Allergic To Time
Authors: Crystal Gables
Allergic To Time: A Novel. Opening
Allergic To Time
Crystal Gables
Published By
Pink Planet Publishing
Traralgon ©2015
Editing: Pink Planet Publishing
Cover Art: VikNCharlie Designs
Allergic To Time: A Novel.
My name is Anna Black, and I believe in time travel.
Part One.
University of Sydney, July 2014.
Chapter One.
I remember it in complete detail, the day everything started. It was the first day of second semester, 2014. “Spring Semester”, it was optimistically called, but it was still the middle of winter and bitterly cold, at least by Sydney standards. Early on that Monday morning, I stood in front of my mirror and buttoned up my deadly black coat, eyeing the details of my outfit to make sure I looked suitably academic for the first day of my official teaching job for the year. Most of my fellow graduate students in the physics department couldn’t have cared if they turned up to class looking like utter slobs, but I thought that you ought to dress to impress at all times — especially when you had a bunch of first year students to terrorise.
I looked myself up and down, dressed in head-to-toe black, dark as a starless sky —
the only hint of colour being the red on my lips. I pursed them and nodded briefly, approvingly, at myself.
That should do it,
I thought.
It was only a five minute walk from my apartment to the university but I eyed the dark skies suspiciously on my way out the door. Even a brief thirty-second downpour would have ruined my painstakingly styled hair that day. Considering what the first day of school would inevitably bring I didn’t want that to happen. Unfortunately I didn’t own an umbrella — or rather, I owned several dozen, but they were strewn all around campus, abandoned in cafes and classrooms and laboratories. As I exited the house I glanced down at the balcony steps, noticing that my flatmate Jennifer had left her umbrella unguarded at the doorstep. Deciding that it was every woman for herself in the rain, I grabbed it without a second thought and hurried across the road to the university grounds.
***
It was in the 10am first year physics seminar that the strangeness really began.
As the semester progressed my attendance at lectures would most likely gradually taper off to the point where I would stop going altogether. But on the first day of class, at least, I had to be there:
Martin Anderson, the lecturer, would introduce me as one of the tutors for his class, and I would be required to stand up and wave to the terrified lecture hall.
As it turned out, it had rained, and the hall was wet and humid as students hurried to get a seat, abandoning their jackets and umbrellas on the floor to gather in small puddles. I quickly dismantled my own umbrella and left it in the designated bucket at the door. Knowing that I was expected to sit in the front row, I paced my way down the stairs, eyeing the dozens of fresh faces in the crowd who were groping through their bags for laptops and notepads. I languished down the stairs before taking my place in the front row of the left wing side. I took my laptop out of my knapsack as a token gesture: I rarely took notes but Martin disapproved when I just sat there. And he would have doubly disapproved now that I’d become a tutor.
Sitting next to me was another PhD candidate called Connie Hung: a Chinese-Australian girl who I had a begrudging friendship with solely because we were the only two females in the physics PhD program. Connie didn’t like me, I was sure of it, and I found her terrifyingly dull but we exchanged pleasantries as I sat down. She’d been to New Zealand over semester break.
“And you?” She asked, peering at me over her glasses as she neatened her pens and paper squarely on her desk. “Did you get up to much?”
I shook my head, disinterested in the exchange. “Not really.”
The clock on the wall read 10:01. I craned my neck around to the back of the lecture theatre towards the doors, certain that I would see Martin enter through them at that precise second. He was never late — and if he absolutely had to be, he would never have been more than a minute late.
The clock flipped to 10:02.
The murmuring of students grew gradually louder as kids squashed in together and the rows filled up. The exchanging of names and awkward introductions became a quiet roar. If Martin Anderson had actually been there one, of his intimidatingly stern glances would have stopped the chattering at once. He was the sort of lecturer who would not tolerate so much as whispering in one of his lectures.
10:03.
The room suddenly seemed overwhelmingly steamy and crowded. I knew the crowds would thin as semester progressed, but these first few classes were always so claustrophobic, and I began unbuttoning my jacket and tugging the collar of my black blouse underneath as the heat rose in the lecture theatre. The seat underneath me was uncomfortable and sticky and I contorted my body trying to get into a better position.
“Are you okay?” Connie paused her scrawling on her notepad to look at me.
“I’m fine.” I glanced automatically at the clock again. “Aren’t you concerned about Anderson?” I asked her, using his surname as reference. “I mean, where the hell is he?”
Connie looked at the time and shrugged. “He’s not that late.”
“For him this is extremely late.”
She looked at me suspiciously and muttered, “Well you would know.” She returned to her notebook without waiting for me to respond. I was about to demand that she tell me just what she meant by that remark when the room suddenly fell silent. Martin Anderson had burst through the back doors and was hurrying down the aisles, his arms and hands barely in control of the briefcase and piles of papers he was trying and failing to balance.
