by David Potter
“But how shall you provide it electricity, Dr. Franklin?” asks Daniel. “There is no storm and no lightning. Must we wait?”
“We are able to generate our own, young man,” Dr. Franklin says. “Unfortunately, we cannot bring our electricity to the device. We must bring the device to our electricity. Mr. Farrington, if you please. Let us do so at this very moment.”
My iPhone lies on its back, its front side exposed, with two long, thin wires protruding from it. Mr. Farrington picks it up, and we go to the front of the print shop, where there is a very large wooden box, as big as a mahogany chest. But at the very top of the chest is a shelf, and upon the shelf are about three dozen big glass jars. Five rows of seven, to be exact. And each jar has a funny-looking lid with metal rods crisscrossing the entire contraption.
Dr. Franklin is beaming, as if he himself is lit up. “Behold!” he says. “Our storehouse of electricity! Mr. Farrington, if you please: engage the condensers!”
THIRTY-FOUR
FOR A GUY WHO was there at the creation of American democracy, he sure as heck didn’t give me a vote. Because the next thing I know, my iPhone is being hooked up. By the two wires dangling out of its back to the big chest of glass jars.
“Don’t be so alarmed, young man,” Dr. Franklin says. “ ’Tis perfectly safe. The jars you see are called Leyden jars, and they were originally devised in Holland. It was my conceit to bunch them together. Do you know one year, using this device, we electrified a turkey? It was most uncommon tasty, if a cook be allowed to praise his own cookery. So moist, so tender: a memorable meal. So my electrical battery is able to generate electricity, of that there is no doubt. And we know electricity is able to flow through wires, such wires as we have affixed to your device. But we must be able to determine if our experiment be successful, do we not? But we do not have a turkey at hand, whose results we are able to see as well as to eat. Have you any suggestions, young man? How we may know if we are, at this moment … injecting … your device with all the electricity it needs?”
“It’ll turn on by itself, and start recharging,” I say. “We won’t have to do a thing.”
Which is exactly what all of us do.
I can hardly believe my eyes.
It’s charging. The power bar moves!
I’d like to see the MythBusters people try this one.
It’s at five percent power, and gaining by the second.
“I knew Dr. Franklin could do it,” Elizabeth says. “I had no doubt of it.”
“How long shall it take?” Daniel asks.
“An hour,” I say. “Two hours? Something like that.”
“A more precise calculation would be helpful,” Dr. Franklin says. “Our Leyden jars will not last forever.”
“It has to get to at least fifty percent,” I say. “Mr. Hart said so.”
“Mr. Hart?”
“He’s my teacher. Somehow … we’re able to text each other. But not call.”
“Text?”
“Yeah. Send short messages.”
“Using this device?”
“Yes.”
“If you tell me,” Dr. Franklin says, “that you are capable of communicating … with someone … not of here … but of … your time … if you tell me this, young man, I believe I shall expire on the spot.”
“All right,” I say. “I won’t tell you then.”
He waits. But I know well enough by now that he won’t wait for long. He’s too curious to wait for anything.
“All right, confound it,” he says. “Go ahead and communicate with this Mr. Hart of yours. Tell him Dr. Benjamin Franklin sends his compliments.”
I pick up my phone and text Mr. Hart. Dr. Franklin is helping. Now at 20 percent power.
We wait, but there is no answer. And while we’re waiting, I get an awful feeling: maybe there’ll never be an answer. If George Washington is dead, wouldn’t the whole history of the world be permanently altered? And if so, how long would it take to … to … manifest itself?
The minutes go by. Every once in a while I pick up the phone, to see if a text has arrived, though I know full well that a familiar electronic beep would let me know. And I check the power status: thirty percent. Forty. Forty-five. Fifty. Fifty-five.
And that might be all we are going to get. Because we are now beginning to notice something. People, in the street, just outside the shop.
Not ordinary people, either.
Agitated people.
