The Bellbottom Incident Read online

  “So she must have spent at least one night, maybe both, there,” I said. “I’m so glad that she was able to get out of the cold and find shelter. Hopefully she managed to get some food, too, after they locked up the cafeteria for the night.”

  “There’s a couch in the women’s restroom?” Dr. Little asked, his brow slightly furrowed. “Why?”

  “There are two, as a matter of fact,” Abigail said. “The restroom is roomier than it is in the present. I think part of it will be converted into a kitchen freezer or something.”

  “Women’s restrooms often do have them…or at least, they used to,” I explained absentmindedly. “For nursing mothers mostly, or if you’re pregnant or have bad menstrual cramps and need to sit down for a bit—well, not you, Dr. Little, but you get the idea. I wonder if that’s where the term restroom comes from.”

  Abigail carefully slid the lunula into her pocket. Dr. Little watched her do it and said, “If Sabina was here last night, she can’t have gone far.”

  “I hope so,” I said, remembering the odd tone of Dr. Mooney’s voice when he’d said that finding her should be straightforward.

  “Why do you say it like that?” Dr. Little challenged me. “Obviously she must have immediately understood that she wasn’t back in 76 AD. She should have known that we would come get her. The prudent thing to do would have been to stick close to the Open Book.”

  He didn’t know Sabina as well as Abigail and I did. She was not one to sit around and wait, not when there was a new place to be explored. She had much of her father’s personality. Secundus had opted to stay in Pompeii to look for his mother and try to protect his shop rather than flee town on foot, as many of Pompeii’s inhabitants did. We had never found out what happened to him, or his mother, Faustilla—whether they had met up and fled to safety or perished.

  I attempted to explain. “It would have been the prudent thing to do, yes, but remember that the details that anchor this decade for us—bellbottoms, smoking on campus, Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford election posters—would mean nothing to her. To her eyes, the campus would only appear slightly different than it does in the present.”

  “She must have been both curious and puzzled,” Abigail said.

  “All right, so she wandered off,” Dr. Little said.

  We all realized that a methodical circuit of campus to check every single building and every single room would take impossibly long. We needed a better way.

  “Maybe she’s trying to find us,” Abigail suggested. “Here, I mean. In 1976. Not me, obviously, but—well, maybe even me if she hasn’t figured out yet how far back in time she jumped, as you say, Julia.”

  I nodded. “Yes, in which case she’d look for us where she expects us to be—the campus security office for Nate, Hypatia House for me…There’s no TTE building for her to look for you, Abigail…but perhaps she’s gone to the physics department to find Dr. Mooney.”

  “If she tried all of those already and didn’t find us, then the lake,” Abigail said. “It’s where she likes to go when she needs to think.”

  Sunniva Lake sat smack in the middle of campus, and Sabina often sat on its reeded shores when she got pensive. The lake’s gentle waters reminded her of her demolished seashore home.

  “Let’s check all those places,” I suggested.

  “I would argue that that’s a waste of time,” Dr. Little said. “You said that those places are the ones she would have gone to first, two days ago. Why would she still be there?”

  “Well, we have to start somewhere. Abigail, why you don’t make a circle of the lake? And once again, Dr. Little, you’ll probably blend into the physics department crowd more easily than us. I’ll swing by Hypatia House and the security office. Then we can meet back by the Open Book. In an hour, say?”

  Abigail and I had the radios Nate and his officer had given us, but we would have no way of reaching Dr. Little. Nothing could be done about that, however. Something occurred to me. “Oh, and Dr. Little? I’ve been meaning to ask—will we get time-stuck less frequently here than we did in Pompeii? No one seemed to care that I was poking around the Registrar’s Office.”

  Dr. Little fought off a tired yawn and confirmed my suspicion. “Yes, you should find it easier to move around.”

  “Because the strands of History aren’t as deeply woven as they are in far time?”

  “Partly, but that’s balanced out by the fact that many of the far-time strands are dusty and irrelevant. The reason is simpler. We blend in. We’re not from so far into the future that we do not belong.”

