Two orange cones dropped onto the street. With one last cough, the engine cut out, and the van fell quiet at the curb. Two workers, civil servants in yellow overalls, swung open the back doors of the maintenance van. One grabbed a digital clipboard from a slot on the van wall. The other began to strap on a clunky power wash backpack.
“It’s not too big, I hope?”
“It is not.” The clipboard loaded a fresh checklist, and the man ran his eyes over it despite already knowing just what they would need.
“Because last time it was half a church,” the guy putting on the backpack said. “Getting the juice everywhere took absolutely forever.”
“It’s nothing like that,” his partner assured. “Whole building, three stories, not too big. Very blocky number, which should make the spray job easy enough.”
“Famous last words.”
As he strapped into the backpack and check the spray hose for obstructions, his partner ran through the checklist. With practiced expertise, he pulled the necessary tools from the shelves of the van. Soon, the checklist had everything ticked off. With a flourish, he spun the clipboard before trying to slam it back in its wall slot. He missed and the clipboard clunked onto the ground.
“Smooth move, Ferguson,” his partner mocked. Sam shook his head in mock defeat.
Clipboard properly stowed, Sam grabbed a sturdy duffel bag. Unzipping, he checked that a small metal box was inside. Then he piled tools and cables on top and zipped the bag shut.
“Ready if you are,” he said, hoisting the bag with a grunt.
“Yeah. Can you check my straps?” Anders asked. He turned to show the clunky, squareish pack to his partner. Sam gave it a quick look, tugged on a few things, and nodded.
“Looks good,” he said.
Sam slammed the van doors shut. The department decal stuck to the right side door – a cream-and-blue DTR logo with clock hands drawn in the R’s closed off loop.
Five minutes later they reached the top of the steps. The large, flat roof was something of a public plaza, though it was blissfully uncrowded. The group of school kids should be moved, but otherwise they didn’t foresee much crowd control. Surprisingly, they saw the DTR historical contractor surveying the building. Punctuality was a rare thing in most of these consultants.
Sam swung by the group of kids on the walk over. He hurried, as leaving Anders alone with a history buff never led to good things.
“Doc, what do we think?” Anders asked as they approached the wiry young woman. He called all the historical contractors “Doc” regardless of age, sex or attitude.
“I have no legs,” she answered in an awestruck voice.
Anders looked down at her legs, then back up to her face. Still she stared at the building. “You’re right. They’re gone.”
Gaze still set firm on the majestic old building, she tapped each of her thighs with her hands. “That’s a relief.”
Sam, caught up after seeing off the class field trip, set down the bag and took a long look at the building. “It’s certainly from the old kingdom’s height. Probably before the wars?” His willingness to discuss the specifics of the building snapped the young history expert out of her reverie. She turned to him, smiled, and nodded enthusiastically.
“You’re spot on. It’s actually not even the entire building, rather a feature on the roof. The design – three windows framed by four columns, faces of knowledge gods on the roof, and the square construction – were all typical of libraries at the time.” The young woman spoke with delight in her voice. It was refreshing; most of the contractors took half a look, confirmed it could be wiped and walked off to cash their check.
“It’s actually part of the roof of a much larger administrative building,” she continued. “The position on the roof, one of these at each corner, was meant to represent military defense. It’s a huge symbol to the scholar-warriors that built the earliest versions of the city almost two thousand years ago.”
Anders pulled up the hood of his coveralls. He dragged goggles into place and primed the nozzle on his back-mounted washer.
“Can I soak it or what?”
“You have no appreciation of history,” Sam lamented.
“I work for a department that deals exclusively in history,” Anders barked back. “I simply prefer history to stay, you know, in the past.”
Sam turned to the young woman who had, for the most part, regained her composure. Still, she fidgeted with her fingers, and she practically vibrated with the excitement of the moment. In many ways, she took the exact opposite approach as Anders.
“Miss…?”
“Ferguson. Clarissa Ferguson.”
An enormous smile bloomed on Ander’s face. He opened his mouth to deliver a joyful slam, but Sam cut him off with a sharp look.
“Miss Ferguson, I’d-”
“Clarissa is fine.”
“Ok. I’d be happy to speak with you about the building’s history while Anders sprays. But, and I appreciate the irony of this statement, timing is generally of the essence in these matters.”
“Of course,” she replied. “I’ve had a look around before you arrived and nothing appears untoward. I think I’m supposed to sign something?”
Sam nodded and pulled out a small electronic pad from a pocket in the duffel bag. He pulled up the necessary authorization page, and she swiped her signature into the screen.
Without further preamble, Anders hoisted the long nozzle. He marched toward the building. Flicking a switch on the pack’s side, he aimed the washer’s cannon end at a column and pulled the trigger. A pink-tinted spray burst from the business end of the nozzle. Working from right to left, Anders began to douse the entire side of the building.
“Pink?” Clarissa said in surprise.
“To make sure we don’t miss a spot,” Sam explained. “For dark buildings, we use pink. For those with lighter stone or wood or what-have-you, we use a dark purple.”
