Connie Willis - Time Out

“Nothing,” Dr. Lejeune said, surprised.

He was looking at the box she was still holding. She set it down on the piano. “I was looking for Dr. Simons.”

“What for?” he said suspiciously. “You weren’t going to try to fix him up with Bev Frantz, were you?”

“I wanted to ask him what he thought of the children he’d tested so far,” Dr. Lejeune said stiffly. “The computer isn’t showing even a glimmer of a hodiechron, long or short. You should check before you turn out the light. It got black as a coal mine in here.”

Dr. Young looked guilty all over again, and he still couldn’t take his eyes off the box on the piano.

“I’ve got to go finish running the extrapolations,” Dr. Lejeune said, and went back up to the office.

Sherri was counting yellow construction paper. Dr. Lejeune asked if she could use the phone in Mr. Paprocki’s office to call the university. “Forty-two, forty-three,” Sherri said. “Sure. You have to fill out these.” She handed Dr. Lejeune a sheaf of forms an inch thick.

“I’ll call collect,” Dr. Lejeune said. She went into the office, shut the door, and called the physics department. “I need to talk to somebody who worked on the temporal oscillator with Dr. Young,” she told the graduate assistant who answered the phone. “I want to know exactly what it does.”

“The main unit?”

“I suppose so,” Dr. Lejeune said. She hadn’t been aware the thing had more than one part.

“It has two functions. It produces the agitational stimuli, and it stores the temporal energy collected by the portable transmitter-receivers.”

“Agitational stimuli?”

“Yes. A combination of subsonic emissions and subliminal messages that produce an excited emotional state in the experimental subjects.”

Yes, and I’ll bet I know what those subliminal messages are saying, Dr. Lejeune thought.

“I don’t suppose this ‘main unit’ looks like a lava lamp, does it?”

“A lava lamp? Why on earth would a temporal oscillator look like a lava lamp?”

“Good question,” Dr. Lejeune said. “Tell me about these portable transmitter-receivers.”

It took two more days to finish kindergarten. Brendan James was the last one on the list. “Maybe we should just skip him,” Carolyn said. “He’s under a lot of stress.”

“I’m not sure we have enough time left today anyway,” Andrew said. It was nearly two-thirty. He could tell because the third grade was rattling past on their way out to recess. “Let’s put it off till tomorrow, and I’ll ask—”

The lights went out.

“Just a minute,” Andrew said. “I’ll get the flashlight. You can’t see a thing in here.”

That was an understatement. It was as black as pitch, as black as a mine shaft in there. It was so black, it seemed to destroy his sense of direction as well. He took a step toward the piano and cracked his knee against the desk. Wrong way. He turned around and started in the opposite direction, his hands out in front of him.

“I’ll try to find the light switch,” Carolyn said, and there was a loud metallic crash.

“Stay right where you are,” Andrew said. His hands hit the keyboard in a clatter of notes. “I’m almost there.” He grabbed for the piano top and got hold of one of the square metal boxes and then the other. The flashlight wasn’t there. He patted his hands over the surface of the piano. “Did you move the flashlight?” he asked.

“No,” she said. “Did you?”

“No,” he said, turning in the direction her voice was coming from. He crashed into the wastebasket. “I can’t see a thing,” he said. “It’s black as the pit from pole to pole in here. Where are you?”

She didn’t answer for a moment, but he didn’t need her to tell him. He suddenly knew exactly where she was. He couldn’t see a thing; there was not enough light for his eyes even to make an attempt at adjusting, but he knew exactly where she was.

“I’m by the blackboard, I think,” she said. She wasn’t. She was between the photon counter and the oscilloscope, and all he had to do was reach out his arm and pull her toward him. Her face was already turned up toward his in the pitch darkness. All he had to do was say her name.

And then what? Make her be the next piece of gossip for Sherri to spread? Well, you know what happened to Wendy and Liz’s mother, don’t you? She ran off with the hodiechronicity man.

“The blackboard’s over here,” he said, putting his hand on her shoulder and turning her gently toward it. He patted the surface with his free hand, completely sure now of where everything was. He could have walked straight down the narrow tunnel to the light switch and never have made a misstep. “You have a better idea than I do where the light switch is,” he said, letting go of her shoulder. “Just keep your hand on the chalk tray, and when you get to the end of it, feel along the wall.”

“It’s against the rules,” she said. “The music teacher doesn’t let the kids run their hands against the wall like this.”

There was nothing in her voice to indicate she had any idea of how close they’d come to disaster, and probably she didn’t. She was happily married to the gymnastics coach. She had a teenaged daughter who was getting ready for college and one who was out for volleyball. She probably hadn’t even noticed that they couldn’t move in here without touching each other.

“I’m sure the music teacher will make an exception this time,” he said. “This is an emergency.”

He could tell she had stopped, her hand already on the switch. “I know.”

She turned on the light. “I guess I’d better go talk to the third-grade teacher,” she said, and opened the door.

“I guess you’d better,” he said.

After school Dr. Lejeune went up to the office to ask Mr. Paprocki if she could use his phone to place a long-distance call to Fermilab.

“I can’t believe it,” Sherri said. “The last single man in the state and he quits.”

“Who quit?” Dr. Lejeune said. “Dr. Simons?”

“Yes. He came up about two-thirty and said he was leaving, to tell Dr. Young he was going back to Tibet.”

“Is that all he said? Did he leave a note?”

“No,” Sherri said. “It’s not fair. I went out and bought a whole new fuchsia wardrobe.”

Dr. Lejeune went and found Dr. Young. He was in the third grade passing out lollipops. “Andrew’s quit,” she said.

“I know,” he said. He handed her a lollipop.

“He says he’s going to Tibet,” she said. “Aren’t you going to try and stop him?”

“Stop him?” he said. “Why would I do that? If he’s unhappy, he’s not much use to the project, is he? Besides”—he unwrapped a lollipop—“you can run a video camera, can’t you?”

“You sent all the way to Tibet for him. You said he was perfect.”

“I know,” he said, looking speculatively at the lollipop. “Well, we all make mistakes.”

“I should have introduced him to Bev Frantz while I had the chance,” Dr. Lejeune said under her breath.

“What?” Dr. Young said.

“I said, what about the project?”

“The project,” Dr. Young said, sticking a lollipop in his mouth, “is proceeding right on schedule.”

“I’ve got bad news,” Sherri said when Carolyn got to school in the morning.

“Don’t tell me,” Carolyn said, looking at the testing schedule. “Pam Lopez’s mother ran off with the Lutheran minister.”

Sherri didn’t rise to the bait. “Dr. Simons left,” she said.

“Oh,” Carolyn said, moving Brendan James’s name to the end of first grade. “Where did he go?”

“Tibet.”

Good, Carolyn thought. Maybe now you’ll stop acting like a college girl. You are not nineteen and living in the dorm. You are forty-one years old. You are married and have two children, and it is just as well he is in Tibet instead of down there in that music room, where you can’t even move without brushing against him. “Is Dr. Young going to continue the project?” she said.