The Book That Proves Time Travel Happens

by Henry Clark

  A chorus of approval erupted, coming from about half the people there. I noticed the kids who were acting in The Crucible were scattered around the auditorium in their seventeenth-century costumes. Billy Osborn was there in his Becky Thatcher getup, the one he had gotten beaten up for wearing. He was sitting defiantly in the front row, his arms crossed, glaring up at his school board father. I found myself thinking his bonnet was nicer than mine.

  The cheering gave way to booing from the other half of the crowd, and I realized the town was pretty evenly divided.

  “My father has taught in this town for sixteen years,” I reminded them. “He’s a good teacher! There’s no reason he shouldn’t be allowed to keep doing it!”

  The microphone cord had stretched as far as it would go. I dropped the mike in Billy Osborn’s lap, jumped up on the stage, and hugged my dad. “He’s my father, and I stand by him!” I shouted.

  Half the audience applauded.

  “I’m so glad I gave up my spot,” said the man I had cut ahead of, who met Billy halfway to retrieve the mike. “I wasn’t really sure what I was going to ask, but now I know.”

  “And you are, sir?” McNamara asked.

  “A reporter for the Cleveland Plain Dealer. In town to visit my daughter, who convinced me this meeting might be worth attending. I’m thinking a story about a school that fires a teacher for being a”—he looked at me—“what was it, Ambrose? A trans-time—?”

  “A trans-temp,” I answered. “Short for trans-temporal. A cross-time dresser.”

  “A story about a school that fires a teacher for being a cross-time dresser might be of interest to our readership.”

  McNamara digested this.

  “And what about a story about a school that doesn’t fire such a teacher?” he asked.

  “Not so much. My question being, now that you’ve heard from both sides, and considering young Mr. Ambrose’s quite eloquent plea—how do you expect the vote will go? I only ask now because I have someplace to be at eight thirty.”

  McNamara studied his hands, which were clenched together in front of him like he was praying, or strangling a rodent. He raised his head, grimaced, and said, “One way to find out. I declare the discussion part of this meeting at an end.”

  He patted the air to calm the angry murmur from those still waiting to speak. Then he banged his gavel again. “We have heard enough! Members of the board. All those in favor of dismissal of Mr. Hannibal Brody from his position with the English department of the Freedom Falls school district, by reason of said Mr. Brody being unfit to teach, please signify by raising your hands.”

  Millicent Mordred’s hand shot up immediately, followed less quickly by Cynthia Moon’s. Billy Osborn’s father frowned down at his son. Mr. Osborn shook his head, then also lifted his hand.

  “That’s three in favor,” acknowledged McNamara, to applause from a distressingly large part of the crowd. “All those against?”

  The three board members to McNamara’s left put up their hands. A different part of the crowd cheered.

  “Three to three.” McNamara sighed. “I get to cast the deciding vote.”

  “It would be a pity,” said my father, “if we never got to see the heroic McNamara tartan again.”

  “That is not what is being decided here,” McNamara shot back.

  “It isn’t?”

  McNamara ignored him, or appeared to.

  “After due consideration,” he said, getting to his feet and glancing at the Plain Dealer reporter, “and as much to avoid some unpleasant publicity as to keep me in the good graces of a venerable clan, I vote against. Mr. Brody can keep his job and dress however he wants!”

  Pandemonium broke out in the room, half the people cheering, half booing. My father clasped hands with my mother and hauled her up on the stage, where they hugged. I got the feeling she wouldn’t be visiting her sister again anytime soon, not after a hug like that. I broke into a silly grin.

  McNamara banged his gavel and restored something close to order. Quentin Garlock started to scramble to his feet, saying, “We had a deal—” and McNamara smacked him on the head with the gavel and he sat back down, much more quickly than he had gotten up.

  “I trust,” said McNamara, continuing to stare at the reporter, “very little of what just happened here was newsworthy.”

  “Not much,” the reporter agreed. “Maybe a small article toward the back.”

