Klaus walked along the road into town, contemplating his situation. News about the end of the war had reached Ann Arbor only a few weeks ago, and with it, his plans had been thrown in disarray.
He had intended to enlist in the army on his eighteenth birthday, as his adoptive father refused to allow him to join before that. Gustav had enlisted four years ago and was killed at a place called Antietam. Because there were no other sons in the family, Klaus was expected to inherit the farm when the old farmer died.
Klaus wasn’t sure he was cut out to be a farmer, he was much more interested in life in the growing cities. One of the reasons he wanted to join the army was to save up enough money to start a shop in Ann Arbor, or even in the distant Detroit.
While considering the options he had left when he would be turning eighteen in a little bit over two months, he didn’t notice the man overtaking him.
“Are you Klaus, the brother of Nicholas Braun?”
This stopped Klaus in his tracks. He had never told anyone about his older brother, since nobody believed his story. And he had almost forgotten his old surname, having used Adler for the past ten years.
“Who wants to know?” he asked, suspicious of the stranger. Klaus tried to take a good look at the man, who was tall with wild gray hair. His black coat, although completely out of place, looked strangely familiar and comforting.
The stranger looked at an unusual metal device he held in his hand. Klaus wondered if it were some kind of weapon.
“You are, aren’t you? The same traces of the Alton defense field are around you.”
Klaus shook his head. The man was talking nonsense, and he started to wonder if he had maybe escaped from an asylum. Still, he knew the name of his brother, and nobody could know that name. At least, nobody who wasn’t involved in his abduction in the first place.
“How do you know Nicholas?” he asked, tacitly acknowledging the stranger’s assertion.
“Never mind that, the question is, what are you doing here? Or more to the point, what are you doing now?”
Klaus’ eyes opened wide at hearing the exact same questions he had been asking himself for over ten years.
“What do you mean?” he asked.
“You are not from here, and not from now. Yet here you are, and now you are. The question is, why? Why are you here, why are you now? There has to be something that brought you here. Something in this place and time.”
The man continued to mutter to himself as he walked ahead, seeming to have forgotten about Klaus and focused on getting into town.
The brief encounter bothered Klaus more than he initially thought. After that first confused day, ten years ago, he hadn’t mentioned his brother or where he came from to anyone. He was convinced that both his adoptive mother and Mrs. Wilder had long forgotten his strange, wild stories, since they clearly didn’t believe him at the time.
He had never been able to find out anything more himself about his past. He was still convinced that he was born in 1527 in a town called Lindow in one of the German principalities, but he knew that was totally impossible. So over the years he learned to ignore that little fact, and all memories he had of his earlier childhood.
Yet now that was all getting raked up again in the form of a man who not only seemed to know he was from a different place, but also that he was from a different time.
It didn’t take Klaus much longer to get to the town, and as he walked down the dusty main street, he saw the strange man again, talking to some people outside of the saloon.
Klaus argued with himself about whether he should avoid the stranger or walk up to him and find out what he knew, when someone across the street cried out.
“That’s him! That’s the one who pointed at my cows, and now one of them is dead in the field.”
Klaus recognized the voice of Kevin Hutchinson, who as a little boy had been known as the bully of the playground. He always seemed to have his friends hanging around him and today was no different.
Realizing there would be trouble, Klaus hurried closer to the saloon.
The stranger looked up at the approaching group and held up his hands, as if to ward them off.
“I didn’t do anything to your cow,” he implored, but with little effect. The young men kept coming and clearly were not going to believe the stranger. All of them were armed.
Kevin demanded to be paid for the dead cow, while the stranger continued to plead his innocence. Other people started to join in, demanding from Kevin to explain how the stranger had killed his cow, if all he had done was point at it.
As the discussions heated up, the stranger slowly drifted to the back of the building crowd, trying not to draw any attention to himself.
Klaus called out “Over here” to the stranger and ducked into an alley. He stopped at the next corner to make sure the man was following him, then dashed to the right and opened the back door of the second house. He held the door open just long enough for the stranger to hurry in behind him, then closed and locked it.
He motioned to be quiet and then called out “Paula? It’s me, Klaus.”
“What’s up, Klaus?” a young woman’s voice replied. Klaus walked to the front of the building to greet his old class mate, and kept her talking for ten minutes while Kevin and his gang looked all over town for the stranger. They even came into the store but Paula truthfully said she hadn’t seen any strangers at all.
Eventually he said goodbye to Paula and returned to the back of the house. He carefully opened the door and peered out.
“Everything clear,” he whispered and motioned for the stranger to follow him. Once outside, he looked the older man in the eye.
“I don’t know who you are, or what you want,” he explained, “but this town does not seem to be a good place for you right now. If I were you I would get out of here as soon as possible.”
“I suppose you’re right,” the stranger answered, “but I’ll be back. Something is decidedly wrong here, and I will find out what and why.”
“Before you go, though, what do you know about my brother? Is he still alive?”
The man looked at him as if trying to figure out how to respond.
“Yes, he is,” he finally responded. “Nicholas survived, and is growing up. But I’m afraid you are not going to be able to find him. He is far, far away.”