“I disagree.” David Mitchell’s round face, bald head, and large girth made him look like the banker he was. “If we’d said ‘no’ they might have moved on to someplace else. They’re offering a lot of gold, which we can surely use.” There were about forty men in Perkins’ front yard. Most agreed with Haines on the trustworthiness of the new arrivals, but their suspicion was evidently overcome by the prospect of hard cash. The fall crop had not generated the income many expected it would, and times were hard.
“How’re we gonna divide it up?” Dwight asked. He had a wife and child to support.
“About ten percent of the land they want to purchase is owned by seven men. The rest is owned by the town,” said Mitchell. “I propose that we pay each of those seven landowners double whatever this man Fallon pays for the land, then divide the rest evenly between the town treasury and all the families in town.”
“I own one of those homesteads,” said Haines. “I’ve put a lot of work into it. I think we should get five times the average value. And we should counter-offer at ten dollars an acre.”
With that, Dwight knew the deal would be done, since John Haines was the most obstinate man he knew. While there would be several more meetings over the next two days, culminating in a formal Assembly meeting on Thursday afternoon, everyone agreed to a price of ten dollars an acre, though they also agreed to ask for twelve.
On Friday morning Perkins, Haines and Mitchell journeyed up to the campsite with their counter-offer. Dwight later learned that the men were surprised when the initial twelve dollars per acre offer was immediately accepted. He wished they had asked for fifteen. But the Councilors were honorable men, and stood by their price.
On the following Monday the deal was finalized at the courthouse. Kellen Coyle deposited one-and-a-quarter-tons of gold into the Bank of Pittsburg on behalf of the newly formed Back Lake Enterprises. After the deeds were signed, he wrote out a series of checks and the town Treasurer and landowners gleefully deposited a total of forty-two thousand American dollars into their bank accounts. Dwight and his wife Mellissa’s share was a whopping one hundred and seventy-five dollars, more money than he had made in the previous eighteen months as a woodsman and part-time farm worker. He hoped Back Lake Enterprises would be hiring woodsmen to clear their property. He was eager to offer his services.
3 - ANNA
Temporal Artifact: an alternate universe in which time behaves differently than in the real world. New temporal artifacts are generated at each moment in time, but all life is immediately extinguished when the artifact is generated. The highest order artifacts can be visited by living beings for short periods of time. Glossary, An Illustrated History of the Republic, Helen O’Shea, Ed.
East Berlin, German Democratic Republic, Friday, November 18, 1988
Anna Mannheim was naked and alone, floating on the edge of consciousness. The hard punch in the face that had concussed her was almost welcome, freeing her from fully experiencing the rape that followed. Her captors had been systematically beating, raping, and sodomizing her for three days.
She had no idea how her Stasi spy masters had found out she was working for the Americans, but a routine meeting with her handler had suddenly become a kidnapping. Sooner or later she would be executed, once her torturers determined she had no more useful information on the American counterintelligence program. She prayed, if not for a rescue, then for a quick end.
As if by magic, a white oval of light popped into existence between her and the cell door. Thinking it must be some new Stasi trick, Anna closed her eyes to the apparition. She opened them when two strong hands grasped her legs and dragged her into the white light. She feebly struggled, but there was nothing she could grab on to, so she was pulled through.
The hands released her just as the strange light went out with a soft pop. She was still lying on the concrete floor of her cell, but now the door was open. Kneeling just beyond her feet was a man that looked a lot like her lover’s grandfather, grave concern visible on his face. Like Mike Wilcox, he was a stocky man of medium height, with eastern European features.
“Hello, Anna, it’s been a long time. But you’re safe now.” The man had Mike’s voice, too. This was too much for her wobbly mind to grasp, and she slipped back into unconsciousness.
