by Katie Khan
But following swiftly behind Rosy is Tony the security guard, along with Tony’s boss, Jim – Head of Campus Security – and Professor Schmidt, Departmental Head of Physics.
‘What in heaven’s name,’ Professor Schmidt says, ‘is going on here?’ Anger makes the question staccato, his words paired in a short rhythm bursting with fury.
Thea winces. ‘Professor—’
‘Don’t tell me, Thea Colman, that this unsanctioned experiment – which I’m sure is something the department expressly forbade – is the reason the entire campus is currently in the dark.’
Tony’s eyes look to Thea, wounded. She hopes he knows it’s not personal.
‘I just—’
‘Tell me, Colman, how you decided breaking and entering would be the best way to pursue your own personal interests at this college.’
‘I—’
‘What was that?’ he snaps. ‘Speak up.’
‘It’s not breaking and entering,’ she says. ‘Or at least, not breaking.’
They jump slightly as the main power comes back on with another womp. ‘I assure you, hacking into building systems is considered breaking and entering by both the University and Oxford police.’
Thea sees Urvisha stiffen.
‘Needless to say, by cutting the power to this building you’ve ruined my team’s research experiment in Lab 1. Six weeks of work. And who are you?’ He looks around at the other culprits. ‘I know you,’ he says, looking at Urvisha. ‘I taught you undergrad Quantum Theory. Malik, isn’t it? Who is your overseeing tutor?’
‘Professor Kelly, Computer Science.’ Urvisha surreptitiously steps in front of her laptop, though it won’t take much for them to work out who in the room’s been manipulating the building systems.
‘She’ll be horrified to hear about your part in this.’
Urvisha bows her head. Behind their backs, Thea gently touches her palm to Urvisha’s shaking hand.
‘Well.’ The professor turns to Rosy, who is skulking by the door. ‘I don’t know you.’
‘Rosy.’ She clears her throat, a cough wrapping itself around her full name. ‘Rosalind de Glanville.’
Even Professor Schmidt looks taken aback. ‘Lady de Glanville. I must say, this is an unexpected honour.’
‘Dishonour, more like,’ Tony’s boss leers, but Professor Schmidt silences him with a look.
‘And what research are you undertaking with the University …?’
‘I’m researching my DPhil thesis in History of Art at the Bodleian,’ she says by way of explanation, downcast at being told off like a schoolgirl rather than the twenty-seven-year-old woman she is. Authority figures usually like her, Thea thinks – the mature Head Girl routine tends to make them feel safe.
Jim sneers. ‘Don’t tell us – your family paid for half this building.’
Rosy shuts her eyes, apparently expecting more barbs, but Thea is relieved to hear Professor Schmidt dispatch the security guards to check the ramifications of the blackout. ‘This is a departmental matter,’ he says, his voice stern. ‘Please notify the police that we have found the reason for our power cut and the threat is contained.’
The two burly men head back to the security desk, visibly disappointed at being dismissed, and Professor Schmidt closes the laboratory door behind them quite precisely. ‘Now then,’ he says, his voice a low hum. ‘I want to know what you were doing, why you were doing it, and – most of all – which individual is responsible.’
The room is silent. Thea sets the hourglass back down on the workbench, watching the sand begin to trickle through.
Rosy takes a breath. ‘Umm, Professor Schmidt, if I may,’ she says delicately, ‘my family did invest some money in this building, perhaps even in this laboratory, and I was curious how it worked. I asked for a tour … My apologies—’
Professor Schmidt sighs. ‘I know what you’re doing.’
But Thea isn’t really listening. She’s looking at Rosy.
Rosy, who wasn’t here a minute ago. Who disappeared for five minutes.
Five minutes.
Professor Schmidt raises his voice. ‘I’m afraid you are trespassing and there is very real evidence here to ensure the removal of all of you from your relevant DPhil studies.’ He looks stern. ‘I would think very, very carefully about what you say next.’
But Thea can’t concentrate on his words.
Rosy disappeared.
