The Bellbottom Incident (3 page)

The lab ceiling light caught the reflective stripes on the professor’s pants, which went along with his usual method of transportation—Scarlett, his red bicycle. “I would send her on foot with a GPS unit to wherever I was planning to jump, and she’d help me gauge the Slingshot’s accuracy. That sort of thing. I never thought…” He didn’t finish the sentence.

“You gave her the security code for the lab door?” Nate asked, not unkindly.

“Of course not! She was a favorite visitor here, and we all always tried to make her feel welcome—well, not Steven, but that’s just how he is. Giving her the code would have been a completely different matter, Chief Kirkland. I’m not sure how she got in, but she must have seen Steven’s run listed on the roster”—the roster hung on the wall just inside the lab door—“and misinterpreted the destination.” Dr. Mooney griped, as if it mattered at the moment, “I’ve asked Steven before to write out his dates fully in the roster, but he seems to expect everyone to know the specifics of his research.”
 

“It’s not your fault, Xavier,” I said, “it’s mine. I shouldn’t have insisted that we keep the story from getting out. I wanted to give her more time.” Or maybe I didn’t want Quinn deciding the when and where for us. “Actually,” I admitted, “I had hoped that we could avoid it altogether, that the matter would stay known only to the TTE staff and Chancellor Evans.”

“If it’s anyone’s fault, it’s mine.” It was the first thing Abigail had said since we’d walked into the lab. She pulled herself to her full height (all five foot and change of it) and crossed her arms over her chest. I hoped she didn’t blame me. This being-an-aunt thing was more complicated than I had anticipated. It was hard to know when to offer help and advice…and when to butt out. “I should have noticed that Sabina was unhappy. I’m her guardian and I’m responsible for her well-being.”

Nate looked from me to Abigail and back. “I think we all wanted to protect her. Anyway, there’s no use crying over spilled milk. We can ask her how she got the code for the door once she’s safely back.”

“Wait,” I said. “You don’t think someone…wanted her out of the way, do you? Gave her the code and encouraged her to go? Someone who knew her real background.” I didn’t get an answer, but then, I hadn’t really expected one. I was just thinking out loud. “How surprised she must have been to find herself not in Pompeii but in a strange time period. I can picture her wandering around campus, trying to pin down the year, but once she did so…shouldn’t she have jumped back already? She can’t
want
to stay in 1976.” I had been glancing toward the mirror-laser array, expecting to be hit with a warm
whoosh
as the basket returned onto STEWie’s platform with Sabina in it.
 

Dr. Mooney gestured wordlessly toward the shelf above his workstation. A small device about the size of a cell phone sat there next to its identical backup. “She didn’t take the Callback.”

We all knew what that meant.

Sabina couldn’t come back. She was stuck in 1976.

“She didn’t take the Callback?” Abigail asked, her face falling. “She must have had no intention of returning, no matter what.”
 

I put a hand on her shoulder and wanted to tell her not to take it personally but didn’t know how to frame the words.

“Has anyone called Dr. Little?” Nate said, now fully in his campus security chief mode. “We need him to go on his run to 1976 as soon as possible. Tonight.”

“I couldn’t reach him, Chief Kirkland,” Dr. Mooney said. “His phone must be off so as not to wake Piper. I texted him as well, but no response yet.”
 

Steven Little was not only a junior TTE professor but the father of a six-month-old baby girl, Piper.

“I’ll send Officer Van Underberg to fetch him.” Nate turned aside to deliver the order into his police radio.

Abigail peered at the STEWie log over Dr. Mooney’s shoulder. “Are those Dr. Little’s notes? Let’s see…He set the system for one o’clock on October 29, with the intended destination…the Open Book sculpture, it looks like. Well, that’s good, at least. I was worried Sabina might have jumped into subzero January weather.”

“My old lab coat is missing from the lab locker,” Dr. Mooney said. “But it won’t help her if it’s a cold or snowy October. It’s just light cotton.”

