During a brief lull in the arrival of party faithful, Anna instructed the teens to show enthusiasm and energy. “We’re here to show the verve and vitality of the Republican Party!” she encouraged.
So they talked enthusiastically and didn’t spare exclamations as they shook the hands of everyone who came in and made sure they had a Hughes button if they didn’t already. But they also looked at everyone who came in to try to decide who was capable of setting off the bomb that would get Hughes elected. They tried to eavesdrop but had a bit of a hard job of it, given that every time there was a lull in greeting newcomers, Margaret and Anna would barrage the teens with instructions of what they should do once six o’clock rolled around.
The basic idea was that at six, the girls would start serving punch and snacks to people who came up to the table, during the ‘meet and greet’ portion of the evening, when people would get to meet their local representatives and the campaign workers. The boys, during that time, would walk around and bring refreshments to anyone who was older or disabled. Apparently, as the ambassadors of the youth of the Republican Party, they were going to make sure that no one would be unable to chat with someone just because they were unable or unwilling to get out of their seats.
This was good news, because it would give Tim and Billy, a chance to walk around the room with open ears and hear what they could. So Tim was pretty happy when six o’ clock rolled around and Margaret and Anna took them over to the punch bar.
“So, find somebody sitting down who doesn’t have a drink and bring one out to them. Ask them if they’re having a good time. Get them excited. Ask them if there’s anybody here who they want to talk to. If they have an answer for that, let me know, and maybe we can get one of the campaign managers or a representative to talk to them. But mostly, just chat with as many people as you can, and… you know, bring them punch. People like punch,” instructed Anna.
Tim made several trips to and from the punch table after that, making sure to listen to the guests. At first, he didn’t hear much that was productive. A few people had the odd financial interest in England or France, one or two were involved in the state government, under the governor Hiram Johnson. Johnson was technically a Progressive, but the Progressive Party was generally supporting Hughes, and so, in general, were Johnson’s employees.
Most of the conversation was running around the idea of how they had to make sure to get out the vote and convince those who had wanted Theodore Roosevelt to run again that Hughes was a good candidate, in spite of the fact that he was a moderate Republican. After all, California was one of the states that had voted for Roosevelt, as a Bull-Moose Progressive, in the previous election. All this was interesting, Tim thought, but wasn’t much going to help them figure out who was building a bomb.
Tim was so focused on trying to hear important things that he almost missed something he was very surprised to see. There were two men sitting toward the back of the ballroom who seemed to be looking at something with a magnifying glass. Tim managed to get half a glance at it and noticed that it was a photograph. A color photograph. Now… that was not quite impossible… there had been color photographs since 1850, but they still weren’t very common, and Tim didn’t like the way they were looking at it like it was a secret.
Tim got a knot in his stomach and quickly scurried over to the punch table. The way that he looked at Julie and Rose when he got there told them pretty clearly that he needed to talk to them right away. Soon the three of them were huddled in the corner behind the punch table. He hadn’t been able to signal to Billy to get over there, because he had been so focused on getting over to the girls, since he knew where they were. He felt like he needed to get this hunch off his chest as soon as possible.
“Those folks over there are acting weird, I really think we ought to keep an eye on them and get out of here if they do anything worrying,” said Tim. Then, Tim looked over to where the two men were sitting to point them out to Julie and Rose. Which is when he saw Billy. The two men were leading him out into the hallway.
Tim, Julie, and Rose looked at each other. They were at a loss for what to do. Should they chase after them or try to figure out another way to help him? As it turned out, they didn’t have to decide.
A third man came out of an adjoining room and walked straight over to them. He was discretely holding a handgun in the pocket of his suit, but he flashed it at them as he said, “You kids need to follow me, and don’t do anything stupid. You know who I’m working for, and you know that even if I got caught shooting you in a crowd like this one, they would still make that okay for me.” He grinned a cheerfully maniacal grin. “But I’m a softy at heart, so I mostly hope you don’t make me do that.”
Tim shrugged. He didn’t love the idea of following this guy, but getting shot at wasn’t part of the plan either. The girls didn’t seem to have any better idea, so they followed him out of the ballroom and to a back staircase of the hotel.
Billy and the two men were already there. Billy actually looked relieved to see the three of them, which perplexed Tim for a second. He tried to figure out how more of them being captured could possibly be a good thing. Then Tim wondered if Billy had a plan that required all of them to be there. Well, reinforcements had arrived.
Then, Tim remembered that Billy still had a can of mace in his pocket. In fact, just as Tim thought of this, Billy seemed to be reaching for it. He put his hand in his pocket, began to draw it out, and-- One of the oafs who had led him out in the first place grabbed Billy’s arm, wrenched it into an awkward position, and grabbed the mace out of it.
“What is this, some kind of futuristic perfume?” asked the oaf. “Here, I thought you were reaching for a weapon. I’ll keep this just to be safe, though.”
“All right kids. Up the steps,” instructed one of the other thugs.
