An Opening in the Air (Applied Topology Book 2)

by Margaret Ball

  “You can’t just close it down?”

  “It’s not that simple. They’re independently funded.”

  “And too dangerous to be left to their own devices.”

  “Dangerous?”

  “Didn’t you know? They were instrumental in that little trouble we had last May. Well, it was a little thing for you, anyway. I managed to clean your name out of the records, but I had to give up an extremely profitable business. You owe me.”

  “Blackmail?”

  “Nothing like that! I just want a hearing. I’ve identified a man who’d be an ideal director for the Center. He’ll see to it that the research fellows don’t get above themselves and make any more trouble… like digging deeper into that fiasco and, who knows, finding that you were a part of it.”

  “Who’s your candidate?”

  “A man named Myers. Assistant professor in the Department of Mathematics Education.”

  “Hmm. The actual Mathematics Department would not be pleased with that.”

  “Are you the Dean, or just the math department’s hired flunky?”

  The next day, it became evident that Lensky had been slightly wrong when he said that nobody would care about Dr. Verrick’s comments. Annelise, who actually had a Facebook account and a Twitter account and an Instagram account and all the other social media necessary to a normal college girl, was the one who warned the rest of us about what was happening.

  “Half of Twitter is exploding with hashtags like #racistVerrick and #CenterFail. And #IsupportBFiN, and #Studentsagainstracialinequality, and #Deletetransphobia.”

  She had to explain to Ben and me about hashtags. We don’t do much involving social media; the word “social” is an automatic turnoff to introverts, and “media” isn’t much more alluring. Then she tried to explain what #Deletetransphobia had to do with anything at all, which I still don’t really get. It had something to do with Dr. Verrick’s remark about finding a black lesbian dwarf to hire, and idiots who interpreted that to mean he thought blacks, lesbians, and vertically challenged people were all incapable of higher mathematics, and the even more logically challenged people who decided that anybody who was prejudiced against lesbians had to be even more prejudiced against transgender people, and… oh, the hell with it. The whole brouhaha was too much work to untangle. If I were going to think that hard about anything I’d rather think about something real, like 5-dimensional manifolds.

  Colton seemed to think this tempest in a teapot was worth worrying about, but I tried to reassure him. “Dr. Verrick emphatically does not Tweet,” I pointed out, “so all these idiots won’t worry him.”

  “They might worry other people, though.”

  “Like who?”

  “Regents. Deans. The chancellor.”

  “Chancellor Eddie deserves to be worried,” I snapped. Edgar TeaGarden III had not exactly covered himself with glory yesterday, with his totally weasel-worded public statement and his order to the campus cops not to interfere with the protest.

  Colton still looked unhappy, but right then Ingrid wanted him for something, so he went off and left me alone. After the previous day’s excitement I could do with a good long chunk of alone time, and I think Ben felt the same way. Lensky had taken himself off to interview one of his agents in El Paso and Annelise was being cool towards Ben, so nobody interfered with our spending a nice, quiet day thinking about topology and shields and improved algorithms.

  Separately.

  It was very restful until late afternoon, when the need to dispose of the last three cups of coffee I’d drunk forced me out of my brown study and over to the public side of the floor, where the plumbing lived. I noticed then that things seemed slightly off.

  Specifically, there was a plate of doughnuts, not very fresh ones, in the break room. That didn’t happen often; Annelise had her hands full keeping up with us. Maybe everybody else had a stomach virus? I felt fine, but since I’d only been thinking rather than teleporting, I also didn’t feel any need to dig into a stale glazed doughnut – even one with those little candy sprinkles on top.

  “Ingrid asked me to set those out,” Annelise told me. “She thought she and Colton were going to need them.”

  “Where were they going?” Nobody’d mentioned any planned jump experiments to me, but then, I hadn’t exactly been welcoming company today.

  She swiveled the log book around so I could read it, and I groaned.

  Ingrid and Colton had signed out on a jump to, where else, Britfield.

