The Left Behinds and the iPhone That Saved George Washington (12 page)

“This is the question of the hour, Samuel. His death is confirmed?”

“It is, alas. His body has been recovered and protected.”

“Protected?”

“His staff is fearful, Dr. Franklin. That … unruly bands … will seek to desecrate … the lifeless body of a man they used to fear and respect. I speak not of the populace, sir. Who present their own problems. I speak of General Washington’s unpaid soldiers, who are using
this event as license to unleash their more degenerate passions. The stores of rum and grog, sir, have been breached. None would have dared were Washington alive.”

“The army …,” Dr. Franklin says, hesitating. “Can it not be restored to order?”

“I believe it too late, sir. Their complaint is that since they are unpaid, and due, they are no longer subject. They have sprung themselves upon the populace, like winter locusts, and are intent on taking, from whosoever shall have plenty, that which they deem their due. What keeps these soldiers yoked, sir, is the order and discipline of the army. The yoke has been removed; they are roaming, and pillaging, at will. I fear our revolution, Dr. Franklin, is unraveling at a frightful pace. If only providence would undo what has been done!”

“Rest assured, Samuel,” Dr. Franklin says. “We are engaged in the very thing. Young man,” he says, turning to me, “the toll is rising, and may rise far more than we ever could fear. Are you not sufficiently supplied … for us to carry on?”

I check my iPhone and see I’m at seventy percent. “We’re good,” I say. Which is exactly what I know Dr. Franklin wants to hear.

What he certainly doesn’t want to hear is what we hear next: a crowd approaching us from down the street. Samuel, Daniel, and Mr. Farrington open the door, and their faces are aghast; we are, Samuel says, in proximate
danger. And Mr. Topping, it appears, has somehow managed to slip away, when no one was paying attention.

We hear the crowd. They are chanting the same thing, over and over: “Death to traitors! Death to traitors! Long live the king!”

“D
ISENTANGLE THE WIRES
!” D
R
. Franklin says to Mr. Farrington. “Put it back together! We shall grab the device and go! Through the back! Mr. Farrington, if you please: fortify the front. Let us not be detected or disturbed. The future of our revolution depends upon it!”

I hold the iPhone while Mr. Farrington detaches the wires and puts the cover on, and then we leave the whole Leyden jar battery cabinet contraption behind and hustle off to the back room.

“Hustle,” of course, is a relative term. Daniel, Elizabeth, and I are perfectly capable; Dr. Franklin, not so much. He does a kind of half-shuffle hopalong, using his cane as a pivot point and a launch tool, but we get there. With maybe two seconds to spare.

As we duck into the back room, Samuel and his comrades, directed by Mr. Farrington, stand foursquare inside the front door, blocking any penetration. We hear the chant—“Death to traitors, death to traitors, long live the King”—and we hear the door being rattled.

“Hurry!” says Daniel. “Hurry, Mel! We haven’t much time!”

We exit the print shop through a little-used back door and trudge through snowdrifts, with Dr. Franklin shouting directions. Daniel leads the way; Elizabeth and I are alongside Dr. Franklin, helping him, or at least trying to help him, keep pace.

We have to tromp through snow, back-alley snow, and it’s cold. We can hear the crowd, fading away now, but still chanting: “Death to traitors! Long live the king!” We all hope that Mr. Farrington and Samuel’s men have been able to fend them off, because if they come after us, in these narrow alleyways, going at Dr. Franklin’s pace—we’ll all be dead meat.

Dr. Franklin shouts to Daniel to turn right, then right again; we come to the end of an alley, and to a back door. Daniel knocks on the door, and he knocks again, and then the door is opened a crack and we are let in.

The house belongs to an older woman, maybe as old as Dr. Franklin himself. She isn’t introduced—there isn’t time—nor does she stick around. We’re let in, the door is closed, and Dr. Franklin glances out the window.

“Our tracks,” he says, “cannot be hidden, or obscured.
Should the mob burst through, it won’t take them long to find us, and I fear our time will have come to an end. Mel, we have electrified your device as well as we could; the moment has arrived for you to command it to do what it can do, or for us to discover … the futility of our efforts. Mel? Please proceed.”

All eyes are upon me. I take my iPhone in my hand, and with one only slightly trembling right forefinger I press the mysterious icon that says iTime.

M
Y I
P
HONE KIND OF BUZZES
. Kind of shakes, rattles, and rolls.

Then a simple screen appears. And on the screen, a message. It says this:

Welcome to iTIME
.

Brought to You by T.G.W., Inc
.

The Aim Is to Play
.

To Mess About
.

Who Says Things Have to Be This Way and Not Another? Who Says Things Wouldn’t Be Better if a Different Road Had Been Taken?

Catch Us if You Can
.

K
.

We read this, and as we do the message fizzles away and disappears. A new screen appears. Five large boxes.

And, to the far right, at the lower corner, a little green circle. And in the middle of the little green circle, tiny letters, etched in white:
Submit
.

“I fear I don’t understand,” says Dr. Franklin, “the point of the message. I wish to reread it. Mel—can we?” I try to, but I can’t get the message back. I hit the home button, then iTime again, but no message. Just the five large boxes, and the one small circle.

“It said something about T.G.W., Inc.” says Daniel. “What is that?”

“I don’t know,” I say.

“It was also signed, I think,” says Elizabeth. “By someone named ‘K.’ Who is this?”

“Presumably,” says Dr. Franklin, “the inventor. And I know something about inventing. You always wish to leave your mark, somehow. Credit must be given where credit is due. So let us assume that ‘K’ is the inventor, and the message, cryptic though it be, is for us. Now then. Let us continue our examination.”

All of us are peering intently at the little electronic screen on the odd little device sitting in the palm of my left hand. A thing I do fifty, seventy-five times a day. A thing none of them, essentially, have ever done.

