Oxford Time Travel 1 - Blackout

by Connie Willis

  The pavement was strewn with bodies, and there were at least a dozen of them.

  Be careful. Should you omit or add one single word, you may destroy the world.

  —THE TALMUD

  Oxford Street—26 October 1940

  POLLY SQUINTED AT THE BODIES SPRAWLED ACROSS THE pavement. Even though she could only just make them out in the darkness, she could see that their arms and legs had been flung into tortured angles.

  Mike limped up. “Oh, Christ,” he breathed. “How many are there?”

  “I don’t know,” Eileen said. “Are they dead?”

  They had to be. It wasn’t light enough to see their faces—or the blood—but it was impossible for necks to turn that far. They had to be dead. But they can’t be, Polly thought. There were only three fatalities. Which meant some of them had to be alive, in spite of the angles of the necks, the severed arm. “Mike, go fetch help!” she said.

  He didn’t seem to hear her. He stood there frozen, staring past Polly at the bodies. “I knew it,” he said dully. “This is my fault.”

  “Eileen!” Polly said. “Eileen!”

  She finally turned, a look of disbelief on her face. “Go back to the station and fetch help,” Polly ordered. “Tell them we need an ambulance.”

  Eileen nodded dumbly and stumbled off.

  “Mike, I need a pocket torch,” Polly said, and ducked under the rope. She crunched across the broken glass to the bodies, but as she ran she was already processing the scene.

  It was all wrong. The bodies should be under the rubble, not flung free of it. They must have been standing at the windows looking out when the bomb hit, but no Londoner in his right mind would do that. And where was the rescue squad? They’d clearly been here. They’d put up rope around the incident. And gone off again?

  They wouldn’t just leave them lying there, she thought, kneeling beside a woman. Not even if they were all dead, which they clearly were. The woman’s arm, still in its coat sleeve, had been blown off. It lay, bent stiffly at the elbow—

  Polly sat back on her heels. “Eileen! Come back!” she called. “Mike! It’s all right. They’re mannequins. They must have been blown out of the display windows.”

  “You, there!” a deep voice called from beyond the rope. “What are you doing?”

  Good Lord, it’s that same ARP warden who caught me going to my drop, Polly thought a little wildly, but it wasn’t. It wasn’t even a man. It was a woman wearing ARP coveralls.

  “Come out of there at once!” she said.”Looting’s a punishable offense.”

  “We weren’t looting,” Polly said, putting the arm down and standing up. “We thought the mannequins were bodies. We were trying to help.” She pointed at Eileen, who’d come running back. “She works here. She was afraid it might be someone she knew.”

  The warden turned to Eileen. “You work at Padgett’s?”

  “Yes, I’m Eileen O’Reilly. I work on the fifth floor. In Children’s Wear.”

  “Have you reported in?”

  Eileen looked at the gaping hole where Padgett’s had been. “Reported in?”

  “Round there,” the warden said, leading them on to the corner and pointing down the side street, where Polly could see a blue incident light and people moving about. “Mr. Fetters,” the warden called.

  “Wait,” Mike said. “Were there any casualties?”

  “We don’t know yet. Come along, Miss O’Reilly,” she said and led Eileen over to Mr. Fetters, who’d apparently come here straight from bed. He was wearing pajamas under his coat, and his gray hair was uncombed, but he sounded brisk and efficient. “I need to know your name, floor, and department,” he said.

  Eileen told him. “I was transferred up from Notions last week,” she said.

  Which explained why she hadn’t been on third.

  “Oh, excellent,” Mr. Fetters said. “You were one of the ones we were worried about. Someone said they thought you might still have been in the building.” He checked off her name, and then turned expectantly to Polly. “And you are—?”

  “I’m—we’re friends of Miss O’Reilly’s. Neither of us works at Padgett’s.”

  “Oh, I beg your pardon,” he said with dignity in spite of the pajamas, and turned back to Eileen. “Who was still on your floor when you left?”

  “No one. I was the last one out.”

  Literally, Polly thought.

