The Lincoln Exchange - Book II

About the Book

This book, the second in The Lincoln Exchange series, is based on an actual series of events that occurred during a three month period in the early life of Abraham Lincoln.  Although the story is certainly original, the category of historical-science fiction definitely is not.  Mark Twain used the same genre in his A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, as did Jack Finney in his well received and much more recent Time and Again.

In this convoluted, but perfectly logical and internally consistent story, I used the device of time travel to turn history on its ear.  At the same time, I maintained strict accuracy with regard to all known facts about our sixteenth president's early life, and of the period in which he lived.

The work was originally conceived as an educational tool, (I am a teacher.) and was not intended for publication.  The outline incubated in my mind for a long time before the writing actually began.  When I finally decided to put it to paper, I expected the resulting book to be fairly short.  It was truly a labor of love, with the plot simply evolving further and further as the characters took on lives of their own.  The fact that it grew to its present length was a complete surprise.  Here, then, is a brief synopsis of the story.

In the early spring of 1828, Lincoln and another young man took a flatboat down the Mississippi River to trade goods in New Orleans for a local merchant.  Toward the end of their voyage, when they put in for a night in Baton Rouge, they were viciously set upon by a gang of slaves bent upon robbing them.  They managed to successfully defend themselves against this onslaught, however, and escaped with their property intact.  Eventually, they reached their destination, completed their business, and returned home by steamer, each richer by twenty five dollars.  Several weeks later, possessing less than eight non-consecutive months of a highly erratic education, Lincoln moved to a nearby town called Rockport, and inexplicably began the arduous study of law.

Every fact in this summary is absolutely true as far as is known, and occurred when the future president was only nineteen years old.  He educated himself well enough to get elected to the Illinois State legislature only a few years later.

This first of two river journeys that young Lincoln undertook is the event that serves as the nucleus of my novel.  The narrator, Alan Gentry, is the other youth who participated in the adventure.  In my tale, however, Gentry is a man of our day, not Lincoln's.  The book reveals at the outset that the ability to travel through time has been developed, but that knowledge of this is shared by very few, and is highly classified.

Gentry has been recruited to work for a recently established but shadowy government agency called TEMPUS; a bureaucracy whose ostensible function is to accumulate historical data, then use computer technology to coordinate any disparate information this data may generate, and develop useful knowledge from it.  Its true purpose, though, is to send people back to specific periods in the past to gather that information by observing and recording those events as they actually occurred.  (TEMPUS is an acronym whose meaning is "Temporal Exploratory Management Program of the United States.")  

    The story and its characters move back and forth through time between 1828 and the present.  All circumstances interweave, however, and are completely dependent upon each other and on actual historical events.

At many points in his narrative, Gentry realizes that he has gotten into the habit of thinking and speaking in mixed tenses.  In Lincoln's time, the true future is Gentry's personal past.  When he is in his own time, but is about to return Lincoln to his, the past then becomes his future.

When the story begins, not much is known

About the Author

Mel Rabinowitz is a New Yorker, born, raised and educated. He and his wife, Joyce, have an apartment in Manhattan, and have been teaching in the New York City public school system for over thirty years. Since they get to share long summer vacations, they have taken advantage of this and have used every one of those summers, since 1967, to travel extensively throughout the world. When their daughter, Naomi, was born, she traveled with them. They have climbed mountains in France, Turkey and Peru, visited with Bedouins in Morocco, and trekked in the jungles of Southeast Asia, and Meso and South America. Mr. Rabinowitz is a skilled amateur photographer and cyclist, and a not so skilled amateur guitarist and pianist. This is his first book.