Emperors of Time Read Online Free

trying to think of a complete non
sequitur, and came up with, “Which is the better planet, Mars or Venus?”
    Julie laughed
sweetly and said, “Hmmm, well…  Mars, obviously.” 
    “Why?”
    “Well… 
Mars has two moons and Venus has none.  Obviously two is better than none,
so it’s Mars.  Why?  Did you think it was Venus?” she asked, as if he
had just gotten a really easy math problem wrong and she was embarrassed for
him.
    “Well of course
Venus is better,” he said.
    “Well pardon
me.  Why?” asked Julie, feigning an intense intellectual curiosity. 
    “Because the
ancients used to call it the ‘Evening Star’, but they also called it the
‘Morning Star’, since you can see it really well at both times.  It wasn’t
until the sixth century BC that they figured out it was the same thing, and it
still confused people way after that. Basically, Venus is better because it’s
two things, the Evening Star and the Morning Star, but Mars is just one
thing.  The god of war.” 
    Julie
nodded.  “We’ll call that one a draw then.  Okay, how about this: 
What’s the best type of bird?”
    “Oh, that’s
easy.  A penguin.”
    Julie burst out
laughing.  “No way.  That’s mine, too!  Why for you?”
    “The poor things
can’t fly, and they look ridiculous.”
    “Right! 
But they always look so smug about it.  Like, I went to the zoo not too
long ago, and I swear they looked at me like they know they’re short, fat, and
have stubby little wings, but they still think they’re the coolest thing on two
legs.  Simply adorable.”
    Tim nodded,
chuckling.  If this whole business about time travelling had been an
elaborate ruse to get him to talk about penguins, it had succeeded.  But
as they turned the corner into a cul de sac, Julie’s face became serious again.
    “Well, that’s my
house there, the blue one,” Julie said.  “My parents don’t get home until
about 5:15, so we’ll have enough time.”
    “Yeah, okay…”
said Tim hesitantly. 
    Julie unlocked
the front door and opened it, motioning for Tim to go inside.  “My room’s
at the end of the hallway.  You can go on in.”
    “Thanks,” said
Tim, although discussing time travel wasn’t exactly his ideal reason for being
invited into a girl’s bedroom.
     “Okay,
first things first,” Julie said once they got in the room.  “Here’s the
1865 coin I told you about.”  She picked it up off her desk.
    Tim looked at
the coin and let out a whistle.  It was the best preserved coin he’d seen
that was more than sixty years old.  It was a century and a half old and
looked fresh from the mint.
    “I thought you
said Hopkins had it in his hand when you saw him?”
    “Yeah, but when I
got back, it was on the floor right where I’d been standing.  Like it had
dropped from my hand when I vanished,” Julie said.
    “Hm, okay...”
    Julie
shrugged.  “I know how it sounds.  And here’s that thing Hopkins kept
calling a microchip.”  It was a little metal disk, no bigger than a half
dollar.  It was shiny, unmarked metal.  Tim wasn’t entirely sure what
he thought it was , but he was confident that a super powerful microchip
that could manipulate space-time was a possibility he could safely eliminate.
    After a moment
of silence, Tim looked at her, “You weren’t figuring it’d be enough to just
show me the coin and the disc, were you?  Because all that proves is--”
Julie held up a hand to stop him.  Tim stopped because, really, he wasn’t
trying to be mean.  But there was only so long you could be fed the kind
of nonsense he was hearing and not get impatient. 
    The worst part
was that Julie honestly didn’t seem like she was insane, aside from the belief
that she had visited nineteenth century Washington DC.  The conversation
on the way to her house had been so normal, or at least quirky in Julie’s
normal style. 
    As Tim pursued
this train of thought, Julie scanned the room.  After a moment,