  “I’m sure they’ll be back soon,” Annelise said. “And anyway, she and Colton loaded up on sugar first and planned to use all their stars to power the jump. So I’m sure it couldn’t have gone bad the way it did last time.”

  She was right about that. It went sideways in a totally different way this time.

  The best vintage car festival ever

  Chapter 15

  Ingrid didn’t give up easily; to be fair, none of us did. That was how we made progress.

  It was also how we kept getting into trouble.

  Her first long-distance jump had gone bad because she wasn’t prepared to carry two passengers and her blood sugar had sunk to a dangerous low. This time she intended to take care of those little problems. Colton had been drilled on Brouwer teleportation until he could probably do it in his sleep; she would apply the full power of an infinite set of stars to augment their efforts; and they would both sugar-load before and after the jump. She bought an entire box of El Patio’s pralines, which are basically pure brown sugar with a little butter to hold their shape, and she and Colton sat in her office crunching the things until they both felt slightly ill and very, very uninterested in brown sugar.

  At the last minute, to minimize the danger of anybody noticing and objecting to her plans, she signed out in the log book and asked Annelise to go out for a box of fresh doughnuts right away.

  At first, hearing this, I was a bit surprised that she’d actually signed out. But that was just because I was thinking about how I would have gone about a clandestine trip. Ingrid was as bad as the rest of us about obeying the unwritten rules of courtesy and common sense. But Dr. Verrick’s insistence that we sign out before teleporting, that was an actual formal requirement, and Ingrid always obeyed the rules – that she recognized.

  I was also surprised that she’d chosen to go without Jimmy. He’d been quite helpful the last time. Did she think his potential help wasn’t worth the extra effort of bringing him along, even with two topologists to do the heavy lifting?

  “Actually,” Ingrid said when we were discussing the matter afterwards, “I did invite him to go with us, but he said he had other things to do.” She went ever so slightly pink around the edges.

  That must have been the first time in the history of the Center that Jimmy DiGrazio had turned down an invitation from Ingrid, and her expression looked like she’d just discovered a missing step where she’d expected to set her foot. I mentally cheered Jimmy. It seemed he had finally discovered his spine.

  Besides, if he’d gone with her and Colton, he would have been lost with them, and hence not available for the rescue mission, and they might all three have been permanently lost.

  But I’m getting ahead of myself here.

  The actual jump, Ingrid said, had felt… just ever so slightly off. She’d made an extremely clear image of the park across from the bottling plant in her mind, going back to her childhood experiences of standing there to watch the mechanical progression of bottles behind the plate glass window. With all that clarity and power, the actual teleportation should have been significantly easier than the first time. But it lasted much longer than her previous jump to Britfield, consumed stars at high speed, and felt as if it were trying to go sideways to the previous jump… whatever “sideways” meant in the multi-dimensional, non-metric space of the in-between.

  And they flickered into Britfield at the wrong time.

  “You knew that right away?”

  “Well, duh. We telepo
rted out of Allandale House around three o’clock. It was still morning in Britfield. It was pretty obvious that something wasn’t quite right. I don’t think any of us had ever teleported to earlier than we left, before.” She paused and swallowed. Gulped, really. “Although it was a little longer until we realized how not right it was.”

  They didn’t have to deal with the beer-drinking crowd of their previous jump, but there was still a surprising number of people milling around the square, and something seemed to be happening across the street, where the bottling plant used to be. And everything seemed brighter, cleaner, than Ingrid’s memories. “You know how you go back to some place you lived when you were a kid, and it always looks kind of, oh, small? And dingy? Compared to your memories?”

  I nodded, though actually I didn’t know. My family had lived in the same house ever since we moved to Texas, and I’d never had the slightest wish to revisit New Jersey.