* * *
Frederick, Maryland, USA, Tuesday, December 11, 1832
Anna clung tightly to Mike’s left arm as they alighted from a southbound train at the Baltimore & Ohio train depot in Frederick, Maryland. She winced with each step down the steep stairs that led to the wooden platform, her cracked ribs shooting bolts of pain through her. Mike, now much older than he was when they first met in Bamberg, West Germany, carried a small but heavy valise in his right hand. Once Anna was safely on the platform, he looked around at the other passengers leaving the train.
“We’re good,” he announced. “No one here could have seen us walk into Gaithersburg.”
“So we stay with Plan A,” she agreed.
“Do you remember your story?”
“Natürlich. We are Mister and Missus. Mike Roberts. We landed in New York ten days ago aboard the good ship Guy Mannering, sailing from Liverpool. After spending five days in New York, we travelled by coach to Philadelphia, spent three days there visiting relatives, travelled by coach to Baltimore, and then switched to this train bound for Frederick.”
A porter arrived, pushing their steamer trunk on a dolly. The porter reached to take the valise, but Mike demurred.
“We’re you folks headed?” the porter asked.
“The best hotel in town,” Anna replied. After her recent experience at the hands of the Stasi and then the rough train ride, she needed to rest.
“Well, Ma’am, we only got two, and one’s full,” the porter replied. “I guess you’ll be staying at the White Deer Lodge, on South Street. It’s a fine establishment. Ol’ Shamus over there will take you to it.”
The porter led them to a one-horse buggy at the edge of the platform and loaded the trunk into the small, open compartment at the rear. As the porter told the buggy driver where to take them, Mike helped Anna climb into the buggy’s rear seat. Mike flipped the porter a small silver coin, for which he got a hearty thanks. The horse and buggy moved off without another word. Ol’ Shamus wasn’t much of a talker.
* * *
The buggy stopped in front of the White Deer Lodge, a prosperous looking two-story establishment painted white with green trim. There were flower boxes in every window, reminding Anna of Bavaria.
Ten minutes later, Mike and Anna had checked into a small but comfortably appointed room on the 2nd floor of the hotel.
“Now that we’re finally alone, would you mind telling me how the hell I got from a cell in 1988 Berlin to a forested hillside in 19th Century Gaithersburg, Maryland?” Anna demanded. “And why are you so much older?”
“Simple,” Mike said. “I hijacked a time machine in 2028, took it back to 1988, grabbed you, and headed to 1832. By 2028 I was sixty-eight years old.”
Anna gaped. “I can’t deny that time travel is possible, since we’re here. Either that or I’m hallucinating. But how can it be?”
“It would take a lot more time than we have now to explain it to you. One thing you need to know is that nothing we do can change our own history. You could go over to Germany right now and kill all of your great-grandparents, and it wouldn’t affect you in any way. You’ll be well out of the way, safe here, when the temporal tide passes through the year of your birth.”
She grimaced at the thought of killing her relatives, but the information relaxed her a bit. “Temporal tide?”
“I’ll explain later,” Mike said. “Right now, I’d like to get something to eat, then you need rest to help those ribs heal. Tomorrow we start a new life.”
“Before we go down, can you give me another one of those magic pills? My ribs are really hurting.”
Mike pulled a pocket watch from his vest pocket and looked at the time. He removed a smal
l mustard-colored bottle labeled Vicoprofen from his valise, opened it and shook out a pill into her waiting hand.
* * *
When Anna woke the next morning, Mike had already left the small but nicely decorated room. Her head was clear for the first time in two days. Or one hundred and fifty-two years, depending on how you counted. She had been sure she was about to die when the Stasi agents grabbed her in the Bamberg garage. Now she was grateful just to be alive, regardless of the year.
She got out of bed, wincing at the ache in her ribs. At least the swelling in her lips had subsided. The Vicoprofen bottle was on the dresser. The label said to take one pill every four-to-six hours, so she popped another one without thinking twice about it.
