An Opening in the Air (Applied Topology Book 2)

by Margaret Ball

  The part that wasn’t such a good idea didn’t become clear until they actually made the jump. They’d waited until night, expecting to be able to appear unnoticed in the dark, deserted park.

  This was where a couple of major deficiencies in the plan became clear. First, Colton still wasn’t able to execute a Brouwer jump automatically. He was nervous about Ingrid’s plan – demonstrating that he was not completely insane – and she wound up having to carry both him and Jimmy. She didn’t notice the strain at first, being nearly drunk on the in-between’s bright colors of arcs and nodes against the blackness, the exhilarating sense of sliding along curves and whipping around turns. But when those few seconds had passed, the ride dumped her in Britfield close to collapse. She couldn’t even stand up without Jimmy’s arm around her.

  The second problem was that the park was not dark and deserted. Not hardly. It was lit up like an amusement park and crowded with locals being determinedly happy. It seemed the Chamber of Commerce had decided that the way to revive Britfield’s stagnant economy was to throw a celebration harking back to its glory days.

  Yeah. The days when the bottling plant was still running. Those glory days.

  Look, not all little Texas towns have a colorful history to hark back to. In West Texas and the Panhandle, they’re more likely to have a fatal case of the galloping uglies. The Chamber of Commerce was doing its best with the cards they’d been dealt; it wasn’t their fault that they had a lousy hand. The locals did their best to support the idea. There were cotton candy booths and antiques vendors and one lonely young woman selling hand-beaded earrings, and everybody in Britfield who wasn’t working a booth turned out to buy things, have a beer in a commemorative Coca-Cola plastic cup, and assure one another that they were having a great time.

  The only thing they lacked was tourists.

  There weren’t even any out-of-state license plates to be seen in the town square.

  By the time our people popped into view, all the locals had greeted one another several times, and the beer was going as flat as the celebration. They were ecstatic to see three strangers turn up in the crowd.

  Well… two strangers, anyway: young men holding up the Thorn girl, who appeared to be drunk or drugged. Confused whispers ran through the crowd. “Isn’t she supposed to be at the university?” warred with, “I always knew those university students were no good,” and the ever-popular, “Who’d have thought the Thorn girl would do drugs?”

  It was the work of a minute for those sentiments to percolate through the bored crowd in the park and for Ingrid’s parents to follow the whispers to their point of origin.

  “What have you done to my daughter?” Mrs. Thorn descended like the wrath of the Valkyries; Jimmy said later that he suddenly began to have a better understanding of Ingrid’s fondness for horned helmets and Wagner. Right then, though, all he did was cringe.

  “Can’t blame him,” Colton said. “Better men than him have cringed before Mrs. Thorn. Me, for one.” He grinned at Jimmy’s outraged expression.

  Neither of them did anything to prevent Ingrid’s father from grabbing her arm and yanking her away from them, and that was probably just as well; getting into a fist-fight with a girl’s father for trying to rescue her would just have turned the mood of the crowd even uglier. As it was, before Jimmy and Colton had quite taken in the situation Ingrid was gone and there was a tightening circle pressing around them. If Colton had been able to execute a Brouwer jump on his own they might have gotten away; but he wasn’t, and they didn’t, and now that her daughter was safe Mrs. Thorn had turned her attention to demanding that the police arrest these two hippie drug dealers.

  The most embarrassing mother on the face of the earth

  Chapter 9

  “We didn’t actually get arrested,” Colton pointed out when he and Jimmy told their part of the story.

  “We just got a real nice invitation to come visit the police station,” Jimmy collaborated.

  They had been searched – thoroughly, and not very pleasantly – for drugs. Then they had had a long, also not very pleasant talk with the chief of police, who wanted to know what they were doing with the Thorn girl in Bowie Park.

  “Same as everybody else?” Jimmy offered. “Enjoying the celebration?”

  “She looked pretty sick,” the chief observed. “Did not look as if she was enjoying anything at all. Particularly not a couple of strange men picking her up and getting her drunk out of her mind.”

