The Bellbottom Incident (6 page)

“Abigail, you brought your phone along?” I chided her.

“I figured no one’s gonna see it in my pocket. Hey, this must be Dr. Mooney’s desk, look,” she exclaimed. The professor was a bit of a father figure to her, which no doubt fueled her interest. She bent down to examine a pair of mismatched conga drums nestled under the wooden surface. The drums were the start of a collection whose gems would one day include a didgeridoo from far-time Australia and many other musical instruments collected by Dr. Mooney on his journeys in time.
 

“Gabriel and Lewis must have desks in here as well,” I said, looking around. “I’m guessing
that
one is Gabriel’s, judging by the neatly stacked books. And that one is Lewis’s—who keeps a picture of themselves on their own desk? Of all the—”

“Shh, someone’s coming,” Dr. Little interrupted me, then continued in a low voice, “We better get out of here.”

We tried, but it was a no-go. History, very firmly, did not want us to leave by the door we had entered, probably because voices were approaching in the hallway outside. We felt a wall of
something
push us deeper into the office, gently but decisively, toward a corner where there was a second door I hadn’t previously noticed.

“There’s another exit,” Abigail whispered.
 

We quickly tumbled through the second door only to find ourselves shut in a closet.

Abigail flicked on her cell phone light. We were in a cleaning supply closet, which some quirk of building design had placed in the grad student office. Sharing the small space with the three of us were a vacuum cleaner, a mop and bucket, and a large can, into which discarded paper, food wrappers, and other trash had been dumped in a decidedly non-recycled fashion.

 
“…and then she told me she wasn’t interested in dating because she’s too busy with classes. Besides, I’m not her type, she said. I guess she doesn’t like physics students. The lunch only went downhill from there. It was very short, needless to say.” From the first audible word, I knew it was a young Xavier Mooney speaking. I would have recognized his voice anywhere.

“I don’t think I’ve met this Isobel,” another voice said, accompanied by the thump of textbooks hitting a table. This one was undeniably Gabriel Rojas’s. “Have I?”

“I don’t know. She’s a geology student.”

I
had met her. She was my boss, a professor of geology turned dean of science. Xavier was very definitely not her type, though not for the reasons he imagined. Back home, Dr. Braga was away for the weekend with Mindy, her longtime partner, for a visit to Mindy’s family in Chicago.
 

“I even put on a suit and tie to impress her. Honestly, I don’t know why I bother. Never mind that, though. Something occurred to me during lunch. What if we’re thinking too small with our Time Machine?”

“Elaborate.”

“The plan is to try and sell them”—he didn’t say who—“on the concept of sending an object on an infinitesimal jump into the past, a nanosecond or two. But, to be quite frank, that’s just boring.”
 

“No jump into the past is boring,” Gabriel said in his usual cautious fashion, the one I was familiar with from countless department meetings.
 

Abigail, next to me, was positively twitching with excitement as she eagerly took in every word. Dr. Little was crouched, peering through the closet peephole. I tapped him on the shoulder and he moved aside to let me take a look. I brought my eye to the keyhole. There they were, young Drs. Mooney and Rojas. No, that was wrong; they weren’t doctors yet, I reminded myself. But they certainly were young. Gabriel, thin and scrawny in a plain white T-shirt, had his elbows on the table and looked lost in thought, as he often did. Xavier’s feet were propped up on his desk, which connected to Gabriel’s back-to-back, and he was indeed wearing a tweed suit, though he’d loosened the tie as he leaned back in his chair. They both looked like they needed a good haircut, and there wasn’t a trace of the gray that would one day prevail.
 

They both had mustaches! I had to hold my lips tightly together to contain a laugh.

Xavier took off his tie and waved it in Gabriel’s direction. “I didn’t mean boring in a technical sense, I meant from the bigwigs’ point of view. Hear me out. What if we go
bigger
, promise a jump of days, weeks, months back in time? Hell, why not
years
? And not an object but a person! That would get their attention, wouldn’t it? And don’t talk to me about risk or energy expenditure,” he added before Gabriel could reply. “Those are just details, my good man, details.”
 

