Emperors of Time (15 page)

Tim’s stomach
tightened with fear.  Suddenly about a hundred downsides of making bets in
a back alley in one of the shadiest parts of San Francisco flooded his
mind.  The whole reason the Tenderloin was known as a hotbed of gambling
and other illegal activities was that the cops turned a blind eye to what went
on there most of the time.  Besides, supposing the mayor had decided to
make a particular effort to clean up the streets of The Tenderloin on that
particular fall day, there would no doubt have been much more pressing matters
to attend to than the small matter of four idiot teenagers getting stabbed in
an alleyway. 

In spite of
this, Tim’s hand moved instinctively to his pocket where he was almost
surprised not to find the familiar form of his cell-phone.  This trip was
probably the first time he had been out without a phone in years, and he had no
earthly idea where he could find a payphone to call the cops.

While these
thoughts were running through Tim’s head, Benny seemed to be enjoying the gasps
and wide eyes that drawing his knife had provoked. 

Billy, on the
other hand, sprang into action.  He stood, reached into his pocket and
grabbed the can of mace.  He tossed it to Rose as he said, “Rose, heads
up!”  Benny looked confused as Billy took a step toward him.

Tim gained a bit
of inspiration from this turn of events.  He stood up and did his best to
look confident as he scanned the other boys to see if any of them were planning
to back up their loud-mouthed leader. 

It seemed to
have come to Dave’s attention that one way or the other, this poker game was
basically over, and it might soon be time to flee the scene.  He was
scooping his coins into his pocket as his eyes darted from Benny to Billy, to
determine when would be a good time to bolt.

Meanwhile, Frank
stood up and Tim took what he hoped was a courageous looking step toward
him.  Then, an awful lot of things happened at once.

Benny reached up
with his knife to stab Billy, but Billy’s reaction time was way quicker than
Benny’s and he managed to grab the kid’s wrist before Benny was able to get the
thing much closer than a foot away from him. 

Simultaneously,
Rose stood up and pointed the mace at Benny so that only a half second after
Billy grabbed Benny’s hand, Benny’s eyes were filled with the stinging
chemical. Billy let out a groan, indicating that he had suffered some residual
backsplash. 

Frank, on the
other hand, turned out also to have a sharp knife and little hesitation to use
it, but luckily also not a great deal of foresight going into that use. 
So, instead of stabbing Tim in the ribs, an act which might have killed him, he
made a kind of slashing movement with the knife.  Still, the slash was
aimed pretty well at Tim’s eye, and could have been very effective had Tim not
shown better reflexes than he knew he had and blocked the knife with his arm.

It sliced
through the sleeve of Tim’s shirt and jacket and left a painful cut on Tim’s
arm.  But it also gave Rose enough of a chance to figure out what was
going on and treat Frank to his own dose of pepper spray before he had a chance
to try a second time.

Now, between the
yelped cusses of Frank and Benny, and the fact that he had just gotten done
transferring his coins to his pockets, Dave decided that this would be a dandy
time to take off.  So he did just that.   Apparently he had
decided that there was no reason for him to get hurt or lose money simply
because Benny was an idiot. 

Tom, on the
other hand, was looking with nervous eyes back and forth between Dave’s
retreating form and his two seemingly wounded friends. 

“Was that Dave
who just ran?” yelled Benny, pain mixing with anger in his voice.

“Uh… yes!” said
Tom. 

“I can’t see!”
complained Benny.  “What did you do to me?!”  He started slashing
with the knife blindly. 

“Relax… 
Stop swinging the knife and we’ll let you be.  Your eyes will get better,
just get out of here,” Billy instructed, calmly but forcefully.  “If you
don’t stop messing around, though, I will take that from you.”

Tom, by far the
calmest of the thirteen year olds remaining, since he was the only one without
substantial amounts of unwelcome chemicals in his eyes, said, “Let’s just go!”

Within a few
moments all three boys were gone.  Tom managed to pick up his own coins,
but in the excitement of losing their eyesight for the moment, Benny and Frank
seemed to forget that they were leaving a pretty substantial amount of money
behind as they walked away from the alley, following Tom’s voice as they felt
their way along the walls of the buildings on either side of the alley. 

