Timepiece

"Where the hell are we?" Nora repeated herself. She was standing in wet mud that hadn't been there before they turned on the gizmos.John stood rooted in place. "Oh NO, NO, NO," he whispered. "I... have a terrible, terrible feeling about this." In the coolness, his nervousness caused him to sweat profusely, giving him a chill.Reynold looked at him and said in his most sarcastic tone, "Really? 100 points for being obvious."John snapped back, "It's now dawn! We hit the button at noon. It should be 12:27 and 31 seconds, but it's frickin dawn!"Reynold said, "I've known you for a long time, when did you become a time savant? How do you know it's dawn?"John pointed at the sun rising. "There's the east toward that wood building, and that's the sun peeking over the horizon." John spun Reynold around ninety degrees until he faced the North Star. "Polaris. That's Polaris... better known as the North Star. The Little Dipper spins around it, but it stays in our north." He turned Reynold ninety degrees back towards the sun. "That's the rising of the Sun. Venus is completely out of place. Last night the sun set in the west and Venus chased it. Look east and a little to the right, THERE IS VENUS!" he pointed. Reynold could make out the outline of a massive partly illuminated planet. When had John become an astronomer?John pondered that he had never seen such intense darkness. There are so many stars! So damn distracting. It was like someone had radically increased their luminescence.Reynold looked at John confused and asked, "How can a planet be out of place?""That's what I'm saying. Planets don't suddenly shift. Venus doesn't follow that path until the fall around early October. Nothing propelled us, so we're at least six months or more into the future. Venus seems to be the same size it usually is, so we seem to be in the same spot. Perhaps someone cleaned Venus because it looks crystal clear. We must have approached the speed of light. This exponentially added to the time dilation." John continued, "The formula gets screwed up if we approached the exact speed of light. Twenty-seven and a half minutes' dilation from the first experiment is nothing. We may have reappeared in the distant or distant, DISTANT future. The building we started in IS GONE! So, Nora, it's not where the hell are we, it's when!" John wiped sweat from his brow to emphasize his point. His stress levels messed his body's functions, and he sweat even more.***********Intrigued by the discovery of a 300-year-old gravestone with his and his carpool partner's names, Reynold follows the secret message on the stone that leads he, Nora his carpool partner, and his best friend John on a journey 300 years into the past to fulfill history.