I involuntarily looked in the direction of the locker, as if it could yield some answers. “She took your old lab coat along? I wonder why—she must have known it wouldn’t belong in the ancient world. Did she take anything else from the lab?”
 

“Not as far as I could tell.”

“The Fourth of July photo from her room is gone. And her Pompeii clothes,” I explained. This was making no sense. Sabina had donned her old dress and sandals in anticipation of returning to the ancient world. But why had she brought the modern lab coat and photo with her?

Nate rejoined us, saying, “Van Underberg is on his way to Dr. Little’s house and will bring him here as soon as possible. We need to get going. The clock is ticking fast in 1976.”

His words made my stomach sink a bit. A second rule of time travel is that clocks carried by researchers touring the past tick faster than clocks do in the present. Much faster. One hour in the past equals just over two minutes in the lab. I glanced at the timer on Dr. Mooney’s computer screen. Sabina had been gone an hour and twenty-five minutes now. I did the math in my head. She’d been in 1976 for a day and a half—alone, frightened, probably cold and hungry. I could see Abigail thinking the same thing and tried to put a positive spin on the situation. “As you said, Abigail, at least it’s October and not the depths of winter. And she’s on campus—there are far more dangerous places and times she could have ended up in, war zones and other ghost zones I don’t even want to think about.”
 

“Yes, it should be fairly straightforward to get her back,” Dr. Mooney said, though something about his tone told me that he thought nothing of the sort.
 

My stomach sank further. As time travel went, jumping back thirty-some years was a blip on the scale of human history. On the other hand, one could never know what to expect when attempting to navigate History’s alleys. What if we didn’t manage to find her? Or, if someone
had
purposefully given her the code, what if they stood in our way and made sure we
couldn’t
find her?
 

Nate was in full take-charge mode. “Let’s leave as soon as Dr. Little gets here. I’ll grab some water, a blanket, and a first aid kit.”
 

“Uh, Chief Kirkland—” Abigail began as Nate turned toward the lab doors. Dr. Mooney intercepted Nate by putting a hand on his shoulder. “You can’t go.”

“You need me to stay here until we leave?”

“I mean, you can’t go after Sabina.”

“Why not? Surely STEWie has cooled and recharged by now. Is it the double basket issue?” He was as impatient to get going as I was.

Dr. Mooney shook his head. “That’s not the problem. Your basket will return because Sabina’s is already there, but you can use hers to jump back home. Chief Kirkland, she traveled to 1976. What year were you born?”

“Nineteen seventy-one. Dammit. Of course.”

“You can’t travel to a time period in which you already exist,” the professor reminded us.
 

And there it was, a subheading of History protecting itself, one Sabina had perhaps forgotten in her eagerness to return to her home town of Pompeii.
 

Abigail, who was the youngest person in the room, said, “I can go to 1976 just fine, so that’s one.”

“And you’re two, Julia,” Nate said. “You were born in 1977, weren’t you?”

Dr. Mooney, who had sat back down at the computer, took his attention away from the screen to give me a look. “Were you? I always assumed you were younger than that, Julia. Sorry, that came out rude.”

“No harm done. I’ve been told often enough that I’m baby-faced. Just the other day someone assumed I was an undergrad and quizzed me on the whereabouts of a dorm party.”

“What month?” Dr. Mooney asked.

“My birth, you mean? I was an April Fool’s baby—April 1, 1977.”

“And Sabina’s gone to October of the previous year. You would have already been conceived by then.”

“Well, yes, I would have.”

“Why is that a problem?” Nate asked. “It’s called the birth date cutoff, not the conception date cutoff.”

Having volunteered for Dr. Little’s study, which was designed to answer the knotty problem of just when the cutoff happened, I already knew the answer.

