Connie Willis - Time Out

“They’ll get over them as soon as they’re removed from contact with the temporal oscillator. Their agitation level will gradually drop back to normal, and they’ll forget about it. I don’t know what you’re so worried about. They can’t have an affair with Andrew on the way to Tibet, and I plan to send Linda back to central casting as soon as—”

“You hired Linda!” Dr. Lejeune said, her hand trembling on the switch.

“I had to. Carolyn scored a six-ninety on the Rick. Nobody else got above a five hundred. But she was too happily married.”

“And you wanted maximum agitation, so you had to ruin her marriage.”

“Oh, I don’t think so,” Dr. Young said, walking carefully towards her. “Her husband scored a four-eighty, and Linda was under strict orders—”

“You wanted maximum agitation,” Dr. Lejeune said, so angry she could hardly speak, “so you took probably the only two people left in the world who wouldn’t cheat on their spouses and you poked and prodded them and subjected them to subliminals till they were in love and miserable, and you planned to go off and leave them like that, sitting ducks for the next Tibetan bar girl or colors consultant to come along, didn’t you? Didn’t you?”

Dr. Young took a few more cautious steps forward. “I think you’re exaggerating. They scored above six hundred on the Rick. They won’t go off with someone else. Andrew will go back to the lamasery and Carolyn will go back to her husband.”

“And what about all the resentment and distrust and desire that’s been built up in the meantime? What about all that longing for the past?”

“It will be used in my time-displacement experiments,” Dr. Young said.

“The hell it will.”

Dr. Young grabbed for the temporal oscillator and got it away from her before she could flip the switch. “I couldn’t let you turn it off,” he said. “There’s no telling what the sudden release of all that temporal energy might do.”

“It’s too late,” Dr. Lejeune said. “I already did.”

• • •

Linda called just after Don left for the state meet. “I was just wondering if I should bring an overnight bag. The weather report looks like we might have to stay overnight. Is it still chicken-pox city over there?”

“Yes,” Carolyn said, “and it’s highly contagious, so you’d better not get too close to Don. He’s never had the chicken pox, and it would be terrible if you got it with those French-cut leotards and all.”

After she hung up, she went in and checked on the patients. Liz was asleep on the couch with a Texas A & M brochure in her hand. Susy Hopkins was in her and Don’s bed. Her mother had called to say she had to work the late shift in the pediatrics ward because of all the chicken pox. Wendy still hadn’t finished breaking out. She looked flushed.

Carolyn put her hand on Wendy’s forehead, expecting it to be warm, but it felt cool. She felt her own forehead. Warm, too warm. I must not have had the chicken pox after all, she thought. But she had. In college. She’d been the only person in her whole dorm to get it, and the doctor hadn’t been able to figure out how she’d caught it.

She covered Wendy up. There was an afghan at the foot of the bed. She took it into Liz’s room and lay down under it.

She had been in the infirmary ten days, and the doctor had made her make a list of everybody she might have exposed, and she had written Don’s name down because he sat next to her in psychology, and that was how they met.

She was shivering badly, hunched under the too-small afghan. Her throat ached. I’m definitely catching chicken pox, she thought. Only I can’t be. I had it fall quarter of my sophomore year. The quarter Allison was in Europe. I remember now. She put her hand under her burning cheek and fell asleep.

• • •

The lights went out, and he couldn’t see anything. He took a step forward and crashed into something. A wastebasket. He didn’t remember there being a wastebasket next to the bar. He tried to set it back up and cracked his knee against something else. A chair. There hadn’t been any chairs in the bar either. And no bar stools either. He and Stephanie Forrester’s head usher had had to kind of lean on the bar to drink their clockstoppers. He must be back in his dorm room.

“Who’s there?” a female voice said. “Is somebody there?”

He was not in his room. He took a step backward and crashed into the wastebasket again.

“I know there’s somebody there,” the voice said, sounding frightened. He heard a crash, and then she must have opened the curtains or pulled a shade or something, because he could see her in the pale light thrown from a street lamp outside.

She was sitting up on a bed, wrapped in a blanket on top of the covers. There was a book open on the bed beside her. She must have fallen asleep reading. There was a clock on the desk. It said three-thirty. The lamp she’d just tried to turn on was lying on its side on the floor. He moved to pick it up.

“Don’t you come near me!” the girl said, scrambling back to the head of the bed, the blanket held up tight against her. “How did you get in here?”

“I don’t know,” he said. He looked around the room. There was a chain on the door. The window. Maybe he’d come in the window and shut it behind him. It was snowing. Snowflakes drifted past the street lamp outside, and he could see it piled up on the windowsill. “I don’t know,” he said helplessly.

The girl was looking at the window and the chained door, too. “Are you a friend of Allison’s?” she asked.

“No.” Stephanie Forrester. He had been ushering at Stephanie Forrester’s wedding and … “Are you a friend of Stephanie’s?”

“No,” she said. “Are you drunk?”

That must be it. He was drunk. It would explain a number of things, such as why he couldn’t remember what he was doing in some strange girl’s room in the middle of the night. “I’m drunk,” he said, suddenly remembering. “I was drinking clockstoppers with Stephanie’s head usher. Beer and wine. Together.”

“That’ll do it,” she said, not sounding particularly frightened anymore. She had let the blanket slip a little, and he could see that she was wearing a brown T-shirt that barely covered her hips. Nebraska State College, the yellow letters on the T-shirt said. He tried not to feel worried about that. And the snow.

There was a simple explanation for all this. It had started snowing while he and the head usher were in the bar. It snowed sometimes in California. Her boyfriend from Nebraska had given her the T-shirt.

“Do you have a boyfriend?” he said, and instantly regretted it. She looked wildly around for something to defend herself with. “Your T-shirt,” he said hastily. “I figured your boyfriend gave it to you or something since it’s not from this school.”

“It is from this school,” she said. “Nebraska State College.”

“In Nebraska?” he said. He grabbed for the back of the desk chair and almost tipped it over again.

“Where exactly were you drinking these clockstoppers?” the girl asked.

“California.”

Neither of them said anything for a minute. Finally the girl said, “Don’t you remember anything about how you got here?”

“Yes,” he said. “I was … no.”

“It’ll come to you if you don’t think about it,” the girl said, and then looked scared. “I feel like I said that before, or somebody said it to me. Only I have this funny feeling it hasn’t happened yet.”

She leaned forward on her hands and looked hard at him. “I know you,” she said. “You’re a temporal psychologist.”

“I’m an English major,” he said. “I was drinking clockstoppers with Stephanie Forrester’s head usher, and all of a sudden it got as black as—”