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AUTHOR’S NOTE:  This is the first chapter of the upcoming second installment of the TIME VANDAL series.  It contains one small spoiler from the first book.  So if you have not yet read First Epiphany of the Time Vandal, you might want to avoid this post.  But it is only a small spoiler, so if you feel so inclined, please continue.

Elijah crouched behind the hedge at the edge of the field.  He kept low to avoid being seen by the many soldiers milling around on the valley floor barely two hundred yards away.  The group closest to him numbered around ten, and seemed to be preoccupied with moving a pile of cannonballs onto the back of a horse-drawn cart.

He had his mini binoculars unfolded and was looking down on them.  He assumed they were General Kutuzov’s men.

“I very much doubt Kutuzov is even in command anymore.” came the voice of Elijah’s A.I. Fuzzy over the earbud in his right ear.  The computer and the T714 craft which housed it were currently hovering some 5 miles above what Elijah knew as the Czech town of Slavkov u Brna, but which the world’s historians knew as Austerlitz.  “The Russian emperor would have long since arrived.”

Elijah nodded, smiling grimly.  “Messing everything up.”

“Is it  your contention,” asked Fuzzy, “that had the command been left to General Kutuzov then Napoleon would have lost this battle?”

It was weird speaking in past tense about an event that was about to unfold in front of one’s eyes, but Elijah had almost gotten used to it.  It was par for the course for a man with his own time machine.  “No, not really.  Napoleon has them by the short hairs.  Remember, he’s been chasing them since Vienna.”  He pulled the binoculars from his eyes, turning them over in his hand and giving them a look of disdain.  “These binoculars aren’t worth a bucket of spit.  I can’t see a thing.”

Fuzzy’s voice answered, “You gave your good ones, the spyglass, to Harald.”  He was referring to Harald Blatan, or Bluetooth, who had been Elijah’s travelling companion for a time.  He was also one of Fuzzy’s all-time favorite humans.  After the boy, of course.

Elijah lifted the binoculars back up to his eyes, training them on the French side.  He wanted to see Bonaparte.  Plus, he wanted to ignore Fuzzy’s last comment.

But Fuzzy was relentless.  “It might not have been such a good idea to give them to him.  Historically speaking, I mean.”

Elijah nodded curtly, fully aware that Fuzzy couldn’t see him doing it.  “They never found him.  Never found his body.  When we left the 21st century they had already  been looking for decades.”  He scanned the horizon again.  “They’ll never find him.”

“So, we’re now using blind luck to justify taking grave risks.”

“You can’t change the future, Fuzzy.”  Elijah’s patience with this line of discussion was quickly running out.

“No, but you can get an anvil dropped on your head by the universe for tempting time,”replied the equally impatient computer.  ” Or so you’ve said many times.”

Elijah looked up briefly into the clouds, then shook his head and went back to watching the troops.  “I get the point.  I won’t do it again.  I promise.”  After a few moments he lowered the binoculars again.  “I see better without these things.  I need to get closer.”  He folded them and put them in his messenger bag.

“I wouldn’t recommend getting any closer,” replied Fuzzy.

Elijah started to turn, another sarcastic comment about ‘who was in charge, etc.,‘  rising to his lips, when the corner of his eye caught a movement on his right, up the slope about twenty yards.  It was a soldier, he realized, no more than seventeen or eighteen years old, crouched behind a bush and watching him.

Realizing he was seen, the soldier stood up and looked around.  His eyes pleaded with Elijah to not make a noise.

Elijah walked slowly towards him, both hands held out on each side, palms up.  “TEE RUS? (Are you Russian, in Elijah’s horrible version of the Russian language).

The soldier nodded.

Elijah whispered into his microphone, “Fuzzy, translate for me.  What is your name?  Are you a deserter?”

Fuzzy gave the translation back to Elijah, which he repeated to the kid.  When the kid answered, Fuzzy gave Elijah the translation back.

The soldiers head went down.  “I do not want to die, but I am not a deserter.  I got too drunk last night, and fell asleep away from the camp.  This morning I overslept.  Now I am afraid if I try to go back, they will shoot me as a deserter.”  He kicked a small pebble at his feet.  “My name is Benka.”

Elijah approached more closely.  Only ten yards separated them now.  “Don’t worry, I won’t tell them.  As you can see I am hiding from them, too.”

Benka eyed Elijah and his strange garb.  “How did you get here? There are scouts everywhere.”  His arm waved back to encompass all the fields and rolling hills behind Elijah’s position.  “I am afraid they will catch me and I will never see my wife Doycia again.”

