The Bellbottom Incident

by Neve Maslakovic

  I thanked her and went to rejoin Abigail. New York City matched the East Coast part, though it wasn’t exactly the first place that came to mind when you said tree, unless that part had been wholly in Xave’s inebriated imagination. I summarized what we’d found out so far. “Our best guess, then, is that they’ve gone either to the Library of Congress or Kurt Vonnegut’s house in New York City. I’m not sure that narrows it down any. It would be easier if I just jumped back home and phoned my parents to ask them.”

  “Your parents were at the book club meeting together?” Abigail said as we got up to look for Dr. Little. “Aww, how romantic.”

  “Sadly, not in the least. My father was sneezing the whole time thanks to his allergies, and my mother was more interested in a tall, dark-haired stranger. Don’t say it…”

  “What?”

  “That he might be the dark-haired ancestor I assumed was somewhere in my family tree.”

  “I’m sure that’s not it,” she said diplomatically.

  “Well, let’s hope it’s not Udo, either. He’s blond but he dyes his hair.”

  “Did your parents ever mention the book club to you?”

  I shook my head. Had my parents possessed grander writing aspirations before their dreams were subverted by life’s realities? Something else to ask them about when I got home. They had ended up happily running the town paper, the simply titled Thornberg News, writing articles that ranged from reports on the popularity of the September corn fair to birth and death announcements. I wondered what Udo Leland had made of the Thornberg News.

  Dr. Little was by the library magazine rack, leafing through a Popular Electronics issue, his duffel bag by his feet, his coat draped over it. “Anything?” he asked at our approach.

  “It will be a place where all the different kinds of truths fit together,” I quoted from the book.

  “Truths? Well, that’s not very helpful.” He slid the magazine back into place next to the others. “I don’t suppose Udo said anything else of interest at the book club meeting, Julia?”

  “Not really. He read a story about twenty-second-century skeleton hoarders. No mention of the tree Xave heard about from Jenny. I don’t suppose there’s a key tree in Vonnegut’s book, Abigail?”

  She wrinkled her nose in thought. “It’s been a long time since I read it. There was a fancy fountain, some deep caves on Mercury, bluebirds on Titan…There may have been a tree, but I honestly don’t remember.”

  “If we had current campus IDs, we could check the book out of the library and read the rest. But since we don’t, you’d better put it back on the shelf, Abigail.”

  “Will do.” She made a 180 and headed back into the stacks.

  Dr. Little reached for his coat and duffel. “Hanging around reading books would be a waste of our time anyway. In this case, I mean, not in general, obviously.”

  “We could check in with Nate,” I suggested as we left the library, Abigail having rejoined us.

  “Why?” Dr. Little wanted to know.

  I hoped that he didn’t think I was eager to keep popping back into the present to see Nate. I was, of course, but that was beside the point. Like I’d told Abigail, I wanted to phone my parents and ask them about the book club, but I felt strangely reluctant to mention that in front of Dr. Little. I also really wanted to sit down and have a very frank talk with Dr. Mooney.

  “Just to touch base,” I said. “It could be that he’s already found Udo and talked to him.”

  Dr. Little checked his wristwatch and did a quick mental calculation. “Only six minutes and fifty-five seconds have passed in the lab. It would be a miracle if Kirkland managed to contact Udo in that short a time. We need to give him at least a full twenty-four hours our time.”

  “In that case, let’s jump to the previous book club meeting—I’m pretty sure the CSI was something they’ve discussed before.”

  On the evening of Friday, October 22, 1976, we found the campus under a clear night sky. This time all three of us were able to go into St. Olaf’s Hall—the dorm monitor was missing from his post. We seated ourselves in the wooden chairs against the back wall of the rec room, just inside the door. A couple of students glanced in our direction, but only briefly. There was presumably nothing unusual about a newcomer or two listening in without contributing.

