The Bellbottom Incident

by Neve Maslakovic

  “That can’t be helped. It’s the right course of action. I feel that strongly.” She shifted in the leather chair, as if uncomfortable. “Do you know what finally convinced me that it was impossible to separate personal issues from scholarly ones in time travel? The unsavory sides that surfaced in our researchers—these attempts at murder, blackmail, fraud…I could have put all those down to having bad seeds in the lab. But when I came right down to it, there was one matter I couldn’t ignore.”

  “What was it?”

  “Despite my dislike of the physical act of time traveling…”

  “Yes?”

  “I found myself fantasizing about going back in time. To, er, fix a small math error in my thesis.”

  32

  The few steps from Dean Braga’s office to my smaller one next door felt like a lifetime. I knew what temporarily on hold usually meant in academia—not days, not months, but years. Things did not move fast, especially where labs were concerned. Delaying the crafting of the message announcing the “temporary” shutdown to everyone on STEWie’s roster, I slid into my desk and put my hand under my chin. I couldn’t believe it. We were just on the cusp of finding out so many things about History. I scrolled through the rainbow of topics filling the STEWie roster: photographing art that had been lost in World War Two; recording Neanderthal speech; then a very challenging one—a jump to the moon and back, space suits and all, which would truly count as space-time travel…

  There was so much we didn’t know about History, about ourselves.

  I glanced up and was surprised to see a blank spot on my wall right across from the desk, where there hadn’t been one before. When she’d gone back to 1976, Sabina had taken not only the Fourth of July group photo and Dr. Mooney’s lab coat, which she said had reminded her of him, but Abigail’s purple hair extensions. All of her meager possessions, except the lab coat, had been in the Ford Mustang when it went into the water. I hadn’t noticed anything missing besides the photo—not that I’d had time to notice, really, as we raced to find her. Besides, she might not have taken anything at all to remind her of me, which would have been all right, of course. I was just Aunt Julia.

  But if I’d had to venture a guess as to what might represent me, I might have gone with (a) a blank yellow legal pad from the stack in the drawer of my desk; (b) one of the many gel pens that populated my shoulder bag; or (c) a list from her room—perhaps the first one I’d made, of things everyone was expected to do in the mornings: brush teeth, shower, put on a fresh set of clothes, make the bed, and so on.

  It wasn’t any of those things. She had taken the world map poster that was normally tacked to the corkboard on the wall of my office just under a row of vintage St. Sunniva photos. I stuck a blue pushpin into it for each successful STEWie run made by our researchers. There had also been two red pins, representing the places where I’d spent some time myself—Pompeii and the fourteenth-century Minnesota woodland. I had been about to reach for a new red pin, for 1976, when I noticed the map was gone. Sabina had left the pins in a paper cup on my desk. The two red ones sat among the blue ones like unwelcome guests.

  The map, with its little punctures all over, had by now decomposed in the salty waters lapping Sanibel Island. I automatically made a mental note to buy another one, then remembered there would be no need. The program was to be shut down.

  I glanced at the blank corkboard again. In a swap that neither she nor Udo could have anticipated, Sabina had lost her treasures to the sea but rescued Udo’s story. If I had anything to say about it, The Skeletons of Eden would see the light of day.

  I might have done some introspection on why the map had reminded Sabina of me, or gotten started on the e-mail letting everyone know about Dean Braga’s decision. But I suddenly couldn’t wait any longer to demand answers from someone.

  “Why didn’t you tell us you met us in 1976?”

  Dr. Mooney was at his workbench, soldering something on the new Slingshot 3.0. At my words—I had tapped him sharply on the shoulder before uttering them—he turned off the soldering iron and set it aside. He blew gently on the wire connection he’d just made before speaking. “It was all so long ago, Julia,” he finally said. “I could make little sense of it, either at the time or after. I gave up on trying to figure it out, perhaps even started to believe I’d imagined the whole episode—the visit Gabe and I received from three people from the future. Then, one day years later, you showed up in the dean’s office, Julia. Not long after, Abigail enrolled as a graduate student and Steven wrote to apply for a junior professorship. It was all happening. I brought it up with Gabriel, but he didn’t remember meeting you all those years ago. When we brought back Sabina from Pompeii, I wondered…and then she disappeared into 1976 and it all came back clear as day. My three visitors and the missing girl they were searching for. I didn’t think Sabina was the name you had given me, but everything else fit. Only—”

  “Only what?”