Rose was hardly
able to hide her excitement, even from the group of thirteen year olds that was
two-thirds blinded with their backs turned.  She did at least wait until
they were out of earshot to actually squeal. 

“That’s almost
two dollars I won, and…  It looks like about two dollars they left. 
So we’re up to four dollars now!  Not bad for a game of poker!” Rose
bragged.

There was about
half a second when Tim wondered whether it was morally wrong to take the money
they had left on the ground.  Then again, the adrenaline that had allowed
Tim to stand up to Frank was wearing off and he was becoming more aware of the
sharp pain in his arm.  So, sure, whatever, they could take Frank and
Benny’s money.

Tim wasn’t the
only one who remembered his cut.  As Billy and Rose were collecting their
booty and storing it in Billy’s now heavily jangling pockets, Julie came over
and gently took the hand of the arm that had been injured.

“You doing okay
there, buckaroo?” Julie asked, as she gently lifted his arm to examine the
cut.  It was hard to see what was going on through the layers of suit that
he was wearing, so Julie helped Tim take off his jacket and rolled up the
sleeve of his shirt to reveal the bare skin of his right forearm.

“I’m fine,” said
Tim, although he was unsure how true this was.

There was a
pretty substantial amount of blood. 

“You’re going to
need a new shirt, for one thing,” said Julie, who didn’t seem squeamish about
the blood at all.  “You’ve got a hole in your shirt, and your jacket,
too.  On the bright side, I’m more concerned right now about the hole in
your
arm,
and the fact that you’re not going to be using this jacket
anymore means we can maybe use part of it as a sort of bandage or
something…  You’ve probably noticed already that I’m not a doctor.”

Tim
smiled.  “You don’t say.”

“But I have had
enough scrapes of my own to know that a doctor would probably ask you when your
last tetanus shot was,” Julie said.

“Er…  About
a century from now?” said Tim doubtfully.  “But, no, I mean…  I was
in tenth grade, I think.  So that ought to be good enough.”

“So it should,”
said Julie.  She placed her fingers on the skin around the cut and poked
around it a little bit.  “Well…  again, I have no real way of knowing
whether this is true, but I don’t think it looks too deep.  Honestly, we
should probably send you back to our time for treatment, but if you leave you
won’t be able to come back.”

“I don’t want to
leave you guys,” said Tim.

“Right, I don’t
want that either,” said Julie. “But I don’t want to be selfish… You’ve got to
tell me if you start feeling weird or anything, and first chance we get we’re
going to put something on it to clean it. In the meantime, let’s just assume
we’ll send you back in case of emergency but not otherwise.”  As she was
saying this, she had also set to work tearing apart his jacket to make a
bandage.  She used the hole that the knife had produced as a starting
point.  Soon enough, she had a piece of fabric wrapped around the cut and
had wiped away the excess blood with the remaining fabric from the
jacket.  After he rolled up the other sleeve to the elbow so that both
sleeves of his shirt matched, you couldn’t even see that the shirt he was
wearing had been cut.  Overall, he looked wounded, but not ridiculous.

Rose and Billy
had been watching all this for the last couple minutes, since they had finished
picking up all the pennies, nickels, dimes, and quarters that had been left
scattered around the alleyway. 

Now, Billy spoke
up.  “Way to take one for the team, there, pal,” he said.  “Still, I
think we’d better get moving here.  The mace will be wearing off any
moment, and I’m still not thrilled about our odds if all four of them come back
looking for their money.” 

In fact, after a
little discussion, they decided to leave the Tenderloin all together for the
day and focus on a slightly less shady part of town as they tried to answer
questions like where someone could buy food in San Francisco or how they could
avoid having to sleep on the street that night. 

Of course, the
other question on their minds was how they were going to discover who was
getting ready to set off a bomb that would change the course of world
history.  But after such an eventful morning, there seemed to be a tacit
agreement amongst the four teens to stick with the type of questions that
didn’t seem impossible to answer, at least for now. 

