The Bellbottom Incident (5 page)

Somewhere nearby, in the physics building some ways up the lakeside path or in one of the graduate student dorms, were a young Xavier Mooney, Gabriel Rojas, and Lewis Sunder, only a couple of years into their PhDs. The thought sent a tingle down my spine.

I had forgotten that October 31 would be Halloween, of course. Decorations—skeletons and ghosts and such—hung here and there in dorm and office windows. I wondered what Sabina was thinking about this strange ritual.
 

We didn’t see any sign of her dark locks or Xavier’s white lab coat, if she was indeed wearing it, among the students crossing the plaza, so we turned toward the cafeteria. It looked just as it did in the present, except that the posters in its large windows advertised different current events and campus happenings. One called on supporters of Jimmy Carter’s presidential run to gather for a rally tomorrow evening, a second urged everyone to get vaccinated for the swine flu, and a third spread the news of a Halloween party at a dorm whose name I didn’t recognize, St. Olaf’s.

I cupped my hands so I could see into the sunlit cafeteria window—one of the students eating lunch inside gave me a startled look back—then turned to face the others. “Let’s split up and check the nearest buildings. Abigail, why don’t you check inside the cafeteria? Dr. Little, do you want to take the computer science building? Of the three of us, you’ll probably blend in the best there.” This was the closest of the science buildings. “And I’ll poke my head into the Registrar’s Office next door.”

We headed in three different directions.

“Over here.”

It was Abigail, waving at me from around the back of the cafeteria.
 

I joined her, with Dr. Little right on my heels. He reported, “Nothing at the computer science building—I checked all around and even in the back parking lot, in case Sabina was forced to stay out of sight by History. Obviously I couldn’t go into every office and classroom.”

My story was similar. “I went into the Registrar’s Office—it’s hardly changed at all. I even looked in the nonpublic areas where the student records are kept, but she was not there…Did you have any luck, Abigail?”

“I did. Look.”
 

She opened her palm. In it lay Sabina’s lunula. The orange-brown amber, crafted into a crescent-moon shape, sparkled in the sunlight. It was Sabina’s one link to home, and she always wore it as a lucky charm. In Pompeii it had hung around her neck on a leather strap, but she’d switched to a silver chain after a few snide comments from the other girls at the Thornberg high school.
 

Abigail explained that she had poked her head around in every corner of the cafeteria. There hadn’t been anything of interest until she checked the restroom. “It was on the floor of the women’s restroom, by the couch. The clasp is loose. I’ve been meaning to get it fixed for her.”

“So she must have spent at least one night, maybe both, there,” I said. “I’m so glad that she was able to get out of the cold and find shelter. Hopefully she managed to get some food, too, after they locked up the cafeteria for the night.”

“There’s a couch in the women’s restroom?” Dr. Little asked, his brow slightly furrowed. “Why?”

“There are two, as a matter of fact,” Abigail said. “The restroom is roomier than it is in the present. I think part of it will be converted into a kitchen freezer or something.”
 

“Women’s restrooms often do have them…or at least, they used to,” I explained absentmindedly. “For nursing mothers mostly, or if you’re pregnant or have bad menstrual cramps and need to sit down for a bit—well, not
you
, Dr. Little, but you get the idea. I wonder if that’s where the term
restroom
comes from.”

Abigail carefully slid the lunula into her pocket. Dr. Little watched her do it and said, “If Sabina was here last night, she can’t have gone far.”

“I hope so,” I said, remembering the odd tone of Dr. Mooney’s voice when he’d said that finding her should be straightforward.

“Why do you say it like that?” Dr. Little challenged me. “Obviously she must have immediately understood that she wasn’t back in 76 AD. She should have known that we would come get her. The prudent thing to do would have been to stick close to the Open Book.”

He didn’t know Sabina as well as Abigail and I did. She was not one to sit around and wait, not when there was a new place to be explored. She had much of her father’s personality. Secundus had opted to stay in Pompeii to look for his mother and try to protect his shop rather than flee town on foot, as many of Pompeii’s inhabitants did. We had never found out what happened to him, or his mother, Faustilla—whether they had met up and fled to safety or perished.

I attempted to explain. “It would have been the prudent thing to do, yes, but remember that the details that anchor this decade for us—bellbottoms, smoking on campus, Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford election posters—would mean nothing to her. To her eyes, the campus would only appear slightly different than it does in the present.”

“She must have been both curious and puzzled,” Abigail said.
 

“All right, so she wandered off,” Dr. Little said.

We all realized that a methodical circuit of campus to check every single building and every single room would take impossibly long. We needed a better way.
 

“Maybe she’s trying to find us,” Abigail suggested. “Here, I mean. In 1976. Not me, obviously, but—well, maybe even me if she hasn’t figured out yet how far back in time she jumped, as you say, Julia.”
 

I nodded. “Yes, in which case she’d look for us where she expects us to be—the campus security office for Nate, Hypatia House for me…There’s no TTE building for her to look for you, Abigail…but perhaps she’s gone to the physics department to find Dr. Mooney.”

“If she tried all of those already and didn’t find us, then the lake,” Abigail said. “It’s where she likes to go when she needs to think.”

Sunniva Lake sat smack in the middle of campus, and Sabina often sat on its reeded shores when she got pensive. The lake’s gentle waters reminded her of her demolished seashore home.

