An Opening in the Air (Applied Topology Book 2)

by Margaret Ball

  “And a good thing too,” I said. “I don’t much want to be part of a statue.”

  “Yeah, yeah. What’s it feel like if you accidentally aim for, like, a place where somebody else happens to be standing?”

  “A kind of pressure, pushing me away from the exact place… Oh, oh, oh!” A light came on. “I think I see what you’re getting at!”

  “Want to share it with the rest of us?”

  “Look, Ingrid. Suppose you had succeeded in going exactly when you were in 2017?”

  “Yes?”

  “How many of you would have been – will be - there then?”

  “Ohh…” Ingrid absorbed her meaning. “It’s like trying to teleport into a place where somebody is already standing. The in-between won’t let us do that. But if we try to get back to, oh, five minutes after we left…”

  “That won’t work either,” Jimmy said. “Lia and I were – are – will be – still in 2017 then.”

  Ingrid made a silent calculation. “And we need to get there before… I’m the oldest of us… before 1992, or there’ll be two of me again, and what happens then?”

  “I’ve been thinking about that,” Colton confessed. “I suspect one of you disappears into the in-between. Forever. Or else the universe changes, and we never can get to our 2017.”

  “We might not exist at all.”

  “Oh, well,” Ingrid said after a moment of silent calculation. “This me will probably be sixty then. I expect I’ll be too old to care.”

  “Speak for yourself,” I snapped. “I am planning on a long and happy life. In my own time. And even if you don’t destroy the universe, my deadline is 1994.”

  Jimmy raised his hands. “Ladies, stop bickering! Don’t you see, what we have to do is aim for a time after Lia and I left. I suggest the next morning; that gives us a good margin of safety. We need to think about October 27, and morning sun.”

  Ingrid frowned. “How can we be sure we’re not aiming for October 26 again?”

  “If we are, the in-between will push us to a standstill again, and we’ll move forward in time.”

  “While teleporting?” Colton asked. “How do we do that?”

  Jimmy shook his head. “Look, I don’t have all the answers. But the three of you actually experience this in-between. Maybe you can try… something… if you feel it pushing you back again. Or do you have a better idea? What have we got to lose?”

  I passed out candy bars again. “How many of these things do you have, anyway?” Ingrid asked.

  “These are the last of my stash. So this better work.”

  After eating the candy, the four of us joined hands again. “October 27, 2017,” I said. “Brouwer.”

  We astonish Ben bigly

  Chapter 20

  We had miscalculated slightly, landing on the third floor of Allandale House at what we later learned was ten o’clock in the morning. To be precise, the time was a miscalculation; we’d planned to be back in 2017 relatively early on the morning of the 27th. The place was due to carelessness.

  I looked around. “This… isn’t Britfield.”

  “No shit, Sherlock!” said Jimmy.

  “I guess… well, I was homesick,” Ingrid said. “I may have thought about Allandale House when I should have been focused on Britfield.”

  “Me too,” said Colton.

  Oh, well. “And me,” I confessed.

  However it had happened, that had been one hell of a joyride through the in-between, and I didn’t regret a minute of it. As usual, after the exhilarating ride my libido was up. I wanted Lensky. And doughnuts.

  I would have to settle for a Coke from the vending machine downstairs. As for Lensky, he wasn’t due back until late tonight. That wasn’t really a bad thing, I told myself. He was going to throw seven kinds of fits when – if – he found out what we’d been doing, and I could use some time to prepare myself. Or to figure out how to keep him from finding out.

  I still wanted him, though.

  Director Scott Myers, who was standing by Annelise’s desk, was no kind of substitute.

  “About time you got here,” he said. “I’m putting you – all of you – on notice that no matter what Verrick let you people get away with, I will not tolerate such slipshod behavior. This will go on your monthly efficiency report.”

  We goggled at him, individually and collectively. “Ah – you object to how we came in?”

  “I wasn’t looking,” Myers said, “but obviously you came up the stairs. It’s the lateness that I won’t tolerate.”

