by Dan Gutman
But they would have to convince Miss Z. On their first two missions, the Flashback Four had encountered very dangerous, life-threatening situations. She hadn’t forgotten that. Even though their little jaunt to Pompeii had worked out, she was still reluctant to send them on another mission.
Isabel, Julia, and David instinctively turned to Luke to be the group spokesman.
“Okay,” he said, pulling a chair over so he would be at the same eye level as Miss Z. “You said Mount Vesuvius erupted at noon, right? And the date was . . .”
“August twenty-fourth, in the year 79,” Isabel remembered.
“Right,” Luke continued. “You said it took a half an hour before all that ash and rock and stuff started falling on Pompeii. So if you were to zap us over there before noon on that day, and zap us back a few minutes after noon, we could be back here in time for lunch. What could go wrong?”
“Famous last words,” said Miss Z.
“We’ll bring back a photo of Mount Vesuvius erupting, for your museum,” Luke promised. “Cross my heart and hope to die.”
“You can count on us, Miss Z,” added Julia. “We’re getting good at this.”
“Please?” begged David and Isabel.
The Flashback Four looked at Miss Z with their puppy-dog eyes. She could see the yearning in their faces. She could see how they had bonded together as a team. And she had seen with her own eyes how determined and competent they could be in a pressure situation.
“I really shouldn’t be doing this,” she finally agreed. “But I’ll let you go on one more mission.”
“Yes!” the kids shouted, high-fiving and clapping each other on the back.
“We’re going back to Pompeii!” Julia whooped and shouted triumphantly.
“But I want you kids to know something,” Miss Z said seriously, holding her hand up. “A word of warning. This will not be like going to Gettysburg or the Titanic. This will be almost prehistoric. And it will be a very different world from what you just saw in modern day Pompeii. Nobody is going to be selling souvenirs and postcards on the street.”
“There won’t be any pickpockets either,” Julia pointed out.
“Oh, I wouldn’t be so sure of that,” said Miss Z. “There were plenty of bad people in Pompeii back in the year 79 too, I bet. Maybe worse people. As always, I’ll need you to stay together at all times and work as a team.”
“We always work as a team,” David said. “We’re the Flashback Four.”
David, Luke, Julia, and Isabel went home with instructions to familiarize themselves with Pompeii and the Roman Empire at the time of the Mount Vesuvius eruption. The better prepared they were, the better they would be at handling any unexpected situations. Two days later they came back to Miss Z’s office, armed with information and excited to get started on their next mission.
“Well, what have you kids learned?” Miss Z said, clapping her hands together. “How did you conduct your research?”
“I read a book for adults,” Isabel said. “It was called The Fires of Vesuvius, by Mary Beard.”
“Me too,” said David. “I think mine was just called Pompeii or something.”
“I went online,” Julia reported. “There are like a zillion websites all about the Roman Empire.”
“Good. How about you, Luke?” asked Miss Z. “What did you do?”
“I watched a movie,” Luke replied.
“Oh, which one? I love film,” said Miss Z. “Was it The Last Days of Pompeii? That was marvelous. Alan Hale was in it. Did you know that his son played the Skipper in that silly TV series Gilligan’s Island?”
“The movie I watched was Animal House,” said Luke.
“Animal House?” said David, puzzled. “I saw that movie when I was little. What does it have to do with Pompeii?”
“Not a whole lot,” replied Luke. “But there was one scene where all the frat guys dressed up in togas. Will we get to wear togas?”
“To-ga! To-ga! To-ga!” Luke and David began chanting until Miss Z held up her hand.
For those of you who don’t know, a toga is a long, loose piece of clothing that was sort of like a bedsheet wrapped around your body.
“I’m sorry,” Miss Z told the boys, bringing their chant to a halt. “Only the noblemen in ancient Rome wore togas.”
“Oh man,” grumbled David. “Togas are cool.”
“So what did everybody else wear?” asked Julia.
