CHAPTER 16
Erase Trouble
What do you want to know?” I asked, prepared to tell Garlock everything, even though I knew he wouldn’t believe it. I tried desperately to imagine a lie that he would.
“For starters, and most importantly,” he said, repositioning the scalpel below Frankie’s left ear, so I could have a clear view of what he might do if he didn’t like my answer, “the question is, who are you working for? That is the eight-hundred-pound gorilla in the room!”
“No,” rumbled a voice behind Garlock. “I am the eight-hundred-pound gorilla in the room. Let go of the child!”
Garlock and the two guards spun around and were slapped across their collective faces by a hand the size of Michigan. Guns got yanked from grips and thrown across the room, a scalpel got tossed aside, and within moments, Alphonse, Millard, and Garlock had been neatly stacked on the floor and Mr. Ganto was sitting on them. They struggled to free themselves, but Mr. Ganto bounced once, and they stopped.
“What took you so long?” asked Frankie.
“Someone played the Shagbolt while I was still quite distant from it,” said Mr. Ganto, sounding hurt. “Almost as if they did not wish to travel with me.”
“We would never leave you behind; you know that,” cooed Frankie, patting one of his hairy wrists.
We had seen Mr. Ganto materialize silently behind Garlock and the others a few seconds before he made his presence known. If anyone had been paying attention to our faces, no doubt our expressions would have betrayed him. Several recent swims by the Gigantopithecus across the Gustimuck River had washed away any lingering trace of skunk.
“Am I sitting on Nazis?” asked Mr. Ganto. “They feel as though they might be Nazis. There is a bumpy sort of arrogance to them.”
“Mr. Ganto has a very sensitive tush,” Frankie explained.
“Sensitive enough to feel arrogance?” I was surprised. Mine was only sensitive enough to feel awful, usually after I had eaten too much peanut brittle.
“They might as well be Nazis,” replied Frankie, ignoring me. “Something we did in the past has changed the present so much that there’s virtually no personal freedom. You can’t even wear a kilt without going to jail.”
“We have to go back to the past and straighten things out!” Tom chirped happily, and the Gigantopithecus scowled.
“He’s right!” agreed Frankie. “And the longer we stay here, the more danger we’re in!” She began an end run around Ganto to get to the Shagbolt. Ganto reached casually behind himself and pressed a hefty index finger down on the case’s lid.
“Your father does not want you using this,” he said, in a voice like sorrowful gravel.
“What’s wrong with Nazis?” demanded Garlock from somewhere in the middle of the pile. “They were our allies—mmpht!” Ganto bounced twice and Garlock shut up.
“My father doesn’t want me using it, but my mother thinks I’m destined to become the Shagbolt’s Keeper! And she’s the one with the crystal ball! If I’m ever going to be the Keeper, I need more practice with it!”
“Your mother and father do not talk,” said Ganto.
“Well, duh!” snapped Frankie, and I thought it was a weird response.
“It is childish to play one against the other.”
“Gantsy, we don’t have a home here to return to,” Frankie explained. “The Romani are gone; anybody who was even the least little bit different is gone; we have to go back to 1852, figure out what we did wrong the first time, and undo it! We have to use the Shagbolt!”
“Undoing mistakes so rarely goes well for you,” replied Ganto, shaking his enormous head sadly from side to side.
“This sort of thing has happened before?” I asked, feeling a flash of anger. “What is wrong with you, Frankie? It’s like your father locked a gun in a safe and you don’t understand why he doesn’t want you to have the combination. The Time Trombone is dangerous! It just wiped out hundreds of thousands of people!”
“The trombone didn’t wipe out those people; other people wiped out those people! Trombones don’t kill people; people kill people. And we can bring them back!” Frankie tugged on the case and Ganto lifted his finger, releasing it. She staggered backward with her prize. “If you had your own time machine, you would use it, too. Believe me!”
“I don’t think I would, if I knew how dangerous it was.”
