Allergic To Time (19 page)

I filed the information away for later.
 

“What are we looking for?” Robert asked, as I fossicked through Martin’s office. Or, former office, I should say. The interior — which had once looked like it housed a hermit hoarder — was now spotlessly clean and tiny, with books and folders filed methodically on the desk and bookshelves.
 

“I’m just trying to see who has taken over. There was no name on the door.”

“I wonder what happened to all his stuff...”
My heart stopped. His folder. Or, rather,
folders.
Who had come in to clean up his things? Had the folder just been thrown away, all that priceless information lost forever? Or worse...had it fallen into the wrong hands?

Robert saw the look on my face. “What’s wrong?”
 

I was breathing heavily. My lungs still hadn’t fully recovered since my little rouge trip through time earlier that week. I was vaguely afraid that I might have a panic attack. “It’s just...” I said, looking around frantically, as though there were even the slightest vain hope that the folder was still in the room. “Martin had all of his research in here.”

“So? Wouldn’t the most important stuff have been published already? Or whatever it is that you academics do with your stuff.”

“Not school stuff. Time travel stuff.”

“Why would he be
 
dumb enough to keep that in his office?”

I shook my head. “I don’t know. He had
some
sort of logical reasoning for it: he thought it would hidden in plain sight if it was just casually mixed in with his ordinary academic research. If someone accidentally came across it, then maybe they would just think he had collected a bunch of crazy stories as a joke, to present to us in a lecture as an example of non-scientific research, I suppose. Anyway, he kept this office locked at all times.”

“But he hasn’t exactly been around to protect it for months.”

“Exactly.” I stared at Robert. “And whose fault is that? It’s my father’s fault, that’s who.”
 

“I don’t think your dad sent us through time just to steal a measly little folder from the good Doctor’s desk.” Robert half-heartedly searched through the top draw of now clean, white desk, although he must have realised it was a futile search we were conducting. “I think he had something a little more sinister in mind than that.”

“You think he meant to kill us?” I looked at him. “It’s fine, you can say it. My own dad tried to murder me and my friends.”

Rob shrugged. “I don’t necessarily think that wanted to kill his own
daughter.
I mean, that’s pretty messed up man.” Rob closed the desk draw. “But I think he meant to get rid of us.”

“Exactly,” I replied. “So he could get his hands on this folder. It was hardly ‘measly’ as you say. It had everything in it: all the case studies of every single instance of time travel in the area from the past twenty years.” I paused. “He was probably going to add your case to the collection.”

“I wouldn’t think so,” Robert muttered.
 

“Why not?”

He shook his head. “He hates me, doesn’t he?” He shot me a meaningful look. “He thinks I’m getting between two of you.”
 

I felt myself blush as I shifted uncomfortably. I didn’t want to discuss that topic again. “I don’t think that’s true,” I said, and turned to leave. “Come on, this isn’t Martin’s office anymore. I don’t think we should be snooping around in it.”
 

“Hang on,” Robert called, as I was half-way through the door.
 
He had a file in his hand. “Who is John Raymond?”

Chapter Twenty-Three.
 

It was strange the way a name I didn’t recognise could seem so hauntingly familiar.
 

“I don’t know,” I said, walking over to the desk and snatching the file from Rob’s hand. It was a letter, addressed to a John Raymond in the top righthand corner. Underneath his name was printed, ‘Senior Lecturer in Physics, University of Sydney.’

“So I guess that answers the question of who took over the Doctor’s office,” Rob said. “Case closed. Come on let’s go, I’m dying for a smoke.”
 

“Yeah, well, it has been a full three minutes since your last cigarette,” I muttered. “Anyway, hold up,” I said, grabbing him by the arm as he went to leave. “I do not recognise this name. He’s not from the physics department that I remember.”

“So, they must have hired from outside the University.”