“Let’s check all those places,” I suggested.

“I would argue that that’s a waste of time,” Dr. Little said. “You said that those places are the ones she would have gone to first, two days ago. Why would she still be there?”

“Well, we have to start somewhere. Abigail, why you don’t make a circle of the lake? And once again, Dr. Little, you’ll probably blend into the physics department crowd more easily than us. I’ll swing by Hypatia House and the security office. Then we can meet back by the Open Book. In an hour, say?”
 

Abigail and I had the radios Nate and his officer had given us, but we would have no way of reaching Dr. Little. Nothing could be done about that, however. Something occurred to me. “Oh, and Dr. Little? I’ve been meaning to ask—will we get time-stuck less frequently here than we did in Pompeii? No one seemed to care that I was poking around the Registrar’s Office.”

Dr. Little fought off a tired yawn and confirmed my suspicion. “Yes, you should find it easier to move around.”

“Because the strands of History aren’t as deeply woven as they are in far time?”

“Partly, but that’s balanced out by the fact that many of the far-time strands are dusty and irrelevant. The reason is simpler. We blend in. We’re not from so far into the future that we do not belong.”

“What could be keeping Dr. Little?”

Abigail and I had managed to keep in touch via the radios, though we had encountered interference, a testy voice instructing us to get off this frequency, as it was reserved for campus security. Abigail had done a full circle of Sunniva Lake, heading from the Science Quad down to the future English department at the lake’s south end, then up the other side past the tower clock, the library, and the dock, and back to her starting point at the Open Book. I had visited Hypatia House and then the security office, which was still where it was in the present, near the south parking lot. After turning off my radio so Abigail wouldn’t try to reach me at an inopportune moment, I had walked right in. I mumbled a weak cover story about having lost a wallet, looked around to see if they had Sabina anywhere, and left. The only bright spot was that the young officer who had promised to keep an eye out for my wallet had been a young and handsome Dan Anderson (in his late twenties, I guessed), our campus security chief before Nate took the job. It had been nice to see him at his prime, before old age ushered him into retirement and a gardening hobby.

The blanket and bottled water were still there at the Open Book, where the basket—invisible, patient—waited to take us back home.
 

After cooling our heels for a good fifteen minutes past the allotted meeting time, Abigail and I decided to look for Dr. Little.
 

The lakeside footpath, tree-shaded in spots, took us to the Chemistry and Physics Annex. Marie Curie’s name would be appended to the building’s name one day, but for now its title was strictly utilitarian. The physics side of the annex was connected to its concrete twin by a glass-encased walkway appreciated by professors and students alike in the winter. It looked just the same as it did in the present, though the glass of the walkway was perhaps a little cleaner. Graduate students catching up on their research over the weekend trickled in and out of the coupled buildings, book bags on shoulders.

Dr. Little was in the courtyard between the two halves of the annex, on a bench by a small fountain under the walkway. He was asleep, his duffel bag by his feet.

I put a hand on his shoulder, and he jerked awake.

“Sorry, it wasn’t my fault. I sat down to get a pebble out of my shoe and found I was time-stuck,” he said with no hint that he was aware of the irony of getting time-stuck right after he’d explained why we weren’t likely to. Like Abigail and me, he had retained his modern footwear under the bellbottom jeans—a five-toed sneaker on each foot—which I knew he preferred for walking. “I found that I couldn’t get up at all. There were two students talking—Good Lord, are they still there? Don’t they have work to do?” A male and a female student were chatting by the front doors on the physics side of the building. “What could possibly take so long?” Dr. Little’s tone suggested that he felt graduate students should have more important things to do than socialize.

Abigail and I had taken a seat on either side of him. I tried to get back up, but my bottom might as well have been glued to the bench.
 

“Guess we’re all stuck now,” Abigail said.

After a good ten minutes of waiting, punctuated by Dr. Little’s irritated sighs, the pair finally disappeared inside.
 

Abigail jumped up. “It’s okay now.”

Dr. Little tentatively got to his feet, reached for his duffel bag, and slung it across one shoulder. As we headed toward the physics entrance, he explained, “I’ve visited this current iteration of campus twice already while working my way closer to my birth date. The grad student offices are in the basement. The stairs are at the end of this hall.” He led us down them into a dingy, windowless hallway.

“This must be it,” Abigail said of the third door down.
 

The door didn’t have a list of names, only a piece of paper nailed to it that said
If Physics Students You Seek, Look No Further
. Abigail raised a hand to knock. She rapped softly first, then, when there was no response, more sharply.
 

There was still no answer. She sent a shrug in our direction and turned the handle. The door swung open with a gentle creak, and we filed inside.
 

The grad student office was larger than I had expected, but the dozen desks packed into it made it seem cramped. All of the desks were unoccupied at the moment. There were coats hanging on a rack by the door, as if several students were there for the day but elsewhere in the building, either in labs or in the physics library on the top floor. A large blackboard stood in one corner and held equations and a sketch. After a few seconds’ consideration, it dawned on me that the sketch represented an idealized version of STEWie—there were circles where the mirrors would be one day, wiggles for lasers, a square box for the generator, and a small oval for the basket. Abigail—and also Dr. Little, which was a little out of the norm for him—let out chuckles of delight as soon as they noticed it. Abigail took out her cell phone and snapped a picture of the blackboard.