  He was still wearing his safety goggles, behind which he looked rather like an unhappy fish. “Only I never found out what happened to her in 1976. None of you ever came back to campus to tell me. You were just…gone.”

  “Oh.”

  “So what could I have told you? That I was going to try my best to help you in 1976, but I had no idea if you’d find her or not? Would it have helped?”

  “I suppose not.”

  He slid off the goggles, mussing up his hair, which was grayer, shorter, and thinner now than it had been when he was a young man. He ran his hand through it. “There was a sense of familiarity when I first met Sabina in Pompeii, but I couldn’t figure out why. In retrospect, I must have recognized her from the photo you showed me all those years ago. I just didn’t make the connection. I’m ashamed to admit that I paid more attention to the smartphone with her picture on it than the picture itself. Then Steven started the experiments bringing him to 1976 and I began to wonder. Still, what could I say? I had two options, if I had them at all. One was to keep Sabina away from the TTE lab at all costs, and the other was to teach her about STEWie technology so she would have some tools at her disposal when and if she did get stuck in 1976. I chose the second. Or maybe I didn’t really have a choice at all, since I knew it had all happened already. The thought struck me then, you know.”

  “Which one?”

  “That some strands of the future must be as firmly fixed as the ones in the past.”

  “You mean key future events are inevitable no matter what we do?”

  “Not key events, necessarily…just some.”

  I let the remark pass unchallenged. “It wasn’t our fault somehow, was it? Udo crashing his car?”

  “You know it wasn’t. Four people—Sabina, Abigail, Steven, you—slipped into the past like a raindrop finding its way down a tree trunk, no more able to disturb History than the raindrop could harm the tree. Is anything bothering you? I am very glad Sabina is back. I only wish I could have helped more.”

  “You did help, Xavier. That’s not it.”

  I sighed and explained that Dean Braga was shutting down the STEWie program. He nodded, like he had expected it.

  STEWie’s mirrors towered over us accusingly, as if pointing out that we had not treated what they represented, the grand things they could do, with enough respect. With the lab closed down and the STEWie program halted indefinitely, the mirrors and their companion lasers would be left to gather dust. For a second I had the wild idea of asking Dr. Mooney to send me into the past one more time, to a location of my own choosing. I could step into STEWie’s basket to find that dark-haired ancestor, or to get some answers about Abigail’s parents, though I didn’t think she would have wanted that, not like this. Or I could use STEWie to answer a question for the ages. An entry from STEWie’s roster popped into my mind, one made possible by Kamal’s recent thesis defense—he had found safe landing zones in Eurasia of thirty-some thousand years ago. Yes. Neanderthals. There was so much we didn’t know: Did they speak? Were they beefy and
taciturn, as modern stereotypes would have it? What did they think of their artistic cousins? I would instruct Dr. Mooney, “Neander Valley, thirty-five thousand years back,” and he would give me a frank look, then reach for Kamal’s catalog of safe landing zones. “It’s a risky run for an untrained traveler, even one with experience,” he would point out.

  “I’m not going to do anything foolish, just take a look around to see if I can spot a few of them.”

  “Who?”

  “The cave painters and their chunkier cousins.”

  “Well, all right then. Bring back video footage and photos.”

  And I would.

  The professor’s voice broke through my fantasy. “Julia? When is Dean Braga halting all runs?”

  “Immediately.”

  He gently flicked a metal shaving off the Slingshot 3.0. “I expect she’ll ask me to hold off on my work on this as well.”

