The Lincoln Project Read online

  “We know, we know,” Luke said wearily. “No cars, no planes, no television, no nothing. We’ve heard it all before.”

  “In fact, I’d like you to give me your cell phones to hold,” said Miss Z.

  Isabel, David, and Luke put their cell phones on the desk. Julia recoiled in horror.

  “My cell phone?” she asked. “I feel like it’s . . . almost a part of me.”

  “You won’t be able to use it where you’re going,” Miss Z explained, “and if I’m holding it, you don’t have to worry about losing it.”

  Reluctantly, Julia put her cell phone on the desk.

  “Good,” said Miss Z. “Now, you need to be aware of one quirk about the Board. My team is still working on this technology. Right now, it can only send you to a particular time and place once. So I can’t be shuttling you back and forth between Boston and Gettysburg every five minutes because you forgot something or whatever. We need to do this once, do it right, and bring you back here safely.”

  “So in other words, we can’t mess up,” said Isabel. “There’s no margin for error.”

  “Exactly. Now, look at this.”

  In the middle of her desk, Miss Z had a simple map of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, that she had drawn. The four kids gathered around to examine it.

  “Where are we going to land?” Luke asked.

  “Most likely, right here,” Miss Z replied, jabbing her finger at a large circle in the middle of the map. “This is the center of town. It still is, in fact. In 1863, they called it the diamond, but today it’s called Lincoln Square. It’s a circle, but they call it a square. Go figure. Anyway, Baltimore Street starts right there, going south, and the biggest buildings in town surround it. You won’t be able to miss it.”

  “Is that where Lincoln will be giving the address?” asked David.

  “No,” Miss Z said. “Remember, he’s coming to Gettysburg to dedicate a cemetery for Union soldiers who died in the battle. That cemetery is at the edge of the village, a short walk down Baltimore Street. It’s called Soldiers’ National Cemetery, right here.”

  Miss Z slid her finger down Baltimore Street to show the kids exactly where they would need to go.

  “Looks like less than a mile,” Luke commented. “It must be a really small town.”

  “It is,” said Miss Z. “There’s going to be a big military parade that will start at the square and end at the cemetery. You’ll be able to follow the crowd to get to the cemetery.”

  “How do you know exactly what’s going to happen?” asked Luke.

  “It’s called research,” Miss Z replied. “Now, this next part is crucial. I know from doing my research that Lincoln will be delivering the Gettysburg Address at around two o’clock in the afternoon. So after you take the photo, I need you to walk back up Baltimore Street to the square, where you first landed. At three o’clock sharp, you need to be standing in the middle of the square. That should give you plenty of time. Then I’ll activate the Board to scoop you up and bring you back here safely.”

  “Got it,” said Isabel, making a mental note. “Three o’clock.”

  “Be there,” Miss Z said seriously, folding up the map and handing it to Luke. “Right after the speech is over. It’s important.”

  “What happens if we aren’t back at the square at three o’clock?” asked David.

  “Let’s just say you could be stuck in 1863 for a long time,” Miss Z said pointedly. “Now, which one of you has experience with a camera? Julia, you’re always talking about shooting selfies. Do you think you can handle this responsibility?”

  “Sure!” Julia replied excitedly.

  “This is a real camera,” Miss Z said, carefully taking the Nikon out of her drawer.

  “Uh, that looks complicated,” Julia said, backing away from the camera.

  “My dad has a fancy camera,” Luke said. “I’ve fooled around with it a little.”

  Miss Z handed Luke the Nikon. Miss Z took a few minutes to explain how to focus and how to adjust the shutter speed and aperture settings. The Nikon had a powerful zoom lens, but she instructed Luke to try and get as close to Lincoln as possible. Photos come out sharper and clearer when you don’t use the zoom.

  She told Luke it was a very expensive camera and advised him to keep it out of sight until the moment he was ready to take the picture. Most people in 1863 had never seen any camera before, much less a high-tech digital one from the future.

  The Nikon wasn’t hard to use, but there were a lot of buttons on it and the controls could be a little confusing. Luke took some practice shots of Julia, David, and Isabel to get the hang of it.