“The birth date is more of a rule of thumb—an approximation, if you will—when it comes to time travel.” Dr. Mooney sat up a bit in the lab chair, again slipping into his professorial mode, even under the stressful circumstances. “For most time travelers the cutoff seems to fall somewhere between conception and birth, but we think it’s closer to the conception side of things than the actual birth event. Dr. Little’s experiments aim to explore the matter, though he’s had no luck so far in figuring out the pattern. Dr. Little’s run—the one Sabina stepped into—was intended to send him into that unique period in his own life.”
 

“So I might be able to go, and I might not?” I asked.

“The only way to be sure is to try. In which case, Julia, you might want to change your outfit. I’m not sure a fleece jacket and those athletic pants”—beneath my fleece jacket, I had on a tank top and yoga pants, having been just about to change into something nicer for the date with Nate—“will do for 1976. You too, Abigail.”
 

Abigail was way ahead of him. Leaving Dr. Mooney to ready the equipment and Nate looking stunned by the news that he was grounded in the present, I followed her out of the lab and into the travel apparel closet across the hall.

It seemed wrong to bother with something as pedestrian as clothes with the clock ticking, but we would need to blend in if we wanted to move around freely—assuming I managed to make it to 1976 at all.
Blend in
was the third of the time-travel rules, the last one being
There’s always a way back
. Abigail, whose hair was back to its natural blonde this week, short, and just below her ears, headed to the corner where modern clothing hung on hangers. The closet was loosely organized by century and geographical area, with shelves and boxes overflowing with everything from ancient Greek tunics to medieval cassocks to disco pants. Abigail, who was more familiar with medieval cassocks than disco pants, began rifling through the modern clothing uncertainly.
 

“Don’t beat yourself up about not noticing that Sabina had snuck into the building,” I said, taking a guess at what was gnawing at her.

“I had my nose buried in my work, trying to weave the notes and photos I took on that last run into a coherent thesis chapter. You know, the ones of Marie-Anne Lavoisier sketching Antoine’s apparatus.”
 

Under different circumstances, the wording might have made us both chuckle. Of course, the apparatus in question was a piece of chemistry equipment. The notes and photos were from an eighteenth-century run.
 

“If Dr. Mooney didn’t give her the lab code—you didn’t give her the code, did you, Abigail?”

“Certainly not.”

“Let’s see, the seventies…jeans and wide-collared shirts…Then maybe one of the other grad students or Dr. B did. Gave her the code, I mean.” Dr. B—Erika Baumgartner—was the fourth of the TTE professors, a junior one like Dr. Little, and Abigail’s advisor. I couldn’t imagine her acting that unprofessionally, however. “I wonder why Oscar didn’t say anything to you about her being here when you left the building.”

“I told him I was headed to pick up a pizza. He must have assumed that I was coming right back for a late night at the lab. I’ve certainly done that often enough in the past.”

I grabbed a couple pairs of bellbottom jeans from the clothes rack and turned to find that Abigail had dug up a set of leg warmers. I shook my head at her. “Not those—they’re from the eighties. Here.” I handed her the smaller of the jeans. She was petite and thin, and I was more what I liked to think of as average sized, both in height and the other dimension. Next I found us both loose-fitting peasant blouses and, as we hurriedly donned the jeans and blouses in the changing area, said, “I suppose I should let Dean Braga know what has happened.” I was not looking forward to that call. Dean Isobel Braga, formerly of the Earth Sciences Department, was my boss. By quiet consensus, we had never gotten around to telling her about Sabina’s real background, and the dean was, I was very sure, not going to be happy about that. She
already disapproved of what she called
past irregularities
in the lab.

Abigail took a look at herself in the floor-to-ceiling mirror and rolled up the sleeves of the shirt, which was a bit large, as were the jeans. My clothes fit just fine. As Abigail rummaged around for a belt to keep her jeans up, I made the call. The dean didn’t answer. I breathed a sigh of relief and, as I was pretty sure that she would see a text message immediately, left a voice mail instead on her desk phone. With any luck she wouldn’t get around to checking her messages until Monday morning, by which time we’d hopefully have Sabina back safe and sound, and the dean would not have to be told of the matter at all.