He made his way to the front podium and heaved the contents of his arms up onto the lectern. His left hand reached up to his head and he ran his hands through his greying light brown hair as he adjusted his glasses with his right hand, all while trying in vain to gain some sort of composure. Flustered, he glanced up at the expectant crowd and fumbled to turn his microphone on.
I saw his mouth move to say, “Umm, is this on?” but no sound erupted from the speakers. He cleared his throat and tried again, pressing a different button and tapping on the microphone this time. “Hello, is this...oh damn...hang on.”
Connie shifted in her seat, looking uncomfortable on his behalf. She leant over and whispered to me, “What is wrong with him?”
I was suddenly defensive. “Nothing,” I snapped. “It’s the first day of class, give him a break.”
Connie peered back at me suspiciously through her dark rimmed frames. Her eyes were huge. I knew what she was thinking.
But I was less worried about what Connie thought than I was about Martin’s performance in front of us. It was now 10:05 – a totally normal starting time for just about any other lecturer in the university, but totally unacceptable for Martin Anderson. Up until that point in time I had never seen him start a lecture more than one minute past the hour — latecomers be dammed — and a nervous feeling played in my stomach.
A murmur sprang back up amongst the crowd, which was eventually silenced by Martin’s microphone finally deciding to work. Still running his fingers through his hair, he struggled to compose himself for the simple introductory welcome to the unit: “All right class,
this is Quantum Physics 2”.
He cleared his throat as his eyes darted around the crowded lecture theatre. “Okay, quieten down everyone.” He pressed a button which caused a PowerPoint slide to flash up behind him on a large double screen. It simply read “Lecture One: Introduction” with a
bunch of contact information listed beneath it. I raised my eyes at one line: he’d listed my contact hours, the time at which I was required to be free to see students. “Anna Black, Tuesday 4 – 5pm”:
Thanks for letting me know
, I thought. Below my name, Connie had been allotted a contact hour time which began at 9am on a Friday. I caught her sighing and quickly rolling her eyes at that ungodly hour.
“Would it kill him to run this stuff by us?” she whispered to me out of the side of her mouth. I didn’t reply. Four years of being Martin Anderson’s undergrad student and two years of being his PhD student meant that I was no longer surprised by any of his methods. Connie was only a first year graduate student and hadn’t spent half as much time with Martin as I had.
Pens and laptops started up frantically as Martin began clicking through his PowerPoint slides at a frightening pace. He barely paused to explain the contents of any one of them, as information about timetables, class content, assignments and exams flew by and students hurried to keep up. An occasional hand flew up in an attempt to grab Martin’s attention and ask a question, but he didn’t pause for questions for the first fifteen minutes and eventually people gave up trying.
A slide containing a list of the semester’s lecture topics was what finally forced Martin to interact with anything besides the screen in front of his face. As it flashed up behind him, detailing the week-to-week breakdown of the course, a flurry of hands went up at the sight of the week three topic.
“The Physics of Time Travel”
“And as you’ll see over on the next page,” Martin began, before being interrupted by a red haired kid in the third row who could no longer keep his thoughts to himself.
“Excuse me, we’re studying time travel in week three?” the kid asked.
Martin glanced up. “Yes. Although ‘studying’ is not really the right word.”
I muttered to myself. “You’ve got that right: more like ‘dismissing’.”
Connie barely registered what I had said despite the fact she was sitting right next to me. Martin, on the other hand, seemed to pick up exactly what I’d said, and his eyes quickly darted in my direction. I knew what he was thinking and I knew what he was thinking. We didn’t exactly agree on the legitimacy of teaching time travel as a subject…
The ginger kid continued on: “So we’re going to learn how to build a time machine?” There was a bunch of giggling in the crowd. Martin did not laugh: he just stared back at the poor kid.
“Absolutely not.” With one final meaningful glance in my direction he concluded with, “Time travel is impossible.”
I remained stoned face and stared ahead, though my eyes briefly rolled.
***
With only ten minutes of class left, people were beginning to get edgy. First year physics students had a full timetable, and most of them would be expected to be at another lecture as soon as the first one finished — and with the large size of the University of Sydney campus, there could be ten minutes walking time involved, easily. On the first week of semester students were prone to getting lost and some teachers — take Martin Anderson, for example
— could be hostile towards late comers.
However Martin showed no signs of wrapping up the lecture any time soon, and he purposely ignored the not-so-subtle signs of students packing up their books and checking their phones. I knew if they pushed their luck Martin would snap and make them stay right until the clock hit 11:00. Heads started to turn towards the exit as people mentally judged how far away the door was and if they ought to risk it and make a dash before the entire class started emptying out all at once.