“Let’s take it
from another angle.  Let’s try to think like we’re one of the Emperors of Time,”
suggested Julie, who kept throwing an apple into the air and catching it as she
talked. 

It was the
evening of the same day they had arrived in San Francisco.  They were
tired, and justifiably so, since their day had been twice as long as it was supposed
to be after they had time-travelled from the evening in their own time to the
morning  in San Francisco. 

But it had also
occurred to them that they only had three more days before Election Day, so
they really ought to come up with a plan as soon as they could, tired or
not.  After all, they had already been successful with their other tasks
of the day, finding some food to eat and a place to stay.  They’d spent
fifty cents on a bunch of apples, a loaf of bread, and a can of tuna fish. 
This hadn’t made for much of an exciting meal, but they’d decided to hold off
eating anything too fancy until Billy won them some more money from Saturday’s
football games.  And besides, it all tasted pretty spectacular by the time
they sat down to eat, given that they had all skipped at least one meal and had
walked all around the city of San Francisco since their arrival. 

Finally, they
had found a place to spend the night, a room at the YMCA.  There were a
couple of problems with the arrangement, but it turned out to be the best
option they found before the sun started to go down, so they took it. 

The first
problem was that since the YMCA was the Young
Men’s
Christian
Association, the girls were not allowed to stay there.  They were there
now anyway, having snuck into the room that the group was renting under Billy’s
name.  Sneaking in wasn’t a huge problem, but there were only men’s
showers in the communal bathrooms, which would present a problem once the girls
started smelling profusely.  But they decided to leave that problem for
another time. 

A problem that
was going to present itself sooner was that they could only afford one room
with their tight funds.  Even then, Billy had to work out a payment
plan.  He paid a dollar up front and had to pay the second dollar of the
weekly rent on Monday night, so that they didn’t lose all the poker money
before they bet on the football games.  All of this meant that the four
teens were sitting in a small room with a twin bed, a small dresser, a closet,
and precious little floor space.

“And how do the
Emperors of Time think?” asked Rose, in response to Julie’s suggestion. 
She held her hand out, and Julie tossed the apple to her.  She tossed it
back, and they continued passing it back and forth, absentmindedly, through the
conversation.

“Well, they’ll
probably get someone to do their dirty work for them.  Who would want to
set off a bomb on Election Day?” asked Julie.

“Well… 
politicians, I guess,” said Tim.  “I mean, if the Emperors of Time
convinced them that setting a bomb off would disrupt the election in a way that
it would help their guy, this could be a good looking opportunity to an immoral
Hughes supporter.” 

“Right,” said
Julie.  “Which means that maybe we should be hanging out where politicians
hang out in this city.”

“Like… 
city hall?” asked Billy skeptically.

“Well, no,
nobody’s going to hatch a plot like that in city hall.  But…  I
dunno, maybe if on Monday we check out where people come and go from city hall,
maybe tail a few people, we can find out where political junkies spend their
time.  Like maybe a bar or something.  And if we’re lucky, someone
there will know something about the plot,” Julie said.

“It’s a
longshot,” Tim pointed out.

“But it’s all we
have at the moment,” said Julie.  “How about we keep coming up with ideas
and if that’s the best we’ve got Monday, we do it.”

They all
agreed. 

Billy yawned and
said, “It might be easier to think of ideas if I could…  you know…”

“Think
straight?” supplied Rose.

“Exactly,” Billy
agreed.  “It’s like ten hours since I should have gone to sleep last
night, and today’s been rough.”

Rose
nodded.  “Well…  two people can sleep on the bed, probably, if they
squeeze.  And maybe they should be the same gender as each other…”

“You girls
should take the bed,” Billy said. 

“Really?  I
mean, Tim’s been injured today and everything…  maybe you guys should have
it,” countered Julie.

“No, it’s okay,
really,” said Tim, who was pretty sure he’d sleep better on the floor himself
than knowing that Julie and Rose had to sleep down there.  Besides, he was
so tired he could have slept in his current position leaning up against the
closet door if he had to.

