Time Out

by Connie Willis

“I want you to come with me to the airport, Dr. Lejeune,” Dr. Young said. “I’ve got to pick up Andrew Simons.”

It was the first time he’d spoken to Dr. Lejeune since she’d told him his project proposal was idiotic, and during the intervening three weeks she’d thought quite a bit about what she would say to him when he did speak to her, but now he sounded so much like the old sensible, sane Max Young that she picked up her purse and said, “Who’s Andrew Simons?”

“He’s coming from Tibet,” Dr. Young said, leading the way out of the physics building and over to the parking lot. “He’s with Duke University. Been studying the cultural aspects of time perception in a lamasery in the Himalayas. He’s perfect, I read a monograph of his on déjà vu three months ago and got in touch with Duke.” He stopped next to a red Porsche.

“When did you get a Porsche?” Dr. Lejeune said, looking at the license plates. They spelled WITHIT1, which was a bad sign. So was the Porsche. “And why exactly is this Simons person coming here?”

“He’s going to work on the time displacement project,” Dr. Young said as if it were obvious, and squeezed himself into the Porsche. “Come on. Get in. His plane gets in at four-nineteen.”

She attempted to get into the Porsche. She had hoped he’d given up on the time-displacement project. She had attempted to argue him out of it, with the result that he hadn’t spoken to her in three weeks, and she had hoped he had come to his senses, but apparently he hadn’t.

The project was idiotic. He had decided that time was a quantum object like space and leaped from there to the idea that it could be separated into pieces called hodiechrons, shaken up, and moved around. Quantum time travel. Only he was calling it hodiechron displacement and the silly gadget that was supposed to do all this a temporal oscillator instead of a time machine.

She had decided he was having some kind of midlife crisis, and now the Porsche confirmed it. “I am too old for sports cars,” she said, slamming the door shut on the tail of her lab coat. “And so are you.”

Dr. Young reached across her to the glove compartment and pulled out a tweed cap and a pair of leather driving gloves.

“Simons is extremely enthusiastic about the project. He accepted the job before I even had a chance to fully explain it to him.”

Which, considering what the project involves, is probably a good thing, Dr. Lejeune thought, clutching the dashboard as the Porsche shot out of the parking lot, down College Avenue, and onto the highway.

“How old is he?” she shouted over the roar of the wind.

“Forty-two,” Dr. Young shouted back.

“Is he married?”

“Of course not. He’s been in a lamasery in Tibet for five years.”

“No wonder he accepted,” Dr. Lejeune said. “I should fix him up with Bev Frantz. She’s forty. You know her, she’s teaching Intro to Nursing this semester. She’d be perfect for him.”

“Absolutely not,” Dr. Young shouted. “I will not have you endangering this project.” He swooped into the airport parking lot. He took off his cap and gloves, shoved them into the glove compartment, and got out. “Are you aware that matchmaking is a substitute for sex? It’s one of the classic symptoms of a midlife crisis.”

Which is a clear case of the pot psychoanalyzing the kettle, Dr. Lejeune thought, struggling up out of the car. “What do you call buying a Porsche?” she said, following him into the airport. “How about suddenly abandoning your work on subatomic particles and trying to build a time machine? Wouldn’t you call those classic symptoms?”

“It’s a temporal oscillator, not a time machine,” Dr. Young said. He walked through the security gate. It buzzed. The guard motioned him back through and held out a plastic bowl for him to empty his pockets into. “The university has complete faith in the project. Dr. Gillis has promised me full university support. And complete freedom in choosing my staff.”

“Obviously,” Dr. Lejeune said. “If you’re hiring Tibetan lamas.”

“Dr. Simons is a research psychologist,” he said stiffly, putting his keys in the dish and trying again. This time it buzzed before he was even halfway through. Some of the guards from other security gates came over to watch. “Are you aware that resistance to new ideas is a classic symptom in postmenopausal women?” He took off his belt. “The federal government doesn’t share your opinion of my project either. If they did, I’d hardly have gotten my funding, would I?”

“You got your funding?” Dr. Lejeune said, astonished. “The new administration must be as senile as the old one.”

He walked through the gate. It buzzed. “It is that kind of negative attitude that has already put this project a month behind schedule!” he said.

“You’re sure it isn’t displaced hodiechrons?” she said, and swept through the gate. “It’s his neck chains,” she told the guard. “He’s postmenopausal. Classic symptom.”

“Mom, when’s supper?” Liz asked, opening the refrigerator. “Lisa and I are going to start filling out college applications tonight.”

“As soon as your father gets home,” Carolyn said. She squeezed past Liz and got the radishes and a tomato out of the crisper drawer. “He had to stay for gymnastics.”

“But, Mom, I have to be at volleyball practice at six,” Wendy said.

“I thought the eighth-grade practices were at four,” Carolyn said, rummaging through the utensils drawer for a paring knife.

“On Mondays, Tuesdays, and every other Friday,” Wendy said. “This is Wednesday, Mom.”

The only knife in the entire drawer was a serrated bread knife. Carolyn tried slicing the tomato with it. It wouldn’t even cut through the skin.

“How come Dad’s having gymnastics practice?” Liz asked. “I thought the season didn’t start till next week.”

“It doesn’t,” Carolyn said. “Shut the refrigerator. He’s interviewing assistant coaches.”

“I have to have new hightops,” Wendy said.

