Confederates

I.

In September 1864, in the midst of the Charlottetown Conference, John A. MacDonald poked his square, wide-nosed head around a corridor and wandered into a room, advising a group of yet unseen associates that “the coast” was “clear”.

MacDonald was abruptly followed by Thomas D’Arcy McGee, who was smoking a kind of cigarette which would have been unknown to anyone at that time. MacDonald turned around and glared at him icily.

“Get rid of that thing,” he said, with no trace of the Scottish burr MacDonald supposedly had. “Are you trying to screw things up?”

“Sorry”, said McGee, with no trace of the Irish lilt he supposedly possessed, as he put out the cigarette and placed the butt in his trouser pocket. Then he turned to another man entering the room.

“Hey, LaFleur,” McGee said. “These guys weren’t civilized enough to think of ashtrays in this-“.

“My name is not LaFleur!” was the dramatic response. “It is Cartier! Sir Georges Etienne Cartier!”

This man, if he was indeed Sir Georges Etienne Cartier, had at least remembered to speak with the proper Quebecois accent while doing his job.

“So do I call you George,” said McGee, “or….”

“You could have made more of an effort to learn your part.”

“My part? Oh, we’re acting now, huh?”

“Yeah, we are,” said MacDonald. “Once we mix in the crowd, anyhow. I put on the brogue, you put on the Irish routine, he goes Frenchy, and it works out. Let’s just wait until Alexander gets here before we do anything rash.”

“Alexander?”

“Sir Alexander Tilloch Galt, you idiot! Don’t you remember?”

“Somebody mention my name?” said a tall man with white-colored mutton-chop sideburns as he entered the room.

“What held you up?” MacDonald demanded.

“The whiskers,” Galt said as he scratched them. “Damn, these things itch! How the hell did the guys who had ‘em back then manage it?”

“Well, don’t overdo it with the scratching,” warned MacDonald. “Somebody will get suspicious.”

“They’ll get suspicious anyway, if we don’t do like we planned.” He moved over to McGee. “Straighten yourself up!” he demanded. “Thomas D’Arcy McGee wouldn’t have let himself look that bad in public.”

“How the hell would you know what he looked like? Did they have photographs back then?”

“Yes, they did.”

“Geez, I didn’t realize…”

Galt sighed and turned to MacDonald.

“Have we got the spiel set up like we wanted? That, in the eventual uniting of the provinces into the nation of Canada, we will assume control of the government until such time comes as a national Parliament is established?”

“Sure thing,” MacDonald said.

“Easy for you to say,” said McGee. “We all gotta walk around in our great-grandfather’s clothing and speak with ridiculous speaking voices ‘cause none of us came from Canada originally. How the hell is this gonna benefit all of us in the end?”

“It will benefit us in the end, mon ami”, Cartier said. “Have patience.”

He let the implications of what he said linger with a pregnant pause.

II.

LaFleur, McGuinness, Lawson and Woods had all come to Charlottetown from other parts of Canada, fleeing from the potential legal after-effects of various criminal enterprises, but found kindred spirits in the small capital city of Prince Edward Island. They pedaled meth and fentanyl, as well as occasionally mainlining dope out in to the rural areas. But mostly, they just ran the numbers, on the horses and on both local and out-of-province sporting events. Woods fronted the operation, being that he was a genuine lawyer, albeit one of the deceitful kind, and they worked out of his office. He and the others seemed to have a knack for steering potential customers to high odds situations that always managed to pay off.

Eventually, Charlottetown being such a small place, people got suspicious as to what they were doing, most notably the RCMP. Fortuitously, they remembered that one of their biggest debtors, a Professor Bloch, was a scientist of some nature. Would he be able to resolve their issues- on his own, or if they leaned on him a bit?

They piled into their car and headed to Bloch’s estate, located in the flat wilderness just west of the city. Bloch was cordial in greeting them, but he was, predictably, less impressed when he learned the object of their visit. He remained stoic and unmoved when they drew their guns on him.

“We ain’t foolin’ here,” said LaFleur.

“I don’t have anything to give you,” said Bloch.

“Don’t lie to us,” said McGuinness. “This place…”

“…takes most of my income to maintain it.”