  “It didn’t come up in our talk, but I expect so. Where did it come from, Xavier? The Slingshot? Version 1.0 that you had back in Pompeii, and Version 2.0? And that one? Did you really design and build them?”

  “I never said I did, not exactly,” he said, his voice quiet. “As a matter of fact, I found the blueprints for the first one in the lab the day I made the decision that I would go to Pompeii. There, on that chair. The blueprints had a note on them that said, Build and take me along. I obeyed. At first I thought it was meant for me, as an aid in my plan to document the ancient Roman lifestyle. I tested it up and down the Pompeii coast, trying to figure out how it worked—discovered it had a propensity for dropping me into ghost zones if I strayed from the handful of destinations I had programmed into it, like Rome.”

  “You said the engineering department had designed the battery.”

  “They probably did, just in the future.”

  “And that you had figured out how to splinter off a Mooney-shaped piece of STEWie’s basket to get it to work.”

  “I decided it’d be best for everyone if I sounded like I knew what I was doing, rather than the truth, that I was winging it. I later realized that the Slingshot generated a basket on its own. In any case, we ended up using it to get out of Pompeii. I think we were meant to.”

  So someone had come up with a rescue plan—for us to use the Slingshot to jump to Rome and in due time meet up with Dr. May and return to St. Sunniva that way. But I had needed antibiotics—fast—and so we had done the foolhardy thing and used the unfamiliar device to jump all the way home. “And Version 2.0?” I asked.

  “The blueprints arrived during the summer. It was an improvement. I discovered that Slingshot 2.0 was more stable and could go with or against the arrow of time, as you know.”

  “So all this while, when you’ve been tinkering with the Slingshot…the tests around campus…what were you really doing?”

  “Trying to figure out why it works, with little luck so far. I think what it does is let travelers glide along the links that exist between the past and the present—and the future.” He turned his palms upward, as if physically admitting the limits of his knowledge on the matter.

  The Slingshot 1.0 was lying in bits and pieces on the worktable in front of him. I carefully touched a small half sphere, whose function I couldn’t begin to guess at. It was simultaneously squishy and very smooth. “When you said you were trying to build Version 3.0 for us take along to the fourteenth century, was that all a farce?”

  “It would have been a duplicate of Version 2.0. I think—no, I’m guessing—that it’s all Abigail’s doing. I don’t know for sure.”

  My head shot up. “Abigail sent you the blueprints for the Slingshot?”

  “Not our Abigail, the future Abigail. The one who has her degree. The one who’s perhaps a tenured professor in charge of the lab. As I said, I don’t know anything for sure—it’s just a feeling. But I figured one of us from Pompeii had to have sent me the Slingshot in the first place. You know, to rescue us.”

  I scratched my head, somewhat stunned by his words. “Are you saying future Abigail saved herself and us by getting the Slingshot into your hands? But that doesn’t make sense.” I clutched the sides of my head, trying to reason it out. “If Abigail and the rest of us had been killed in Pompeii, there would have been no future Abigail to rescue us.”

  “I think she was the only one of us who originally made it out of the town alive, on foot, and got home safe after meeting up with Dr. May’s group on their STEWie run to Rome.”

  “Even if that’s the case, the future Abigail couldn’t change History—you know that. It’s more than a rule—it’s an unyielding cornerstone.”

  “Is it? We can’t change History, but they may have figured out how to. I’m talking about the next generation of occupants of this lab, or whatever stands in its place.” The professor gestured around him. “Besides, if my hypothesis is correct, Abigail would have only been changing our role in the past, not the past itself. We didn’t belong there anyway.” He added thoughtfully, ”I wonder if the older Abigail anticipated that we would bring Sabina back.”

  “And Version 2.0?”

  “I think that was meant for fixing what happened this week, to find Sabina in 1976, and whoever sent it didn’t expect that it would get used for a joyride to the fourteenth century by Quinn and Dr. Holm.”