  “Thank you. That is appreciated, Mr.—?”

  “Whiffletree. Clarence Whiffletree. Don’t mention it.”

  CHAPTER 26

  Not Yet Completed

  It wasn’t, of course, our Clarence Whiffletree, the one we had met in the engine room of the Buckeye Beauty. It was one of his descendants, from the family he began in 1853, the year after time travelers from the future had saved his life.

  Frankie and I found a few minutes to discuss it after the meeting broke up, while my parents met with McNamara privately in his office. The two of us slipped into a room with a working computer, and I looked up information on the steamboat explosion. Frankie was still arguing that it had been irresponsible of me to scare everybody off the boat.

  “Usually,” she said, “when you mess with the past, more bad comes of it than good. You got lucky. Besides, the only reason the boiler exploded was because the boat got stuck on a sandbar, and it wouldn’t have gotten stuck on a sandbar if it hadn’t gone out of its way to rescue Killbreath, and Killbreath wouldn’t have been floating around on a log if Mr. Ganto hadn’t dragged him to the far side of the river. So we caused that boat to explode. If we hadn’t been there, Clarence Whiffletree’s life would never have been in danger!”

  “But he was the engineer on a boat with faulty boilerplates!” I argued. “Sooner or later, it would have blown, and he would have died. His life needed saving. We just did it sooner than later. Look!” I spun the monitor toward her and pointed to the article about the Buckeye Beauty that we had been trying to read when the tablet’s battery had gone dead. It had taken some searching, but I had finally found it. I highlighted the important part.

  … boiler exploded at ten minutes to six on the evening of August fourteenth, 1852, resulting in no loss of life due to the earlier abandonment of the boat because of the alleged presence of an escaped circus monkey, thought to be rabid and of a size some witnesses described as ‘gargantuan.’ The last overboard was engineer Clarence Whiffletree, who, upon reaching shore, announced his decision to give up steam in favor of employment in his brother’s printing office.

  “Amazing that the battery went dead only seconds before we read that,” Frankie marveled.

  “So, if Clarence had died, he never would have had a family, and that reporter from the Plain Dealer never would have been at the meeting, McNamara wouldn’t have gotten embarrassed, and my father would have been fired.”

  “Actually,” said Frankie, “I think your speech had a lot to do with saving your dad.”

  “You do?”

  “It was a very good speech. Well delivered. I liked it.”

  I felt a warm glow all over. I decided it might be from lack of sleep.

  At breakfast the next day I sat facing the fridge, where a smiley-face magnet held a photo of me and Tom with our arms around each other’s shoulders, our grins both bigger than the smiley face’s. I kept staring at it and forgetting to eat. I finally abandoned my English muffin and ran to my room. I had thought of something that might tell me what had happened to my friend.

  I did an Internet search for I-Ching hexagrams and was surprised by how many sites had them. Some of the sites were totally loony, others were overly serious, but they all featured the hexagrams in the same order as the book.

  Tom had consulted the I-Ching just as the soldiers came around the bend, only moments before he made the decision to cover his ears and remain in ancient China. I had no idea what question he had asked, but I knew the result had been the seventh hexagram. My own question, as I scrolled down to it, was simply—wha
t happened?

  The seventh hexagram was almost all broken yin lines, with only a single unbroken yang. It looked like this:

  It was called The Army. Of the sixty-four hexagrams, it was definitely the one that best applied to the situation we’d been in at the time. Shang troops had been marching down on us.

  But this didn’t tell me what had happened to Tom.

  I printed out the hexagram, then I printed a chart showing all the Morse code letters.

  The hexagram started with eight dots, but no Morse code letter was made up of eight dots, so I started by assuming maybe the first three dots stood for the letter S, and then maybe the next dot was an E, and the next dot, maybe another E, followed by three dots that might have been another S. The single dash, I thought, could have been a T, and the final two dots together might have been the letter I. That gave me seesti, which, unfortunately, wasn’t a word.