  “Well, Britfield didn’t look small and dingy. All the storefronts were clean, and all the signs were fresh and didn’t have letters falling off or mud dauber nests underneath, and there were things in the stores. Not antiques or handmade jewelry; regular things like, oh, washers and dryers, clothes, magazines. Everything looked shiny and new and at the same time kind of old-fashioned. But I didn’t go over and take a good look, because Colton was going crazy over the cars, of all things!”

  “It looked like the best vintage car festival ever,” Colton told me when I talked to him. “Nearly all the cars were clean and shiny and hardly any of them had dings. As if every single car owner had done major repairs to the body work, right down to matching the original paint shades – do you have any idea how rare that is? Right across from us somebody had parked a 1957 Cadillac ElDorado, you know, the model with the shark fins? And somebody else was driving a 1954 Buick Skylark down the street. That one car had to be worth a quarter of a million dollars. There were only 836 of them ever made, you know.”

  Well, I knew now.

  “At first I thought I had to be wrong, maybe it was a different year,” Colton went on. “But they stopped just this side of the bottling plant, so I got a good look, and everything checked out. Wire wheels, white sidewall tires, those pop-eyed headlights, and the definitive feature – those curved-over fins enclosing the tail lights in a kind of teardrop shape. I went to tell Ingrid to check it out, only by that time she… looked like she wasn’t feeling so good, you know? She was slumped down on a park bench, staring at this torn newspaper like she was reading her own funeral notice.”

  And when Colton tried to convey his excitement about the vintage Buick Skylark in perfect condition, she’d said, “Of course it looks new. It practically is new – it’s only three years old.”

  “Are you feeling all right?”

  “Not really.” She waved the newspaper page at him. “See this nice, fresh sheet of newsprint, Colton? Does it look like it’s been sitting around for sixty years waiting for me to read it? Or does it look like it came off the presses this morning?” She showed him her lightly stained fingers. “Look – the ink was still wet enough to get on my hands.”

  “So?”

  “So according to this nice, fresh, just-printed newspaper,” Ingrid said, “this is 1957. And the fuss over there?” She nodded at the crowd in the street. “There’s going to be a ribbon-cutting ceremony. For the new Coca-Cola bottling plant.”

  Colton sucked in his breath. If he hadn’t spent the last few minutes counting all the unbelievably spick-and-span vintage cars in the square, he might have been able to avoid believing her. But as it was –

  “I think it’s my fault,” Ingrid said unhappily. “I was trying to concentrate on this spot in the park…”

  “Yeah, but that part worked,” Colton pointed out. “So I don’t see how it’s your fault.”

  “I’m trying to tell you! When I thought of the park, I remembered all those hours I spent watching bottles go through the assembly line. There not being,” she said, now sounding slightly bitter, “a whole lot else to watch in Britfield.” She frowned. “But why didn’t we go back to that time? When I was a child?”

  “We’d have been in just as much trouble then. So don’t worry about it. The real question is, what do we do now?”

  “I think we go over there behind the statue of Jim Bowie,” Ingrid said, “click our heels three times, and say There’s no place like home. And pray.”

  “Teleport back,” Colton translated.

  “ASAP. But don’t run. We really don’t want to be noticed.”

  They made their best attempt at casually wandering over to the statue, holding hands and smiling at each other, because Ingrid hoped anybody who did see them edging out of sight would assume they were just going to sneak a quick kiss. Then, holding hands for all they were worth, they pictured the sun-streaked floor in Ingrid’s office, exactly as it had been on their departure, and Ingrid said, “Brouwer.”

  They fell into the black space and glowing shapes of the in-between… and it pushed them out again.

  Still in Bowie Park.

  Still, from all appearances, in 1957.

  Ingrid sighed sharply. “Maybe we need to sugar-load first; it’s the hell of a long jump.”

  The crowd in front of the bottling plant wasn’t there just because of a desire to hear self-congratulatory ribbon-cutting speeches from the mayor, half the Chamber of Commerce, and the manager of the plant. They were actually lined up and jostling slightly, in a reserved West Texas manner, for the free Cokes being handed out on the plant manager’s orders. Colton, with his long reach and big hands, managed to score four big paper cups of ice and Coke; three for Ingrid and one for himself. Then he ambled around to the other side and got two more.