  As before, a cloud of smoke hung over the space. The difference this time was that rather than Udo monopolizing the conversation, it was a free-for-all. We had walked into a discussion of the kind that really only can be had in college, before the everyday details of adult life take over: mortgage payments, meals, child care, laundry. More of the lights had been left on this time, and the students were sprawled on the couch, chairs, and the floor with well-thumbed copies of The Sirens of Titan in their hands. Words like fate, free will, and determinism were flying around the room. There never was an answer to these things. It wasn’t there in Vonnegut’s book, I guessed, and it wouldn’t be hammered out by Udo’s book club either. But they sure were trying.

  Scanning the room, I saw that my parents were not present this time. Breathing a sigh of relief, I devoted my attention to the metaphysical questions occupying the students, which, I hoped, would soon turn into a discussion of where the book club would be heading in a couple of weeks.

  I watched Udo as he occasionally partook in the debate regarding Vonnegut’s The Sirens of Titan and read something in his expression. Not that I knew much about budding fiction writers, but I had spent almost eight years observing the academic environment from within. I suspected that the problems that existed in the ivory tower—jealousy, greed, narcissism, loneliness, unrealistic expectations—were all represented in this room as well. Udo was trying to figure out what elements in The Sirens of Titan spoke to the others in order to absorb them into his own work in progress. He wanted Vonnegut’s success for himself.

  I heard someone mention the infundibulum, and my ears perked up. It was the woman in a sari, the one who would form one fourth of the flirting quadrangle one week hence. She was wondering at the significance of the fifty-nine-day interval at which Rumfoord and his dog, Kazak, popped in and out of New England via their CSI.

  A second voice said, “Gilberte, that’s a great question,” and I felt Abigail sit up in the chair next to me. Gilberte was who had taken Sabina in for the night. At her question, the discussion took off on a different tangent. Did the fifty-nine come from the year the book was published, or had it been chosen because it was a prime number, or perhaps because it was the last minute on the clock before it struck the hour, denoting inevitability?

  Udo raised a hand. “Friends!” He was a natural speaker, projecting his voice without having to shout, and the conversation in the room immediately died down. “I have a thought. I propose we visit a chrono-synclastic infundibulum of our own.”

  There were gasps of surprise and approval in response.

  “I have one in mind, as it happens. It’s by the ocean, under a tree. The place has housed the rich, but no matter.” He waved that issue away. “There we will find some answers perhaps.”

  I, too, wanted some answers. But it was not to be. I felt my breathing turn shallow, as if the very air was growing thinner. When I turned to look at Dr. Little and Abigail, I saw that they were already on their feet, backing out the door. I joined them.

  Behind us, conversation had broken out again, voices rising and falling over each other as Udo’s idea of a pilgrimage to a CSI took hold. We did not get to hear the rest.

  In the hallway, we passed a couple hurrying into the room, late to the book club meeting. My parents. They were clearly in the middle of an argument—“I can eat dinner with whomever I wish,” my mother was saying angrily; “I didn’t mean it like that,” my father countered, adding, “Are you mad because of what I said the other day?”

  It was clear that their presence there meant that ours wasn’t welcome. Would Missy or Soren have stumbled over our feet had we stayed in the rec room, thus interrupting their arg
ument and halting the book club discussion? Whatever the reason, History propelled us as if we had a winter wind at our backs, and we passed out of St. Olaf’s Hall.

  16

  “Too bad that couple had to come in just then,” Abigail said after we came to a halt behind the now-familiar shrubbery in the courtyard of the dorm. Dr. Little gave an irritated grunt and pulled out his duffel bag from where we had left our things hidden—under one of the shrubs—but carefully so that none of the sensitive instruments inside would get damaged. Abigail continued. “Julia, were those your—”

  “My parents, yes. Sorry,” I said, feeling an obligation to apologize for their intrusion.

  “They were having a lovers’ quarrel?” Abigail said. “How cute.”

  “Poor timing on their part, though.”

  “I’m glad my parents are all the way in California,” Dr. Little said. “I do not want that problem.”