  “What could be keeping Dr. Little?”

  Abigail and I had managed to keep in touch via the radios, though we had encountered interference, a testy voice instructing us to get off this frequency, as it was reserved for campus security. Abigail had done a full circle of Sunniva Lake, heading from the Science Quad down to the future English department at the lake’s south end, then up the other side past the tower clock, the library, and the dock, and back to her starting point at the Open Book. I had visited Hypatia House and then the security office, which was still where it was in the present, near the south parking lot. After turning off my radio so Abigail wouldn’t try to reach me at an inopportune moment, I had walked right in. I mumbled a weak cover story about having lost a wallet, looked around to see if they had Sabina anywhere, and left. The only bright spot was that the young officer who had promised to keep an eye out for my wallet had been a young and handsome Dan Anderson (in his late twenties, I guessed), our campus security chief before Nate took the job. It had been nice to see him at his prime, before old age ushered him into retirement and a gardening hobby.

  The blanket and bottled water were still there at the Open Book, where the basket—invisible, patient—waited to take us back home.

  After cooling our heels for a good fifteen minutes past the allotted meeting time, Abigail and I decided to look for Dr. Little.

  The lakeside footpath, tree-shaded in spots, took us to the Chemistry and Physics Annex. Marie Curie’s name would be appended to the building’s name one day, but for now its title was strictly utilitarian. The physics side of the annex was connected to its concrete twin by a glass-encased walkway appreciated by professors and students alike in the winter. It looked just the same as it did in the present, though the glass of the walkway was perhaps a little cleaner. Graduate students catching up on their research over the weekend trickled in and out of the coupled buildings, book bags on shoulders.

  Dr. Little was in the courtyard between the two halves of the annex, on a bench by a small fountain under the walkway. He was asleep, his duffel bag by his feet.

  I put a hand on his shoulder, and he jerked awake.

  “Sorry, it wasn’t my fault. I sat down to get a pebble out of my shoe and found I was time-stuck,” he said with no hint that he was aware of the irony of getting time-stuck right after he’d explained why we weren’t likely to. Like Abigail and me, he had retained his modern footwear under the bellbottom jeans—a five-toed sneaker on each foot—which I knew he preferred for walking. “I found that I couldn’t get up at all. There were two students talking—Good Lord, are they still there? Don’t they have work to do?” A male and a female student were chatting by the front doors on the physics side of the building. “What could possibly take so long?” Dr. Little’s tone suggested that he felt graduate students should have more important things to do than socialize.

  Abigail and I had taken a seat on either side of him. I tried to get back up, but my bottom might as well have been glued to the bench.

  “Guess we’re all stuck now,” Abigail said.

  After a good ten minutes of waiting, punctuated by Dr. Little’s irritated sighs, the pair finally disappeared inside.

  Abigail jumped up. “It’s okay now.”

  Dr. Little tentatively got to his feet, reached for his duffel bag, and slung it across one shoulder. As we headed toward the physics entrance, he explained, “I’ve visited this current iteration o
f campus twice already while working my way closer to my birth date. The grad student offices are in the basement. The stairs are at the end of this hall.” He led us down them into a dingy, windowless hallway.

  “This must be it,” Abigail said of the third door down.

  The door didn’t have a list of names, only a piece of paper nailed to it that said If Physics Students You Seek, Look No Further. Abigail raised a hand to knock. She rapped softly first, then, when there was no response, more sharply.

  There was still no answer. She sent a shrug in our direction and turned the handle. The door swung open with a gentle creak, and we filed inside.

  The grad student office was larger than I had expected, but the dozen desks packed into it made it seem cramped. All of the desks were unoccupied at the moment. There were coats hanging on a rack by the door, as if several students were there for the day but elsewhere in the building, either in labs or in the physics library on the top floor. A large blackboard stood in one corner and held equations and a sketch. After a few seconds’ consideration, it dawned on me that the sketch represented an idealized version of STEWie—there were circles where the mirrors would be one day, wiggles for lasers, a square box for the generator, and a small oval for the basket. Abigail—and also Dr. Little, which was a little out of the norm for him—let out chuckles of delight as soon as they noticed it. Abigail took out her cell phone and snapped a picture of the blackboard.

