The Bellbottom Incident Read online

  “Closer to fifteen states and two thousand miles, Julia.” Dr. Little spotted a wayward hairbrush that had rolled out of his duffel bag and sprang on it. “We need a more precise location, obviously.”

  “Xave, did Jenny say anything else?” Abigail asked. “Try to remember. It’s really important.”

  “Jenny…We talked about why I like physics and why she likes chemistry, which turned out to be the same reason—the building blocks of the universe…Then we got into politics for a bit and the election. She’s voting for Ford—what are you gonna do?…What else? She likes Elvis…Hey, I should’ve asked if she wants to go to one of his concerts sometime. I don’t know why I didn’t think of that.”

  I was ready to shake him to get him to focus on the problem at hand, but Abigail guided him back with a gentler approach. “What exactly did Jenny say about Sally? Can you recall?”

  “She didn’t call her Sally—she just said a costumed freshman dressed as a Roman scientist.” He chuckled at this again, but quietly, as if it hurt his head. “They took her in, offered her a bed, and that was when Jenny came to the party. I ran into her just as the party was heating up. Dawn. She was mad at her roommate, Gilberte, who couldn’t be bothered to clean up her half of the room before leaving for the week with her stupid book club.”

  The last bit was clearly a quote.

  “So where did the book club go?” Abigail asked.

  “Don’t think Jenny knew. Wait. She did say that the Roman scientist girl wanted to get to the ocean, and that was why she decided to go with the book club.”

  “They’re on their way to the ocean?” I said with a sudden uncomfortable feeling in the pit of my stomach. I met Abigail’s eyes over Xave’s head. Sabina had waited two days for us to come for her. When we hadn’t, she had jumped at the chance to get to the ocean. It wasn’t surprising. Sabina’s frequent daydream—what I imagined her thinking about when she sat on the shores of Sunniva Lake—was to take a boat across the “big water” we had shown her on the map of the world, all the way to Pompeii. “Just for visit, yes?” she often liked to say, and we had promised her we would arrange the trip one day. She knew the town would be empty, but she wanted the chance to walk its stone streets once more, even if only as a tourist.

  “Xave, you mentioned something about a tree before,” I said.

  His head shot up too fast and he said, “Ow. Yes, some kind of tree came into it.”

  “What kind of tree?” I asked as patiently as I could muster.

  He shook his head at me.

  “This line of questioning is doing us no good,” Dr. Little said. “They’re coming back in a week? Then the easiest thing is to jump ahead in time and meet them here.”

  “Won’t work,” I said.

  Dr. Little sent a glare in my direction that was meant to remind me that I was just a dean’s assistant. I shot him a look back and explained, “Sally is not going to return to St. Sunniva, not with the book club.”

  “Exactly,” Abigail said.

  Dr. Little stared at us as if we’d simultaneously gone mad. “Why on earth not?”

  “Because of the ocean and the ships and everything. Just take our word for it.” I tried to think clearly. “Can’t we just use the Sling—the device we have at our disposal—to jump to early this morning and stop her from getting in the car in the first place?”

  This time it was Dr. Little’s turn to say, “Won’t work. Even if we could jump to early morning—and we can’t because we’re present already, me in Mooney’s room and you and Abigail in the women’s restroom—there would be nothing we could do. It’s already happened. She got in the car and they’ve all left. We need to catch up to where she is now, at this moment. Only we have no idea where they’ve gone.”

  We had hit an insurmountable wall. The three of us went silent as the enormity of the problem sank in, Xave watching us curiously all the while.

  Despair swept over me. Had we saved Sabina from a quick death in the Vesuvius eruption only to have her die a slow one in 1976—homeless on the streets, perpetually time-stuck wherever she went, and in the end finally lost to an unknowable fate?

  12

  Having decided some questions were in order, I tried to think what Nate, being a police officer, would ask if he were here. I reflexively reached for my notepad before remembering that I didn’t even have my shoulder bag, then grabbed a pen and lab notebook from Xave’s desk. I sat down on the unmade bed, opened the notebook to a blank page, and readied the pen. Lists always made a problem more manageable. “Xave, tell us everything you know about the book club, no matter how unimportant it seems.”