Box one, on the left:
DAY
. Inside the box is
25
.

Box two:
MONTH
. Inside the box,
12
.

Box three:
YEAR
. Inside the box,
1776
.

Box four:
TIME
. Inside the box,
11:00
.

Box five:
COORDINATES
. Inside the box,
+40.287660, -74.8898391
.

That’s it. No other information to go by, no instructions, no tabs.

Dr. Franklin speaks first. “Mel,” he says. “At what time did you … arrive on Christmas Day?”

“I don’t remember exactly,” I say. “But eleven o’clock in the morning seems about right.”

Dr. Franklin nods. Then he puts a hand on my shoulder. “Tell me, Mel,” he says. “What do you think would happen if you changed the setting? On this device? If we were to put in ten o’clock, let us say, in the box on the right? In place of eleven o’clock?”

“I would guess I might have an hour to work with.”

“Indeed,” Dr. Franklin says. “And if that were so, Mel, do you think that you would be able to … handle things?”

Dr. Franklin’s eyes are on mine. He sees a twelve-year-old kid, a skinny kid, a kid with braces on his teeth. He’s really asking, does it make sense to trust this entire operation to a twelve-year-old
boy
?

I remember what my dad said: You want to be
somebody
, right? You don’t just want to be a
potted plant
, do you? What he didn’t tell me was that there’d be an occasion when you don’t have much of a choice, like right now. When you’d be forced to do something you never knew you had in you.

“Don’t worry, Dr. Franklin,” I say, and hold his gaze steadily. “I got it covered.”

E
LIZABETH COMES FORWARD AND
puts her hand on my arm. “He’ll know what to do, Dr. Franklin,” she says. “He’s gotten us this far.” Then she does something very strange, and very nice: she hugs me. For all she’s worth.

She’s also tearing up a little, and it hits me. This is going to be the end of something, isn’t it?

Dr. Franklin understands it. So does Daniel.

If I reset the time, to one hour earlier—for us, everything changes.

“Tell me,” Dr. Franklin says. “Indulge an old man. Are we remembered?”

“To this day,” I say. “Celebrated and honored. Your picture, Dr. Franklin, is on our one hundred dollar bill. One
of the most popular science museums in Philadelphia is called the Franklin Institute. Every kid in America learns about you, sir, to this day. And they will for every day to come.”

“My picture,” he says, “on a hundred dollar bill. I can’t imagine. I am speechless, I truly am.” And then Dr. Franklin positively beams.

But then we hear them—the mob. They’ve found our tracks in the snow. It won’t be long till they find us.

I push the TIME box, and reset it to “10:00.”

There’s only one thing left to do: press the little green circle in the lower right corner.
Submit
.

And I can’t bring myself to do it just yet.

There is more to say.

To explain.

“Wait,” says Daniel. “I want to come with you. Elizabeth can stay behind.”

“I will not!” Elizabeth says. “We shall go together.”

“I don’t think so,” I say. “It’s a one-person operation.” I’m not absolutely certain about this, but at this point I don’t want to take any chances. Besides, it would completely blow everyone’s brains to bits if
this
Daniel and Elizabeth happened to run into
that
Daniel and Elizabeth.

Which I realize makes absolutely no sense at all, except for the fact that it does.

“I’ve learned wonders, absolute wonders,” Dr. Franklin says. “A veritable fortune could be had, a hundred fortunes
could be had, if I have retained a tenth of it. But I fear not. Mel—are you thinking along the same lines as I? Once you … go back … all this … will be as if it never were?”

“Dr. Franklin, I think you’re right—all of this, and all you’ve learned, will be as if it never happened.”

We can not only hear the mob now, but also see them. They’ve got muskets, sticks, and torches. What they plan to do with all of it I don’t want to know. They are chanting, “Death to traitors, death to traitors, long live the king.”

I put my finger on the green circle.

I give a final nod to Elizabeth, to Daniel, and to Dr. Franklin.

“You must go,” Dr. Franklin says. “You must go this instant, before it is too late! They approach! Good luck to you, lad! For the revolution!”

“For the revolution!” I say, and press the green circle.

My phone starts tingling, buzzing. It goes completely haywire, and the room starts twirling around and around and around.

Then I’m gone.

 

I
T
’
S KIND OF LIKE
I clicked my heels together three times, and said: “I am not a potted plant.

“I am not a potted plant.

“I am not a potted plant, Dad.”

Then I’m in a stable. A very familiar stable.

There are stacks of hay, saddles hanging up on a wall, bunches of rope, and a godawful stench.

And though I’m dizzy and disoriented and still feel like everything is spinning round and round and round, there’s something I just have to know.

Is that stall empty?

Or no?

I know where it is. I don’t have to search around. In less than a second I find it.

No dead bodies anywhere.

So that leaves a two-item agenda. Item number one: make sure no one shoots and kills General George Washington.

Item two: make sure that at exactly eleven o’clock—one hour from now—I’m in this stable, at this same spot.

’Cause I expect two—or maybe three—befuddled prep school kids to crash-land after a whirling ride of 240-odd years. What I’ll do is tell ’em what’s what, who’s who, get everyone to reprogram our iPhones, and get the heck out of here and back to where we belong. General Washington will have to carry on by himself.

I say maybe three, because what if, at eleven o’clock, I see not only Brandon and Bev, but also me?

Is that even possible?

It would be weird. Because that me would not be the me I’d want to be. Get it?

This
is the me that knows stuff. That got the iPhone powered up, and figured out the iTime app. Any other me walking around would just get in the way.

So I have an hour to figure everything out. Or even less than that, because I just wasted a good five minutes standing around the stall and looking at nothing but hay.