  “Remember, you are only going to Gettysburg to take this photo,” Miss Z said, addressing all four of the kids. “That is your sole purpose. You’re not going there to make friends, to sightsee, or to bring back souvenirs. Do not disturb history in any way. You take pictures, not things. Do you understand?”

  All four heads nodded.

  “And I need you to stay together as a group at all times,” Miss Z continued. “That’s why I recruited you. Work as a team. Don’t go running off and getting into trouble.”

  “Okay, can we go now?” asked Julia impatiently.

  “One last thing,” said Miss Z as she reached into her desk drawer once again. She pulled out a small black box, slightly smaller than a cell phone. “Isabel, I’m putting you in charge of this.”

  “It looks like a little cell phone,” she said.

  “How come she gets the cell phone?” complained Julia. “I want the cell phone.”

  “It’s not a cell phone,” said Miss Z. “Needless to say, an ordinary cell phone would be useless in 1863.”

  “Then what is it?” asked David.

  “I call it a TTT. That stands for Text Through Time.”

  “Text Through Time?” asked Luke. “You mean to say we’ll be able to send texts back and forth with you while we’re in 1863?”

  “Correct.”

  “Cool!” said David.

  “Wait a minute,” Isabel said. “Doesn’t texting use satellites just like cell phones do? There were no satellites in 1863. How can this thing possibly work?”

  “Isabel,” Miss Z said, putting a hand on the girl’s shoulder. “I spent a billion dollars to create this technology. It works. Twenty years from now, everybody will have one of these. Time travel is going to be as commonplace as Skyping is today. You’ll be able to swap texts with relatives who died centuries ago. Instead of going to Disney World, people will be going back in time on vacations. It will be a whole new industry. Believe me. This is the future. It’s inevitable.”

  “If you say so,” Isabel said, examining the buttons on the TTT.

  “I need you to keep me informed about where you are and what you’re doing,” Miss Z told her. “When you arrive at the square, text me right away. Give me updates. And be careful with this thing. It’s the only one I have. In fact, it’s the only one in the world.”

  “You can count on me,” Isabel said.

  “Also, when you arrive in Gettysburg, be respectful,” Miss Z told the Flashback Four. “The mood is likely to be somber. Remember, thousands of people were wounded or died there just four months earlier. Some of their loved ones will probably be there. In my research, I’ve found that people can grieve for up to four to six months after things like this.”

  “So no cracking jokes and stuff,” said David. “Okay, we get it.”

  “Good. Mrs. Vader! Let’s get these kids ready.”

  Mrs. Vader came into the office and led the Flashback Four to the restrooms to change their clothes. Luke and David came out first, looking very sharp in their knickers and waistcoats. They stood awkwardly in front of the Board, waiting for the girls to come out. Five minutes later the girls appeared, smiling, twirling around, and doing their best not to step on their enormous dresses.

  Isabel slipped the TTT into a pocket that had been specially sewn into her dress. The four kids took their places in front of the Boar
d. It was a tight squeeze, mainly because Isabel and Julia’s dresses took up so much space. They had to stand boy-girl-boy-girl to fit in.

  “Tighter,” Miss Z instructed, as if she was taking a group photo. “Get closer together. You don’t want me to cut somebody’s arms off, do you?”

  The kids jammed together until Miss Z was satisfied that they all fit within the frame of the Board. She turned on the power and then rolled over to her computer.

  “Are you all ready?” she asked. “Last chance to change your mind.”

  “Nobody’s backing out,” Luke said, holding the camera tightly. “Do it.”

  “I’m scared,” Isabel said.

  “It will be fine,” David assured her. “It will all be over in a few seconds.”

  “What do we do if something goes wrong?” asked Julia.

  “Text me. I’ll try to help,” Miss Z said. “But it may be up to you. That’s why there are four of you. Figure out a solution. Be strong.”

  “Bye-bye!” said Mrs. Vader. “Good luck! Have fun!”

