Impossible Things (40 page)

“For
your
information,” the man said, wrestling with something in the overhead compartment, “Carlos is paid to say things like that to overweight, middle-aged women.”

Andrew took his plastic safety-instructions card out of the seat pocket and began reading the emergency-exit diagrams.

“I’ve been thinking about going on tour,” the woman said.

“Now that’s what I mean,” the man said, pulling down a tennis racket in a zippered lavender cover. “You’re getting carried away with this tennis thing!”

“The way you got carried away with those Managua municipal bonds? The way you got carried away with
that little blond in securities?” She grabbed the tennis racket out of his hands.

According to the safety card there were emergency slides over both wings. If he could climb back over the seats till he got to row H and then pull down the handle on the emergency door …

“I thought we agreed not to talk about Vanessa,” the man said.

“I am not talking about Vanessa. I am talking about Heather.”

Andrew sat back down in his seat, fastened his seat belt, and pretended to read the proposal until everybody but the flight attendants had gotten off the plane. The proposal didn’t make any more sense now than when he had read it in earnest.

He looked longingly at the emergency-slide handle and then stuck the proposal in his duffel bag and walked out through the covered walkway and into the terminal. Dr. Young and a fiftyish woman with disorganized hair were the only people left at the gate. The woman was looking interestedly down the hall.

“Dr. Simons,” Dr. Young said, coming forward to shake his hand. “I want you to meet Dr. Lejeune. Dr. Lejeune, Dr. Simons is going to run the psychology end of our little project. Dr. Lejeune?”

Dr. Lejeune came over and shook his hand, still trying to peer down the corridor. “This woman just hit some man over the head with a tennis racket,” she said.

“She found out about Heather,” Andrew said.

“We’re very excited to have you working with us,” Dr. Young said. “I’ll be working with the oscillator, and Dr. Lejeune will be running the computer interp.”

“Since when?” Dr. Lejeune said.

Andrew began looking for emergency exits. There didn’t appear to be any.

“Dr. Gillis told me I could choose whatever staff I
needed. I told him I wanted you as my second in command.”

Dr. Lejeune was glancing around as if she were looking for a tennis racket to hit Dr. Young over the head with. “Did you also tell him I think your project is completely addlepated?”

I should have had at least two more Scotches, Andrew thought. Or what were those things he had drunk when he ushered at Stephanie Forrester’s wedding? Clockstoppers. He should have had a clockstopper.

“Addlepated?” Dr. Young said. “Addlepated! Dr. Simons here doesn’t think it’s addlepated. He came all the way from Tibet to work on this project. Tell us, Dr. Simons, is ‘addlepated’ the word that springs to mind about this project?”

The word that sprang to mind was disaster. He should have had a lot of clockstoppers. Ten. Or fifteen.

“No,” he said.

“You see?” Dr. Young said triumphantly to Dr. Lejeune. He took Andrew’s bag. “We’ll go straight back to the lab and I’ll show you the oscillator. And then I’ll outline my theory in more detail.”

His junior year hadn’t been half-bad, all things considered, Andrew thought, walking out to the car with them. He had had to usher at Stephanie Forrester’s wedding, and when the minister had read that part about, “let him speak now or forever hold his peace,” the entire congregation had turned and looked at him, but otherwise it hadn’t been half bad.

Dr. Lejeune didn’t speak to Dr. Young on the way home from the airport even though he didn’t realize until they got to the Porsche that there wasn’t room for all three of them and then told her to take Andrew’s duffel bag and go find a taxi. Andrew, who was looking either jet-lagged or sorry he had ever left Tibet, insisted on being the one to take the taxi, and Dr. Young spent the trip
back to the university telling her how her attitude was undermining the project. She maintained a stony silence.

She maintained it through his announcing that their research was not going to be done at the university but at an elementary school in a town called Henley that was halfway across the state and through his unveiling of the temporal oscillator, even though it was close on that one. It looked like a giant lava lamp.

She talked to Dr. Gillis instead, but she didn’t get anywhere. Dr. Gillis refused to take her refusal to work on the project seriously. Worse, he thought shiftable hodiechrons and temporal oscillation were entirely plausible, and when she told him she thought Max was having some kind of midlife crisis, Dr. Gillis stiffened and said, “Dr. Young is three years younger than I am. I would hardly call him middle-aged. Besides, he is far too intelligent and sensible a man to have a midlife crisis.”

