The Time Hackers Read online

  “But they were still holograms, right?”

  Dorso nodded. “As far as I could tell. Now that I think of it there was lots of dust and noise with Custer at the battle but it disappeared when the hologram faded. And with Beethoven I think I would have felt his hand when he hit me….”

  Frank turned to the side and whispered into the computer: “Subject says severity increased with each incident.”

  “Frank.”

  “I'm sorry. Dorso says severity increased with each incident.”

  “And that's it, right?” Dorso looked at the charts and graphs. “That's all we know, isn't it? Which is nothing, really. Just that all these things have happened.”

  “No. Two more things.” Frank held up two fingers. “One, the mammoth. That was an amazing new step. Now it's become real. Somehow they brought a live woolly mammoth from the past and dropped it in front of you. Think if it had been that way when they brought Custer—there would have been bullets and arrows all over you. Or if I hadn't sacrificed myself to the mammoth—”

  “Sacrificed yourself?”

  “I put myself in harm's way to protect you and the mammoth took me instead of turning on you. What if I hadn't done that?”

  Dorso decided to let it go.

  “Maybe he would have stomped on you,” Frank said, “that's what. I mean, this has escalated to where it's life threatening….” He trailed off, thinking.

  “Two things,” Dorso reminded him. “You said there were two things. You always say that. What's the other one—something to do with naked ladies again?”

  “No.” Frank pointed at Dorso. “We have to figure out why it's happening to you. Why not me, why not somebody else? What makes you the receiver?”

  For a long time they sat in silence. Dorso tried to think of what might make him the target for these pranks, if that was what they were, and that made him think of himself, his life, who might hate him. He kept coming up blank. Born twelve years earlier; nice, ordinary parents who worked hard and were loving and fair; insane younger sister but insane in a good way, unless you were a cat she wanted to dress up. Got average grades; didn't do anything that would make anybody particularly upset with him; had only one emotional entanglement—Karen Bemis, who didn't know he was alive, or at least didn't show it.

  There was just nothing about him that should draw this kind of attention. He shook his head, looking at the charts on Frank's flex-screen. He was about to say they should chuck it all and go to the authorities when something popped into his brain.

  A word, there was a word bothering him. Something he'd said—no, something Frank had said. Something about how he was the target. No. Something else.

  “Receiver.” That was it. “What did you say about me being the receiver?”

  “Just that—what makes you the receiver?”

  “Yeah. That. The word made me think of something else. I can't really be a receiver, not in the technical sense. It would have to be a device. What if I'm not the target at all? What if it's something else and I just happen to be close to it?”

  “But what…,” Frank started, then stared at his flex-screen. “Your laptop! You think it might be your laptop?”

  Dorso rubbed his forehead, thinking. “Let's look at it. I never see the holograms unless my laptop is there, and every time one comes to my locker, it's been when I go to PE.”

  “And you leave your laptop in your locker….”

  “Exactly! There it is. My laptop is the target, not me. Somehow whoever is doing this is locking onto my laptop.” Dorso had been carrying his computer rolled up and he brought it out. The computer came on automatically.

  “But you leave it turned off in your locker, right?” Frank pointed to his own computer. “I turn mine off when I store it.”

  Dorso shook his head. “But with light and solar power they never really turn off. See, it's just the display and working circuitry that shut down. The internal workings, all the memory chips stay on all the time, so it can retain its programs.

  Frank whistled. “That's it—it makes sense. There's just one more question.”

  “Always two questions?”

  “Yeah—what does your laptop have against you? Or more to the point, since I'm the one who got flipped by the mammoth, what does it have against me?”

  At precisely 7:47 the next morning, while Dorso's mother was back in the kitchen and Darling was dressing the cat as a G.I. Joe commando trooper who was having trouble keeping his helmet on straight and his weapons belt on correctly and who had no idea at all what he was supposed to do with his little plastic assault rifle, Dorso and Frank left to join a pirate ship and sail the Spanish main.

  All unintentionally.

  It happened in this way:

  Frank had come to get Dorso to go to school. He had just knocked on the door and Dorso had opened it and taken a step outside, had turned to wave goodbye to his mother when there was a flash of white light and he tripped and stumbled against Frank. The two of them fell onto the deck of a sailing ship.

  The sun was bright in a brilliant blue sky above a stunning blue ocean. In normal circumstances, the ship they fell on would have been beautiful, with its towering masts and gray-white sails. But what the boys fell into was war. Men who were almost unbelievably dirty, covered with clothing in rags and carrying axes and short swords, were screaming and swearing as they ran back and forth, while a short distance away another ship, bigger and much neater-and cleaner-looking, disappeared in a cloud of gray smoke as it fired off a broadside.

  “Duck!” Frank screamed. Dorso turned and fell as a man who barely qualified as human took a swing at his head with a boarding axe.

  “Blast!” he yelled. He raised his axe for another swing just as a cannonball from the other ship took out his center in a splash of something Dorso hoped he would forget.

  “They come! They're boarding us!” someone screamed over the noise, and Dorso took a quick look around and saw that this was not the first salvo the ship had taken. Wreckage was everywhere, hanging from the yards and masts; boards were splintered and there were blood and chunks of flesh all over everything.

