the more exciting clothes for these little adventures of ours, don’t they?” asked Billy, as he began to pull on his new 1910s pants.

  “That’s fair, I guess, because they usually seem to be more excited about clothes, don’t they?” asked Tim.

  “Still, just once I think we should go back to a time when men’s clothing was really outlandish and weird, although… I’m not sure I can think of any time in American history that was like that…” said Billy.

  “If we went back to the 18th century, we could probably justify wearing wigs,” registered Tim. “Although I’m pretty sure that we are only visiting times when the Emperors of Time changed things first from now on.”

  “Hmm… Do you think they’d take requests?” asked Billy.

  “If they did, I’d probably just ask them to stop changing the timeline, so we didn’t have to chase them around fixing it,” Tim countered.

  Billy laughed. “Fair point, I guess.”

  By then, the boys had finished changing. Tim supposed it made sense that the amount of excitement the outfit caused would determine the amount of time it took to change into it. He came up with this theory when it was several minutes after he and Billy had come out of the office and the girls were still ensconced in their own makeshift changing room.

  The girls were a bit giggly when they came out of the changing room, fully costumed in their 1916 garb.

  “You look nice, Rose,” said Billy in a tone of apparent sincerity. Then, he added as a polite afterthought, “You, too Julie.”

  “Yeah, you do, Julie!” agreed Tim. “Er… both of you, I mean.”

  It was hard for Tim to put his finger on why the clothes looked so good on them. They certainly weren’t the type of clothes that the girls at school would wear if they wanted to look good. If nothing else, they certainly covered them up more, from the high top button on their blouse to the skirt that reached almost to the floor. Even the upper parts of their hands were covered by the roomy jackets. But somehow, they just looked really well put together in a way that was quite attractive. Especially on Julie.

  “You guys, too,” said Rose.

  “Yes,” agreed Julie with a smile. “So we can pull off 1916?”

  “I think so,” opined Jane.

  At this moment, Patrick came back down from the upstairs room where he had been hunting for an object from San Francisco in 1916. He was carrying a small stack of newspapers in one hand.

  “A little hobby of mine,” said Patrick with a smile. “They don’t often sell, but I have a lot of old newspapers up there. Sometimes I like to read one and imagine that I’m opening the newspaper and reading the stories for the first time as morning news. Of course, most people wanting to look at newspapers from these times would just go to the local library and get the microfilm, or maybe search the internet, these days. But to me it’s not the same. Anyway, enough rambling from me. I’ve got a few issues of the San Francisco Chronicle from that year, if you want to pick one or two that you like. You can even keep a couple if you want. Like I said, they don’t sell.”

  “No, and he’s got far too many up there as it is,” said his wife with an affectionate eye-roll.

  Tim feared that newspapers would be a tricky prospect when it came to using them for the sort of time travel the Domini allowed. While they were convenient in that almost all copies of the San Francisco Chronicle would have been distributed in or around San Francisco, they also had a ridiculously short shelf-life. If they wanted to go to the specific day that a newspaper was printed, then it could get them to when and where they wanted to go. But if they tried to use it to get somewhere even a week after it was printed, the newspaper would likely be in a landfill already. If they touched it and tried to go back to a certain time, they might well end up under a pile of garbage in a dump some unknown distance from San Francisco itself.

  But Tim couldn’t communicate any of this with Jane and Patrick around, so he had to content himself with hoping that the others had considered the same issues he had. All he said out loud was, “Sure, that sounds great! Let’s have a look at them, then!”

  Patrick had six issues of the San Francisco Chronicle from 1916. When he spread them on the table, Tim immediately began to search the date lines of the papers. It seemed that Patrick already had them organized in chronological order, which made Tim’s task easier as he scanned for one that might work. February 12, 1916. Way too early. May 6, 1916. Closer, but too early. September 15, 1916. Still no. November 3, 1916.

  “Wait!” said Tim, with an amount of excitement that Patrick and Jane probably thought was far too high for what was supposedly a school assignment. “Wasn’t the election on November… 6th, was it?”

  “November 7th!” exclaimed Julie. “I have a good memory for numbers.”

  “Right,” said Billy in an even tone, looking at Jane and Patrick. “It’s just that one of the things we mention in our report is the election. So it’d be really cool if we could bring a newspaper that mentions it.”

  “Well, there’s this one, then, from November 10. I’m sure that one talks about the election, too, and that one would do it in retrospect.”

