An Opening in the Air (Applied Topology Book 2)

by Margaret Ball

  “And then trapped himself in a bubble with not enough air? I’ll bring him back to life so I can kill him personally!”

  “Can Mr. M. help?”

  “Who knows? Maybe. Call Meadow and tell her we need to borrow Mr. M. back immediately.”

  Ingrid went into her office to retrieve her phone and make the call, and Colton prodded at the opaque surface with his crutch. That made a bigger dimple than my finger, naturally, but nothing else happened.

  “Can we get this thing out of his office?”

  “Why?”

  “Well… if this thing is based on his concentration, and we can’t get sound or light or a stick in there… what do you think it would do to his concentration if we rolled it down the stairs?”

  “Um. He might fall badly and break his leg.”

  “Oh. Well. I didn’t think of that, and I’m sure you have much better ideas.”

  Actually, I didn’t. And I was sufficiently annoyed with Ben to feel that his potentially broken leg was an acceptable risk.

  I won’t go into the physical and mathematical difficulties of extracting a large, squishy closed surface from an office which it had tried to fill completely, or the subsequent problem of visualizing a Möbius strip wide enough to let us roll the sphere through the wall. Imagine us dealing with a seven-foot balloon eighty percent full of very light liquid, and you’ll have the general idea.

  Once we got the thing to the head of the stairs, though, Colton’s idea worked like a charm. It wobbled on the edge of the top stair, trying to reshape itself around the stair. Colton gave it a hard push with one of his crutches. The sort-of-sphere bounced down seven steps to the landing, broke apart, and became nothing. Suddenly we were all looking down at a very aggrieved Ben who still had earbuds in his ears. “All” now included Annelise, who’d come running when she heard the crash and kept on going until she had Ben’s head in her lap.

  “Ben! Are you all right?”

  He ignored her. “What happened?” he asked us. Crankily. “I had a great visualization going. I figured out that I could listen to one of my meditation soundtracks and that would help me block out distractions.”

  “Why did you do that to him?” Annelise demanded. “He could have been killed!”

  His chances of survival were still not all that great. I was getting tired of his penchant for taking off with new untested theories. But he patted Annelise’s hand reassuringly. “There, there. It’s all right,” he told her.

  He looked way too comfortable with his head in her lap.

  “Do you realize,” Ingrid said, “that you’ve been blocking out distractions for two hours and forty-five minutes?”

  “What? No way!” Ben looked down at his phone and began tapping symbols. “The track’s only about 45 minutes long and it’s still… oh.”

  “Oh?” I echoed.

  He didn’t meet my eyes. “I may have… that is, I did… set the play mode to Repeat.”

  “Did you break any bones on your way down the stairs?” Ingrid demanded.

  “No…” Ben looked dubious, waggled his feet and hands. “No.” He stood up and kissed Annelise.

  “What a pity.” Ingrid wheeled around and headed back to her office.

  “I’m beginning to wish Annelise had never persuaded you to get a cell phone,” I told Ben when he got to the head of the stairs. Last year we’d had a few problems related to the fact that we could never contact Ben when he was out of the office, because he didn’t have a landline in his apartment and he refused to even think about using a cell phone. During one of the periods when their on-again, off-again relationship was set to “on,” Annelise had talked him into getting one so that she could get in touch with him, tactfully omitting that this meant Dr. Verrick, Ingrid, Lensky, and I could also have a shot at him. I hadn’t expected Ben to become so adept at using a cell phone so quickly, and I certainly hadn’t expected him to figure out a way of using it to block out distractions when it was the nature of the thing to create distractions.

  The noise of Ben and his sphere crashing down the stairs had attracted Lensky’s attention, and for once Annelise was telling nothing but the truth as she described us coming through the wall with an amorphous blob and rolling it down a flight of stairs. I could tell from his expression that he thought she was treating him to one of the tall tales she created whenever outsiders noticed something a little bit strange about the Center.

  “I work with you people,” he said, “you don’t have to concoct fantastic tales for my benefit.”