“But we can’t guarantee a weeklong jump. We can’t even guarantee a nanosecond one.”

“Yes, but we might as well think big, don’t you agree?”

“Hmm…I don’t know if I’m comfortable promising results which we’re not sure we can deliver.”

“Isn’t that how the game is played? After all, if we already knew
how
to do it, that it would work for sure, we wouldn’t need their money. We’d be writing papers and filing patents and so forth.”
 

As Gabriel pondered the ethics of this, I felt someone elbow me in the side. It was Abigail, wanting a closer look. I moved to make room for her. “Xave,” Gabriel finally said after a while, “I think the prudent thing to do when seeking funding is to at least try to sound like your project isn’t straight out of a story by Asimov…But maybe we should ask Lewis his opinion.”

“I did, on the way back here. He thinks it’s best not to mention the words
time
and
travel
together and stick instead to talking about warping spacetime. He’s being all
political
about it.”

“He’s probably wise.”

“He insisted that we not call it the Time Machine in our funding proposals. He suggested the Spacetime Warper.”

Gabriel tested the phrase. “The Spacetime Warper. It doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue.”

“It doesn’t, does it?…Wait, I got it. How about this? We take the
s
,
t
, and the last
e
from
spacetime
…and the
w
from
warper
. That gives us STEW.”

“The STEW machine. It sounds a little mushy but could be worse.”

“Better yet, let’s call it STEWie.”

“Now that I like.”

“Let’s remember to tell Lewis about it.”

Lewis Sunder, I knew, would soon abandon the project to seek a safer topic for his own degree. Years later, when Xavier and Gabriel achieved fame and the promise of a Nobel Prize, he would regret the move, even though by then he would have a prestigious position of his own as the university’s dean of science. But that was years away. Much hard work lay ahead before STEWie would grow from a blackboard sketch into a working lab with a cement-and-steel home. Even then, years of false starts would follow, progress held back because they kept trying to jump into near time, after they’d already been born. The first successful run, in summer of 2010, would be to the sandy dunes of 1903 Kitty Hawk to watch a breakthrough in aviation take place, one that paralleled the astonishing breakthrough Dr. Mooney and Dr. Rojas had just made.
 

“In retrospect,” Dr. Mooney had said to me once, “Kitty Hawk was not the best site. The sandy dunes offered little cover, and we weren’t able to get very close. Not to mention all that time wasted on attempting near-time runs. They required less energy, we reasoned, and would be safer and easier to pull off as a demonstration. Little did we know…”
 

I wished I could tell the pair to try Kitty Hawk at once.

“It maddens me that we have to suck up to pencil pushers,” I heard Xavier say, his voice muffled by the closet door. The young Xavier Mooney, brash and full of himself, reminded me of someone—someone besides his older self, that was—and I suddenly realized who: Junior Professor Steven Little, with whom I was currently rubbing elbows in the closet.

“Science should be pure, free of all that red-tape stuff. I don’t mind the teaching part, but the rest of it…”

Gabe agreed. “You said it, man. Is that the time? I spent the whole morning in the library and forgot to eat breakfast. Time to grab something before I keel over. Hey, are we still on for going as Einsteins tonight? We are? All right, I’ll see if I can dig up a suit. See ya later, Xave.”

We heard the office door open and close. The three of us had our ears glued to the cupboard door, which seemed sturdily shut, but it turned out that History was the only thing holding it in place. As Gabriel’s footfalls receded down the hallway, the door burst open under the force of our combined weight, and the three of us fell out onto the linoleum floor of the grad student office.

Xavier looked up from a stack of papers he had started grading, probably homework from one of the classes he was TA-ing. “How did you three get in there? Is this some kind of undergrad prank? Never mind, I don’t want to know. This office is off-limits to undergrads. How about you use your fancy sneakers to walk out the door?”

As we picked ourselves up off the linoleum, he added in Dr. Little’s direction, “Though
you
, at least, look like you might be a grad student.”

Dr. Little swatted at the knees of his jeans, which had acquired a layer of dust in the closet. “I’m not a student—I already have my PhD.” I sent him a look. What was he doing? I’m sure it was quite a strange and thrilling sensation to meet an older, more famous colleague at a time when that colleague had been no more than a newbie, but still.

