by C T Cassana
Lisa, meanwhile, had found a pair of shorts with copious pockets that she often used on trips to the country, and a Puma t-shirt that her grandmother had given her for her last birthday and that had quickly turned into her favorite. Although she had no special interest in brand-name clothes (above all due to Marcus’ influence), she had an embarrassing weakness for that particular shirt. She loved its yellow color, wildly bright and cheerful, and the contrast it made with the brand logo, the silhouette of a large black puma leaping forward. The Puma brand name did not appear anywhere, which soothed her conscience whenever she felt she was betraying her father’s ideals.
Dressed as they were, Charlie and Lisa wandered among the ruins of the ancient city of Akhetaten like any other tourists. The only details that would have given away the fact that they weren’t just any travelers were that they were not accompanied by an adult and that Lisa kept writing feverishly in a notebook, taking down the places named by the guide and the coordinates that a GPS indicated to her for each one. But nobody seemed to suspect anything. Only the guide noticed that the young woman had an irritating fascination with where Queen Nefertiti lived, ate and slept, because she had asked about it nearly every single minute of the mere half hour that had passed since the tour began.
Charlie walked next to his sister, watching the sweaty tourists dragging their feet as they looked around at the rows of bricks that rarely rose any higher than their knees. These people must have been at least as disappointed as he was, although nobody seemed to dare to complain, perhaps because it was abundantly clear that the guide was a grumpy, ill-tempered woman. He and Lisa hadn’t spent a single penny to travel there, and hadn’t even paid the price of admission to the enclosure where the ruins were. But this trip must have cost the other poor tourists a fortune, and all to see a few pathetic, collapsing walls, bordered here and there by circular stones on the ground which the guide referred to as columns. Every now and then they came upon the odd sign which, rather than explaining what had once been there, defied the imagination and, above all, the intelligence with its description.
“House of the King,” read Charlie as he looked out over an empty terrace pock-marked with holes, which might easily have been dug out by the guide herself with a couple of buddies with the intention of fooling the naive tourists.
“Here is where the Great Royal Palace once rose majestically above the city,” she explained pompously, sheltering herself from the heat under a red parasol. “And on this side was the Great Bridge, which joined the Palace to the House of the King, located to our right.”
Charlie looked over to the lumpy pile of rocks which, according to the guide, was the bridge. He then turned to his sister, but she seemed to have left her capacity for critical thinking and common sense behind in London, as she silently wrote down every word spoken by the guide, a woman who seemed as dry and lifeless as the desert itself.
“And which one were the Queen’s chambers in?” asked Lisa.
The guide eyed her with disdain. This girl was wearing out her already limited patience with her constant interruptions.
“... The bridge ran over the Royal Road and its walls were decorated with gorgeous color scenes depicting the royal couple, a pond and a garden,” the woman went on.
Charlie turned back to look at the mound of dirty, eroding bricks. To claim that such a pile of dust was once a bridge was already a stretch, but to assert without blushing that it also had paintings of the queen with gardens and ponds was simply outrageous.
“And how do you know that? The Egyptians took all the stones from the city when the pharaoh died, so it would be impossible to know what was painted on the walls,” remarked the boy defiantly.
That was it. Since the beginning of the tour, the guide had put up with the girl’s incessant questions, but that her brother should now cast doubt on the veracity of her explanations in front of the other tourists was something she wasn’t about to accept. They had only just begun looking at the Great Royal Palace and still had to visit the Northern Palace, and she had no intention of allowing these two brats to ruin the tour.
“Where are your parents, boy?” asked the woman in a dull tone.
Charlie pretended not to hear the question, but the guide fixed him with a fierce glare.
“I asked you where your parents are,” she fumed, shooting an angry glance at Lisa as well.
The children froze for a moment, not knowing what to say.
“They’re over there, with another group,” explained Charlie.
“And why aren’t you with them?” inquired the woman.
“Because you explain things so well,” replied Charlie in an effort to calm her. “I understand everything much better.”
“I know why. It would be because this afternoon I’m the only English-speaking guide. And you two are English, are you not?”
Lisa and Charlie stared at the woman, trying to think of a reply that would get them out of the situation.
“May I see your tickets?” she asked, cutting them off before they had the chance to answer.
Lisa took her brother’s backpack and began opening the zipper.
“I think they’re in here,” she replied, her eyes still fixed on the woman.
The guide waited impatiently in front of her and then suddenly turned around, as if the few seconds Lisa had spent searching the backpack had been far too long.
“I see,” was all that she said. And she went in search of the nearest security guard.
Lisa grabbed Charlie by the hand and took off running in the opposite direction. Things had turned ugly and they needed to escape before they got worse. They had to travel back into the past at once, but they couldn’t do it in front of all those tourists watching on curiously. They had to find a hiding place where they could do it, and quickly.
