“What happens in 2092?” I asked.
Katherine’s mouth tightened into a firm line. “The corridor ceased to be a stable point.”
“Don’t even bother to push on that,” Connor interrupted. “She’ll go all ‘need-to-know’ on you.”
“To get back to the medallion,” Katherine said, “it allows the user to scope out the territory, make minor temporal adjustments if needed, and determine the best time to make the jump.”
“So how did you wind up here—now? Did you just decide to stay in the past? Or was there an accident of some sort?”
“It certainly wasn’t an accident,” Katherine answered. “It was made to look that way, however. Your grandfather—Saul, your biological grandfather—sabotaged CHRONOS and stranded the teams at their various locations. I was scheduled for a jump to Boston 1853, but… let’s just say I was forced to make a last-minute adjustment. Saul had…”
Katherine paused, phrasing her words carefully. “Saul had fallen in with some bad elements in our society, and I’m quite sure he planned to follow me. He was always a black-and-white sort of person. Either you were friend or you were foe, with no gray area in between. He considered me a traitor, and he would have killed me and—although he wouldn’t have realized it—your mother and Prudence along with me, if I had not ducked into 1969 at the very last minute.”
Over the next hour, I learned how Katherine had started a new life in the 1970s. She emerged in an abandoned barn about a mile outside Woodstock, New York, in mid-August of 1969, taking the place of a music historian friend who had hoped to see Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix at the festival. Dressed in the height of fashion for the 1853 destination for which she’d been scheduled, Katherine was somewhat overdressed for a rock concert. Hoping to get at least some usable data for the friend whose slot she had taken, she removed the pins from her hair, stashed the elaborate gown, gloves, and button-up shoes in her carpetbag, and headed for the concert in just her silk chemise, pantalettes, and a black lace choker. She was still a bit more fully covered than many of the young women at the concert, but after a few hours in the mud and heat, she said, she managed to blend into the crowd.
“I returned to the stable point—the barn—several times over the next few weeks and tried to contact headquarters. But I could see nothing—just a black void with occasional bursts of static. I tried to correspond using one of the diaries that I had packed, but it vanished. It was as though everything from my time no longer existed.”
“So why didn’t you go back to the day before you left?”
Connor nodded. “I asked that, too.”
“You’ve both seen too many movies, I’m afraid. I couldn’t just zip from one location to any other point in time. The CHRONOS key allowed me to emerge at one preprogrammed stable point and then return to CHRONOS headquarters when my work was done. No side trips allowed.
“Fortunately,” she continued, “CHRONOS historians followed the Boy Scout motto: ‘Be Prepared.’ If we could not contact headquarters, we were to find a way to blend in and lie low for a year or two. And, after that point, if we still had no contact with home, we were to give up and try to create normal lives in our new time and place.”
Using a safe-deposit key stitched into her undergarments, Katherine had retrieved the contents of a box initially set up in 1823 with the Bank of New York. She selected the best option from the array of identities inside, invented a husband who had died in the war in Vietnam, and over the next few months secured a university research position.
She had tried to find information about a few of the other historians whose destinations had been the relatively recent past, including Richard, the friend who swapped places with her and landed in 1853. “I would love to know how he managed to blend in after arriving in the bell-bottom jeans and rather loud shirt he was wearing at the time. He would have been perfectly dressed for Woodstock—but I’m sure that he looked rather ridiculous for 1853. Richard was always clever, however. I eventually learned that he edited a newspaper in Ohio for the next forty years, married, had children and grandchildren. That wasn’t protocol—we were told to avoid having children at all costs—but I would imagine that was a bit hard if you were stranded in the 1850s and wanted a normal life.”
She sighed. “He died in 1913. It was strange to read that he had grown old and died so long ago when I’d seen him just a few weeks before. He was a good friend, although I think he’d have liked to be more than that. If I hadn’t been so fixated on Saul…