“Physics?” Xavier inquired.

“No, computer science and engineering.”

“Ah. Well, then you and your friends are in the wrong place,” Xavier said, his tone and words reminiscent of what Dr. Little might have used himself in similar circumstances. He nodded toward the door and gave his attention back to the papers.

Abigail moved closer and tapped him on the shoulder. “We are looking for a girl.”
 

“In the janitor closet? Besides, who isn’t?”

“No, you misunderstand me. A girl has gone missing.”

Xavier put the pen down and studied the three of us for a moment. “A student?”

“No, she’s…a visitor to campus,” I explained. “It’s a long story.”

This was all quite strange. How could we be having this in-depth conversation with the young Xavier Mooney? What, had he developed selective amnesia and forgotten to mention it to us back at the lab?
 

“I’m Julia,” I introduced myself, still feeling quite odd about the whole thing. “I’m not a student either, nor is Abigail here—or, well, actually she is…”
 

“Not a student, huh, Julia? Are you single?”

“What?”

He looked me up and down and I almost said,
Dr. Mooney, are you feeling all right?
 

“Do you have a picture of this girl you’re looking for? I could show it around, ask if anyone has seen her,” he offered, sounding as if he was only doing so to impress me. Great. He and Isobel would not end up together for the aforementioned reason, but he would, in a few years, fall in love with a young linguistics graduate student, Helen Presnik, who was now a good friend of mine and a senior professor in her own right.
 

I decided it would help matters if I thought of the man in front of me as the young and upcoming academic Xave and not as the older and mellower Dr. Mooney. After all, the Dr. Mooney I knew was quite different; he played his musical instruments at office parties and was kind to everyone who came by his lab, whether it was a newly arrived freshman or Chancellor Jane Evans herself.
 

I attempted to give a physical description of Sabina. “We don’t have a picture, I’m afraid, but she’s just about my height, with dark hair and eyes, strong shoulders, sandals, and a dress the color of wheat. She’s possibly wearing a white lab coat,” I added.

Not just any white lab coat, but the very one hanging on the back of his chair, I was startled to see. It looked crisply white and new.
 

I felt it was important to mention one more thing. “She is, uh, mature for her age.” Sabina had experienced a growth spurt over the summer, but that wasn’t it. While she was thirteen, she wasn’t a
modern
thirteen but rather like Juliet in
Romeo and Juliet
, only without the Romeo. Kids stayed kids longer nowadays. Sabina’s peers in 2012 were middle-class high schoolers whose biggest worries were what their friends were saying about them on Facebook and how to fudge the book reports they had no interest in writing. Sabina had already worked two jobs. Her family had been preparing to marry her off to a shopkeeper’s apprentice when the volcano disaster had struck. In some ways she was more of an adult than Abigail and I were. I concluded my verbal snapshot of Sabina by saying, “She’s from Italy, so her grasp of English is a bit sketchy.”

Abigail seemed to come to some sort of snap decision. She reached into her coat pocket, but carefully, as if she expected her hand to be pulled up short by an obstruction. It wasn’t.

There were a lot of things about this scenario I had trouble wrapping my head around. One, I still couldn’t believe we were talking to the twentysomething Xavier Mooney. Two, I couldn’t believe that Abigail was about to show him her smartphone, a small, sleek twenty-first-century device that was bound to look straight out of
Star Trek
to him. But most of all, I couldn’t believe that History was letting her do it.

But it was…and it did. Abigail methodically thumbed through the phone’s photos (some of which no doubt showed Xavier himself) until she found a close-up of Sabina. She stuck the phone under Xave’s nose.

Xave had been watching the proceedings wide-eyed. His feet now hit the floor. He got stood up and took the device.

Abigail had taken the picture at Sabina’s birthday party, on the back porch of the house, with Celer lounging by the girl’s feet in the warm sunshine. The paper hat on Sabina’s head, which I had made, said
Happy 13th Birthday (again!)
, which was an in-joke. We had jumped from August of 79 AD to May of 2012, and it had seemed simpler to double celebrate her mid-July birthday than to have her lose almost a full year.