THIRTY-FIVE
AND WE ALL KNOW why: the news of General Washington’s demise is being carried along, person to person, family to family, neighbor to neighbor, by the fastest way possible: word of mouth. Everyone wants to be the first to tell the news; no one wants to be the last to hear.
And I’m now at just about sixty percent power. “Do you think you have a sufficient supply?” Dr. Franklin asks.
“I think,” I say, “that what I have is going to have to be good enough.”
“I am beginning to sense,” Dr. Franklin says, and his eyes scan the street, which is filling rapidly with passersby, “that our experiment has come to its conclusion. I fear my cabinet of Leyden jars—my electrical battery—has never been put to such a test. I also suspect we will not be permitted the leisure of standing here for so long a time without distraction. Indeed, I keenly feel a fresh distraction approaches us at this very moment.”
He isn’t wrong. Into the shop come a group of men, four of them, and they make no effort to hide the alarm on their faces.
Daniel nudges me. “Patriots,” he says. “By which I mean fellow revolutionaries of Dr. Franklin’s.”
“Dr. Franklin!” cries the first. “Have you heard the awful news? General Washington is killed!”
“I have already heard this unbearably awful news, Samuel,” Dr. Franklin says. “Time and time again. I suspect every man, woman, and child in Philadelphia has heard by now.”
“The people are saying the revolution is finished, that we must sue the king for peace. What are we to do now, Dr. Franklin?” Samuel says. He is a younger man, perhaps the same age as Mr. Farrington—thirty, I would guess.
“This is the question of the hour, Samuel. His death is confirmed?”
“It is, alas. His body has been recovered and protected.”
“Protected?”
“His staff is fearful, Dr. Franklin. That … unruly bands … will seek to desecrate … the lifeless body of a man they used to fear and respect. I speak not of the populace, sir. Who present their own problems. I speak of General Washington’s unpaid soldiers, who are using this event as license to unleash their more degenerate passions. The stores of rum and grog, sir, have been breached. None would have dared were Washington alive.”
“The army …,” Dr. Franklin says, hesitating. “Can it not be restored to order?”
“I believe it too late, sir. Their complaint is that since they are unpaid, and due, they are no longer subject. They have sprung themselves upon the populace, like winter locusts, and are intent on taking, from whosoever shall have plenty, that which they deem their due. What keeps these soldiers yoked, sir, is the order and discipline of the army. The yoke has been removed; they are roaming, and pillaging, at will. I fear our revolution, Dr. Franklin, is unraveling at a frightful pace. If only providence would undo what has been done!”
“Rest assured, Samuel,” Dr. Franklin says. “We are engaged in the very thing. Young man,” he says, turning to me, “the toll is rising, and may rise far more than we ever could fear. Are you not sufficiently supplied … for us to carry on?”
I check my iPhone and see I’m at seventy percent. “We’re good,” I say. Which is exactly what I know Dr. Franklin wants to hear.
What he certainly doesn’t want to hear is what we hear next: a crowd approaching us from down the street. Samuel, Daniel, and Mr. Farrington open the door, and their faces are aghast; we are, Samuel says, in proximate danger. And Mr. Topping, it appears, has somehow managed to slip away, when no one was pay
ing attention.
We hear the crowd. They are chanting the same thing, over and over: “Death to traitors! Death to traitors! Long live the king!”
THIRTY-SIX
“DISENTANGLE THE WIRES!” DR. Franklin says to Mr. Farrington. “Put it back together! We shall grab the device and go! Through the back! Mr. Farrington, if you please: fortify the front. Let us not be detected or disturbed. The future of our revolution depends upon it!”
I hold the iPhone while Mr. Farrington detaches the wires and puts the cover on, and then we leave the whole Leyden jar battery cabinet contraption behind and hustle off to the back room.
“Hustle,” of course, is a relative term. Daniel, Elizabeth, and I are perfectly capable; Dr. Franklin, not so much. He does a kind of half-shuffle hopalong, using his cane as a pivot point and a launch tool, but we get there. With maybe two seconds to spare.