  He had definitely been looking at us – well, the spot where we were now standing – when the air opened and we stepped out of the in-between. I began to have a deeper appreciation of the new director’s talent for self-deception.

  “Annie!” he barked now. “The employee forms!”

  Giving the new director her best glare, Annelise picked up one of the taller stacks of paper on her desk, divided it into four, and handed each of us an armload. I glanced down and saw that the top sheet was headed, “Hourly time-use report for week 10/23/17 – 10/27/17.” I had a sinking feeling that the rest of the pages weren’t going to be much better.

  “I expect you people to have everything filled out by noon, including the time sheet.”

  “It’s only the morning of the twenty-seventh,” Colton protested. “How are we supposed to know what will happen this afternoon?”

  This objection might have gone over better if he hadn’t snickered at the end. Or it might not. I suspected Myers’s tolerance for backtalk ranged from infinitesimal to nil.

  Probably the latter. Too bad; as math majors, we had some experience dealing with infinitesimals.

  Now he pointed behind us, snapping, “Get to work – now!”

  I turned and saw the unthinkable.

  There was a door in the wall that had protected the Research Department.

  Jimmy had mentioned that plan, but I’d discounted it as too outrageous to be true. Now he seemed to be the only one of us who wasn’t too furious to think clearly.

  “Use it,” he said out of the corner of his mouth.

  We filed meekly through the open door, Jimmy bringing up the rear. He shut it. There was no lock.

  “You’re back!” Ben jumped up, came around his desk, and gave me an exuberant hug that ended with whirling me around like a spinning top. “You’re all back! Safe and sound.”

  “Well, naturally,” I said when I got my breath back. “Surely you didn’t expect anything else?”

  “The Britfield Effect,” he said. “I was beginning to think of it as another Bermuda Triangle. I’ve been chewing my nails down ever since you didn’t come back yesterday afternoon. What took you so long?”

  “There were technical difficulties,” Ingrid said, and sailed into her office. Jimmy followed her. I wondered about those two.

  “It’s… a long story,” said Colton.

  “Oh? Well, you can tell me all about it later. You wouldn’t believe how much trouble I’ve had covering for you. Yesterday afternoon was a nightmare, and this morning was a disaster.”

  ”So we gathered,” I said, “when Myers bawled us out for lateness, impertinence, and failure to complete our paperwork in a timely fashion.” I held up my stack of papers. “He expects us to have all this filled out by noon.”

  “He can damn well expect whatever he likes,” said Colton. “It’s vastly more important to fill you in, Ben.”

  As usual, the three of us gathered in my office. Hiding all the spare chairs hadn’t done me any good; everybody knew where to find them.

  Mr. M., coiled like a paperweight as usual, roused himself to give me a dirty look. “And where have you been, small person? Do you realize that fool is looking for a rat-catcher to dispose of me? Me!” he repeated, in case I failed to recognize the enormity of Myers’s actions.

  “I had complete faith in you,” I told him. “A great mage such as yourself, with your centuries of experience, could never be caught in something so mun
dane as a rat trap.”

  A few more sentences of overblown praise, and Mr. M. preened himself and settled down in his spiral again. I had, of course, refrained from mentioning that most of the centuries of his existence had been passed as a common box turtle, magic inhibited by the ring around his neck.

  Briefly, I wondered just what had become of that ring. It wasn’t something I’d want Myers to get his hands on. Well, it had been lost when Mr. M. was freed of it, and with any luck it would stay lost.

  Colton and I told Ben what had happened, rather like a two-part Greek chorus – strophe and antistrophe – with Colton emphasizing his and Ingrid’s troubles in the Britfield of 1957, and me filling in the rescue mission from my and Jimmy’s point of view. Colton’s story was unquestionably the more dramatic, but he lost momentum when trying to describe the 1954 Buick Skylark he’d seen.

  At least it wasn’t called a Buick Grackle.

  Partway through, Jimmy and Ingrid joined us and added their own views of the experience.

  Ben’s eyes got wider and wider as we went on. To borrow a word from a certain public figure, I thought we had astonished him bigly.

