The Copernicus Legacy: The Forbidden Stone (22 page)

Chapter Forty-Three

“A
time machine.”

Darrell’s voice sounded somewhere between utter disbelief and drooling desire.

“Copernicus discovered an astrolabe that could travel in time?” he said. “That thing in the sketch? I don’t think so. I mean, of course it would be cool, flying around the years, the sinking of the
Titanic
, Lincoln’s assassination, chatting with MLK and Jeff Beck—well, Beck’s still alive—or sitting in the dugout of game three of the 2005 World Series between the Astros and the White Sox, all five hours and forty-one minutes of it—”

“Except it’s incredibly not possible,” Wade said.

“You’re kidding, right?” said Lily. “A time machine is
so
possible. I want one. I’m only amazed it took so long to invent one.”

“No, look,” Wade said. “If you don’t believe me, there’s something called the grandfather paradox. Say you go back in time and kill your grandfather. There would be no
you
in the future to go back in time in the first place. It’s just logical.”

“Maybe,” Becca said. “But what if we only know the kind of logic that works in one direction, past to present to future.”

Where was she going with this?
“Uh . . . okay . . . and . . .”

“People only go forward in time, like boats going the same direction on a river,” she said. “We’ve learned to think in only that one way. But, Wade, what if there is another kind of logic? One that controls moving in two directions, back and forth in time? Maybe only when you actually
do
travel back in time, do you discover how logical
that
is.”

She stared at him as if he had the answer.

“It’s . . . it’s . . .” He didn’t finish.

When he was young, Wade would have loved a time machine. To go back before his parents split up and, somehow, fix things between them. But time travel was a fantasy, unreal, a dream.

“It’s
what
?” asked Becca. “You’re the scientist.”

The museum had begun to fill with more tourists, and he didn’t like the look of some of them. He lowered his voice. “It’s late. If Dad’s been released, it can’t be long before the Order knows we’re in Rome. I say we hightail it to the Castel Sant’Angelo, find somewhere to hide, and wait for him. As for the time machine, we need to reread the diary.”

“Actually, good ideas. Both of them,” said Lily, erasing her computer searches. “Let’s get moving.” They packed up their stuff and headed through the rooms toward the entrance.

“Hello!” the white-haired man said, standing at his desk near the door. “I never hope you will leave us again very soon!”

“Lo stesso con noi,”
said Becca with a smile. “Us, too.”

They wound their way quickly down the hill from the museum, out of the park, and onto Via Trionfale, which ran straight for a long while, then doglegged to Via Leone IV, toward the Tiber River and the Castel.

At the intersection of the two streets, they stopped at a café. Earlier, they had passed a McDonald’s and several outdoor sandwich stands, but Becca convinced them to eat a true Italian breakfast of fruit, coffee, juice, and stuffed pastries. It was their first real meal since the picnic basket in the car the day before.

“I feel pretty good that our luck is turning,” Lily said, munching the remains of a pear as they started down Via Leone. “We found out so much there. Don’t ask me to explain it all or how it’s possible.”

“Only Wade could do that,” said Darrell, laughing. “Right, bro?”

Becca glanced at him.

“I’ll leave that for Dad,” he said.

Besides, Lily had put her finger on it. Something
was
changing for them, and it was much more than their luck. They had discovered things. If he was too logical to accept that a time-traveling astrolabe was strictly possible—he was too rational for that, wasn’t he?—he
loved
the idea of a quest for relics, and they were getting closer.

The clues, codes, dagger, diary, all of it was exciting, smart, and even—discounting that killers were after them—fun, and what made the quest that way was simple: being with these three people.

By noon the crowded sidewalks on Via Stefano were hot, the traffic snarling, fast, and busy. When a blue motorbike whizzed between jammed cars, bounced up onto the sidewalk past them, and raced back into the street, Lily screamed, “We’re going to get killed by accident!”

“The next street is just as good,” Becca said. She led them down to Via Plauto into a series of smaller streets and alleys nearer the river.

A few minutes later, Wade spotted the same blue motorbike idling two blocks behind them. Its helmeted driver was on his cell phone.

“Guys, that Vespa . . .” His hand went instinctively to his side, the dagger under his shirt.

“The Order?” said Lily.

“Could be,” Darrell said. “I say we don’t take chances. I say we run.”

They took off to the next corner and zigzagged down the next two side streets as they had done in Berlin. Lily jerked suddenly through a door on her left, a clothes shop, where they slammed into customers until they found a way out on the next street over. They crossed a busy intersection against the light, then hurried down a narrow cut-through into a small, deserted piazza.