“I’m glad you asked,” replied Miss Z. “Mrs. Vader, will you please go get the clothes we discussed?”
Mrs. Vader went out in the hall.
“Isn’t this exciting?” Julia whispered to Isabel. “We’re going to be the most fashionable ladies in all of Pompeii!”
Julia loved fashion. Shopping was her favorite thing to do in the world. Nothing made her happier than trying on new clothes.
Mrs. Vader wheeled in a rack of clothes. They were identical formless, shapeless, full-length cotton frocks. Rags, really. It would be almost like wearing a garbage bag with armholes and a hole for the head cut out of it. And they were all the same color—beige. Some had stains on them.
“Those are for the boys, right?” Julia asked hopefully. “After this, you’re going to bring out the ladies’ clothes for Isabel and me.”
“No, these are the clothes for all of you,” said Mrs. Vader.
Julia couldn’t hide her disappointment.
“They’re not very fashionable,” she said, feeling the material. David and Luke rolled their eyes.
“It’s not about being fashionable,” Miss Z said. “This is not about making you look good. It’s about blending in with the everyday people of Pompeii. This is what regular people wore. Remember, you’re going to the year 79. They didn’t have factories or sewing machines back then. They didn’t have machines of any sort.”
Each of the kids picked an outfit off the rack and went to the little changing rooms adjoining Miss Z’s office. A few minutes later, David was the first to emerge.
“I’m looking good!” he said, showing off for Miss Z and Mrs. Vader. “Hey, we should walk around Boston like this and blow everyone’s mind.”
Luke came out next, looking pretty much the same as David.
“Well,” he said, “it’s better than that sailor suit you made me wear on the Titanic. That was humiliating.”
Isabel was next to emerge from the changing room. She spun around, struck a pose, and pointed one finger in the air.
“‘Friends, Romans, countrymen!’” she bellowed. “‘Lend me your ears. I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him!’”
Miss Z and Mrs. Vader clapped. The boys just stared at Isabel blankly.
“That’s Shakespeare!” Isabel told them. “It’s one of the most famous speeches ever given! Didn’t you guys read Julius Caesar in fifth grade?”
“Julius who?” asked David.
“I had a Caesar salad in fifth grade,” added Luke.
One-fourth of the Flashback Four had yet to emerge from the changing room.
“Come on out, Julia!” called Miss Z.
“No!” Julia shouted back. “This is horrible. I’m staying in here forever.”
“Don’t be a baby,” Isabel said. “We all look the same.”
Finally, Julia came out, hiding her face in her hands.
“You look fine,” said Mrs. Vader.
“I look like I’m homeless,” Julia complained. “If any of my friends saw me dressed like this, I’d have to change schools.”
Miss Z informed the kids that even though they were dressed in rags, the people of the Roman Empire considered keeping their clothes clean to be a high priority. When Pompeii was finally unearthed in the 1800s, a dozen laundries were discovered among the ruins.
At that point, Mrs. Vader brought in a tray with bread, cheese, and pastries for the kids to munch on. Julia asked about what foods they should expect to find in Pompeii, but Miss Z told her it shouldn’t be an issue.
“I’m sending you there for just tw
o hours,” she said. “You shouldn’t need to eat a meal. When you get back, I’ll give you lunch and you can tell me all about your adventure.”
While the kids snacked, Miss Z opened her desk drawer and one by one took out four pieces of technology they would need to complete their new mission. . . .
1. Camera
For the Gettysburg project, Miss Z had given the Flashback Four a complicated digital SLR camera, which was large and hard to use or conceal. That turned out to be a problem. For the Titanic mission, she had given them a smaller, simpler point-and-shoot camera. This time, Miss Z pulled out what looked to be a standard cell phone.
“It’s basically a phone without the phone,” she said as she handed it to Luke. “But it has a built-in zoom lens, so you can get a close-up shot of the mountain as it is erupting.”
“Any special instructions?” he asked.
“It’s simple,” Miss Z explained. “As soon as Mount Vesuvius blows and all that rock comes blasting out, just push this button. Then I’ll get you out of there before anything hits the ground.”
