Well, of course, Jon knew where he had to go first. The entirety of time and space stretched out before them, and the possibilities and the sheer power in his and Karyn's hands staggered his imagination. But Jon knew there was a power greater and more terrifying even than this time machine: Mrs. Hinkelmeyer, his history teacher. The sooner Jon could figure out the fall of Constantinople, he realized, the sooner he and Karyn could get down to the very serious business of having fun.
"Machine," Jon said, "take us to Constantinople on..."--he stopped and flipped through his history textbook--"May 29, 1453."
"INPUT ACCEPTED," the machine boomed. "PLEASE ENTER THE CHAMBER."
Karyn raised an inquisitive eyebrow. "Constantinople, Jon? You can go anywhere at any time and you want to see Constantinople?"
"Homework," Jon explained, realizing that Karyn was in Mr. Furtlehiggins's history class. "If I don't do this, my history teacher will eat me. After this, I promise, we can cruise spacetime all we want, but first I need to learn about the fall of Constantinople."
Karyn shrugged and grabbed Jon's hand, and together they stepped into the glass tube. A moment later the world around them glowed in a bright white ligiht, then it faded away.
An explosive concussion rocked Jon's senses as the light faded away, and for a second Jon wasn't sure whether it was part of the effect of the time machine or something else entirely. As a shower of brick and stone clattered to the ground less than a dozen feet from Jon, though, he realized he had arrived successfully in the past.
Jon was overwhelmed at once by the sheer hurricane of sensations that stormed around him. He was standing in a broad plaza in a medieval, though the architexture was both grander and more distinctly eastern than he thatched cottages and stone castles he had always imagined when he'd thought of the Middle Ages. Uncountable thousands of men, and perhaps a handful of women, tumbled through the streets in a torrent of bodies. Many of them were armed with swords or clumsy, primitive guns, and they were engaged in furious combat. Jon felt a number of them jostle his shoulders as their fighting crashed all around him. It was uncomfortable, but it didn't matter; Jon's whole body already ached with injury and exertion. The entire scene was swallowed up in the roar of combat and the choking odors of gunpowder, open sewage, and rotting bodies, and it was enough to make Jon sink to his knees.
As he fell, Jon saw that he was clad in a heavy suit of black chainmail, as were many of the men around him. Beneath the armor, Jon could see that his body was tall, massive, and strong, a far cry from his own short, lanky figure. Jon had wondered, after he'd made his wish, whether he would actually inhabit the body of the person whose life he took over, or whether he would retain his own body while everyone else saw him as someone else, like in Quantum Leap. Now he had his answer: this was definitely not his body.
"Ahmet!" a voice shouted near his side. Jon looked up and saw a man, heavily bearded, strong and dark-skinned like the body he currently inhabited, and dressed in armor identical to his own, rushing to his side. "Ahmed, are you all right?"
The man was speaking in a language Jon had never heard before, but Jon could understand his words without effort, almost as though the man were speaking English. It must have been an effect of the time machine, and it was a fortunate one, as Jon realized he would have had a great deal of trouble making his way in the past if he couldn't speak or understand the language of the person he was pretenting to be.
The man helped Jon to his feet. "I'm all right," Jon grunted in the strange language, in a voice far deeper than his own. "I was just overwhelmed for a minute."
"I understand," the man said. "All our drilling, all the weeks of this siege... it didn't prepare me for the final battle." The man clapped a hand on Jon's shoulder, rattling the rings of Jon's armor. "But take heart, Ahmed! We've won this battle today, for the glory of Mehmed and of Allah on high!"
Jon began to fumble for an answer to this, but his efforts were cut short by a voice nearby. It rambled frantic words in a language Jon couldn't understand, but there was one word Jon could pick out clearly from the otherwise incomprehensible rush of syllables: "Jon!" Jon spun and saw a man fighting his way toward him through the crowd. The man was lighter-skinned than Jon and his friend, and dressed in armor that looked noticeably different. The man was burly and masculine, larger even than Jon, and incredibly intimidating in his bulk and the natural scowl of his face, but Jon felt a wondrous sense of relief as he took the man in. He couldn't understand the mechanism; it was a bizarre sort of double vision, like the double hearing that let him understand and speak the Turkish he had never heard before in his life... but whatever the process, Jon recognized this man immediately. While on the one hand Jon saw an unfamiliar giant of a man, Jon knew without hesitation that he was looking at a girl he had known all his life. Even had he not said anything at all, Jon would have known immediately that this man was Karyn.
