Glimpse (The Tesla Effect Book 1) (18 page)

“Chicken-bacon-ranch?” he asked.
“That’s a new one.”

“No, they’ve had it forever,” she assured him.
“It’s fantastic. With shredded basil under the cheese.”

They retraced their route from a few hours before and made their way back to campus as they passed through the little refurbished downtown with the grassy public square and the gazebo.
Tesla noted that not all of the storefronts had been redone yet, but Angelo’s was still there and it looked exactly the same. They passed two dorms and some student apartments, and were soon in the thick of classroom and administrative buildings. Sam pulled up in front of the library, and Tesla climbed off the back of the motorcycle. She unbuckled her helmet, pulled it off, and handed it to him.

“I’ve got a long shift,” he said.
“Sorry to leave you alone for so long, but it can’t be helped. I’ll pick you up here a little after four.”

“Okay, thanks.”

“Are you gonna tell me what your research is for?” he asked.

She looked at him for a moment.
“No, I don’t think so,” she said. “I don’t want to step on any butterflies.”

“If you don’t tell me that could be the death of the butterfly,” he pointed out.
“There’s no way to know.”

“That doesn’t make it easier, you know,” she said.

“Who said I wanted to make it easier?” Without waiting for her to answer he turned and rode away.

When he was gone Tesla looked up at the university library, at the wide, formal steps that led to its entrance.
It was time she began her research, began to dig into her parents’ work, and the rivalry they had had with Sebastian Nilsen. It was time to look for clues—anything at all—that would help Lydia’s people identify Nilsen in the future and provide some clue as to where he might take her father eight years from now. And then she turned away from the library, which would be of no use to her, and cut across campus toward the physics building and her father’s office.

Though it was a bit risky to take the elevator up to the fourth floor and just walk right into the physics department, Tesla thought she’d be safe enough. It was only eight o’clock in the morning, and it was summer; the campus was pretty quiet, with only a fraction of the usual number of students, faculty, and staff around. And as unlikely as it was that she would run into anyone she knew, if she did, the odds that they would somehow recognize her were negligible. If anyone here knew her at all, it would be as a little kid, not as her nearly-grown-up self. When the elevator doors opened, Tesla walked out, turned left, and walked into the department as if she had every right to be there, though she threw the occasional guilty look over her shoulder.

“Can I help you?” asked the middle-aged woman behind the desk, and Tesla visibly relaxed when she realized she did not know the woman.

“No, thanks, I just need to drop off a late paper for my professor.” Tesla smiled, patted the messenger bag at her side, and walked by without pause in an effort to discourage further conversation.

She held her breath for a moment, but let it out again when the woman did not follow or call out to her.
When the hallway made a ninety degree turn, the front office was lost from view altogether. She checked the name plates on each door as she went, but stopped unexpectedly at the one right before her father’s office.
Dr. Tasya Petrova
, she read, as her fingers moved lightly over the raised letters of the name plate. She sighed wistfully, then remembered that she hated overt displays of sentimentality and moved on. Tesla looked back down the hall to make sure no one watched her, then took the key to her father’s office that she’d taken from the house, slid it into the lock and opened the door, thankful that her father had never thought to request a bigger, better office as the years had passed and his career had advanced. She closed the door behind her and relaxed when she heard the click of the automatic lock slide into place.

She was in, she was alone, and no one knew she was here.

Tesla carefully passed the heavy strap of her messenger bag over her broken arm, over her head, and then laid it on the desk. She sat down in her father’s chair and began to search his desk drawers. A small twinge of guilt pricked her conscience, but it wasn’t like she didn’t have cause, she reasoned.
Where are you, Dad
? she wondered silently. She felt the paralysis of fear creep up on her and shook it off to focus on the task at hand.

The shallow, center drawer held exactly what she’d expected: pens, pencils, a couple of scientific calculators, a ruler, a stapler, and various other mundane office supplies.
She shut that drawer and opened the first of the three drawers to the left of her chair. A tape dispenser, an unopened bag of cheap pens, a heavy 3-hole punch and more of the same were all she found, so she started on the next one and was surprised to discover that what appeared to be a middle and lower drawer was, in fact, one deep drawer that served as a filing cabinet.

Tesla began at the front and worked her way to the back of the drawer, reading the labels on the file tabs.
Grad School Teaching Evals, Thesis Notes, Qualifying Exams, Dissertation Committee Notes, Research Agenda for Job Apps
. It seemed clear that these were old files filled with papers from her father’s graduate work. She took each one out, quickly perused the pages, realized quickly that they were not helpful, and moved to the drawers on the right, only to find that they were locked.

There was no place to insert a key, even if she’d had one, and for a moment Tesla panicked.
This must be where he kept sensitive material, exactly the stuff she probably needed, but she couldn’t open it.
Calm down
, she thought to herself.
Think!
Obviously her dad could open the drawers, and unless there was some kind of sophisticated remote device that wasn’t on the premises, she would figure it out in this room. She began with a close examination of the drawers themselves, but this only confirmed that there was no keyhole of any kind on the smooth metal surface of the drawers. She pushed back her chair, slid down to the floor, and crawled into the knee-space of the desk. It was much darker here, and she couldn’t see very well, so she ran her uninjured hand lightly across the inside surfaces. She was just about to give up and had already turned her thoughts to where in the office she might look next, when the very tip of her index finger touched a raised, rough area on the interior wall of the right hand desk drawers.

