She was still a bit more fully covered than many of the young women at the concert, but after a few hours in the mud and heat, she said, she managed to blend into the crowd.
“I returned to the stable point—the barn—several times over the next few weeks and tried to contact headquarters. But I could see nothing—just a black void with occasional bursts of static. I tried to correspond using one of the diaries that I had packed, but it vanished. It was as though everything from my time no longer existed.”
“So why didn’t you go back to the day before you left?”
Connor nodded. “I asked that, too.”
“You’ve both seen too many movies, I’m afraid. I couldn’t just zip from one location to any other point in time. The CHRONOS key allowed me to emerge at one preprogrammed stable point and then return to CHRONOS headquarters when my work was done. No side trips allowed.
“Fortunately,” she continued, “CHRONOS historians followed the Boy Scout motto: ‘Be Prepared.’ If we could not contact headquarters, we were to find a way to blend in and lie low for a year ortwo. And, after that point, if we still had no contact with home, we were to give up and try to create normal lives in our new time and place.”
Using a safe-deposit key stitched into her undergarments, Katherine had retrieved the contents of a box initially set up in 1823 with the Bank of New York. She selected the best option from the array of identities inside, invented a husband who had died in the war in Vietnam, and over the next few months secured a university research position.
She had tried to find information about a few of the other historians whose destinations had been the relatively recent past, including Richard, the friend who swapped places with her and landed in 1853. “I would love to know how he managed to blend in after arriving in the bell-bottom jeans and rather loud shirt he was wearing at the time. He would have been perfectly dressed for Woodstock—but I’m sure that he looked rather ridiculous for 1853. Richard was always clever, however. I eventually learned that he edited a newspaper in Ohio for the next forty years, married, had children and grandchildren. That wasn’t protocol—we were told to avoid having children at all costs—but I would imagine that was a bit hard if you were stranded in the 1850s and wanted a normal life.”
She sighed. “He died in 1913. It was strange to read that he had grown old and died so long ago when I’d seen him just a few weeks before. He was a good friend, although I think he’d have liked to be more than that. If I hadn’t been so fixated on Saul…
“Anyway,” she continued, shaking her head as if to clear it, “I sent a letter to the granddaughter who was Richard’s caregiver before he died. I told her I was writing a history on nineteenth-century journalists and her grandfather was one of the people I was researching, and I was surprised when she asked me to visit in person. When I arrived, she went straight to her china cabinet and pulled out a CHRONOS key.
“She said that her grandfather had always been a bit psychic and he told her that one day when she was in her seventies, a woman named Katherine might come asking questions. If that happened, Richard said that she should give me that old medallion and his diary, because I’d know what to do with them.
“I packed Richard’s key away with my other belongings when I married Jimmy, a few months later. He was a young history professor, and I was a newly widowed research assistant, six months pregnant with your mother and Prudence.”
She smiled softly. “Jim should have been born in an era where knights-errant rescued damsels in distress—when he met me, he became a man with a mission. I was reluctant to marry so quickly. CHRONOS members were told to wait at least a year before making the decision on how to best assimilate. But I knew better than the others that this was, in all likelihood,
“I returned to the stable point—the barn—several times over the next few weeks and tried to contact headquarters. But I could see nothing—just a black void with occasional bursts of static. I tried to correspond using one of the diaries that I had packed, but it vanished. It was as though everything from my time no longer existed.”
“So why didn’t you go back to the day before you left?”
Connor nodded. “I asked that, too.”
“You’ve both seen too many movies, I’m afraid. I couldn’t just zip from one location to any other point in time. The CHRONOS key allowed me to emerge at one preprogrammed stable point and then return to CHRONOS headquarters when my work was done. No side trips allowed.
“Fortunately,” she continued, “CHRONOS historians followed the Boy Scout motto: ‘Be Prepared.’ If we could not contact headquarters, we were to find a way to blend in and lie low for a year ortwo. And, after that point, if we still had no contact with home, we were to give up and try to create normal lives in our new time and place.”
Using a safe-deposit key stitched into her undergarments, Katherine had retrieved the contents of a box initially set up in 1823 with the Bank of New York. She selected the best option from the array of identities inside, invented a husband who had died in the war in Vietnam, and over the next few months secured a university research position.
She had tried to find information about a few of the other historians whose destinations had been the relatively recent past, including Richard, the friend who swapped places with her and landed in 1853. “I would love to know how he managed to blend in after arriving in the bell-bottom jeans and rather loud shirt he was wearing at the time. He would have been perfectly dressed for Woodstock—but I’m sure that he looked rather ridiculous for 1853. Richard was always clever, however. I eventually learned that he edited a newspaper in Ohio for the next forty years, married, had children and grandchildren. That wasn’t protocol—we were told to avoid having children at all costs—but I would imagine that was a bit hard if you were stranded in the 1850s and wanted a normal life.”
She sighed. “He died in 1913. It was strange to read that he had grown old and died so long ago when I’d seen him just a few weeks before. He was a good friend, although I think he’d have liked to be more than that. If I hadn’t been so fixated on Saul…
“Anyway,” she continued, shaking her head as if to clear it, “I sent a letter to the granddaughter who was Richard’s caregiver before he died. I told her I was writing a history on nineteenth-century journalists and her grandfather was one of the people I was researching, and I was surprised when she asked me to visit in person. When I arrived, she went straight to her china cabinet and pulled out a CHRONOS key.
“She said that her grandfather had always been a bit psychic and he told her that one day when she was in her seventies, a woman named Katherine might come asking questions. If that happened, Richard said that she should give me that old medallion and his diary, because I’d know what to do with them.
“I packed Richard’s key away with my other belongings when I married Jimmy, a few months later. He was a young history professor, and I was a newly widowed research assistant, six months pregnant with your mother and Prudence.”
She smiled softly. “Jim should have been born in an era where knights-errant rescued damsels in distress—when he met me, he became a man with a mission. I was reluctant to marry so quickly. CHRONOS members were told to wait at least a year before making the decision on how to best assimilate. But I knew better than the others that this was, in all likelihood,
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