Frankie handed the case to Tom, opened it, and withdrew the Shagbolt. She looked at Ganto, who shrugged and stood, his head almost grazing the ceiling. He opened a supply closet and shoved his prisoners into it, jamming Alphonse and Millard in first and then, when it became obvious there would be absolutely no room for Garlock, stuffing him in, too. Then he upended a desk and stuck it under the closet’s doorknob.
“It’ll help if we’re all thinking about August 12, 1852,” said Frankie. “And the place should be here, rather than San Francisco, no matter how badly one of us wants to see the American premiere of chopsticks.”
Tom nodded to show he understood.
Frankie raised the mouthpiece to her lips and played the same flatulent notes that she had the very first time we had time-traveled. Again, I felt myself disintegrate and turn into tiny particles, and I realized it must be the way sand feels when it’s passing through the narrowest part of an hourglass. The office in the prison that had once been my school vanished, and I was never happier to leave a room in my life.
We were instantly surrounded by hay, and at first I thought we were back in the runaway wagon before the horses bolted, but then I saw the roof, and I realized we were in the hayloft of a barn.
“This is the place where they held us prisoners!” declared Tom, peering over the loft’s edge at the barn’s floor. “I recognize the corn shucker!”
“You would,” I said, a little tired of his knowledge of strange antiques. I looked where he was looking. Eyes gazed up at me from the top of a rusty contraption.
“And I recognize the cat,” said Frankie. “So we’re in the right place. But what time is it? Is it after we escaped, or before they brought us here?”
Bright daylight flooded the loft as Mr. Ganto swung wide a door in the back that opened into thin air.
“Midday,” he rumbled.
“That doesn’t answer my question,” Frankie muttered.
I whipped the tablet out of my apron pocket, thinking all I had to do to find the time was turn it on, but then I realized I was being foolish. A tablet had to be connected to a network to know what the local time was, and there was no way an 1852 barn was going to be a hot spot.
The black surface of the tablet glinted.
The noises around me faded to a distant buzz.
The glint on the glass expanded and became a blurry picture, then sharpened in the center where human figures moved. Oh, I thought. Somebody downloaded a movie. It looks like a Western.
I watched, mesmerized, as people walked up a gangplank and boarded an old-time paddle wheel steamboat. The name Buckeye Beauty was painted on the boat’s side. I recognized two of the passengers. The boat was chugging up a river, and arm in arm, looking eagerly toward their destination, were Dwina and Seth. I broke into a big smile, seeing Dwina again.
Then the boat exploded.
I shouted, threw the tablet into the air, and staggered backward. Sound came flooding back, and the first thing I heard was Tom saying, “Bro! What? Are you okay?”
Frankie retrieved the tablet from the hay and glanced at it. I could see the screen was blank. “What?” she demanded.
“Dwina!” I gasped. “And Seth! They were on a steamboat called the Buckeye Beauty—and it blew up!”
“You saw that on the tablet?”
“Yes!”
“What app were you using?” Tom asked. “It wasn’t SimCentury Nineteen, was it? That’s only in beta; it’s full of bugs!”
“The tablet wasn’t turned on!” I explained. Behind me, Ganto snorted.
“He was scrying,” said Frankie. “That’s what Rose’s kind of precognition is called. He can glimpse the future in shiny objects.”
“So you think I saw the future? You think Dwina and Seth are going to be on an exploding steamboat? I didn’t save her life just so she could die trying to get across the river! She’s supposed to live and have kids!”
“I don’t know what it means, or why it’s the first thing that’s happened now that we’re back!” Frankie ran both hands through her hair as though things were getting to be a bit too much for her. It was the first time, in all we had been through, that she showed signs of losing her cool. It made me like her a little more.
“First things first!” she decided, regaining control. “We figure out what we did to ruin the future, and we fix it! Then we decide what to do about this new thing.”
“We find Dwina and Seth,” I said, “and we keep them from getting on any steamboats!”