She glances up – all of them are staring at her. She sees how tired her friends look; she notices how Urvisha has lost all of her predatory keenness, the mention of the police playing on her mind. Cyber crime carries huge penalties. She can’t afford to fail: not financially, not morally.
Thea looks at Rosy, so frequently seen only as a toff. But Lady Rosalind de Glanville is so much more. She’s kind – almost too kind – and Thea knows without a flicker of a doubt that Rosy will not hesitate to take the fall, knowing her family name will help protect her – and them.
‘Professor,’ Thea says slowly, and Urvisha’s face betrays her relief. ‘You know the theory I’ve been working on?’
‘Not your magic crystals again.’
‘It’s not magic.’ Rosy disappeared. What happened to her? What does that mean? Think, Thea. Not Thea-logic. Time for actual logic. ‘I wanted to explore if it was possible to break the speed of light—’
‘Which Einstein stated is impossible—’
‘Not if we slow it down.’ The words come out in a rush. ‘Professor, we both know a crystal is capable of breaking symmetry and trapping light inside, and I know something can be done with time if we find the precise moment when the light wave slows and interacts with matter, and then harness it—’
‘Colman, you have willingly ploughed ahead with an expressly banned project and a frankly ludicrous obsession with the mystical, rather than the rational.’
‘But Professor, tonight—’
‘Tonight you triggered a university-wide blackout and destroyed the results of more than six weeks of experiments for an entire class of students.’
Thea is silent.
‘What’s more, you dragged innocent friends here to break the law. You brought those without lab training or security clearance into a highly controlled laboratory space and you put everyone at risk.’ He eyes Rosalind uneasily. ‘I’m disappointed, Colman. And not only about tonight. Do your cohorts here know that you’re nine months behind on your DPhil research?’
The two women look at Thea, shocked. She’s the hardest worker they know: always at her desk by 6 a.m., typing furiously; scrawling notes by hand over lunch; an entire wall of her room liberally covered with equations worked on late into the night. And everywhere, everything interspersed with the same incessant doodle she draws when she’s thinking: an interlocking pattern of diamond and prism shapes, like the lines etched on the glass house.
‘Your work is languishing; you’ve become obsessed with this ridiculous theory about time travel. This, I’m afraid, is the last straw.
‘Criminal activity.
‘The coercing of fellow students.
‘The breaking of health and safety.
‘Misuse of departmental property.
‘The hacking of university systems.
‘But most sadly, for me: the negligence of your studies.’
Rosy disappeared.
Thea shuffles through her thoughts, turning each one over slowly.
She almost laughs out loud when the realization comes to her, the idea forming whole in her mind. Pop culture has it wrong: the eureka moment is not a light bulb going off above your head. It’s a light beam.
She’s only half listening as Professor Schmidt lays down the price of tonight’s misadventure.
‘I will be telling the Vice-Chancellor precisely who is responsible, and I will be forced to assure him that the individual in question is no longer with us at the Department of Physics as of tonight. Either that or I will be filing criminal damage charges against all three of you, and you can each take your ch
ances with your respective colleges and the Oxford police.’
Thea’s attention snaps back.
She can’t let anyone else take the blame, no matter how hard they’re trying not to land her in trouble. She can’t risk their futures, as well as her own.
The tap dancing in her ribcage tells her it’s that time again: fight or flight.
She turns to face the professor who has never supported her, not even at the beginning; not when she gained her undergraduate scholarship, not when she graduated with double honours in Physics and Philosophy. And certainly not when she’d taken her theory of time travel to him, and been denied permission to spend three to four years studying it for a DPhil.
‘So,’ he says expectantly.
‘It was me, Professor,’ she says, her voice floating. ‘The others had nothing to do with it. I told them it was all above board and that I had permission from you to run tonight’s experiment.’
Professor Schmidt sighs, satisfied but disappointed.
