The Bellbottom Incident (17 page)

“Udo could have enlisted in the army when he came of age,” Dr. Little pointed out.

“Let’s assume he was relieved, then. Either way, it makes sense that he’s more enamored with
The Sirens of Titan
than with
Slaughterhouse
.”

“There’s a war part in
The Sirens of Titan
, too,” Abigail said. “An interplanetary one. But I see what you mean, Julia.”
 

We stuck around until the book club dispersed. I kept an eye out for my parents to see how their argument had turned out. The student my mother walked out with was not my father but the tall guy she’d sat next to at the book club meeting I’d crashed alone. Well, at least that probably ruled out Udo. It was dark, so I didn’t get a good look at the man’s face, but once again I had the feeling of familiarity—something about the way he carried himself and his walk. Had I met him before, in the present? If he was a student in 1976, that meant he was nearing his sixties in 2012. Perhaps he was a professor in one of the departments or maybe worked elsewhere on campus or in town.

Udo was the last to leave, with two female students on either side of him, but he seemed to be more interested in telling them all about his plans for the book than anything else. I heard him say, “I’m thinking of calling them
Richers
, my society of skeleton hoarders. What do you girls think?”

As we left the courtyard behind us and headed back to the Open Book, which we were using as our base of operations, I brought up the subject of Dr. Mooney once again—how he had never said anything about having met us in the past.

“That’s not the only odd thing,” Dr. Little said. “There’s also the matter of the Slingshot.”

The device was in the duffel bag on his shoulder, snug amidst the professor’s sleeping pad, notebooks, and other belongings.
 

“What about it?” I asked. “To be honest, I’ve never understood how it works. I’ve been meaning to ask him to explain it to me.”

To say I had no engineering skills would be an understatement, but I had hoped Dr. Mooney might be able to explain the main points with a napkin sketch or two.
 

I saw Dr. Little shake his head as we passed under a street lamp. “I’m not sure he even knows how it works, not really.”

That was an odd thing to say. “How can Dr. Mooney not know? He built it,” I protested.

“Well, we didn’t actually see him do it, did we?” Abigail said quietly. Like before, her discomfort at saying anything even slightly critical of her beloved professor was obvious. “He just sort of…unveiled the Slingshot 1.0 when we were in Pompeii. But he could hardly have built it there.”

“He must have brought it with him, then.”

“But none of us noticed him working on it in the lab.”

“Oh. I hadn’t realized that,” I said.

“And he’s certainly been keeping things close to the vest since your return,” Dr. Little said, which almost made me snicker, since he was the one prone to wearing vests, not Dr. Mooney. In fact, he had one on at the moment—the blue-jean one.

“Have you thought about what the Slingshot really represents?” Dr. Little went on. “It’s not just a small, portable version of STEWie. It’s a whole new paradigm.”

Now that he mentioned it, I
had
wondered why the Slingshot didn’t need the mirrors and lasers that served as STEWie’s heart, or cryogenic equipment to prevent it from overheating. Dr. Mooney had breezily explained that the Slingshot used a power source more efficient than STEWie’s expensive thorium-powered generator, and I hadn’t given it much more thought than that.

As we crossed the plaza onto the green beyond it, Dr. Little added, “Even the conference presentations Dr. Mooney has done have only been demonstrations of the device in action, not explanations of how it
works
. I assumed Mooney didn’t want to say more on the subject until he published”—not an unreasonable assumption, as publication was the academic equivalent of planting a flag on a mountaintop to stake your claim of having been there first—“but now I’m not so sure.”
 

“And have you noticed,” Abigail said, lowering her voice to almost a whisper, as if someone was listening in to our conversation, “how much better the device got between versions 1.0 and 2.0? Version 2.0 has a rechargeable battery and can go with or against the arrow of time. And who knows what the one he’s been ‘working’ on, Version 3.0, will be able to do? For all we know, it’ll be able to take us into the future.”

“Hold on. I don’t know much about inventions and design, but wouldn’t you expect that each new version would be better than the previous one?” I asked.
 

“But for the innovation to happen so quickly? I mean, Mooney is a brilliant scientist, don’t get me wrong,” Dr. Little said as we reached the Open Book. The words, I suspected, had not been easy for him to say. “But he would need superpowers to have accomplished what he did in such a short time.”

“So what are you suggesting, then?”

“What if Mooney’s contribution to the Slingshot is only for show? That is to say, maybe he builds protective cases around devices that are provided to him.”

“By whom?”

“Well, if
we
can jump into the past, then it makes sense that someone from further along in the future can jump into our present. In fact, we have to assume that it does happen.”

“When you say it like that, it sounds a little creepy,” Abigail said, wrinkling her nose. I was with her on that. I fought the impulse to furtively look around to see if anyone was watching from the shadows, judging us as I had judged my parents’ actions and words just minutes before.
 

“You mean someone…sent the Slingshot to him?” I said to Dr. Little.

“My point is, there’s a lot we don’t know about Dr. Mooney. Like why he chose not to mention the fact that he met us in 1976.”

“Well, he can’t be from the future himself—he’s here in 1976, just as he’s supposed to be. Unless an older version of him sent the Slingshot back…But that’s not possible, is it? Because that would mean Dr. Mooney was changing his own past.” This was getting complicated.