“You had new hightops when school started.”

“These are for volleyball. Coach Nicotero says we need ones with bank and turn heels and spike insteps.”

The phone rang. Liz dived for it. “It’s for you,” she said disgustedly, and handed Carolyn the phone.

“Hi, this is Sherri at the elementary school,” the voice on the phone said. “I tried to catch you when you were doing your volunteer stuff, but you would not believe what our beloved principal Old Paperwork decided his secretary should do now! He’s having me call every parent and check to make sure the information is correct. Just in case, he says. Are you aware that you are the ‘person to be contacted if parents cannot be reached’ on fourteen separate emergency cards?”

“Yes,” Carolyn said. “It’s because I’m at home during the day. I may well be the last woman in America at home during the day.”

“No, Heidi Dreismeier’s mother doesn’t work either. Anyway, Old Paperwork decided I should call every single ‘person to be contacted if parents cannot be reached’ just to make sure they really can be contacted and their phones are in working order. The man’s a menace.”

“Mom, it’s five o’clock,” Wendy said.

“Anyway,” Sherri said, “I need to read you the names of all these kids. Heidi Dreismeier, Monica Morales, Ricky Morales—”

“Mom, I’m not going to have time to eat,” Wendy said.

“Troy Yoder,” Sherri said, “Brendan James. Speaking of which, did you know Brendan’s parents are getting a divorce?”

“You’re kidding,” Carolyn said. “She’s PTA vice president.”

“Not anymore she’s not. You remember that Make Me Marvy guy who was going around doing color consultations? Well, apparently Brendan’s mother didn’t stop with a few swatches.”

“Mother, Coach Nicotero said we’re supposed to let our food settle before we practice.”

“Look, Sherri, I’m going to have to go,” Carolyn said. “Whoever put my name on the emergency card, it’s fine.”

“Wait, wait, that isn’t really what I called about. Do you remember that fat, bald guy from the university who had you take all those tests last March?”

“Dr. Young?”

“Yeah. Well, he’s coming back with some kind of research team, and he wants you to work for him. It’d be every day all day for about a month, he said. It pays better than volunteering.”

“Oh, gosh, I don’t know,” Carolyn said, thinking about Wendy’s hightops. “Don starts gymnastics practice next week, and the PTA Fair’s coming up. Did he say how much he’d pay?”

“Yeah, and he must really want you because he said he’d pay anything you asked. And you wouldn’t have to start till October second.”

Carolyn tried to lift up the September page of the calendar with the hand that was still holding the bread knife. “That’s next Wednesday, right?”

“I have my orthodontist appointment on Wednesday,” Wendy said.

“I’ll have to see if I can reschedule some stuff. How long will you be at school?”

“Oh, till about midnight if Old Paperwork has his way. After I’m done with the emergency cards, he wants the recess-duty schedule redone alphabetically.”

“I’ll call you back,” Carolyn said, and hung up.

“There’s no way that meat loaf is going to be done by six,” Wendy said.

Carolyn poked some holes in a hot dog with the end of the bread knife and put it in the microwave. Then she called the orthodontist and changed Wendy’s appointment to four-fifteen on Tuesday.

“I have practice at four on Tuesdays,” Wendy said. “Coach Nicotero says if we miss even one practice, we can’t play.”

“What do you have on Thursday?” Carolyn asked the orthodontist’s receptionist.

“We have a five forty-five,” she said.

“How’s five forty-five?” Carolyn asked Wendy.

“Fine,” Wendy said.

“Thursday’s the College Fair,” Liz said. “You promised you’d drive Lisa and me.”

“I have a three-thirty on Wednesday,” the receptionist said.

“Oh, good. That’s after school. I’ll take it,” Carolyn said.

Before she could get the phone back in its cradle, it rang again.

“Hi, this is Lisa. Can I talk to Liz?”

Carolyn handed the phone to Liz and got Wendy’s hot dog out of the microwave. She poured her a glass of milk.

“Coach Nicotero says we’re supposed to have something from each of the four food groups. Meat, grains, dairy products—”

“Fruits and vegetables,” Carolyn said. She handed Wendy the tomato.

Liz hung up the phone. “I’m eating supper at Lisa’s,” she said. “Can you drop me off when you take Wendy?” She ran into her room and came out with a stack of college catalogs. “Where did you say you went to college, Mom?”

“NSC,” Carolyn said.

“Did you like it?”

I had all the time in the world, Carolyn thought. I didn’t have to take anybody anywhere, and I’d never heard of the four basic food groups. My favorite food was a suicide, which my roommate Allison and I made by mixing different flavors of pop together.

“I loved it,” Carolyn said.

The phone rang.

“Sorry to call so late, honey,” Don said. “We’re not even half-done. Don’t wait supper for me. You and the girls go ahead and eat.”

The plane taxied to a stop, and everyone made a dash for the aisles. Andrew was in the window seat. He pulled his duffel bag out from under the seat in front of him and leaned back against the upright seat back. He shouldn’t have had the Scotch on the L.A.-to-Denver leg. He had hoped it might put him to sleep so he wouldn’t have to listen to the obviously unhappily married couple in the seats next to him.

Instead it had sent him off into a sentimental reverie of his junior year in college, which was possibly the worst year of his life. He had nearly flunked out of prelaw, he had gotten serious about Stephanie Forrester, and he had been an usher at her wedding. There was no reason to remember that misbegotten year at all, and especially not nostalgically.