“You know… 
Every freaking time I travel back in time a hundred years, I
always
forget to bring my pajamas,” Rose complained.

“Don’t worry,
nobody’s going to look,” said Billy.  “My eyes are scheduled to be closed
for the next ten hours anyway…  In fact, it’s eight o’clock now, so let’s
keep to that…  If we wake up at six, we’ll hopefully have no problem
getting to the Tenderloin and finding somewhere to bet before nine here… 
Which of course is noon eastern time.”  He picked up the alarm clock that
was sitting on the dresser and started fussing with it.

“You really
think the criminal element of San Francisco is even going to be
awake
at
that time on a Saturday morning?” asked Julie.

“Well… 
unless we want to try to head out now and adventure after dark in the
Tenderloin, we don’t have any other options.  You want to try our luck now
after we almost got beat up by a bunch of thirteen year olds?” asked
Billy.  He said all this without much conviction and with a pretty hefty
yawn.

Nobody came up
to the bat for the idea of going out to a rough neighborhood after dark. 
This was probably a combination of prudence and exhaustion.  On Tim’s
part, at least, it had a lot to do with the fact that his arm still hurt from
where he had been slashed earlier.  He had washed the wound out with soap
and water that afternoon in the shower, or at least he had tried to, and he was
at least hopeful that it wouldn’t get infected.  But he certainly didn’t
want to get a wound on the other arm to match.

Billy yawned
again and said, “Good, see…  We can just try to find something tomorrow
morning.  If we can’t, we can always live off of Rose’s poker skills for
the next couple days.”

The conversation
died at that point, after a half-hearted laugh from everyone and a few quick
goodnights.  Billy turned out the light and stretched out on the floor
between Tim, who was laying beside the bed, and the door. 

The alarm, one
of those little ones with a small round clock face and a pair of bells at the
top, went off with a spectacularly obnoxious ring at six am. 

The ten hours of
sleep had done everyone good, though, and Tim felt better than he had since
they had arrived on the twentieth century West Coast.  The girls dressed
and snuck out of the room and the YMCA grounds as stealthily as they could
manage, and no one saw them. 

Meanwhile, the
boys managed to make some coffee in the kitchen and take two disposable cups
each.  Tim hadn’t ever drunk coffee before, except for sporadic sips here
and there, but he had a feeling that drinking some this morning might keep his
circadian rhythms in check.  After all, no matter how good he felt at the
moment, it was supposed to be about eight PM for him now, and Tim figured that
if there was ever a time when you wanted to stay sharp, it was when you had
only three days to solve a mystery on which the fate of the world depended.

After a quick
breakfast of coffee, apples, and bread in the vicinity of the YMCA, the four
teens set off back toward the Tenderloin area.  It was lucky Billy and
Julie seemed to have some kind of innate sense of direction, because Tim had
none and probably would have wandered around San Francisco all day before
independently discovering the area of the city where they had been the previous
morning.  As it was, they arrived around eight o’ clock. Now the major
challenge was the question of how to find someone for Billy to make his sure
bets with. 

Billy had thought
hotel lobbies might be a good place to look for people ready to gamble, but
after popping into a few hotels where people seemed more concerned with paying
their bills and dealing with their luggage than anything else, and where the
hotel bars weren’t even open at this hour, they got tired of this
approach. 

Then, they
walked past a cafe and coffee shop which seemed to be doing a thriving business
this morning.  To judge by the smells coming out of the storefront, the
business seemed to consist mostly of coffee and bacon.

The smells did
not give them any particular reason to believe the cafe was doing any trade of
the gambling variety that morning, but it was the biggest congregation of any
group of people they had seen.

“Right,” said
Billy, after they had decided that they should try the place.  “I’ve been
thinking.  There’s no real reason to rock the boat on the whole women’s
lib issue right now, so maybe it’d be best if it was just Tim and me who deal
with gambling.  I mean… even thirteen year olds were suspicious at you
wanting to gamble.”

“They weren’t
suspicious, just chauvinists,” countered Rose with a huff.

