The Bellbottom Incident

by Neve Maslakovic

  “I told him I was headed to pick up a pizza. He must have assumed that I was coming right back for a late night at the lab. I’ve certainly done that often enough in the past.”

  I grabbed a couple pairs of bellbottom jeans from the clothes rack and turned to find that Abigail had dug up a set of leg warmers. I shook my head at her. “Not those—they’re from the eighties. Here.” I handed her the smaller of the jeans. She was petite and thin, and I was more what I liked to think of as average sized, both in height and the other dimension. Next I found us both loose-fitting peasant blouses and, as we hurriedly donned the jeans and blouses in the changing area, said, “I suppose I should let Dean Braga know what has happened.” I was not looking forward to that call. Dean Isobel Braga, formerly of the Earth Sciences Department, was my boss. By quiet consensus, we had never gotten around to telling her about Sabina’s real background, and the dean was, I was very sure, not going to be happy about that. She already disapproved of what she called past irregularities in the lab.

  Abigail took a look at herself in the floor-to-ceiling mirror and rolled up the sleeves of the shirt, which was a bit large, as were the jeans. My clothes fit just fine. As Abigail rummaged around for a belt to keep her jeans up, I made the call. The dean didn’t answer. I breathed a sigh of relief and, as I was pretty sure that she would see a text message immediately, left a voice mail instead on her desk phone. With any luck she wouldn’t get around to checking her messages until Monday morning, by which time we’d hopefully have Sabina back safe and sound, and the dean would not have to be told of the matter at all.

  Abigail and I finished up by donning a couple of black woolen coats—I figured our modern sneakers would not be that noticeable under the long jeans—and hurried back across the hall, almost bumping into Dr. Little on his way in. The young professor was in pajamas and slippers under a plaid robe, having left his house in haste after being roused from bed by Officer Van Underberg. The good officer was right behind him, concern written all over his face. He was very fond of Sabina. We all were.

  I hoped that Dr. Little wasn’t going to have a problem with me joining the search-and-rescue party. Abigail was a TTE grad student and had plenty of STEWie experience up her sleeve. I had some, too, much of it hard earned, but that had not seemed to matter to Dr. Little when I popped into his office during the summer. He had sent a note to Dean Braga requesting several STEWie roster spots, and in it he’d mentioned that he was seeking volunteer research subjects.

  “You were born in the first half of 1977?” he had asked when I showed up in his office to volunteer.

  “Yes, April 1.”

  “You look younger.”

  He didn’t make it sound like a compliment. He added, “When I asked for volunteers, I meant people in the science departments—professors, postdocs, senior graduate students.”

  “I’m in the dean’s office. That counts.”

  I could almost see the phrase But you’re just the dean’s assistant hovering on Dr. Little’s lips.

  “As a general rule I prefer that those who step into STEWie’s basket with me have some technical knowledge,” he finally said. “Obviously you’ve been on the Pompeii run”—this was before the incident with the runestone and its accompanying fourteenth-century run—“but that hardly counts.”

  Given that we had barely made it back in one piece, it counted quite a lot in my opinion. I decided not to belabor the point and instead said, “I’m a quick learner. I’ll attend a workshop.”

  He tried another tack. “You should know that some of the questions we need answered by each volunteer about their family history”—we included him and his two graduate students, Tammy and Lee—“are, by definition, very personal. After all, we are trying to find the link between birth date, conception date, and the historical cutoff for time travelers.”

  “Shoot,” I said. “Ask me anything. Father’s name, Soren Olsen. Mother is Missy, maiden name Donovan. They met here at St. Sunniva as freshmen and married at the end of their senior year, soon after I made my appearance in the world.”

  Dr. Little, who could hardly be called insightful, looked up from the volunteer form he had opened on his computer screen. There were several pages of questions, it looked like. I was pretty sure my parents wouldn’t mind if I provided details about their younger days, and if they did, I was confident I could convince them that it was for the greater good and the advancement of scientific knowledge. Which it was. As for any personal matters…well, there was one, but I wasn’t about to spell it out for Dr. Little.

  He was frowning at me. “I find that when people volunteer for these things, they often have an ulterior motive. The goal of the study is not for you to run around in the seventies digging around in your parents’ lives. If you want to do this because you have unanswered questions about your parents’ past, it would be best just to talk to your folks. Unless—I’m sorry, are they still living?”

  “They are. They live in Florida,” I explained, as if that was of any interest to him. “They are in charge of a retirement community there and—”

  He held up a hand. “Just as long as you understand that STEWie cannot be used to resolve personal issues.”