“I didn’t say I didn’t want you to play tennis,” the male half of the unhappy couple said. He stood up, opened the overhead compartment, and got down a suitcase and his raincoat. “I just said I thought four lessons a day was a little too much.”

“For your information,” the woman said, “Carlos thinks I have real potential.” She reached in the elasticized seat-back pocket, pulled out a paperback of Passages, and jammed it in her purse.

Andrew remembered Dr. Young’s project proposal and got it out of his seat pocket. That was the real reason he’d had the Scotch, to try to blot out the memory of Dr. Young’s harebrained ideas. Dr. Young’s theory was that time existed not as a continuous flow but as a series of discrete quantum objects. They were perceived as a flow because of a “persistence” phenomenon that was learned in childhood. That part of the theory wasn’t so bad. Ashtekar’s research at Syracuse University had already suggested the quantum nature of time, and the idea of perceptual time blocks of some duration was generally accepted by temporal psychologists. Without it, there couldn’t be phenomena like music, which depended on relationships between notes. If time were a continuous flow, music would be perceived as a single note replaced immediately in the consciousness by another instead of as a pattern of interval and duration.

But the concept of time blocks, or hodiechrons, as Dr. Young had christened them, was a perceptual concept, not a physical reality. Not only did Dr. Young think his hodiechrons were real, he also thought they were much longer than any temporal psychologist had suggested—minutes or even hours long instead of the seconds it took to hear a melody. But the truly crazy part of his theory was that these hodiechrons could be moved around like toy blocks, even stacked one on top of the other.

It had nothing to do with cultural aspects of time perception or déjà vu, and if he’d read it all the way through before this, he’d never have accepted Dr. Young’s offer, but he hadn’t checked Dr. Young out at all. Dr. Young had checked him out—he’d had him take a whole battery of tests before he offered Andrew the job. And Andrew had leaped at it without even reading the proposal. Andrew stood up in a semicrouch and looked ahead at the line of people in the aisle. He willed it to move.

“For your information,” the woman said, “Carlos says I have the most beautiful backhand he’s ever seen.”

“For your information,” the man said, wrestling with something in the overhead compartment, “Carlos is paid to say things like that to overweight, middle-aged women.”

Andrew took his plastic safety-instructions card out of the seat pocket and began reading the emergency-exit diagrams.

“I’ve been thinking about going on tour,” the woman said.

“Now that’s what I mean,” the man said, pulling down a tennis racket in a zippered lavender cover. “You’re getting carried away with this tennis thing!”

“The way you got carried away with those Managua municipal bonds? The way you got carried away with that little blond in securities?” She grabbed the tennis racket out of his hands.

According to the safety card there were emergency slides over both wings. If he could climb back over the seats till he got to row H and then pull down the handle on the emergency door …

“I thought we agreed not to talk about Vanessa,” the man said.

“I am not talking about Vanessa. I am talking about Heather.”

Andrew sat back down in his seat, fastened his seat belt, and pretended to read the proposal until everybody but the flight attendants had gotten off the plane. The proposal didn’t make any more sense now than when he had read it in earnest.

He looked longingly at the emergency-slide handle and then stuck the proposal in his duffel bag and walked out through the covered walkway and into the terminal. Dr. Young and a fiftyish woman with disorganized hair were the only people left at the gate. The woman was looking interestedly down the hall.

“Dr. Simons,” Dr. Young said, coming forward to shake his hand. “I want you to meet Dr. Lejeune. Dr. Lejeune, Dr. Simons is going to run the psychology end of our little project. Dr. Lejeune?”

Dr. Lejeune came over and shook his hand, still trying to peer down the corridor. “This woman just hit some man over the head with a tennis racket,” she said.

“She found out about Heather,” Andrew said.

“We’re very excited to have you working with us,” Dr. Young said. “I’ll be working with the oscillator, and Dr. Lejeune will be running the computer interp.”

“Since when?” Dr. Lejeune said.

Andrew began looking for emergency exits. There didn’t appear to be any.

“Dr. Gillis told me I could choose whatever staff I needed. I told him I wanted you as my second in command.”

Dr. Lejeune was glancing around as if she were looking for a tennis racket to hit Dr. Young over the head with. “Did you also tell him I think your project is completely addlepated?”

I should have had at least two more Scotches, Andrew thought. Or what were those things he had drunk when he ushered at Stephanie Forrester’s wedding? Clockstoppers. He should have had a clockstopper.

“Addlepated?” Dr. Young said. “Addlepated! Dr. Simons here doesn’t think it’s addlepated. He came all the way from Tibet to work on this project. Tell us, Dr. Simons, is ‘addlepated’ the word that springs to mind about this project?”

The word that sprang to mind was disaster. He should have had a lot of clockstoppers. Ten. Or fifteen.

“No,” he said.

“You see?” Dr. Young said triumphantly to Dr. Lejeune. He took Andrew’s bag. “We’ll go straight back to the lab and I’ll show you the oscillator. And then I’ll outline my theory in more detail.”

His junior year hadn’t been half-bad, all things considered, Andrew thought, walking out to the car with them. He had had to usher at Stephanie Forrester’s wedding, and when the minister had read that part about, “let him speak now or forever hold his peace,” the entire congregation had turned and looked at him, but otherwise it hadn’t been half bad.