  The statement was a touch insensitive—I was pretty sure Abigail would have been very happy to have the problem of running into her parents. It was too dark for me to make out her expression, but I decided it would be best to change the topic. “What do you think of Udo? Everyone in the club seems to hero-worship him, especially the women. He’s more your age than mine, Abigail.”

  Abigail was an unabashed romantic, but she had a practical side. “He looks like he would faint if he had to wash a dish or mow the lawn. So the attraction—I don’t know…the tight black turtleneck?”

  We chuckled at that—a chuckle not shared by Dr. Little—and I brought up a thought that had occurred to me during the book club meeting. “Do you think it’s odd that they’re reading The Sirens of Titan and not Slaughterhouse-Five? That’s Vonnegut’s most famous novel, isn’t it? I had to—I mean, I read it in college. And he’s already written Slaughterhouse. We saw it on the library shelf.”

  “What was that one about, Slaughterhouse-Five?” Dr. Little asked. “It’s not one I’ve read.”

  I remembered a bit about it. “It was based on his experiences in World War Two—Vonnegut survived the bombing of Dresden as a prisoner of war.”

  Abigail nodded. “Come to think of it, that one featured time travel, too…at least, of sorts. The main character, whose name I can’t remember, jumped in and out of various points in his life. In one scene he’d be in a trench in Europe, and in the next he’d be an old man in an armchair back home, then he’d be back in the war.”

  “There you go. Udo never went to war,” Dr. Little said. “He can’t match Vonnegut’s experience. The US pulled out of Vietnam in 1973—three years ago. He may have been called in for a physical, but he probably wasn’t assigned a lottery number.”

  “A lottery number?” Abigail asked.

  “To see who would be called up.”

  “Yes, I see…” I said. “Udo grew up watching those only a few years older than him be drafted—or go to Canada—all the while expecting that he himself might be called up, too. I wonder if he was relieved when that didn’t happen, or if he was disappointed that he wouldn’t get to serve, like his literary hero Kurt Vonnegut did.”

  “Udo could have enlisted in the army when he came of age,” Dr. Little pointed out.

  “Let’s assume he was relieved, then. Either way, it makes sense that he’s more enamored with The Sirens of Titan than with Slaughterhouse.”

  “There’s a war part in The Sirens of Titan, too,” Abigail said. “An interplanetary one. But I see what you mean, Julia.”

  We stuck around until the book club dispersed. I kept an eye out for my parents to see how their argument had turned out. The student my mother walked out with was not my father but the tall guy she’d sat next to at the book club meeting I’d crashed alone. Well, at least that probably ruled out Udo. It was dark, so I didn’t get a good look at the man’s face, but once again I had the feeling of familiarity—something about the way he carried himself and his walk. Had I met him before, in the present? If he was a student in 1976, that meant he was nearing his sixties in 2012. Perhaps he was a professor in one of the departments or maybe worked elsewhere on campus or in town.

  Udo was the last to leave, with two female students on either side of him, but he seemed to be more interested in telling them all about his plans for the book than anything else. I heard him say, “I’m thinking of calling them Richers, my society of skeleton hoarders. What do you girls think?”

  As we left the courtyard behind us and headed back to the Open Book, which we were using as our base of operations, I brought up the subject of Dr. Mooney once again—how he had never said anything about having met us in the past.

  “That’s not the only odd thing,” Dr. Little said. “There’s also the matter of the Slingshot.”

  The device was in the duffel bag on his shoulder, snug amidst the professor’s sleeping pad, notebooks, and other belongings.

  “What about it?” I asked. “To be honest, I’ve never understood how it works. I’ve been meaning to ask him to explain it to me.”

  To say I had no engineering skills would be an understatement, but I had hoped Dr. Mooney might be able to explain the main points with a napkin sketch or two.

  I saw Dr. Little shake his head as we passed under a street lamp. “I’m not sure he even knows how it works, not really.”

  That was an odd thing to say. “How can Dr. Mooney not know? He built it,” I protested.