The steamer trunk sat next to the window on the bare wood floor. She opened the lid and examined the contents. The top tray held an accordion folder full of papers, assorted toiletries, and a strange device made of plastic and glass. It was very thin but heavy, and she couldn’t make heads or tails of it. There was also a good-sized medical kit. She lifted the tray out and set it aside. In the bottom of the trunk was an Uzi with several clips of ammunition, as well as spare ammunition for the Glock .40 caliber pistol she had seen under Mike’s coat. There were several five pound bags of seed; one each of corn, wheat, and barley, and a lot of smaller packets of fruit and vegetable seeds. Finally, there were two changes of clothes for each of them.
She washed her face over a basin on the dresser, then dressed in the old-fashioned clothes Mike had brought for her. She took a bit more time to examine the 19th century clothing. When she had hurriedly dressed in the woods outside Gaithersburg the previous day, she hadn’t noticed the odd, unsewn buttonholes.
It took her twenty minutes to get all of the underclothing and the dress on, and she wasn’t sure she had got it right.
It took another ten minutes to hide the ugly bruises on her face with makeup. One final check in the mirror showed she hadn’t done a half-bad job. She felt better than she looked. The drug made her slightly euphoric as it numbed the pain in her ribs.
She debated whether to go eat breakfast alone, or wait for Mike’s return. She wondered if it was even proper for a woman to dine alone in this time and place. Since they weren’t married, staying in the same room and sleeping in the same bed definitely weren’t proper. Mike had registered them as Mr. and Mrs. Roberts. Three days ago, she would have liked the sound of that, even if Mike was using an alias. But now he was sixty-eight – old enough to be her grandfather. But he didn’t act or move like an old man. As they were undressing the previous night, he’d seemed to be in better shape than he was before, except for the lines in his face and the gray in his hair.
There was a knock at the door, followed by a soft inquiry. “Anna, you awake? It’s almost eleven o’clock.”
“Ja,” she called. “The door’s unlocked.”
“Great news,” he boomed as he pushed through the door. “We own our own farm!”
“What are we going to do with a farm?”
“Live there, for starters. I bought one hundred acres near Springfield, Virginia.”
“Where’s that?”
“About seventy miles west of here as the crow flies, but it’s about a ninety mile trip. It’s nice and private, too.”
“But we don’t know anything about running a farm. Unless you became a farmer after I…” she trailed off. Forty years had passed between the time she was abducted by the Stasi and the time Mike took a time machine back to rescue her.
“I did learn some farming and a great many other useful skills as well,” Mike answered, but she barely heard him. Suddenly she felt faint.
“Mike, what happened to me in 1988?”
“I don’t know,” he admitted, frowning. “We never heard of, or from, you again, so I assumed the worst. That cell was the last place and time that I could reliably put you, so that’s where I went to find you.”
Anna began to sob. In Mike’s past, she had most certainly died at the hands of the Stasi.
Mike put his arms around her and said, “You’re safe now, meine Liebe. Whatever happened to you in my past won’t happen in your future. I’ll protect you in this world, with my life if necessary.”
Mike’s words comforted her somewhat. She got up and took a Vicoprofen pill from the bottle on the dresser, lying to Mike when he asked if she’d taken one earlier. The pill made her feel much better.
* * *
Mike had been busy that morning. While Anna slept, he had purchased not only a farm, but a horse and small wagon, plus a wagonload of supplies.
By one o’clock in the afternoon Anna was feeling much better. They had eaten, checked out of the White Deer Lodge, and loaded their bags into the wagon, along with the rest of the supplies. The small valise sat between them on the hard bench. The steamer trunk was just behind them. They headed out of town along a rutted, bumpy road leading towards the forests to the southwest.
Once they were out of town, Mike stopped the horse, reached around to the back of the wagon, and opened up the trunk. He withdrew the Uzi and asked her to slip it under her apron. “You know how to use that, right?”
“Natürlich,” she answered, more tartly than she meant. “We trained with them at Stasi spy school in East Berlin.”
“The chamber’s empty and the safety’s on, but the magazine is full. We have a lot of gold in here,” he said, patting the valise.
“How much gold? Where’d you get it?”
