JB seemed to be trying hard to hide a smile at Katherine’s using a time-travel term like “release the ripple.” JB had explained this to them back when they’d first learned about being missing children from history. JB and his fellow agents had frozen the impact of the kids’ being stolen; the whole point of returning them was to allow time to follow its natural courses again.
“We already did release the ripple,” JB said. “Everything’s fine.”
“But … but … unless it changed in the last ten minutes, none of the Web sites have the right information about what really happened to Chip and Alex and Richard the Third,” Katherine objected.
JB stopped a few steps away from her.
“Did you expect history to say that Richard got religious advice from time travelers the night before he died?” JB asked. “Did you want it on Wikipedia that Chip and Alex were saved at the last minute and carried off to the twenty-first century?”
“No.” Katherine shook her head stubbornly. “But people should know that Richard wasn’t all bad. He repented at the end. He wanted to give his crown back.”
“Sit,” JB told the sheepdog. The dog eased his hindquarters down onto the sidewalk. Then he lay all the way down and put his head on his front paws, as if he expected this to take a while.
“Time needed Richard to be a villain,” JB explained carefully. “The year 1483 was something of a turning point in history. Before that, killing for political gain was … expected. Ordinary. But the way the princes disappeared from the Tower, the way everyone thought they knew what had happened, the way people were so horrified at Richard killing kids … that changed history. Killing children became something you usually couldn’t do and still be considered a decent human being. It became part of the change in how people viewed children, how they viewed humanity. Richard was held up forever after that as an example of what leaders shouldn’t do. In some ways this was almost as important as the Magna Carta.”
JB sounded as earnest as a college professor trying to explain why history mattered. Jonah couldn’t quite remember what the Magna Carta was, but everything else kind of made sense.
Of course Katherine wasn’t satisfied.
“But that’s not fair to Richard,” she complained. “He doesn’t deserve his bad reputation.”
“Do you think that matters to Richard?” JB asked. “He died five minutes after offering Chip the Crown.”
“But did he go to heaven?” Katherine persisted.
“That’s between him and God, not him and history,” JB said.
Alex started, jerking so spastically that he kicked the basketball, and would have sent it spinning out into the street if Chip hadn’t caught it. Amazingly, Chip still seemed to have a swordsman’s quick reflexes.
“You believe in God?” Alex asked JB incredulously. “But you know how to travel through time. You’re a scientist.” He hesitated. “Aren’t you?”
JB rolled his eyes.
“It amazes me how people of your time set up such a false dichotomy between science and religion. Fortunately, that only lasts for another … well, I can’t tell you that,” he said, stopping himself just in time. “But I assure you, the more I travel through time, the more I witness, the more I realize that there are things that are both strange and wonderful, far beyond human comprehension.” He turned to Jonah and Katherine. “Like how a couple of untrained kids could save time, when expert professionals would have failed every time.”
Katherine tossed her head as if she was ready to launch into a victory dance: So there! We showed you!
“You helped us some,” Jonah said modestly. “With Hadley signaling us there by Chip and Alex on the battlefield so we’d find them in time. And with how you let us use invisibility.”
JB shook his head.
“But you did everything wrong,” he said. “We’re still cataloging how many sacred rules of time travel you broke. No certified time traveler would have dared to speak directly to Richard—and you did it twice!”
“Why didn’t you yank us out of time when we were breaking all those rules?” Jonah asked.
“We, uh, couldn’t,” JB said sheepishly. “We kept being blocked by the impact of your actions. And then … we kept discovering that everything you did worked.”
“But …” Alex shifted uncomfortably. “We didn’t stay with our tracers exactly. Chip and Jonah and Katherine and me … we did change history. Why doesn’t anyone know that?”
“Well,” JB said. “There was the matter of a certain Shakespeare quote being widely used more than a hundred years ahead of time. …”
“Oops,” Alex said.
JB shrugged.
“In the scheme of things that was nothing,” he said. “Otherwise … everyone who heard Richard offer Chip the throne died on that battlefield. So did everyone who saw you separate from your tracers, saw the princes vanish into thin air. The way everything worked, it almost seemed … preordained.”
He seemed embarrassed saying the word, which seemed out of place on this sunny autumn day, in twenty-first-century America.
“Still,” Alex said. He looked around, as if suddenly scared. “You can’t tell me nobody else thought of this. I’m not ruining anything talking about this—”
“What?” Katherine demanded. “Would you just spit it out?”
Alex looked down, biting his lip. Then he peered back up at JB.
“Chip and me, we still don’t belong in the twenty-first century,” Alex said. “Okay, so it didn’t mess up the fifteenth century to have Jonah and Katherine rescuing us—that’s great. Whatever. But anything we do here, now, aren’t we changing this time period? Should we plan never to come up with any brilliant scientific discoveries, never to have a job, never to get married and have kids, never to have an impact at all?” He looked over at Chip, whose jaw had dropped. “Sorry. I had to say it.”