Dr. Lejeune didn’t speak to Dr. Young on the way home from the airport even though he didn’t realize until they got to the Porsche that there wasn’t room for all three of them and then told her to take Andrew’s duffel bag and go find a taxi. Andrew, who was looking either jet-lagged or sorry he had ever left Tibet, insisted on being the one to take the taxi, and Dr. Young spent the trip back to the university telling her how her attitude was undermining the project. She maintained a stony silence.

She maintained it through his announcing that their research was not going to be done at the university but at an elementary school in a town called Henley that was halfway across the state and through his unveiling of the temporal oscillator, even though it was close on that one. It looked like a giant lava lamp.

She talked to Dr. Gillis instead, but she didn’t get anywhere. Dr. Gillis refused to take her refusal to work on the project seriously. Worse, he thought shiftable hodiechrons and temporal oscillation were entirely plausible, and when she told him she thought Max was having some kind of midlife crisis, Dr. Gillis stiffened and said, “Dr. Young is three years younger than I am. I would hardly call him middle-aged. Besides, he is far too intelligent and sensible a man to have a midlife crisis.”

“That’s what I thought,” Dr. Lejeune said, “till I saw the Porsche.”

She went back to the lab and Andrew Simons, who was staring at the temporal oscillator. He looked terrible. Max hadn’t given him a minute’s rest since he got there, but she had the feeling it was more than that. He looked unhappy. He needs to get married, she thought. I really should introduce him to Bev Frantz. She’s pretty and smart and unmarried. She’d be perfect.

“How can this be a temporal oscillator?” Andrew said. “It looks like a lava lamp.”

Dr. Young came in, beaming. “I’ve just been talking to the school secretary in Henley.” The top of his head was bright pink with excitement. “I decided you needed an assistant, Dr. Simons, and they just called to say they’d hired someone. Her name’s Carolyn Hendricks. She’s perfect. She’ll be helping you with the screening and getting coffee and things like that.”

“Why does she need to be perfect if all she’s doing is getting the coffee?” Dr. Lejeune almost asked, and then remembered she wasn’t speaking to him.

“She’s forty years old, married, secretary of the PTA, and has two daughters. Her husband coaches the girls’ gymnastics team. The seasons’ just started,” he added, as if that were perfect, too. “Which reminds me—” he said, and hurried out.

Why is her husband’s coaching a bunch of teenaged girls in leotards perfect? she thought. Does he expect her to fly off the uneven bars and into the past?

“Have you ever heard of a drink called a clockstopper?” Andrew asked, still staring at the lava lamp. “I used to drink them in college.”

“No,” Dr. Lejeune said, frowning at the door Dr. Young had just left by.

“Beer and wine,” Andrew said. “That’s what they were made out of. The clockstoppers.”

“Oh,” said Dr. Lejeune, still frowning. “We called them cataclysms.”

Carolyn dropped Wendy at the middle school and drove over to the elementary.

“Where am I supposed to go?” she asked Sherri in the office. “The library?”

“No,” Sherri said, handing Carolyn a sheaf of papers. “You’re downstairs in the music room.”

“Where’s music?”

“In with the PE classes. They divided the gym in half with masking tape.”

“And the music teacher stood for that?”

“She had to. Old Paperwork told her how much money Dr. Young was paying to use the school for this project.”

“If he’s paying so much, why didn’t he let him use the library?”

“I don’t know. The music room is pretty cramped.”

“I know,” Carolyn said. “I did hearing tests in there last year. The room’s L-shaped, and the light switch is at the top of this hall part next to the door and about a million miles from the main part of the room. The third-graders were always switching it off on their way to recess and leaving me in the dark, because there aren’t any windows. Can’t you see if we can be in the library instead?”

“I’ll ask Old Paperwork,” Sherri said. “I don’t know what you’re griping about, though. I’d love being stuck in a small space with a gorgeous-looking man like that.”

“Dr. Young?”

“No. The guy you’re working with.” She fumbled through the papers on the counter. “Andrew Something.” She picked up a pink sheet and looked at it. “Andrew Simons. Speaking of gorgeous looking, how’s that adorable husband of yours?”

“Adorable,” Carolyn said, smiling. “When I get to see him. Gymnastics is our worst time of the year. And this year’s been even worse because of his having to hire a new assistant coach.”

“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.”

“Okay,” she said, and went down the hall.

“I know you,” he said, looking after her. “I know you.”

•    •    •

Dr. Lejeune spent half the day setting up her computer equipment and the other half looking for Dr. Young.

“Have you been down in that broom closet of a music room?” she asked when he finally came in. “My purse is bigger. I was down there this morning, and there was hardly room for the two of them to even move, let alone try to get kids in there.”

“Perfect,” Dr. Young said.

“Perfect?” Dr. Lejeune said suspiciously. He had said Carolyn Hendricks was perfect. Come to think of it, he had called Andrew that, too. “He’s perfect,” he had said. “He’s forty-two years old and spent the last five years in a Tibetan lamasery.”

“Why is it perfect?” Dr. Lejeune said.

“Your computer setup,” Dr. Young said. “I knew the kindergarten was the perfect place for you to work.”

“Well, the music room isn’t.”

“No, I know,” he said, shaking his bald head sadly. “I tried to get the library, but Mr. Paprocki said they needed it for Fire Prevention Week. Maybe after that’s over, we can move them,” he said, and left before she could ask him anything else.

