Lincoln

Whit is bent over the Imagination Station, finishing a new program and testing a remote control small enough to slip into a pocket. One push of its button ends an adventure. Jimmy Barclay stops by on his way to meet a friend for a game of Zappazoids, and Whit offers him the first ride. Jimmy hesitates when he hears the adventure comes out of American history, a subject he finds to be nothing but faces and dates that blur together after a while. Whit sets the date for March 4, 1865, and tells him there is only one way to learn what makes that morning exciting. Jimmy climbs in, pushes the flashing white button, and is gone.

He lands in a quiet stretch of woods and is promptly shushed by a tall, easygoing man who is hunting squirrels with nothing but a sling. The sling, the man explains, is a noble instrument, the weapon King David used in the Old Testament, and he himself was once the champion sling marksman of McLean County, Illinois, three years running. His shot misses badly. He laughs at himself, introduces himself simply as Abe, and lets Jimmy take a turn. Jimmy hits a branch instead of a squirrel, which is good enough for a first try, and Abe tells him to keep practicing. Then he hurries off to an important appointment, leaving instructions: when the clock strikes twelve, head toward his house.

Twelve strikes, and Jimmy follows a growing crowd toward the noise of a band. He steps into the street without looking and is yanked out of the path of a carriage by a young man who introduces himself as David Herold. Everyone is headed to the inauguration, and Herold brings Jimmy along to seats his friend Lewis Paine is holding down front. The two of them are less interested in the ceremony than in someone they call the Captain, who is up on the platform and who, Paine says, is going to do a good deal more than speak. Jimmy barely notices. He has just recognized the man at the podium as the friend he went squirrel hunting with that morning, and the man is Abraham Lincoln.

Lincoln speaks of malice toward none and charity for all, of binding up the nation's wounds, and then places his hand on the Bible while Salmon P. Chase leads him through the oath of office. Jimmy hollers up at him, thrilled, and Lincoln sends a lieutenant to bring the boy and his friends inside. Herold and Paine will not go. They cannot be seen with him, they say, and there are soldiers coming, and they need to find the Captain. They vanish into the crowd.

Inside the Capitol, Jimmy finds the President in the middle of an argument with his Secretary of War. Edwin Stanton thinks a visit to the front lines is a foolhardy risk; Lincoln thinks a commander in chief who never looks at the fighting might fairly be called a coward. Lincoln introduces Jimmy as an old squirrel hunting acquaintance, and Jimmy, still dazzled, blurts out that Lincoln is the greatest president there is, the one who freed the slaves and got the country through the Civil War. Lincoln gently points out that the war is still going on, unless Jimmy knows something he does not, and then invites him aboard the riverboat River Queen, bound for City Point, Virginia, to meet another friend - General Grant.

Grant's report is blunt. With Sherman's and Sheridan's forces closing the ring around Richmond and a siege underway at Petersburg, the outcome is simply a matter of arithmetic, and Lee cannot have more than fifty thousand men left. Lincoln does the math and hopes aloud that one more battle can be avoided, because so much blood has already been spilled and people set aside the sixth commandment far too lightly when a cause is at stake. When Grant needs a private word, Lincoln sends Jimmy ahead to hunt, with a tip about the woods behind the mess tent and a warning not to wander too far.

Jimmy wanders too far. Dusk is coming, he has no idea which direction camp is, and the only shelter in sight is a weathered little shack. He calls hello into the dark and is grabbed from behind by a man three times his size named Hunk. It is Hunk's companion, Moes, who calms things down. The two of them are runaway slaves, careful of everyone they meet, because some people would send them back south. When Moes sees Jimmy's sling and says it is just like King David's, Jimmy mentions that Lincoln told him the same thing. Moes calls Lincoln the great emancipator, the man who gave them their freedom, and declares that any friend of his is a friend of theirs.

Then they hear horses. Confederate soldiers halt outside for a five-minute rest, and an officer orders a detail to go see what is inside that shack. Moes says plainly that if the soldiers find them, they will be killed. Three people crouch in the dark with nowhere to run and no plan at all.