The motorbike roared in seconds later.

With a quickness that surprised even himself, Wade unsheathed the dagger, went into a crouch, and growled, “Leave us alone—”

“Put that back!” Becca shouted. She tugged him toward an open door. It was a grocery. They stumbled through to the next street over, when Lily’s phone started ringing.

“What? Becca, it’s the lady driver. What’s a
tuber
?”

“Tiber? The river. This way—”

They entered the park surrounding the Castel. The banks of the river were visible ahead. The motorbike bounced over the sidewalk toward them. Wade turned, the dagger still in his hand. It was a reflex now. Crouch and show your weapon. Even if he didn’t know what he was going to do with it. The bike roared at them, the driver’s hand went inside his jacket—

There came a sudden shriek of tires, and the motorbike flew up in the air and flattened into a low wall. The biker was hurtled over the wall, where he landed with an awful sound on pavement.

The vintage Maserati spun completely around the kids. A voice cried out.

“Kids, get in!”

Chapter Forty-Four

J
amming themselves into the Maserati, the kids screamed, “
Daaaaaad!
” and “
Roaaaald!”
and fell all over him.

“I’m fine, I’m fine,” he said, hugging them as much as possible while the driver settled into a swift spin along the ancient river. “Is everyone all right?”

“Yes!” Lily said breathlessly. “Tell us how you escaped!”

“Hardly an escape,” he said. “The police arrested me at the train station. I was in a cell for a day on a charge of something ridiculous, breaking into a cemetery. Luckily, your friend Carlo contacted a lawyer, suddenly there was bail, and I was out. We drove down here overnight.” He glanced at the driver. “That’s an adventure I’ll tell you about sometime.”

Darrell tried to catch his breath. “We have an adventure for you, too, Dad. Wait’ll you hear.”

“You can tell me on the plane. We’re flying home before anything else happens.”

Wade shared a look with the others. “Dad, we can’t really go home, I mean, not yet. We discovered, we
think
we discovered, some amazing stuff. Incredible stuff. Unbelievable—”

“Uncle Roald, Copernicus had a
machina tempore
!” Lily blurted out. “Which is the Latin way of saying ‘time machine.’ We even have a picture of it. In his ancient diary. Which we also have!”

Dr. Kaplan’s jaw dropped. “Copernicus wrote a diary? There’s no record of that.”

“It was in Carlo’s fencing school in Bologna,” said Darrell. “Copernicus discovered an ancient time machine, an astrolabe so big you can sit in it. The details are real sketchy, but Becca can show you.”

Wade nodded. “Yeah, plus the Knights of the Teutonic Order, the ancient organization of evil villains—”

“—are still around,” Darrell went on, “and working with the evil Berlin police. They’ve always wanted the time machine—”

“And still do,” said Becca. “But Copernicus—”

“Took the astrolabe apart,” Darrell interrupted, “that’s the time machine. And he gave twelve pieces of it to people called Guardians to hide wherever they wanted. That was sometime after 1514. A whole army of other Guardians have been hiding the pieces ever since. That’s who Uncle Henry was. But even after five hundred years the Order still wants the pieces. They’re the creeps after us.”

“The motorbike guy was one of them,” Lily said.

“And the lady with the hair,” Darrell said breathlessly.

He knew the others wanted to tell it, but he couldn’t seem to stop talking until he got it all out. He finally couldn’t think of anything else to say, so he glanced around and said, “You guys take it from here.”

“Thanks a lot,” Wade grumbled. “It’s just that the twelve relics in Uncle Henry’s message are the pieces that supposedly made Copernicus’s astrolabe work.”

“And we think we’ve discovered what the first one is and where it’s hidden,” Lily added. “The island of Guam. It was taken there by Magellan on his voyage around the world!”

The car fell quiet as Roald took the diary, which Becca had opened to the page with the sketch of the
machina tempore.
“So . . . Uncle Henry died trying to keep the relics away from those men.”

“He was a Guardian,” Becca said.

Roald studied the picture—his brow furrowing, his head shaking, all the while murmuring to himself, “Heinrich . . .”—and Wade realized that whatever doubts he’d had about the diary were vanishing.

If his dad believed it, he did too.

“Copernicus somehow figured out the theory of the wormhole,” Wade said after a few minutes. “Something like Kip Thorne’s equations is in the diary, too.”