  “Well, we didn’t actually see him do it, did we?” Abigail said quietly. Like before, her discomfort at saying anything even slightly critical of her beloved professor was obvious. “He just sort of…unveiled the Slingshot 1.0 when we were in Pompeii. But he could hardly have built it there.”

  “He must have brought it with him, then.”

  “But none of us noticed him working on it in the lab.”

  “Oh. I hadn’t realized that,” I said.

  “And he’s certainly been keeping things close to the vest since your return,” Dr. Little said, which almost made me snicker, since he was the one prone to wearing vests, not Dr. Mooney. In fact, he had one on at the moment—the blue-jean one.

  “Have you thought about what the Slingshot really represents?” Dr. Little went on. “It’s not just a small, portable version of STEWie. It’s a whole new paradigm.”

  Now that he mentioned it, I had wondered why the Slingshot didn’t need the mirrors and lasers that served as STEWie’s heart, or cryogenic equipment to prevent it from overheating. Dr. Mooney had breezily explained that the Slingshot used a power source more efficient than STEWie’s expensive thorium-powered generator, and I hadn’t given it much more thought than that.

  As we crossed the plaza onto the green beyond it, Dr. Little added, “Even the conference presentations Dr. Mooney has done have only been demonstrations of the device in action, not explanations of how it works. I assumed Mooney didn’t want to say more on the subject until he published”—not an unreasonable assumption, as publication was the academic equivalent of planting a flag on a mountaintop to stake your claim of having been there first—“but now I’m not so sure.”

  “And have you noticed,” Abigail said, lowering her voice to almost a whisper, as if someone was listening in to our conversation, “how much better the device got between versions 1.0 and 2.0? Version 2.0 has a rechargeable battery and can go with or against the arrow of time. And who knows what the one he’s been ‘working’ on, Version 3.0, will be able to do? For all we know, it’ll be able to take us into the future.”

  “Hold on. I don’t know much about inventions and design, but wouldn’t you expect that each new version would be better than the previous one?” I asked.

  “But for the innovation to happen so quickly? I mean, Mooney is a brilliant scientist, don’t get me wrong,” Dr. Little said as we reached the Open Book. The words, I suspected, had not been easy for him to say. “But he would need superpowers to have accomplished what he did in such a short time.”

  “So what are you suggesting, then?”

  �
�What if Mooney’s contribution to the Slingshot is only for show? That is to say, maybe he builds protective cases around devices that are provided to him.”

  “By whom?”

  “Well, if we can jump into the past, then it makes sense that someone from further along in the future can jump into our present. In fact, we have to assume that it does happen.”

  “When you say it like that, it sounds a little creepy,” Abigail said, wrinkling her nose. I was with her on that. I fought the impulse to furtively look around to see if anyone was watching from the shadows, judging us as I had judged my parents’ actions and words just minutes before.

  “You mean someone…sent the Slingshot to him?” I said to Dr. Little.

  “My point is, there’s a lot we don’t know about Dr. Mooney. Like why he chose not to mention the fact that he met us in 1976.”

  “Well, he can’t be from the future himself—he’s here in 1976, just as he’s supposed to be. Unless an older version of him sent the Slingshot back…But that’s not possible, is it? Because that would mean Dr. Mooney was changing his own past.” This was getting complicated.

  Abigail tilted her head to one side, considering this. “Think about the times we’ve used the Slingshot. It helped us escape a ghost zone in Pompeii. It helped you survive the fourteenth century, Julia. For the most part, having it hasn’t changed the past, only our own travels into it.”

  Drizzle had started falling all around us and was threatening to turn into a steady rain. Dr. Little brushed a raindrop off his nose and yawned. He and Abigail had been up for longer than I had, counting the hours that had passed when I went back to present-time to touch base with Nate.

  “The cafeteria will be locked up by now. Should we all go to Xave’s room in St. Olaf’s?” I suggested.

  Dr. Little shook his head sharply at this. “Let’s not confuse matters further, Julia, by approaching Mooney even earlier in time than we already have.”

  “The library?” Abigail said. “We could go back there and find a quiet spot in the stacks.”