  “She’s not concocting anything,” I said on my way past. “Just call it a workplace accident, okay?”

  “Really, Brad,” Annelise snapped at Lensky, “I was hired to make up stories that would make whatever they do sound normal, not to tell stories about something that nobody would believe existed if they hadn’t seen it with their own eyes and I’m still not sure I believe in it!”

  While Lensky was trying to parse that, Ben and I escaped back to the Research Division to work out the math of what he’d just done. The shield was excessive on several levels, but I did like the elasticity. If we could maintain that while losing the opacity and the sound-damping, we’d have the beginnings of something that was actually useful.

  It took us another week of research and carefully controlled experimentation to isolate the useful properties of Ben’s shield algorithm. Meadow and Mr. M retreated back to the engineering labs, Colton got off his crutches and began taking prolonged coffee breaks, and Ingrid actually joined our low-key, purely intellectual discussions as we worked out various minor differences of opinion. As for Lensky, he claimed that the Washington office had requested him to investigate something in El Paso. I feel that was an exaggeration; he wouldn’t have had to go farther than San Antonio to be well out of earshot.

  At least, as Ben pointed out righteously after the fact, he wasn’t the next one to get into trouble. That would be Ingrid and Colton – and they took Jimmy with them.

  I frequently feel like locking them up myself

  Chapter 8

  If Dr. Verrick hadn’t called a staff meeting we might not have realized for some time that anything was wrong. His intent had been to address the problem of soothing the trustees of Allandale House, who were making what I thought an excessive fuss about our minor fire and subsequent deployment of the automatic sprinkler systems. It had, after all, been a minor fire. When I raised that point with Dr. Verrick, he added recent unexplained damage to a balcony railing, an intern, and the stairs to the list of our offenses.

  As it happened, though, the trustee problem rapidly became a minor inconvenience compared with the new problem.

  The thing was, only three of us showed up in the break room.

  “Did I fail to announce the time of this meeting?” Dr. Verrick queried, somewhat testily. “Did I, perhaps, not specify the date?”

  Ben shrugged. “I got the message.”

  “Lensky’s in El Paso,” I volunteered.

  “And Meadow is working with Mr. M. in one of the engineering labs,” Annelise put in.

  That left Ingrid, Colton, and Jimmy unaccounted for.

  Annelise had some ideas about Colton. “He might be meeting his sister. The family’s still really unhappy that they sent him to UT to study business and didn’t get a farm manager back. His father and brother aren’t speaking to him, and he’s upset about that. Janaelle keeps trying to arrange a reconciliation. Or at least to get them all into the same room without a fight.”

  So that was what Colton’s long, quiet conversations with Annelise had been about. He hadn’t been trying to flirt with her – he’d been crying on her shoulder.

  “Did he tell you he was going to a family meeting?”

  Annelise shook her head. “But he might not have wanted to. In case, you know, it ended badly.”

  We thought that over for a while. “He wouldn’t have taken Ingrid and Jimmy with him, would he?”

  “Ingrid, maybe,” Ben said. “If they were
going to teleport out of town… He hasn’t soloed since he fell off the balcony. Might have wanted support.”

  “But not Jimmy?”

  “I wouldn’t have thought so, no.”

  “Why don’t we just call them?”

  Three phone calls got us switched to voice mail three times in a row.

  We tossed out a few other theories for why they would all three have gone missing without telling anybody where they were going, but didn’t come up with anything really satisfactory before the telephone rang and Annelise ran back to her desk to get it.

  “Yes…” we heard her saying. “Yes, this is the Center for Applied Topology.”

  “Not any of our people calling in, then,” Ben deduced.

  “Yes… yes… One moment, sir. I’ll transfer you to the Director.” Annelise gestured at Dr. Verrick and pointed at the phone.

  “Yes. Verrick speaking. No, I cannot switch over to Skype. I do not Skype.”

  “Who is it?” Ben hissed at Annelise.