His father nodded slowly. “I see it.”

“Wade thought it was impossible,” Lily said, “but there it is in black and white. Well, sort of brown and white.”

Becca and Lily alternately filled him in on the attack in Bologna and their discovery of the Copernicus museum.

“Carlo from the fencing school called me as we were driving down here,” Roald said. “He said Uncle Henry deliberately contacted me for help. The Order has never been this close. The relics have never been in such danger as now. He said the Guardians have begun—”

“The Frombork Protocol,” Becca said. “Carlo told us.”

“And you’re saying you know what the first relic is?”

“Vela,” Lily said. “We’re not sure exactly
what
it is, except that Copernicus gave it to Magellan. We put about a thousand clues together to narrow it down, and we’re pretty certain it’s hidden in Guam.”

“Dad,” said Wade. “I know you said we’re going home, and I get that, but . . .”

“We’re not going home,” Roald said. “Not yet. Take me through this, every step of the way. I have to understand it.”

Darrell tapped the driver on the shoulder.

“Sì?”

“Museo Astronomico e Copericano,
per favore
.”

She laughed.
“Sì!”

Chapter Forty-Five

F
or the next two hours, the kids detailed what they had found out that morning, what piece of information led to what fact that then led to which guess. Roald consulted his student notebook constantly, arguing at first with the notion of a time machine, but not as strongly as Wade would have imagined. He couldn’t explain the modern formula’s appearance in a sixteenth-century diary, but set that aside as a question to be solved later. He rightly said that it didn’t affect the fact that the Order was after the relics.

Beyond his own notes, Roald studied Wade’s additions carefully while the language-challenged museum docent opened the display cases for “Dottore Kaplani” (but really Becca) to consult the documents inside.

The evidence invariably produced the same result.

When Lily related that Magellan had called the Guam islands
las Velas Latinas
, Roald just stared into space for minutes, shushing them when they tried to tell him more. At last, he wandered away from the kids and dialed his phone.

Wade and Darrell tried both to listen and not listen, then heard, “Sara, I know you won’t get this until the weekend, but we’ll be traveling for a few more days . . .”

It was all they needed to hear.

Fifty-seven minutes later, their wispy-haired driver laughingly announced,
“Siamo qui!”
and slowed in front of a busy airline terminal. She revved the Maserati louder and louder until the kids and Dr. Kaplan got out. Then she fishtailed away exactly as she’d done so many times before.

“She’s a wee bit strange,” Lily said.

“She is,” Roald said with a smile. “But Carlo told me she’s part of the reason the Order isn’t on our tails this exact moment.”

Inside the terminal the mayhem was a hundred times worse than the Berlin train station—oceans of passengers, families, security, airline personnel moving in every direction, while shrill announcements in Italian, French, and English overlapped in a storm of noise.

“Be careful with everything you do,” Roald said, huddling them together. “We lay low, we do not separate. Two of us stand outside the bathroom while the others are in there. The Order will be on our tail before we know it. The Guam Air counter is over there. Come on.”

As it turned out, there was only one flight from Rome to Guam. Dr. Kaplan negotiated with the airline representative, using a credit card drawn on a Bologna bank, which Wade guessed Carlo had given him.

“It’s a twenty-five-hour flight,” Roald said, handing boarding passes to each of them. “Two stops. We’ll be in Guam the day after tomorrow.”

“Maybe the Order doesn’t even go there,” said Darrell.

“We can’t count on that,” Wade said. “We should act as if they’re right behind us.”

“I’ll bet the Order goes everywhere,” Lily said as they hurried into security. “Your home in Austin, remember?”

Wade remembered. He couldn’t forget.

After finding their gate, Roald paused. “I should tell you that something happened while you were on the run. A school bus vanished in the mountains of Spain.”

“Really?” said Darrell. “Do you know how many times I wished my school bus would disappear?”

“It was filled with children,” said Dr. Kaplan.

Darrell blushed. “Sorry.”

“If Uncle Henry predicted it, it means the Teutonic Order is behind it,” Wade said.

“Of course they are,” Becca added. “They know we’re getting close.”

“Boarding Flight Thirty-Seven to Dubai, continuing to Narita and Guam.”

“Time to fly,” Lily said, hooking her arm through Becca’s and heading to the Jetway.

As Roald nudged the boys after them, Darrell turned. “How do we know that the Order won’t make our plane disappear?”

Wade felt suddenly queasy. “I guess we don’t.”