Chapter 18
Room 706
The bright side, Tim realized begrudgingly as he drifted off to sleep at about two AM that morning, was that the room they were being held captive in was much nicer than the one at the YMCA. Tim wasn’t sure how much it would have cost to rent this room for the week, but he was pretty certain he had never had that kind of money, not even in twenty-first century dollars.
Not only were there two large beds in the room, so that he and Billy were sharing a bed instead of a patch of floor, but there was also a private bathroom. This was apparently not a given in hotels at that time, from the way the thugs who had brought them up to the room talked about it. This meant that the girls had finally been able to take their first showers since they had arrived in 1916, and whatever else the implications of their capture would be, they were at least excited about that. Yes, they were being held captive, but they were being kept in style.
When he first led them into the room, one of the thugs had mentioned something about how dinner was coming soon (it did, and it was actually pretty delicious) and gave them a letter from people who the thug referred to as his superiors.
Reading the letter was the second thing they did once they got into the room. The first was to confirm that they had been right about the number of stairs they walked up and that they couldn’t get out by going out the window. It was definitely too high up to try anything. If they’d wanted to get killed, they might as well have let the thugs shoot them. So they stayed inside and read the letter.
It said,
To our dearest Julie Chapman and her Time-Traveling Friends,
No doubt, you have already heard our former colleague Hopkins’ side of the story, but we thought you might like to hear ours as well. We know he brought you to see the world how it is in our time, because we have security footage of Hopkins with you and your friends. Of course, we had rigged building security to let us know whenever Hopkins makes an appearance. He is awfully hard to catch these days, but we still make a point of being aware of his movements. When we found video of him with the four of you, we ran an analysis on the faces and quickly found out we had been playing host to the soo
n to be famous Julie Chapman. That is, soon to be famous in your timeline. For us, you always appear to do something important no matter how we manipulate the timeline. Of course, we could have identified your friends are as well, but after finding out we were dealing with you, it did not seem necessary. We know you well enough to know that you will listen to reason. You have a very gifted mind.
Speaking of which, I feel it is only fair to satisfy your scientific curiosity. You are no doubt wondering whether we were involved with the Russians breaking through the American defense grid in your own modern day. Yes, it was us. We attempted to kill you before you came back to the year 1916.
You must understand, this was nothing personal, and we see this as no reason why we cannot be friends in the near future. We have no intention of killing you any longer, now that you have made it to 1916. But we had to try to keep you away from this year at any cost, even if it meant creating a timeline where I will never have been born. Because I am a first-cause in all the current variability of timelines, I will continue to be able to jump into whatever timeline I create, unless I personally get killed. But the more we have to meddle in this year, the harder things become.
Which leads me to another point. No doubt, Hopkins has told you the Dominus Temporis will only take a person back in time to a year once to change things, and then allow one trip back in order to try to restore them. On an elementary level, that is the case, but it leads to confusion in the present situation.
You see, we had originally only sent two of us back to the year 1916. I am the third. I came back now that the current wrinkle of your presence in 2347 made it appear that our original plan was in jeopardy.
We were able to figure out the exact date when Hopkins first recruited you. Starting on that date, the Domini would not allow us to travel back to change events in a unique way for one year forward or backward, since only one event can be changed per year. Of course, what I did by trying to help the Russians kill you does not count as changing the year a second time. I was simply trying to undo what Hopkins did. If you were dead, the mischief would have been undone.
When we heard from the police officer you disappeared in front of, we knew you had left. This is why I came back to 1916 as well, trying to keep our original change on track. It is still the same change, so the programming on the Dominus allows it. Of course, it was still necessary that someone other than the original two be sent back, because it is impossible for any one person to visit the same year more than once.
Immediately, we expended resources to make sure we found you, including the hidden cameras that Margaret and Anna were unwittingly carrying. We discovered from our own headquarters that you would be at their event tonight, so we told some of the folks we hired from this time to be on the lookout. Now we have caught you.
Do not worry, we will hold you until the bomb goes off and then take you back to your own time and take the Dominus Hopkins has stolen from us and given to you back. We would have had our recent hires from 1916 take it from you, but we wouldn’t want them accidentally figuring out what kind of technology they had. Of course, you still have a Dominus now, which means that if you want, you can go back to your own time yourself, but you will be unable to return to this time once you go, and we will get the Dominus back from you one way or another. Do not make us harm you. You have tried, you have failed, now you must wait for us to come chauffer you back home.
If you hear any loud noises coming from the next room over, do not fret. It is simply the bomb makers. Of course, we could have built the bomb in our own time, but there were certain materials, TNT, for instance that are easier to get here, and we did not want the bomb looking like it was made in a later century, since the police will no doubt analyze the debris once it explodes. If you try to get out of your room to go see the bomb, you will be shot on sight. But perhaps we will introduce you to bombmakers once the bomb has gone off on Tuesday.
