The Bellbottom Incident Read online

  I checked my watch, which I had carefully set to the correct time on October 22, 1976. “By the time we walk around the lake, the library will be closed. Unless you want to use the Slingshot to get us there faster, Dr. Little.”

  “I’m not opening up my laptop in this weather.”

  “We’ll get in somehow,” Abigail said. “Leave it to me.”

  Soaked from the now-steady rain, we stopped by the side door to the Crane Library, an industrial-looking one where I guessed book and other deliveries took place during daytime hours. Abigail eyed the lock. “Dr. Little, do you have a paper clip in your bag?”

  “Why would I have one?”

  “Just check,” I said.

  Sheltering the duffel bag under the overhang of the roof, Dr. Little unzipped it and rummaged around. The bag had an inner waterproof layer to protect the contents from inclement weather, such as the current downpour. “Will a pencil do? Pen? Wait, you’re in luck.” He pulled the paper clip off a thin stack of papers and passed it to Abigail, quickly sliding the papers back in to prevent them from being soaked.

  “Give me a minute,” Abigail said.

  We did, and sooner than I would have thought it possible, not having any previous breaking-and-entering experience, we heard a soft click. Abigail pushed the door open. Her strange upbringing had led to some unexpected skills. “You’re welcome,” she said, pocketing the paper clip.

  The night lights had been left on inside, bathing the quiet halls in a soft, ambient glow.

  “Let’s get out of sight in case campus security swings by for a check,” I said.

  We found a good spot away from the windows, a circle of easy chairs of the sort found in most libraries—that is to say, comfy and inviting. Dr. Little glanced at the easy chairs, then picked a high-backed wooden seat at a nearby table. He pushed a textbook left behind by a student out of the way, then retrieved his laptop from the duffel bag. As he did so, a page fell out and onto the floor, one of the ones that had been freed when he gave Abigail the paper clip.

  I picked up the page for him, catching sight of a list of numbers on it as I did so:

  4-9-33-36-39-47

  8-21-32-35-36-38

  20-30-32-43-44-47

  5-7-12-21-32-45

  4-5-18-41-47-48

  11-16-21-26-27-47

  2-10-19-23-26-30

  15-18-22-24-28-49

  …

  “Oh, are these spacetime coordinates?” I was always interested in learning more about the mechanics of time travel. “Precomputed ones you planned to use with the Slingshot 2.0 to edge forward in time until you reached your birth date cutoff?”

  “Something like that, yes,” he answered a bit testily, as if not wanting to be bothered with having to explain things to amateurs. He opened his bag again, and the page joined its brethren within.

  I plopped into one of the easy chairs. Well, he was right. I was an amateur when it came to time travel. But how was I to improve if I didn’t ask questions? Deciding I wasn’t going to let him brush me off so quickly, I said, “I’ve always wanted to learn how to calculate spacetime coordinates. Say I wanted to jump to a prehistoric time and place…” Kamal Ahmad’s recent thesis defense, which I had attended, came to mind. “Neander Valley, 30,000 BC. Does the place and date of the destination somehow get woven into a sequence of numbers and that gets entered into STEWie or the Slingshot?”

  Dr. Little bent down to plug the laptop charger into the wall. “It’s complicated. If you’re really interested in the topic, you should sign up for a class.”

  “You have to be a student to take a class.”

  “Yes, that is a problem.”

  Abigail had taken the easy chair opposite me. “STEWie uses light to warp spacetime so the point where you are meets up with the point where you want to go, like fingers pinching four-dimensional dough. You orient the STEWie mirrors just so, fire up the lasers and the generator…and there you are, fresh out of the basket, in Neander Valley. STEWie is the SUV of time travel—it’s an energy-guzzling way to travel in time compared to what the Slingshot can do.”

  “And the Slingshot?” I asked.

  “Let’s see, what’s the opposite of an SUV? Something slim, trim, and efficient that requires very little gas except for a starting push.”

  “A bobsled?” I suggested. “Never been in one, but I’ve seen them in the Olympics on TV.”