“That makes sense.”
“You said this was a dedication to the early scholar-warriors?” Sam prompted.
“It was,” she said. “The entire building was designed with motifs that called back to those that studied language and made war and cut a small empire from the vast forest that once covered basically every inch of the country.”
As they spoke, Anders methodically ran the beam of sudsy pink spray over the side of the building. He had good technique built over years of service to the city. One side was done in six minutes flat. He turned a corner, spray running the whole time. Soon, he disappeared around the building’s edge.
“You’re not like the other contractors,” Sam said.
“I’m not?”
“No.”
“How so?”
Sam shrugged. “Most don’t actually care. It’s just a paycheck.”
“Well that’s ghastly,” Clarissa said, and Sam could honestly believe she meant it. “It’s living history, right there for them to see and study and touch.”
“Clarissa, please tell me you didn’t touch it,” Sam said, already knowing the answer.
“Of course not.”
Sam laughed. “You’re a terrible liar.”
Clarissa blushed and brushed a few loose strands of hair back behind her ear. She gave a small, guilty wave of her right hand.
“It was only a second,” she admitted. “That won’t cause any problems?”
“Not for us. We’ll just spray you down and send you back with it,” Sam deadpanned. Clarissa’s face began to drain, and he actually heard her breathing pick up.
“Please, that seems so-”
“I’m teasing.” Sam felt terrible seeing how seriously she took it. “It’s fine. The proletariat need some horror stories to keep them clear, but there’s no harm in touching it.”
There was a tangible breaking of tension in the young history buff. She nodded and exhaled in relief.
“If you want to know the truth,” Sam said, his voice lowered in the age-old manner of one confiding a secret. “In the early days, when they first started slipping through the fabric of time, people actually went inside.”
“No,” Clarissa detracted in a tone that implied she desperately wanted to believe what Sam said was true. “They’d have to be sent back then for sure.”
“Early government researchers, big time experts, ex-military types,” Sam listed. “No one that couldn’t pull some strings if they needed.”
“What did they find?”
Sam smiled what he hoped was a mysterious smile. “Couldn’t say for sure. Whatever it was, it had to be enough to decide returning the buildings from whence they came was the only real solution.”
Around the far corner, Anders reappeared. Another few moments, and he had the entire building covered. He spun the nozzle, concentrating the spray into a thin beam. He arced it high to direct the pink goop over the top and onto the roof.
“You guys are very thorough,” Clarissa noted.
“Not temporal splices in fifteen years,” Sam said. “No way we’ll let the next one happen on our watch.”
As Anders finished up, Sam dug out the small metal box and the long cables from the duffel bag. He hooked everything together, and flicked the power button on the box. Anders finished with the roof and turned off his pack. The pink spray retracted toward the nozzle, then died out.
Sam double checked his connections, tapped meters on the box, and nodded in satisfaction. He unbent a plastic handle and cranked it clockwise for twenty seconds. As he did, a plastic tube slowly emerged from the top of the box. It was filled with a pale green liquid. Once it reached its zenith, Sam stopped cranking. He triple checked the connections. All was in order.
With a flick of his wrist, he toss the longest cable out to Anders. He trudged back to the building and stuck the cable end into a seemingly random spot on the wall.
“Does it matter where the cable goes?” Clarissa asked.
“Don’t think so,” Sam said. “Guess I hadn’t thought about it.”
Anders thumped back over toward them and gave the thumbs up. Sam returned the sign. Then with his palm pressed to the little tube on the box, he pushed it, slow as can be, back inside.
“Box primed,” he said aloud.
“Prime confirmed,” replied Anders.
Sam twisted a cap off the side of the box to reveal a little plastic button. It was currently lit up in the same pale green as the liquid.
“You understand I can’t let you do this part,” Sam said, looking up at Clarissa.
She nodded. “Of course.”
“It would be a grievous beach of protocol,” Sam continued. “Punishment-worthy, for sure.”
“I understand.”
“While I would really love to let you do the honors, it’s a professional decision, you see,” Sam said, trying to add a bit more overt meaning to his tone. Evidently, it failed.
“Honestly, I’m just glad I get to see it,” she answered.
“I hit this button, and it goes back in time to where it belongs.”
“Yes.”
“When I hit the button. But not you. The rules are very clear,” Sam was almost pleading now. “You cannot hit the button.”
“I get it.”
Anders threw his hands in the air. “For the love of… hit the button, lady!”
Clarissa looked at him, then down at Sam. He grinned, looked at her, then down to the button, then back up at her. Finally, the gears slipped into place.
She crouched beside the little metal box. With a deep intake of breath, she put her finger on the button.
“What misshapen chaos of well-seeming forms,” she whispered. She hit the button.
Strangely, it was an underwhelming show from her perspective. The box discharged its payload, and the energy zipped through the cable into the building. The pink goo caught the charge, reacted, and pushed the building out of this time. To her eyes, it was there, then it was a ghost, and then it was gone, sent back to its own time before the wars.
The Tall Tale Year 