You need not feel guilty that you have failed. Do not let Hopkins mislead you. In our own time, now that I and my comrades govern, there is a promised land for our citizens. A utopia where crime is almost nonexistent, and poverty and want are entirely unknown. There are a few who choose to live outside of our system, and they are given that choice. They choose anarchy. But just because some people do not choose it does not mean that our utopia is flawed. Some people are merely ungrateful.
Do not be one of them, Julie. Relax and enjoy this room. I look forward to meeting you tomorrow. You become quite famous one day.
Dr. Russell
There were a couple places in the letter when Tim wasn’t sure whether to fall asleep with boredom or vomit because of Russell’s overbearing pretension. As it turned out, he did neither, but waited until all four of them had finished reading it.
Then, he turned to Julie. “You’re not falling for any of this, are you?”
“Falling for what?” she asked with no irony.
For a second, Tim worried she didn’t see the trick, that she actually believed the Emperors of Time had done the world a favor by taking it over.
Billy seemed to be having similar concerns because he said, “No, don’t tell me you don’t see he’s trying to trick us…”
Julie looked at them confused for a second, and then shook her head. “Oh, wait… No.. I get that they’re not really the good guys… I thought you were trying to say that we weren’t really trapped in here and that was all a bluff or something.”
“Ah,” said Tim. “Yeah, no such luck on that one.”
“Right,” said Julie. “I’m also kind of weirded out by this whole thing where everyone keeps saying I’m going to be famous. I mean… that’s spooky, right? What about that, do you think that might be a trick? ‘Cause I think that might be a relief.”
Rose laughed. “No, I’m not sure I can think of any reason why they’d try to trick us on that, plus it was Hopkins who told us about that first. But let’s try to keep your famously logical mind focused on the problem at hand, for now.”
So they’d concentrated for a while, but they hadn’t come up with any solutions. They could leave, but wouldn’t be able to come back. They could think of no way to get out of the room without using the Domini. As they concentrated on it more and more, they became more and more frustrated, until finally they decided that maybe concentrating on the problem at hand exclusively wasn’t a good idea. Maybe a good idea would come to them if they were cleaner, so they took turns showering. Or if they weren’t hungry, so they ate the food that the thugs brought by and handed them through a door cracked open while a pistol was aimed at them. Or, they decided at about one-thirty, after hitting their heads against the problem at hand for over seven hours without making any progress, maybe they would think better if they got a little sleep.
So finally, at about two in the morning, Tim fell asleep, still without having come up with any good ideas.
“I’ve got something!” said Billy as soon as the four teens all woke up the next morning, with the sun glaring into their seventh story window.
But although Billy had shouted, it hadn’t been his shouting that had woken them. So the collective attention at 7:30 that morning was split between being curious as to what idea Billy had just had and wondering what it was that had woken them up. They didn’t need to be curious for long, though, as it was only another fifteen seconds until someone knocked at the door again. Tim shuffled over to the door, took their breakfast delivery at gunpoint, and closed the door again.
“So what’s the idea?” asked Rose, as she put cream cheese on one of the bagels that the most recent thug had delivered.
“What?” asked Billy. “I don’t have any idea.”
Tim raised a confused eyebrow, but noticed that Billy was looking around the room. Finally, he spotted what he was looking for. A pen. He also grabbed the sheets of paper that held Russell’s letter to them. The backs of the papers were blank, so he started writing on them, after motioning for the others to huddle up close. They weren’t sure why, but th
ey followed Billy’s mimed instructions.
He wrote the following sentence on one of the pieces of paper.
Not sure if the room is bugged visually/audibly/both, but why chance it?
The others nodded in agreement and showed by their faces that they understood.
Is there anywhere in this room something could stay hidden for a year? Keep talking normally… We can at least throw off an audio bug… That might be all they did… They think we’re done for.
“So back to square one,” Rose said in an awfully convincing voice of defeat and frustration. She had that voice down, Tim figured, given the amount of time they had each been using their disappointed, defeated voices recently.
“I’m starting to think we should just give up… Won’t make much of a difference to us whether we succeed or not. Why should we care what happens to the world centuries after we’re dead?” Julie asked. She was looking around the room feverishly for the sort of place that Billy was describing as she asked it, though.
Rose snatched the pen and wrote, How big of a ‘something’ are we talking?
After half a second’s pause, Rose crossed out the word “talking” and amended it to “writing.”
After Billy was done rolling his eyes at Rose’s precision, he took the pen back from her and wrote Couple cans of mace… maybe a taser?
Julie narrowed her eyes and took the pen.
Tim realized they had forgotten to keep talking. “Julie, we can’t give up now,” he said. Julie nearly dropped the pen in surprise at him accusing her of doing such a thing, until she remembered they were supposed to be putting on a show for any potential listening devices the room might contain. “We can’t let that pretentious loser Russell win!”
Julie cracked a smile at Tim for his description of Russell as she struck one of the words she had just written with an underline. Tim saw that she had written
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