The children jumped over some blackened ropes that marked the boundaries of the areas where tourists were allowed to walk, and ran straight over a pile of ruins. When they saw what they had done, the tourists began shouting accusingly at them and calling out to the guard and the guide to come back quickly.
“Look how mad they get for stepping on a few rocks!” said Charlie as he ran. “It’s not as if there’s anything here left to ruin.”
“Come on, Charlie! Don’t stop!” replied Lisa, visibly nervous. “Those walls over there look a little higher; we have to hide.”
The guide and the guard ran past the group and jumped over the ropes to chase after the children.
Lisa looked back. They were about a hundred yards ahead of their pursuers, who were already beginning to look tired from the run and the heat. She and Charlie were close to the walls, but they still had to cross a terrace with a series of stones forming a large square in the middle. That had to be the lovely pond of which only the border remained, like the skeleton of a beautiful animal dried out in the sun. On one side, a sign indicated that they were standing on the ruins of the Small Temple of the Aten.
“That one on the left!” said Lisa, pointing to one of the walls. “It’s the tallest.”
Before skirting around the wall, the girl looked back to see the guide and the guard, who had begun crossing the terrace. They didn’t have much time, as their pursuers would soon catch up to them.
The children ran around the wall, which fortunately was tall enough to block them from the view of the tourists.
Lisa took the cape out of the backpack and put it over her brother’s shoulders. Then she took hold of the bracelet to enter the date they had to travel to, when she heard the guide call out a few yards away. Their pursuers had crossed the pond and the woman was giving instructions to the guard to go around the other end of the wall and cut off the children’s escape.
Lisa hesitated for a moment. She could choose to send them back to the safety of the attic of their house, or enter the date that they had planned to travel to. While she tried to make up her mind, she looked into her brother’s eyes.
“Come on, Lisa,” said the boy. “Let
’s see if this Nefertiti was as good-looking as they say.”
The guide came walking slowly around one end of the wall, gasping for breath. There was no rush. After working there for seven years, she was familiar with every corner of the ruins and knew that the brats were hiding behind what was left of one of the temple pylons. They couldn’t come out without being seen. At last she had them.
Sensing that her pursuers were close, Lisa grabbed her brother’s hand and moved the time dials quickly. Year 1336 B.C., just one year after the disappearance of the Queen. Then the two siblings wrapped their arms around each other and Charlie turned the clasp on his bracelet.
When they reached the other side of the wall, the guide and the guard found only sand and pebbles scattered on the ground, but no sign of those damned children. They had vanished as if in a dream.
“I don’t get it,” said the woman, shaking her head.
Then she turned back, still panting, and returned to the group of tourists, trying to recall where she had left off in her explanations.
. . .
Max Wellington didn’t trust in luck. That was why for years he had designed and perfected a system that enabled him to detect time travelers without having to be constantly journeying all over the world and all through history to find them. This system was based on three pillars.
The first involved monitoring the antiques market closely through different intermediaries, keeping track of any antique objects put up for sale in any corner of the world. Time travelers had a habit of bringing antique objects back to their era and selling them off in order to pay for their high standard of living. This was how Max had managed to discover the identity of Franz Schneider and several other targets.
The second pillar was what he called “the intelligence center”, a supposed news agency specializing in strange, supernatural or unexplained events occurring anywhere on the planet, both now and in the past, because Max knew that many if not all such events involved time travelers.
The agency’s sources were as diverse as tip-offs from informants who used to work for the police, fire brigade or public authorities, news stories reported in the mainstream media, unauthorized access to official or private databases that compile this kind of information... There were no limits on how the news might be obtained.
On receiving a story, the investigators would make further inquiries in an effort to complete it and document it insofar as was possible. All the details were gathered on a predetermined and carefully structured file stored on the news agency’s intranet. Its employees assumed that the center sold this information to sensationalist newspapers, magazines with esoteric or paranormal content and television documentary programs. They never suspected that the only person who had access to their work was Max Wellington, who reviewed the news arriving from all over the world on a daily basis.
Despite having such a limited audience, the efforts of these investigators never went unappreciated. Max was a meticulous and persistent man, who took his work very seriously. When a piece of news seemed important to him or when he thought it might be related to a time traveler, he would visit the witnesses and the scene of the events to make his own inquiries. Sometimes, the information proved reliable; other times, it was the product of the superstitions or the imagination of the people concerned, about whom Max had quite an extensive and rather amusing collection of stories which, sadly, he was unable to share with anybody.
The third pillar of Max’s system was his “network of sentinels”, an initiative on which he had spent a lot of time and money before it finally began bearing fruit. The idea was simple, but highly effective: since 1916, Max had partially or fully financed countless archeological and paleontological excavations all over the world, always through one of his many foundations. In return, the foundation would keep a portion of the pieces found, and reserved the right to choose which ones it would take. And more importantly, it was agreed that one of the foundation’s employees—the sentinel—would remain on the excavation site at all times and would be informed of any detail or finding of any kind. The sentinel had orders to confiscate any rare or unusual object that was found, to inform the foundation immediately of the discovery and to keep the object in safekeeping until someone came to collect it on the foundation’s behalf.
