by Henry Clark
CHAPTER 27
Completed
Two days later, Sunday evening, as the sun was setting and Camlo’s carnival was closing, Frankie and I sat swinging gently at the top of the Ferris wheel. Across the treetops we could just make out the sun’s last rays glinting off the windows of the Dingleman Hole-Punch factory. It was the kind of view you never forget.
“Your school will be wondering where Tom went,” said Frankie, sitting close to the center of the seat. I thought maybe there was gum or something on the far side of her that she didn’t want to sit in.
“Gee Gee Pa is returning to China for a visit,” I explained. “He leaves tomorrow. The Xui family has already gotten word out that Tom is going with him, and won’t be back in school for a while. I’m guessing that, eventually, they’ll say he decided to stay in China. That would be pretty much the truth. Tom’s family seems okay with the idea of time travel. The rest of the world might have some trouble with it.”
“And you explained it all to them without mentioning the Shagbolt. Thank you for that.”
She patted my hand, then let her hand linger. I raised my hand and scratched the side of my nose.
“All I told them was, the time-travel thing seemed to involve some kind of psychic power that Tom possessed, and that he had only confided about it to me. They knew about Tom’s ability to predict ringing telephones, and the evidence in the hexagrams was pretty convincing. I didn’t have to tell them anything about Time Trombones or slave catchers or exploding steamboats.”
“Well,” said Frankie, drumming her fingers on the seat, “I guess this explains why your friend was able to decode the Morse code messages so quickly. He was the one who put them there!”
“Yeah,” I agreed. “He was reading his own mind. I wish I had figured that out sooner.”
A blue jay landed on the edge of the seat, hopped to the floor, and flew off with a piece of popcorn. Frankie and I were the only ones on the wheel. We had been at the top for a few minutes. I wondered if the ride’s operator had fallen asleep.
“Speaking of the Time Trombone…” I said.
“My father put it someplace,” Frankie said, clasping both hands in her lap and staring straight ahead. “I’m not sure if it’s with the carnival, or if he’s found a new place to hide it in your town. I can’t believe he thinks it’s more of a danger than a benefit to have around. When I’m officially the Shagbolt’s Keeper, I will keep it with the carnival at all times. Just to be safe.”
“Yeah. You never know when Nazis are going to come crashing through the trees.”
“You joke. But it’s truer than you think. My mother thinks I could be named Keeper as early as my fourteenth birthday.”
“Does your father agree?”
“He’s of two minds.”
“You know,” I said, “I thought about it, and that place where the Shagbolt was hidden in the middle school—it’s on the other side of the wall from the English department office, right near the desk where my father sits and grades papers.”
“So?”
“So… is it possible being that close to a time machine somehow affected my dad? Maybe… made him need to dress in the clothing of other time periods?”
Frankie tapped her foot, as though she were irritated.
“Maybe,” she conceded. “The Shagbolt gives off an energy we call the Aura of Inevitability. Long-term exposure to it can cause a variety of odd side effects.”
“Does that mean that now that the Shagbolt’s gone, my father will stop being a cross-time dresser?”
“No.” Frankie shook her head emphatically. “I’m sorry, Rose. The aura’s effects are permanent. Your father might as well have been born the way he is. He will always feel the need to put on homespun or togas or stovepipe hats. And, the way I see it, that’s a good thing. Apparently, there are other people who feel the need to live the alternative lifestyle your father is living, even without any past exposure to a time machine. And your father seems willing to teach these people and reassure them that being different is perfectly all right. So it’s really for the best.”
“GOOD NIGHT, AND THANK YOU FOR ATTENDING!” a voice rang out from the carnival’s public address system. “Camlo’s Traveling Wonder Show is now closed. We will be breaking down our tents and moving on, with happy memories of all our delightful guests from insert name of town here—er—Freedom Falls—to warm us as we journey to our next destination. Good night! Good night! Lost children must be claimed within the next fifteen minutes, or they become property of the carnival. Good night!”