  “A bobsled, then. One that can go in both directions.”

  Dr. Little glanced up from the laptop, as if the current topic actually intrigued him, but said nothing.

  “Like we said, though, we’re not really sure how the Slingshot works, not really. Other than that it’s prone to dropping travelers into ghost zones,” Abigail said, trying out another of the armchairs.

  “Well, at least we aren’t likely to encounter many ghost zones in good old 1976.” I wondered what was inside the device that was sitting there so innocently next to Dr. Little’s laptop and whether he ever got the urge to just open it up and look. It was somewhat larger than the laptop, though it had a smaller screen and keyboard, and there were wire loops sticking out of it here and there. Not quite how I would have pictured a device from the future, if that was what it was.

  Abigail curled up in the armchair. “You should sign up for a class, Julia. Even just to audit. I think you’re good at this whole time-travel thing.”

  “I am? How so?”

  “You don’t let it mess with your head. Time travel isn’t—you know—easy.”

  “It’s not,” Dr. Little concurred for once. He fought off a yawn. “Not computationally, physically, or mentally. I suppose we need to decide where to jump to next—to another book club meeting or Udo’s room to see if we can find any clues.”

  “No.” I decided an executive decision was in order. They both had bags under their eyes. “You two need some rest. There is nothing more we can do tonight. We’ll regroup in the morning. That will give Nate time to track down Udo Leland in the present. As for me, I’m going to fetch the copy of The Sirens of Titan and see if I can glean anything more from it.”

  Abigail pulled the book out of the pocket of her coat. “Here, Julia.”

  “You snuck a book out of the library? And then back into it?”

  “I figured in the worst-case scenario we could return it when we got back home and pay a hefty fee.”

  “Hmm. I guess that’s all right,” I said, taking the book. “I’ll keep an eye out for place-names, especially ones on the East Coast.”

  The others headed to the library restrooms to get ready for the night and, as Abigail said, “To check if there’s a couch in there.” The backpacks I had brought for us held a thin mat each, but a couch would certainly have been more comfortable.

  She came back first—“No couch”—and pushed two armchairs together before stretching out on them and closing her eyes. Dr. Little came back and unrolled his mat—a thicker, more solid one—to one side away from us. He settled in after instructing me, “Keep an eye out for campus security. They make building rounds throughout the night.”

  “I know. They usually don’t go inside buildings, though.”

  I found an armchair away from Abigail and Dr. Little and flicked on a nearby lamp. I had given up trying to keep track of the time-travel lag, deciding to eat and sleep whenever I felt like it and not according to my wristwatch, which I made sure to still carefully adjust every time we jumped.

  I turned to the page in the story where I had left off, right after the CSI definition, and read on.

  As the campus clock struck 2:00 a.m., I left Abigail gently snoring in the easy chairs and Dr. Little prone on his sleeping mat, and snuck out of the library. Not having Abigail’s questionable skill for breaking and entering, I made sure to leave the door unlocked behind me. I hoped campus security wouldn’t swing by to check.

  I didn’t have any particular purpose in sneaking out; rather, I just wanted to clear my head a bit after reading for two hours straight. I pick
ed a destination at random—Hypatia House, where my office would one day be—and set a brisk pace. The rain had stopped. The night air was cool, but there wasn’t even a hint of wind, which made the cold tolerable. Despite the late hour, I crossed paths here and there with a student on a bicycle or a couple intertwined in a dorm doorway. Occasionally I heard the unmistakable sound of a Friday-night party through an open window or glimpsed campus security as they made their rounds by car on the well-lit campus streets.

  Seeing another of the intertwined couples—not my parents—made me wonder if their argument really had been about who was having dinner with whom, or if there was more to it. I hoped the issue wasn’t my impending arrival, though I still had the feeling Dad didn’t know about it yet, not at this earlier book club meet nor the later one I had gone to first. I had always thought that my parents seemed to get along very well, in a sort of cheerful, half-exasperated way, as though their very quirks and differences were what drew them to each other. Mom was chattier than Dad. Dad liked to be up and about early, while she liked to sleep in a bit. He liked spicy food, she preferred plain. And yet they had lived and worked together harmoniously for years, first running the Thornberg paper and now the retirement community. It was a situation that might have fractured the strongest couple, but all their rough edges and sharp points worked to their benefit. They were two irregularly shaped puzzle pieces that fit just right.