  That was unfortunate, because, like I said, there were things I wanted to know. Perhaps there would be a way of getting around that. I’d worry about it later. “Got it,” I said.

  “I’ve sent the questionnaire to the printer,” he said in a voice that suggested he was only humoring me and had just wasted six sheets of paper. “Fill it out, and I’ll let you know if we need you.”

  Needless to say, I never heard back about the study.

  Well, I was going now, and he would just have to accept it.

  We all tumbled into the lab at the same time, Abigail and I looking like we were on our way to a theme party. Dr. Little wasted no time before asking, “How long has she been gone?”

  “Ninety-five minutes,” Nate said at once, as if he and Dr. Mooney had just done the math again. “Forty-two hours and counting in 1976.”

  “Almost two days! Dammit. This is what comes of letting teenagers roam around the lab.”

  This was directed at Dr. Mooney, who didn’t seem to take it personally. “Sabina is hardly a typical teenager. What was I supposed to do? Turn her out of the lab and send her to the mall?”

  “It would have been safer.”

  I wasn’t so sure I agreed with Dr. Little about that. What would Sabina have learned from hanging around at the mall? How to fall into debt by spending money she didn’t have? That she could never be thin enough or pretty enough? Not for the first time, I thought about how strange our culture must seem to her.

  “And how did she get in?” Dr. Little asked.

  “I couldn’t tell you. None of us gave her the security code for the door.”

  The two professors—one gray haired with life-earned wrinkles around his eyes, the other young and underslept with bags under his eyes—stood facing each other, as if in some kind of academic standoff. Abigail, even though graduate students occupied just about the lowest rung on the academic ladder, had no problem speaking up when the occasion called for it. “We’re wasting time. Julia and I are ready to go.”

  Dr. Little turned his displeased stare in my direction—the volunteer study aside, there was no love lost between us, as he thought I interfered in the TTE lab doings far more than what my title should have allowed. I stared him down and he nodded. “Give me two minutes—I have my to-go bag and seventies clothes in my office.”

  “Please, can I come along?” Officer Van Underberg’s caramel-colored mustache was wrinkled in consternation. “I’d like to help.”

  “Sorry, three people is enough. The larger our group, the more attention we’ll draw,” Dr. Little called out as he headed out of the lab at a brisk clip.

  A few minutes later he was back, and we all assembled by STEWie’s platform, which stood raised off the ground and supported a steel frame that represented the basket’s
dimensions. The basket itself, the component of STEWie that would travel with us into 1976, was invisible. We were taking Slingshot 2.0, the only one in working condition, so we would be able to make small spacetime adjustments as needed.

  Dr. Mooney was bent over his keyboard. “I’ve adjusted the coordinates by forty-eight hours to account for the two days Sabina has already been there.”

  “We can’t jump to the exact same point she did, greet her as she steps out of the basket and into 1976?” I asked.

  He shook his head without looking up. “Those two days are already part of her own past and can’t be changed. You’ll be arriving on October 31, 1976. That’s a Sunday. I left the destination unchanged—the Open Book.”

  The Open Book was a large stone sculpture on the green fronting the student cafeteria. As he climbed up onto STEWie’s platform, Dr. Little explained why he had chosen this destination for his study. “I figured there would be a lunchtime crowd, which would allow me to arrive on campus unnoticed.”

  Abigail and I followed him up onto the platform. Nate hesitated, then climbed up as well. “Since the birth date cutoff is only a rule of thumb, I figure there’s a chance.”

  Dr. Little gave him a disapproving look, as though he personally begrudged such an unscientific attempt to circumvent one of History’s key rules. “Kirkland, no one has ever managed to travel past their birth date. It won’t work.”

  “No harm in trying.” Still, he passed me the blanket, bottle of water, and the first aid kit he had dug up in the lab stores.

  As the lab equipment started whirring to life, I asked, “Do we know how cold it will be? Should we have grabbed an umbrella, or hats and mittens for ourselves and Sabina?”

  Dr. Little shook his head curtly. “I checked the campus weather database. October 31 will be dry and sunny, with a midafternoon high of thirteen degrees.”

  Officer Van Underberg gasped from his position just outside the laser-mirror array.