  “She wasn’t drunk!”

  “And we’re not strangers. We’re her colleagues. We all work at the Center for Applied Topology.”

  “Never heard of it.”

  “At UT Austin.”

  “So your story is that the three of you came out here together for the big celebration?”

  Jimmy and Colton nodded.

  “And how did you get here?”

  “Drove,” Colton said.

  “Where’d you leave your car? Don’t want to get towed, do you?”

  “Um, he meant that we got a ride with friends who dropped us off on the way,” Jimmy tried.

  “Son, Britfield isn’t on the way to anywhere.”

  “Isn’t it? I didn’t know. They were going to, uh, Santa Fe, and they didn’t mind coming through Britfield.”

  The chief of police tapped his pen on the table. “I think you boys had better spend the night right here.”

  “Are you arresting us?”

  “Not exactly. Holding you. It’s for your own protection as much as anything else,” he told them. “The Thorns are well thought of here. Scruffy young men messing around with their daughter, not so much. Do you boys really want to go outside and look for a place to stay? With Mrs. Thorn on the warpath? It’s late. I want to go home to bed and not get called out in an hour to rescue you kids. So here’s what we’re going to do. You’re going to accept our hospitality for the night – you’re not under arrest and you won’t be, as long as you don’t try to go anywhere. In the morning I’ll call this Center where you say you work, and if they verify your employment, you can go wherever you like. I would strongly suggest leaving town. I’ll drop you off at the car rental.”

  “Not without –“

  Colton stood on Jimmy’s toes. “Mighty obliged, Chief. We sure don’t want to make trouble here.”

  After they were shown to their lodging for the night Jimmy objected in furious whispers. “We can’t stay here, we have to rescue Ingrid!”

  “From her parents? You seriously want to tell the chief you’re going right out and get into a fight with her parents? Who, if you recall, have enough pull in this town to get us run in to the police station?”

  “She’s twenty-five. They have no right to keep her prisoner.”

  Colton sighed. “You don’t understand small towns, do you, Jimmy? There is no way that it’s a good idea to go and try to remove a young woman from her parents’ house, against their wishes, in the middle of the night. And considering how drained Ingrid looked after that jump, she’s going to need hours to recover. Now just calm down. Let Ingrid get some rest. Let’s us rest too. In the morning, we don’t argue with anybody, we just agree that we’re leaving town right away. Then we’ll make contact with Ingrid, figure out a place to meet and teleport ourselves back to the Center.”

  “We should at least get in touch with her now. She’ll be worried sick.”

  Colton felt that Jimmy did enough worrying for all three of them that night. Their cell phones and everything else they’d had were locked in the chief’s desk, so there wasn’t much they could do before morning.

  And when morning did come, it wasn’t quite that simple.

  The chief of police sent a message that he was busy and they should order in some breakfast for those boys.

  “Pretty good, actually,” Colton said. “They ordered in from some joint called Mamie’s Tex-Mex. Migas, huevos rancheros, chorizo. I wouldn’t mind going back there, we ever find ourselves in Britfield again.”

 
; Jimmy indicated that one of his life goals was never, ever to find himself in Britfield again.

  He was a nervous wreck by the time the chief ambled in, in mid-morning, and placed a call to the Center. When they got their possessions back, he grabbed his phone and started texting Ingrid immediately. Colton elbowed him, took the phone away and turned it off. “Wait.”

  Jimmy’s nails were bitten down to his knuckles by the time the chief dropped them off at Harvey’s Rent-a-Rek. While Colton negotiated for a car to get them back to Austin, he called Ingrid.

  And got bumped to voice mail.

  Twice.

  Finally, after they’d taken possession of the beater car that was the only vehicle Harvey would let them take so far, one of Jimmy’s texts to Ingrid was answered.

  “Cant talk now wait?” Jimmy exploded. “What the hell kind of answer is that? What are they doing to her?”

