Emperors of Time by James Wilson Penn Page A

been
restored recently, but assuming the microchip could work in spite of this, he
was soon going to be seeing what it had looked like in 1863. 
    A wooden brown
painted picket fence stood in front of the building.  The building was
made of gray limestone bricks, some of which seemed to be growing moss. 
The mansion had three chimneys. It had five windows on the top floor and four
on the bottom, plus the window above the door.  Ivy covered the bricks on
the first floor, but hadn’t conquered the awning which jutted out from the
space between the first and second floors. 
    A brown sign with
gold lettering (the brown matched the shutters, door, and fence), proclaimed
that this was Wright’s Ferry mansion, and that tours were available from April
to October.  It was early April, and a tour group was forming beside the
building right now.  Tim was trying to figure out how they would get close
enough to touch the building without anybody thinking they were weird. 
    He
absentmindedly touched the microchip currently resting heavily in his
pocket. 
    He and the girls
had met yesterday afternoon to decide how they would introduce Rose and Billy
to time travel.  They decided Tim should hold the Dominus Temporis, as he
could best envision the time they were heading to.  They had met at
Julie’s house again and  buried the description of where they would be by
the oak tree, just as Hopkins had asked them to. 
    Tim led the
group of four toward the building. 
    As they walked
around the corner of the mansion, out of sight of the tour group, Rose spoke
up.  “So, Billy…  Um…  completely hypothetical question. 
If it turned out it was possible to travel back in time, would you want to?”
    “Yeah, sure,”
said Billy, in a way that made it perfectly obvious he wasn’t taking the
question seriously.
    “Even if it
would make your life way more complicated?” asked Rose.
    “Uh… 
yeah,” said Billy.
    Tim looked at
Julie.  They had decided the afternoon before that they at least should
give Billy the option whether he wanted to be involved. 
    Julie shrugged,
“Good enough.”
    Rose said,
“Billy, would you hold my hand?”
    “What?” asked
Billy, but Rose grabbed his hand anyway. 
    At the same
moment, Julie grabbed Rose’s and Tim’s hand while Tim took the Dominus Temporis
in his right hand and placed that hand in what he hoped was a casual and
non-noticeable way, up against Wright’s Ferry Mansion. 
    Nobody had a
clear view of him and his friends, so he figured that when they weren’t around
anymore, people would assume they had missed seeing them walk away.  After
all, Tim himself had taken a whole lot of convincing before he believed any of this
time travel stuff, nobody was going to believe they had seen four kids vanish
in front of them. 
    He imagined the
town of Columbia on June 29, 1863, with Confederate forces advancing just on
the other side of the river.  They had been marching closer all day and
now that it was night they were close at hand.  The townspeople and the
Union troops must have been panicking, trying to figure out how to keep the
Confederate forces from coming across the river to invade Lancaster and maybe
even Philadelphia.  He touched the wall with his hand.
    One second there
was a group of tourists standing around the corner, chattering about how much
of the furniture they were about to see had come from Philadelphia and was
original to the time period.  And then they were gone.
    The tour group
was gone, the sign in front of the building was gone, even the trees in the
front yard had changed size and location.  The time had changed,
too.  It was almost dusk, as if they had missed the entire afternoon and
early evening.  Some of the surrounding buildings vanished while others
changed size and shape.  The mansion itself was unchanged.  The folks
who restored it had done a good job. Tim heard shouting in the not too far
removed distance, but there were no people directly