  “Here, have more coffee while you talk.” Abigail pushed the mug into his hands.

  He took a slow slurp of the liquid. “It’s a dorm club. They meet in the rec room downstairs.”

  “You called it Udo’s book club. Who’s Udo?”

  “A senior. Udo Leland. Creative writing student. Third floor, I think.”

  “Does he have a roommate?”

  “All the undergrads do.”

  “Well, then, his roommate should know where they went. What room is he in?”

  Xave shook his head. “No idea.”

  “I’ll go knock on doors,” Dr. Little said and left.

  I jotted down in an orderly fashion what we knew so far:

  Gilberte Dubois and Jenny (last name?), Room 104 (where Sally spent the night)

  Udo Leland (book club leader), Room 3??

  Xave Mooney, Room 510

  I looked up from the page. Xave’s head had started to droop, like he might doze off again in his desk chair.

  “I’ll get some fresh coffee,” Abigail said. She grabbed the mug and left as well.

  “Xave?” I said gently.

  “Hmm, what?” Xave mumbled. “Right, Udo. He runs the book club. There are about nine or ten of them in the inner circle of the club. They meet on Friday evenings.”

  I jotted down Friday evenings. “Did all of them go on the midterm break? If any of the members stayed behind, maybe we can track them down.”

  “Couldn’t tell you. It was a car caravan, if two vehicles make a car caravan. Do they? Or do you need more than two cars to call it a caravan? Hey…I just realized something.”

  I looked up eagerly from the notebook. “What?”

  “Caravan has the word car already in it.”

  “Oh.” I had been hoping he’d remembered some significant detail from the previous night.

  Xave looked a little sad again. “Hmm…You know things about me, don’t you, Julia? Am I going to meet anyone special? Or should I just give up and focus all of my attention on my spacetime-warping work? To be honest, I sort of do that already. It’s the only way to do research, isn’t it? You aren’t pursuing a topic, it…it consumes you.”

  I knew this to be often true, having observed many an obsessed academic in my time as dean’s assistant. As to the other—Xave wouldn’t meet Helen Presnik for a few years, not until he was at a couple of stages further down the road in his career, in a junior professorship. The pair would get married, fight a lot, get a divorce, and then rekindle their romance after Pompeii. I have summarized their life together in a sentence, but of course there was much more to it—these events were just the bare bones of a flesh-and-blood life.

  “It’ll all work out, Xave,” I said. “It really will. Now, what about license plates?” I wasn’t sure what we could do if we had the vehicles’ numbers but thought I’d ask.

  “Hmm?”

  “Of the cars in the two-car caravan?”

  “No idea. Udo Leland drives a Ford Mustang, a red one. Everyone on campus knows it.”

  I certainly did. It was a bright red Ford Mustang convertible that had almost mowed me down in a three-way intersection just yesterday. All I could remember of the driver was his long blond hair. Had that been this Udo Leland?

  “Whoever couldn’t fit into the Mustang would have gone in the art bus,” Xave explained.

&nb
sp; I looked up from jotting down the makes of the cars. “Did you say the art bus?”

  “It’s a painted VW minibus. I’ve seen it in the parking lot—one of the undergrads in the dorm drives it.” He added, “It’s a midterm break for all of them, except for Udo Leland—he’s going to be working.”

  This was new. “Working on what?”

  “He’s researching a setting for his novel or something, Jenny said. As I said, it has to do with a tree.” The future professor did not sound too impressed with trees, as if he considered research that didn’t have to do with time travel a frivolous pursuit. I had encountered this attitude in one guise or another in every circle of academia. Everyone thought their field was the one to be in: astronomers studied stars (stars!), physicists the rules that governed the universe (the universe!), anthropologists all of humankind (humankind!), and so on. The young Xavier Mooney was not immune to it.

  “A novel, huh,” I said. So this Udo Leland wanted to be a writer. “I’ve never heard of him, unless he later changed his name to Stephen King.”