  “Abigail, you brought your phone along?” I chided her.

  “I figured no one’s gonna see it in my pocket. Hey, this must be Dr. Mooney’s desk, look,” she exclaimed. The professor was a bit of a father figure to her, which no doubt fueled her interest. She bent down to examine a pair of mismatched conga drums nestled under the wooden surface. The drums were the start of a collection whose gems would one day include a didgeridoo from far-time Australia and many other musical instruments collected by Dr. Mooney on his journeys in time.

  “Gabriel and Lewis must have desks in here as well,” I said, looking around. “I’m guessing that one is Gabriel’s, judging by the neatly stacked books. And that one is Lewis’s—who keeps a picture of themselves on their own desk? Of all the—”

  “Shh, someone’s coming,” Dr. Little interrupted me, then continued in a low voice, “We better get out of here.”

  We tried, but it was a no-go. History, very firmly, did not want us to leave by the door we had entered, probably because voices were approaching in the hallway outside. We felt a wall of something push us deeper into the office, gently but decisively, toward a corner where there was a second door I hadn’t previously noticed.

  “There’s another exit,” Abigail whispered.

  We quickly tumbled through the second door only to find ourselves shut in a closet.

  7

  Abigail flicked on her cell phone light. We were in a cleaning supply closet, which some quirk of building design had placed in the grad student office. Sharing the small space with the three of us were a vacuum cleaner, a mop and bucket, and a large can, into which discarded paper, food wrappers, and other trash had been dumped in a decidedly non-recycled fashion.

  “…and then she told me she wasn’t interested in dating because she’s too busy with classes. Besides, I’m not her type, she said. I guess she doesn’t like physics students. The lunch only went downhill from there. It was very short, needless to say.” From the first audible word, I knew it was a young Xavier Mooney speaking. I would have recognized his voice anywhere.

  “I don’t think I’ve met this Isobel,” another voice said, accompanied by the thump of textbooks hitting a table. This one was undeniably Gabriel Rojas’s. “Have I?”

  “I don’t know. She’s a geology student.”

  I had met her. She was my boss, a professor of geology turned dean of science. Xavier was very definitely not her type, though not for the reasons he imagined. Back home, Dr. Braga was away for the weekend with Mindy, her longtime partner, for a visit to Mindy’s family in Chicago.

  “I even put on a suit and tie to impress her. Honestly, I don’t know why I bother. Never mind that, though. Something occurred to me during lunch. What if we’re thinking too small with our Time Machine?”

  “Elaborate.”

  “The plan is to try and sell them”—he didn’t say who—“on the concept of sending an object on an infinitesimal jump into the past, a nanosecond or two. But, to be quite frank, that’s just boring.”

  “No jump into the past is boring,” Gabriel said in his usual cautious fashion, the one I was familiar with from countless department meetings.

  Abigail, next to me, was positively twitching with excitement as she eagerly took in every word. Dr. Little was crouched, peering through the closet peephole. I tapped him on the shoulder and he moved aside to let me take a look. I brought my eye to the keyhole. There they were, young Drs. Mooney and Rojas. No, that was wrong; they weren’t doctors yet, I reminded myself. But they certainly were young. Gabriel, thin and scrawny in a plain white T-shirt, had his elbows on the table and looked lost in thought, as he often did. Xavier’s feet were propped up on his desk, which connected to Gabriel’s back-to-back, and he was indeed wearing a tweed suit, though he’d loosened the tie as he leaned back in his chair. They both looked like they needed a good haircut, and there wasn’t a trace of the gray that would one day prevail.

  They both had mustaches! I had to hold my lips tightly together to contain a laugh.

