More hugs were dispensed, and the two women greeted the kids warmly.
“It’s so good to see you!” Mrs. Vader said.
“We framed that wonderful photo you took of the Titanic as it was sinking,” Miss Z told the kids, “and we hung it in the empty space on the wall.”
“What are you doing out here?” asked Isabel.
“I guess I’m . . . semi-retired,” Miss Z replied, tossing the last of her bread into the water. “Living the good life, as they say. It’s a little dull, if the truth be known. What are you kids doing out here? School must be over for the day.”
“We were a little bored too,” said Julia.
“Bored?” Miss Z looked surprised. “How can you possibly be bored? What are you in, sixth grade? You have your whole lives ahead of you!”
“Yes, shouldn’t you be home playing video games or something?” asked Mrs. Vader. “Isn’t that what your generation does for fun?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” Luke replied. “Video games just aren’t the same anymore. They’re not like jumping off the Titanic.”
“I guess not,” Miss Z said. “Simulating reality is not quite the same thing as experiencing it.”
The Flashback Four helped wheel Miss Z back to her office in the Hancock building. Always the good hostess, Mrs. Vader offered the kids some cookies before they left. The Flashback Four, of course, accepted.
“You said you were planning to send us on another mission after we got back from the Titanic,” Julia asked. “What was it?”
Miss Z hesitated, then glanced at Mrs. Vader. “It doesn’t matter anymore,” she said. “I’m retired. The program is over.”
“Please?” the Flashback Four begged.
“Well, I guess there’s no harm in just talking about it,” said Miss Z. “What do you kids think of when I say the word Pompeii?”
CHAPTER 6HOLD ON TIGHT
POMPEII.
It’s pronounced pom-PAY. To some people, the word means nothing. To others, it’s the greatest tragedy in human history.
“That’s the name of some old movie, right?” asked David.
“Isn’t pompeii some weird hairdo from the 1950s?” asked Luke.
“That’s pompadour, you dope,” Julia told him.
“I learned about Pompeii at school today,” Isabel told the group. “It was a city in the Roman Empire. There was a volcano nearby, and it erupted. The whole city was buried in ash and disappeared. They didn’t find it for over a thousand years.”
“Very good, Isabel,” said Miss Z. “Would one of you mind getting that globe near the window?”
David went to get the globe. Miss Z lowered her voice almost to a whisper. “Here’s the story. It was August twenty-fourth in the year 79 AD. Pompeii was on the western shore of Italy, next to the Bay of Naples. Right here. It wasn’t called Italy back then. About ten miles away was Mount Vesuvius, a volcano that had been dormant since 920 BC. If the people of Pompeii knew it was a volcano at all, they figured it was a dead volcano. But it erupted that day, shooting out billions of tons of rock and ash over the next eighteen hours. It completely buried the city. Thousands of people in Pompeii died.”
“Cool,” said Luke. “I mean the eruption, not the dying part.”
“Here’s the interesting part,” Miss Z continued. “It all happened so fast that those people died in the middle of whatever they were doing—walking the dog, cooking some food, whatever. So they were found at the moment of death, preserved in volcanic ash. They were like statues. When archeologists finally unearthed the city centuries later, it was like looking at a snapshot of a moment of ancient history.”
“That must have been gross,” Julia said, “finding all those dead bodies.”
“Did any of the people survive?” asked Isabel.
“Yes, some people got out fast and escaped,” replied Miss Z. “But for the people who stayed, their whole city was wiped out.”
“And you were going to send us there?” asked David, incredulous. “That would be even more dangerous than putting us on the Titanic. At least on the Titanic we had the chance to be rescued.”
“Well, my plan was to send you to Pompeii to take a picture of Mount Vesuvius as it was erupting,” Miss Z told them. “You see, it took about a half an hour before all that stuff fell from the sky and landed on the city. In that half hour I would have gotten you out of there safely. That was my thinking, anyway.”
“I don’t get it,” Julia said. “Why didn’t the people get out of Pompeii as soon as the volcano erupted? Why didn’t they evacuate the whole city?”
“Many people tried to get out,” Miss Z explained. “It wasn’t so easy.”
“Yeah, it’s not like they could catch a plane or a train out of town,” Isabel said. “It was the year 79.”
“Right,” Miss Z said, “and a lot of people just decided to stay put in their houses, waiting for the eruption to blow over.”
“Wait a minute,” Luke interrupted. “How do we know any of this stuff is true? They didn’t have radio, TV, or internet in those days. Was paper even invented?”
“Oh yes, they had paper,” Miss Z replied. “We know what happened in Pompeii mainly because a teenager named Pliny the Younger watched the eruption from his uncle’s home across the Bay of Naples. He wrote down everything that happened.”
“That eruption would have made a cool picture for your museum,” said Isabel.
“Yes,” Miss Z said wistfully. “For a long time I’ve been fantasizing about getting a photo for my collection of an event that took place before photography was invented. The first photograph was taken in the 1820s. So we really don’t know for sure what the world looked like before that time. Imagine this—a picture of Mount Vesuvius erupting in the year 79. Talk about a snapshot of a moment of ancient history! How cool would that be?”
“Cool,” said Isabel.
“Way cool,” said Julia.
“Moderately cool,” said David.
“I’ve always wanted to go