  “Hmm…” said Rose. “But isn’t speculating about the potential always more exciting? Think about it, it’s just before the election, everyone is holding their breath, not sure who the winner is going to be…”

  Tim knew that Rose was only trying to explain why they would want one newspaper over the other in a way that didn’t involve time-travel, but he still thought she was pretty convincing.

  “Well, like I said, you can feel free to take them both,” said Patrick, with a shrug.

  “Thanks so much!” said Tim in a way that must have sounded overly sincere.

  “Yes,” said Julie with a measured nod of her head, having recovered herself. “We are de
finitely going to ace this project.”

  Twenty minutes later, they were dressed in their normal clothes standing in the parking lot around their cars. Julie had volunteered to give Tim a ride home, but the four teens were in no particular rush to leave. Instead, they were glad for the parking lot, empty of people other than themselves, so they could talk openly about what they had just gotten their hands on.

  But Billy, it turned out, had another gem to share with them first.

  “So, I took some initiative on something… I hope that wasn’t too bold, given that I was the last one to be recruited for this team and all…” said Billy.

  “I’m sure it’s fine,” said Rose cheerfully.

  Julie just shrugged. “Let’s hear what it was, at least.”

  Billy pulled a piece of paper out of his pocket. “I’ve been thinking a bit about money for our little adventure. As in, almost everything is easier if you have a couple dollars to spend. But, of course, pretty much all of our money is useless.”

  “I’ve got some coins that are worth, maybe… fifty cents… from around 1900,” said Tim, glad that his love for collecting coins was now having something approaching a useful application.

  “Right, but that’s not going to be enough to help us get around. Like, if we need to spend a night there or something… I mean, I know money was worth a little bit more back then, but…” Billy trailed off.

  “Mmm… I remember from economics class that there was a lot of inflation, obviously. But not enough to make it worth more than $10 today,” Tim confirmed.

  “Right. And I think we should have more,” said Billy. “So, here’s my bright idea: Sports betting.”

  Julie cocked an eyebrow at him skeptically.

  “Well… I mean… we know what all the scores are going to be. I looked up all the college football games that happened on the Saturday before the election,” said Billy.

  Tim grinned. “There you go… Some good has come up out of your obsession with sports.”

  “Of course it has,” said Billy seriously. “My obsession with sports is always useful.” Then, he laughed. “No, not really. But, you think this might work?”

  “Betting wasn’t legal in San Francisco back then, was it?” asked Julie, still skeptical.

  “No, but that doesn’t mean that we can’t find someone to bet with,” Billy pointed out. “I found a little information on where there was gambling.”

  “Yeah, but… anybody who would take a bet would be a criminal, right?” asked Julie.

  “Well, it couldn’t hurt to have the information,” said Rose, clearly trying to preempt potential conflict. “And make sure you bring those coins along, Tim. I don’t imagine you carry them around regularly, do you?”

  “Right,” said Tim. “No, I don’t.”

  “Well… I’ve got to get home and eat dinner with the family,” said Julie. “You still want that ride, Tim?”

  “Yeah,” said Tim. “Thanks.”

  Julie turned to the other two and said, “We’ll meet tomorrow, then, and try to figure more about where the bomb went off and how to stop it. Let’s put the stuff we just got in my car… I’ll keep it at my house because we meet there most often anyway.”

  They all agreed to this, and Tim got in the passenger’s seat of Julie’s car.

  The ride home did not feel particularly awkward. Julie and Tim had a pleasantly off-topic conversation about which were cooler, giraffes or dolphins, with Julie of course taking the side of the giraffe. Tim had a bit of a hard time defending his choice of the dolphin as being cooler, because he kept wondering whether he should change the topic to how sorry he was about how he had reacted to her kissing him. But he decided he shouldn’t talk any more about it, but simply kiss her. He also decided that he should probably wait to do that until sometime she wasn’t driving, so there was a moment of truth when she parked in his driveway. He had almost begun to lean over to kiss her when his Dad’s car pulled in next to them on its way to the garage. With that, the moment was lost, he said good-bye to Julie, and got out of the car.

  Chapter 12

  Blackout

  Coincidences happen all the time, and usually people learn to accept them as part of the natural order of things. Once, Tim had found three heads up pennies on the same day. One was lying on the road in front of his house, another was lying on the cafeteria of the elementary school Tim had attended at the time, and the final one had been at the store where Tim’s mother happened to take him that evening. Sure, it was strange, since he had rarely had an occasion to find one heads up penny any other day, but he had never thought that a band of time travelling villains was behind any of it.