“That’s what I thought,” Dr. Lejeune said, “till I saw the Porsche.”

She went back to the lab and Andrew Simons, who was staring at the temporal oscillator. He looked terrible. Max hadn’t given him a minute’s rest since he got there, but she had the feeling it was more than that. He looked unhappy. He needs to get married, she thought. I really should introduce him to Bev Frantz. She’s pretty and smart and unmarried. She’d be perfect.

“How can this be a temporal oscillator?” Andrew said. “It looks like a lava lamp.”

Dr. Young came in, beaming. “I’ve just been talking to the school secretary in Henley.” The top of his head was bright pink with excitement. “I decided you needed an assistant, Dr. Simons, and they just called to say they’d hired someone. Her name’s Carolyn Hendricks. She’s perfect. She’ll be helping you with the screening and getting coffee and things like that.”

“Why does she need to be perfect if all she’s doing is
getting the coffee?” Dr. Lejeune almost asked, and then remembered she wasn’t speaking to him.

“She’s forty years old, married, secretary of the PTA, and has two daughters. Her husband coaches the girls’ gymnastics team. The seasons’ just started,” he added, as if that were perfect, too. “Which reminds me—” he said, and hurried out.

Why is her husband’s coaching a bunch of teenaged girls in leotards perfect? she thought. Does he expect her to fly off the uneven bars and into the past?

“Have you ever heard of a drink called a clockstopper?” Andrew asked, still staring at the lava lamp. “I used to drink them in college.”

“No,” Dr. Lejeune said, frowning at the door Dr. Young had just left by.

“Beer and wine,” Andrew said. “That’s what they were made out of. The clockstoppers.”

“Oh,” said Dr. Lejeune, still frowning. “We called them cataclysms.”

Carolyn dropped Wendy at the middle school and drove over to the elementary.

“Where am I supposed to go?” she asked Sherri in the office. “The library?”

“No,” Sherri said, handing Carolyn a sheaf of papers. “You’re downstairs in the music room.”

“Where’s music?”

“In with the PE classes. They divided the gym in half with masking tape.”

“And the music teacher stood for that?”

“She had to. Old Paperwork told her how much money Dr. Young was paying to use the school for this project.”

“If he’s paying so much, why didn’t he let him use the library?”

“I don’t know. The music room
is
pretty cramped.”

“I know,” Carolyn said. “I did hearing tests in there
last year. The room’s L-shaped, and the light switch is at the top of this hall part next to the door and about a million miles from the main part of the room. The third-graders were always switching it off on their way to recess and leaving me in the dark, because there aren’t any windows. Can’t you see if we can be in the library instead?”

“I’ll ask Old Paperwork,” Sherri said. “I don’t know what you’re griping about, though. I’d love being stuck in a small space with a gorgeous-looking man like that.”

“Dr.
Young
?”

“No. The guy you’re working with.” She fumbled through the papers on the counter. “Andrew Something.” She picked up a pink sheet and looked at it. “Andrew Simons. Speaking of gorgeous looking, how’s that adorable husband of yours?”

“Adorable,” Carolyn said, smiling. “When I get to see him. Gymnastics is our worst time of the year. And this year’s been even worse because of his having to hire a new assistant coach.”

“I heard they hired some twenty-year-old who looks like Farrah Fawcett.”

“They did,” Carolyn said, looking through her collection of forms. “Don was really upset. He spent two whole weeks doing interviews and then the board hires this Linda person, who never even applied.”

“I’ll bet he’s not all that upset,” Sherri said. “He gets to work with Farrah Fawcett, you get to work with this absolute hunk of a psychologist—why don’t I ever get to work with anybody gorgeous?” Sherri asked. “Do you know what happened to me when I had the Make Me Marvy guy at my house? He wrapped a dish towel around my head, held up a few swatches, and told me I look sallow in pink. It isn’t fair. The married women are grabbing all the eligible bachelors. Like Shannon Williams’s mother.”

“Shannon Williams’s mother?” Carolyn said, looking
up from her papers. “I thought it was Brendan’s mother who ran off with the colors guy.”