She went up to the office. “Is Mr. Paprocki in?” she asked Sherri, who was folding a stack of orange papers in half one at a time.

“He’s out on the playground. Brendan James got into a fight. It’s his third fight today. His mother ran off with the Make Me Marvy man.”

Dr. Lejeune took one of the folded sheets and unfolded it. It said, “ATTN PARENTS: IT’S CHICKEN-POX TIME!” Dr. Lejeune folded it back up. “Make Me Marvy?” she said.

“Yeah, you know, he tells you what colors you can wear by examining your skin tones. And then he runs off with you, at least if you’re Brendan James’s mother. All he did to me was tell me to wear fuchsia.”

Dr. Lejeune took part of the stack of orange sheets and started folding them.

“Actually, I wasn’t all that surprised it happened. There was this article in Woman’s Day about the Donkey Doldrums. You know, that point in a marriage where you feel like all you are is a pack animal, and just the week before she’d been in to bring Brendan his lunch that he forgot, and she told me the only time her husband noticed her anymore was when he needed her to find his keys. It still makes me mad, though. I mean, the Make Me Marvy man was just about the only single guy in town.”

“Is Mr. Paprocki married?” Dr. Lejeune asked, folding.

“Old Paperwork?” Sherri asked, surprised. She folded the last sheet in her pile and got a stamp and stamp pad out of the desk drawer. “Married? Are you kidding? He never looks up from his triplicate forms long enough to see you’re a woman, let alone marry you!” She pounded the stamp into the stamp pad two or three times and banged it onto the folded sheet. It was a smiley face. She whacked the next sheet. “What about Dr. Simons? I suppose he’s too good-looking not to be married.”

“No,” Dr. Lejeune said, thinking of something else. “He spent the last five years in a lamasery in Tibet.”

“You’re kidding!” Sherri said. “That’s perfect!”

Dr. Lejeune narrowed her eyes. “Why do you say that?”

“Well, because he’s probably desperate. Five years and no sex would make me desperate,” she said, stamping. “What am I talking about? Five years and no sex have made desperate. But I’ll bet the first woman who comes along can have him for the taking.”

“I’ll try to catch Mr. Paprocki later,” Dr. Lejeune said, handing the stack of folded sheets to Sherri. “Just tell him I want to talk to him about the music room.”

“What about it?”

“It’s too small. They’ve got all that equipment in there, and they can hardly move. I was just wondering if there was some other room they could use.”

“Carolyn Hendricks asked about that this morning, and I asked Old—Mr. Paprocki about. He said he knew it was too small and he’d offered Dr. Young the library instead, but Dr. Young had insisted on the music room. He said it was perfect for what he was going to do.”

While Carolyn was waiting for Wendy at the orthodontist, she unstapled the orange flyer Sherri had handed her on her way out and read it.

“ATTN PARENTS: IT’S CHICKEN-POX TIME!” it said in all caps. There were subheadings: Be Aware, Be Prepared, and Be Informed, each with a cute picture of a bee next to it. “Be Aware. Sixteen cases have been reported in the state since school started, two in Henley, though so far we have had no cases in the schools.”

The Be Prepared section listed the symptoms of the disease, and the Be Informed section talked about the incubation period, which was from thirteen to seventeen days, and concluded, “Chicken pox is most contagious the day before any symptoms appear and during the first few days of breaking out.”

Great, Carolyn thought. Neither Liz nor Wendy had had the chicken pox even though they’d both been exposed when they were little.

After Wendy was done, Carolyn ran to the cleaners and the bank and went to the grocery store.

“Don’t forget we’re out of pop,” Wendy said. “And Coach Nicotero said we were supposed to have—”

“The four basic food groups,” Carolyn said. “Are you aware that pop is not a basic food group?”

“Are we going to the mall to get my hightops after this?” Wendy asked. “My shoelaces came untied during practice today and I called a time out and Sarah Perkins said there weren’t any time outs in volleyball and I said there were time outs in every game. So are we?”

“Are we what?” Carolyn said, staring at the two-liter bottles of pop. When she was in college, pop had come in reasonable-sized bottles. They had bought one bottle each of Coke and orange and lemon-lime for their suicides, and what else? Root beer? Cream soda?

“Getting my hightops. At the mall.”

Carolyn looked at her watch. “It’s a quarter to five already, and Dad said he’d be home early tonight. We’ll have to do it tonight after supper.”

“Mother,” Wendy said, somehow managing to get several extra syllables in “mother,” “it’s Wednesday. I have practice at six.”

Carolyn bought two-liter bottles of cola, orange, cream soda, root beer, and lemon-lime and some new batteries for the flashlight and raced Wendy out to the mall to get her hightops. They didn’t get home till five-thirty.

“I’m eating supper over at Lisa’s,” Liz said. “We’re going to do our applications on her computer.”

“I have to be at practice at six,” Wendy said, lacing up her hightops.

Carolyn made Wendy a peanut-butter sandwich and began unpacking the groceries. “Did your father call, Liz?”

“No. Sherri did, though. She wants you to call her at school. What kind of microcomputers did your college have?”

“None.” Carolyn took out the bottles of pop and set them on the counter. “There weren’t any microcomputers in those days.”

“You’re kidding! What did you have, then?”

“It’s twenty to six,” Wendy said, munching on her sandwich.

