What Was I Thinking? (5 page)

He unlocked it and held it open, saying, “I
trust Mrs. Peacock implicitly, of course, but I’m very particular about my
laboratory. With the best of intentions, she could move an object that I had
placed just so. With my last laboratory I learned the value of prevention
rather than rescue and a good lock prevents any amount of wasted work.”

Well, something else I didn’t understand, but I
didn’t want him to feel that I was grilling him. If we got to know each other
better, I’d figure him out, and if we didn’t, his little oddities and strange
turns of phrase really didn’t matter.

He led me in through the center door, which was
standing ajar, and I looked around the long, bright room. It was indeed a lab,
and not a historian’s study, though there was a sitting area with a few history
books on the side tables. I wasn’t exactly sure what kind of lab it was. I had
spent a lot of time in labs over the years, but this one had quite a few
instruments I couldn’t put a name to. They were all neatly arranged, though, on
the long counters familiar from classrooms. Some had built-in sinks, many had
shelves and brackets, and they all had storage cabinets beneath.

The room clearly ran the length of the house,
and had French windows that let in the afternoon light. The lab was most of the
room, but the near end was the study, with a big oak desk pushed up to the
wall, a beautiful oil painting of a wild river hanging on the wall above the
desk, an Oriental carpet, attractively faded, comfy-looking chairs, and good
reading lights. You had to walk through the study to get to the lab. I was
curious, but I hadn’t been invited to go farther in.

“Have a seat and we’ll get a little brandy in
you,” Bert said. “You still look a little peaked.”

I expect I did. In fact, I probably looked
God-awful, with tear tracks through my makeup and my hair, once more, frizzed
to the max. “Um, yes, yes, that would be nice. But first, could I use your
bathroom?” He looked blank again. He couldn’t actually be stupid, could he?
“To freshen up?”
I added, hoping it would help.

Mrs. Peacock helped. She arrived with a large
tray, which she deposited in the center of the desk. “She means the powder
room, Bertie,” she said, patiently.

“Oh? Oh!
Of course.
Would you be
so
good as to…I mean, if you don’t mind…”

“Yes, I’ll show her where it is,” she said. “We
don’t want you dealing with anything indelicate.” That really was right on the
edge of rude, but she seemed more amused than anything, and he took it with a
good humor.

I followed her into the hall and down to the
second floor. She opened the door on the right of the stairs, pulling a fresh
washcloth and hand towel out of a drawer. “Here you go. You probably want to
fix your face. Do you need anything else? I keep a few supplies on hand in the
first floor bathroom.”

“No, this will be fine, thanks, but actually,
you could…what’s…” I gestured helplessly toward the lab and the confusing Bert.

She shook her head, and laughed a little. “I
really don’t know, but it does help if you remember that the Progressive Era is
his time. He seems to speak that language best.”

“What? I mean, I didn’t take a lot of history,
just the required courses, you know?”

“Hmm.
You and all
the other undergraduates.
The Progressive Era was turn of the twentieth
century in the U.S. Roughly equivalent to the Edwardian Period in England.
Teddy Roosevelt, St. Louis World’s Fair, Gibson Girls, suffragists—
ring
any bells?”

“Some, yes. Bert was quite firm on the
difference between suffragists and suffragettes when we met a few days ago.”

“That’s a historian for you. Passionate about
things everyone else barely remembers.”

“You seem to know a lot—history and
historians.”

“I was married to one, Addie. You either love
it or you get divorced, but you can’t avoid it. I got divorced.”

I blinked. She saw and smiled again. “Did
Bertie tell you I was a widow?”

“Yes, actually.”

“I think he finds divorce disgraceful, and
assumes I would be ashamed to have it mentioned. And in his era, divorcées were
called ‘grass widows’ anyway.”

“In his era?
Really?”

“His era of study.
It’s easier just to think of it
as his era. Explains a lot, don’t you think?”

I did. She left and I shut the door to tidy up.

When I returned to the lab, Bert had set out
the lunch and poured a finger of brandy for me. I sipped it and was surprised
by how much it helped. I’d never had brandy before. Wine was my drink—when I had
one at all.

We settled into armchairs facing each other,
balancing sandwich plates on our knees. He seemed suddenly struck dumb, maybe
even nervous, so I asked the question uppermost on my mind.

“Bert, you’ve said a couple times that you
wanted to talk about your work, so I assume I’m not prying too much…you
introduced yourself to me as a historian and Mrs. Peacock referred to you as a
historian, but you also called yourself a scientist more than once, and this
looks much more like a science lab than a historian’s study. What
is
your field?”

He smiled, and some of the tension left him.
Maybe he had been looking for a way to open the topic. “Actually, I’m a
scientist with a good, working knowledge of the Progressive Era in St. Louis.
My scientific field is odd enough that it’s hard to find work, and although I
have an endowed chair, I do like to get out in the world, and work is the best
way to meet people and talk to them easily. History consultancy provides the
bridge I need.”

Well that was a mouthful! The endowed chair
might explain the expensive house, I thought, but it still left a lot of
questions. I didn’t know what to ask next.

He smiled again. “You look gobsmacked. Shall I
show you my experiments first, since you’re a scientist?”

He led me around the room, showing me one
simple physics experiment after another. There were various models of the
universe, including a complex arrangement of Tinkertoys spinning on an old
record turntable. That was odd. I had switched my major to chemistry after
freshman year, so I didn’t claim to be anything like a research physicist, but
I was pretty sure nobody thought the universe was spinning on an axis.