  Miss Z typed some commands on her computer, took one last look, and hit the Enter key. The Board buzzed for a few seconds and then lit up. The five bands of color appeared, and then merged into one band of intense white light. It was like staring at the sun.

  “It’s blinding me!” said Julia, squinting and shielding her face.

  “Close your eyes,” David told her. “Hold on!”

  “I feel something happening,” Luke reported. “It’s like I’m melting.”

  “That’s normal,” Miss Z assured him. “It means you’re about to go back.”

  The humming sound started, and the kids grabbed each other’s hands for support. The white light was flickering now, first slowly, and then faster, like a fluorescent bulb that was partially burned out. Something was clicking on and off.

  “I don’t—” was the last thing anybody said.

  And then they vanished.

  CHAPTER 12

  THE SQUARE

  DAVID HIT THE GROUND RUNNING. ISABEL AND Luke crashed into each other and nearly fell down. Julia almost landed on a stray cat. But fortunately, nobody on the street seemed to notice when these four strange kids from another century suddenly appeared in the middle of the square.

  A large wooden building in front of them was decorated with red, white, and blue bunting, and topped with a sign. . . .

  GETTYSBURG HOTEL. BUILT IN 1797.

  “The Board works!” Isabel said breathlessly.

  “I told you it worked,” said David.

  “In the back of my mind I thought that the whole thing was just a trick,” Luke said. “I figured we were part of some crazy reality TV show.”

  “We’re in Gettysburg,” Isabel marveled. “And this isn’t the twenty-first century, that’s for sure. This is like watching a documentary on TV, but we’re right in the middle of it. This is so cool!”

  Just so you know, reader, Gettysburg was founded in 1761 by an innkeeper named Samuel Gettys. It’s located in central Pennsylvania, close to the Maryland border and about sixty miles from Baltimore. If you look at it on a map, you’ll see that ten roads converge at Gettysburg, which is a big reason why the Union and Confederate armies chose to pick a fight with each other there.

  Still getting over their disbelief, the kids turned to look around the square. There was a high, wooden flagpole right in the middle, its flag featuring just thirty-five stars. Wooden and redbrick buildings surrounded the square. None of them were higher than four stories, because elevators had only been invented a few years earlier.

  The road that circled the square wasn’t paved. It was made of dirt. There were no cars on it, of course, but plenty of horses. Even though Gettysburg was not in the western part of the country, the kids were reminded of Western movies they had seen.

  Miss Z had cautioned them to be respectful because the atmosphere in Gettysburg would be somber, but it was just the opposite. The square was jammed with men, women, and children, and it looked like a big celebration. People were shouting, chanting, and waving little American flags. A military band was playing on one side of the square, and a college glee club was singing “When Johnny Comes Marching Home” on the other. In the middle were smaller groups of roving serenaders. A little girl rolled a wooden hoop down the street, pushing it forward with a stick. An old man weaved around, greeting friends and strangers he encountered. He was clearly drunk. There was merriment in the air. Everybody seemed to be having a good time.

  People were dressed much like Luke, Isabel, Julia, and David. Some were decked out in their best finery, while others seemed to be wearing rags. Everybody—men and women, boys and girls—wore some kind of a hat. Many of the men sported stovepipe hats like the one made famous by Abraham Lincoln.

  David looked around for suspicious men who might possibly be slave traders. Luke checked to make sure the camera had made the trip safely. He thought about taking a few pictures of the square, but decided to wait for the Gettysburg Address. If the battery were to die before Lincoln started to speak, there would be no way to recharge it. Isabel checked to see if she still had the TTT. Everything was in order. The Flashback Four started walking around the square.

  “What is that smell?” Julia suddenly asked, wrinkling up her nose.

  “I think it’s horse manure,” David replied.

  “Oh, gross!”

  “Well, what did you expect?” asked Luke. “They’ve got a lot of horses here. Horses produce a lot of manure.”

  “I expected clean, fresh air,” Julia replied. “Isn’t 1863 before they had pollution? Isn’t this before they started digging coal and oil out of the ground and burning it? The air should smell wonderful.”