Elijah nodded, his eyes taking in Benka’s uniform.  “You’re right, you’ll never make it past them.  There are five on horseback not two miles from here, in the direction I’m guessing you’ve planned to go.” He pointed and the soldier nodded sheepishly.  “I’ll make you a deal,” Elijah continued.  “You give me that uniform, and I’ll give you a change of clothes and  get you out of here.”

A look of unbelief washed over Benka’s face.  “How could you do that?”

Elijah grinned.  “Never mind that.  Where are you from?”

“Petrovichi.  In Belarus.”

Elijah nodded and sat on a nearby tree stump.  He opened his bag.  “Would you like to see your wife tonight?  Taste her home cooking again?” He pulled out a flask and opened it, taking a long swig.  He handed it up to Benka  “Want some?”

Benka sat and took the bottle.  “You’re talking crazy,” he said.  “Na-zda-ROV-yea.”  He shrugged and lifted it to his lips.

Elijah took that moment to lift a small syringe from its place on the inner wall of the bag.  Just enough to knock the kid out.  “Well, when we get to Petrovichi, you can apologize.”

                                                           .                   .                   .

Fuzzy was beside himself.  Hadn’t they just talked about this very thing?  About tempting time?  About getting involved when they need not do it?

Elijah was nonplussed, sitting at the console of his MTDM (mobile time displacement module) high in orbit.  He was still wearing Benka’s uniform.  Benka laid on the floor behind his seat, snoring loudly.  “The kid won’t remember a thing, other than meeting me in a field.” He punched in a few keys on the right hand keyboard.  “Besides, it was the least I could for the loan of this uniform.  It got me close.”

“Too close,” came Fuzzy’s reply.

“I could have gotten even closer had you not ruined it.”  He looked up at the middle monitor.  “That really pissed me off.  I have half a mind to lower your Assertiveness setting.

“You didn’t know I could make a dust devil, did you?”

“No, I most certainly did not.”  Elijah punched in a few more keys, this time stabbing the keyboard like a kid playing typewriter on his little brother’s chest.”

“Well, an officer off to the right of and behind you had taken notice of your presence, just standing there and doing nothing.  He was sending a guard over to you when I intervened.”

Elijah looked back up at the monitor, his full attention now on the subject at hand.  “I wasn’t ‘doing nothing‘, I was taking video.  Great video.”  When Fuzzy said nothing in response, he went on. “So it was that close?”

“It was that close.  And it gets worse.”

Elijah stiffened.  “Worse?”

“I know who he is.” Fuzzy’s voice was flat, emotionless.  “Benka.”

Oh no, came the thought to Elijah’s head, not again.  “Go on.”

“I ran him through face recognition to try to get a progenic match. To see if I could determine his family tree.   I knew that his home village was Petrovichi, and he had spoke of his wife and gave her name, so I was able to better filter the results.”

“A progenic match?”  Elijah’s voice raised a notch.  “I don’t think that’s a word.”

“I tried to match him to his progeny, if he had any.”

“Of course you did.”

“You’re not going to like it.”

Elijah half-turned in his chair and looked down at Benka.  “No, I probably won’t.  So who is he?”

“He is Benka Asimov, the great-great-great-grandfather of Isaac Asimov.”

In the silence that followed Elijah’s head dropped to his chest.  He held that position a few moments, then started shaking it slowly to the left and the right.  “I had to save him.  I didn’t have a choice.  He would have been killed.”

His face brightened suddenly and his head popped back up.  “See?  I just made sure that our history happened, that we had Asimov to write all those great stories.”  He smiled broadly.  “I’m a hero.”

“You’re a very reckless man.”

“You’re welcome.”  He saluted the middle monitor above his head.  “Aw, come on, Fuzzy.  Don’t ruin this for me.  I’ve got Isaac Asimov’s great-great-great grandfather in my care.  I told him we’d get him home, and home is where we’ll get him.”  He went back to punching numbers into the keyboard.  “Let’s go to Russia .”

Fuzzy begin making calculations and plotting courses.  Elijah smiled and asked him to play back the footage from the ship’s cameras.  He wanted to see Bonaparte.  As Fuzzy did so, Elijah pulled a pen and a small piece of paper from his front pocket.  He wrote the words ‘Name Your Son Israel‘ on the paper and folded it over.  Asimov’s great-great grandfather was, after all, named Israel.  Elijah just wanted to make sure he had the right guy.

Later he would slip the note into Benka’s pocket.  Benka would have to translate if from English, as unfortunately Elijah didn’t know how to write in Russian.

And he wasn’t about to ask Fuzzy for help.