Carolyn handed Wendy an apple and called Sherri.

“I talked to Monica and Ricky Morales’s mother after school, and she says she’s not surprised Brendan James’s mother ran off with that Make Me Marvy man. She read this article in Cosmopolitan on the seven warning signs of Over-Forty-Frenzy, and she had them all. She was forty-three, her husband was never home, her kids were right at two of the most demanding ages—”

“What? Thirteen and seventeen?” Carolyn asked.

“No. Two and five. The article said she was easy prey for the first man who said two nice words to her.”

“Mom, it’s a quarter to six,” Wendy said.

“I know the feeling,” Carolyn said.

“And I know you,” Sherri said. “You’d never run off with anybody. You’re crazy about Don, and your girls are two of the nicest girls I know.”

“Mom,” Wendy said, pointing at the kitchen clock.

“I’m in kind of a hurry,” Carolyn said. “Can I call you back?”

“You don’t have to do that. I just wanted to warn you that Heidi Dreismeier’s mother called. She heard you were doing tests and wanted to know how Heidi should study for them. I told her not to worry, but you know how she is. She’ll probably call you next. I’ll talk to you tomorrow,” she said, and hung up.

Carolyn pulled her coat on and fished her car keys out of her purse. The phone rang. She handed Liz the keys and picked up the receiver.

“Hi, sweetheart,” Don said. “How was your first day of work?”

“Fine,” she said, waving good-bye to the girls. “We moved equipment all day. And chairs. I’m still not sure what this project is all about. There’s one machine that looks like a giant lava lamp. And the guy I work with—” She stopped.

“The guy you work with what?”

“Nothing. Did you know Brendan James’s mother ran off with the Make Me Marvy man? And there have been two cases of chicken pox in Henley.”

“Great,” Don said. “The girls will probably both get it. You’ve had it, haven’t you?”

“What? Chicken pox?” Carolyn said. “Of course I—” She stopped. “I don’t remember.” She frowned. “I must have. I had to have had it as a kid: I mean, all those times the girls were exposed when they were little, I was exposed, too, and I never got it, but … isn’t that funny? I don’t remember whether I’ve had it or not.”

“It’ll come to you if you don’t think about it,” Don said. “You’re probably just tired.”

“I am,” she said. “Wendy had her orthodontist appointment and then dragged me all over the mall looking for volleyball shoes, and then Sherri called and Wendy had to go to practice.”

“And you moved equipment all day. No wonder you’re exhausted. Linda says she doesn’t know how you do it all, taking care of the kids and all and now this job. She said she wondered if you had any time left over for being a wife.”

“And what did you tell her?”

“I said you were a terrific wife and I—” Don said something to somebody else and then came back on the line. “Sorry. Linda just came in. She went out to get us some sandwiches. That’s what I called about. I thought I was going to make it home early, but Linda is feeling real insecure about the meet tomorrow. She wanted to go over the floor ex routines again. But, listen, sweetheart, I can tell the girls to come in before school tomorrow.”

“No, that’s okay,” Carolyn said. “I’m just being tired and cranky.” She had a sudden thought. “I’ll make myself a suicide,” she said.

“A what?” Don said.

“A suicide,” she said. “We used to drink them in college when we’d had a bad day.”

She told Don good-bye, hung up, and opened all the bottles of pop.

We used to drink them in college, she thought, pouring some Coke into the glass. She added some orange and a little root beer. My roommate Allison and I used to sit on the floor and drink them and talk about what we were going to do with our lives. I do not remember our ever discussing driving people to the orthodontist or volleyball practice or the mall. She added a dollop of grape, filled the glass up with lemon lime, and stirred it with the knife she had used for peanut butter.

I don’t’ remember us ever discussing being married to a coach with a snotty assistant.

She took the suicide into the living room, sat down on the floor, and took a sip. It didn’t taste anything like the suicides she and Allison had made, probably because Allison was the one who always made them. That one fall quarter when Allison was in Europe, she had had to experiment for days before she got the recipe right. That had been a bad fall quarter. It had snowed all the time, and she had sat by the window and drunk suicides and thought about falling in love, and being pursued by handsome men, and sex.

Which reminded her. She set the suicide on the coffee table and went and got the flashlight and put the batteries in.

Andrew got to school early, hoping he’d have a few minutes to try to figure out why he kept thinking he knew Carolyn Hendricks, but she was already there.

“I brought the flashlight,” she said. “Where shall we put it so we both know where it is in case of emergency?”

“How about the top of the piano?” he said.

She set it on end between two gray boxes that didn’t plug into anything. She didn’t look familiar today, which Andrew was grateful for. It was bad enough working on a nutty project without behaving like a nut yourself.

“We’re just going to do some screening today,” he said. “The Idelman-Ponoffo Short-Term Memory Inventory. It consists of reading strings of numbers, letters, and words and having the child repeat them back to you, forward, backward, from the middle—”

“I know,” Carolyn said. “Dr. Young gave it to me when he tested me last year.”

“Oh,” Andrew said. He had had the idea Dr. Young didn’t know her, that she had been picked at random by the elementary school. “Good. You’ll be asking the questions, and I’ll be monitoring their responses. They’ll be hooked up to an EKG and autonomic response sensors, and I’ll be videotaping the testing.”

“Don’t you think all this equipment is liable to scare five-year-olds?”