“What about that place you teach at?” McGuinness continued. “You could ask them for some sort of advance on…”

“I am no longer affiliated with the University of Prince Edward Island. We came to a parting of the ways on scientific issues about a year ago, sadly.”

“Look here, Bloch,” said Lawson. “You gave us the impression that you were wealthy.”

“And you gave me the impression that you were legitimate businessmen,” countered Bloch. “Not criminals.”

“Watch who you call that,” said Woods. “We’re criminals with guns. And you said you had money for us to…invest.”

“I did when we first met. And my university position. But I lost both of them. And that is attributable to only one thing. The private research project I have labored on for a number of years. I lost my money to the cost of continual development and refinement of my ideas in practical research, and my position at the university to the fact that my employers considered it to be an indescribable waste of money and time, in spite of my protestations that it was not so. Your failed attempts to turn the “investment” I presented to you into capital gain ruined what was left of my savings, and I now have nothing left in the bank.”

“You’re gonna have nothing, period,” said McGuinness, as he aimed his gun at Bloch’s head.

“Hang on, now,” said Lawson. “I’m interesting in hearing more about this thing that the Professor’s been working on. If a smart man like him is willing to lose his money and his job over it, there may be something to it.”

“If you want to see it,” Bloch said, “I’ll gladly oblige.”

“Okay,” McGuiness said. “But nothing funny, Bloch.”

“There’s nothing funny about it, sir,” retorted the Professor.

They adjourned to the old barn accompanying the house, which Bloch was using for his private laboratory. In the center of the room was a large piece of metal, in the shape of a rectangle, with electric cables and wiring covering the exterior.

“Huh!” said an unimpressed LaFleur. “What’s this supposed to be? Some sort of spaceship?”

“You insult me, sir,” retorted the Professor.

“We’ll kill you if you don’t behave yourself,” retorted McGuinness. To Lawson, he said: “This goddamn thing ain’t no use to us. Couldn’t get anyone to pay a dollar for it.”

Lawson ignored him, instead addressing the Professor.

“Exactly what were you trying to achieve with this device, Bloch?” he asked.

“This is a time machine.”

“Damn!” McGuinness slapped himself on his forehead. “What the hell did we let this guy get us into?”

Again, Lawson ignored him.

“So, in other words, a machine that allows people to go backwards or forwards in time.”

“Yes,” said Bloch. “But you can only travel backwards in time. The future is a nonexistent quality in terms of time, and cannot easily be measured. But it’s probably not accurate for me to say that you would travel through time. It’s more accurate to say that you would be experiencing a form of transit. Time does not possess any material or spatial characteristics, as it is bound to our three dimensional universe by the observable phenomenon of duration.”

“I’ll duration you in a minute,” snapped Woods impatiently. To Lawson, he said: “Let’s get out of here before we waste any more time.”

But that pithy phrase only served to give Lawson an idea.

“Listen, Bloch,” he said. “Have you tested this thing out? Does it actually work?”

“I have never tested it. But I am positive that it will work effectively if put into use.”

“Why no testing before now?”

“You cannot trust the past to be remain stable if someone or something alters it. If I were to do so, there could be drastic changes. Things which are now here would become absent, and things which disappeared then would return now. This would alter the past, and make it different from the past which we are all familiar with now.”

“So you’re worried about doing just that if you performed an experiment with the machine?”

“Yes.”

“Then what is the point of working on this?”

“Trying to prove a point. To the point of becoming a complete, monomaniacal obsession.”

“I’ve had it with this damn fancy talk,” McGuinness spluttered. “Let’s just get rid of him and be done with it.”

“There’s no sense in killing him,” Lawson remonstrated.

“Why not? He screwed us.”

“But will killing him help? It’ll just make the Mounties more suspicious of us.”

“But we can’t go back to town,” McGuinness reminded him. “What can we do?”

“We’ll stay here,” Lawson pronounced. “Have Professor Bloch work off his debt by offering us his hospitality. And, then, in a pinch”- he gestured to the machine- “we can escape into time.”

“Man, you can’t be serious,” said LaFleur.

“It can be done,” Lawson assured him. “We just have to find the right place- and the right time.”