  I stared at him wordlessly. Could it be true? If we hadn’t had the Slingshot 1.0 in Pompeii, we wouldn’t have made it out alive. If we hadn’t had the Slingshot 2.0 in 1976, we wouldn’t have been able to jump around Fort Myers so easily, instead relying on the unstable Version 1.0. Even with the Slingshot by our side, it had been a close call.

  As for the designer of the Slingshots…he or she was a serious out-of-the-box thinker. Abigail had shown herself to be inventive when needed. She had the same cheerful disregard for rules as Dr. Mooney and was as fearless as he when it came to taking the unbeaten path. It’s where she felt most comfortable.

  “Do you have any proof of this, Professor? That it’s Abigail, or any of it?”

  “None whatsoever. But there’s a familiar touch to the design of the two Slingshots. The simultaneous elegance and scrappiness of it is all Abigail, if you will.”

  I sighed. “I guess we’ll have to be patient and wait to find out what happens. Will happen.”

  “Unless we’re dead by then. I suspect I will be. If so, I’m content to know that Abigail will carry the torch and the lab will continue to thrive.”

  We left it at that. I turned to go, pondering that it was like knowing we were all headed toward a real-life CSI, one where all truths would finally become known. I stopped with one hand on the lab door. The professor had slid his goggles back on and recommenced tinkering with the Slingshot 3.0.

  “Anything else you know that the rest of us don’t, Dr. Mooney? Was 1976 the only time we unexpectedly popped up in the past?”

  “Hmm? Yes, Julia—you know everything I know,” he said without looking up.

  “Well, all right then.”

  I took the lakeside path from Time Travel Engineering back to Hypatia House, lingering to watch the ducks waddling on the shore. I found myself reluctant to go back to my office, to do what had to be done.

  Hold on—

  Did it have to be done? If Dr. Mooney was right, the lab would reopen one day with Abigail in charge. Maybe that meant we needed to fight to keep it open now. Maybe it meant I needed to fight to keep it open.

  But how?

  A student texting as she biked along almost ran me over and I called out after her, “Don’t bike and text!” as much for her safety as mine. I don’t think she heard.

  I had been as guilty as the others. Like Dean Braga, I’d wanted to use STEWie to settle a personal concern, an issue important only to me. What on earth had led me to conclude that digging around in the past was a better course of action than asking my parents outright? I had wanted to save them some embarrassment—and myself as well—and I’d thought the answer would be easily found in 1976. Answers rarely were, of c
ourse.

  There was nothing we could do about human nature. But there was something we could do about the way we approached time travel. The focus thus far had been on funds, academic merit, how to soothe wounded feelings over who would get a roster spot and who wouldn’t. There was a fourth side to the square, one that had been overlooked. Because what did we, as a society, do to counter human nature and the tendency to make bad choices, cheat, steal, or take more than our share? That unexciting enemy of chaos—laws—usually boiled down to the administrative and bureaucratic enforcement of them. And administration was a job in which I had a lot of practice.

  Feeling suddenly energized, I ran up the path of Hypatia House, passing Dr. B, who gave me a startled look on her way out, and burst into my office.

  I slid into the desk and grabbed a notepad and a pen.

  (1)Pairs.

  A single professor and his or her grad students just did not cut it, because of the power imbalance. Professors would have to go on STEWie runs in pairs, like Dr. Mooney and Dr. Rojas originally had. No one would approve of the arrangement, especially not the senior professors, who were tenured and used to being free of oversight. I foresaw much arguing and many wounded egos. It had to be done, however.

  (2)An oath.

  Having travelers sign an oath of professionalism wouldn’t guarantee that there wouldn’t be any shenanigans, but it was a step in the right direction. I assumed that new police officers at campus security had to do something similar. I’d have to ask Nate about it.

  (3)Retiring the Slingshots.

  That one made me pause for a bit, but I felt it was the right course of action. If the two versions had been sent from the future to help us out in Pompeii and 1976, then we shouldn’t be repurposing them for other matters. Simple and straightforward meant using just STEWie, the method we had earned. The Slingshots would appear in their proper time; Dr. Mooney would have to find a new subject matter to focus his talents on.