There were occasions when an excavation already had a private or public sponsor covering its costs, leaving Max unable to participate financially in it or to monitor its findings. In such cases, if the excavation was important, Max would exploit human frailty by bribing a member of the team with access to the discoveries. In exchange for a substantial reward, the individual in question had to keep him informed and ensure that any rare objects ended up in his hands.
In any event, and whatever the status of the sentinel might have been, the only way in which the information could be sent was by letter, which had to be sent to a post office box in New York City, located at the General Post Office on 8th Avenue, which decades later would be re-named the James A. Farley Post Office Building. Max acquired the post box mere days after the post office opened in 1916, in the name of a small company that was not related to his business group, Arum, and he had kept it ever since.
Every Monday at the same time, he would go personally to check whether a new letter had arrived. In this way, from the comfort of his home in the twenty-first century and without neglecting his obligations, he could monitor whether anybody had made a journey in time in the previous week with a reasonably good chance of success. If the traveler was careless, which was surprisingly common, he would leave some trace behind him in some past era, altering the course of events from that exact moment.
Max knew that in the temporal dimension everything operated in a similar way to the spatial dimension. Just as his briefcase could not be on the living room table and in his office at the same time, a traveler could not visit his own past, because this would require him to be in two places at once.
And just as Max’s briefcase would remain in his office until the exact moment when somebody moved it to the living room, the same would happen with objects lost in time. They would only reach the place and the era that the traveler visited when he took them with him, never a minute before; and they would only remain in the place visited if, while there, the traveler was careless and lost them.
If Max was lucky, the forgotten trace would appear in one of the countless fossil sites, tombs or excavations he was monitoring, which would occur more often than might be expected, because time travelers tended to have a weakness for visiting well-known historical places and figures.
When some lost object appeared, Max’s sentinel would inform him by sending him a letter, which would appear suddenly in his post office box. That small variation in events would be perceptible only after the journey in time had been made, just as his briefcase would only appear on the living room table after it had been moved there. It didn’t matter whether the sentinel had sent his letter years or even decades earlier: it would only appear in Max’s post box after the trip to the past had taken place.
And that is precisely what had happened when somebody traveled millions of years back to visit dinosaurs in South Dakota, where a small compass had gone astray. Although Dr. Oswald Butler’s team had found it under the vertebra of the Elasmosaurus in June 1962 and the sentinel had sent the letter immediately, Max did not find the letter in his post box until February 10, 2014, fifty-two years later, in spite of having checked it the previous Monday.
This left no room for doubt: during the last week, and more specifically between February 3 and February 10, 2014, a traveler (and clearly a novice) had taken a seat to play at the board of time. It was possible that his initials were C. W., and of course he did not appear to be a very experienced or careful player, which made it likely that he would soon make another mistake.
And when he did, Max Wellington would be waiting, ready to hunt him down.
. . .
Charlie and Lisa broke apart and looked around them. The
little wall that they had been hiding behind was now enormous, some fifty or sixty feet tall. They took a few furtive steps away from it while they tried to work out where they were. A large, empty courtyard, illuminated by the light of dusk, spread out before them. The children moved around it in silence, admiring the walls and columns of the temple in wonder. Covering the walls were beautiful, colorful paintings depicting the pharaoh in different scenes: worshiping the solar disk, sitting on his throne, shooting an arrow from a chariot, or punishing his enemies. Each scene was framed by borders with geometrical motifs or extremely long hieroglyphs, giving the whole place an orderly and harmonious quality. The children had seen countless reconstructions of ancient Egyptian temples in their father’s books, but none of them did justice to or even came close to reproducing the beauty and splendor that surrounded them now.
They were shaken from their reverie by a desert wind blowing a few long, narrow flags, like enormous colored ribbons, that hung atop a row of masts.
“Right, so let’s look for the Queen,” said Lisa. “We’ll use the coordinates that I’ve collected, but with some slight adjustments. The guide always took us along the pathways and kept us outside nearly all the buildings, so if we change the coordinates a little, maybe we can get inside.”
“OK.”
“If we don’t like what we see, just move the dial a little and we’ll go somewhere else.”
“Alright. I’ll do a test.”
Charlie moved the dials showing the coordinates and suddenly appeared a few yards away from his sister; another slight change, and this time he appeared on the far end of the huge courtyard.
Lisa laughed when she saw him appear out of nowhere in a different spot each time.
“And above all, don’t forget me,” she told her brother.
“That depends,” he replied with a cheeky expression. “Seeing as how the Queen is so pretty, I might just swap you for her.”
Lisa gave a mirthless laugh, crossing her arms in front of her as if demanding an explanation.