“Possibly. But not before we work out what we did to cause the future to change so radically!”
“We should consult the I-Ching,” said Tom, digging the quarter out of his apron pocket.
“The last time we did that, we got dead as a Morse code message,” I said. “But nobody died.”
“I’m pretty sure dead was a description of the society we found ourselves in. It looked pretty dead-end to me.” Tom balanced the coin on his thumb. “Everybody think about our current problem and the best way to solve it.” The coin flew in the air and Tom caught it.
“Tails!”
He slid the pencil he had gotten from the prison out from behind his ear and looked around for something to write on.
“Here,” I said, taking the pencil from him and drawing a broken yin line on the post I was standing next to. Tom tossed the coin five more times, until I had drawn this:
“It’s the forty-sixth hexagram,” he said, and showed us the page.
HEXAGRAM 46
RISING. ASCENDING.
LIFE HAS ITS UPS AND DOWNS. BUOYANCY IS A VIRTUE. ONLY AFTER YOU’VE HIT BOTTOM CAN YOU TRULY GO OVER THE TOP. WHAT GOES AROUND, COMES AROUND. THE DUTY ROSTER FOR TORNADO WATCH IS, APPROPRIATELY, ROTATIONAL.
“More gobbledygook,” I decided. “Is there a message in Morse?”
“Do you have to ask?”
“I wish I didn’t. Just once, it would be nice if the word in Morse turned out to be stupid, or inane, something that proved whoever is sending these messages knows how idiotic this all is.”
“Inane?”
“Vocabulary word in Richardson’s class last week. You were out sick. Means ‘silly.’”
“The Morse here,” explained Tom, poking at the hexagram with his finger, “is four dots followed by one dot, followed by a dot and a dash, followed by a dash and two dots. Morse code for head.”
His decoding was even quicker than usual.
“Meaning what?” I wondered. “That we’re supposed to use our heads to solve our problem? Isn’t that obvious? How is that a help?”
“Phone,” said Tom.
“What?”
“Foe-un,” Tom repeated, turning it into a two-syllable word.
My phone rang.
It was the ringtone I used for my wake-up alarm. My phone thought it was six o’clock on Thursday morning—I had been up for twenty-four hours. It was a good thing I had dozed off during social studies. I slapped the places where my pockets usually were, remembered I was still wearing a dress, and scooped the phone out of my apron. I shut off the alarm, glanced at the phone—and froze.
“It says I’ve got perfect reception! That shouldn’t be possible, should it? In 1852?”
“Cell phones only work if there are cell towers,” said Tom. “You should have zilch.”
“Unless…” I tried puzzling it out. “This phone is here right now in two places. I’ve got one, and my past self has one, but it’s the same phone. Maybe it’s in touch with itself. Maybe… holy cow!” I finally recognized the voice that had called me just before Killbreath had captured us. “Nobody recognizes their own voice when they hear it over a speaker! That was me! I have to warn him!”
I punched my number into the phone. The phone rang once, twice, three times, and on the fourth ring a voice said, “Hello?”
I knew I had very little time, but at least I knew what I was supposed to say.
“Listen to me,” I said, as rapidly as I could. “Whatever you do, don’t let Dwina drown! You got that?”
“What?”
“Don’t let Dwina drown! Repeat it!”
“Who is this?”
“Repeat what I just said!”
“Uh, don’t…”
“Let Dwina drown!”
“Let Dwina dwown. I mean, drown.”
“Good. Now duck!”
“What?
“DUCK!”
“All right,” I said. “About how long did it take, after Killbreath captured us, before we all arrived here at the barn?”
Frankie thought for a moment. “About forty-five minutes, tops.”
“Then we have forty-five minutes to figure out what we have to undo.”
“Assuming we didn’t do it between getting captured and arriving here,” said Tom.
“Let’s hope we didn’t. I don’t remember us talking much. Not with burlap bags over our heads.”
Frankie thumbed the tablet to life.