  “Miss Haskins and Miss Peterson both left before I did. Miss Haskins had asked me to switch off the lights.”

  “Did you see anyone on your way out? Do you know if Miss Miles or Miss Rainsford had gone?”

  And there are two of the three casualties, Polly thought.

  “Are they unaccounted for?” Eileen asked.

  “We haven’t been able to locate them as yet. I’m certain they’re in a shelter and perfectly all right.” He smiled reassuringly. “You need to go see Miss Varden,” he pointed at her, “and give her your address and telephone number so we can contact you when we’re ready to reopen.”

  Eileen nodded.

  “Wait,” Mike said to her, “what floors did Miss Miles and Miss Rainsford work on?”

  “They were both on fifth,” Eileen said. “I do hope they’re all right,” and went off with Mr. Fetters.

  The moment she was gone, Mike said accusingly, “You said there were supposed to be three fatalities.”

  “There will be,” Polly said. “They’ve only been searching a few hours. They’ll find—”

  “Find who?” he said. “You heard Eileen. Those two women worked on fifth. We were on fifth. There was no one there.”

  “I know,” Polly whispered, drawing him back around the corner, out of sight and earshot of the others, “but that doesn’t mean they weren’t in the store. They might have gone down to the basement to the shelter—”

  He wasn’t listening. “There are only two,” he said in that driven voice. “There were supposed to be three.”

  “There may have been someone in the offices. Or it may have been a charwoman. Or the guard who chased us. Just because they haven’t found all the casualties yet doesn’t mean there weren’t any. It was sometimes weeks before all the bodies at an incident were found, and you saw that pit. This doesn’t prove your being at Dunkirk affected—”

  “You don’t understand, I saved a soldier’s life. Private David Hardy. He saw my light—”

  “But one soldier—”

  “It wasn’t one soldier. After I saved him, he went back to Dunkirk and brought back four boatloads full of soldiers. Five hundred and nineteen of them. And don’t tell me changing what happened to that many soldiers didn’t alter history. It’s a chaotic system. A goddamn butterfly can cause a monsoon on the other side of the world. Changing what happened to five hundred and twenty soldiers is sure as hell going to change something! I just hope to God what I changed wasn’t who won the war.”

  “It wasn’t.”

  “How the hell do you know?”

  Because I was there the day we won it, she thought. But telling him that meant telling him she had a deadline, and he was still reeling from finding out about the drops and the retrieval teams. “Because the laws of time travel say it’s not possible,” she said. “And historians have been traveling to the past for nearly forty years. If we were altering events, we’d have seen the effects long before now.” She put her hand on his arm. “And the men you saved were British soldiers, not German pilots. They couldn’t have affected Padgett’s bombing.”

  “You don’t know that,” he said angrily. “It’s a chaotic system. Every action’s connected to every other action.”

  “But they don’t always have an effect,” she said, thinking of her last assignment. “Sometimes you do things that you think will alter the course of events, but in the end they don’t. And you said yourself there should be discrepancies, and there haven’t been.”

  “You’re certain? There hasn’t been any event that was supposed to have happened that didn’t? Or tha
t happened earlier or later than it was supposed to?”

  “No,” she said, and thought suddenly of the UXB at St. Paul’s. Mr. Dunworthy had said it had taken the bomb squad three days to remove it, which would have been on Saturday, not Sunday. But Mr. Dunworthy could have made a mistake about the date, or there could have been an error in the newspaper reports.

  “No, none at all,” she said. “And even in a chaotic system there must be connections. The butterfly flapping its wings can only cause a monsoon because both involve air movement. The lines of connection between your soldiers and the number of casualties in Padgett’s simply aren’t there. And besides, five hundred and twenty British soldiers not dead and not in prisoner-of-war camps would help the war effort, not hurt it.”

  “Not necessarily. In chaotic systems, positive actions can cause bad results as well as good, and you know as well as I do that the war had divergence points where any action, good or bad, would have changed the entire picture.”

