Tesla's Time Travelers
What’s Past Is Prologue—Shakespeare
Tesla’s Time Travelers
By Tim Black
Copyright 2013 by Tim Black
Cover Copyright 2013 by Ginny Glass and Untreed Reads Publishing
Cover image - Washington at the Battle of Trenton. An engraving by Illman Brothers. From painting by E.L. Henry. Courtesy of
http://commons.wikimedia.org
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This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to the living or dead is entirely coincidental.
Tesla’s Time Travelers
First in a series of Historical Research Trips
Tim Black
To Courtney and Mikayla
What’s Past Is Prologue—Shakespeare
The portable classroom shook and rattled. Outside the classroom, three members of the Pennsylvania Militia dissolved into the ether of a receding past, a last musket ball seeming to stop, frozen in mid-air. The portable’s flight reminded Victor Bridges of Dorothy’s flying house in
The Wizard of Oz,
although no cranky old lady bicycled past the windows of the classroom. Victor clenched Mr. Greene’s podium and held on for dear life. He felt that if he lost his grip he would be deposited somewhere along the space-time continuum from 1776 to the present, maybe even in the 1830s, which was really a boring decade, except for the battle at the Alamo in 1836.
Why couldn’t they have a cool chrome time machine like the movie version of
The Time Machine?
No, they were stuck with this Tesla prototype, a chrome plated thumb drive that the Wizard of Menlo Park, Thomas Edison, Tesla’s technological rival, had placed in a locked wooden box that he hid in the basement of the Cassadaga Hotel after a visit to nearby Rollins College, where he was awarded an honorary degree. Mr. Greene had bought the old wooden box containing the device at a yard sale at the hotel in 1996, fifty-three years after its inventor, the forgotten scientific genius, Nikola Tesla, passed away, penniless.
No one knew what the device was in 1996, before thumb drives were common, and Mr. Greene had purchased the locked wooden box for seventy-five cents. The most amazing thing, Mr. Greene told his class, was that the Croatian immigrant Tesla left notes, albeit in his native Croatian—notes on how to install the device into a USB port, decades before a USB port was developed. Mr. Greene had the instructions translated into English and was astounded to discover that the thumb drive was actually a prototype for a time travel device. It seems that Edison, Tesla’s rival (Tesla’s invention of alternating current made Edison’s direct current obsolete), may have stolen the invention from Tesla and hidden it in the Florida town famous for its mediums and psychics—which was a tad ironic, Mr. Greene explained, because none of the psychics knew that a time machine was in the basement of their favorite hotel.
Of course, Victor realized the portable classroom was the perfect cover for a time machine’s force field. Who would ever suspect an old school portable could go back in time? But still, why couldn’t they have a cooler model? He always let his thoughts digress when he was nervous, and he was very nervous now. Everyone was depending on him. Mr. Greene was incapacitated. In a quick fifty more years they would be back. A mere minute and a half if he could just keep the portable on track. He held the podium steady. Don’t let it veer off course, he told himself. We aren’t dressed for Woodstock and the Sixties.
As he held the podium firmly, he stared longingly at Minerva Messinger, a vision of loveliness in her pretty colonial dress. She had her beautiful blue eyes firmly closed. In fact, everyone in the room had their eyes closed. The behavior reminded Victor of being a little boy and hiding under the bed during a hurricane—as if by hiding under the bed nothing bad could happen, especially if you shut your eyes while under the bunk. Of course, crazy historian Mary Beard was floating about the portable, giggling and screaming “wheee” as if she were on a roller coaster while her husband Charles, a dignified ghost historian, sat disdainfully atop a filing cabinet, shaking his head at his late wife, who, Victor admitted, was pretty lively for a dead woman.
Finally, after more than two hundred and thirty-five years, the portable classroom came to rest on its normal site on the back lot of Cassadaga Area High School, replacing the façade of the holographic image that had taken its place in its absence. The other students opened their eyes and began to cheer along with Mrs. Beard, who was now wearing a cheerleader’s uniform with a big “H” on the front and waving holographic pompoms. “Give me an H,” she demanded. “Give me an I, give me an S-T-O-R-Y. What’s it spell?”