III.

Lawson and Bloch spent the next several days in consultation, figuring out the plan of attack.

“Where are the controls?” Lawson asked, examining the machine. “Is there some sort of mechanism for steering it, or….”

“No. You see how the buttons are lain out over here? They control speed, velocity and direction at once, since they will occur at the same time.”

“Are there any limits to how far back we could go?”

“Theoretically, there are no limits. But it must be done in such a way that the desired commands are given to the machine in a way that it can conceive possible. We never occupy the same space of time at any one instant, remember. We are constantly moving through time.”

“But is it possible to establish a precise point in time for a destination?”

“Yes, you can.”

“Good. All we need to figure out is exactly what time.”

“Exactly what we were thinking.” McGuinness, LaFleur and Woods, having tired of waiting, ended the room.

“So what did you have in mind?” Lawson said.

“We thought sometime when people were making a lot of money real fast,” said McGuinness. “We make some of that and come back. Say, like the Klondike Gold Rush….”

“The machine would be of no use to you for that,” said Bloch.

“But that happened in 1898,” said Woods. “Wouldn’t we be able to…?”

“You could travel to 1898, yes,” retorted Bloch. “But you would not be in the Klondike. You would be on Prince Edward Island, just as sure as you are now.”

“So, no matter how far we go back in the past, we’ll still be stuck on P.E.I., huh?” said McGuinness.

“Exactly,” said Woods.

“Well, what happened here?” asked LaFleur. “Anything.”

Lawson, who was well versed in Canadian history, among other things, explained to the others about the Charlottetown Conference, and its significant role in the formation of Canada as it now existed. And it was then that the men thought of how it could be used to their advantage. After all, Lawson prided himself on how closely he resembled Sir Alexander Tilloch Galt, even without the sideburns. Woods had enough of a tall and long-nosed appearance to pass for Sir John A. MacDonald. LaFleur had a natural vocal and physical resemblance to Sir George Etienne Cartier. And the ruggedly handsome McGuinness had a slight resemblance to Thomas D’Arcy McGee.

Yeah, they could pull it off. Take those guys’ places and slip unnoticed into Canadian history, to silent profit from all that they and no one else knew would occur in the future.

Even the Professor, taken as a hostage for safe-keeping, couldn’t dissuade them.

IV.

So the plans were made, gone over, and scanned and rescanned until everyone was certain they would be in the right place. Finally, it happened. They were in Charlottetown, September 1, 1864, just as the Charlottetown Conference was set to begin.

It took some effort to track down their dopplegangers, but it was done, and they were restrained and prevented from interfering, for the time being. Lawson instructed McGuinness and LaFleur to stand guard over the captives in case anything happened.

“Bloch said there might be some stuff that’ll be different from things are now,” he warned them. “We don’t want to add to that burden, even if just by accident.”

When they vanished, Lawson turned to Woods.

“We’d best make our appearance at the next round of meetings,” he said.

“Och aye,” answered Woods, finally remembering to apply MacDonald’s Scots accent. “ ‘Tis a good thing we- what the….?”

A bomb crashed through the window. Lawson and Woods took cover as it exploded.

Dozens of men wearing green uniforms crashed through what remained of the window and surrounded them, with others going in and rousing the other occupants of the building. The men had vibrantly colored red and black hair, and spoke with an accent that was unquestionably Irish.

“Oh, my God,” declared Lawson. “Bloch was right. By going into the past, we changed it.”

“Who are they?” asked Woods.

“The Fenians. The rebel army that fought the British Empire tooth and nail for control of Ireland during the 1840s and the 1860s. It was partly because of their raids on British territories in North America from the American border that Canada came into being.”

“But why are we being arrested?”

“Because we’re Britons. Their enemies. This is an alternate universe we stumbled into. Somehow, the Fenians have gotten greater military strength than they had in our timeline, enough to actually provide a sustained military challenge to the British Empire- and prevent Canada from coming into existence.”

“Enough with ye palaver, ye enemies of our nation!” a Fenian ordered as he drew a cutlass out of a scabbard and pointed it at them. “Today, all ye who are not sons of Erin on this land shall die!”

Truer words were never spoken.