  As I swung around the north end of Sunniva Lake, where the dock was, I found myself thinking of the Fourth of July picnic, the one that had been the source of the photo Sabina had taken along. Tonight the wooden dock was a dark strip in the calm surface of the water, and the reeds where it met the sand were bare and stark. On the Fourth of July the reeds had been tall and green, and we had all met up just before dusk, as it was a decent spot for viewing the town fireworks.

  The day had started off on the wrong foot because of a morning dentist appointment for Sabina. It had been one in a long sequence of appointments intended to bring her teeth up to modern standards in health and appearance. By afternoon the Novocain had worn off and the puffiness of her cheek had subsided—she had been nervous that she would stay that way forever, with one of her cheeks unnaturally inflated—so her smile was back as well.

  “Fire works?” she’d asked, sounding puzzled, as she and Abigail hauled the larger of the coolers out of the trunk of my Honda.

  “Not two words,” I explained, “but one. Fireworks. They’re not really fire; they’re more like shooting stars sent up into the sky.” I winced, worried that everything I was saying must be reminding her of the Pompeii eruption. She didn’t seem to mind. Still, I thought that it was probably good that we’d decided to watch the display from by the lake rather than opting for a more close-up view at the high school field, from where the town fireworks would be launched loudly and brightly.

  Nate had pulled into the lot after us and parked his Jeep in a shady spot. As was his wont, he attended to a bit of campus business before coming over to help, advising a student who was trying to snag a visitor parking spot that all students needed to park in the orange zone. Wanda was trotting around excitedly at his heels.

  Celer lumbered down out of the Honda, having decided that all the action was outside, and waddled over to where we were setting up our picnic on the tiny sandy beach that housed the dock. Wanda raced ahead of Nate to greet the older dog, who placidly submitted to her attentions. I unrolled a pair of oversized blankets and spread them on the ground. We were expecting four more people: two professors—Xavier Mooney and Helen Presnik; and two graduate students—Kamal Ahmad and Jacob Jacobson. Sabina was happy that Jacob wouldn’t see her with one puffy cheek. She had a bit of a harmless schoolgirl crush on the ginger-haired second-year grad student, a crush he was oblivious to.

  I waved a mosquito away and greeted Nate.

  “Where do you want this?” He was carrying a case of gourmet ice tea.

  “Put it in whichever cooler has more room.”

  “Lovely day, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, it is.”

  The exchange was not as insipid as it sounds, or maybe it was. But the Fourth of July picnic was before the incident with the runestone, before our first kiss in a fourteenth-century woodland. We were still in that equally awkward and exciting phase of things when all conversation, even that related to the weather, takes on a special meaning. I saw Abigail, whose hair was dark purple that day, wink knowingly at me.

  Nate deposited the tea in one of the coolers and turned to Sabina. “How are the teeth?”

  “Feel same. Look better.”

  “Are you excited to see the fireworks?”

  “Yes,” Sabina said in her distinctive accent. It didn’t hide the combination of bravado and uncertainty that underlay the word. In moments like these I was reminded of how young she really was. An older person might simply have said, “Not really. It sounds like a loud and strange thing,” but she was not only young but out of place, unsure of her surroundings or of what to expect.

  “Just keep in mind that it’s a happy occasion, a celebration,” Nate said easily.

  “Celebrate what?” Sabina bent down to rub Wanda’s soft head, and the dog accepted the attention, rolling onto her back in the sand. Abigail smiled, as if to say, Good luck with this one, and walked off after announcing her intention to get some bug spray.

  Nate scratched his head. “This country’s independence from Great Britain—Britannia?—which we won many years ago. And independence…Let me see if I can think of a similar example from ancient Roman history…Can you think of anything, Julia?”