Abigail tilted her head to one side, considering this. “Think about the times we’ve used the Slingshot. It helped us escape a ghost zone in Pompeii. It helped you survive the fourteenth century, Julia. For the most part, having it hasn’t changed the past, only our own travels into it.”
 

 
Drizzle had started falling all around us and was threatening to turn into a steady rain. Dr. Little brushed a raindrop off his nose and yawned. He and Abigail had been up for longer than I had, counting the hours that had passed when I went back to present-time to touch base with Nate.
 

“The cafeteria will be locked up by now. Should we all go to Xave’s room in St. Olaf’s?” I suggested.

Dr. Little shook his head sharply at this. “Let’s not confuse matters further, Julia, by approaching Mooney even earlier in time than we already have.”
 

“The library?” Abigail said. “We could go back there and find a quiet spot in the stacks.”

I checked my watch, which I had carefully set to the correct time on October 22, 1976. “By the time we walk around the lake, the library will be closed. Unless you want to use the Slingshot to get us there faster, Dr. Little.”

“I’m not opening up my laptop in this weather.”

“We’ll get in somehow,” Abigail said. “Leave it to me.”

Soaked from the now-steady rain, we stopped by the side door to the Crane Library, an industrial-looking one where I guessed book and other deliveries took place during daytime hours. Abigail eyed the lock. “Dr. Little, do you have a paper clip in your bag?”

“Why would I have one?”

“Just check,” I said.

Sheltering the duffel bag under the overhang of the roof, Dr. Little unzipped it and rummaged around. The bag had an inner waterproof layer to protect the contents from inclement weather, such as the current downpour. “Will a pencil do? Pen? Wait, you’re in luck.” He pulled the paper clip off a thin stack of papers and passed it to Abigail, quickly sliding the papers back in to prevent them from being soaked.
 

“Give me a minute,” Abigail said.
 

We did, and sooner than I would have thought it possible, not having any previous breaking-and-entering experience, we heard a soft click. Abigail pushed the door open. Her strange upbringing had led to some unexpected skills. “You’re welcome,” she said, pocketing the paper clip.
 

The night lights had been left on inside, bathing the quiet halls in a soft, ambient glow.
 

“Let’s get out of sight in case campus security swings by for a check,” I said.

We found a good spot away from the windows, a circle of easy chairs of the sort found in most libraries—that is to say, comfy and inviting. Dr. Little glanced at the easy chairs, then picked a high-backed wooden seat at a nearby table. He pushed a textbook left behind by a student out of the way, then retrieved his laptop from the duffel bag. As he did so, a page fell out and onto the floor, one of the ones that had been freed when he gave Abigail the paper clip.
 

I picked up the page for him, catching sight of a list of numbers on it as I did so:

4-9-33-36-39-47

8-21-32-35-36-38

20-30-32-43-44-47

5-7-12-21-32-45

4-5-18-41-47-48

11-16-21-26-27-47

2-10-19-23-26-30

15-18-22-24-28-49
 

…

“Oh, are these spacetime coordinates?” I was always interested in learning more about the mechanics of time travel. “Precomputed ones you planned to use with the Slingshot 2.0 to edge forward in time until you reached your birth date cutoff?”
 

“Something like that, yes,” he answered a bit testily, as if not wanting to be bothered with having to explain things to amateurs. He opened his bag again, and the page joined its brethren within.
 

I plopped into one of the easy chairs. Well, he was right. I
was
an amateur when it came to time travel. But how was I to improve if I didn’t ask questions? Deciding I wasn’t going to let him brush me off so quickly, I said, “I’ve always wanted to learn how to calculate spacetime coordinates. Say I wanted to jump to a prehistoric time and place…” Kamal Ahmad’s recent thesis defense, which I had attended, came to mind. “Neander Valley, 30,000 BC. Does the place and date of the destination somehow get woven into a sequence of numbers and that gets entered into STEWie or the Slingshot?”
 

Dr. Little bent down to plug the laptop charger into the wall. “It’s complicated. If you’re really interested in the topic, you should sign up for a class.”
 

“You have to be a student to take a class.”

“Yes, that is a problem.”

Abigail had taken the easy chair opposite me. “STEWie uses light to warp spacetime so the point where you are meets up with the point where you want to go, like fingers pinching four-dimensional dough. You orient the STEWie mirrors just
so
, fire up the lasers and the generator…and there you are, fresh out of the basket, in Neander Valley. STEWie is the SUV of time travel—it’s an energy-guzzling way to travel in time compared to what the Slingshot can do.”
 

“And the Slingshot?” I asked.
 

“Let’s see, what’s the opposite of an SUV? Something slim, trim, and efficient that requires very little gas except for a starting push.”
 

“A bobsled?” I suggested. “Never been in one, but I’ve seen them in the Olympics on TV.”

“A bobsled, then. One that can go in both directions.”

Dr. Little glanced up from the laptop, as if the current topic actually intrigued him, but said nothing.

“Like we said, though, we’re not really sure how the Slingshot works, not really. Other than that it’s prone to dropping travelers into ghost zones,” Abigail said, trying out another of the armchairs.

“Well, at least we aren’t likely to encounter many ghost zones in good old 1976.” I wondered what was inside the device that was sitting there so innocently next to Dr. Little’s laptop and whether he ever got the urge to just open it up and look. It was somewhat larger than the laptop, though it had a smaller screen and keyboard, and there were wire loops sticking out of it here and there. Not quite how I would have pictured a device from the future, if that was what it was.