“If we’re lucky, this thing’s got an encyclopedia, or something similar, stored in its memory,” she said, searching through the apps.
I pointed at the tablet’s upper right corner with Tom’s pencil.
“Watch out for that,” I said, tapping the spot. It showed the battery life was down to 2 percent. “What the—?” I looked closely at the pencil for the first time. “This pencil has KILLBREATH printed on it!”
“Yeah,” agreed Tom. “I noticed that. It’s probably a campaign pencil, the sort of thing they give away before an election. Puma Ma’s got a sponge with our congressman’s name on it. She says it’s ironic.”
“No,” I said. “Then it would say something like VOTE FOR KILLBREATH. This just says KILLBREATH No. 2.”
“Maybe the opposing candidate paid for it,” suggested Tom. “Maybe they were comparing Killbreath to a big load of the old number two.” Tom held up two fingers and grinned.
“No,” I disagreed. “It’s more like it was made by the Killbreath Pencil Company!”
“‘Killbreath Graphite Novelties,’” Frankie read from the tablet. “‘Founded 1853. The most successful pencil-making company in the history of the world. It made its founder, former slave catcher Archibald “Kill” Killbreath, a millionaire by the time he was thirty, and enabled the start of the Killbreath political dynasty.’” Frankie looked up at us. “Ask me what made Killbreath Graphite Novelties so successful.”
“What?”
“It was the first company to put an eraser on the end of a pencil!”
Tom fell to his knees and clutched his head. “Oh no! The pencil I had been using to write out the hexagrams—that’s what gave Killbreath the idea! And the Trouble hexagram contained the Morse code message erase! That’s what it meant! This is all my fault!”
“No, it isn’t,” I tried to reassure him.
“It is! If I’d only made more mistakes, the eraser would have been worn down, and he wouldn’t have noticed it!”
“Okay, then,” I couldn’t resist saying. “Maybe it is your fault. He never would have gotten the idea from one of my pencils.”
“So what we have to do”—Frankie enunciated slowly and deliberately, as if she were talking to children—“is make sure Killbreath never finds the pencil. Then his family will never become rich and powerful, and the future will go back to being what it was when we first left it. We can fix this!”
“I can’t believe something as simple as a pencil is at the bottom of all this,” I said.
“Oh, I don’t know,” replied Tom, recovering quite quickly from his guilt trip. “I once read a book where a zucchini-colored crayon was at the bottom of a plot to take over the world.”
“Sounds awful.”
“It wasn’t that bad. A little loony at times—”
“Focus!” Frankie hissed. “Our best chance of getting the pencil is between the time they brought us into the barn and the moment Killbreath took it to write down our names.”
We joined her, looking over the hayloft’s edge at the barn floor below.
“They dragged us in,” said Tom, reviewing what had happened. “I managed to kick one of them in the shins—”
“That was me,” I said.
“Oh. Sorry. And then they tied us to the posts, left the burlap sacks over our heads, and frisked us. They spread our stuff out on that bench down there. The pencil was tucked into my I-Ching book for at least half an hour before Killbreath found it.”
“So, it’s during that time that we’ll have to get it back,” said Frankie. “Any ideas?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Mr. Ganto jumps down, knocks their heads together, unties us, and we get the pencil back.”
“Do you remember that happening?” asked Frankie.
“No. Of course not.”
“Then it didn’t happen. Whatever we did, our earlier selves didn’t notice. If they had noticed, they would have behaved differently afterward, and we wouldn’t be having this conversation right now.”
“My head hurts!” Tom complained.
“It’s lack of sleep,” I assured him.
“It’s time-travel nuttiness,” he corrected me. “Paradoxical!”
“Whatever we do to keep that pencil from Killbreath,” said Frankie, “we have to do it so cleverly that our earlier selves are unaware that we’re doing it.”
“Okay,” I said, eyeing a coil of rope hanging off a peg on the opposite side of the barn. “How about this?”
My friends huddled around me as I explained my plan.