The Bellbottom Incident

by Neve Maslakovic

  A disconcerting thought hit me as I left the dock behind me and turned back toward the library. I hadn’t considered how Sabina would react when we did catch up with her. After all, we were planning to turn her right around and bring her home to St. Sunniva. I hoped she would be happy to see us.

  She had ended up enjoying the fireworks after a few minutes of staring up at the colorful patterns, her eyes wide. And it was that image that stayed with me as I set a course back to the library.

  “Julia, where were you?” Abigail asked sleepily.

  “Wandering around. Never mind. Go back to sleep.”

  I was lucky to have made it back inside at all. I had almost been caught by Dan Anderson, the future chief of campus security. The young officer had been making his rounds of campus on foot, whistling a happy tune as he did so, and I’d had to duck under a dark stairwell until he passed, crossing my fingers for fear he’d check the library door. Luckily he hadn’t. The last thing I’d wanted to do was spend the rest of the night outside.

  “Did you see them?” Abigail mumbled, shifting a bit in her armchair setup.

  “Who?”

  “Your parents.”

  “Certainly not. Why would they be wandering around campus in the middle of the night?”

  “Just thought you might have run into them at St. Olaf’s or wherever.”

  I hadn’t. But she was right, I had wanted to.

  17

  Nate and Dr. B looked up as I arrived on STEWie’s platform. I was like Rumfoord and his dog, bouncing in and out of the lab, only without the dog.

  “No luck yet?” Dr. B asked, waving a greeting at me.

  Nate was at the workstation beside her, his cell phone pressed between one ear and shoulder, a pen in his hand. He nodded in my direction and said, “Uh-huh…I see…” into the phone. I wasn’t used to seeing him at a desk; most of his campus security duties were done by car or on foot. But that wasn’t why my step had suddenly faltered and I’d almost tripped as I descended off the platform. I had realized the identity of the man my mother had been keeping company with in 1976.

  I hadn’t met him in the present. I had met his son.

  Nate’s profile as he sat at the desk with the phone cradled in his shoulder was exactly the same as that of the man in the book club—they could have been brothers if not for the twist in time. I hadn’t met Nate’s parents yet—they lived on the North Shore, in Duluth—but I knew with certainty that the book club man could only be one person: Nathaniel Kirkland Sr.

  Well, that was an interesting development.

  I shook my head in response to Dr. B’s question and set the Slingshot 2.0 down on her workstation. “Dr. Little asked if you could please recharge this,” I said, adding, “I never realized how hard it could be to find a person lost in a particular year.”

  Dr. Little had not actually used the word please but I had thought it best to include it. (He had griped, “I budgeted for five small jumps on my original run and we’ve already done three. I don’t know how many more we’ll need.”)

  The third jump had brought us from the Crane Library of the morning of Saturday, October 23, 1976 to the Open Book of November 2. We had jumped ahead so that we were once again parallel in time with Sabina. Dr. Little and Abigail were planning to head to Udo’s room, which they were going to search one way or another. As I was preparing to leave, Abigail had started to throw out ideas, starting with picking the room’s lock or bribing Sam, Udo’s engineer roommate, to let them in. Dr. Little had looked a little aghast at her lawless approach.

  “Hey, wouldn’t it be funny if Chief Kirkland found Udo still on campus, teaching in the creative writing program?” Abigail had said as they prepared to send me back, in between breaking-in ideas.

  “It would certainly be convenient,” had been Dr. Little’s reply.

  Dr. B accepted the Slingshot and plugged it into its receptacle.

  “Any new developments at your end?” Nate asked, hanging up the phone after thanking the person at the other end. Unlike my previous jump into the lab, when it had just been the two of us, he was all business in Dr. B’s presence, which was fine with me—I needed to wrap my head around the implications of what I had seen in 1976. There weren’t any, I was pretty sure—in 1976 Nate’s parents were already married and very much together, even though little Nate was living with his grandparents, like I had mentioned to Abigail. So the fact that Nate Sr. was hanging out with my mother in book club meetings, and outside them, probably meant nothing. I was reading too much into it. Nate was not my half brother.