  He saw a black flag flying from the stern.

  “It's a pirate ship!” he yelled to Frank. “We're on a pirate ship …”

  Frank was pounded from the rear by a falling slab of wood, so that he slammed into Dorso and drove him back and down beneath a board just as the other ship careened into them. Its men threw lines with boarding hooks that caught the pirate ship. Men came screaming over the side and into the remaining pirates with boarding axes and cutlasses, hacking and slashing and continuing the killing even when the pirates tried to surrender, throwing them into the water, where the blood had drawn sharks that quickly finished off any pirates who still lived.

  It was over in three minutes. The men from the attacking boat stood wiping their blades on the rags of sails.

  “Here's two more!” A man with one eye and a scar down the side of his face found the boys. “They ain't but sprites, sir, and they be dressed all queer. What do we do with them?”

  “Sprites make brutes, Williams,” a man in a blue uniform said. “Cut their throats and throw them over the side. Our orders were to kill them all.”

  “No, wait!” Dorso yelled. Frank was still groggy from being hit by the falling yard, and Dorso pulled him up. “We're not pirates! We're visitors from … no, we're captives. They took us captive and were holding us for ransom.” Somewhere, Dorso thought, he'd read about pirates and ransom. Somewhere. Oh, yeah, Huckleberry Finn. “We're not pirates at all….”

  “A good story.” The man in uniform must have been an officer in the English navy because he spoke very correct English. “Not very likely. Still, we should examine the situation before we go further. Why are you wearing such outlandish clothes? And those shoes. What are they made of?”

  Dorso looked down at his sneakers and then at the bare feet of all the other men. “It's a kind of plastic.…”

  “And wha
t is plastic?”

  “A kind of rubber.” Frank shook his head to clear it. He pushed Dorso's hand away and stood alone. “From the rubber tree.”

  “Rubber.” The officer frowned. “I don't know this substance. What of those packs on your backs? Take them off and let us examine the contents. There's much here that makes no sense.”

  And that's when Dorso saw it, or rather him. On the other ship, but close, looking across at Dorso in complete shock. A young man, perhaps in his late teens or early twenties, was standing there, and he was staring at Dorso almost as if he recognized him, or at least knew that he was drastically out of place—or better yet, out of time. The young man looked down and seemed to jab at something Dorso just caught sight of before there was another blinding white flash and Dorso and Frank were back on the step of his house, waving goodbye to his mother as if only a hundredth of a second had gone by.

  Except that both boys were splattered with spots of blood and wood splinters and had torn their shirts.

  “Dorso?” His mother stared. “What on earth …”

  “Oh,” Dorso said, thinking fast, “it's all right. Frank had a nosebleed. You know, he gets them all the time. We'll clean off with the hose.” He closed the door and dragged Frank around to the hose connection by the garage.

  “Well,” Frank said, sputtering as the water from the hose hit his face. “That was fun….”

  “We'll go in and get clean T-shirts for school and then we'll go to work on this.”

  “What? What is it? What did you see?”

  “I saw a guy back on the English ship. He looked at me.”

  “Oh, great. You mean like Custer and Beethoven looked at you?”

  Dorso shook his head. “No. He knew we were out of place and he looked surprised, really surprised. Then he looked down and jabbed something and we were back here.”

  “What do you mean, he jabbed something?” “It was a keyboard,” Dorso said, smiling. “I saw the corner of it. He must have hit the Escape key or something and ended the scene in some way. He was carrying a laptop.”

  “This is impossible.” Frank stood in front of his locker.

  Dorso nodded. “He's trying to cheat the time paradox.”

  “Not only that.” Frank shook his head. “The rest of it.”

  “What rest of it?”

  “Life. Here we are, on the edge of the greatest discovery of all time …”

  “Or disaster.”

  “Whatever. Here we are, on the edge of the single biggest thing that's ever happened, and life, my dull life, goes on and on. I'm going to flunk a math test this afternoon and I can't tell anybody that it's because I was whumped by a mammoth and kidnapped on a pirate ship.”

  “You're going to flunk math because you didn't study, which is the same reason you always flunk math and have to take the tests over.”

  “That's it exactly! Here I am, with maybe the most perfect excuse of my life, and I can't tell anybody.”

  “Well, we could tell somebody else. We could tell the government. Or Mr. Cather, the science teacher. Or our parents. Which brings up something I didn't think of before.”

  “Right.” Frank nodded. “If we tell somebody else we'll lose our edge. You know. We might be able to use this to find treasure or see—”

  “Naked women.”

  “Aren't you even curious about how Helen of Troy or other famous babes looked without any clothes on? And I started thinking that I might be able to go back and maybe be there….”

  Dorso stared at him, wondering for the thousandth time what made Frank tick. Or whirr. Or buzz. Or whatever it was he did inside that brain. “No. Not that. I was thinking how odd it is that nobody else has seen any of this.”

  “It's just us,” Frank said. “It's aimed at us somehow.”

