She glanced at a page of data that computer-Bob had compiled. ‘What we do know is he was described as very tall and thin and scruffy.’ She pointed to a screen showing a JPEG image of Lincoln’s presidential portrait. ‘And check out those freakin’ brows … I mean it looks like he’s got a small mouse living above each eye. Even as a young man, that’s got to be a feature to look out for, right?’
Bob nodded. ‘Information: cranial growth variation around the orbital sockets is limited after a human skull reaches maturity, whereas certain other features — nasal cavity and cartilage tissue, soft tissue around the ears, the lower jaw — continue to —’
Maddy waved him silent. ‘Which means even as a kid he probably always looked miserable.’ She wiped a runny nose. ‘Anyway, just keep your eyes peeled for a large cart loaded with barrels of booze and Costen Brothers Distillery painted on the side. Any tall, miserable-looking idiot looks like he’s going to step out in front of it, you grab him. Simple.’
Liam lifted his chin to adjust his collar button. ‘Sounds easy enough, eh, Bob?’
Bob rumbled an acknowledgement.
‘How’re you doing, Sal?’ Maddy called out.
‘Almost!’ Her voice came back brightly through the drape, the unintended racial slur already completely forgotten by the sound of it. ‘It’s just a bit big on me.’
‘I am tightening the corset to its smallest setting to compensate,’ added Becks.
‘Hey!’ Maddy frowned. ‘Hey! No … don’t say it like that. Like I’m a butter-troll or something.’ She caught her reflection in the perspex displacement tube. ‘OK, so I’m not just some skin-’n’-bones clothes hanger,’ she muttered to herself.
‘Completed,’ said Becks, and pulled the drape to one side.
Liam held back a gasp and Maddy found herself nodding approvingly. ‘Now that looks better on you than a hoody, right?’
Sal ran her hands over the corset and skirts. ‘Feels so weird.’ She grinned. ‘I feel like a … ugh, jahulla! I know this sounds pathetic, but … I feel like a princess.’
Maddy clapped her hands. ‘I know — it’s kinda cool, isn’t it?’ She cast a glance at Liam and Bob. ‘Good … you all look the part. Now undress and bag your clothes. It’s a wet departure.’
Ten minutes later Liam, Sal and Bob were treading water in their underwear together in the displacement tube.
‘So, a nice and easy mission this time,’ said Maddy, huddled on the top step of the ladder. ‘Just find young Abe and grab his collar before he gets himself turned into Lincoln ketchup. You OK in there, Sal?’
She nodded, her teeth chattering. ‘Guess I’m g-getting a bit nervous n-now.’
‘You’ll be just fine. Remember you’ve done this before. It’s no big deal.’
‘It’s the white s-stuff that s-scares m-me …’
‘Chaos space?’ Liam shook his head. ‘Ahh, you’ll be through it in a heartbeat, so you will. Nothing to it.’
‘Could you h-hold m-my hand?’
Liam nodded. ‘I s’pose. Sure, if you like.’
‘Uhh … it’s probably best if you don’t,’ said Maddy. Her eyes quickly met Liam’s and after a few seconds he nodded. He knew what she was thinking. After all, he was the one who’d seen it up close: fused bodies, bodies turned completely inside out. Very messy. He’d told Maddy about it, but not Sal. It was a grisly detail she didn’t really need to hear and, anyway, it only happened rarely. Maddy had no idea what caused it, but when Foster had insisted Liam had to float on his own first time round … well, there was almost certainly a very good reason for that.
‘Works best if you’re all floating freely, Sal. But look,’ she said before Sal could ask why, ‘you’re going together. The other two will be right next to you. And as Liam said, it’s, like, a second, no more.’
‘I’ll sing you a ditty,’ said Liam, ‘so you’ll hear me in there … in the chaos soup.’
‘There you go.’ Maddy smiled. ‘That is, if you can bear to listen to his howling.’ She started to descend the ladder. ‘Right, we should get going, guys. We’ve been more than lucky with only small ripples so far. Let’s not push our luck.’
At the bottom she checked to confirm the displacement machine was green right across the board, then called across to Becks. ‘Punch in a thirty-second countdown.’
‘Yes, Maddy. Thirty seconds … as of now.’
‘Return window at seven in the evening!’ she reminded them. ‘And, remember, the usual back-up windows after that if you miss it!’
She could see Sal’s face through the scuffed plastic, wide-eyed with growing panic. Beside her, kicking water and still holding on to the top of the tube was Liam, saying something encouraging to her. And then Bob, keeping afloat with strong, powerful kicks. All three of them holding Ziploc plastic bags containing their clothes.
‘It’ll be fun, Sal!’ she called out over the increasing hum of the displacement machine. ‘Enjoy seeing 1831 with your own eyes!’
Sal flashed her an uncertain smile and a wave.
She stepped back into the middle of the floor as Becks’s countdown reached ten.
‘Right! Hands off, everyone!’ she shouted.
Liam reluctantly let go and began thrashing furiously and ineffectually to keep his head above water. The other two let go and managed to tread water calmly. On five seconds, Maddy bellowed over the rising pitch of the machine for them all to grab some air and duck their heads under the water.
And on one they were all completely submerged.
A crescendo of channelled and suddenly released energy merged with the boom of flexing perspex, and in the blink of an eye the three of them were gone.
CHAPTER 10. 1831, New Orleans
They were standing on Powder Street nearly a whole hour before six watching the dock workers industriously unloading boats of all different sizes, watching horse-drawn carts clattering up the busy thoroughfare. Although that snippet of digitally archived news from a long-dead New Orleans newspaper had claimed the event had occurred ‘in the evening’, it would be foolish to assume that meant for certain it happened after 6 p.m. Liam told them that in his time people still generally didn’t carry clocks or watches. Time was less specific. You’d arrange to meet someone in the afternoon, not ‘at 2.35 p.m. precisely’ as he noticed most modern New Yorkers seemed to do.
‘Just keep looking,’ said Liam, craning his neck to look up and down the busy street. ‘Tall grumpy-looking fella.’
‘Affirmative.’
Sal nodded. But then it was far too easy to be distracted by the sights and sounds going on around her.
Nothing can prepare you for what it’s like, Sal … actually standing in the middle of a piece of history. That’s what Maddy had told her after her trip to San Francisco, 1906. And she was right.
She and Dadda had once gone along to a technology expo, while they’d been in Shanghai on one of her Pikodu tournaments. One of the last as it happened; international relations between China and India were beginning to chill then. A sign of the troubled times ahead. At the expo she had tried out a prototype of a thing they were calling a Reality Hat. It looked like a shower cap with marbles stuck all over it. She’d put it on and almost instantly she found herself smelling things, hearing things that weren’t there, and then finally seeing herself in a Roman street. Of course nothing was quite right. The scene was computer graphics, very realistic, but still there were little jerks in the animation here and there that gave it away. The visuals, the smells, the sounds were being transmitted into her head, stimulating the senses. She had been stunned by how convincing an experience it had been.