  “They burn wood,” Luke told her. “That causes a lot of pollution, too.”

  “It would smell a lot better if you’d watch where you were walking,” David told Julia. “Look at your shoe.”

  Julia looked down. Then she screamed.

  “I stepped in it!” she shouted, horrified. “Oh, I think I’m gonna throw up!”

  “Will you be cool?” Luke told Julia, putting his hand over her mouth. “You’re drawing attention to us. People around here probably step in horse manure all the time. It’s no big deal to them.”

  “So that means I should like it?” Julia said disgustedly. “Ugh, these shoes are totally ruined! And we just got here!”

  “Look, you need to calm down,” Isabel told her. “This is not a problem. Give me the shoes.”

  “Gladly!”

  Isabel took the shoes and rubbed them in the dirt to clean them off the best that she could. She scraped them up pretty badly, but at least she got the manure off them. Julia put the shoes back on gingerly, still disgusted and complaining.

  “I just thought it would be cleaner in 1863,” she said. “Everything looks so dirty.”

  “You’ve seen too many movies,” Luke told her. “I bet a lot of the houses here don’t even have running water. People probably bathe once a week, if that. Can you imagine how tough it is to clean one of those dresses? They probably wash ’em once a year.”

  Julia was still adjusting her shoes when a couple of teenage boys walked by, whistling “Yankee Doodle.”

  “Good day, ladies!” one of the boys said with a smile. “Lovely day to be out for a walk.” The other one tipped his hat and smiled as he passed. Julia and Isabel responded by collapsing into giggles.

  “I think those boys were flirting with us!” Isabel whispered.

  “The one on the left was kind of cute,” Julia said.

  “Don’t flatter yourself,” David told her. “They were just being friendly.”

  “I notice they weren’t being friendly to you guys,” Julia replied. “They were just being friendly to us.”

  “Who cares who they were being friendly to?” asked Luke. “We have a job to do. Remember, we’re supposed to text Miss Z to let her know we got here safely. She told us to do that before anything else.”

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sp; “Do we really need to tell her every little thing we do?” asked Julia. “It’s not like she’s our mom or anything.”

  “I think you’re forgetting something,” Isabel said. “Miss Z has that disease, remember? We don’t know how long she has to live. Getting that picture may be the one thing that keeps her going. The one thing that makes her want to get up in the morning.”

  “Besides, she promised the adventure of a lifetime,” David said, “and look around—here it is! We’re gonna see Abraham Lincoln give the Gettysburg Address! Think about that for a minute! We’re gonna see one of the most important events in history, in real time. Nobody ever did this before.”

  “Okay, okay!” Julia said. “Go ahead and text her.”

  Isabel took out the TTT and started tapping the buttons.

  “Hey, hide that thing!” David told her. “If the people here see you using it, they’re gonna totally freak out.”

  “Shhhhh!” Luke told David. “Keep your voice down, dude! If the people hear you say ‘freak out,’ they’re gonna freak out.”

  “Don’t say ‘dude,’ dude!” David told Luke. “Nobody said ‘dude’ in 1863.”

  Isabel turned her back to the square so people would not be able to see what she was doing. She switched on the TTT and tapped out . . .

  WE R HERE. SAFE & SOUND

  “No way that thing’s gonna work,” Julia said to nobody in particular. “It’s impossible to text through time.”

  As each second passed with no response, Julia appeared to be more and more correct. And then, after about fifteen seconds . . .

  Bzzz.

  This appeared on the screen . . .

  SPLENDID! WHERE R U EXACTLY?

  Isabel just about dropped the TTT when she saw the words come through.

  “It works!” she said.

  THE SQUARE, Isabel tapped out. LINCOLN SQUARE.

  A few more seconds passed. Bzzz. And then . . .

  EXCELLENT. PROCEED TO THE CEMETERY.

  David pulled out the map Miss Z had given them, then turned around. There were no signs, so it was hard to tell which of the roads branching off the square was Baltimore Street. A man with a cane was walking by, so David approached him.