As we duck into the back room, Samuel and his comrades, directed by Mr. Farrington, stand foursquare inside the front door, blocking any penetration. We hear the chant—“Death to traitors, death to traitors, long live the King”—and we hear the door being rattled.
“Hurry!” says Daniel. “Hurry, Mel! We haven’t much time!”
We exit the print shop through a little-used back door and trudge through snowdrifts, with Dr. Franklin shouting directions. Daniel leads the way; Elizabeth and I are alongside Dr. Franklin, helping him, or at least trying to help him, keep pace.
We have to tromp through snow, back-alley snow, and it’s cold. We can hear the crowd, fading away now, but still chanting: “Death to traitors! Long live the king!” We all hope that Mr. Farrington and Samuel’s men have been able to fend them off, because if they come after us, in these narrow alleyways, going at Dr. Franklin’s pace—we’ll all be dead meat.
Dr. Franklin shouts to Daniel to turn right, then right again; we come to the end of an alley, and to a back door. Daniel knocks on the door, and he knocks again, and then the door is opened a crack and we are let in.
The house belongs to an older woman, maybe as old as Dr. Franklin himself. She isn’t introduced—there isn’t time—nor does she stick around. We’re let in, the door is closed, and Dr. Franklin glances out the window.
“Our tracks,” he says, “cannot be hidden, or obscured. Should the mob burst through, it won’t take them long to find us, and I fear our time will have come to an end. Mel, we have electrified your device as well as we could; the moment has arrived for you to command it to do what it can do, or for us to discover … the futility of our efforts. Mel? Please proceed.”
All eyes are upon me. I take my iPhone in my hand, and with one only slightly trembling right forefinger I press the mysterious icon that says iTime.
THIRTY-SEVEN
MY IPHONE KIND OF BUZZES. Kind of shakes, rattles, and rolls.
Then a simple screen appears. And on the screen, a message. It says this:
Welcome to iTIME.
Brought to You by T.G.W., Inc.
The Aim Is to Play.
To Mess About.
Who Says Things Have to Be This Way and Not Another? Who Says Things Wouldn’t Be Better if a Different Road Had Been Taken?
Catch Us if You Can.
K.
We read this, and as we do the message fizzles away and disappears. A new screen appears. Five large boxes.
And, to the far right, at the lower corner, a little green circle. And in the middle of the little green circle, tiny letters, etched in white: Submit.
“I fear I don’t understand,” says Dr. Franklin, “the point of the message. I wish to reread it. Mel—can we?” I try to, but I can’t get the message back. I hit the home button, then iTime again, but no message. Just the five large boxes, and the one small circle.
“It said something about T.G.W., Inc.” says Daniel. “What is that?”
“I don’t know,” I say.
“It was also signed, I think,” says Elizabeth. “By someone named ‘K.’ Who is this?”
“Presumably,” says Dr. Franklin, “the inventor. And I know something about inventing. You always wish to leave your mark, somehow. Credit must be given where credit is due. So let us assume that ‘K’ is the inventor, and the message, cryptic though it be, is for us. Now then. Let us continue our examination.”
All of us are peering intently at the little electronic screen on the odd little device sitting in the palm of my left hand. A thing I do fifty, seventy-five times a day. A thing none of them, essentially, have ever done.
Box one, on the left: DAY. Inside the box is 25.
Box two: MONTH. Inside the box, 12.
Box three: YEAR. Inside the box, 1776.
Box four: TIME. Inside the box, 11:00.
Box five: COORDINATES. Inside the box, +40.287660, -74.8898391.
That’s it. No other information to go by, no instructions, no tabs.
Dr. Franklin speaks first. “Mel,” he says. “At what time did you … arrive on Christmas Day?”
“I don’t remember exactly,” I say. “But eleven o’clock in the morning seems about right.”
