Seven Rules by Dayle MacKenzie
Chapter Nine
The past week had been the longest in Andy and Tim’s lives. From the very second they agreed to keep the Talisman hidden and lie low, time itself seemed to slow down.
On the first few mornings Tim grabbed his father’s morning paper, expecting to see headlines like, ‘Ancient Artifact Stolen’ or ‘Police Closing in on Thieves’. His nerves were shattered and he expected some big meaty police hand to grab him at any minute.
Andy was also worried and kept looking over his shoulder thinking undercover cops were after him. He often imagined himself in a darkened room with a bright light shining in his eyes being interrogated by detectives.
As the week wore on the boys’ tensions eased a little and they started to talk about how they would find out what was written on the Talisman.
“What will we do now?” asked Tim.
“Don’t know,” said Andy sucking a pencil. “Guess we start at the library.”
A loud voice interrupted their conversation.
“Anderson and Meadows. Be quiet and get on with your work!”
“Yes, Mr Brown.”
Tim did as he was told and started reading his work book. It was a study of ancient cultures from North and South America. Andy stared out the window thinking about how to research the Talisman.
Tim shattered his thoughts.
“Andy!” he said urgently.
“What?”
“Have a look at page thirty-eight.”
“Why?”
“Just look,” said Tim a little too loud.
Mr Brown boomed again.
“Anderson and Meadows, I’ve warned you once already and I won’t do it again. Get back to your work and be quiet!”
“Yes, Sir.”
Andy looked at Tim with a puzzled face.
“Thirty-eight!” Tim mouthed back pointing at the book.
Andy turned over the pages until he got to thirty. He looked at the heading.
‘The Maya.’
Andy looked back across to Tim and tried to get his attention but he was totally absorbed in what he was reading, so Andy started reading as well.
The Maya civilization extended throughout the southern Mexican states, the Yucatán Peninsula and also into the northern Central American region, including the present-day nations of Guatemala, Belize, El Salvador and western Honduras.
The Maya area was initially inhabited around the 10th century BC. The Maya calendar, which is based around the Mesoamerican Long Count calendar, starts on a date equivalent to 11 August, 3114 BC.
For reasons that are still unclear, the Maya centres of the southern lowlands went into decline during the 8th and 9th centuries and were abandoned shortly after. Theories of Maya decline blame overpopulation, foreign invasion, peasant revolt, or the collapse of trade routes. Other theories include environmental disaster, epidemic disease, and climate change.
From the 10th to the early 16th century, development in the northern centres and the cities of the northern lowlands in Yucatán continued to flourish. Some of the important sites in this era were Chichen Itza, Uxmal, Edzná, and Coba. After the decline of the ruling dynasties of Chichen and Uxmal the Mayapan ruled all of Yucatán until a revolt in 1450. The area then degenerated into competing city-states until the Yucatán was conquered by the Spanish.
The Spanish initiated a number of attempts to conquer the Maya in the Maya territories of the Yucatán Peninsula and the Guatemalan highlands. This campaign would take some 170 years before the Spanish established substantive control over all Maya lands.
Andy read a couple more pages and stopped. All this was very interesting, but what did it have to do with the symbols on the Talisman? He looked across to Tim and shrugged.
“Did you read page thirty-eight?” Tim whispered anxiously.
“Not yet.” Andy replied.
“Then read it!”
Andy flicked over two more pages and read the heading.
‘The Mayan Numerical System.’
The Maya used a base 20 (vigesimal) and base 5 numbering system. Also, the preclassic Maya and their neighbours independently developed the concept of 0 (zero) by 36 BC. The symbol for the number 0 was unique. From numbers 1- 19 a combination of dots and or dashes was used to represent each number. Inscriptions show them on occasion working with sums up to the hundreds of millions and dates so large it would take several lines just to represent it.
The text was followed by an illustration of the Mayan numerical system.
Andy nearly fell out of his chair in shock. Staring at him were diagrams of the exact symbols that were on the Talisman. He looked back over to Tim who was smiling triumphantly like he had just won a million in the lottery.
“It’s them, it’s them!” he said in a hoarse whisper.
“I know,” said Tim. “Read the rest of it.”
Mr Brown interrupted them.
“Anderson and Meadows: you’ve been warned twice already. Lunch-time, Emu Parade for the both of you.”
They were both a little annoyed at losing their lunch-time but thought it was a small price to pay for discovering the secret of their missing symbols, so they settled down and read about the Mayan numerical system until lunch time.
