The Bellbottom Incident

by Neve Maslakovic

  I slid onto the bench seat and took Dr. B’s e-reader out of my pocket. Shielding the tablet in its brown-leather “book” jacket from the glare of the sinking sun with one shoulder, I turned it on, explaining, “I’ve been skimming through a Vonnegut biography. There are also copies of all his books published prior to 1977, just in case we need them.” I readied the search function in the Vonnegut biography. “Abigail, read me the first item on the list again.”

  “The CSI is by a river. The animal KV wants to be lives in it.”

  “Searching for river…” I got a good fifty hits, from the Iowa River to the Elbe River, all connected in some direct or indirect fashion to Vonnegut’s life. “Hmm…Maybe we better start with animal, as in Vonnegut’s favorite one. Well, not his favorite necessarily, but the one he wants to be…” This was better and yielded only a handful of results. “Here we go. Dresden zoo, aftermath of bombing. No…Oh, here.” I looked up from the e-reader. “It’s from a Playboy interview, of all things.”

  “Well, what does it say?” Dr. Little demanded. He had slid onto the bench on the opposite side of Abigail and me, but couldn’t see the text because of the angle and the sun’s glare.

  I skimmed the relevant passage. “Huh…Apparently Kurt wants to be an alligator.”

  “Why?” Abigail, quite fairly, wanted to know.

  “Let’s see…He gave the Playboy interview three years ago, in 1973. There’s an excerpt—he talks about modern society, loneliness, how we lack the support of a community of like-minded people…Ah, here we go. He says he’s tired of thinking and longs to live in a place where he doesn’t have to think at all. Hence an alligator.”

  “I don’t know if I’d have gone with an alligator for non-thought,” Dr. Little said disagreeably. “Maybe a clam or something.”

  “I’d choose a tumbleweed,” Abigail said.

  “I’d probably just choose to drink a glass of wine. Speaking of like-minded people…” I recounted how Udo had read a chapter of his novel to the book club. “Udo needs the club not just for discussions of worthy books, but as an audience-in-waiting for his own work. It’s his community of like-minded people—avid readers and wannabe writers. It sounded as if he doesn’t get along with his own family very well. I got the impression that they’re wealthy. Maybe Nate will send some information to us on that score.”

  Dr. Little turned the conversation back to practical issues. “Never mind Vonnegut’s thoughts on communities. Alligator fits in with them going to the ocean, somewhere warm. Florida or Georgia probably.”

  Abigail found a pen in her backpack and jotted down ALLIGATOR in neat block letters next to Udo’s clue #1.

  “So we have a river with alligators, which would be neither the Iowa nor the Elbe Rivers. On to clue #2, then,” I said. Twenty-first-century tools made research much faster than going to the library would have been. Using them in 1976 almost felt like cheating, but we needed every advantage we could get.

  “Clue #2 is that the CSI is in a garden,” Abigail read. “The man at whose company KV worked built it.”

  “Wait, I know this one.” I made a few searches in the book text. “Oh, here we go. It says that after Kurt’s thesis was rejected, he went to work at General Electric. His older brother, Bernard, had a job there as a research scientist. Kurt was hired by the public relations department, of all things…He wrote press releases about the research division’s work and products.”

  “GE? Thomas Edison’s company,” Dr. Little said, as if he was thinking of one of the posters above Sam’s bed. I wondered if that was where Udo had gotten the idea, too. “The original headquarters were in New York State.”

  “Could it be a garden by the company buildings?” Abigail suggested.

  Dr. Little shook his head. “New York doesn’t fit. No rivers with alligators. Interesting fact about GE—the headquarters in Schenectady have the zip code 12345. But, to get back to the issue at hand, Edison died in 1931, so it’s hardly his company anymore.”

  “Could Udo have been referring to the army and a company there, like a military unit?” I suggested.

  “No. He wouldn’t have used the word work. You don’t work in the army, not if you’re a soldier,” Dr. Little said.

  “On to clue #3,” Abigail said, penning in EDISON? next to clue #2. “The CSI is by a tree—which we already knew. But not KT’s money tree. The T must be a typo.”