  Ingrid shook her head when he offered her one from his second haul. “You’d better drink them. If I chug one more Coke I’m going to be distracted by the need to find a ladies’ room.”

  They made their way back to the far side of the statue, clasped hands, closed eyes and concentrated desperately.

  This time Ingrid remembered to feed her stars into the teleportation, and after a minute so did Colton. The in-between didn’t dump them out immediately this time; in fact, the first seconds felt as if they were actually reversing direction, zipping up a widening spiral, shooting off sideways, and… slowing… There was no friction here to bring them to a complete halt. But there was a barrier of sorts, some kind of opposing force that slowed their motion. Ingrid lifted all limits and funneled her entire, infinite set of stars at the emptiness that had stopped them; it inhaled them all and then, she said, the in-between simply blinked out of existence between one breath and the next.

  Leaving her lying on the grass behind Jim Bowie’s statue.

  “Young lady, are you ill?”

  A matronly sort with curly gray hair frowned down on her as if she suspected Ingrid and Colton of trying to shelter behind Jim Bowie for nefarious purposes.

  “Um. Ah. Yes, ma’am. I just, I just felt all dizzy for a minute there.”

  “I told you not to drink that Co’Cola so fast, Janie May,” Colton said, patting her hand. He gave the censorious matron his best wide-eyed innocent farm-boy stare. “It’s the ice, ma’am. Janie May just loves cold drinks, but she’s too delicate to drink them fast. Gives her the chills and, and…”

  “Sometimes it makes me a little bit dizzy,” Ingrid said. “But I’m better now, ma’am.”

  She scrambled to her feet, lurching slightly until Colton took her elbow. That attempt to force a jump had drained whatever temporary energy the Cokes had given her.

  “You’d best take that little girl home,” the matron said before she walked off.

  “Home…” Colton sighed. “I only wish I could.”

  Ingrid gave him a cold look. “Janie May?”

  “Only old-fashioned name I could think of,” Colton said. “I was in love with her in third grade. Janie May McGruder.”

  Ingrid muttered fretfully that every crisis involving Cen
ter guys seemed to involve them giving her ridiculous pseudonyms. Look at that time with Ben, last spring…

  “Oh? What did Ben call you?”

  Ingrid’s glare went from cold to freezing. “You. Don’t. Need to know. Anyway, we have worse problems to worry about.”

  “Getting home, yes.”

  “Before that… I really have to find a ladies’ room.”

  “No problem! Camouflage…”

  There was actually a below-freezing version of Ingrid’s glare. “Camouflage or no camouflage, I am not going to pee on the grass behind Jim Bowie’s statue.”

  “In front of it, then?”

  “We’ll have to find a café.”

  A message to the future

  Chapter 16

  That part was easy enough; Mamie’s Tex-Mex (and Hamburgers) was right across the street.

  “I had no idea this place was so old,” Colton said when Ingrid got back from the restroom in back.

  She frowned. “What do you mean? Everything looks brand-new. Besides, there’s a framed newspaper article on the wall beside the restrooms, saying they opened in 1956.”

  “Yes, but I ate a breakfast from here way back in 2017. They sent it to the jail. And later on, Jimmy and I spent a couple of hours here waiting to hear from you. They’d quit doing hamburgers by then, though.”

  Ingrid looked as if she just might burst into tears. “I wish you wouldn’t mention jail, that’s probably where we’ll wind up. And why did you have to say ‘way back in 2017’ as if it were impossibly far away? We may never see Jimmy again.”

  Their food arrived then: three plates of huevos rancheros, over easy. (Two for Colton; his frame demanded a lot of sustenance, even when he wasn’t trying to teleport across sixty years and three hundred miles.) He dug into his first plate immediately, figuring he couldn’t get into any more trouble with his mouth full.