2. Timer
On the first two missions, the kids had been given a watch so they would know what time they needed to get back to the meeting spot for the return trip. But watches have a tendency to get broken, lost, or wet. This time, Miss Z pulled a small digital timer out of her drawer. It was waterproof, and about the size of a matchbook.
“I’m going to set this for a hundred and twenty minutes,” she told the kids. “Two hours. That should give you plenty of time to get the lay of the land in Pompeii and find a good location to take the photo. When the timer clicks down to zero, that’s when we’re going to bring you back here. Unless, of course, you tell me to do it sooner. Got it?”
“Got it,” all four agreed.
She handed the timer to David.
“You’ll notice that each of you has a small pocket sewn into your frock to hold these devices,” Miss Z told the group. “You can thank Mrs. Vader for her fine needlework.”
3. TTT
The TTT was Miss Z’s pride and joy. Text Through Time. It enabled the Flashback Four to swap texts with her in Boston while they were in a completely different time period. The first TTT cost millions to develop, and it was destroyed. Its replacement was lost on the Titanic. Fortunately, after the first one was made, it was a fairly simple matter to build extra units.
“I want to know where you are and what you are doing at all times,” Miss Z instructed as she handed the TTT to Isabel. “Do you understand?”
“Yes.”
4. Ear Buddies
Before reaching into the drawer one last time, Miss Z had a question for the Flashback Four.
“Do you kids know what language people spoke in Pompeii during the Roman Empire?”
“Uh, Roman?” replied Luke.
“Roman isn’t a language, dope!” David said, slapping his friend on the back of the head.
“They spoke Latin,” said Isabel, who remembered reading that in the book about Pompeii.
“That’s right,” said Miss Z.
“I don’t even know if the English language existed in the year 79,” Isabel added. “How are we going to communicate with people when we get to Pompeii?”
“Good question,” Miss Z said as she reached into her drawer once more. She pulled out a long, thin box, the sort of box that would hold a new watch. She had a little gleam in her eye as she opened it. Inside were four tiny, flesh-colored objects that looked sort of like the eraser you see at the end of a pencil.
“This is F-R-E-D,” she said as she carefully handed one to each of the kids. “It stands for Fully Recognizable English Decoder.”
“What does it do?” Luke asked.
“It’s a universal translator,” Miss Z explained. “It fits inside your ear canal like an earplug. Vocal sounds come in this side. FRED instantly translates the words and repeats them into your ear in English. And when you speak, it translates your words into that language as they come out of your mouth.”
“How does it work?” asked Isabel.
“Nanotechnology,” Miss Z explained. “It is the science of working with atoms and molecules to build devices that are extremely small. My tech team has been working on this for many years. It has a tiny battery inside. But there are no moving parts, so it doesn’t use much energy. And when you put it in your ear like an earplug, it’s virtually invisible. Go ahead, try it out.”
Luke, Isabel, David, and Julia each inserted a FRED into one ear.
“Hello,” said Julia. “Testing . . . one . . . two . . . three.”
“You’ve got to say something in a foreign language,” Isabel pointed out.
“Bonjour,” David said, and instantly the word hello echoed in the ears of the others.
“Wow!” said Luke. “That is amazing!”
“It can translate virtually every language that has ever been spoken,” said Miss Z. “I’m very proud of it, as you might imagine.”
“How much did it cost to make that?” asked Isabel.
“You don’t want to know,” said Miss Z. “I thought about naming it TT for Tiny Translator, but I thought that was too close to the TTT. Then I thought about naming it LISTEN, for Language Interpretation System Translator & Ear Nano-Robotic. But I decided to go with FRED instead. It’s friendlier, don’t you think?”
“It’s sort of like a translating earbud,” said David. “Hey, you should call it Ear Buddy!”
“Ear Buddies!” exclaimed Miss Z. “I like that!”
