The Bellbottom Incident

by Neve Maslakovic

  “Julia—Abigail—hold up.”

  It was Nate, who must have pulled into the parking lot right behind us. I guessed that my text had reached him en route to my house—he was in slacks and a nice shirt, his hair still a bit wet from a shower. As he joined us in the hallway, the police radio on his hip crackled (he was always on call) with a bit of mundane campus business. It was Officer Lars Van Underberg checking in to say he’d put a stop to a student prank involving a dozen dorm mattresses and some fun-loving seniors. Nate instructed the officer to stand by in case we needed him. Our eyes met over Abigail’s head as she typed the security code into the small panel to the right of the lab doors, but he said nothing. What was there to say?

  The three of us filed into the TTE lab. This was where STEWie researchers worked on turning legend and myth into textbook material. A typical week in the lab could yield anything from video footage of the construction of the Mayan pyramids to details about Winston Churchill’s boyhood.

  Xavier Mooney was at one of the workstations, his shoulders stooped in his lab coat as he pondered something on the computer screen. He was alone. STEWie’s basket, the one that had taken Sabina away, must have been gone for a while—send-offs into the past generated so much heat that cryogenic equipment under the floor was necessary, and the lab was already back to its usual chilly state. But it wasn’t the cold that sent a sudden shiver down my spine; it was a feeling of foreboding, one the fleece jacket I’d grabbed on my way out into the crisp late-September evening could do nothing to ease.

  “She left a note.” Dr. Mooney nodded toward a piece of paper taped to one of the blackboards, above a collage of photos taken on previous STEWie runs. “The basket took off an hour and thirteen minutes ago…No, fourteen minutes,” he amended, checking the timer he had set running on his computer screen.

  Nate pulled down the note in one sharp movement, read it, and passed it to Abigail and me. Writing English by hand was a skill Sabina was still working on, so she had typed up the note on one of the lab computers, where the spell-checker was her friend, and printed it out. Abigail read it aloud:

  BEST THING TO GO. IF STAY, ONLY MORE TROUBLE WILL BE. THANK YOU FOR FRIENDSHIP AND HOME.

  Sabina had added an additional line below:

  SEND CELER TO ME, YES?

  I felt tears well up in my eyes and didn’t bother blinking them away.

  “It doesn’t say where she jumped to,” Nate pointed out.

  The professor spun around in the barstool-like lab chair to face us. “Seventy-six. That’s where she went.”

  “You mean Pompeii of 76 AD?” I asked, confused by this new bit of information. “A couple of years before the eruption? How can that be? She’s already there.”

  The professor tugged at the strands of his graying hair. He was that rare breed of academic—beloved by students and colleagues alike. He took the note back and explained in the affable manner that was the hallmark of his lectures but felt a bit strained, given the circumstances, “Helen is away at a conference, so I thought I might as well get some work done. It took me a while to notice something was wrong. The lab felt a little warm, but I didn’t think much of it—I was already sweaty from biking—and my attention was elsewhere.” He gestured toward the workbench. Whereas STEWie was what you might call old-generation time-travel equipment—large and clunky were the best descriptors for the nested array of mirrors and lasers that filled the oversized lab—the Slingshot was portable and the next thing in time-travel technology. Since our time in Pompeii, Dr. Mooney had focused his energies on perfecting the device, which at first glance looked like the junkyard edition of a laptop. He was tinkering with a new version, 3.0, and had taken apart the prototype, Version 1.0, which had been damaged by a direct hit from a bullet. Its parts lay strewn all around the worktable.

  He went on. “Then I saw the last entry in STEWie’s log. Sabina may have thought she was going back to the ancient Roman world, but no, it was not that seventy-six, and it wasn’t Pompeii either. She’s still on campus. Only in near time. The year 1976.”

  4

  I breathed a small sigh of relief—1976 wasn’t that bad as these things went. She’d find the campus somewhat different, but she would be safe. There would be buildings for her to take shelter in, water fountains to quench her thirst, people she could turn to for help.