I had a final question, but I had been putting it off. I thought I might already know the answer.
“So why did your future self steal Uncle Tom’s Cabin?”
“Because that was the book I happened to be reading just before we arrived in Freedom Falls.” She shrugged. “It could just as easily have been Ivanhoe.”
“Nobody reads Ivanhoe.”
“Obviously, my future self knows me well enough to know my solution would be to find the Shagbolt and go back and try to replace the book. It was like she was deliberately telling me I had to go back to 1852.”
“Why?”
“That, at first, was what I couldn’t figure out. I thought maybe there was something I had to set right, or undo, or find. But it didn’t matter, because I started out with all this confidence. I had seen my future self, so I knew I would survive whatever happened. But then I wound up traveling with you, and Tom, and Mr. Ganto, and I realized I had no idea if anything bad would happen to any of you, and I started to get worried, especially after we didn’t go to New York, and we wound up in a much more dangerous place. And at first I thought you were such a goof, but then you rescued Dwina and figured out how to get the Shagbolt back, and saved us all when we were going over the falls. I’m not really sure when it was I knew.”
I looked over the edge of the seat. I wondered how difficult it would be to climb to the ground. “Knew what?”
“I didn’t fully understand at the time, but when my future self held her hand to her lips to keep me quiet, she wasn’t just showing me my charm bracelet. She was showing me the ring on her finger. I think she stole the book to make sure you and I would have this adventure together!”
“Because,” I said, gripping the handrail like we were spinning a mile a minute, “we’ve become good friends, and, and—I’ll probably be the one who introduces you to your future husband! Fiduciary! It’s probably somebody I already know! Maybe Mickey Steinmetz, he’s really cool, he can burp the national anthem, or… or… Jamal Tremain, his family raises chinchillas, or Nooby Wilson, he’s a little bit weird, he thinks inchworms should be converted to the metric system, or Sylvester Delgado—he broke the three middle teeth out of his comb so he can comb his hair without snagging the wart on the top of his head—”
“Are you aware that girls mature faster than boys?” Frankie swiveled her head and examined my expression.
“Uh, I had heard something like that—”
She leaned in close. The Ferris wheel lurched and threw us back in our seats. The wheel rolled forward and we swung down and around and halted with a bump at ground level.
The ride’s operator turned out to be Orlando Tiresias Camlo.
“Dad!” cried Frankie.
He was wearing a T-shirt and jeans. At least, as far as I could tell.
“‘The wheel is come full circle; I am here,’ as Edmund said in King Lear. Our revels now are ended. Or, at least, they should be.” He turned and shouted at a passing worker, “Adam! Give Dukker a hand with the game trailers! I want to be halfway to Louisville by midnight!” He looked back at us and added, “Time for you two to say good night.”
“‘A thousand times good night’?” Frankie asked in an impish tone, and I suspected she was quoting Shakespeare back at him. I decided I didn’t want to know which play.
“Once will be quite sufficient. Parting may be sweet sorrow, but you’ll get over it!” He hurried after one of his me
n. “Mander! Wait up!”
Frankie walked me to the exit, stopping at the ticket booths like they were a barrier she wasn’t going to cross. The mood from the top of the Ferris wheel had been broken, and I certainly didn’t want to pick up the conversation from where we had left off, but I wanted to talk to her some more, so I told her, “One of the boys in the school play—The Crucible—broke his leg skateboarding yesterday. They’re holding emergency auditions tomorrow to find a replacement. I was thinking of trying out.”
“I think you should! You have a great voice; it really carries. What part?”
“Giles Corey.”
“He was a young black man?”
“He was an old white guy. But the part of the judge, Thomas Danforth, is being played by a girl, so I’m guessing casting is flexible.”
“And who was Giles Corey?”
“He was one of the citizens of Salem who was accused of witchcraft.”
“He was hanged?”
