Fugitives of Time: Sequel to Emperors of Time Read Online Free PDF Page B

about within shouting distance if they
weren’t all facing in the other direction.
    Tim quickly got over his initial relief at seeing nobody
looking at them and became immediately curious to see what so many people were looking at.  He turned in the general direction they were staring.
    He knew that the postcard had been from Washington DC. 
Washington was only a couple hours from the house where Tim had grown up in
Southern Pennsylvania, and he had even been there a couple times.  He had
seen the major buildings that defined the DC skyline in his timeline, the
Washington Monument, Lincoln Memorial, the Capitol, and the White House, for
instance.  He scanned the night sky now, wondering which ones were there
and which ones weren’t.
    “Well, there’s the Washington Monument,” Julie said,
apparently doing the same thing Tim was.  She pointed to the humongous
obelisk.
    “It makes sense it would still be here.  I visited it a
couple years ago, and I remember construction on it started in 1848, well
before the Civil War,” Rose said.
    “But where’s the Lincoln monument?” Billy wondered. 
Rose looked at him and cocked her head.  Billy got slightly
defensive.  “What?  I like Lincoln!”
    “Well, he wouldn’t have a monument in this timeline, would
he?” Tim asked after a moment’s hesitation.  “No Civil War means no
Lincoln Monument.”
    “He wasn’t even president, was he?” Rose asked. 
“Didn’t we just find out Stephen Douglas took his term in 1860?”
    “What, so now my favorite president was never president at
all?” Billy demanded.  “Now we have to change the timeline back.”
    Tim wondered what building would have replaced the Lincoln
monument he’d visited as a child and looked around.  They were on a flat,
mostly empty, plain of grass crisscrossed with a network of sidewalks. 
This plain had a few large buildings laid out on it, with the more developed
part of the city glowing in the form of a large number of lit windows in the
not-so-far-off distance.  He assumed that the buildings close by were
monuments.
    As Tim surveyed the scene, he remembered that the postcard
had featured the “Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. Memorial Dedication,” and it was for
this reason that he quickly concluded that the building which was apparently
the focus of everyone’s attention must be this very monument. 
    The structure jutted out of the ground with sharp angles and
high walls, the fresh marble glaring in the light of about a dozen large
spotlights that were trained on it in the darkness of night.  Tim racked
his brain to think of who this Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. guy could have been to
deserve such a monument, but he couldn’t come up with any kind of
association.  He guessed this wasn’t too surprising.  They had
already discovered that history in this timeline diverged from their own way
back before the Civil War.  It wasn’t shocking that someone who Tim had
never heard of had risen to prominence in this new timeline, but Tim was still
dying to know what he had done to do so.
    Someone cleared their throat behind where Tim stood. 
    The teens whipped around in unison.  In the dimness of
a few nearby streetlights, the teens saw a harassed and tired looking Dr.
Hopkins.  His hair was frazzled, his clothes were wrinkled, and his eyes
had bags that were increasingly visible as he approached them in the
semi-darkness.
    Hopkins cracked a smile.  “You look like you have had
as long of a day as I have,” he said, after surveying their faces for a moment.
    “Day or days.  I lost track around the third
time jump,” Julie said, with a bit of a laugh in her voice.  Tim was
slightly surprised by how confident Julie sounded as she talked to
Hopkins.  Tim was still quite in awe of this man who had helped create a
device that allowed people to travel through time. 
    It wasn’t exactly that Julie’s response to him had been
disrespectful, but it seemed flippant.  On the other hand, if Julie