  I adjusted my position to better block the sun’s glare and resumed my search. I looked in the biography for “money tree,” then in The Sirens of Titan, but came up empty both times. I found the answer in Slaughterhouse-Five, Vonnegut’s World War Two book. It was a tangential remark, one made by a side character Vonnegut had created, a struggling science-fiction author named Kilgore Trout. I read the relevant bit out loud. “‘It had twenty-dollar bills for leaves. Its flowers were government bonds. Its fruit was diamonds. It attracted human beings who killed each other around the roots and made very good fertilizer.’” I put the e-reader down. “Well, that’s a depressing, if not entirely inaccurate description of human beings. It fits in with Udo’s dislike of money and possessions. So we need something opposite to that—a good tree, a healthy tree…a real tree.”

  Abigail recapped where we stood. “So we have an alligator-rich river, a garden with a possible connection to Thomas Edison, and some kind of nice, non-money-grubbing tree.”

  I glanced away, distracted as an exceptionally loud cheer from the football game onlookers reached us. It was an ordinary fall day on campus, a bit brisk but pleasant under the reddish setting sun. The loveliness of it gave me a sudden pause and had the opposite effect. I felt that we were caught in an unreal moment that wouldn’t last. If I hadn’t known better, I would have said that we’d inadvertently stepped into a ghost zone and an asteroid was about to come crashing down, smooshing us and the football players and the birds to bits. It was ridiculous, of course—if an asteroid had slammed into the biology green in 1976, I would have heard about it already.

  “Julia?” Abigail asked.

  “Sorry, my mind wandered for a bit. Just feeling uneasy for some reason.”

  But I knew why. It all seemed too pat—the list of clues, our quick and handy research tools to help us tackle its apparent randomness. I ventured a guess as to the point of Udo’s list. “I wonder if what he’s getting at is that much of what happens in life is just a random collection of coincidences.”

  Dr. Little frowned. “If the place they’ve gone to was randomly chosen, we will have a hard time zeroing in on it, even with this list of clues. Like I said, alligators strongly suggests Florida or another Southern loc—”

  “Wait, that’s it—Florida.” I closed the e-reader and slapped myself on the forehead. “I know where they’ve gone.”

  As we left the biology green, dodging a wayward football, I explained enthusiastically, “It’s Fort Myers—it has to be. Edison had a winter home there.”

  “Yes, that sounds right. He was trying to find a natural source of rubber,” Dr. Little said. “He owned a lab and garden, where he grew exotic plants.”

  “The Edison & Ford Winter Estates,” I said. “It’s a popular tourist destination.”

  “You’ve been there, Julia?” Abigail asked.

  Since Dr. Little could hardly set up his laptop and the Slingshot in full view of the football game watchers and players, we were headed to the Open Book.

  “I’ve been to Fort Myers many a time—my parents live there. As for the estates, uh, I’ve been meaning to go. Inventors and plants aren’t really my thing. I’ve driven by it, though. Pretty palm trees lining the road.”

  “Is there a river?” Abigail asked.

  “The Caloosahatchee.”

  “Does it have alligators?”

  “It’s not teeming with them or anything like that, but yes, I think so.”

  “And trees?”

  “I expect the estate is teeming with those. Presumably, one of them is what Udo meant. We just need to find it.�
�� It felt good to finally have an idea of where the book club had gone. We had wasted enough time. I picked up the pace.

  “I’ll need a detailed map of Fort Myers,” Dr. Little said, matching his steps to mine, “so we’ll have to pop back into the lab again. Unless you happen to know the GPS coordinates of the estates, Julia.”

  “What? Of course I don’t know the—oof. Oh, for heaven’s sake.”

  A student fiddling with his bike had blocked our path, not literally but in the invisible-wall sense.

  He was a bit down the campus path. We turned, but the opposite direction was blocked, too. We were stuck in a narrow space between two buildings. Sandwiched as we were, there was nowhere to go, and we were left to cool our heels as the bicyclist methodically applied a repair patch to one of the tires.