  Xavier took off his tie and waved it in Gabriel’s direction. “I didn’t mean boring in a technical sense, I meant from the bigwigs’ point of view. Hear me out. What if we go bigger, promise a jump of days, weeks, months back in time? Hell, why not years? And not an object but a person! That would get their attention, wouldn’t it? And don’t talk to me about risk or energy expenditure,” he added before Gabriel could reply. “Those are just details, my good man, details.”

  “But we can’t guarantee a weeklong jump. We can’t even guarantee a nanosecond one.”

  “Yes, but we might as well think big, don’t you agree?”

  “Hmm…I don’t know if I’m comfortable promising results which we’re not sure we can deliver.”

  “Isn’t that how the game is played? After all, if we already knew how to do it, that it would work for sure, we wouldn’t need their money. We’d be writing papers and filing patents and so forth.”

  As Gabriel pondered the ethics of this, I felt someone elbow me in the side. It was Abigail, wanting a closer look. I moved to make room for her. “Xave,” Gabriel finally said after a while, “I think the prudent thing to do when seeking funding is to at least try to sound like your project isn’t straight out of a story by Asimov…But maybe we should ask Lewis his opinion.”

  “I did, on the way back here. He thinks it’s best not to mention the words time and travel together and stick instead to talking about warping spacetime. He’s being all political about it.”

  “He’s probably wise.”

  “He insisted that we not call it the Time Machine in our funding proposals. He suggested the Spacetime Warper.”

  Gabriel tested the phrase. “The Spacetime Warper. It doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue.”

  “It doesn’t, does it?…Wait, I got it. How about this? We take the s, t, and the last e from spacetime…and the w from warper. That gives us STEW.”

  “The STEW machine. It sounds a little mushy but could be worse.”

  “Better yet, let’s call it STEWie.”

  “Now that I like.”

  “Let’s remember to tell Lewis about it.”

  Lewis Sunder, I knew, would soon abandon the project to seek a safer topic for his own degree. Years later, when Xavier and Gabriel achieved fame and the promise of a Nobel Prize, he would regret the move, even though by then he would have a prestigious position of his own as the university’s dean of science. But that was years away. Much hard work lay ahead before STEWie would grow from a blackboard sketch into a working lab with a ce
ment-and-steel home. Even then, years of false starts would follow, progress held back because they kept trying to jump into near time, after they’d already been born. The first successful run, in summer of 2010, would be to the sandy dunes of 1903 Kitty Hawk to watch a breakthrough in aviation take place, one that paralleled the astonishing breakthrough Dr. Mooney and Dr. Rojas had just made.

  “In retrospect,” Dr. Mooney had said to me once, “Kitty Hawk was not the best site. The sandy dunes offered little cover, and we weren’t able to get very close. Not to mention all that time wasted on attempting near-time runs. They required less energy, we reasoned, and would be safer and easier to pull off as a demonstration. Little did we know…”

  I wished I could tell the pair to try Kitty Hawk at once.

  “It maddens me that we have to suck up to pencil pushers,” I heard Xavier say, his voice muffled by the closet door. The young Xavier Mooney, brash and full of himself, reminded me of someone—someone besides his older self, that was—and I suddenly realized who: Junior Professor Steven Little, with whom I was currently rubbing elbows in the closet.

  “Science should be pure, free of all that red-tape stuff. I don’t mind the teaching part, but the rest of it…”

  Gabe agreed. “You said it, man. Is that the time? I spent the whole morning in the library and forgot to eat breakfast. Time to grab something before I keel over. Hey, are we still on for going as Einsteins tonight? We are? All right, I’ll see if I can dig up a suit. See ya later, Xave.”

  We heard the office door open and close. The three of us had our ears glued to the cupboard door, which seemed sturdily shut, but it turned out that History was the only thing holding it in place. As Gabriel’s footfalls receded down the hallway, the door burst open under the force of our combined weight, and the three of us fell out onto the linoleum floor of the grad student office.

  Xavier looked up from a stack of papers he had started grading, probably homework from one of the classes he was TA-ing. “How did you three get in there? Is this some kind of undergrad prank? Never mind, I don’t want to know. This office is off-limits to undergrads. How about you use your fancy sneakers to walk out the door?”