  I’m going to have to tell him about VE-Day, even if it does mean his finding out about my deadline, she thought. It’s the only way to convince him. But once he found out she had a deadline, he’d—

  “Polly! Mike!” Eileen’s voice called, sounding frantic, and they hurried back around the corner. “I came to tell you—”

  “What is it?” Mike said. “Have they found bodies?”

  “No, and everyone except Miss Miles and Miss Rainsford have been accounted for.”

  “What about the guard at the staff entrance?” he asked.

  “He’s here. He was the one who told them he thought I was in the building. He thought you might have been, too, Polly, but I told him that as soon as you got to fourth you realized I’d gone and left. The bomb apparently hit just after we got out.”

  And if we hadn’t been able to get the lift door open, Polly thought, or if we’d run into the guard on the way down—She looked anxiously at Eileen, wondering if she was thinking the same thing.

  Eileen was shivering, though that could be due to her thin blouse and the damp, chill air. We should have done that looting we were accused of and stolen that coat off the mannequin.

  “You’re sure everybody’s been accounted for? Even the charwomen?” Mike demanded, his voice rising the way Eileen’s had in the tube station. He’s just as near the edge as she is, Polly thought. He’s in no shape to hear more bad news. “Yes, everyone,” Eileen said, “but that isn’t what I came to tell you. It was two words.”

  “What was?” Mike asked impatiently.

  “The name of the place Gerald was going. It was two words. I was speaking to Miss Varden about Miss Miles, and she said she lived in Tegley Place, and when she said it, I thought, The airfield Gerald told me he was going to was a two-word name.”

  “Middle Wallop?” Polly said.

  Eileen shook her head.

  “West Malling?”

  “No. I’m positive one of the words began with a T. Or a P—” She stopped, looking past Polly. “Oh, thank goodness, it’s Miss Miles!” She ran to meet the young woman coming across the street.

  “What happened?” Miss Miles said, staring at the scattered mannequins.

  “Padgett’s was bombed last night—” Eileen began, but Mike cut in, “Was Miss Rainsford still in the building when you left last night?”

  “No,” Miss Miles said, still staring blindly at the sprawled bodies.

  “No, you don’t know? Or no, she wasn’t in the building?” Mike shouted, and Eileen turned to look at him incredulously, but his anger had roused Miss Miles from her trance.

  She turned from staring at the mannequins and said, “She wasn’t here yesterday. Her brother was killed the night before last.”

  “You’d best tell Mr. Fetters that,” Eileen said, and to Mike and Polly, “I’ll be back straightaway,” and led Miss Miles off toward the others.

  “Well?” Mike said before the two girls were even out of earshot. “You heard her. Everybody’s been accounted for. Which means there weren’t any fatalities.”

  “It doesn’t mean that at all,” Polly said. “They could have been passersby. On my way to Padgett’s I saw a woman and her little boy insisting the doorman get them a taxi. They might still have been waiting for it when the bomb hit,” she said, though if that were the case, their bodies would have been blown out onto the pavement like the mannequins. “No one knew we were in Padgett’s. There might have been other people who—”

  “Or the continuum might have been altered,” Mike said, looking like he was going to be sick, “and we’re going to lose the war. And don’t tell me it’s impossible.”

  It is impossible, she thought, but she said, “If England lost the war, then Ira Feldman’s parents would have died in Auschwitz or Buchenwald, and he’d never have invented time travel, and Oxford would never have built the net, and we couldn’t have come through.”

  “You’re forgetting something,” he said bitterly.

  “What?”

  “We came through the net before I saved Hardy.”

  And I was at VE-Day before he saved Hardy, she thought, but—

  “Why else would there be a discrepancy?” he said.

  “You don’t know that it’s a discrepancy. You don’t know you saved Hardy, either.”

  “What do you mean? I told you—”

  “Perhaps it wasn’t your light he saw. Perhaps it was a light from some other boat, or a reflection off the water. Or a flare.”

  “A flare,” he said, and some of the color came back into his face. “I hadn’t thought of that. There were flares.”

  “In any case, we can’t know anything for sure till we’ve found Gerald and seen whether his drop is working.”