  “Hey, I’ve heard of Stephen King. He wrote that book, Carrie, didn’t he? I’ve been meaning to read it.”

  “And he’ll go on to write a few more. Never mind that,” I said as Abigail came back with the refilled coffee, a bit breathless from the stairs. She handed Xave the mug. As he slurped some more, I turned to Abigail and scratched my head with the pen, trying to think how to phrase my question. “If Dr. Little can’t get anything out of the roommate and all else fails, can one of us jump back home and ask Nate to track down Udo Leland in home-time?” I tried to be careful, so as not to give away the year. “After all, he’d know where his own book club went in 1976.”

  Would that work? I wasn’t sure, which is why I’d wanted to ask the question. Would talking to present-day Udo be pointless because the midterm break was already in the past and long over with? Or did we still have a chance to fix things as long as at least one of us stayed on Sabina’s trail in 1976, like a temporal bookmark? The logistics were starting to confuse me. As the TTE grad students, including Abigail, were fond of saying, time travel messes with your head.

  “Who’s Nate?” Xave wanted to know, but I didn’t bother replying.

  Abigail seemed to understand what I was asking and tried to explain, but she didn’t get far before she ran out of words—or, more precisely, her tongue became immobilized by History. “No one would have to stay, though one of us probably should, just in case we’re wrong and Sally didn’t leave with the book club after all. Whoever heads back to the lab will need to keep an eye on the clock. As you know, the clocks here run faster by a factor of…”

  “Yes, I see. Because of the clock rate difference, whatever we do back at the lab would have to be done fast.”

  “Whoever goes back would have just minutes, really.”

  Xave had been looking back and forth between us as we attempted to carry on this stunted conversation, like a spectator in a tennis match that wasn’t going terribly well for either side. The topic—the mechanics of time travel—had seemed to pull him back together. He downed the remainder of the coffee in a long gulp, shuddered, and set the mug on the table with a resounding thump. “Do you need my help in contacting this Nate?”

  “Hardly.” Dr. Little had come back in, having apparently had no luck locating Udo’s room. He continued just as rudely: “What we need is for you to leave and let us have the room. That is, if we’ve decided to stop wasting time here and are ready to tackle the problem from the other end.”

  Nate was pacing back and forth in the lab. He was alone. We had been in 1976 from midday October 31 to the morning of the following day, but less than an hour had passed for him. He ground to a halt in response to the whoosh of warm air that signaled my arrival on STEWie’s platform. His face fell when he saw that I was alone, but I didn’t take it personally.

  “You haven’t found her?” he asked, lending me a steadying hand as I descended from STEWie’s platform. Abigail and Dr. Little had stayed behind to inquire around the dorm, with Xave’s help, about where the book club had gone. We had decided it would be best if I jumped to the lab, since I might find myself shuttled back at any moment anyway.

  “We have,” I explained. “She is with a campus book club.”

  “That’s good news.”

  Since it had only been an hour, he was obviously still in the nice shirt and slacks he’d pulled on for the dinner we were supposed to have at my house. I was sure I looked very grungy after spending the day aimlessly searching around campus and the night in a public restroom. Nate didn’t seem to care. He pulled me to him for a long kiss.

  “There is a small glitch, however,” I said once my feet found steady ground again…and not because of the time traveling, either. “The book club, they’ve gone on a midterm break and we have no idea where. All we know is that they are headed to the East Coast, to the ocean.”

  Since he, too, knew Sabina very well, he saw the problem at once. “And you don’t think she’ll want to leave the ocean.”

  “Sally—I mean Sabina—spent last night in someone’s dorm room. Early this morning—November 1 in 1976—the book club members took off. We think they’re probably headed for Georgia or Florida. Two vehicles, the first a red Ford Mustang, the second a VW minibus.”

  “Hmm…Sabina was able to hitch a ride with them?”

  “I know, it’s a bit weird. I don’t like it. What if she just…disappears?”

  “She’s got a good head on her shoulders. She’ll be fine.”

  “She’s quite capable of sneaking onto a cruise ship going to Europe.”