  “I’ve been meaning to read up on my Roman history but haven’t had a chance yet. We can ask Helen when she gets here. She would know.” I tried to summon some long-buried information from my college studies. “Uh, didn’t Rome have kings before it became a republic with a senate? There were seven of them, I think, weren’t there? Not all at once, but in a row, one after another?”

  This seemed familiar to Sabina. She nodded. “Yes. Seven—how you say?—kings.”

  “Well, there you are,” I said. “Was the last one overthrown by the people, the seventh of these kings?” I tried to think of words she might know. “Overthrown means gotten rid of…done with…”

  “Done with, yes.”

  The mention of Romans led us to Roma, which Sabina had never been to. Rome was the New York City of her day, and Abigail and I knew it had been a childhood dream of hers to visit it. Not to mention that she was set on paying respects to the goddess Diana, whose statue still stood in the Pompeii forum, something we could hardly make happen in the US. This was the conversation, the one where I should have picked up on her strong feelings about it. Instead, I had waved another mosquito away and said idly, “Maybe one day we could take a vacation to Pompeii and Rome,” and quickly added, “Well, whoever wants to go.”

  I didn’t want Nate to think I was hoping he’d want to travel with us. Or maybe I was, and that was why I had failed to notice how strongly Sabina had latched on to the idea.

  Nate had simply nodded in agreement. “That’s not a bad idea—I’ve never been to Europe. Well, not counting our few days in ancient Pompeii and that one stop in London on the way back…I suppose I mean I’ve never been to modern Europe.”

  “Who’s going to Europe?” Abigail was back with the bug spray. Jacob and Kamal were with her, having walked over from the TTE building (empty-handed, I noticed, but I had expected that of grad students and had brought enough food to cover everyone.)

  “We all,” Sabina said.

  “Are we going any place and time in particular? And when?” Kamal asked. “I’ve got so much preparation to do for my thesis defense.”

  “To Pompeii and Rome,” I explained. “One day. And we’re not using STEWie for it. Just airplanes and trains.”

  “I don’t have a passport.” Jacob was Dr. Rojas’s junior student and lived with his parents in town, above their book-and-antiques shop. Sabina gave Jacob a
smile that showed her new teeth. He didn’t notice.

  “Well, get one,” Abigail said. She commenced spraying Sabina’s arms after instructing her to stretch them out. “I’d love to go, but someone will have to fund me. I’m just a grad student—no travel money.”

  “Me too,” Jacob said.

  “I guess I could ask my parents for my share,” Kamal said. “Maybe it could be a graduation present for me on their part.”

  I didn’t remember inviting half the TTE grad student office. “I’m glad you’re all on board with the idea. I suppose we could try to figure something out, get a group rate perhaps.”

  I had meant to look into organizing it, but I’d figured there was no rush—Sabina was still getting used to modern life, Abigail and Kamal were coping with thesis writing, and I was dealing with Quinn-related issues. For adults, the promise of doing something “one day” means a few years into the future, when a good opportunity comes up. I had even vaguely thought that once she was old enough, Sabina might join the Time Travel Engineering program and get to Pompeii—the past one—that way.

  Young people sometimes need things to happen faster.

  And so Sabina had taken matters into her own hands. But her plan had gone awry and she had landed here in 1976. When the opportunity to get to the ocean presented itself, which she knew was the first step to getting back to Italy, she took it. At times young people can be so blindly optimistic. I see it all the time with incoming students—freshmen arriving with high hopes that they’ll choose the right major at once, ace all their classes, be popular with all their peers, and are then bothered when it doesn’t all happen according to plan. Not that I don’t still consider myself young, but for good or bad I was past that stage where everything seems possible. Not much in life ever happens according to plan, and usually that’s okay. Granted, Sabina had more cause to know about life’s turbulence than most, and, standing there by the still water with campus lights twinkling all around, I was happy she had managed to retain her youthful enthusiasm, even if it sometimes led to not-the-best decisions.