Connie Willis - Time Out

“I heard they hired some twenty-year-old who looks like Farrah Fawcett.”

“They did,” Carolyn said, looking through her collection of forms. “Don was really upset. He spent two whole weeks doing interviews and then the board hires this Linda person, who never even applied.”

“I’ll bet he’s not all that upset,” Sherri said. “He gets to work with Farrah Fawcett, you get to work with this absolute hunk of a psychologist—why don’t I ever get to work with anybody gorgeous?” Sherri asked. “Do you know what happened to me when I had the Make Me Marvy guy at my house? He wrapped a dish towel around my head, held up a few swatches, and told me I look sallow in pink. It isn’t fair. The married women are grabbing all the eligible bachelors. Like Shannon Williams’s mother.”

“Shannon Williams’s mother?” Carolyn said, looking up from her papers. “I thought it was Brendan’s mother who ran off with the colors guy.”

“It was. Shannon’s mother is messing around with some guy she works with at the bank. It seems they had to spend all this time in the vault together, and the next thing you know … Speaking of which, how much time will Don have to spend with this Linda person?”

“I think I’d better get down to the music room before the bell rings,” Carolyn said. “Is this Dr. Simons down there?”

“I don’t know. He’s been in and out all morning, carrying stuff. I’ll check with Old Paperwork about the library. And in the meantime, you watch out for this Andrew Simons guy. That music room is even smaller than the vault.” She held the pink paper up to her neck. “Do you really think pink makes me look sallow?”

“Yes,” Carolyn said.

Andrew hooked the temporal oscillator up to the response monitors and plugged the whole thing into the only outlet he could find in the music room. The lights stayed on.

Good, he thought, and started hooking up the rest of the response wires, which were supposed to register reactions in the students they tested.

According to Dr. Young they would be screening to find children who saw time as blocks rather than a continuous flow. These children would have longer hodiechrons since, according to Dr. Young, their hodiechrons got progressively shorter as they learned to perceive time as a flow.

After Andrew had found these children, they would be hooked up to the temporal oscillator and worked into an excited emotional state and they would begin switching their hodiechrons around. Dr. Young claimed he had been able to make it happen on a subatomic level.

“Maximum agitation,” Dr. Young had said. “Simple bombardment won’t do it. The key is maximum agitation.”

“But even if it does happen at the microcosmic level, what makes you think you can make it happen in macro?” Dr. Lejeune had asked, the first thing she’d said to Dr. Young in a week and a half.

“It already happens,” Dr. Young had said. “You’ve both experienced it. The sensation of déjà vu. The now is displaced for a millisecond by a hodiechron from the past, and you have the sensation of having seen or heard something before. It usually occurs when you’re in an excited emotional state. Déjà vu is temporal displacement, and what we’re going to do in this project is to produce it in longer hodiechrons so the displacement lasts a second, a minute, as long as several hours.”

Andrew didn’t believe a word of it. He had told Dr. Lejeune so while they packed the equipment for the trip to the elementary school in Henley.

“I don’t believe it either,” she’d said.

“Then why are you staying?”

She’d shrugged. “Somebody needs to be around to save him from himself, or at least to pick up the pieces when his precious oscillator doesn’t work. But that’s no reason for you to stay. So why are you?”

I don’t know, he’d thought. Why did I agree to usher at Stephanie Forrester’s wedding? “Maybe I’m having a midlife crisis,” he said.

“Along with everybody else around here,” Dr. Lejeune had said, and then looked thoughtful. “You’re forty-two, right?” she said. “Hmm. Did you have a girlfriend in Tibet?”

“I was in a lamasery in the Himalayas.”

“Hmm,” she’d said, and handed him another piece of equipment.

There was too much equipment. He didn’t even know what some of it was. There was a medium-size gray box with only an on-off switch on it and two smaller ones without even that, and no jacks to plug any of them into anything else. He wondered if they were something the music teacher had left behind. He set them on the piano along with the photon counter and the spectroscope.

The lights went off. “Hey!” he said. The lights went back on.

“Sorry,” a woman’s voice said. She came down the ell and into the room. She had short dark hair and was wearing a skirt and blazer. She extended her hand. “I’m Carolyn Hendricks. I couldn’t tell if you were here or not, and I didn’t want to get locked in. Sherri forgot to give me a key. I called a couple of times, but the room’s soundproofed unless you really yell.”

He shook her hand. “Which you knew I’d do if you turned off the lights?”

“Yes,” she said. “I had to do hearing tests in here last year, and the third graders think it’s funny to flip the light switch on their way out to recess.” She smiled. “I yelled a lot.” She had a nice smile.

“For a minute there I thought maybe I’d blown the lights,” he said, indicating the jumble of wires. “Would you believe there’s only one outlet in the whole room?”

“Yes,” she said. She watched him plug the spectrum analyzer into the power supply. “Maybe it would be a good idea if I brought in a flashlight tomorrow, just in case we blow a fuse.”

“Or a miner’s lamp,” he said, peering at the back of the spectrum analyzer. “It got awfully black in here when you turned off the light.”

“ ‘Black as the pit from pole to pole,’ ” she said.

He looked up at her.

“I know you,” he said.

“Oh?” she said, squinting at him the way people did when they were trying to decide if someone looked familiar or not.

“Were you ever at Duke University?”

“No,” she said warily.

“And I don’t suppose you’ve been in Tibet lately.”

“No,” she said even more warily, and he realized suddenly how that must sound, especially down here in the black hole of Calcutta.

“Sorry,” he said. “That wasn’t meant to sound like the oldest line in the book. You must remind me of somebody,” he said, frowning.

That was a lie. She didn’t remind him of anybody. He was positive he’d never seen her before, but for a fraction of a second there, when she said, “Black as the pit from pole to pole,” he could have sworn he knew her.

She was still looking wary. He said, “What I need you to do is help me get this equipment arranged so we can actually move in here. If we could move that ,” he pointed to the resonant converter, “over next to the blackboard and then do something with the chairs to get them out of the way—”

“Sure,” she said, squeezing between the oscilloscope and the magnetometer to get to him. Together they hefted the resonant converter, carried it over to the blackboard, and set it down. “We can move some of these chairs out of the room if you don’t need them,” she said. “We can store them in the supply closet.”

“Great,” he said.

“I’ll go get the key from the janitor,” she said. She started to pick up one of the chairs and knocked it over instead.

“I—” he said, and clamped it off.

She picked up the chair and looked inquiringly at him.

“Leave a couple for us,” he said lamely. “And one for the child we’ll be testing. And maybe you’d better leave a couple for Dr. Young and Dr. Lejeune in case they want to observe. Five. Leave five chairs.”