  “C’mon, c’mon,” I whispered to the student, peeking around the building corner. He was now waiting for the patch to dry. I wondered what possible disturbance the three of us could present—it wasn’t as if we were likely to distract the student from his task merely by walking by. I could only assume that it was something intangible, perhaps a fleeting thought about to trickle through the scrawny student’s brain—a thought whose arrival could not be disturbed. Whatever it was, I was impatient to get going. Not only had we finally figured out where to jump, but that underlying sense of unease was still with me, as if we needed to hurry for some reason. Abigail was fidgeting as well. Only Dr. Little seemed to take the delay in stride and had started calculating something on the back of Udo’s list with a pencil.

  He had said we needed a map of Fort Myers. I made a move toward Dr. Little’s duffel bag. “That list of coordinates in your bag, could it help us any?”

  “No,” he said somewhat sharply, and I arrested my movement. “I didn’t anticipate having to jump to Florida, obviously.”

  “Well, if there are alligators, we do not want to accidentally end up in the river. The Caloosahatchee did you say its name was, Julia?” Abigail said. “How long is the drive from here to Fort Myers? I wonder if they are there yet.”

  It turned out that’s what Dr. Little had been doing—making an estimate on the back of Udo’s list. “About seventeen hundred miles.”

  He could have just asked me. My usual method of getting there was a three-hour flight from the Twin Cities, but I had driven last time. “It took me three days, but I made sightseeing stops along the way and didn’t have anyone else to take a turn at the wheel.” Quinn had not come along. It wasn’t that he didn’t get along well with my parents—he was the type of person who got along with everybody—but things had really started going downhill for us by then. Was that why I had left early and taken my time driving?

  But like I’d figured while waiting in New York City, the students were probably taking turns at the wheel and sleeping in the vehicles instead of paying for hotels along the way. Reaching Fort Myers would not take much longer than reaching Manhattan. “They could very well be there already. Probably tomorrow at the latest.”

  “But it’s election day,” Dr. Little pointed out.

  “What of it?”

  “If they’re in another state, it means none of them voted. Irresponsible.”

  “Maybe they filled in absentee ballots.”

  “This is kind of a dumb question, but it is Carter who gets elected, right?” Abigail asked. “I moved around so much as a child, from foster family to foster family and school to school, that I have some odd gaps in my knowledge.”

  “Yes, Carter will win. And I think everyone has gaps in their knowledge,” I said, though Dr. Little frowned briefly, as if unprepared to admit anything of the sort. “As you know, mine have to do with plants and cooking. I couldn’t even tell you how to boil an egg.”

  Dr. Little wasn’t interested in adding his own shortcomings to our discussion. Instead, he turned thoughtful as the scrawny student hunched over to pump air into the now-fixed tire. “So much happens in this decade. Seeing Mooney and Rojas attempting to birth STEWie reminded me of all the other innovations occurring right now: Wozniak and Jobs with their Apple I, priced at $666.66…the Cray I supercomputer…Microsoft…”

  He sounded wistful, so I suggested, “Perhaps after we catch up with Sabina, you could work it into your research somehow and jump to the West Coast or wherever. Dr. Mooney manages to squeeze quite a lot of historical research into his experiments. And Dr. B as well.”

  “I just mean it’s inspiring, that’s all,” he said. His brief moment of humanity was gone, and I remembered that he preferred to let his heroes remain that way, admired from afar.

  Finally, the student slid the hand pump back into its place on the bike’s frame, hopped on, and bicycled on ahead.

  It took but a minute to reach the Open Book, which was deserted. Dr. Little asked, “Do we have all our things?”

  “Two backpacks, one duffel,” I counted. “We’re all set.”

  Dr. Little readied the Callback, which would send us home at the touch of a button.

  “Wait, Professor.” Abigail said. “There’s a note.”

  We hadn’t spotted it at once because it was tucked under a rock, as if it and the rock had arrived together. Probably Nate or Dr. B making sure the note wouldn’t blow off in the wind.

  Abigail bent down and picked up the note and rock. The note had been taped in place, and she pulled it off, letting the rock fall on the ground by her feet. I saw her visibly flinch and thought for a second it had landed on her toes.