  The events of the night when Tim, Julie, Billy, and Rose visited the antique shop together would test the limits of what Tim could credibly believe was a coincidence.

  The evening started out normal enough. There was a rumble of thunder as Tim, his parents, and his sister sat down for a late dinner of spaghetti around eight. But that was not unusual, since it was springtime, and there were often spring thunderstorms in southern Pennsylvania.

  But roundabout the time when Tim, who generally had a large appetite, especially when spaghetti was served, was helping himself to seconds, the emergency alarm went off.

  Tim had mentioned to Julie not long before that he had only ever been in the proximity of airstrike hits a few times. This was true, but the alarm went off a lot more than that. Often, even though the missile shield seemed to be malfunctioning, a neighboring shield would be able to compensate, or the missile would hit far enough from Tim’s own location that the whole event felt less like a near miss and more like an annoyance.

  As usually happened when a siren went off when Tim was home, his father grabbed the battery-operated radio and brought it into the basement as he ushered the family to the windowless, underground room, which was considered the safest place to be in a missile strike. After a minute, the alarm stopped sounding, since that’s the setting Tim’s family had selected on their missile warning system. There was a blinking light on each floor that would continue to flash red until the threat passed.

  In the basement, Tim’s mother looked a little worried. His Dad turned on the radio, and his sister obediently ducked and covered under a desk they kept in the corner of the basement, as her parents instructed. As for Tim himself, he covered his head with his hands and contemplated how unusual it was for him to be in two missile warning areas in one week. This was a lot like the second penny on that day when he was in elementary school. A bit weird, maybe, but nothing suspicious.

  There was a little chatter on the radio, but nothing exciting until a few minutes in, when the on-air personality was silent for a few seconds -- perhaps reading something -- and then broke the silence with some rather peculiar news.

  “We are getting word at this time that several of the missile defense systems along the Eastern seaboard are simultaneously malfunctioning, as are many of the programs that run the local or privately owned defense systems of individual buildings. All potential targets in our listening area should be considered vulnerable at this time. Please make sure that you are in an internal room and duck and cover until the threat has passed. Of course, you should stay tuned in to this station for updates on this developing situation.”

  Contrary to the radio announcer’s instructions, this warning actually caused Tim to take his hands off his head and look at his father. His father and mother were both sitting against a wall. It was mostly school that had taught Tim and his sister to duck and cover during missile strikes. His mother and father had always seemed to think it was useless to do for themselves, although they still made their kids do it.

  “Has this ever happened before?” Tim asked his father.

  “Not that I’m aware of, no,” he answered. “Although I’m sure it’s nothing to worry about. We’ll be safe enough down here, anyway, even if the house is hit directly.”

  The two announcers on the radio were mixing words of prudence with
encouragement. The government was advising caution, but there was no doubt that the situation was under control and all systems would be back up and running again. Judging by the amount of times the announcers insisted this was “nothing more than a mechanical glitch,” Tim expected that his favorite internet sites would soon be calling it an act of sabotage by the Russians. He was unsure how this could have happened, though, since they had never been able to do it before.

  This was like the third heads up penny, and Tim was beginning to get a bit suspicious.

  That was when the light in the basement went out, and the radio signal turned to static. With no windows, it was eerily dark for a few moments, with only the slight glow of the power indicator on the radio giving off light.

  Tim’s father took his cellphone out, and after a moment of letting his eyes adjust, was able to find the emergency box they’d never had to use before. He got out a flashlight and soon there was enough light that the four of them could see each other.

  “Cell-phone signal’s out, too,” his father muttered, as he put his phone away. “I wonder if they hit a tower or something.”

  There was a rumble above ground, and Tim was unsure whether it was thunder, a car, or a missile impact.

  Then, there was a car honk, very close to the house. It sounded like it was in the driveway itself.

  “Who on Earth could that be?” asked Tim’s father. “Can’t they hear the outdoor siren?”

  There was a moment of relative quiet. Then, the doorbell rang.

  Tim’s mother and father exchanged a look.

  “Well, I’d best be quick about this,” said Tim’s father. He hurried up the stairs. Tim had no idea who it could be, so he was just as surprised as everyone else when his father yelled down the stairs, “It’s that Julie girl, Tim.”

  “Well let her in!” yelled Tim’s mother. “We can’t have children outdoors during a missile-raid!”

  Tim had gotten out from under the table as soon as Julie’s name had been mentioned, and now he was at the base of the steps, looking up at the door. His father opened the door, and Julie rushed in. Rain water was dripping from nose, from her ponytail, from everywhere.