“That’s what you’re here for. They know you already, and you’ll be the one interacting with them. Don’t start the test immediately. Talk to them awhile, and then we’ll hook them up as unobtrusively as possible and start the test.”

She went and got the first kindergartner and brought him in. “This is Matt Rothaus,” she said.

“Wow, neat!” Matt said, racing over to look at the temporal oscillator. “Star Trek: The Next Generation!”

Carolyn laughed. She leaned forward. “Do you like Star Trek?”

I know you, Andrew thought. I’ve never seen you before, but I’ve heard you laugh and lean forward just like that.

“What did you do in Show and Tell today?” Carolyn was asking Matt.

“Heidi threw up,” Matt said. “It was gross to the max.”

At lunch Dr. Lejeune set her tray down next to Sherri’s. “How’s Heidi?” she asked. “It isn’t the chicken pox, is it?”

“No. Nervous stomach. Her mother—”

“Don’t tell me. She ran off with the man who installed their cable TV.”

“You’re kidding!” Sherri said. “Where did you hear that?”

“I was kidding. What about her mother?”

“Oh, she just lessons Heidi to death. Ballet, tap, swimming, tae kwon do. The poor kid probably wishes her mother would run off with somebody and leave her alone.” She sighed. “I wish somebody would run off with me.”

“What about Mr. Paprocki?” Dr. Lejeune said.

“Old Paperwork? Are you kidding? He’s never even looked at me.” She took a bite of macaroni, hamburger, and tomato sauce. “I think my timing must be off or something. I always meet guys after they’re already married or engaged. Would you believe I was out with strep throat when Dr. Young did all that testing last March or I could have been the one down there in that cozy little music room with Dr. Simons?”

“All what testing?” Dr. Lejeune said.

“The testing he did to find somebody to work with Dr. Simons,” Sherri said, eating her peach slices. “He did all kinds of interviews and stuff and then gave the finalists all these psychological tests. If I’d known how gorgeous Dr. Simons was, I’d have taken a few tests myself, but I thought whoever Dr. Young picked was going to work with him!”

Dr. Young had gone up to Fermilab in February and been gone two months. She had assumed—correction, he had let her assume—he was working with the cyclotron that whole time, trying to get his subatomic hodiechrons to switch phases. “The school wouldn’t have copies of those tests, would it?”

“Are you kidding? Old Paperwork makes me make copies of everything.” She stacked her silverware and milk carton on top of her plate. “My timing’s always been off. In college I kept meeting guys who’d just been drafted.” She stood up and pushed her chair in. “It’d be great if this time-machine thing of Dr. Young’s worked, wouldn’t it? You’d be able to go back and get the timing right for once.”

“Yes,” Dr. Lejeune said. “It would.”

•    •    •

Wendy called after school and told Carolyn they had an out-of-town volleyball game and could Carolyn bring her money for McDonald’s and some Gatorade to drink on the bus. “Coach Nicotero says we have to have lots of electrolytes.” She and Andrew weren’t done testing Heidi Dreismeier, but he told her to go on and he’d finish the last few questions.

Carolyn ran by the grocery store and bought the Gatorade and a two-liter bottle of black-cherry pop, which she’d decided was the secret ingredient in the suicides. She took Wendy the Gatorade and the money and picked up Liz at the high school.

“Can you drop me over at Lisa’s?” Liz sad. “Harvard sent her a recruitment video. I don’t know, though. How important do you think coed dorms are?”

“I don’t know,” Carolyn said, stopping in front of Lisa’s. “We didn’t have them.”

“You’re kidding. How did you meet guys?” She gathered up her books and got out of the car. “Oh, I almost forgot. I saw Dad. He said to tell you he and Linda had to go out to the mall to look at warm-ups. He said not to wait supper.”

Carolyn went home and made herself a suicide, adding a very small amount of black cherry to try it out. Not only did we not have coed dorms, she thought, we weren’t even allowed to have boys in the dorm. The dorm mother ran a bed check at midnight, and you could be expelled for sneaking a boy into your room, but I still managed somehow to meet boys, Liz. They sat next to me in class, and they danced with me at mixers, and they called me on the phone.

The phone rang. “Thanks a lot for running out on me,” Andrew said.

“What happened?” Carolyn asked. “Did Heidi throw up?”

“Worse. Her mother came in. It took me an hour and fifteen minutes to convince her Heidi doesn’t need hodiechronicity lessons.”

“Sherri says she read this article about Housewife Hysteria, and that’s what she thinks Heidi’s mother has,” Carolyn said. She took a sip of the suicide. Black cherry was not the secret ingredient. “She can’t find a socially acceptable outlet for her frustrations and longings.”

“So she makes poor Heidi take belly-dancing. She spent forty-five minutes telling me about their Suzuki lessons. I felt like I was caught in some horrible time dilation. It serves me right for going into this business.”

“How did you get into this business anyway?” Carolyn said, opening the refrigerator and peering inside to see if there were any other flavors of pop she could try.

“You mean why did I decide to study time? Well, I …” There was a long pause and then he said in an odd voice, “Isn’t that funny? I don’t remember.”

“You mean you just sort of gradually got into it?” There was a jar of maraschino cherries in the refrigerator door with one cherry left in it. She ate the cherry and poured the juice into the suicide. “You just drifted into it?”

“Temporal psychology isn’t something you just drift into,” he said. “This is ridiculous. I can’t for the life of me remember.”