‘I misled them. I misled you. And –’ she stumbles on this one – ‘I’m sorry.’ She turns instead to her friends, who glance at each other in shock at the turn this is taking. ‘I truly am sorry,’ she says, genuinely this time, ‘to have lied to you. To have got you into this, when I have clearly been working on it for six months with no input from you whatsoever, entirely on my own.’
Professor Schmidt holds up a hand. ‘Fine, Colman. Fine, I get it.’
Rosalind takes a step forward. ‘Professor—’
‘No, Rosy,’ Thea says with some grit, urging her to listen to what she is saying. ‘I’ll take my belongings and leave.’
‘What a shame,’ Professor Schmidt says to himself, with a shake of his head, but it’s hard to know if he genuinely feels sadness or is just saying what a university lecturer must when a promising pupil comes adrift of the rails. ‘It’s not often I have to unceremoniously remove someone from the most prestigious research qualification in the country.’
‘I’ll leave the college tonight,’ Thea says, then places a bet: ‘and the rest of you should go home.’
‘Yes. Please vacate my laboratory immediately,’ Professor Schmidt says sternly, particularly eyeing Rosy, who probably has, in truth, more claim to the laboratory than he does.
Heads lowered like handmaids, Rosy and Urvisha begin to file out of the laboratory, but as she reaches the doorway, Rosalind turns back. ‘Thea—’
‘Don’t. Please.’ She smiles sadly at her friend. ‘It’s fine. I shouldn’t have dragged everyone else into it.’
‘Come on, Colman. Let’s go.’
Thea looks to her prismatic glass house, partially folded on the floor, and the camera still set up diagonally to the laser. ‘May I gather my things?’
‘You certainly may not. We’re going straight to the Vice-Chancellor.’
‘Oh,’ she says.
‘I’ll have security deliver your …’ He pauses as he casts a disapproving eye over the equipment. ‘… things. After we’ve finished.’
Thea sighs, following the professor out of the room into the atrium, the glow of the exterior college lights illuminating his head like a ghostly halo. She snatches a glance out at the place she has lived, worked and dreamed for so many years … She can’t believe it’s come to this. Four years of studying for her degree, a year in industry, then three years (so far) for the DPhil – nearly her entire twenties. All for nothing.
They walk out of the Beecroft Building into the night air, the lighting of the college quads once again restored.
‘You know, Colman,’ Professor Schmidt starts as they arrive at the darkened Vice-Chancellor’s office. She has always hated how the older faculty staff insist on referring to their students by surname. ‘I’ve met people like you before.’
Under the cover of darkness Thea rolls her eyes, expecting a vicious diatribe. She is not disappointed.
Professor Schmidt rings the bell. ‘You’re the type of person who always had potential, but never did anything with it.’
‘With the greatest respect, Sir,’ she says, as the door to the Vice-Chancellor’s office opens, with absolutely no respect at all, ‘I’m going to spend the rest of my life proving you wrong.’
Four
The birds are beginning their dawn song as Thea emerges from the Vice-Chancellor’s office, two hours before the full light of sunrise will bring a sharp sobriety to the dream-like state of her night.
Hearing her blood pulsing in her ears, heart thumping, she stands looking at the grounds around her, pondering what to do.
She didn’t ever think she would come to rely on something outside her own rationale, but with some surprise, Thea finds she has. She wants to speak to somebody who can calm her.
That person is not Urvisha or Rosy – not yet. They were there, they saw it all – they won’t be able to process what she’ll say without reliving their own experience, or thinking about how it might affect them. She knows that’s brutal, but she wants to speak to an outsider. Somebody who will tell her everything is going to be okay.
Like a parent would.
She thinks about calling Ayo, who – wisely? – chose not to join them tonight in the lab. But she doesn’t want an I-told-you-so, so decides otherwise.
It really doesn’t leave too many options. Anyone else she’d call would need to be told the story from scratch …
She does the only thing she can in this situation: she picks up the phone and calls Isaac.
A clunk, then the muffled sound of people laughing. Music in the background, a gut-thumping bass.
‘Hello?’
‘Thea?’ Another clunk, then some rustling.