“Why would they do that?” I dropped the piece of paper down on the desk and turned to face Robert. “There’s cut-backs going on. The vice-chancellor just axed a hundred academic jobs. Why would they hire someone brand new to replace Martin?” I pulled a face. “I mean, money wise, the University was probably glad we disappeared. It would have meant two fewer people they had to pay. Well, three, including Connie.” I feel silent.

“Maybe no one else here was qualified to do his job?” Rob piped up. “Though I can’t see how hard the job of being condescending arsehole could be…” Rob added, the trace of his British accent coming through again.
 

I shook my head. “There were — are, I’m sure — other people in the physics department who were perfectly qualified to step up. They wouldn’t have been as good, mind you, but they would have been capable. No, this doesn’t make any sense.”

“Well,” Rob said, making for the doorway again. “Whoever this John Raymond bloke is, I’m sure he doesn’t want us going through his things.”

I sighed. “Fine. Let’s go. I know you’ll collapse if you don’t get some nicotine into your lungs at least twenty times an hour.” I followed him out and closed the door behind us, eyeing the empty nameplate suspiciously as we walked away.
 

***

I was tired of breathing in second-hand cigarette smoke, so I told Rob I was going to go to the library, and that I’d meet him back outside in twenty minutes or so. I had a little bit of digging I wanted to do in there. I’d been without access to a phone, a house, or internet connection for days, so I needed to use the library’s free facilities to not only check my email, but to do a quick search on “Robert Smith”.
 

“This must have been what it was like in 1974,” I said to myself as I walked towards the entry of Fisher Library. I wondered why Rob was so reluctant to talk about where he was from, or track down people he would have once known. After all, it had only been 40 years. A long time, sure: almost two generations in fact. But it wasn’t a lifetime. Surely some of his family, friends — or even his fiancé for crying out loud — might still be alive.
 

And that was exactly what I was going to the library to find out. I smiled cordially as I walked through the doors, nodding at the familiar desk staff, who recoiled in wide-mouthed horror as I walked by.
Oh well
, I thought,
no time to explain myself right now
. They could watch the news if they wanted any gossip.
 

I headed down two flights of stairs to the archives level, where all the historical records and old academic journals were stored: basically all the boring things that no one except people who worked at the university cared about. As long as my student log-in still worked, I would be able to access electronic birth and death databases as well. The University of Sydney library had one of the best research subscription services in the entire country.
 

I walked down to the computer lab that was located the furthest toward the back. I thought I would be the only person using at that time in the morning. But as I walked into a half-full room I remembered that it
 
was now actually the last
week of semester, the week when final assignments and essays were due, and the most difficult time of year to find a spare computer. If it were later on in the day I would probably have had to have queued for anywhere upwards of an hour before one became available.
 

But I found one in the corner with only one neighbouring computer, to my right. There was a young guy on it frantically bashing at a keyboard as fast as his hands could reasonably move — whatever assignment he was working on was probably due by 9 o’clock that morning. I was hoping he’d be preoccupied enough with his own deadline to not glance up from his own computer screen to look at mine.
 

It took almost five minutes for the computer to start up, but when the screened finally flashed alive I entered my username and password, praying that my details had not been erased from existence during my stint as ‘presumed dead/presumed to be having an illicit affair with her thesis supervisor’. I had to wait to find out as the computer froze for another three minutes, trying to process my log-in. I rolled my eyes at the ancient state of the Fisher computer and internet service, neither of which had been updated in over a decade.
 

I let out a sigh of relief as my log-in worked and I was presented with the student home page on the screen.
Phew, now time to get to work
. I glanced at the clock. I wouldn’t be able to leave Robert alone for too long, before he came looking for me, so I set about getting to work quickly.
 

Just as I had feared, “Robert Smith” was an extremely common name. The very first thing I did was perform a simple Google search for ‘Robert Smith, missing Sydney 1974’, hoping that some old news report or paper would surface. Maybe a follow-up missing person’s story had been done on him some time over the years. But there were no results.
 