  “Hold on,” Nate said. “Are you saying she arranged this alone? How is that possible, Professor?”

  “The system was ready for Steven’s run tomorrow. For his ongoing series of experiments in 1976,” Dr. Mooney explained. “She must have misinterpreted the date.”

  Steven Little was one of the two junior professors in the TTE department. I knew all about his research, and none of it had anything to do with Sabina.

  “All right, so the system was set for 1976,” Nate said, then followed up with the same questions I had asked Abigail: “But how did she know how to work STEWie? It’s not just a matter of simply stepping into the basket, is it? There are generators and things that must be turned on. And how did she get into the lab in the first place if no one was here?”

  “It’s my fault.” Dr. Mooney got up to tape the note back on the blackboard, as if it belonged there with the other historical documents and photos. “I’ve been giving her free rein in the lab. She’s so bright and has a real aptitude for math and physics—but, more to the point, I reasoned that she has a right to know how time travel works. It saved her life and brought her here, after all. And so I’ve let her help me with a test run on occasion. No, nothing like that,” he said, noticing our shock. “I don’t mean I’ve let her step into the basket. Of course not. She’s only assisted me in sending the mobile robot on quick STEWie runs and in testing the Slingshot around campus.”

  He didn’t need to explain why he himself could not step into STEWie’s basket again, not for the adventurous, uncharted kind of time travel in any case. Dr. Mooney had been grounded in the present by an immune system illness that put him at risk when traveling to places and times before the advent of antibiotics. He was one of the original minds behind STEWie, the other two being Gabriel Rojas, who was on a well-earned sabbatical after having been wrongfully accused of murdering a handful of people, myself included, and Lewis Sunder, who was now behind bars for his attempt to commit the crime of which he’d accused his colleague.

  The lab ceiling light caught the reflective stripes on the professor’s pants, which went along with his usual method of transportation—Scarlett, his red bicycle. “I would send her on foot with a GPS unit to wherever I was planning to jump, and she’d help me gauge the Slingshot’s accuracy. That sort of thing. I never thought…” He didn’t finish the sentence.

  “You gave her the security code for the lab door?” Nate asked, not unkindly.

  “Of course not! She was a favorite visitor here, and we all always tried to make her feel welcome—well, not Steven, but that’s just how he is. Giving her the code would have been a completely different matter, Chief Kirkland. I’m not sure how she got in, but she must have seen Steven’s run listed on the roster”—the roster hung on the wall just inside the lab door—“and misinterpreted the destination.” Dr. Mooney griped, as if it mattered at the moment, “I’ve asked Steven before to write out his dates fully in the roster, but he seems to expect everyone to know the specifics of his research.”

  “It’s not your fault, Xavier,” I said, “it’s mine. I shouldn’t have insisted that we keep the story from getting out. I wanted to give her more time.” Or maybe I didn’t want Quinn deciding the when and where for us. “Actually,” I admitted, “I had hoped that we could avoid it altogether, that the matter would stay known only to the TTE staff and Chancellor Evans.”

  “If it’s anyone’s fault, it’s mine.” It was the first thing Abigail had said since we’d walked into the lab. She pulled herself to her full height (all five foot and change of it) and crossed her arms over her chest. I hoped she didn’t blame me. This being-an-aunt thing was mo
re complicated than I had anticipated. It was hard to know when to offer help and advice…and when to butt out. “I should have noticed that Sabina was unhappy. I’m her guardian and I’m responsible for her well-being.”

  Nate looked from me to Abigail and back. “I think we all wanted to protect her. Anyway, there’s no use crying over spilled milk. We can ask her how she got the code for the door once she’s safely back.”

  “Wait,” I said. “You don’t think someone…wanted her out of the way, do you? Gave her the code and encouraged her to go? Someone who knew her real background.” I didn’t get an answer, but then, I hadn’t really expected one. I was just thinking out loud. “How surprised she must have been to find herself not in Pompeii but in a strange time period. I can picture her wandering around campus, trying to pin down the year, but once she did so…shouldn’t she have jumped back already? She can’t want to stay in 1976.” I had been glancing toward the mirror-laser array, expecting to be hit with a warm whoosh as the basket returned onto STEWie’s platform with Sabina in it.