“History!” the students cheered. Victor noticed the word had escaped his lips as well. Mrs. Beard was so cheesy. He looked at Caesar Rodney’s riding crop as if it were Dorothy’s ruby slippers, which were of course silver slippers in the book, and were only changed because of Technicolor, which was developed by M.I.T.—hence the name for the colorization. Mr. Greene had taught the class about the allegory of
The Wizard of Oz
.
The story was about the 1896 presidential election: the Emerald City was Washington, the Wizard was McKinley, a proponent of the gold standard, and Dorothy was actually Mary Elizabeth Lease, a Populist who wanted silver to replace gold as currency—hence her “silver slippers” in the book, as well as the “yellow brick road.” Frankly, Victor had been able to live with the demythologization of Betsy Ross, but when he found out that Dorothy was really a Populist, he was crushed, for
The Wizard of Oz
had been his favorite childhood story. Well, at least Toto was still a dog, he mused. Okay, Victor, you can turn off the anxiety; you’re back, he told himself. Finally he exhaled.
Mr. Greene unbuckled his seat belt at his desk and stood up. How could that be, Victor pondered, for Mr. Greene had hurt his ankle and wasn’t ambulatory.
“Now there’s something,” the teacher smiled, able to walk. “Seems time healed my ankle.” He began to dance a little jig. Victor noticed the girls raising their eyebrows simultaneously as their portly teacher quivered like a reject from
Riverdance
. Victor scanned the classroom: Justin’s black eye was gone, as were the bruises on his twin brother Heath’s face, as if the time travel had healed the wounds received in the 18
th
century. Surprisingly, any signs of intoxication in the Anderson twins were gone as well, as if the trip through time had sobered the boys. The Dunlap broadside of the Declaration of Independence was back on the bulletin board. There was a musket hole through a window, which Mr. Greene could explain away as a rock thrown by a student. But the opposite wall of the classroom, which displayed a map of the United States that covered holes in the drywall, had a small round perforation in Missouri where a musket ball had ended its trajectory, and already Justin Anderson was digging the lead out of the Show Me State (which Victor knew, along with Alaska, was a leading lead producing state) with the point of a scissors. Minerva and Bette were hugging, a sight that Victor hadn’t quite gotten accustomed to yet, for they had begun the trip hating each other. Then Victor noticed something amiss on the map of the United States as Justin finished retrieving his souvenir ball of lead from the trip. Tennessee was missing.
“Mr. Greene,” Victor commented. “There’s no Tennessee on the map.”
“What?” Mr. Greene said. “Justin, on the map, what is in Tennessee’s space?”
Even a blockhead like Justin would know where Tennessee was, Victor realized, remembering his first test in Mr. Greene’s class when all of the students had to draw the contiguous forty-eight states on a blank piece of paper from memory, forever imprinting “the nation in the their noggins” as Mr. Greene was fond of saying.
“Um,” Justin said, looking at the map. “Franklin is where Tennessee should be,” he said.
“Franklin?” Mr. Greene said. He thought for a moment then replied, “There was a portion of western North Carolina that tried to become the state of Franklin, but it didn’t fly…or maybe it did. Okay, no one leaves the classroom. We have to find out why Tennessee is now Franklin.”
“Wow!” Justin exclaimed. “Look, Mr. Greene, the capital of Franklin is Greeneville. I bet they named it for you.”
“Probably General Greene from the American Revolution,” the teacher replied. “We have a lot of work to do, students, before anyone goes home.”
“I’m hungry, our mom has dinner early, Mr. Greene,” Heath whined.
“Shut up, Heath, you caused more of the mess than anyone did,” Victor chided his classmate.
“Mr. Greene?” said Minerva, holding up the two ten-dollar bills her mother had given her that morning. “Something’s wrong with the money my mom gave me.”
“Let me see,” said Victor, taking a ten-dollar bill from Minerva’s hand. He looked at the face on the front of the ten-dollar bill. It wasn’t Hamilton’s visage, it was… “Arnold! Mr. Greene, Benedict Arnold is on the ten-dollar bill!”
