The Bellbottom Incident (12 page)

The door of Room 104 was shut. I hesitated, then raised a hand to knock, figuring that asking Gilberte’s roommate, Jenny, where the book club had gone might be faster than trying to sober up Xave. History had other plans for me; my knuckles barely grazed the wood, hard as I tried. There was an ABBA poster on the door, with the members of the Swedish pop group paired off on a park bench, Anni-Frid and Benny smooching and Agnetha and Björn side by side. The poster seemed to mock me, as if it were underlining that I was misplaced in time.
 

I went back to plan A—sobering up Xave. I softly walked past the sleeping students to the humming percolator, which one of them must have turned on before drifting off in an easy chair. The mugs looked reasonably clean, if mismatched and slightly dinged. Just typical dorm items.

I carried the mug back up the four flights of stairs to find Xave still slumped against the wall, gently snoring. Dr. Little was standing with his hands at his waist, like a two-sided teacup, tapping an impatient foot. Abigail turned up her hands at my approach. “Are we sure he’s not high on something?”

I squatted down with the mug in my hand. Xave’s eyes were soon open, though he was still a bit greenish around the cheeks. It took all three of us to pull him to his feet and steady him. Once we had Xave safely back inside his room and in the chair and he had imbibed more of the coffee, Abigail knelt down next to him. “Prof— I mean, uh, Xave. Where did they take Sally?”
 

He looked at Abigail with moist eyes and gave a small shrug, not of lack of concern but an indication of his limited knowledge of the matter. “East. Tree.”

“The East Coast, you mean? But where?”
 

He shook his head.

Abigail’s eyes were wide. I explained that I had no luck knocking on Jenny’s door and voiced the problem. “The East Coast—that’s like ten states and a thousand miles.”

“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?

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.

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.”