  Dr. Mooney gestured wordlessly toward the shelf above his workstation. A small device about the size of a cell phone sat there next to its identical backup. “She didn’t take the Callback.”

  We all knew what that meant.

  Sabina couldn’t come back. She was stuck in 1976.

  5

  “She didn’t take the Callback?” Abigail asked, her face falling. “She must have had no intention of returning, no matter what.”

  I put a hand on her shoulder and wanted to tell her not to take it personally but didn’t know how to frame the words.

  “Has anyone called Dr. Little?” Nate said, now fully in his campus security chief mode. “We need him to go on his run to 1976 as soon as possible. Tonight.”

  “I couldn’t reach him, Chief Kirkland,” Dr. Mooney said. “His phone must be off so as not to wake Piper. I texted him as well, but no response yet.”

  Steven Little was not only a junior TTE professor but the father of a six-month-old baby girl, Piper.

  “I’ll send Officer Van Underberg to fetch him.” Nate turned aside to deliver the order into his police radio.

  Abigail peered at the STEWie log over Dr. Mooney’s shoulder. “Are those Dr. Little’s notes? Let’s see…He set the system for one o’clock on October 29, with the intended destination…the Open Book sculpture, it looks like. Well, that’s good, at least. I was worried Sabina might have jumped into subzero January weather.”

  “My old lab coat is missing from the lab locker,” Dr. Mooney said. “But it won’t help her if it’s a cold or snowy October. It’s just light cotton.”

  I involuntarily looked in the direction of the locker, as if it could yield some answers. “She took your old lab coat along? I wonder why—she must have known it wouldn’t belong in the ancient world. Did she take anything else from the lab?”

  “Not as far as I could tell.”

  “The Fourth of July photo from her room is gone. And her Pompeii clothes,” I explained. This was making no sense. Sabina had donned her old dress and sandals in anticipation of returning to the ancient world. But why had she brought the modern lab coat and photo with her?

  Nate rejoined us, saying, “Van Underberg is on his way to Dr. Little’s house and will bring him here as soon as possible. We need to get going. The clock is ticking fast in 1976.”

  His words made my stomach sink a bit. A second rule of time travel is that clocks carried by researchers touring the past tick faster than clocks do in the present. Much faster. One hour in the past equals just over two minutes in the lab. I glanced at the timer on Dr. Mooney’s computer screen. Sabina had been gone an hour and twenty-five minutes now. I did the math in my head. She’d been in 1976 for a day and a half—alone, frightened, probably cold and hungry. I could see Abigail thinking the same thing and tried to put a positive spin on the situation. “As you said, Abigail, at least it’s October and not the depths of winter. And she’s on campus—there are far more dangerous places and times she could have ended up in, war zones and other ghost zones I don’t even want to think about.”

  “Yes, it should be fairly straightforward to get her back,” Dr. Mooney said, though something about his tone told me that he thought nothing of the sort.

  My stomach sank further. As time travel went, jumping back thirty-some years was a blip on the scale of human history. On the other hand, one could never know what to expect when attempting to navigate History’s alleys. What if we didn’t manage to find her? Or, if someone had purposefully given her the code, what if they stood in our way and made sure we couldn’t find her?

  Nate was in full take-charge mode. “Let’s leave as soon as Dr. Little gets here. I’ll grab some water, a blanket, and a first aid kit.”

  “Uh, Chief Kirkland—” Abigail began as Nate turned toward the lab doors. Dr. Mooney intercepted Nate by putting a hand on his shoulder. “You can’t go.”

  “You need me to stay here until we leave?”

  “I mean, you can’t go after Sabina.”

  “Why not? Surely STEWie has cooled and recharged by now. Is it the double basket issue?” He was as impatient to get going as I was.

  Dr. Mooney shook his head. “That’s not the problem. Your basket will return because Sabina’s is already there, but you can use hers to jump back home. Chief Kirkland, she traveled to 1976. What year were you born?”