  How had Tom been able to do it so quickly? I had a theory, but I couldn’t believe it.

  It took me half an hour to find a Morse code message in the lines of the hexagram known as The Army. And once I found it, I was pretty sure it was addressed to me.

  The first broken line—two dots—was the letter I. It was followed by four dots—the letter H—and then another two dots, meaning another I, and then, finally, a dash and two dots, giving me the letter D.

  Tom Xui, how did you escape the approaching army?

  I hid.

  He and Jiang must have made their way back to Jiang’s hiding place before any of the soldiers noticed. Presumably, the army marched right past without seeing them.

  And then what?

  I flipped a coin. Six times. All the while talking to Tom directly, as if he were sitting there in the room with me.

  “Tom Xui, what happened to you? Are you all right?”

  The hexagram I got was this:

  I looked it up and I was relieved to find it was called Deliverance, and it was all about past difficulties that had been successfully overcome. I worked out the Morse. It only took me twenty minutes this time. I was getting better. I would never be as good as Tom, but then, he had an advantage that I could never have.

  The Morse was three dots followed by a dot and a dash, followed by two dots, a dash and a dot, ending with a final dot.

  It spelled safe.

  So Tom was safe, and he seemed happy to be where we had left him.

  I did another six coin flips and got the very first hexagram. This, I could see, was a very special one.

  It was called Heaven.

  It was all solid yang lines, meaning the Morse would be nothing but dashes, with no dots. I looked at my Morse alphabet and discovered there were only three letters that used only dashes. When I saw what those letters were, I knew what the hexagram spelled.

  I freaked.

  I jumped up and hugged myself, I was shivering so badly.

  Then I forced myself to calm down, and flipped my coin six more times.

  It didn’t surprise me when the hexagram it gave me was the very last one, hexagram sixty-four:

  The last hexagram was just as special as the first. It had an equal number of yin lines and yang lines, and they alternated back and forth, sort of the way Frankie’s mom and dad gave equal time to each other (I surprised myself, thinking of it that way). I was almost positive what the first Morse letter would be, and I wasn’t wrong. And once I had the first letter, I knew the rest.

  I couldn’t believe it, but it made perfect sense.

  The sixty-fourth hexagram was called Not Yet Completed. And it was right: Things were not yet completed.

  I had to go see Mrs. Xui.

  I pretended to head for the bus stop—Dad always left for school too early for me to ride with him—and after I passed the corner, I cut through a hedge, looped back, and made my way to the Xui residence.

  Even though more than twenty-four hours had passed between the time my father dropped me off at Tom’s on Wednesday and the Thursday night school board meeting when I returned with the others from our time-travel trip, nobody had missed me. My father had taken it for granted I would go to school with Tom on Thursday morning, and the school attendance office had left a message about my absence on voice mail that didn’t get listened to until late Thursday night.

  Tom, on the other hand, was missed at breakfast on Thursday morning. His mother, however, decided he had once again run away from home and this time taken his friend Ambrose with him. This meant he was most likely with me at my place. Mrs. Xui fully expected to see her son back by nightfall, or, at the very latest, sometime on Friday. Whenever he ran away, he never stayed gone for more than a day. She always made him make up the piano practice and studying he had missed, so staying away any longer only made his workload worse.

  By the time I got to Tom’s house, his sisters had left for school, and Mrs. Xui was off at the supermarket. It was Tom’s great-grandfather—Gee Gee Pa—who opened the door when I knocked.

  “Hello, Bro!” he said, giving me the very faintest of bows, to which I gave a much deeper one. “I am sorry. I do not know where Tom is.”

  “I do,” I replied. “That’s the reason I’m here. May I come in?”

  He stepped aside, then ushered me into the living room. On the TV, a dark blue box was spinning through space. Gee Gee Pa switched it off.

  “Doctor Wu marathon,” he explained. “Most amusing.”

