Connie Willis - Time Out

“The interview transcripts,” Carolyn said, sounding exhausted. “He thought I might have time to go over them, but I’ve got a whole bunch of—”

“There wouldn’t be a flat gray box in with them, would there?” Dr. Lejeune interrupted.

“I don’t think so. Just a minute,” Carolyn said. She was gone a long time. “Yeah, it’s here. I don’t know how it got in with the transcripts. Do you want me to bring it back to school?”

“No,” Dr. Lejeune said. “We can get it when we pick up the transcripts. Don’t worry about it.”

“Is the other one missing, too? There were two of them on top of the piano.”

“No, it’s not missing,” Dr. Lejeune said. “I know right where it is.”

Even with Dr. Gillis helping, it took three weeks to arrange everything, and then Andrew had trouble getting a flight to L.A. The one he finally got on was jammed. He was sandwiched in between a sleeping man and a little girl. When the flight attendant came around with the drinks cart, he ordered a clockstopper.

“I’m sorry, sir,” she said. “I don’t know that drink. How is it made?”

“I wanta Coke,” the little girl said.

“Just give me a beer and a wine and I’ll mix it myself,” he said.

“I’m sorry, sir. I can only sell you one drink at a time.”

“Fine,” he said, pointing at the sleeping man in the window seat. “Give him a beer and me a wine, and I’ll pay for both of them.”

The flight attendant slapped a napkin down on his tray and followed it with a vile-looking pinkish-brown drink in a squat plastic glass. It was not anywhere near the amount to do anything but taste the way it looked. He drank it anyway.

The little girl picked her glass up with both hands and then tried to maneuver the straw into her mouth by moving the glass around and grabbing for it with her teeth. “I’m going to see my mom,” she said between grabs. “She lives in Santa Monica. My dad lives in Philadelphia. They’re getting a divorce.”

“Oh?” Andrew said. He twisted around in his seat and tried to catch the attendant’s eye, but the cart was already fifteen rows back.

“My mom went to California to find herself,” the little girl said. She put down her glass and began blowing bubbles into it with the straw. “She lives with this guy named Carlos. He plays tennis.”

The drinks cart disappeared into the recesses of the plane.

“My dad has a new girlfriend named Heather.”

A different flight attendant came up with headphones. “Would you like to see the movie? It’s Nostalgia Month.”

“What’s the movie?” the little girl said, bending her straw in half trying to drink upside down.

“An Affair to Remember .”

Andrew bought a headset. He put it on, turned the volume all the way down, and closed his eyes.

“My psychiatrist says the divorce has had a traumatic effect on me,” the little girl said, holding her straw above her head and catching the drips with her tongue. “He says I feel abandoned and neglected.”

Andrew took off the headphones and put them on the little girl. He put his seat back, snatched the blanket away from the sleeping man, and stared out the window of the plane. It looked like it was snowing.

Dr. Lejeune waited till nearly all the teachers had left the building and then went down to the music room and got the gray box with the on-off switch. She took it upstairs to the office and asked Sherri where Mr. Paprocki was.

“He’s got late bus duty,” Sherri said. “One of the second-grade teachers went home with the chicken pox at noon.”

“Oh,” Dr. Lejeune said. “Did he tell you about the music room?”

Sherri shook her head. She looked a little haggard, and she wasn’t wearing fuchsia, but that wouldn’t matter.

“He wants you to file all the sheet music according to key signature,” she said.

As soon as Sherri started downstairs, Dr. Lejeune walked out to the playground. She met Mr. Paprocki coming in. “Sherri sent me to get you. She’s in the music room. I’m afraid she’s coming down with the chicken pox.”

Mr. Paprocki took off at a dead run. Dr. Lejeune followed, still carrying the gray box, and as soon as he was all the way in the music room, she turned off the light.

“Hey!” Sherri and Mr. Paprocki said.

Dr. Lejeune locked the door and went up to the kindergarten. “I want to know what’s going on,” she said.

Dr. Young was sitting at the computer. “Going on?” he said, turning around. “What do you mean?” He saw the gray box. The top of his bald head went pale. “What are you doing with that?”

“I’m turning the temporal oscillator off in about ten seconds if you don’t tell me what’s going on,” she said, holding her hand over the switch. “This is the temporal oscillator, isn’t it? Along with the portable transmitter-receivers you sent home with Carolyn—where’s Andrew Simons’s? In his luggage?”

“Yes,” Dr. Young said. “Don’t—what do you want to know?”

“I want to know what your project really is, and don’t tell me you’re testing kindergartners’ hodiechrons, because I know that’s just a blind,” she said. “What are you really doing? You hired a housewife whose husband is never home and a psychologist who hasn’t had sex in five years, and you stuck them down in a tiny room where they couldn’t move without touching each other, and then you turned off the lights and started subsonically whispering in their ears.” She moved her hand closer to the switch. “You obviously wanted them to have an affair, and what I want to know is why.”

“I didn’t want them to have an affair,” he said.

“I don’t believe you,” she said, taking hold of the switch.

“It’s true! All right, all right, I’ll tell you everything! Just take your hand away from the switch.”

Dr. Lejeune did. Dr. Young sank down on one of the tiny kindergarten chairs. “I needed to have maximum agitation, but subsonics and subliminals aren’t enough to produce an excited emotional state, so I had to have subjects who were already under stress. People going through midlife crises experience a lot of stress. They worry about growing old, they think about death, they long for the past. Most of them find some outlet for that longing—”

“Like running off with the Make Me Marvy man,” Dr. Lejeune said.

“Or finding God,” Dr. Young said, “or becoming obsessive about their children or their work.”

“But people who score a six-ninety on the Rick don’t have any outlets.”

“Right. So their hodiechrons would be in a maximum state of agitation.”

“And if they weren’t, you’d see to it that they were,” Dr. Lejeune said grimly. “What did you do besides the subsonics? Hire Sherri to talk about Shannon Williams’s mother’s boyfriend at the bank? Release some chicken pox virus into the air?”

“I had nothing to do with Sherri or the chicken pox,” he said stiffly. “I was simply trying to maximize their agitation so their hodiechrons would be destabilized. Hodiechrons can’t be switched when they’re stable.”

“What about Carolyn and Andrew?”

“They’re simply supplying temporal energy, which is then stored in the oscillator. The actual time-displacement experiments will be carried out on laboratory rats.”

“Oh. They’re simply supplying temporal energy. And what about what’s going to happen to them afterwards?”

“Nothing’s going to happen to them afterwards,” Dr. Young said, looking as if he were getting ready to lunge for the storage unit. “The temporal oscillator has no effect on them whatsoever.”

“No effect on them? What about all those feelings you’ve churned up? What are they supposed to do with those?”