The Emu Parade was a punishment nearly as old as the school itself. At the beginning of lunch those being punished would line up under the supervision of a teacher who would march them forward looking for rubbish on the ground. When one of the boys found some rubbish he would stop and pick it up. Whenever one stopped, all of the others had to stop as well.
Fortunately there were a fair number of boys given Emu duty and the weather was looking threatening, so the teacher whipped the boys through the clean up as quickly as possible then disappeared for his own lunch.
Andy and Tim sat down to have their lunch under the shelter of a stone arch in front of one of the old classroom blocks.
“Have you got your drawing of the Talisman here?” asked Tim.
“Yeah,” said Andy through a half eaten sandwich. “It’s in my bag.”
“Is your drawing accurate?” said Tim.
“Should be,” said Andy fishing through his bag. “Here it is.”
“I’ve got my history book here so lets have a look and compare,” said Tim.
The two put the book and Andy’s drawing on the bench in front of them.
“So let’s see,” said Tim. “The Talisman has four dials, each one inside the other. If we compare them to the Mayan numbers in the book, then the first dial is a zero.”
“And the second one is zero too,” said Andy.
Tim nodded in agreement and carried on.
“The third one is, let’s see… five, six, seven. It’s a seven!”
Andy was already onto the final dial.
“Yeah and the last is a three. So that’s zero, zero, seven, three.”
He leant against the stone arch.
“So what does that mean? Is it that seven plus three equals ten, or is it seven and three- seventy three?”
They fell silent for a few minutes, both trying to make sense of what they had learned so far.
“Hey,” said Tim. “I think I’ve figured it out! What year did you say that aviator guy crashed?”
“1936. Why?”
Tim didn’t answer straight away. He had his eyes half closed, muttering to himself and counting on his fingers.
“Because 1936 was seventy-three years ago.”
Andy thought about it for a minute. It seemed too easy to be true.
“So you just turn the numbers to how many years you want to travel and vroom you’re there? Sounds a bit easy, doesn’t it?”
“Why wouldn’t it be?” said Tim. “Why does it need to be hard?”
“I thought you’d set a date or something. Like an exact date and travel to a specific day.”
“Yeah I suppose you’ve got a point,” Tim replied. “But if you’re setting dates, whose dates are you going to use?”
Andy looked confuse
“What do you mean by whose dates?”
Tim held up the book they’d been reading about the Maya.
“Well it says here that the Maya had their own calendar and the Romans had one of their own called the Julian calendar.”
“What’s that got to do with it?”
“What I’m trying to say is, all these civilizations were calling days and years by whatever name they came up with, and they’re counting their time from an event that is important to them.”
“I don’t get it,” said Andy.
Tim was getting frustrated.
“Look, what year is it now?” he asked.
“2009,” said Andy.
“2009, what?” asked Tim.
“Umm, 2009…… AD?” Andy said hesitantly.
“Yes,” said Tim. “And the AD stands for Anno Domini, which is Latin for ‘in the year of Our Lord.’ Our Lord being Jesus Christ.”
“Jesus Christ,” said Andy. “How’d you know that?”
“Mr Brown taught us the other day. Don’t you remember?”
Andy shook his head.
“Nope, must have been asleep for that one. What’s all this Anno Domini stuff got to do with the Talisman anyway?”
“Don’t you see? The Roman calendar started before Jesus was born and the Mayans had no idea who he was.”
Andy was still lost.
“So, how does all that have anything to do with how the Talisman works?” he asked.
“What I think,” said Tim. “Is that a date is just a number or a name that people give to time so they can keep track of it. Time goes on regardless of what anyone calls it, so if you’re going to travel through time you may as well ignore calendars and use something else.”
The bell rang to end lunch and they got up to go back to class. They walked in silence for a bit, before Andy spoke.
“So you think that the seventy-three is just seventy-three years back in time?”
“Yes I do,” replied Tim.
“How does the Talisman know how long a year is?”
“I don’t know. How does a bird know when to fly away for the winter? It just does.”
Andy nodded.
“I suppose it’s not important that we know how the thing works but just how we can use it.”
Tim stopped and grabbed Andy by the arm, pulling him to the side of the corridor.
“What do you mean by, use it?” he asked.
Andy looked up and down the hall.
“You know what I told you about my experience in the airplane?”
“Yeah.”