“It was. Shannon’s mother is messing around with some guy she works with at the bank. It seems they had to spend all this time in the vault together, and the next thing you know … Speaking of which, how much time will Don have to spend with this Linda person?”

“I think I’d better get down to the music room before the bell rings,” Carolyn said. “Is this Dr. Simons down there?”

“I don’t know. He’s been in and out all morning, carrying stuff. I’ll check with Old Paperwork about the library. And in the meantime, you watch out for this Andrew Simons guy. That music room is even smaller than the vault.” She held the pink paper up to her neck. “Do you really think pink makes me look sallow?”

“Yes,” Carolyn said.

Andrew hooked the temporal oscillator up to the response monitors and plugged the whole thing into the only outlet he could find in the music room. The lights stayed on.

Good, he thought, and started hooking up the rest of the response wires, which were supposed to register reactions in the students they tested.

According to Dr. Young they would be screening to find children who saw time as blocks rather than a continuous flow. These children would have longer hodiechrons since, according to Dr. Young, their hodiechrons got progressively shorter as they learned to perceive time as a flow.

After Andrew had found these children, they would be hooked up to the temporal oscillator and worked into an excited emotional state and they would begin switching their hodiechrons around. Dr. Young claimed he had been able to make it happen on a subatomic level.

“Maximum agitation,” Dr. Young had said. “Simple
bombardment won’t do it. The key is maximum agitation.”

“But even if it does happen at the microcosmic level, what makes you think you can make it happen in macro?” Dr. Lejeune had asked, the first thing she’d said to Dr. Young in a week and a half.

“It already happens,” Dr. Young had said. “You’ve both experienced it. The sensation of déjà vu. The now is displaced for a millisecond by a hodiechron from the past, and you have the sensation of having seen or heard something before. It usually occurs when you’re in an excited emotional state. Déjà vu is temporal displacement, and what we’re going to do in this project is to produce it in longer hodiechrons so the displacement lasts a second, a minute, as long as several hours.”

Andrew didn’t believe a word of it. He had told Dr. Lejeune so while they packed the equipment for the trip to the elementary school in Henley.

“I don’t believe it either,” she’d said.

“Then why are you staying?”

She’d shrugged. “Somebody needs to be around to save him from himself, or at least to pick up the pieces when his precious oscillator doesn’t work. But that’s no reason for you to stay. So why are you?”

I don’t know, he’d thought. Why did I agree to usher at Stephanie Forrester’s wedding? “Maybe I’m having a midlife crisis,” he said.

“Along with everybody else around here,” Dr. Lejeune had said, and then looked thoughtful. “You’re forty-two, right?” she said. “Hmm. Did you have a girlfriend in Tibet?”

“I was in a lamasery in the Himalayas.”

“Hmm,” she’d said, and handed him another piece of equipment.

There was too much equipment. He didn’t even know what some of it was. There was a medium-size gray box with only an on-off switch on it and two smaller ones
without even that, and no jacks to plug any of them into anything else. He wondered if they were something the music teacher had left behind. He set them on the piano along with the photon counter and the spectroscope.

The lights went off. “Hey!” he said. The lights went back on.

“Sorry,” a woman’s voice said. She came down the ell and into the room. She had short dark hair and was wearing a skirt and blazer. She extended her hand. “I’m Carolyn Hendricks. I couldn’t tell if you were here or not, and I didn’t want to get locked in. Sherri forgot to give me a key. I called a couple of times, but the room’s soundproofed unless you really yell.”

He shook her hand. “Which you knew I’d do if you turned off the lights?”

“Yes,” she said. “I had to do hearing tests in here last year, and the third graders think it’s funny to flip the light switch on their way out to recess.” She smiled. “I yelled a lot.” She had a nice smile.

“For a minute there I thought maybe I’d blown the lights,” he said, indicating the jumble of wires. “Would you believe there’s only one outlet in the whole room?”

“Yes,” she said. She watched him plug the spectrum analyzer into the power supply. “Maybe it would be a good idea if I brought in a flashlight tomorrow, just in case we blow a fuse.”

“Or a miner’s lamp,” he said, peering at the back of the spectrum analyzer. “It got awfully black in here when you turned off the light.”

“ ‘Black as the pit from pole to pole,’ ” she said.