  “Time travel,” he breathed before we had even finished. “Time travel.”

  “Subject,” I said, “to certain technical constraints whose implications we have not fully defined.” Mainly, that we had to jump way back and then slightly forward, where neither “way” nor “slightly” was clearly defined. But we could get into that some other time: for instance, when Myers was not harassing us for paperwork.

  “Oh, you can just copy mine,” Ben said when Ingrid and I mentioned the paperwork. “Ninety percent of it is meaningless, you’ll just have to do your own personal information – date of birth, driver’s license number, Social Security number, cell phone, address, university transcripts, next of kin…”

  I may have groaned. Not only did the list seem more and more invasive as Ben went on, some of it was going to be impossible to fulfil before noon. University transcripts, for instance. That was going to involve, at the least, a long trek over to the Administration Building and probably a long wait in line, culminating in the announcement that the transcripts would be mailed to my home address within 10 to 300 business days.

  I just hoped I could get them to accept my apartment as a home address instead of my family’s house, which had been my address for the four years at the university. There was some risk that Dad would tear up the transcripts; he was still steamed about the fact that I’d defied him by going to college.

  “Or,” Ben went on, his eyes dancing, “given that it’s impossible to get all the forms and reports done by noon – you know, if Myers had any smarts, he’d have told us to get the paperwork in by this time next week. With some hope of clearing our desks, we might have allowed ourselves to be distracted by his demands.”

  “I think that’s his intention,” I sighed. The exhilaration produced by that long jump was completely gone now. Nothing like a three-inch stack of bureaucratic paperwork to ruin a mood.

  “I think,” Ben continued, “we should carry on the fine traditions of the Center until Dr. Verrick returns.”

  “Is he coming back?”

  “Don’t you expect him? Once we get rid of Myers?”

  I’d engaged in too many evasions and misdirections of my own to be misled by this. “In other words, you have no idea.”

  Ben fenced with us for a few more interchanges, but finally admitted that he was in the same boat as the rest of us: none of us, including him, had heard from Dr. Verrick since his forced resignation.

  “But I,” he said, somewhat pointedly, “have faith in him. And as the senior research fellow in your absence, Lia, I have already taken steps to ensure we follow one tradition at least.”

  “You were the only research fellow left,” Ingrid pointed out.

  “Well, I’m senior to Colton, anyway. And as long as we’re counting, I joined the Center three weeks before you did.” I had a strong feeling that Ben was barely able to refrain from sticking out his tongue after that riposte. Fortunately, he and Ingrid managed to rise above that level of childish squabbling. I was relieved; it would have been even lower than our usual level of childish squabbling.

  “And the tradition?”

  “Have you looked at the calendar?”

  “I have,” Ingrid said, “been intensely conscious of the calendar, as you would know if you’d actually listened to our trip report. It’s the 27th. So what?”

  “So the Moore Foundation’s annual Halloween Hoopla is tomorrow night.”

  Colton winced. Oh, right, this was his first exposure to the Moore Foundation’s tradition of stupid party names. I couldn’t wait to see him when he found out about the Solstice Shindig. (It used to be the Christmas Celebration, but the trustees had decided that “Christmas” was insufficiently inclusive of Jews, Moslems, Buddhists, Rastafarians, agnostics, and atheists.)

  Ingrid sank into a chair. “That’s one tradition I could stand to forget about.”

  “Too late,” said Ben, grinning. “I’ve already RSVP’d for all of us, including Lensky.”

  Good. If I had to suffer, so should Lensky.

  “It would have been embarrassing,” he added, his smile fading, “if you people had failed to return by tomorrow night. But in that case, I’d have had worse things to worry about than annoying the head of the foundation.”

  “I hate to admit there’s anything good about Dr. Verrick’s absence,” said Ingrid, “but at least we won’t have to endure his pre-party speech this time.” Dr. Verrick made a habit of gathering the Center employees together before every Moore Foundation party and exhorting us to dress properly and be on our best behavior. His style of exhortation could have stripped the varnish off the break room table.