‘It’s a bad time,’ she says. ‘I’ll call you later.’
‘No – I’m here.’ The thumping music fades as Isaac presumably walks out of whatever Brooklyn loft or bar he’s in. ‘What’s the time there? Is everything all right?’
‘Please don’t lecture me,’ she says before Isaac can continue. ‘I’ve messed up, that’s why I’m calling.’
‘What happened?’
She takes a deep breath. ‘I’ve ruined everything. The college sent me down.’
The whoosh of cars going past, the angry honking of a horn, followed by Isaac yelling.
‘Sorry,’ he says, his voice back with her, a million miles away from the profanity he’s just shouted at the driver from the sidewalk. ‘Down where?’
‘They kicked me out.’
There’s silence – or at least, Isaac is silent while the sound of hipsters in Williamsburg celebrating their Friday night carry on around him.
‘I’m off the course. Out of the college. Booted from my accommodation, too, from tomorrow.’ Which is a consideration she hadn’t even taken into account – a DPhil failure, and homeless. What a night. ‘Please don’t say I should have listened to you. It’s too late.’
‘Oh, Thea.’ She has his full attention. ‘What happened?’
‘It didn’t work, though something clearly went right: Rosy disappeared for five minutes, so if we make some adjustments I don’t see any reason why—’
‘Theodora? What happened with the college – why did they kick you out?’
‘Oh.’ She cuts short a laugh, brought back to earth with a bump. ‘We broke into the science building to use the Beecroft laser. The experiment triggered a power cut across the whole of the university.’
‘Oh, fuck,’ Isaac says. ‘What happened then?’
‘My supervising professor rocked up with campus security, and threatened to remove Rosy and Urvisha from their DPhils, as well as reporting us to the local police.’
‘Damn.’ She can hear the slight pant in Isaac’s voice as he walks through the New York streets, the sound of his shoes hitting the pavestones. It’s only just after midnight, Eastern Time, a whole five hours behind – if she could somehow travel to where he is, to his time, none of this would have happened, and she’d still have somewhere to live.
But then she wouldn’t
have known she was onto something. Rosy disappeared.
‘Without sounding like a parent—’
‘Please don’t act like my parents would have,’ she says at the same time, and the similarity in their trains of thought breaks the tension for a moment.
Isaac wisely doesn’t finish his sentence. ‘What are you going to do?’
She finds herself grateful to have her friend back, even momentarily. ‘Thank you,’ she says. She remembers that he never used to judge her, never called her out for her shortcomings – didn’t seem to even notice them, on the whole. She could always get on with telling him the things inside her head without having to craft the least offensive way to say them.
‘Is it worth,’ Isaac says, as she hears him put his key in the door of his rented apartment, ‘speaking to the college? I’m sure the proctors would forgive—’
‘The Vice-Chancellor was brutal,’ she says.
‘Really? That surprises me,’ he says. ‘Hold on – can we change to a video call now I’m home? This feels too important.’
Thea sighs, hating video calls at the best of times.
Isaac appears on the screen. She might be imagining it, but his expression looks marginally softer towards her than the last few times they’ve spoken. ‘The Vice-Chancellor was really nice when I graduated,’ he carries straight on, ‘even wrote a letter to the head of the museum …’
She sighs again. ‘I rather walked in with my back up, determined to prove them wrong.’ There’s nowhere to hide now that he can see her.
‘Oh.’
‘I know. I didn’t mean to.’ Though she did, in a way.
Isaac closes his bedroom door. ‘What did you honestly think would happen? That you would do this, and the college would thank you?’
‘I guess so. They never listened to me, never let me follow this course of study. I wanted to show them as a gigantic “FU” that I could prove the theory …’
‘And the college would turn a blind eye to the rule-breaking and share the glory?’
‘Wouldn’t they?’ she says. ‘If there’s one thing any major research institute in the world loves, it’s success.’
‘I suppose so. They do say success has many fathers,’ Isaac says, his voice wise beyond his twenty-six years.