“What! Let me see, Victor,” Greene demanded.
Victor turned a bill over. There was Benedict Arnold on horseback, charging at Saratoga, the battle in which he became a hero. “The Battle of Saratoga is on the back of the ten-dollar bill!”
Mr. Greene examined a bill. “Is this a joke on me, kids? Did the Anderson twins put you up to this, Minerva?”
Victor watched Minerva get angry. She was about to speak when Bette Kromer, scanning the bulletin board of U.S. presidents, discovered something equally unnerving.
“Mr. Greene?” she called.
“What?” said the teacher, still puzzled by the currency.
“Benedict Arnold is the second president of the United States. There is no John Adams!”
“What the devil?” Mr. Greene said. “Victor, use my computer and Google Benedict Arnold.” He walked over to the bulletin board. “There’s no John Adams? I’ll be darned. No John Quincy Adams. Shippen Jefferson? Who the heck is he? He’s in John Quincy Adams’s spot. Google Shippen Jefferson as well, Victor.”
“Mr. Greene, I know you don’t like Wikipedia, but here’s what it says. ‘Benedict Arnold, second president of the United States, was George Washington’s most trusted subordinate in the American Revolution. After leading the charge at Saratoga, Arnold went on to assist Washington in the defeat of the British as Yorktown, the last major battle of the American Revolution. When Washington was elected president, he selected Arnold as his first secretary of war. Later, Fort Arnold, the nation’s gold depository in Kentucky, was named for the American hero. In 1796, Arnold defeated John Adams in the presidential election. Adams finished second and served a third term as vice president. In 1800 Arnold won reelection. Thomas Jefferson became vice-president and succeeded Arnold upon his untimely death in 1801.”
“What in the world did we do?” Mr. Greene said, stunned. “Did we make
Benedict Arnold a hero?”
“It would seem so, dearie,” Mary Beard said, and began to laugh.
“I didn’t think it was possible,” Charles Beard added. “My my, Mr. Greene, I don’t believe the Adams family will take this very well.”
Chapter 1
“Good day, Mr. Jefferson, how are things at Monticello?” Victor Bridges practiced in front of his bedroom mirror. He adjusted the tilt on his tri-corner hat. Was that correct? he wondered. Did Jefferson have Monticello as early as 1776? Did he? Darn, he surely didn’t want to say anything too stupid to Thomas Jefferson.
“Victor, breakfast,” Victor Bridges’ mother yelled from downstairs in the kitchen.
“Coming, Mom,” he replied, searching his messy bedroom for his field trip permission form. Why hadn’t he gotten her to sign that last night? She wouldn’t have even read it last night, but she was unpredictable in the morning. Not as unpredictable as blond, blue-eyed Minerva Messinger, the favorite to be class valedictorian and Homecoming Queen, the girl who sat across from Victor in Mr. Greene’s American History Advanced Placement Class and made Victor stutter when she deigned to speak to him. Minerva, in an effort to pad her resume for college applications, was joining the prestigious sounding “History Channelers,” a club that Mr. Greene sponsored, and of which Victor was president. Victor smiled: Miss Smarty Pants is going to get a bit more than a line on her curriculum vitae, he mused. For starters, she was going to meet the ghosts of Mary and Charles Beard, historians of the American Revolutionary period. Too bad Minerva couldn’t have been on last spring’s field trip to Ford’s Theater to catch Laura Keene in
Our American Cousin
—now THAT had been a heck of an evening, Victor remembered, with the deceased Shelby Foote as their historical spirit guide. Mr. Foote was Victor’s favorite “historical apparition,” as Mr. Greene referred to the tour guides he called upon to lead The History Channelers on their field trips. The standing ovation for the Lincolns impressed Victor. He couldn’t imagine a modern play would stop in the middle of a performance for the arrival of the president of the United States, or that the actors on stage would applaud as the Ford Theater actors had for Mr. Lincoln and his wife Mary. The president had looked so exhausted, Victor recalled, the four years of the Civil War having taken their toll.