“Still, he’s
right, no reason to choose that battle right now, we have plenty of others to
fight,” said Julie.  “There’s a produce stand over there, and I’m starting
to get bored with apples.  What do you say to giving Rose and me twenty
cents or so and we go do some shopping?”

So the boys and
the girls parted ways.  Tim followed Billy into the diner.

Tim had to admit
he was a bit jealous of how confident Billy seemed as he strode up to the bar
to talk to the waiter.  Of course, Billy did have a bit more cause to be
confident, since he looked a lot better put together than Tim did.  Even
though he had been able to take the improvised jacket bandage off his lower
arm, and the blood on his shirt mostly wasn’t showing with the sleeves rolled
up, Tim was aware of looking a little bit ridiculous.

“Pardon me,
sir…” said Billy, once he had gotten the waiter’s attention, “but if someone
wanted to make a bet on a football game around here, do you know where they
could do it?”

The waiter
looked at them and laughed.  He got control of himself and said, “See, and
I was just going to say I thought you were too young for me to serve you
coffee.” 

Billy stammered
unintelligibly.  They had assumed they would be able to pass for at least
eighteen, but looking around at the other folks in the diner, who were mostly
middle aged, they could see how maybe they looked more like the thirteen year
olds they had met yesterday than actual adults.

The waiter
grinned and pointed to the end of the bar.  “No, don’t worry about
it.  I’ll let him turn you down himself.  There’s a guy over there
who has been known to take bets from time to time.  Of course, I probably
should have checked to make sure that you weren’t police before telling you
that.”  He chuckled to himself.  “But I suppose that during your time
at police academy they’d at least have taught you how to grow more than that
little bit of peach fuzz.  Go ahead, and don’t mind me watching you get
rejected, this job leaves me needing some entertainment.”

Understandably,
it was a slightly less confident Billy who made his way over to the man at the
end of the bar a moment later, but Tim still let him take the lead.

“So I was
wondering if I could place a bet with you…  A couple bets, actually… 
On some football games?” asked Billy.

The man was
middle aged, about as old Tim’s father.  That, however, was where the
similarities between this man and Tim’s father ended.  This man was
wearing a brown hat and suit with a gray five o’clock shadow.  He had the
kind of face that looked like it had a good bit of practice being hardened, but
when he looked at Billy, it softened a bit. 

The man looked
at Billy probingly. “Ya know, I ain’t usually the kind of man who looks too
hard into the welfare of children, but I’m not sure I feel comfortable taking
your money…  You guys don’t look particularly well…  Did you sleep in
your clothes last night?”

“No, we’re doing
all right,” said Billy.  Well, okay, he more or less stammered it, not
really exuding the coolness he meant to.

The bet-taker
looked at him and began to shake his head when Tim finally jumped in and said
what he figured Billy would have said had he had his normal confidence.

“Listen,
sir…  we really appreciate your concern, but we’re okay.  We can
afford to gamble.  We’re nineteen and we’re from out of town.  Our
clothes are a little ruffled because we’re travelling on a budget, only brought
one set of clothes each.  But the reason we’re here is that Billy’s
getting married next week.  And yeah, he’s got a bit of a weakness for
gambling, but that won’t matter next week because his wife-to-be hates
gambling.  And we’ve had a rough couple days already…  I got in a
fight with some guys we were playing poker with and got this little scrape
here.  No big deal, but not the best way to send my friend here into
‘wedded bliss’, if you know what I mean.”

The bet-taker
seemed to think about this for a moment.  Finally, he reached out his hand
and said, “Alright, fine.  The name’s Richie.  You want to bet on
some football games today, you say?  You certainly didn’t give yourselves
too much extra time to fool around here, but let’s go ahead and get
acquainted.”

“Tim,” said Tim,
shaking Richie’s hand.

Billy reached
out his hand and introduced himself as well.

“Now let me tell
you how this works.  The way I do this, is I take other people’s bets and
then give the winners what they win minus a ten percent cut for my
troubles.  Can you boys operate on those terms?”