  He wasn’t.

  “Julia?”

  “Sorry, it’s been a tiring run. There’s been one new development. We found out that the book club is headed to a CSI.”

  “A what?” Nate said. “Sounds like crime scene investigation.”

  “The term is from a Kurt Vonnegut novel, The Sirens of Titan. Chrono-synclastic infundibulum, a place where people finally understand each other. We’re calling it a CSI for short. The book club had been reading the novel, and Udo Leland wants them to go to a CSI of his choosing.”

  He wrote all this down after checking the spelling of synclastic and infundibulum with me. “So where is it?”

  “We don’t know. In the book itself it’s in outer space. Udo’s CSI appears to be on the East Coast, possibly by a tree.”

  Nate thoughtfully tapped the notepad in front of him, where he had scribbled down notes in pen. “That was the Registrar’s Office. I called to get Udo Leland’s contact details. I found out something rather odd. According to them, Udo Leland never completed his undergraduate degree here. He dropped out of St. Sunniva that semester—fall 1976.”

  “Huh,” I said. “Maybe he left school to work on his novel, or to gain some life experience by backpacking around the world before settling down.”

  “That’s the thing.” Dr. B said. “We’ve been checking. He has no Facebook page, no personal blog, or anything like that.”

  “So he doesn’t like social media,” I suggested. “He would hardly be the only one.”

  Nate grunted in agreement. “You won’t find much of an online presence for me, except what’s required for my job.”

  “More to the point, he never did write anything,” Dr. B said. “There’s no published author by the name. No library listing, no Amazon listing, nothing.”

  “Pen name? Maybe he’s a recluse author who works on an old typewriter in a cabin up on the North Shore,” I suggested, before it struck me that such a scenario did not sound like Udo at all. Recluse living wasn’t his style. He liked having an audience, unless he had changed a lot in the intervening years. “Didn’t the Registrar’s Office have his contact details?”

  “No forwarding address, only his last known address—St. Olaf’s Hall. I’m not sure where that is. It must be an old name for a dorm.”

  I pointed down at the ground. “It’s here. Or at least it used to be here, before they built the TTE lab.” I thought for a minute. “Whatever Udo ended up doing in life and wherever he ended up going, Sabina couldn’t have had anything to do with it—it had all already happened before she went back. She was just a shadow in his peripheral vision—had to be, right, Dr. Baumgartner?”

  “Yes, we can’t change History, as you know. Although she would have hardly been a shadow—did you say she was in one of the vehicles with Udo and the rest of the book club? Driving for hours, maybe even days?”

  I remembered Dr. Little’s theory about boldness often trumping stealth in time travel, and mentioned it.

  “It’s not a theory, scientifically speaking,” Dr. B said, distracted by the academic point. “That’s a working idea on his part, a hypothesis. Contrary to popular belief, a theory is a hypothesis that’s been generalized and verified—by observation, experimentation, or deduction. Like Einstein’s theory of relativity, the theory of evolution, and many others…”

  I didn’t want to get sidetracked into a lengthy academic discussion. “But it could ac
count for why Sabina was able to hitch a ride with the book club. She was just an extra passenger either in Udo’s Ford Mustang or the art bus.”

  “Yes, I suppose it could.”

  After the briefest internal debate, I said, “I could give my parents a call.”

  “Your parents?” Dr. B said.

  “To ask where the book club went. They were both members.” I wasn’t sure whether to mention that Nate Sr. had also been there, meaning Nate could call his father as well. A bit flustered, I covered it up by pretending to look around the lab. “Now where did I leave my cell phone?”

  “In the lab locker,” Nate said, staring at me. “With your purse.”