Another model seemed to show the universe
curving in on itself, and yet another was actually made of large pretzels glued
together in complex patterns. It was definitely supposed to be the universe,
though. For one thing, it had a label that said so, neatly lettered on a tape
stuck to its support. It also had various tiny spheres dangling from threads
here and there.

Next we came to a large Mobius strip made of
metal. It was mounted on a stand, and it had various slender spikes running
through it, connecting the farthest parts of the metal strip, like shortcuts
connecting a loop of highway.

As I said, I’m no physicist—those guys on
The Big Bang Theory
would laugh their
heads off at me—but I was pretty sure I recognized the next experiment as a
restatement of Einstein’s theory of relativity. It didn’t show the familiar
equation, and the wording of Bert’s explanation didn’t show any familiarity at
all with the famous wording about mass being conserved, but still…really, it
was as if someone very smart, but with absolutely no contact with standard
science curriculum, had thought up the basic E=
MC
²
idea all by himself, and then had done a science fair exhibit about it.

In keeping with the science fair feel
,
there was a diorama explaining light speed and the speed
of sound.

Finally, there was an extravagant display about
tesseracts, which I remembered from Madeleine L’Engle’s children’s book,
A Wrinkle in Time.
It showed the same
idea, the basic idea behind “warp speed”—the notion that the best method for
fast travel across the universe was folding the section you wanted to cross, so
one location touched another that it wouldn’t ordinarily be near. This had
fabric models, with the cloth folded to show the notion of the wrinkle quite
literally, cardboard models, and equations on neatly posted cards. It was a
nice display, and kind of fun for someone who remembered the book fondly, but
it just didn’t look like current research.

I was a guest, though, and a very curious one,
so I listened carefully to each explanation. Like a good student, or a
brownnose, I asked pertinent questions at each station, though I generally knew
the answers. Like a good first date, I acted fascinated with his lecture while
calculating madly behind a polite smile. The truly interesting thing was that
there wasn’t a computer in sight. Most of the scientists I knew, at Wash U or
in industry, did a lot of their work with computer modeling.

We reached the end of the tour—and it
was
a tour, I realized. We had
progressed neatly through a catalogue of the various theories of space travel,
in progressive complexity.

Even more interesting than the missing
computer—like the dog that didn’t bark, I thought, mildly hysterically—was the
lack of any active work. Every experiment in the room was a demonstration of a
solved
problem.
Hmm
again.

“Any questions?”
Bert asked, with a look of
hope.

“I think you’ve answered—” I began, and stopped
myself. It definitely was a look of hope on his face, but he didn’t look like a
first date who was hoping for general praise. He looked more…I had seen that
look more than once over the years, but not in social situations…he looked…he
looked like a teacher who thought he might have found a protégée. He was almost
leaning toward me in the intensity of his hope that I would ask the smart
question and
confirm
that I was the pupil he’d been
looking for.

So I did. “I have no questions at all about the
displays here. They’re all quite easy to understand. I do have two questions,
though. One, where is your current work? And two, where is your computer?”

He beamed. “Let’s finish our sandwiches, and
I’ll tell you about it.”

“I notice you didn’t answer the very easy
questions. ‘Where’ doesn’t take a lot of explanation,” I said, smiling back.

“It doesn’t, does it? They are both in a
separate laboratory.” He bit into a sandwich and seemed to think a bit as he
chewed. “At the risk of insulting you, I have had poor experiences with
allowing access to my work before confirming interest and understanding.”

“Not at all,” I said. “I understand
completely.” That was a bit of an overstatement. I did understand hiding space
program stuff, or groundbreaking experiments that a rival might steal or
destroy, but something about Bert didn’t square with that sort of thing. He had
said that his specialty was odd, so it was unlikely he had any direct
competitors seething with jealousy.

Still, research was research, and even if I
hadn’t done any myself in years, I understood the protective instinct.

“Good.” He leaned in a little. “You did
understand all the experiments?” I nodded.
“Completely?”
I nodded again.

“Did you see anything there, or in your own
studies, that ruled out the possibility of time travel?”

“Time travel.”
I took a moment to think. It
was easy to jeer at such science fiction/movie fantasy stuff, but at a very
basic level…hm. At a very basic level, in fact, all of what I had thought of as
space travel theory in the display could actually be the basis of time travel
theory. Einstein was said to have theorized about time travel, until he decided
it was impossible to exceed the speed of light. And tesseract theory
was
a time travel theory—it was just
that Star Trek and its competitors mostly used it as a method for traveling
fast enough to get to distant stars, and didn’t talk about the time factor
much.

The fact is, you talk long enough to smart
enough scientists, and you begin to doubt the rules about possibility. And
didn’t Arthur C. Clarke say something about sufficiently advanced science being
indistinguishable from magic?

Bert was watching me think, almost holding his
breath. I decided to answer the question he had asked, and not all the other
ones it raised.

“No, nothing I saw there or have studied
precludes time travel. In fact, you could make a case that it’s quite
possible.”

He sighed and sat back. The pupil had passed
the next test.

“Is that what you’re working on?”

“Yes. It’s not fanciful stuff, such as Mr.
Wells and Mr. Twain have described. Quite as interesting, I assure you, but
more mundane.”

“Mark Twain wrote a time travel book?” The gaps
in my education were appalling. My parents and Mrs. Peacock were right. I
should have taken more humanities, instead of trying to rush through my course
work in record time.

“Certainly.
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court.
Don’t tell me that
has
fallen out of favor.”