“I have about four hundred of the twenty-dollar gold Double Eagles left, plus an assortment of smaller gold and silver coins. Altogether we have about ten thousand dollars in hard cash, a small fortune in this day and age. I stole it from the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia.”
“So you not only hijacked a time machine, you’re a gold thief as well?”
“Nobody will miss the gold. You can steal anything you want from the future, and nobody will know. It’s the second best part of time travel.”
“What’s the best part?” she asked.
“Saving those you love,” he said jovially.
“Your timing was impeccable, which I guess is to be expected of a time traveler. I don’t think I would have lived much longer. But how does it work?”
“Well-,”
“Before you start,” she interrupted, “are you sure you know where you’re going?”
He laughed. “Remember, I grew up here in the 1960’s and 70’s. Believe me, I researched this very carefully before leaving 2028. I’ve been to the farm several times and scouted the terrain carefully. I even took soil samples. The man-made stuff around us will change a lot, but the terrain was still pretty much the same in 2028 as it is now. Also, the state of West-by-God Virginia hasn’t been established yet; it’s all still Virginia now.
“Now for the lecture.” He launched into a description of the quantum gravitational theory that led to the development of time travel.
“There are at least six other directions of time where our three-dimensional universe moves forward in the seven-dimensional uber-universe, but without life,” he concluded two hours later. “They’re totally dead worlds, which we refer to as temporal artifacts.”
“So people can’t live there?”
“We can only survive in one of them, and not for long. It’s sort of like mountain climbers who go above twenty thousand feet – you start to die bit by bit. Most of the damage isn’t permanent, although there are chronic effects.” The wagon hit a big pothole in the road. Anna gasped as a bolt of pain ricocheted through her ribcage.
“Have you got another Vicoprofen? I think the last one is wearing off.”
“In the valise,” Mike said. “Be careful with those. They’re highly addictive.” Anna pulled the heavy bag onto her lap, unfastened the leather straps and flipped open the flap. Removing one pill from the bottle, she swallowed it with a swig of water from the canteen.
“The temporal artifacts are dead worlds, filled with dead people, plants and animals,”
Mike went on. “Physics continues however. Cars continue down the road, with lifeless drivers at the wheel, until they crash. Airplanes fall from the sky.”
“Nuclear and chemical plants go out of control eventually. Fires don’t get put out. These worlds are very dangerous places, particularly in the 20th and 21st Centuries,” Mike explained as Anna closed up the bag. His eyes remained focused on the road ahead.
“And filled with rotting corpses. Ugh.” To Anna, these artifacts seemed horrible.
“Not really rotting, since there’s no living bacteria to rot the flesh. Desiccating corpses is a more accurate way to describe it.” Mike paused as two men on horseback rode by in the opposite direction.
“Where is it?” she asked.
“What?”
“The time machine.”
“Carefully hidden one universe to the left! You’ll get to see part of it when we arrive at the farm.”
4 - CORCORAN
Portal: an opening generated by a time machine allowing interdimensional travel through time and space. There are four types with varying capabilities and restrictions: type A allows passage of living tissues and inanimate objects through space and time; type B allows passage of (only) things through space and time; type C allows passage of living tissues and things through time only; and type D allows only passage of electromagnetic radiation through space and time. Glossary, An Illustrated History of the Republic, Helen O’Shea, Ed.
Republic of Indian Stream, Monday, December 17, 1832
Most of the land was deeded to a company Corcoran formed called Back Lake Enterprises, listing himself as President, and Kellen as Treasurer. Each of the twelve families in the party held stock in the company and were individually deeded five-acre plots on the high ground east of Back Lake. Corcoran insisted that the names of both the husbands and their wives be included on the deeds.
His first task was to distract the seven families that were displaced by the land purchase. The terms of the sale allowed them to remain in their homesteads until spring, which could be problematic if they should stumble onto any of the impending portal operations. Accompanied by Mack O’Malley, the Haines homestead was Corcoran’s first stop. Haines was outside chopping wood when Mack and Corcoran rode up to his cabin.
The Legend of Indian Stream Page 2