  “Right.” I headed to the locker, retrieved the phone, and dialed my parents’ home number. I received no answer and tried the main office of the retirement community next, even though it was late evening. Raul, their assistant, was still there. “¡Hóla, Julia!” I explained that there was something of an emergency afoot without giving any details, and learned that my parents were not back from their cruise yet. Getting in touch with them, he said, would be tricky—the aim of the cruise was to sweep its guests away from the pace of modern life, so no one carried their electronic devices on board. The first such cruise my parents had brought their retirees on—that one to the Caribbean—had been such a success that they’d immediately organized a second one to Key West. The best way to reach them would be through authorities, Raul suggested.

  I left a message with him for my parents to call me when they got home and turned to find Nate still studying me.

  “No luck getting through to your parents?”

  I shook my head. “They’re on the Floating Free cruise from Fort Myers down to Key West and possibly beyond. A vote is taken along the way to see what ports they want to call in.”

  “They should be reachable from shore,” Nate said, reaching for his pen. “I’ll get on it. Floating Free, you said?”

  I hesitated. There was a faster option—Nate’s father had also been at the book club meeting. Only bringing that out into the open might raise all sorts of other issues that I wasn’t ready to handle. I watched Nate jot down the name of the cruise and decided this behavior was unworthy of me. “Wait.”

  “That’s not the name of the ship?”

  “I don’t think it is—I don’t know the name of the ship—but that isn’t what I meant. Call your father instead and ask him. He was there, too, with the book club.”

  Dr. Baumgartner had gone to fetch her e-reader from her office for me—I figured it would be useful to have a biography of Kurt Vonnegut on hand, as well as copies of his books. In the meantime, Nate had left a message on his father’s phone and turned back with the clear intent of drawing me into an embrace—not an amorous one necessarily, but as a gesture of support. Well, maybe an amorous one.

  He looked surprised when instead of taking a step into his arms, I took one back.

  “What, do I have bad breath or something?”

  “No, it’s not that.” If anyone smelled bad it was me—I hadn’t showered since we’d left for 1976, and the stench of the cigarette smoke we’d encountered everywhere we went clung to my clothes.

  “Julia?”

  “Really, it’s nothing. I’m just out of my mind with worry about Sabina.”

  This was true, and also, what was I going to say to him—I think your father might be my father as well? Luckily Dr. B came back before he could ask any more questions. She handed me the e-reader. “It’s recharged.” Kamal and Jacob trailed in behind her. They waved a greeting at me.

  Nate turned on them. “Did one of you give Sabina the door code to the lab?” he asked, sternly for him.

  Both of them adamantly denied it. They hurried to explain that they’d been in the grad student office down the hall, spending their Saturday evening on thesis writing for Kamal and coursework for the younger of the two students, Jacob.

  “The strange comings and goings in the TTE lab lured us out,” Kamal said. “Did you say Sabina has gone somewhere?”

  I brought them up to speed and underlined that they were not to tweet or post about any of this, even if they were used to sharing news, bad or good, online. “We don’t need everyone on campus and beyond in our hair at the moment.”

  “We wouldn’t do that, Julia,” Jacob said, checking his hand on its way to the phone in his back pocket. “Can we come along and help look for her?”

  “I’m not an expert on American history,” Kamal said, “but I’d be glad to lend a hand.”

  I appreciated their concern, but we didn’t need more boots on the ground. I instructed the pair to help Dr. B and Nate with the present-day research that needed to be conducted, then quickly downloaded a biography of Vonnegut’s life onto Dr. B’s e-reader. I did the same with all of his works I could find that predated 1977, up to Slapstick, published in October 1976, just in case.

  “Thanks for the use of your e-reader, Dr. B. I may have run up a bit of a tab—I’ll reimburse you when I get back.”

  “Don’t worry about it, Julia.” She was readying New York City coordinates—I was going to pop in quickly to Kurt Vonnegut’s house there, before rejoining Dr. Little and Abigail on campus.

  I took a step toward STEWie’s basket, then turned back. “Dr. B?”

  “Yes?”

  “Sabina’s presence cannot be what made Udo leave school…not even in a small way? That has to be right, doesn’t it?”

  She nodded without glancing away from the screen. “Correct.”

