Michael Mayer - Time Trippers The Nights of the Round Table

- Dr. Will Durant

To the reader:Your enjoyment of your trip through time in this book will be enhanced if you buy or download original music of the 1920’s. It’s inexpensive and easily available online at such places as iTunes or Amazon, for example.

I had ‘The Kids’ to look after for a week while their mother and their grandmother (my wife) were on vacation in Florida. Jonathan and Lauren are the apples of my eye. I was their ‘Lito’ short for Abuelito, meaning grandfather in Spanish. Since they already had two other grandfathers and grandmothers it could get confusing. This was my wife’s suggestion since she’s from Latin America. She was Lita, short for Abuelita.

Jonathan was 11. Slender yet athletic, he was a voracious reader of fantasy novels and very imaginative. An avid video gamer, he hated homework and had a real aptitude for mischief. Lauren was 9 and slim, with large, soulful eyes. Quiet and straightforward, she loved dogs, exuded an air of innocence yet had a real sense of fun.

Anyway, that morning I got dressed and told them that we were going to go to a baseball game, and we’d be away for a couple of days. “A baseball game, Lito?” Jonathan asked.

“Yep!” I said.

“You look funny, Lito,” Jonathan said.

“Well, we have to dress up a bit for this trip,” I said with a smile and held up some outfits for them to wear.

“These clothes look kinda weird,” said Jonathan.

Lauren smiled, happy to play dress up.

I was wearing a snappy grey suit with a vest, tie and matching old-fashioned hat: a Fedora, like Indiana Jones’s hat, which is what the gangsters and reporters liked to wear. It went well with my rather distinguished 50-something graying hair, pencil-thin mustache and chiseled features. Jonathan struggled into his ‘Knickerbockers’ or ‘plus-four’ short pants that were tight below the knees and long argyle socks with a matching suit and tie, not at all happy about it. Lauren was cute in her rather pretty dress, with a white collar and shiny girl’s shoes.

“You look just great!” I said, “The bee’s knees!” They both looked at me funny.

Jonathan was puzzled, “What, Lito?”

Lauren laughed and repeated, “The bee’s knees!” She started to giggle.

“The bee’s knees, the ant’s ankles, the cat’s pajamas! Where we’re going, you have to understand the lingo, you see?” They didn’t but there wasn’t much time to explain.

“Everything’s going to be Jake,” I told them. “You are about to have the greatest adventure anybody has ever had, and probably the most fun.”

“Just a baseball game?” Jonathan said.

“Not just a baseball game,” I said with a big smile. “A Yankees game and we’ll see probably the most famous baseball player of all time!”

“Where are we going?” Lauren said.

“Well, first we fly to Philadelphia, then, well, it’s a surprise!” I said with an air of mystery. “It’s magic!”

I had bought some old-fashioned suitcases for each of us and some ID papers we would need. We changed into regular clothes for the flight and packed our ‘costumes’ and more older-style clothing and left for the airport.

The TSA people inspected us carefully, examining the old clothes in our bags.

“Going to some kind of costume party?” one of the agents asked.

“Something like that,” I said smiling.

We arrived midday and took a taxi to the Marriot by Reading Terminal, the old station and giant arched train shed converted into a convention center where I had booked a room for the night. After settling in our room, we took a walk to Independence Hall. The kids were already impressed with Philly’s heavy industry and old buildings, especially the area and park around Independence Hall.

We caught one of the last tours; saw the Liberty Bell, the kids in quiet awe as I explained a few things about the bell.

“Smaller than you thought, hey?”

They both nodded. The National Park ranger took us on the tour of the Hall with a small group, how it was the Pennsylvania State House at the time of the Revolution, and how much it looked like it did then, even though very little of the furniture was original. Still, it was very impressive with papers scattered about and feather pens poised in their pots, as if Continental Congress had just left for the evening, ready to return the next day.

I told them that everything we see here, the surroundings and the park outside existed more or less like it did now, the same as it did in 1776, even earlier, and except for minor details, we could be standing here IN 1776. Their eyes widened.

“The only thing that tells you it isn’t 1776 or 1812 or 1863 or 1927 is that we know it isn’t and we have thousands of things that link us to the present, our memories of daily life, my cell phone, your I-Pods, everything.”

Jonathan’s eyes narrowed and Lauren smiled with excitement. “Are you saying we could be time traveling, Lito?” Jonathan said with a smile. With a steady diet of Sci-Fi and Fantasy novels, he was quick on the draw, I’ll say that.

“Yep, that’s EXACTLY what I’m saying.”

Lauren was thrilled but said in her always quiet, matter of fact way: “How do we do it, Lito?”

“It’s kinda hard to explain, but you learned in school about Albert Einstein, right?”

They nodded.

“According to him, time is relative, the faster you go, the slower time gets for you the traveler, and so on?” They looked at me strangely. “According to the theory, if we could travel faster than the speed of light we could actually reach the past, which is impossible, right?”

They looked somewhat puzzled.

“In short, it would take a bit of magic to make that happen, and, well, I happen to have stumbled on it,” I said with a grin.

They looked both impressed and puzzled.

Jonathan flashed one of his amazing grins, “You don’t do magic, Lito.”

“Right, I don’t, but I collect an amazing amount of stuff on Ebay, right?”

They nodded.

I opened the small box I had brought and produced the white-tipped collapsible wand. “This wand is supposed to have belonged to Harry Houdini, the most famous magician of all time. I found a secret compartment with papers in a language that it turned out was Yiddish in Japanese Katakana letters spelled backwards – a kind of secret code.”

They stared with wide eyes.

“What’s that, Yid—dish?” Lauren asked.

“It’s really a very old-style German that Jewish people spoke widely in Europe. Houdini’s real name was Erich Weiss. He was an amazing fellow, exceptionally smart, an expert on locks. His stage shows were fabulous. He once made an elephant disappear on stage! He could escape from anything: jails, straightjackets, even locked boxes dropped to the bottom of rivers, an almost supernatural ability.

“Houdini had been working on his latest trick, trying to actually dematerialize – really disappear, for even more amazing escapes. He had discovered the secret of time travel by accident, or so his secret paper says,” I told them. “He had hidden the box, and died on tour in Detroit on Halloween, 1926 before he could tell anyone what he had discovered. Somebody found it years later, apparently with no idea of its significance and eventually sold it, auctioning it off on Ebay along with other Houdini items. I bought it against a very persistent bidder – amazing how close I came to not winning it.”