  “With any luck, feeding her,” Colton said. “And her parents struck me as the kind of people who think it’s rude to stick your face in your phone while breakfasting with somebody.” He ruminated for a moment. “For that matter, don’t much like it myself. City ways.”

  “But this is an emergency!”

  “Just hold your horses. You’ve made contact. She knows we’re free – uh, you did tell her that part?”

  “I thought it would just worry her unnecessarily.”

  “Telling her the cops let us go?”

  “To do that, I’d have had to tell her they had us in the first place,” Jimmy pointed out.

  They sat in the car for a while, waiting to hear back from Ingrid. Then they went into Mamie’s Tex-Mex and ordered more coffee.

  Even Colton was getting twitchy by the time Ingrid texted them again, though he claimed that was just a side effect of three cups of coffee. She wanted them to come meet her parents.

  Jimmy promptly went from twitchy to full-on nervous wreck. “What if they don’t like me? Colton, can I borrow your comb? What if they ask…”

  Colton tried to explain that there was a difference between, “Meet the man I want to marry,” and “Meet my perfectly respectable colleague who is absolutely not responsible for my condition last night.” It didn’t calm Jimmy down any.

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” Jimmy said to this. “I knew perfectly well it wasn’t the first kind of ‘Meet my parents.’ How could it be, when Ingrid doesn’t know yet that she’s going to marry me? But if I flunked, ‘Meet my perfectly respectable colleague,’ it wasn’t going to help when it did come time for ‘Meet my future husband.’”

  He had to wait until Ingrid wasn’t in the room before giving this bit of explanation, of course. Because as far as I know, she still didn’t know that she wanted to marry Jimmy. The man can simultaneously be a perfect realist about his current standing with her and a perfect fantasist about the near future. Of course, optimistic fantasies probably help if you’re pursuing a Norse goddess who walks right over you on a regular basis. And she doesn’t even need boots to do it.

  I never did get a report on how the meeting with Ingrid’s parents went: just three different one-line takes.

  Ingrid: “I have the most embarrassing mother on the face of the earth.”

  Jimmy: “My entire life passed before my eyes.”

  Colton: “I never realized how many ancestors Ingrid has.”

  When I pointed out, in response to this last comment, that mathematically everyone has the same number of ancestors, he just shook his head and wandered off mumbling something about Daughters of the Swedish Immigration and the Gustavus Vasa Society.

  I suppose the only important thing is that they did get out of there. Eventually. With Ingrid.

  “She wanted to try teleporting all three of us back to Austin,” Jimmy said, “so I had to put my foot down.”

  Now that was interesting. In my observation of Ingrid’s interactions with Jimmy, the boot had definitely been on the other foot. “How did you do that?”

  “It was necessary,” Jimmy said. “You didn’t see her after she teleported us to Britfield. I thought she was dying! If her parents hadn’t dragged her away…” He shook his head. “I was about to take her to the nearest emergency room. I don’t ever want to see her in that condition again.”

  I refrained from saying that in that case, he’d better never go on another mission or experiment with her. Because research fellows push the boundaries. It’s what we do.

  Besides, I was still impressed that Jimmy had been able to overrule her even once. And in a context that forced her to substitute a long, hot, uncomfortable car journey for a quick whoosh back to Allandale House. “I’m surprised she didn’t abandon you and Colton and simply jump back here by herself.” It suggested she’d known she was too shaky to repeat the long jump, which helped explain how Jimmy had won that argument.

  Ingrid did not, understandably, want to discuss her post-teleportation condition any more than she wanted to go into details about how her parents had interacted with Jimmy and Colton. But she spent quite some time rhapsodizing about the long jump itself.

  “You know those trip reports you and Ben have been turning in about your distance jump tests?”

  “Of course I do, I wrote them.” Being sensible and scientific, we’d been increasing the jump distance incrementally. We’d now got to where we could jump back to Austin from San Marcos without getting too dizzy and disoriented; it was all in learning how to deploy the Lights of the Medes sequentially rather than all at once. I wanted to try doubling our distance on the next test, but we’d been having a little trouble persuading somebody to drive us to San Antonio.