  “But the other way, that could happen? I mean, if Udo’s plan all along was to leave school and disappear—for whatever reason—there’s nothing to stop Sabina from also…disappearing.”

  She stopped what she was doing and looked up at me. “I suppose it’s a possibility, yes.”

  “I’ve got a bad feeling about this,” Jacob said as if quoting from somewhere—a Star Wars movie probably; he loved them.

  “I don’t. Sabina’s smart,” Kamal said. “She wouldn’t do anything dumb.”

  “I don’t know that any of us go out of our way to do dumb things,” I said. “It’s part of life.”

  Nate walked me to the basket. “I’ve got everybody in the campus security office working on finding Udo Leland. How has Dr. Little been?” he added, as if taking a stab in the dark about where exactly the problem might lie. The young professor was not exactly known for his interpersonal skills.

  “Well, you know him.”

  “True. He did seem quite put out with what’s happened—more than circumstances warrant, perhaps.”

  “Never get between a professor and his research, I guess.”

  “Still, I might take a look around his office.”

  “You don’t think he had anything to do with sending Sabina into 1976, do you? He’s been helpful—for him—really more overworked and overtired than anything. Maybe his long hours are catching up to him.”

  “That’s probably all it is.”

  He offered me a steadying hand to climb STEWie’s platform, and after the briefest of hesitations, which I’m sure he noticed, I accepted it. Once I was secure on the platform, he passed me the freshly recharged Slingshot. “I do wish I could come along. How’s Abigail holding up?”

  “You know her. She’s very…resourceful. As for me, I feel I’m in 1976 on borrowed time—I expect to be sent back by History any second, my mother being, er, pregnant and all. Besides, I’m not sure I’m of much use. I don’t seem to be an expert on anything that will help us catch up with Sabina, like seventies literature or the ins and outs of time travel.”

  “Nonsense. I trust Abigail—very much so—but Dr. Little is a professor, and she’s a graduate student. I’m glad you’re there—you can overrule him if it came to it. She can’t.”

  This was somewhat true—there was a deeply entrenched power structure between students and professors, one I was outside of. I gave him a small smile. “I believe Abigail would be very much up to the task if it came do
wn to choosing between antagonizing Dr. Little and helping Sabina. But I see what you mean—there’s a power differential. My position doesn’t depend on his goodwill…hers does.” I had put my coat back on in preparation for 1976. I tucked Dr. B’s e-reader into a pocket. The newly charged Slingshot was in my backpack, where it took up most of the space.

  “Good luck in New York City.”

  “Thanks. Nate, I—”

  But I didn’t get to say more. Bright light filled the room, and STEWie’s basket whisked me away.

  The nineteenth-century brownstone stood inset a bit from the neighboring buildings on a one-way street. Ten steps led up to an ornate front door. A small chubby angel sat perched above it like a benevolent gargoyle. I set down my backpack and checked the house number—228. A cloak of noise lay over the city—car horns in heavy midafternoon traffic, sirens, construction. I had arrived in a quiet spot to one side of the steps, opposite what seemed to be a gated-off photo studio on the street level of the four-story townhouse. The black metal railing edging the front steps felt cool to my touch.

  The upper levels had three windows each. There was no movement behind them.

  If the pedestrians walking by briskly, as if they all had someplace to be, were surprised by the sight of me appearing out of thin air, none showed it. It was Manhattan, after all. And it was election day—the news blared from a TV through an open window on the neighboring building.

  I moved from the railing to the curb to scan the cars parked bumper to bumper on both sides of the one-way street. It didn’t take long. There was no sign of either Udo’s red Ford Mustang or the art bus, which Xave had described as “colorful, very colorful.” A few trees stood on each side of the street. City ones—spaced out, semi-healthy, and surviving as best they could in the urban shadows. Having checked a map back in the lab, I knew that 228 East Forty-Eighth Street stood a couple of blocks away from Manhattan’s East River; a quick search in the e-book biography had yielded the address, and Dr. B had woven it into STEWie coordinates. It was hardly a location that anyone would describe with the words tree or ocean.