  “Oh, I think we should replicate that part of it,” Ben said. “I’ll go first.” He hunched his shoulders and took two or three very short steps into the room. “Miss Kostis, your colleagues are tired of seeing your little black dress.”

  “Lensky isn’t,” I said. He particularly liked the high-heeled, strappy black sandals that went with the dress. Not to mention the suspense of whether a stray breeze would show the tattoo of Texas on my thigh.

  “Well, the rest of us would like to see something more creative from you this time. You are encouraged to consider the wider possibilities involving Halloween costumes, particularly the skimpier ones that would have even more effect on your champagne-drinking friends. Okay, Lia, you do Ingrid.”

  He was lobbing me the easy one. “Miss Thorn, your performance as a Valkyrie choosing heroes for Valhalla lacked a certain élan at the May Fiesta. You are encouraged to pour more enthusiasm into the role this time. After,” I added, “you pour yourself into that silver dress, assuming you can still get into it.”

  “Of course I can!” Ingrid gave me a dirty look before turning to Jimmy. “Mr. DiGrazio, it was observed that you were not observed at the Foundation Fiesta last May. You are advised that attendance at Moore Foundation festivities is not optional. In fact, you may escort me this time, just in case you have any funny notions about ‘forgetting’ your duties.”

  Ingrid was losing that Verrick style of biting formality, but what I found more interesting was that thing about going to the party with Jimmy. Was he actually making progress with her, or was this just an overflow of gratitude for being rescued?

  “Sure thing,” said Jimmy. “Ah, what would a Valkyrie’s companion wear?”

  “Fatal wounds,” Ben muttered, at the same time that Ingrid said, “Use your creativity, Jimmy. And you’re up next. Do Colton.”

  Jimmy cleared his throat. “Ah – Mr. Edwards, you have not previously attended a Foundation party in the capacity of a representative of this Center.”

  “Nor in any other capacity,” Colton agreed.

  “For this introductory visit, then, you are advised to pay attention to the Foundation’s tradition of an open bar. Creative costuming is also recommended. Co
lton, you get Ben.”

  Colton rose to the occasion. “Mr. Sutherland. As a senior fellow of this Center, you share the responsibility for demonstrating our propriety and decorum. Please refrain from encouraging representatives of the Moore Foundation to believe that we have any sense of either.”

  “I believe I can promise to fulfil your expectations,” said Ben. “Now, about costumes… after your reports, Ingrid and Colton, it’s obvious how you should dress.”

  “I have a dress for the occasion,” Ingrid said.

  “And I have a deep regret that we’ll be missing the view this time. By the way, Jimmy, you really should have attended the May Fiesta. Then you’d know what you’re going to be missing. Look, Ingrid, isn’t it obvious? You and Colton have to go as space aliens.”

  ”No,” Ingrid and Colton said in unison.

  “No effing way,” Ingrid amplified.

  “Not in this life,” said Colton.

  “After our recent experiences,” Ingrid added, “neither of us is ever, ever again going to encourage anybody to believe that we’re not human beings.”

  “Hmm. I hope you’ve got your calibration under better control than you did last spring, then. Making the top half of a house disappear is hardly convincing normal behavior.”

  “It beats teleporting oneself into a women-only dorm when one’s girlfriend is wearing nothing but some skimpy underwear!”

  Colton glanced from one to the other, clearly enjoying this particular outbreak of childish squabbling and hoping for more.

  “Mr. Edwards,” I said, in an attempt – probably doomed – to cut off this squabble at the pass, “when we’re through here, I’ll get you a copy of the private, classified in-house report on the events of last May and you can catch up on all the details. In the meantime, the only thing that you really need to know is, ‘Don’t trust the grackles.’”

  Ben felt it necessary that some of us celebrate the time-travel experience by going to the party as aliens. Ingrid, Colton and Jimmy had all flatly refused – as had Annelise, who said that she might allow Ben to escort her, but her previous experience at a Foundation party had been traumatic enough without intentionally dressing up as an idiot this time.