  She shrugged. “Police. In some place called Britfield.”

  That rang a very, very faint bell in my memory, but I couldn’t recall where or when I’d heard the name before.

  “Yes, he is indeed an employee of the Center. He too. They are both employed here, and may still be if they get back here as soon as possible. I trust you feel no further need to detain them? Good. Good. No, I can perfectly well understand your need to lock them up until you could verify their story. I frequently feel like locking them up myself.”

  He stumped back into the break room and glared at all of us. “Effective immediately, no one is to teleport anywhere out of Austin without signing out in the log book.”

  “What log book?”

  “The one I’m about to create. Miss Wilson, please procure an appropriate notebook, label it, and chain it to your desk to prevent future occurrences such as this. I have enough problems already.”

  “Ah…. What occurrences, sir?”

  “I just told you.” He frequently thought he had already told us whatever he was thinking. “Those idiots teleported themselves to West Texas and it appears that they will be dependent upon surface transportation to return. That call was from the Britfield chief of police. He said something about renting a car. For reasons which I look forward to hearing upon their return, Mr. Edwards and Mr. DiGrazio were apprehended there last night for vagrancy and suspicion of drug dealing.”

  “What about Ingrid? Did he say anything about her?”

  “He did not.”

  Now that bell was ringing louder. “I think… Ingrid comes from Britfield. Whatever happened, I bet they were all in it together.”

  “In that case,” said Dr. Verrick, “we can only hope that they all return together.”

  “Maybe Ben and I should go pick them up?”

  Dr. Verrick’s glare became more pointed. It had the same effect as a magnifying glass concentrating the sun’s rays to a burning point. “I should prefer not to lose my remaining staff to Britfield. If you are at loose ends until the return of your colleagues, Miss Kostis, I suggest you prepare a short presentation aimed at persuading the trustees of Allendale House that the Center is not a threat to the fabric of the building. Mr. Sutherland, you might prepare a second presentation highlighting the useful results of our research to date. If there are any.”

  “Should we use Powerpoint?”

  Dr. Verrick’s glare moved from me to Ben. “On no account, Mr. Sutherland. No Powerpoint, no Skype, no Facebook. If you are unable to express yourself in English, this is the time to learn.”

  I elbowed Ben as Dr. Verrick stumped out and headed for the stairs. Evidently he meant to hole up in his other office, across campus. “Why’d you bring that up? You know how much he doesn’t love modern technology.”

  “Thought I’d take some of the heat off you,” Ben muttered back. He poured himself a cup of cold coffee, set it on the table, and stretched. “How long do you suppose they’ll take to get back?”

  “I looked it up,” Annelise came back into the break room. “It’s only three hundred miles. If they rented a car, they should be here by two o’clock. Unless, of course…”

  “Unless they get into some other kind of trouble,” Ben finished her unspoken thought. He took a sip from his cup. “This coffee is terrible. It’s stone cold!”

  “I’ll make a fresh pot,” Annelise said. “Y’all are going to need it, if you’ve got to figure out how to calm the trustees down.”

  Ben and I retreated to our respective offices… briefly. Neither of us could concentrate with so many open questions nagging at us. When would Jimmy and Colton be back? Would they have Ingrid with them? If not, would they at least know what had happened to her? Why weren’t they teleporting back? What had happened?

  “We should have been working on telepathy, not shields,” Ben said, running both hands through his hair until it stuck up in untidy tufts. “I’d give anything to be able to contact Ingrid right now and ask her what the hell.”

  “Mmm. Ingrid and I were thinking about telepathy last year, because it was so hard to get hold of you in an emergency. But then Annelise talked you into getting a cell phone and it didn’t seem so urgent.”

  When they still weren’t back by three-thirty I began to share Ben’s regret that we hadn’t developed a functional telepathy system. “Although if they can choose not to answer their phones, they could probably also choose not to respond to telepathic queries.”

  “They might respond to telepathic threats,” Ben said grimly.