  “Or yours is,” he said.

  Now was no time to tell him of her multiple trips to the drop. “I’ll take you there tonight after work,” she said. “I think right now you should go with Eileen to Stepney. She’s had too many shocks to deal with to go by herself,” and before he could object, called “Eileen!” and walked briskly over to where she stood talking to Miss Miles. Eileen’s teeth were chattering, and she was hugging her arms tightly to herself. “Here, take my coat,” Polly said, unbuttoning it.

  “But—”

  “I won’t need it. I’m going to Mrs. Rickett’s to see about your moving in with me, so I can get my suit jacket.” She put the coat on Eileen. “I’ll see you when you return from Stepney. Come to Townsend Brothers, and we’ll plan our next move.”

  Now she was the one shivering in the chill predawn air. “I’d best go if I’m to get to Mrs. Rickett’s and back in time for work. I’ll see you in a bit. I’m on third,” she reminded her. “The stockings counter. Take care,” and hurried off toward the tube station.

  The train to Notting Hill Gate was empty, and she was grateful. She needed time to think what to do. If she told Mike why she was positive they’d won the war, it would stop him worrying about having altered events.

  But she’d have to tell him all of it. Saying she’d been at VE-Day wouldn’t convince him. He’d just say the continuum hadn’t changed till later, after he’d rescued Hardy. She’d have to tell him why that wasn’t true. And both of them had had as many shocks as they could take for one night.

  Eileen had already broken down once, and when the knowledge of how narrowly she’d escaped death in Padgett’s sank in, she might give way altogether.

  And Mike, for all his Admirable Crichton–like taking charge, was in worse shape than Eileen. He’d obviously been brooding for weeks over the possibility of having lost the war. Telling him about VE-Day might send him right over the edge.

  But so could thinking he’d caused the nightmare the world would have become if Hitler and his monstrous Third Reich had won—concentration camps and gas chambers and ovens and who knew what other horrors. Hitler had planned to set up a gallows outside the Houses of Parliament and execute Churchill and the King and Queen. And Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret Rose, aged fourteen and ten.
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  I’m going to have to tell him, she thought. I’ll do it as soon as he and Eileen get back from Stepney, and the train immediately jerked and slowed.

  Are we coming into the station? she wondered, peering forward out the window, but she couldn’t see anything. The train ground to a halt and sat there. And sat there.

  What was causing the delay? A bomb on the line like the one on Miss Laburnum’s train from Croxley, or a tunnel collapse? Or a simple mechanical problem? There was no way to tell, any more than the three of them could tell if their drops’ failure was due to a catastrophe in Oxford or Mike’s having rescued a soldier at Dunkirk. Or only something minor, like slippage or their retrieval teams having difficulty finding them.

  The train started up, gathered speed, racketed along for perhaps a minute, and halted again. I’ll never get out of here, she thought and smiled bitterly. Mike had already convinced himself that he was responsible for all this. What if she told him and he still didn’t believe her? What if it only made matters worse? And what if he told Eileen? Surely there was some other way to convince him he couldn’t have altered events besides telling him about VE-Day.

  But by the time the train reached Notting Hill Gate three quarters of an hour later, she hadn’t thought of one. She walked quickly along the tunnel and onto the escalator, glancing at her watch. Half past eight. She scarcely had time to get to Mrs. Rickett’s and back, let alone go see Mrs. Wyvern about coats. She hurried over to the turnstile.

  “Finally bringing the curtain down, are they?” the guard asked as she started through.

  “What? Is the troupe still down there rehearsing?”

  He nodded.

  “Thank you,” she said fervently and ran back down to the District Line. With luck, Mrs. Rickett and Mrs. Wyvern would both be there, but when she reached the platform, she couldn’t see either of them. The rest of the troupe was still doing a scene. “No, no, no,” Sir Godfrey was saying to Lila. “Not like that. You need to sound more cheerful.”

  “Cheerful?” Lila said. “I thought you said we were supposed to play this scene like we didn’t know what was going to happen to us.”