Jon focused all his attention on Karyn... he took her in, looked at her new body, listened to her new voice, tried to make out her words and understand her body language, and tried to figure out how he could communicate with her across an impenetrable language gap. Even as he did so, though, his companion's voice shot through Jon's thoughts and blew them apart.
"Ahmed!" the man said. "Watch out!"
Jon realized, suddenly, that the man saw Karyn as an enemy soldier... as a large, burly, scowling soldier, no less, and one who was shouting and charging wildly toward them. Jon turned to his fellow soldier, hoping he could stop the man from doing something rash, and saw something that chilled him still further: the man had hoisted a large rifle and was pointing it in Karyn's direction. Before Jon could speak, before he could act, before he could even think, the man had pulled the trigger...
...and with a thundering report, a bullet raced through the air, shattering Jon's world beyond repair.
For a split second the entire world around Jon seemed to stop. The soldier's halted their fighting, their voices were silenced, and the ring of steel and the sound of gunfire were blown a thousand miles away. Even the pain in his body seemed to vanish. The gunman's rifle hovered still in the air for a moment, as his look of terror and rage melted slowly into a sneer of satisfaction. Then a sharp, horrible cry, a deep, bellowing man's cry ripped through the air, and the world moved again.
Jon turned in horror to where Karyn had been a moment before, and saw a sight even more ghastly than he had expected. Karyn was still there, and at first he was relieved to see that she was still alive, still moving, still breathing. But as she crumpled to the ground, Jon realized, with a sudden shudder of revulsion, that where her arm had once been, there was nothing but a six-inch stump and a gushing shower of blood. Some three feet behind her lay the still, severed remains of a hand and arm.
A shudder ran through Jon's entire body, shivering through his legs and arms and straight through his thoughts. Jon turned away with instinctive revulsion and fought back the urge to loose whatever food Ahmed had eaten that morning. A hand clanked down on Jon's back, and Jon realized that his fellow soldier was saying something to him, but for the moment Jon couldn't understand the man's words any more than he had been able to understand Karyn's a minute before. (A minute? Could it all have happened in a minute?)
Eventually, though--Jon couldn't begin to guess how long it had been--Jon began to collect himself and turned feebly back in Karyn's direction. Karyn was on the ground now, curled up in fetal position, but she was gurgling and cringling, and Jon knew that this was an unspeakably good sign. She was still alive, thank God. But she was bleeding, bleeding heavily, bleeding more heavily than Jon, in his short and sheltered life, had ever seen anyone bleed. Jon knew next to nothing about medicine, but he knew enough to know that no one who was bleeding that profusely could survive long. Karyn would die from blood loss alone in a frighteningly short time, if she wasn't trampled to death first, or finished off by Ahmed's friend or another of the vast army of Ottoman soldiers storming all around her. Even had Jon been certain of Karyn's survival, though, Jon couldn't bear the thought of his best friend suffering another minute what must have been an unspeakably excrutiating pain.
The coin. The coin. The coin. The COIN. He had to find the coin. If he could find the coin, Jon and Karyn could return to their own time. If they returned to their own time, Karyn would return to her own body, and if she returned to her own body, she would be safe, and she would be healthy, and she would be whole, and she would be thousands of miles and hundreds of years away from this horrible, horrible war.
Jon looked frantically over his body and clothing, trying to figure out where on earth on his person he would have a coin. After a moment, he found a satchel hanging from his belt. Tearing it off, he jerked it open and dumped its entire contents on the ground. Heedless of his companion's puzzled words, Jon threw himself to the ground and pawed hurriedly through the items he'd spilled out. Junk, too much junk. Bullets, bandages, silver coins, and too many small trinkets for Jon to even figure out what they all were, and...
Yes. Yes. A flash of gold glimmered at the bottom of the pile. Jon threw off the rest of the items, and with overwhelming gratitude he lifted a small gold coin with both hands. Although his breathing was shallow and quivering, Jon took a deep breath and blew the entire contents of his lungs onto the coin..
..and the world vanished in a flood of light.
As the light faded and his own time took shape around him, Jon closed his eyes and heaved a sigh of relief. A moment later, though, his eyes snapped open again. This wasn't his room... and, he realized, looking down... this DEFINITELY wasn't his body. And suddenly he knew his mistake: when he had wished that the coin would return Karyn and himself to their own time, he hadn't specified that they return to their own bodies...