  If I hadn’t been so concerned for our missing colleagues, I would have enjoyed Ben getting a taste of his own medicine. Now he might have some idea of how we felt when he dashed into some visualization before he’d finished working out the relevant math, and had to be hauled out bodily.

  It was nearly five-thirty when they showed up, hot, dusty, and complaining about the rush hour traffic jam on Highway 183. I let out a breath I hadn’t been aware of holding when Ingrid came up the stairs after Jimmy and Colton.

  “Where have you been?” I demanded.

  Ingrid gave me a dirty look. “You know where we’ve been. Sitting in traffic on 183.”

  I suggested, tactfully and calmly, that this was not a completely adequate explanation for the day’s events. Jimmy’s ears turned red and Ingrid’s jaw set in a very unbecoming expression. Colton just looked quietly amused.

  “It’s a long story,” he said, “and we’re thirsty. Perhaps we could have the debriefing at Scholz’s Beer Garden?”

  The story as they told it was extremely long and unnecessarily complicated. They kept interrupting and contradicting each other. “No, I was fine, you two were the ones in trouble – we weren’t in trouble, anyway we wouldn’t have been if your mother had stayed out of it – the only car we could rent didn’t even have air conditioning –“

  That last helped to explain Ingrid’s windblown look.

  This, then, is an edited version of the whole story, smoothing out the interruptions and contradictions, and you should be grateful to me for not just dumping a verbatim transcript here.

  It began with Ingrid’s current dilemma about whether to pursue a conventional mathematics career or to stick with the Center. She put it in terms of perfectly logical information gathering – but then she would, wouldn’t she? She was beginning to question whether the longish jumps we’d made when we first learned to use the stars in teleporting had really been as exhilarating as she remembered. And if you ask me, she was also jealous because Ben and I had been extending our range over the summer while she studied for qualifiers. We’d reached the point of being able to jump back to Allendale House from as far away as San Marcos. She’d seen us on a couple of those long-distance returns, flushed and laughing and out of breath; and she’d read the trip reports, which tended to make references to the better rides at Six Flags.

  She felt it was time she got in on some of this long-jump action. And, being Ingrid, she decided she was going to g
o us one better by not only teleporting much farther than Ben and I had managed, but by doing the jump going and coming instead of having someone drive her out of town so she could teleport back. (She never exactly admitted to this motive, but I have roomed with her long enough to know what was going on in her head. Whoever told you that women aren’t competitive never met Ingrid… or, okay, me either.)

  She figured she could do this because there was one place a few hundred miles out of town that was crystal clear in her memory: Bowie Park in Britfield, where she’d spent hours on the swings, or watching the machines at the bottling plant through the huge plate-glass window, or just plotting her escape from Britfield.

  And she didn’t want to tell anybody else until she’d done it and succeeded.

  The first catch she encountered was Jimmy, who noticed that she’d been calling up maps and pictures of Britfield on the Internet. (“And how do you know my browsing history?” Ingrid demanded over the beer pitchers at Scholz’s. Jimmy’s ears turned red again, but he managed not to give a direct answer.) He confronted her and threatened to tell the entire Research Division about her plans unless she took him along in case of difficulties. (“How did you make the leap from pictures of Britfield to Ingrid planning a solo jump?” was what I wanted to know. This time he turned red from hairline to Adam’s apple, but managed to respond with some dignity. “When you love someone, you get a sense for what they’ll do.”)

  Ingrid blinked at that, and I began to think Jimmy might have a chance with her after all.

  Jimmy, though, was a computer jockey, not a research fellow. He would be dead weight on a jump, and even Ingrid realized that she might be pushing her luck to teleport three hundred miles while dragging Jimmy along. She could, of course, have promised to take him and then jumped alone, but I’ll say one thing for Ingrid: she doesn’t break promises.

  Instead, she enlisted Colton to help. This was and wasn’t a good idea. The part that was a good idea from her perspective was clear to all of us without saying: she could bully Colton into going along with her crazy plan, whereas Ben or I just might have refused to have anything to do with it.