  “You ran into a mammoth's butt. A whole mammoth. And he picked you up and flipped you onto the library lawn. And nobody, not a soul, saw it? And we had half a navy on my front step and my mother didn't see anything? That's just crazy. I mean, it probably is my laptop, or it seems like that's the way it works. But why my laptop, why us? What did we do? And why can't anybody else see it?”

  “Well, if we go back to my logic flow charts we might find—”

  Dorso shook his head. “Nope. No more of me being the subject.”

  “Then all we've got left is your laptop. What did you do to it?”

  “What do you mean? I haven't done anything to it.”

  “You must have,” Frank said. “Why doesn't it happen to me, on my laptop? Just yours, right? So why?”

  “I've never touched it. Besides, you know you can't mess with them. It takes special tools and equipment…” Dorso trailed off, then reached into his locker and took out the laptop.

  “What? What is it? You thought of something.”

  “Four months ago, or five, I had that problem, remember? It kept doubling the holograms. I'd see two of everything.”

  “So?”

  “So I sent it back to get it fixed. I sent it to the main office and they fixed it. They had it about a week.”

  Frank nodded, remembering. “But it was okay when you got it back, right? It was all repaired.”

  “Yes. But it was gone a week, and that's the only time it's been out of my control. Somebody there must have done something to it.”

  “Maybe that guy you saw on the ship was involved somehow. Maybe …”

  Frank was going to say that maybe the guy was an engineer or something and had learned how to alter the time chips. But before he could speak there was a singular blinding flash, like a thousand camera flashes going off, but all at one point. Now they were standing on a hill overlooking a series of cornfields. Below them a group of soldiers dressed in blue uniforms rode up on horses and pointed first at the top of the hill and then at a long line of men dressed in gray uniforms marching toward them on a dusty road.

  “I've seen this before in history holograms,” Frank said. “This is Gettysburg. Right before the battle. Those are Union troops pointing at us. And those others are Confederates coming to battle. We're in a bad place.” There was a series of puffs of smoke from the men in blue, and half a second later the grass at the boys' feet was snipped by bullets zipping by. “A really bad place.”

  “And we're not alone.” Dorso pointed to a small gnarled oak forty yards away. Behind the tree was the same man who had stood on the deck of the ship. He was blond and thin and Dorso could now see that he was probably in his early twenties. He was smiling a tight, thin, angry smile, and he yelled at them at the same moment that a booming sound came from below and cannons drowned out his voice.

  “What? What did he say?” Dorso turned to Frank. But Frank wasn't there, he was down on his back, his eyes rolled up to show the whites, and there was a streak of blood on the side of his head. Dorso thought, He's been shot! Then there was another blinding flash and he was back by his locker. Frank was on the floor and there was still blood, real blood, on his head, and his eyelids were fluttering and then his eyes rolled back into focus. “What hap— Ow!”

  Dorso sank down in relief. “Frank, Frank,” he said. He was shaking. “You were shot at Gettysburg.” He helped Frank sit up straight. “That guy yelled at us and when I turned you were down. You have blood on your head. Here.” Dorso reached into his locker and took out a box of tissue. “It's a small cut. A bullet grazed you, I guess. But I thought… you were dead.” His face felt clammy.

  “Wait.” Frank held up his hand. “You have tissue in your locker? What kind of guy has tissue in his locker?”

  “The kind who finds dead bodies there.” Dorso sighed. “I'd keep a garden hose if there was a place to attach it.”

  “What happened to you?” They turned to see Olivia Whelms holding her books and looking at Frank's head. Olivia never really listened to what anybody said and always spoke so that at least one word in every sentence was emphasized, but she almost never stressed the right word. “You have blood all over your head.”

&
nbsp; “I was shot,” Frank said. “At Gettysburg. Right in the head. It was a grazing wound.”

  “Which will teach you not to open your locker so fast without moving your head away.”

  She moved off down the hall and Frank watched her go, shrugging. “If a truck hit her she wouldn't know it.”

  “He yelled something,” Dorso said. “The guy was there, by that tree, just before you got hit, and he yelled something at us. I couldn't make it out.”

  “Oh, yeah.” Frank nodded, then winced. “It was something about a combination. Like a snotty question or something. Like ‘So you have the combination,' or ‘How do you have it' or ‘So you think you know the combination' or ‘code' or ‘sequence'…”

  “Combination? Code?”

  “I think so. Then I lost it. I got shot in the head, you know.”

  “Yes, I know.”

  “At Gettysburg.”

  “Yes. I know.”

  “Because of your laptop. So in a way I guess you could say I took a bullet for you.”

  Dorso ignored him. “Combination,” he mused. “What did he mean by that?”

  Frank dabbed at his head and saw that the bleeding had stopped. “I wonder if I should go to the school nurse. No. All those reports and things. How could I explain getting shot in the head at Gettysburg? And if I lied and said I'd hit my head on the locker like Olivia thinks, they'd want to come and inspect the locker…. I'll just let it go. I think he meant code.”

  “What? What did you say?”

  “Code. Maybe there's some kind of combination or entry code that lets you into the time line or something.”

  Dorso stared at him. “That's it! A code. Let's say they did something to my computer when I sent it in to the factory and then put in a code to access the time line thing. You thought of that?”