“They piled rocks on him until he died.”
“Just because they thought he was different.”
“Yeah. If I get the part, I’m going to ask the director if I can throw the rocks back at them. Make it a surprise ending.”
“You can’t rewrite history.”
“Why not? I’ve done it before. And I get the impression you do it all the time.”
She kissed me, a fast peck on the lips, and then she turned and disappeared into the growing chaos that was a carnival coming apart. I walked backward so I could see her until the last moment.
I collided with her father.
“Well met by moonlight,” he said as I whirled to face him. He was dressed in the old-time suit and tie from our first meeting—or he appeared to be—only this time he was smoking a cigar, the way I had seen him in the crystal ball.
“Ambrose, is it?” he asked. “You and I won’t be formally introduced for another year yet, but I feel compelled to thank you here and now for the way you protected my daughter during your recent excursion. Well done, sir!”
He took my hand and shook it firmly.
“She—she told you about it?” I stammered.
“Her future self did.”
“Her future self?”
“Hard to believe a daughter of mine will ever wear that much eyeliner. I trust I did not keep you at the Ferris wheel’s apex for a period beyond your own personal comfort. It was a tricky thing to judge.”
“You wanted us up there?” I looked over my shoulder at the wheel. It was being disassembled. When I turned back, a woman in a kerchief and fancy robes stood where Frankie’s dad had been standing. Instead of a cigar, she was chewing a strip of red licorice. She smiled and gave me an approving pat on the head. I blinked, and she was gone, replaced by Mr. Camlo.
“‘We are such stuff as dreams are made on,’” he informed me.
“You don’t smoke,” I told him.
“Do you smell smoke?”
I sniffed. “No…”
“Then I’m not smoking. But I sometimes accessorize. The future Shofranka tells me that you, young Ambrose, will one day be important to her, and that in the protection of the Shagbolt, you will prove to be—if I may make a Bard-like pun—instrumental.”
I didn’t understand half the things he said. I had a feeling it was just as well.
“You… planned for us to time-travel?”
“Let’s just say that when I leave a treasure map in a locked safe, I fully expect my daughter to get her hands on it. It was a small conspiracy between myself and the future Shofranka. I really do look forward to meeting you!”
He stepped around me and walked back to his carnival.
The next day, my father taught his classes dressed as Shoeless Joe Jackson, a baseball player from the early twentieth century. The uniform looked almost modern, but the cap looked more like a beanie.
“Shouldn’t you be barefoot?” I asked him when we met in the parking lot at the end of the day. On the other side of the fence, the school’s sports teams were starting to practice.
“What? Because they called him Shoeless?” My dad shook his head. “He only played barefoot once. It doesn’t take much to get branded for life. Care to have a game of catch?” He nodded at an unused baseball field. “Or—” He hesitated. “Is it too public for you?”
I looked. Kids I knew were all over the place. But it didn’t matter.
“Sure!” I said eagerly. “But on one condition!”
“What?”
“You let me wear that hat!”
He did, and we played, and the hat looked a little goofy—
—but I didn’t mind a bit.
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A FEW MORE LINES FROM THE AUTHOR
There has been positive proof of time travel ever since 1836, when Samuel Morse invented Morse code. Ever since then, had anybody bothered to look, they would have found Morse code messages in the three-thousand-year-old hexagrams contained in one of the world’s oldest books, China’s I-Ching: The Book of Changes.
Nobody bothered to look.
It doesn’t surprise me that it was two middle-school kids who finally made the discovery. Middle schoolers are still intellectually curious, and they have not yet been taught that some things are impossible. (Or, if they have been taught this, they know enough not to believe it.) Finding Morse code in the I-Ching is the same as finding a cell phone in King Tut’s mummy case, or a fossilized snow-blower in the La Brea Tar Pits, or a battery-powered nose-hair trimmer in the ruins of Machu Picchu. This is why the title is The Book That Proves Time Travel Happens. You can’t argue with hard evidence.