  “That’s true, she is,” he said in a tone that could only be described as proud. “Hold on—don’t the other students in the dorm know the book club destination?”

  “It seems to be a bit of a mystery. Dr. Little and Abigail are asking around campus. All we know is that there’s a certain tree that interests Udo Leland, the driver of the Ford Mustang and the book club leader. We were hoping you could talk to him in the present and ask him where they went all those years ago, in 1976.”

  “Will that work?”

  “Dr. Little and Abigail seem to think so.”

  He slid into one of the workstations. “You said this Udo Leland was interested in a tree? He was studying to be a biologist or a botanist, then?”

  “No, a writer. The tree had to do with the setting for his Great American Novel or something.”

  “I see. Udo Leland is an unusual name—tracking him down shouldn’t be a problem. Let’s see what we can come up with.”

  A disconcerting thought occurred to me as he commenced a Google search, but I held off on saying anything.

  “Hmm…there’s an Udo here and there, and many Lelands, but none are paired up.”

  “He must be somewhere.”

  “I’ll keep looking.”

  “Okay.”

  “What?”

  “What what?”

  “It seemed like you had more to say.”

  I voiced the unsettling thought that had occurred to me. “If we don’t manage to locate Sabina in 1976, that would mean she’s here in 2012 as a middle-aged woman. What if we did a search on her name…and found her? It would mean that all of our efforts in 1976 are pointless.”

  “Then we should do a search for her name, if only to be sure.”

  “No…Wait. Yes, do it—I need to know. There was something odd about Dr. Mooney’s demeanor earlier—where is he anyway?” I looked around the lab. The unfinished Slingshot 3.0 was still in its place in the middle of the worktable, next to the disemboweled Version 1.0, but the professor was nowhere to be seen.

  “Dr. Baumgartner is on her way to take over guard duty for STEWie. She should be here any minute. Dr. Mooney had some things to attend to off campus.”

  “I bet he did. We just spent a day with him in the past.”

  “Really? He was, what, a graduate student then?”

  “With a mustache. But that’s
not the only odd part. We talked to him and he figured out that we were from the future.”

  Nate frowned at this. “How’s that even possible?”

  “Well, he was a bit condescending and swollen-headed back then. I guess we merely proved that his high opinion of himself was correct.”

  “He’s never said anything to you about having met you back when he was a student?”

  “Never. We saw Dr. Rojas, too, but I’m not sure he took much note of us.” The mild-mannered professor was still on his sabbatical, but I figured calling him up and asking him whether he remembered meeting us in 1976 would be a waste of time. Dr. Mooney was the person I wanted to grab by the collar and talk to.

  Nate had given his attention back to the Internet search. “Hmm…”

  “What?” I leaned over his shoulder to look at the search results.

  “You’ll be happy to know I’m not finding any hits on a Sabina Secunda Tanner.”

  I breathed a sigh of relief.

  “Unless she’s gotten married and changed her last name, of course,” Nate added, ever the cautious police officer. “Or is still keeping a low profile and her personal information off the Internet, as we have taught her to.”

  The lab doors opened and Dr. Baumgartner hurried in, looking a touch irritated that she had been summoned without explanation. “Xavier said you needed me urgently. He didn’t say why.”

  “Sabina is lost in 1976,” I said simply.

  Worry replaced the look of irritation on Dr. B’s face at once. She was as fond of Sabina as the rest of us. “What? How did that happen?”

  “Nate can explain later, but right now I need you to send me back—time is flying by in 1976. I came back to update everyone and to get a couple of overnight kits.”

  “Nineteen seventy-six?” I heard Dr. B ask as I exited the lab. “What on earth is going on?”

  Overnight kits were always kept at the ready in the travel apparel closet. I chose two—Dr. Little had pretty much everything he needed in his duffel bag—and hurried back into the lab with a backpack on each shoulder, balancing the small stack of sandwiches I had grabbed from the vending machine in my hands. My few minutes in the lab would be hours back in 1976; I figured Dr. Little and Abigail would be hungry.