“Okay, is that it?” asked Luke, whose patience for sitting still had just about come to its end. “Can we go to Pompeii now?”
“Everybody should use the bathroom before you leave,” said Mrs. Vader.
“You sound like my mother,” Julia said.
“I don’t have to go to the bathroom,” said Luke.
“Try to go anyway,” instructed Miss Z. “They’re not going to have regular toilets—or toilet paper—when you get to Pompeii. Do you want to know what they used during the Roman Empire instead?”
“Uh . . . I’m not sure I want to know,” said Isabel.
“A sponge mounted on a stick,” Miss Z said. That was followed by a chorus of gagging noises from the Flashback Four. “They would dip it into a bucket of salt water or vinegar water—”
“Okay, okay! TMI!” shouted the kids as they rushed to the bathroom.
When they got back, Luke, Isabel, David, and Julia took their places in front of the Board. It was 10:15 a.m. Mrs. Vader took David’s timer and set it for 120 minutes—two hours.
“Exactly two hours from now, at 12:15, I need you four to be outside the Porta Marino gate at Pompeii,” Miss Z instructed the team. “Do you remember where it is? That’s the same spot where we landed the first time.”
“We’ll be there,” Luke said. “We promise.”
Mrs. Vader woke up the computer and turned on the Board to warm it up.
“One last thing,” Miss Z told the group. “I know you kids. You like to fix things. You may very well feel a desire to right a wrong, to prevent a death, or change history in some way. When we see a stranger about to walk into the path of a moving car, we reach out and pull them back. It’s human nature. That’s the way our brains are wired. And it’s a good thing. That’s probably why our civilization has survived. But your job here is not to do good deeds. Your job is to take a photograph. You are photojournalists. Do you understand?”
“We understand.”
“Any people you interact with in Pompeii are almost certainly going to die. Do not become friends with them. Do not become emotionally attached to them. And by all means, do not try to rescue them. Got it?”
“Got it,” said David. “We promise to be totally cold and heartless.”
“Okay, let’s get this show on the road,” Luke said.
By this time, the Flashback Four had become accustomed to the way the Board worked. They no longer needed to be told to brace themselves, or to close their eyes. The
y knew the routine.
So do you.
Miss Z cranked up the Board. It did its thing.
In seconds, the kids were gone.
CHAPTER 9
A NEW OLD CITY
THE FLASHBACK FOUR TUMBLED TO THE GROUND ten feet outside the Porta Marina gate, frightening a couple of goats that had been lolling around in the dirt. Luckily, there were no human beings standing nearby to ask the kids who they were and how they got there.
“Is everybody in one piece?” Luke asked as he stood up and dusted himself off. “Looks like we made it safe and sound.”
“Okay, this is the meeting spot,” Isabel reminded the others. “If we get separated for any reason, we’ll meet up again right here to get back home.”
David took out the timer. The screen read 119 minutes, and it was counting down by seconds.
“We’ve got two hours,” he told the others. “Plenty of time to scope out the town and find the perfect location to take the picture. Let’s go.”
“First I should let Miss Z know we arrived safely,” Isabel said, pulling the TTT out of her pocket. She typed into the device. . . .
WE R HERE
Soon, a reply came back. . . .
FANTASTIC! KEEP ME POSTED.
It was hot out, close to ninety-five degrees. Luke was already sweating. He wiped his forehead with his sleeve and checked the camera. Everything seemed to be in working order.
The Flashback Four were ready to get to work.
Before walking through the entrance to the city, the kids turned around to get a good look at the main attraction—Mount Vesuvius. It looked very different than it had the first time they visited. It was much higher now. The top of the mountain hadn’t blown off yet.
“In two hours, it’s going to erupt, and all that rock is going to go flying,” David said. “Less than twenty-four hours from now, the people who are still inside these walls are going to be dead.”
It was a sobering thought. Those plaster casts they had seen on the first trip were the same people who were walking around Pompeii right now.
“Don’t even think about it, dude,” Luke told David. “It’s out of our hands. We can’t save them.”