Chapter 29
I CRAWLED THROUGH the wreckage toward the spot where the pin on the Google map in my brain indicated I’d find the National Archives Building’s rotunda, thanks to the neuron-based, high-speed Wi-Fi connection in my Alpar Nokian cerebellum.
As I moved forward, I remembered Xanthos’s advice: Beware of darkness. Right now, I was having some extremely dark thoughts about President McManus and his cowardly cronies—and not just because they’d just put a bounty on my head.
I was ticked off because they’d forgotten what America was supposed to be all about. As a former, much braver president once said, “America is a shining city upon a hill whose beacon light guides freedom-loving people everywhere.” I needed to find that shining beacon’s three instruction manuals: the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the Declaration of Independence.
When I reached the spot where the Charters of Freedom exhibit stood when the National Archives Building wasn’t a scrap heap of neoclassical rubble, I opened my eyes and switched on my handy X-ray vision.
I used it to visually pierce the fallen ceiling slabs, felled columns, and pulverized plaster that made it look like a tour group had arrived here on a bulldozer instead of a bus.
Buried beneath a heap of twisted rebar and chunks of marble was the four-paneled, gold-framed display case holding the four pages of the original United States Constitution, handwritten back in 1787. After quickly levitating a landfill’s worth of building debris, I unburied the pen-and-ink version of the United States Constitution.
I peered through the first shattered pane of glass and read the preamble on the yellowed sheets of crisp parchment, filled with loopy calligraphy: “We the people of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”
Okay, so usually government documents—junk like tax forms and change-of-address cards from the post office—don’t choke me up. But this? This was the blueprint for running a country based on the premise that all human beings were created equal, that they had the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
Now the Constitution, and all that it stood for, lay trampled on the ground.
And if its brittle, antique parchment was exposed to the elements much longer (Number 2 had ripped off the building’s rotunda like the pop-top lid of a Pringles can), the document, like the ideals it stood for, would soon turn to dust and disappear.
I planned on materializing a new, high-tech, hermetically sealed, bullet- and bombproof display case for the Constitution as well as the two other Charters of Freedom.
But first, I wanted to touch it. I needed to feel the document the way the founding fathers had felt it when they wrote down its vital words.
As soon as the tip of my finger touched the first sheet, I was blown away by a hurricane of emotions. So much so that I immediately (and involuntarily, I might add) dove down through the surface of time and went soaring back into history.
Hey, I’ve time-traveled before. I’ve even visited King Arthur’s Court and hung out with Merlin (spoiler alert: he was an alien). But I’ve always been the one booking the flight and choosing the destination. I’d never before been swept up by a time-flux tsunami generated by raw, gut-wrenching emotion. I had no idea where or when I was headed—or why I was headed there—until I arrived.
I instantly recognized a lot of the men in powdered wigs, waistcoats, ruffled collars, and knee-high breeches milling around the room. George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, James Madison, and Alexander Hamilton were the most famous guys in the hall, but thirty-three other gentlemen were also present. All of them were eagerly awaiting their turn to pick up a feathered pen and affix their signatures to a freshly inked document.
Because I was in Philadelphia, in Independence Hall, standing with the thirty-nine founding fathers who had originally signed the United States Constitution.