Time Travelers Never Die - Jack McDevitt [104]
“By us?” asked Franklin. “How do you mean?”
“The club,” Dave said. “There were no women present.”
CHAPTER 30
I have often thought that if there had been a good rap group around in those days, I might have chosen a career in music instead of politics.
—RICHARD NIXON, AUDIO, THE NIXON PRESIDENTIAL LIBRARY
THE lack of women participants at the Junto led Dave and Shel to Sojourner Truth. They were among the very few males present when she delivered her “Ain’t I a Woman?” speech in 1851 at the Ohio Women’s Rights Convention in Akron.
They spent an evening with Alexander von Humboldt in eighteenth-century Berlin discussing celestial mechanics and politics.
They hung out in a Milan bar several evenings with Ernest Heming way, while he was recovering from wounds incurred driving an ambulance during World War I.
A few nights later they were in eastern France, at the Chateau de Cirey, talking with Voltaire and his lover, the Marquise du Châtelet. Actually, Dave did most of the talking, because Shel’s French was nonexistent. But they hit it off. Voltaire, whose name was actually François-Marie Arouet, was simultaneously the funniest and the most passionate man Shel had ever encountered. And this despite the fact that everything had to be translated.
The evening went well, and they were invited back. Shel worked on his French, and the next time they went, he was better able to participate.
Voltaire loved parties. They met Ibrahim Muteferrika at one and Alexander Pope at another. Jonathan Swift was to have traveled with Pope, but he failed to arrive. “I think,” Pope said, “he has no taste for traveling long distances.”
On October 1, 1932, they were in the stands at Wrigley Field when Babe Ruth called his shot against Charlie Root. (And yes, there was no question in Shel’s mind what Ruth intended when, on a 2-2 count, he stepped out of the box and pointed his bat toward the right center field bleachers.)
At Fort Bridger, in 1868 Wyoming, Dave bought a round of drinks for Calamity Jane. In France after the Great War, they arranged to meet the Unsinkable Molly Brown while posing as reconstruction volunteers. (And, in fact, she successfully coerced them into doing some work.) Years later, her time, they partied with her on the Hannibal, Missouri, social circuit.
But the big catch was to be George Washington. Claiming to be journalists, they attended the award ceremony for Mary Hays McCauly. Mary, the general explained, had accompanied her husband to the battle fie ld, and “on a blazing hot day, paid no mind to incoming artillery shells, and carried pitchers of water to thirsty soldiers. When her husband was wounded, she took his place at the gun.” He presented her with her warrant. “Henceforth, Mrs. McCauly will be known as Sergeant Molly.”
In fact, of course, history knows her as Molly Pitcher.
After the ceremony, in their anxiety to talk with Molly, they let Washington slip away.
THE converters were hopelessly addictive. Shel and Dave were out constantly, visiting Caesar’s Rome, wandering through Florence at the height of the Enlightenment, offering advice to Van Dyck and El Greco. On August 3, 1492, they stood at the mouth of the harbor in Palos, Spain, watching Columbus’s three ships depart westward, ostensibly for India.
They visited Henry Thoreau, jailed in Concord for refusing to pay taxes during the Mexican War; and Harlan Ellison, jailed in southeastern Louisiana for participating in civil rights protests.
They spent an afternoon in Dayton, Tennessee, at the Scopes Monkey Trial, and rode on Mark Twain’s riverboat. They were on a crowded rooftop in the Battery at Charleston, with several dozen others, when, at 4:30 A.M., April 12, 1861, the Confederates opened fire on Fort Sumter.
It was during this period that they moved the base of the operation from the town house to Dave’s modest home on Carmichael Drive. By then there were too many costumes to manage equitably, and Dave had the ideal walk-in closet.
They made a second try for