  Dr. Little and I moved to look over Abigail’s shoulder. The note was worded so that it wouldn’t mean much to anybody but the three of us. Presumably, Dr. B had sent it, but Nate had written it—I recognized his neat handwriting. It said:

  FORD MUSTANG IN ACCIDENT

  SANIBEL CSWY, FL, NOVEMBER 3, 1:15 P.M.

  UDO L. KILLED

  We stood still, all of us frozen by shock. November 3 was tomorrow.

  Dr. Little was the first to speak. “So that’s why Sabina was able to hitch a ride so easily. Udo does not have long to live.”

  20

  “That explains matters. Udo does not have very long to live,” Dr. Little repeated.

  I could have smacked him for saying it with such clinical detachment. Udo’s book would never be finished. He would never see it in print, never have the opportunity to grow wiser and more jaded…So it goes, as someone I had spoken to recently would have said. Udo was not leaving St. Sunniva; he was leaving life. That thought was immediately followed by another one: Not if I can help it. Followed by one that pointed out just as firmly, But History cannot be changed. It can’t.

  Over the past several minutes I’d been feeling somewhat pleased that I had managed to contribute to this mission, even though I was not an expert in time travel or seventies US history or famous literary figures. True, it was merely a coincidence that my parents happened to live in Fort Myers and that’s where Udo and his book club had gone, but so what? And now this…

  “Well, this news about Udo is depressing. What’s CSWY?” Abigail asked of the note.

  “The Sanibel Causeway. It’s a bridge that connects Sanibel Island to the mainland of Fort Myers,” I explained distractedly. As a TTE professor had once pointed out to me—I think it was Dr. Mooney—everyone you met while time traveling tended to be dead already. It was always the case when you jumped to far time. But being in near time made it feel so very different. All the fresh-faced students milling about campus without paying us much heed—and Udo, wherever he was at the moment—were supposed to make it to 2012.

  “Hold on,” I said. There was more to the note. Figuring that Nate had reused a scrap of paper from the recycling bin in the lab, I had at first glance ignored the text printed upside down at the bottom of the page. Now I realized that someone had fed the paper into the printer the wrong way after Nate had written on it. There was a sequence of numbers and a very short note—BEACH, 8 p.m.

  “Beach, 8 p.m.,” I said. “That’s a bit cryptic.”

  D
r. Little took a look. “Not at all. These are coordinates.”

  Abigail clarified. “Dr. B made it easy for us—she gave us the coordinates to a beach we can jump to. Is Sanibel Causeway near a beach, Julia?”

  “There are lots of beaches all around in the area.”

  “Well, we’re heading to one of them.” Dr. Little took the note from me and turned to ready the Slingshot. I wasn’t surprised that he still found something to complain about. “I wish Dr. B had thought to send a grid map of the area, in case we need to make small adjustments. As things stand, we only have one data point in the timeline—Udo Leland’s car will be nearing Sanibel Causeway just after one o’clock tomorrow afternoon.”

  “Perhaps that’s all they had found out for the time being,” I said. My watch said five o’clock. A thought occurred to me. “Can you tell from the coordinates if Dr. B and Nate are sending us to Fort Myers at 8:00 p.m. tonight…or tomorrow, November 3?”

  “Not at first glance.”

  Tomorrow would be too late. Tonight there would still be time to do something. “I guess we’ll just have to trust them.” I bent down to pick up the rock that had accompanied the note. I turned it over several times in case there was some other hidden sign to be found on it, but the only significance I could glean was that I recognized where it had come from—the decorative garden in the courtyard of the TTE building. I slid the rock into my coat pocket. It seemed bad form to leave twenty-first-century detritus strewn around 1976.

  Whatever they were feeling underneath, Dr. Little and Abigail did what we were supposed to do under the circumstances: focus on practical matters. However long Udo had left, our mission had to go on. “I’ve never been to Florida,” Abigail said as Dr. Little started typing the coordinates from the note into the Slingshot in a furious staccato, much faster than I had done on the stairs of Vonnegut’s Manhattan brownstone. I wondered if he would double-check them or if his belief in his infallibility would prevail. Abigail added, “I’ve heard it’s very flat. Where exactly is Fort Myers?”