Dr. Franklin nods. Then he puts a hand on my shoulder. “Tell me, Mel,” he says. “What do you think would happen if you changed the setting? On this device? If we were to put in ten o’clock, let us say, in the box on the right? In place of eleven o’clock?”
“I would guess I might have an hour to work with.”
“Indeed,” Dr. Franklin says. “And if that were so, Mel, do you think that you would be able to … handle things?”
Dr. Franklin’s eyes are on mine. He sees a twelve-year-old kid, a skinny kid, a kid with braces on his teeth. He’s really asking, does it make sense to trust this entire operation to a twelve-year-old boy?
I remember what my dad said: You want to be somebody, right? You don’t just want to be a potted plant, do you? What he didn’t tell me was that there’d be an occasion when you don’t have much of a choice, like right now. When you’d be forced to do something you never knew you had in you.
“Don’t worry, Dr. Franklin,” I say, and hold his gaze steadily. “I got it covered.”
THIRTY-EIGHT
ELIZABETH COMES FORWARD AND puts her hand on my arm. “He’ll know what to do, Dr. Franklin,” she says. “He’s gotten us this far.” Then she does something very strange, and very nice: she hugs me. For all she’s worth.
She’s also tearing up a little, and it hits me. This is going to be the end of something, isn’t it?
Dr. Franklin understands it. So does Daniel.
If I reset the time, to one hour earlier—for us, everything changes.
“Tell me,” Dr. Franklin says. “Indulge an old man. Are we remembered?”
“To this day,” I say. “Celebrated and honored. Your picture, Dr. Franklin, is on our one hundred dollar bill. One of the most popular science museums in Philadelphia is called the Franklin Institute. Every kid in America learns about you, sir, to this day. And they will for every day to come.”
“My picture,” he says, “on a hundred dollar bill. I can’t imagine. I am speechless, I truly am.” And then Dr. Franklin positively beams.
But then we hear them—the mob. They’ve found our tracks in the snow. It won’t be long till they find us.
I push the TIME box, and reset it to “10:00.”
There’s only one thing left to do: press the little green circle in the lower right corner. Submit.
And I can’t bring myself to do it just yet.
There is more to say.
To explain.
“Wait,” says Daniel. “I want to come with you. Elizabeth can stay behind.”
“I will not!” Elizabeth says. “We shall go together.”
“I don’t think so,” I say. “It’s a one-person operation.” I’m not absolutely certain about this, but at this point I don’t want to take any chances. Besides, it would completely blow everyone’s brains to bits if this Daniel and Elizabeth happened to run into that Daniel and Elizabeth.
“I’ve learned wonders, absolute wonders,” Dr. Franklin says. “A veritable fortune could be had, a hundred fortunes could be had, if I have retained a tenth of it. But I fear not. Mel—are you thinking along the same lines as I? Once you … go back … all this … will be as if it never were?”
“Dr. Franklin, I think you’re right—all of this, and all you’ve learned, will be as if it never happened.”
We can not only hear the mob now, but also see them. They’ve got muskets, sticks, and torches. What they plan to do with all of it I don’t want to know. They are chanting, “Death to traitors, death to traitors, long live the king.”
I put my finger on the green circle.
I give a final nod to Elizabeth, to Daniel, and to Dr. Franklin.
“You must go,” Dr. Franklin says. “You must go this instant, before it is too late! They approach! Good luck to you, lad! For the revolution!”
“For the revolution!” I say, and press the green circle.
My phone starts tingling, buzzing. It goes completely haywire, and the room starts twirling around and around and around.
Then I’m gone.
THIRTY-NINE
IT’S KIND OF LIKE I clicked my heels together three times, and said: “I am not a potted plant.
“I am not a potted plant.
“I am not a potted plant, Dad.”
Then I’m in a stable. A very familiar stable.
There are stacks of hay, saddles hanging up on a wall, bunches of rope, and a godawful stench.