What do we know about the time traveler who created the I-Ching hexagrams and their cleverly concealed Morse code messages?
We know a lot. For one thing, he made his base in the mountains. Hexagram fifty-two, called Stillness of the Mountains, contains the Morse code for base. He was also an avid follower of the weather—hexagram fifty-one, called Thunder, contains the Morse code for sleet. He liked to leave his dwelling for an occasional stroll—hexagram ten, Walking, contains the Morse for out. And his parents apparently came from two very different backgrounds—hexagram thirty-seven, The Family, contains the Morse for mix.
And, how appropriate is it, considering China’s notorious rainy season, that hexagram fifty-seven, known as Ground, should be turned by its Morse into mud?
If you’re thinking this is all just coincidence, our time traveler was sometimes exuberant—hexagram sixteen, Enthusiasm, is full of sass, as so many of the enthusiastic are, and when he was at peace, he hummed—hexagram eleven, Peace, contains hum—and he felt that change for the better almost always takes place in small increments, otherwise why would hexagram fifty-three, Gradual Progress, contain the tiny measurement of mites? He also, quite sensibly, preferred his seafood cooked, rather than raw, since hexagram thirty, Fire, is full of tuna.
Added to the hexagrams mentioned earlier in the book—Trouble containing erase; Observing containing miss; Decay containing dead; and, most telling of all, Travel containing times—we have irrefutable proof that someone from the future visited, and probably made his home in, China at the time of the Zhou dynasty.
I am eagerly awaiting notification that I have won the Nobel Prize for time-travel research. To my mind, there are no other contenders.
Exactly half—thirty-two—of the I-Ching’s sixty-four hexagrams contain Morse code messages that relate to the topic of the hexagram they occur in. The I-Ching is all about opposites: yin versus yang, chaos versus order, hello versus goodbye. So, whoever created the I-Ching made a deliberate artistic choice to put messages in only half of the hexagrams: meaning vs. nonsense. Of the thirty-two nonsense hexagrams, most contain no messages whatsoever, while a few contain gibberish. (There is, for instance, no sensible reason why hexagram twenty-one, Chewing Up and Spitting Out, should contain the Morse code for Tibet, unless the I-Ching’s creator was making a
veiled critique of modern-day China’s internal policies.)
A few of the hexagrams contain more than one message, depending on how the dots and dashes are read. Here, for example, is hexagram eighteen, Decay:
It can be read from top to bottom in four different ways:
All four words can relate to Decay, but dead is the most appropriate. The other three choices are just the I-Ching’s creator showing off, something he did fairly often. (For instance, hexagram fifteen, Modesty, contains either the Morse code for hers, or seers, and since it would be sexist to suppose that modesty is only appropriate to the female, he had to have meant that seers—fortune-tellers such as himself—should show a little more humility, which he easily could have done by being a little less clever.)
Do I believe all this?
Of course.
So should you.
It will make your world that much more intriguing.
The point here—or maybe it’s a dot, possibly a dash, maybe even a dot and a dash—is that patterns are everywhere. Some patterns are easy to find; we’re all aware of them. Other patterns are more complex, and we need artists, musicians, writers, and scientists to find them and point them out to us. Usually, once these people show us the patterns, the patterns make our lives a little richer: We say, cool, I like that song; this painting moves me; what you just said helps me understand the universe a little bit better, or it makes me laugh, or both.
When the scientist Sir William Ramsay first isolated the element helium in 1895, he did it by studying the patterns in something called a spectrogram. Spectrograms are a series of lines; they look like I-Ching hexagrams on steroids. Sir William’s discovery of helium made modern MRI medical scanners possible, and has resulted in birthday balloons being 98 percent less droopy. (I like to think that Sir William ran out of his laboratory shouting, “I’ve discovered helium! I’ve discovered helium!” but that’s just me.) His discovery would never have been made without his ability to recognize patterns.