“I’m starting to think I was responsible for his crash.”
“Why’s that?”
“Because I distracted him and the plane went into a dive and he crashed. If I hadn’t surprised him he probably wouldn’t have lost control.”
“Yes, but he would most likely have run out of gas and crashed into the ocean anyway. You probably just delayed the inevitable.”
Andy thought for a minute and then shook his head.
“No, I don’t agree. I think he would have survived. I was responsible for his crash. The man died because of me.”
“So what are you going to do?”
“I’m going to get the Talisman and go back to 1936 or wherever it was and try to put things right.”
“So you, Andy Anderson, are going to use a time travel device to go back in time and save a crashed pilot are you?” said Tim with a hint of sarcasm.
“Exactly!” Andy said. “It won’t be hard; just slip the Talisman over my head, whiz back in time, tell the pilot he’s going to crash and hey presto, job done.”
“It’s not as easy as you think Andy,” he said. “You can’t change history. Just accept it and leave it alone.”
Mr Brown, who had been walking behind them, broke into the conversation.
“On the contrary, Mr Meadows,” he said. “Nothing is set in stone and if you could arrive before an event happens you could influence how or if it occurs. Now boys, tell me how it is that you can travel back in time.”
Andy and Tim paused for a minute. They could feel the panic rising inside them.
“Come now boys, I’m waiting to hear about your time travel theories”
Andy answered first.
“We don’t know how to travel in time Sir. We were just wondering what you would do if you could.”
Mr Brown laughed and looked Andy in the eye.
“Knowing you Mr Anderson, you would be using your history knowledge for laying sizable bets or other scams.”
Andy pretended to be hurt by Mr Brown’s comment.
“I’d never do that sort of thing, Sir”
“Of course not,” Mr Brown said. “How could I ever doubt you?”
“What we were actually thinking, Sir, was; would you save someone’s life if you knew they were going to be killed?”
Mr Brown stopped walking and looked at them very seriously.
“Time travel could be a very dangerous thing. Anything you do could have consequences far beyond what you originally intended. You could change a lot more than you intended and not necessarily for the better. I would think you would have to be very careful and learn a great deal about the time you intend to go to beforehand. And another thing…..”
The bell rang interrupting Mr Brown.
“My word,” he said. “Is that the time? What class are you this period?”
“English,” Tim said.
‘Then tell Mrs Foley I kept you talking in the corridor and I’m sorry for making you late.”
“OK Sir,” they said.
After school Andy had decided it was time to retrieve the Talisman from its hiding place.
“Would your mum mind if I came over to your house for a while?”
“Don’t think so. She’s picking me up so we can ask.”
They walked around the corner from the main gate and Kim Meadows was there in her old VW Beetle window down, singing loudly to the radio. Tim looked mortified.
“Man, I’ve told her heaps of times not to do that. It’s so embarrassing.”
Andy laughed.
“She’s only doing it to wind you up ‘cause she knows you hate it.”
Tim’s mother got out of the car to meet them
“Hi guys, how was school?”
“So, so,” said Tim. “Can Andy come over for a while tonight?”
Kim smiled and said, “I can do better than that. He’s staying the whole night. I spoke to his mum today.”
Andy was happy to be staying at Tim’s but still upset his mother was dumping him again for a night out.
“She’s going out again, is she?” he said quietly.
Kim put her arm around Andy and gave him a small hug.
“I know how you feel, mate,” she said. “My life was very similar when I was your age. You don’t mind staying over, do you?”
Andy felt a little better. He couldn’t remember the last time someone had hugged him.
“No, of course not,” he said. “I like staying at your place.”
“Good,” said Mrs Meadows. “I’m having the night off tonight and your father’s cooking, Tim, so I guess it’ll be fish and chips. We may as well get a movie on the way home.”
The boys cheered.
“Cool!”
Andy and Tim didn’t have time to discuss or even think about the Talisman that Friday night. Mrs Meadows made them cut firewood, do chores and have a shower until Mr Meadows arrived home with the fish and chips. They sat on the floor in a circle around the pile of takeaways and shovelled them into their mouths. After dinner they settled in the lounge in front of the fire and watched the movie. The boys managed to squeeze in popcorn and soft drink on top of the chips.
Not long after 9.00pm two bloated and content boys went to bed. They tried to stay up and talk but weariness got the better of them and they fell into a deep sleep. It was the last decent sleep either of them was going to have for some time.