  “If you think that’s amusing, wait’ll you see this,” I said, spreading my papers on the coffee table.

  I explained to him what had happened to his great-grandson.

  It went better than I expected. Possibly because his command of English was not as good as his Chinese, he sat quietly without interrupting me. I made the story simple. I skipped over the Time Trombone and everything that had happened to us in 1852 and mainly told him that his great-grandson had time-traveled to ancient China and decided to stay there, and I had messages from him to prove it.

  Gee Gee Pa nodded and smiled, as if I were trying out a creative-writing assignment on him. But when he saw the I-Ching hexagrams on my computer printouts, and I showed him the chart I was using to decode the Morse, his smile vanished and he took me more seriously. He had heard of Morse code; he knew it involved a series of dots and dashes. When I showed him that the dots and the dashes contained in the fifty-sixth hexagram, Travel, spelled the English word times, he got up and left the room. He came back a few moments later with an old leather-bound book, which he opened on the table.

  “Book of Changes,” he said, and I saw that the book, written in Chinese, contained the familiar hexagrams. Gee Gee Pa had his own copy of the I-Ching, and I was sure it made more sense than the wacky version Tom had been using.

  “Funny,” said Gee Gee Pa, in the slow, halting, but very precise way he always spoke English, “hexagram fifty-six, about traveling, should contain code for times, and no one ever noticed. Traveling through times. Very clever.”

  I showed him more. I showed him how the hexagram called Trouble contained the code for erase; and Decay, dead; and The Army, I hid. I showed him every single hexagram that had guided us, and how each contained a Morse code message that had been important to us at the time.

  Then I showed him the first hexagram and the last hexagram, and the Morse code they contained.

  And he believed.

  “Oh, my Tom Xui!” he said, clutching his leather book to his chest. “I knew you were born to do great things!”

  “All he had with him,” I said sadly, “was his I-Ching book and a gold coin with a nail hole through the middle.”

  “Ah,” murmured Gee Gee Pa. “This would explain why early Chinese coins all had holes in the center. Inspired by my great-grandson’s cash. More proof of what you say!”

  He took it very well. It probably helped that he had been watching a Doctor Wu marathon.

  I met Mrs. Xui at the door when she returned from shopping and helped her carry in her groceries.

  “Ambrose! Good! The two o
f you are back! I wish Tom would outgrow this—he can’t keep running away. His studies are important. I ride him for his own good! Where is he? Why aren’t the two of you in school?”

  Gee Gee Pa was waiting for us when I led Tom’s mom into the living room.

  “Granddaughter, you must listen,” he said, and his presence was a help.

  She threw me out of the house halfway through my explanation.

  I waited patiently outside and listened to the voices within. One murmured, while the other got louder and louder. Finally, the door flew open and Mrs. Xui dragged me back inside.

  I finished explaining, and Gee Gee Pa showed her pages in his I-Ching book. She batted the book away and stomped angrily around the room.

  Gee Gee Pa coaxed her back to the sofa with us, and I showed her the Morse code hidden in the first and final hexagrams. She swayed back and forth like she might fall, then she collapsed into her grandfather’s arms and sobbed uncontrollably. Gee Gee Pa fluttered his hand at me behind her quaking back, suggesting I should leave, and I did. I let myself out.

  On the doorstep, I cried, too. I never expected to see my friend again. He had obviously grown to manhood and become a very respected figure in the China of long ago.

  I don’t think Mrs. Xui would have believed it if it hadn’t been for the Morse contained in the first and last hexagrams. Tom must have realized this.

  The first hexagram was formed by a single dash, followed by three dashes, followed by a final two dashes.

  The Morse code spelled Tom.

  The last hexagram was formed by a dash, two dots and a dash, followed by two dots and a dash, followed by two dots.

  The Morse code spelled Xui.

  My best friend, Tom Xui, inventor of the three-thousand-year-old hexagrams of the I-Ching, had signed his work.