The Bellbottom Incident (9 page)

Abigail nodded. “Same for me.”

“Your wish is my command, ladies,” Xave said. He turned to Dr. Little, who had slid his duffel bag under the table and taken a seat across from us. Dr. Little wrinkled his nose. “Isn’t there anything…lighter? A vegetable would be good.”

Dr. Little had grown up in California and earned his PhD at Berkeley before coming to St. Sunniva. He was not the only vegetarian in the state of Minnesota; they were just grossly outnumbered.

“Time travelers can’t be choosers, but I’ll see what I can do. I don’t suppose you have any…funds to contribute? I’m just a poor graduate student.”

Dr. Little dished out some cash from his travel wallet, and I said, “I’ll help you carry, Xave.” He and I got into the food line, exchanged some light chitchat about the election while waiting, and came back with fried chicken (which was a strange orange color), mashed potatoes (green), and corn on the cob (with pitchfork-shaped holders).
 

Abigail hesitated before digging in. “I hope Sa— Sally comes back here. It’s getting really dark out there.”

I was worried too—where could Sabina be?—but forced myself to eat. After all, none of us would be thinking clearly if we didn’t nourish ourselves. The food coloring made for an unappetizing appearance, but it didn’t change the taste of the chicken and mashed potatoes. Just standard cafeteria fare. Dr. Little, who had stuck with the corn and mashed potatoes, seemed to be enjoying them just fine.

After a moment of quiet contemplation, Abigail dug in as well.

“How’s the chicken tonight?”
 

Gabriel. Gabe was dashing in a dark suit, with the upturned collar of the white shirt underneath tightly pinched by a tie. His hair was slicked and tied back to look short, and his mustache had been combed to a bushier version. I glanced from him to Xave and it sank in that their costumes were supposed to be of a young and an older Einstein. Gabriel was the young Einstein. Xave—dressed in a sweater, casual droopy pants, and the white wig—was the older Einstein; he had even dyed his mustache white, which I had somehow failed to notice. It wasn’t bleached but covered in some kind of a white paint. I found myself hoping it was nontoxic food coloring, as it had started to flake as he ate.
 

Gabe had addressed the question to his friend and fellow grad student, all the while avoiding any eye contact with the rest of us. I studied him above my fork. This was strange. If I didn’t know better, I would have thought History was making sure he didn’t register our presence, but that made no sense. It was supposed to be the other way around.
Our
movements were supposed to be limited while we traveled, not those of the locals.
 

Xave waved his fork at the three of us. “Gabe, meet Julia, Abigail, and Dr. Little. They’re visitors. You’re not allowed to ask them anything.”

Gabe didn’t appear to have a problem with that request. He seemed too weighed down by what I suddenly understood was his own social anxiety to care why he wasn’t expected to talk to us.
 

Xave told him, “The chicken’s not awful.”
 

Focusing on a spot on the floor, Gabe replied, “I’ll be back with my tray,” and left.

“Gabriel’s a bit shy,” Xave explained, and waved hello to a female student passing by our table. She waved back at him.
 

I opened my mouth to comment that we all knew Gabriel Rojas but thought better of it. It struck me that while we’d been able to fill one of STEWie’s inventors in on the bare bones of our situation, we probably wouldn’t be able to interact much with the other, if at all. Xave was a doer, his confidence in his pet project unshakable, so our presence was only confirmation of what he already knew with certainty—his time machine idea would work. Gabe, on the other hand, was a thinker, a worrier, a tight knot of social and other doubts. He obviously didn’t like meeting new people, something he would mostly outgrow in his professorship, with his shyness morphing into excessive politeness in social situations. Learning where we were really from and that we had gotten here using a device he would have a hand in designing—well, that would have deeply affected the mild-mannered graduate student and sent History on a different path. Which explained why we’d been stuck in the janitor closet in the graduate student office earlier.

“Hey, before Gabe gets back, let me ask you this. The three of us—Gabe, Lewis, and I—we haven’t been able to figure out how fast time streams for travelers relative to their home-time. Does it stream in parallel? Just nod if I’m correct…Faster? Slower?”

I saw Dr. Little bite his lip, as if to fight back the urge to show off his superior knowledge on the subject by giving a detailed answer, one involving the use of pencil and paper and lots of diagrams and equations. Gabe came back and took a seat on the side of Xave that was opposite to the three of us. The friends launched into an in-character discussion—Gabe, as the young Einstein, was arguing for the cosmological constant, whatever that was, while Xave, the older Einstein, was arguing against it. We heard the terms
field equation
,
spacetime
, and
relativity
bandied about with abandon.

Dr. Little just stared across the table at the two grad students as if jealous of the success and fame that awaited Xave and Gabe, and simultaneously disdainful that they were wasting time on Halloween fun instead of applying themselves in the lab. He caught my gaze, cleared his throat, and went back to eating.
 

The fried chicken and mashed potatoes were heavy and I fought off a yawn. We were all experiencing the time-travel version of jet lag, which really needed a name, I thought.
Time-travel lag
, perhaps. We had jumped from early evening home-time to one o’clock—no, noon—local time, which meant that it felt far later for us. I fought a follow-up yawn and transferred my attention to the students streaming into the cafeteria, keeping an eye out for Sabina.
 

There was no sign of her, but then someone else came in.

I dropped my fork into the tiny mound of green mashed potatoes left on my plate and instinctively started to rise to my feet, but History sent me right back down.

The
someone
was my mother, Missy Donovan, before she became one half of Mr. and Mrs. Olsen. She was in a group of five or six students who seemed to be using the cafeteria as a shortcut; having streamed in through one door, they were immediately heading for the other. Mom’s blonde hair had been blow-dried into a big and puffy feathered look, a la Farrah Fawcett. Her cheeks were plump and smooth, and there was a spring in her step I hadn’t seen in a long time. A moment later she was gone, the far door of the cafeteria having closed behind the group.

