Chapter 14

Meanwhile back at Mr. Greene’s portable at Cassadaga Area High School, a dead, but suspicious historian, Henry Brooks Adams, snooped about the classroom, sifting through a pile of papers on the absent teacher’s messy desk until he discovered the pedagogue’s lesson plan book.

“Eureka!” he shouted as if had found pay dirt in a gold mine.

For there, in the lesson plan book, in plain, albeit chicken scratch cursive writing, were the details of Greene’s summertime travel assignment for his students: An innocuous enough plan to visit Gettysburg, Pennsylvania on November 18th and 19th, 1863 and hear Abraham Lincoln deliver his Gettysburg Address.

But Henry Adams was skeptical of the lesson plan. He had overheard some dead historians talking about Shelby Foote and Bruce Catton sabotaging the trip, playing with Greene’s computer, which was somehow tied up to Nikola Tesla’s prototype of a time travel device. Will and Ariel Durant, the married couple who always felt slighted by the snobbish, degreed historians, had been a salient source of Adams’ information. What Will Durant informed Adams was that Catton and Foote were going to redirect the teacher and his students to the Battle of Gettysburg in lieu of the National Cemetery Dedication. It was not that Henry Adams was concerned about the high school teacher, for as a former Harvard professor, the dead historian had a dim view of most high school history teachers, but the children might be in danger. And, he admitted to himself, after Greene’s trip to Philadelphia, which had temporarily removed his grandfather and great grandfather from the presidency, he was opposed to any more visits to the past by Greene and his students. On the last trip, their actions had replaced John Adams with Benedict Arnold in the executive mansion. Benedict Arnold had even wound up on the ten-dollar bill! The infamy! What could Greene and his miscreants do this time? Help Robert E. Lee win the Battle of Gettysburg? Keep the Union from winning the Civil War?

Adams thought that a meeting of the dead historians needed to be convened. He knew where most of them were congregated at that moment. Adams wondered if he might find some incriminating evidence in the teacher’s closet that might tie Nathan Greene to the chicanery perpetrated by Catton and Foote. He opened the door and leafed through a number of shirts, which Adams had heard that Greene wore during certain lessons throughout the school year.

There was even a wig with the name tag “G. Washington.”

He finally stopped at a shirt with the drawing of a young boy wearing a school backpack, standing on a stack of books and staring off at some distant mountains. Adams liked the drawing, but what really stunned him was the wording on the shirt: “A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops. Henry Brooks Adams.” The ghost was so overcome with emotion at seeing his own words on a shirt in the closet of a man he considered his adversary that he literally fell apart and dissolved into a puddle of phantasmagoria.

Regaining his composure and, consequently, his apparitional shape, Henry Brooks Adams suddenly had a new appreciation for Nathan Greene. He examined the shirt and saw the note pinned to the shirt: “For the first day of school.” Suddenly, Henry Brooks Adams had an epiphany and knew that Nathan Greene was innocent of conspiring with the dead Civil War historians and sensed that Greene and his students were in trouble. He decided then and there that he, Henry Brooks Adams, would rescue Nathan Greene and his students. But he needed help. He was clueless how the portable moved through time.

Henry Adams floated off to the Cassadaga Hotel. The hotel, a hotbed of psychic activity during the winter season when the majority of the mediums and psychics were in town, was slow in the summer, and the dead historians liked to gather in the cool hotel basement and chat about the past. They not only discussed Greece, but remembered slights that they had endured in the course of their careers. For even a small-minded comment by a colleague could unnerve the pedigree of a Ph.D.

When Adams arrived, the late Barbara Tuchman had the floor and was reciting passages from her seminal work, The March of Folly. Mary and Charles Beard, banned from time travel after the Philadelphia chaperoning debacle, were also there, along with Frederick Jackson Turner, who was futilely raising his hand in the hope that he would be allowed to share the more salient facts of his Frontier Thesis. Unfortunately for Mr. Turner, the other historians considered him a one-trick pony, and were not interested in rehashing the significance of the 1890 United States Census figures or the closing of the American frontier. Turner’s past was passé.

Adams waited patiently for Tuchman to finish up her caustic comments on the folly of the Vietnam War before raising his hand. Thucydides, bearded, sandaled, and wearing a white robe, was leading the group as usual, for all of the dead historians showed deference to the Greek scribe as they considered Thucydides the first real historian, the scientific historian—unlike that silly Herodotus who wrote down every whopper that b.s. artists in antiquity fed him. Even Henry Adams referred to Herodotus’ historiography as bovine excrement. Thucydides looked at Henry Adams, saw the concerned look on the Harvard professor’s mug, and recognized him.

Adams began. “Ladies and gentlemen, as you know Mr. Nathan Greene and his students have made another foray into the past. You know I have been against their time traveling, however, on this occasion, I believe the teacher and his students have been hoodwinked by some historical hijinks perpetrated by the Civil War wastrels, Bruce Catton and Shelby Foote. You see, in my investigation, I discovered that the students and teacher presumed they were headed for Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, when in reality our two colleagues sent them to the Battle of Gettysburg.”

“So?” Barbara Tuchman said.

“So, Mrs. Tuchman? So?” Adams said, flabbergasted at her reaction. “So, remember what happened last time?”

“Yes,” Mrs. Tuchman said. “Your prissy family lost its place in society when Benedict Arnold became the second president. It is always about the Adams family for you, isn’t it Henry? You are such a snob, you old stuffed shirt.”

Adams huffed, but said nothing. He hated the best-selling Barbara Tuchman, and was annoyed that John F. Kennedy proclaimed that his favorite book was Tuchman’s The Guns of August, which JFK consulted during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Indeed, Adams was disturbed that no one alive seemed to read any of his works any longer.

Thucydides chimed in. “Henry has a valid point, Barbara,” he said. “We are going to have to intervene in their trip, I’m afraid. Does anyone know how to use that time travel thingee?” the Greek asked.

All of the dead historians shook their ghostly heads no, shattering their apparitions momentarily.

“Tesla does,” Turner offered.

“Nikola Tesla?” Thucydides mused. “Where is he haunting these days?”

“His museum in Belgrade, probably,” Tuchman suggested. “Thucie,” she said using the Greek’s nickname, which was common among the dead historians, but only Tuchman had the cheek to use it in public. “Are you suggesting we cross disciplines and combine history and science?”

“Well, Barbara, isn’t this thing Tesla’s invention? “

“Yes.”

“And none of us knows how to work it, is that correct?”

“It seems Bruce Catton and Shelby Foote are competent with its use,” Mary Beard said in an understatement, which drew a frown from the Greek.

“Obviously, Mrs. Beard,” Thucydides said, raising an eyebrow. “Henry, why don’t you visit Tesla over in Serbia and see if you can get him to help us out.”

“I don’t know, sir. I am hesitant to cross disciplines.”

The Greek shook his head in disbelief. “Well, let us first start by crossing oceans, in this case the Atlantic. Let me worry about the purity of the thing, Henry. You call me the scientific historian anyway. Just go fetch Nikola Tesla for us. Do you think you can do that?”

Sheepishly, Henry Adams replied, “Yes sir.”