  “That’s Celsius,” Dr. Little said with an implied of course. He adjusted his hair, which he had been letting grow to more seamlessly blend into the seventies, over his coat collar. It was, along with the beard that was undergoing the same process, still a work in progress. “About fifty-five Fahrenheit, so reasonably warm for fall. Unfortunately, last night’s low almost reached the freezing point. Let’s hope Sabina found shelter somewhere.” He sounded not unfeeling about it; rather, it was clear that he was attempting to prepare us for anything. Like Abigail and I, he had changed into bellbottoms. Above them he was wearing one of his trademark button-down vests. It was a denim one that was a slightly lighter blue than his jeans, with two pockets and four buttons. Under it he had on a white T-shirt, and a short coat covered the whole ensemble.

  Nate thought of something. He took the two-way radio off his belt and passed it to me, then nodded at Officer Van Underberg to give his to Abigail. The officer hurried over with his radio and passed it to Abigail like a good-luck charm. Nate explained of the radios for us, “They can work without a base station if you’re not too far from each other. In case I get left behind.”

  “If you get left behind?” Rousing Dr. Little out of bed had made him grouchier than usual, though he was no more a fan of Nate’s than he was of mine. The pair were neighbors and a troublesome property-line tree had caused some tension between them. “You will get left behind.”

  Setting the watch I’d borrowed from the costume room to one o’clock, I heard Nate say calmly, “Dr. Little, why don’t you give your bag to Abigail? In case you get left behind with me.”

  “I’m pretty sure that I’ll arrive just fine. I’ll still be a good six months away from being born.” Still, he grudgingly pushed his duffel bag into Abigail’s arms. It held his travel gear—this typically meant local currency, a map, snack food, water, camera, a notebook, that kind of thing, perhaps a sleeping mat and blanket for extended runs.

  “Abigail,” I said, “if I get left behind, too…”

  Her eyes met mine above the duffel bag. “Don’t worry, Julia. I’ll find her.”

  6

  A pleasant fall day, with the sun high up in the sky, greeted only three of us. History had weeded out Nate. I had expected it, but it was still jarring. I had never made a journey into the past without him, and I’d come to depend on him in more ways than one.

  No Sabina either. I don’t know why I’d expected her to meet us, as if she would have spent two days waiting by the book sculpture, but in the back of my mind I guess I had.

  I blinked in the bright sunlight, then let out my breath, which I had been holding in anticipation of being left behind. With my next breath, I took in the familiar scent of the campus—the sweetness of the decomposing fall leaves, sharp cooking smells from the nearby student cafeteria, pine needles…and a couple of less familiar ones. Car exhaust fumes and cigarette smoke were rife in the air, and cigarette butts and pop and beer bottles littered the ground by my feet. I resisted the urge to bend down to clean up the mess and instead reached out to touch the sculpture itself, which looked new, unweathered by thirty-plus years of alternating hot and cold seasons. Shaped like a large letter V laid on its side, it was a portrayal of a half-open paper book, its marble pages chiseled with famous quotations. (A room without books is like a body without a soul.) The three of us were inside its seven-foot pages, where we were sheltered from curious eyes.

  “I told Kirkland he wouldn’t be able to come and that I would arrive just fine,” Dr. Little said smugly as he took his duffel bag back from Abigail.

  “And you were right.” I peered out from behind the sculpture. Students, individually and in clumps, were making their way across the plaza toward the cafeteria for lunch. We heard the campus clock tower across the lake chime one o’clock.

  Leaving the blanket and water tucked under the sculpture in case Sabina returned, we emerged unhurriedly, as if we belonged on campus on the early afternoon of Sunday of October 31, 1976. Caution really wasn’t necessary. If it wasn’t all right for us to be seen, if our presence was likely to interfere with anyone’s path or the course of their day, then History would not have let us leave the shelter of the Open Book. We crossed the small green to the paved plaza. The campus, as familiar to me as the back of my hand, was both the same and disconcertingly different. The two-story Hypatia House, where I worked, was in its place farther up the lakeside path, which was no surprise as it was one of the original nineteenth-century buildings. The trees fronting it stood in a different configuration, though, and had shed most of their fall leaves. In the other direction, down by the bend in the lake, I could see that construction had begun on a future campus eyesore, the square cement building destined to house the English department. No work was being done on it at the moment, however, it being Sunday. Just a quiet autumn day on campus.

  Only one of the Science Quad buildings was missing—the balloon-roofed building that would eventually become the Time Travel Engineering lab. Its spot was occupied by five stories of stained concrete that looked to be a dorm. Perhaps its occupants were the ones responsible for the late-night party that had left the Open Book littered with trash.

  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 urge
d 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.”