I was sitting at my desk the other night trying to think of things I could use as subject matter for my blog entries here. In the last few weeks I’ve considered things like science, science fiction and commercial advances, etc. That was what the flying car article was about. But that night, in my easy chair, I settled on something that I figured would be a blast for me to write and hopefully as much fun for the reader to read.

In Time Vandal 1 (my pet name for the book First Epiphany of the Time Vandal) I went into detail about a few of the historical events Dr. Snow visited and his interactions there. But there were many I only mentioned in passing, in sort of a summation at the end.

One example of this would be the Battle of Austerlitz, where Napoleon defeated the combined armies of Russia and Austria outside of what today is the city of Brno, Czech Republic. This battle has always intrigued me, and I’ve read voraciously on the subject over the years.

Living in Prague, I’ve even managed to take a visit to the site and stand at the very spot where Napoleons’s command tent stood, the spot where Bonaparte looked out over the rolling fields and concocted his battle strategy.

So I thought to myself, why not expand on that one line in the book as a subject for one of my posts?  Why not publish a series of short stories detailing the travels of Dr. Snow as they happened in Time Vandal 1‘s timeline?

I immediately saw the pro’s and the con’s of such an endeavor.

On the pro side, I get to add a few facts to the canon (heh) and maybe get a chance to set up some more storylines for Time Vandal 2 (as yet untitled…who knows, maybe it’ll be named Time Vandal 2?  nahhh).  I get to have a little fun while simultaneously deepening some of the characters that the readers got acquainted with in the earlier book.  And I get articles for my site, which I won’t let you folks read unless you register and log in.

On the con side, I will have to be very careful to not tip my hand on the plot of the second book.  This might be harder than it sounds, as I am absolutely ITCHING to spill the beans on what Dr. Snow, Fuzzy.  and Mole get up to in the sequel.

Oops, did I just say Mole?  Dangit!

See, I’m already slinging spoilers.

Anyway, the stories are there, just waiting to be told.  Why not tell them?  So that’s what I’m going to do.

My next blog post will be a short story detailing one of the Time Vandal Visits from book one.  (I’ve even created a hashtag, of all things, for my tweets on the matter.  #timevandalvisits.)  Will it be Austerlitz?  The eruption of Vesuvius?  The defeat of the Spanish Armada?  To be honest, I haven’t a clue yet.

Yes, it’s Sunday.  And although technically a day of rest, I’ve chosen it to be the day I put pen to paper (well, you know what I mean) and write my weekly blog.

Blog.

Say it out loud.  Draw out the vowel.  Bloooooooggggg.  It sounds ridiculous, doesn’t it?  It sounds like the name of some Norse king from antiquity.  “King Blog of Denmark has attacked Jarl Erg of Rittenshumen!“.  Or, “King Blog has commanded all his subjects to set aside Sundays as their day of writing!”

You get the idea.  Yes, I think the word is somewhat stupid.  A made up word, as Kramer might say.

Yet here I am, writing my first one about how I want a flying car.

I’ve always wanted a flying car.  I am sure I’m not alone in this, as the idea of flying cars has been a mainstay of western literature and science fiction since at least the 1950’s.  Literally hundreds of major motion pictures have featured flying cars, and thousands of books have done the same.  (Author’s Note:  My novel First Epiphany of the Time Vandal, while employing the use of a time machine, did not feature a flying car.  Much to my shame.)  

The flyingcar-coveting public (that is not a typo – it is high time we joined the words flying and car into one word.  If they can do it with ‘web log’, I can do it with ‘flying car’) of the last century was certain that by the year 2000 we would all be zipping around like the Jetsons.

Yet here we sit in the year 2016, still stuck in traffic jam after traffic jam, breathing noxious cancer-causing exhaust fumes and listening to talk radio.  (One aside, why don’t they have those cancer warnings on the sides of cars like they have on packs of cigarettes?)  I, for one, am not happy with this turn of events.

I want my flying car.

And no, I don’t mean this:

I mean this:

That’s right, folks.  They’ve finally done it.

The flyingcar company Terrafugia claims its TF-X will be ready to take to the skies by 2018.  That’s just two years away, and only eighteen years later than the certain-to-exist year of 2000.

Yay, a flying car that might actually work!

Of course, there are some drawbacks.  You won’t actually fly it yourself.  You’ll input your destination, and the TF-X will take you there.  So don’t plan on joyriding or buzzing the neighbors vegetable garden.  But on the plus side, you’ll be able to get wasted during your trip!

It might be pricey, though.  By all indications it will set you back $261,000.  But I’m sure there will be easy credit terms.

After all, you’ll need to have a few bucks leftover to buy a bottle of Jagermeister for the trip.

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