  “Well.” Ingrid sighed happily. “I didn’t know the half of it. Three hundred miles, that’s far enough for you to really experience moving through the universe. Being a point of light sliding around curves of light and through star clouds, whipping around vertices to change to a direction that doesn’t exist in our reality… I suppose you two have enjoyed a hint of that in your limited jumps, but there’s nothing like having time to absorb the experience. I think I’ll see the universe differently from now on.”

  That was Ingrid all over, wasn’t it? Turning her near-disaster into a way to one-up the rest of us. Once again I wondered what Jimmy saw in her. Apart from the obvious, that is.

  The next morning, when Annelise came in to make coffee and set out pastries, she was rather miffed that the expedition to Britfield hadn’t included her. “My job is to come up with stories that will convince onlookers what they just saw didn’t happen, or has a rational explanation, or whatever. How can I do my job if you go diving into crises without me?”

  “We didn’t expect a crisis,” Colton said defensively.

  “You idiots never expect a crisis!”

  “Call it the triumph of hope over experience,” said Lensky on his way up the stairs.

  “You’re back from El Paso!”

  “Really great deduction, Lia,” Ben said.

  I didn’t bother bandying words with him. Lensky had wrapped one arm around me as soon as he came within reach, and his greeting kiss demanded my full attention. In fact, the enthusiasm he demonstrated demanded privacy as well as attention.

  We took the rest of the morning off and advised Colton and Ingrid that, should anybody ask about us, they should say we were driving back from Britfield. After all, that had excused their disappearing for a whole day.

  God’s Own Amusement Park

  Chapter 10

  Dr. Verrick probably understood the nature of research fellows better than I did: he told Ingrid that until he informed her differently, her job and her only job was to see that Colton Edwards was solid enough on the Brouwer Fixed-Point Theorem to deploy it for teleportation automatically and without regard for external distractions. Then he went back over to the math building, muttering again that he had enough problems already without our creating more. He’d been saying that a lot lately, so I didn’t pay as much attention as I should have.

  Anyway, although he was mor
e explicit than I would have been, we both made the same fundamental mistake. Neither of us told Ingrid to lay off any teleporting on her own account without a certified user accompanying her – which at the moment meant Ben or me. Both Ben and I made the silly assumption that after this experience, Ingrid wouldn’t want to go anywhere without one of us for backup.

  In our defense, she didn’t pull anything right away. She appeared to settle down to training Colton and brooding about her future.

  “I think our mistake with Colton was, we concentrated too hard on the mathematical theory, because we knew he was weak on that. But once he got that down, we should have worked with him on invoking Brouwer automatically – the way you and I did when we were first researching jumps.”

  That made sense. And I refrained from mentioning that it was her mistake, not ours. Up to now I had not been involved with Colton’s training.

  She spent several days practicing small inter-office jumps with Colton, giving him the same kind of experience we’d had. When he was able to synchronize his Brouwer jumps with hers, she expanded the area of operations to the big open central room on the public side and drafted Jimmy to watch the stairs for visitors while she and Colton teleported on command to different coordinates in the room.

  Annelise started bringing extra doughnuts, since Colton was working hard and it took a lot of resupply to fuel that big country-boy frame. And I thought again how lucky we were to find a receptionist who could take in stride having a large, hungry, slightly shocky young man appear in front of her just after she’d seen him in a far corner of the room.

  I had to think about that rather a lot, because the quiet rivalry between Colton and Ben for Annelise’s attention was heating up again. It seemed to me that her favor swung to whoever had been hurt most recently. She’d bonded with Colton after he fell off the balcony, had gone back to Ben when (as she put it) ‘y’all pushed him down the stairs!’ (I thought ‘saving his life’ was a better description of what we’d done, but Annelise had her own take on things.)