“Julia?” Abigail asked. “Something wrong?”

“Hmm? Nothing. Just saw…a familiar person. Not Sally,” I said quickly, before Abigail could get her hopes up.

I went back to eating, but not before I did a quick mental calculation, counting back from my day of birth, April 1 of 1977. My mother had five months to go in her pregnancy. Did that mean she was aware of it already? It wasn’t anything I had personal experience with. If she knew, was she being responsible and all that? No. She’d had a cigarette in one hand and had taken a leisurely puff on it as she walked, before passing it on to another student. Maybe they didn’t know that kind of stuff was bad in the seventies? The campus ban on smoking was a good twenty years away. I had never seen her smoke—she must have given it up after I was born.

I also couldn’t help but notice that the person she’d passed the cigarette to was not Dad but some other student, a tall, broad-shouldered guy with dark hair. Granted, I’d only gotten a quick glimpse of his back, but Dad was more of an average height, blond, and had a different line to his shoulders.
 

There was something else. Seeing my mother, I had felt odd, shaky, as if I had instantly come down with a bad bout of the flu and it had narrowed my breathing passages. The feeling—so brief I couldn’t be sure it wasn’t just my imagination—passed as quickly as it had come on.

Abigail and I stayed behind as the cafeteria slowly emptied and the kitchen staff cleaned up. Dr. Little, who couldn’t function any longer without sleep, had headed to Xave’s room in St. Olaf’s Hall, having taken one of the two-way radios. Xave was going to leave for the dorm Halloween party with Gabe after letting Dr. Little into the room.

Abigail and I slipped into the women’s restroom as soon as the janitor had finished up inside. We waited in silence until all sounds of activity died down and the lights in the building turned off one by one. The rally outside had lasted a good while, but even the most strident Carter supporters had other places to be on a weekend night.

“Let’s prop open a side door so Sabina can come back in,” Abigail suggested, her face shadowy above her cell phone, which we were using as a flashlight.
 

We peered out of the restroom and slipped into the hallway when we determined the coast was clear.

Looking for an object to prop open the cafeteria doors with, I spotted a magazine someone had left behind on one of the green tables. I rolled it up—it was
Mad
, with some kind of
Star Trek
spoof, the
Star Trek Musical
, on the cover. “Oh, that’s a collectible. We should bring it back with us,” Abigail suggested. I cracked open the back cafeteria door and stuck the magazine into the small space. Cold, fragrant autumn air wafted in, mixing with the smell of cleaning chemicals, which had lingered after the janitor and the kitchen-cleaning crew left for the day.
 

There was nothing to do but head back to the restroom and wait. “Guess it’s all right to turn on the lights now,” Abigail said. “I don’t want to completely drain my phone battery.”

The couches were in the front of the restroom, set in an L-shape and offset from the plumbing part by a wall. Abigail took the smaller couch, a two-seater, while I took the other. We made ourselves as comfortable as possible, our heads pointed toward the bend of the L. I offered Abigail our blanket, the one Nate had sent with us, but she shook her head and curled up under her coat.
 

I folded the blanket into a pillow and lay on my back, staring up at the tiled ceiling. We had decided to leave the overhead light on, a small beacon to Sabina under the door. The tiles were a creamy white and there were sixteen of them, with lights set into four middle ones. As tired as I was, I was too wired to sleep and I suspected the same was true of Abigail. I heard her give a little sigh, but it was a sound of dissatisfaction, not of sleepiness.

“Julia?” she said.

“Yes?”

“Do you really think someone did let Sabina into the lab? Watched as she wrote the note, helped her into the basket?”

Having had time to think about it, I’d decided that it was unlikely. I said as much and explained my reasoning. “No one who belonged there and knew the door code would have made the mistake of misinterpreting the date. He or she would have known that STEWie was set for 1976, not the first century.”

“True. Unless they didn’t care where Sabina was jumping to, just as long as she jumped somewhere.” Abigail was silent for a moment, then said, “I’m not saying it was him, but Dr. Mooney did seem a little
odd
about the whole thing back in the lab, didn’t he?”

She had said it in a quiet voice, as if mortified to be voicing suspicions about her beloved professor.

He
had
sounded odd, but we now had an explanation as to why. “I’m pretty sure it was because he remembered meeting us in 1976 but didn’t want to say so for whatever reason. I believe him, though; I can’t imagine he gave her the code. Maybe Kamal or Jacob or one of the other students did it without realizing how she’d use the information.” I decided that it might be good to talk about other matters to get our mind off Sabina, so I asked, “How’s your thesis going, Abigail? You said you’ve been working on a new chapter?”

Her thesis topic was Marie-Anne Lavoisier, wife and lab partner of the eighteenth-century chemist Antoine Lavoisier and a chemist in her own right—she of the apparatus sketching.

Abigail propped herself up on one elbow to face me. “The thesis? Slow, I guess. I’ve been writing Chapter 4, but I’m not happy with the first three and want to redo them. I’m thinking of overhauling my outline and choosing an entirely new approach to presenting the work…My defense is scheduled for early in the spring and I have all the historical data I need, so I’m done with my STEWie runs. Which is good, I guess.”

“But you’re not sure how to weave the results into a solid thesis?”

“No, that’s not it.”

“You wish you’d chosen a different topic?” This was pretty much guaranteed with all grad students at some point in their career, sometimes even long after they’d graduated and left school.

She laughed outright at that and said, “Well, yes. A topic more hands-on, perhaps, not involving people. Now I sound like Dr. Little. No, the real problem is that when I finish the thesis and graduate, my funding will stop.”