Not too surprising, really: people went missing all the time, and the disappearance of a 31year old man in Sydney wouldn’t have made too many news reports: at least none that would still be notable enough to warrant archiving all these years later. But it was still disappointing, because my next option would have to be to enter the generic name ‘Robert Smith’ into the other databases that my university log-in gave me access to. And I’d more than likely be presented with a tonne of unrelated info to sort through.
 

I sighed and double clicked on an icon that would allow me to access birth and death records. I did the maths quickly in my head. If Robert Smith had been 31 in 1974 than he would have been born in 1943. And I supposed that he would have been presumed dead in 1974. I shivered I tapped ‘Robert Smith, died 1974’ into the database: after all, he seemed so
young.
Not to mention alive. I mean, he
was
still young and alive. He’d just...skipped 40 years of linear time. But I felt sad over the fact that he should have been alive in the present time, but as a 71 year old. It seemed so strange to think that, if he hadn’t been sent through time 40 years — most likely by my father’s equipment that time as well — then I could have just wandered over to a Surry Hills nursing home and bumped into the elderly version Robert Smith right then. He would even probably be dressed in modern, appropriate attire.
 

I waited a few minutes for the results to load, impatiently tapping my fingers and watching the clock in the bottom right
 
hand corner of the computer screen. I’d already been gone ten minutes and I’d told Robert twenty.

Approximately twenty-eight pages of results turned up on the screen. I knew they wouldn’t all be exact matches, but I would probably have to wade through them all to narrow it down.
 

I scrolled down the first page of results briefly, my eyes scanning down the screen to quickly take in all of he details. “Rob Smith, b 1942”, “Robert James Smith, b 1943,” “Robert L. Smith”... Damn it, I thought,
I should have asked his middle name as well
. Though that would have been a bit weird, and might have made him suspicious.
 

I flicked through the second and third pages of results as well, but I was beginning to realise that the search was almost entirely pointless unless I had the time to investigate each of them properly to weed out the results which were clearly wrong — the entries with the wrong year of birth or death, the name spelt differently, etc. I needed more information from Rob: his second name perhaps, the name of his fiancé, his street address, all of that would help. But right now I didn’t have the time or the resources to continue on. I reluctantly clicked on the icon that shut the computer down and pushed my chair back, leaving the stuffy computer lab to meet Robert again on the outside.

***

I made my way down the outdoor steps of Fisher Library, my heels tapping on the concrete as I descended. Outside, in front of me the university was still a wasteland: after all, it was not yet even 8:30, and apart from students on deadline in the computer labs, the campus wouldn’t start to fill up will 9. Only super keen students like Naomi were there that early. I couldn’t help thinking about Connie Hung again. She would have been there that early. I pushed the thought away again,
 

Even though it was early the sun was already hot and blazing down on us. I put my hand over my eyes to shield them and so I would be better able to grab sight of Rob. I couldn’t see him where I had left him, out the front of the coffee cart. I scanned the horizon, trying to catch sight of my six foot glam rock friend He would be hard one to miss even in a crowd, let alone a deserted campus.
 

But Robert was nowhere to be seen. There was a straggle of students coming up the hill, one or two strolling along Eastern Avenue, a couple heading into Fisher. But no signs of my 70s man. I walked down the road that led away from Fisher, and headed back up towards the Physics building, which I figured he might have retuned to. Maybe he had wanted to do some more snooping around in there. I glanced to my right as I walked along, towards the main student lounge and bar, Manning. It was possible he could have gone there to hang out, but I knew from experience that the bar didn’t start serving alcohol, till Midday, despite my best efforts to get them to make the opening time 10am. I mean, back in my undergrad days there were so many morning classes that would have benefited from a quick beer beforehand. But they disregarded my advice. So I dismissed Manning as an option, for the moment: I’d check there next if he wasn’t back in the physics building.