Tesla scrambled out from under the desk and jerked the center drawer open.
She pawed through the pens and markers in the hope that her not-always-practical father might just have—and there it was, a small flashlight. She grabbed it, ducked down and crawled back into the space beneath the desk, the flashlight’s thin beam trained on the six-figure combination lock she had felt.

She sat for a moment and stared.
Six numbers. What numbers would her father choose? The commonplace approximation for the speed of light?
186000
. She spun the numbers. Nope, probably too obvious. The first six digits of pi, maybe.
314159
. Fail. Maybe the golden ratio, her dad loved the Greeks.
161803
. Wrong again. Wait, what about
e
, Euler’s number; her mother had been all about order and chaos and randomness! Euler’s number was irrational, significant because it was crucial for probability calculations—what were the numbers again? She turned the tumblers with her right hand and held the flashlight in her mouth to illuminate the lock.
271828
. Just as she dialed the last tumbler into position, she heard a soft click, and the drawers on the right side of the desk slid open an inch.

Okay, I. Am. Awesome
, she thought.

She grabbed the flashlight out from between her teeth, ducked and stood up from underneath the desk—and promptly smashed her head into the center drawer she’d left open.
The pain brought tears to her eyes for a moment, and she gingerly touched the top of her head and felt the stickiness of blood.
Maybe not entirely awesome
, she thought.
What would Finn say now about my talents with spatial relationships
?

She squatted to pick up the pens and other crap that had flown out of the drawer when she hit it, scooped them up, quickly returned them to the drawer and then slammed it shut, harder than was strictly necessary.
Stupid drawer
. Then she sat back down in her father’s chair and scooted in so she could fully open and peer into the two drawers that had unlocked when she’d hit upon the right combination.

The first drawer held a stack of papers, some stapled or paper-clipped together, and a couple of old cassette tapes, unlabeled.
She left the tapes and grabbed the stack of documents and put them on her lap to flip through them. The first was a copy of the abstract of her mother’s dissertation—but Tesla frowned. The
blah blah blah
of adult conversation about scientific research that had swirled around her all her life made her certain that her mother had done her doctoral dissertation on wave-particle duality. The abstract Tesla held in her hand, however—signed and approved by her four committee members—was titled, “The Multiverse: Probability Theory, Randomness, and Wormholes.” Those areas of research were connected, of course, but this title suggested a very different project.

She must have abandoned this project for the one she eventually submitted and, later, published.
Why had her father kept it? It certainly didn’t seem important enough to lock away, but Tesla had already moved on to the pages beneath the abstract. A photocopy of an article published in 1994 in one of the most prestigious theoretical physics journals, with a hastily drawn circle in red pen around the title and an angry exclamation mark next to it, looked up at her. The title was “Time Travel and Patterns in Random Sequences.”

The author was Dr. Sebastian Nilsen.

Tesla’s heart beat faster with excitement. Nilsen’s infamous article, the one that had ruined his career and caused the rift with her parents! The title was so close to her mother’s abandoned dissertation title, it wasn’t much of a leap to conclude that when Nilsen stole her data and published it, Tasya Petrova had changed her dissertation topic.
She should have brought him up on charges, the scumbag
, Tesla thought.

She had just moved to slide the article underneath the pile on her lap so she could examine whatever was next when someone knocked sharply on the office door.

“Dr. Abbott?” said a crisp, insistent woman’s voice.

Tesla froze and held her breath.

“I heard somebody in there just a few minutes ago,” someone else said, a man.

The knock came again.
“Dr. Abbott, are you in there?” Tesla and the woman only a few feet away from her listened intently from their respective sides of the door.

“Sorry,” the woman said.
“You must have heard a noise from one of the other offices. He’s not usually here this early. You’ll have to come back later to have him sign your drop/add form.” Her voice faded as she walked away.

Tesla waited another few seconds before she allowed herself to exhale, but her hands shook now.
She realized that the longer she stayed here, the greater the chance she’d be caught, and she couldn’t even begin to think of what would happen if her father himself came in before she left. She gathered the stack of papers on her lap and shoved them into her messenger bag, which was not easy with one arm in a cast. She had ransacked her father’s office, and he would discover the theft—but surely he had already discovered they were gone, back in two-thousand-and-four, right? Had she always already stolen them—did she even have a choice now?

Tesla moved to shut the drawer and, at the last minute, grabbed the cassette tapes and threw them in her bag as well.
She was scared now, completely overwhelmed by the unanswerable question of whether this act in the past would change the future, or if she chose
not
to act in the past, whether that omission would change the future. She wished, suddenly, that Bizzy was here with her, or Finn or Lydia, even Max, to help her figure this out. How could she know? She was blind, just like everyone else, to the future, but she was also blind to the past and the two were interdependent—and of course, though she had tried to avoid thinking about it, this was all tied to her mother. Her mother, who right now, in this time, would be dead in a few months. If she could somehow warn her, let her know about the car accident that would end her life, she could save her—or perhaps set off the very chain of events that would lead to her inevitable death. How could she know? And just like that, she couldn’t breathe. Panic began to set in, and she was so agitated, so desperate to get out of there
and not have to decide
that she could not take even one more minute to look in the second, lower drawer which remained slightly open. Without a second glance she shut it firmly and slung her bag over her head and across her body. At the door she stood still for a moment, her ear pressed to the door, and listened. She heard nothing, but she feared the carpet in the hallway would effectively muffle the sounds of anyone who walked by or, worse, waited outside to catch her. When she opened the door she might come face to face with—well, it could be anyone, a student, another physics prof, the secretary, who would probably call the cops, or even her father. She finally just had to open the door and look out.