  “Nineteen seventy-one. Dammit. Of course.”

  “You can’t travel to a time period in which you already exist,” the professor reminded us.

  And there it was, a subheading of History protecting itself, one Sabina had perhaps forgotten in her eagerness to return to her home town of Pompeii.

  Abigail, who was the youngest person in the room, said, “I can go to 1976 just fine, so that’s one.”

  “And you’re two, Julia,” Nate said. “You were born in 1977, weren’t you?”

  Dr. Mooney, who had sat back down at the computer, took his attention away from the screen to give me a look. “Were you? I always assumed you were younger than that, Julia. Sorry, that came out rude.”

  “No harm done. I’ve been told often enough that I’m baby-faced. Just the other day someone assumed I was an undergrad and quizzed me on the whereabouts of a dorm party.”

  “What month?” Dr. Mooney asked.

  “My birth, you mean? I was an April Fool’s baby—April 1, 1977.”

  “And Sabina’s gone to October of the previous year. You would have already been conceived by then.”

  “Well, yes, I would have.”

  “Why is that a problem?” Nate asked. “It’s called the birth date cutoff, not the conception date cutoff.”

  Having volunteered for Dr. Little’s study, which was designed to answer the knotty problem of just when the cutoff happened, I already knew the answer.

  “The birth date is more of a rule of thumb—an approximation, if you will—when it comes to time travel.” Dr. Mooney sat up a bit in the lab chair, again slipping into his professorial mode, even under the stressful circumstances. “For most time travelers the cutoff seems to fall somewhere between conception and birth, but we think it’s closer to the conception side of things than the actual birth event. Dr. Little’s experiments aim to explore the matter, though he’s had no luck so far in figuring out the pattern. Dr. Little’s run—the one Sabina stepped into—was intended to send him into that unique period in his own life.”

  “So I might be able to go, and I might not?” I asked.

  “The only way to be sure is to try. In which case, Julia, you might want to change your outfit. I’m not sure a fleece jacket and those athletic pants”—beneath my fleece jacket, I had on a tank top and yoga pants, having been just about to change into something nicer for the date with Nate—“will do for 1976. You too, Abigail.”

  Abigail was way ahead of him. Leaving Dr. Mooney to ready the equipment and Nate looking stunned by the news that he was grounded in the present, I followe
d her out of the lab and into the travel apparel closet across the hall.

  It seemed wrong to bother with something as pedestrian as clothes with the clock ticking, but we would need to blend in if we wanted to move around freely—assuming I managed to make it to 1976 at all. Blend in was the third of the time-travel rules, the last one being There’s always a way back. Abigail, whose hair was back to its natural blonde this week, short, and just below her ears, headed to the corner where modern clothing hung on hangers. The closet was loosely organized by century and geographical area, with shelves and boxes overflowing with everything from ancient Greek tunics to medieval cassocks to disco pants. Abigail, who was more familiar with medieval cassocks than disco pants, began rifling through the modern clothing uncertainly.

  “Don’t beat yourself up about not noticing that Sabina had snuck into the building,” I said, taking a guess at what was gnawing at her.

  “I had my nose buried in my work, trying to weave the notes and photos I took on that last run into a coherent thesis chapter. You know, the ones of Marie-Anne Lavoisier sketching Antoine’s apparatus.”

  Under different circumstances, the wording might have made us both chuckle. Of course, the apparatus in question was a piece of chemistry equipment. The notes and photos were from an eighteenth-century run.

  “If Dr. Mooney didn’t give her the lab code—you didn’t give her the code, did you, Abigail?”

  “Certainly not.”

  “Let’s see, the seventies…jeans and wide-collared shirts…Then maybe one of the other grad students or Dr. B did. Gave her the code, I mean.” Dr. B—Erika Baumgartner—was the fourth of the TTE professors, a junior one like Dr. Little, and Abigail’s advisor. I couldn’t imagine her acting that unprofessionally, however. “I wonder why Oscar didn’t say anything to you about her being here when you left the building.”