“Maybe you still haven’t gotten used to the altitude or something,” Carolyn said, trying out the suicide. Maraschino-cherry juice wasn’t the secret ingredient either. “And you’re probably under a lot of stress with the project and all. People forget things when they’re under stress.”

“You forget phone numbers and where you put your keys. You don’t forget why you picked your chosen vocation.”

“I can’t remember whether I had the chicken pox,” Carolyn said. “I even called my mother. She said I didn’t have it when I was little, but she thought I’d had it when I was in college, and when she said that, it sounded right, but I can’t for the life of me remember. It’s like there’s a big hole where the—”

“Nebraska State College,” Andrew said.

“What?” Carolyn said.

“Your college. You went to Nebraska State College. That’s where I know you from.”

“You’re kidding. You went to NSC, too?”

“No, Stanford, but—” He stopped. “You didn’t ever go to California when you were in college, did you? For spring break or something?”

“No,” Carolyn said. “Did you ever come to Nebraska?”

“No, and you still think I’m trying the old ‘Don’t I know you from somewhere?’ routine, don’t you?”

“No,” Carolyn said. “I think you probably had a girlfriend in college that I remind you of.”

“Not a chance. Stephanie Forrester was blond and malicious.”

She certainly was, Carolyn thought. Making him usher at her wedding.

“Brown and gold,” he said suddenly.

“What?”

“Your school colors. Brown and gold.”

She looked at the suicide and then poured it down the sink. Her school colors were brown and gold, and Andrew had never said a word about Stephanie Forrester until this minute, but she knew all about it, how the head usher was in love with her, too, how they’d gone out drinking clockstoppers and—

“I’ve got to go fix supper before my husband gets home,” she said, and hung up the phone.

Dr. Lejeune had hoped Sherri would look for the tests right away, but when she went into the office after school, Sherri said. “Oh, I forgot all about that. Old Paperwork suddenly decided he wanted me to take an inventory of the supply closet, including counting the individual sheets of construction paper.”

“How old is Mr. Paprocki?” Dr. Lejeune asked.

“Six, seven,” Sherri said, counting green. “Forty-three.”

“Forty-three,” Dr. Lejeune said thoughtfully, watching Sherri count. “Are you aware that obsessive attention to detail is a classic symptom of sexual repression?”

“Nineteen—you’re kidding,” Sherri said. She looked at the half-counted stack. “Where was I?”

“Nineteen,” Dr. Lejeune said. “Are you sure he’s never noticed you?”

“I’m sure. I’ve been wearing fuchsia for a week.” She finished the stack and tamped it down and along the side to straighten the sheets back into line. “I’ll try to look for those tests as soon as I finish this inventory.”

Dr. Lejeune went down to the music room to see what she could find out from Carolyn, but she wasn’t there and neither was Andrew. They had probably gotten lost in all the equipment, Dr. Lejeune thought, looking at the metal boxes stacked next to the piano and lined up under the blackboard. She wondered what he needed the photon counter for. And the spectrum analyzer. She didn’t even know what some of this stuff was. She picked up a gray metal box that wasn’t plugged into anything. There were no dials or markings on it except an on-off switch. Whatever it was, it was turned on.

The lights went off. “Hey!” Dr. Lejeune shouted. She took a step in the direction of the door. She crashed into the wastebasket. “Hey!” she said again.

“Sorry,” Dr. Young said, and the light came on. He came down the narrow ell and into the main part of the room, looking oddly guilty, as if she had just caught him at something. “I didn’t know anybody was in here, and I saw the light on. It’s a waste of electricity to leave a light on in an empty room and—” He stopped. “What are you doing?”

“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.

“Yes.”

Brendan James’s mother was married and had two children, Carolyn thought, and what on earth is the matter with you? Brendan James’s mother is a complete flake and always has been, and you love your husband, you love Liz and Wendy, and just because they are a little preoccupied with gymnastics and volleyball and college right now is no reason to act like a college girl with a crush. “I wonder who they’re going to have replace him? Dr. Young?”

“I don’t know. Honestly, you don’t seem very upset that he left,” Sherri said. “Well, maybe you don’t care that the last single man around just departed for another continent, but I do.”

Another continent, Carolyn thought. The university wasn’t far enough. Even Duke University wasn’t far enough. He had to go all the way to Tibet to get away from me.

“There’s always Mr. Paprocki,” Carolyn said, and went down to the music room.

“Dr. Simons was called away suddenly,” Dr. Young told her. He was showing Dr. Lejeune how to use the video camera. “Some kind of emergency,” he said.

Some kind of emergency. “This is an emergency,” Andrew had said, and he hadn’t known the half of it. She had known exactly where he was, standing there in the pitch darkness. She hadn’t been able to see her own hand in front of her face, she hadn’t been able to find the spectrum analyzer even when she crashed into it, but she had known exactly where he was. All she would have had to do was put her hand on the back of his neck and pull him down to her.

“Sorry to interrupt,” Sherri said, holding out a note to Carolyn. “I’ve got bad news. The senior high just called. Liz has the chicken pox.”

Andrew took the Greyhound bus back to the university. Someone had left a McCall’s on the seat beside him. The cover had a picture of Elizabeth Taylor and the headline, “Are You Ready for an Affair? Our Test Can Help You Tell.”

He took the test, answering the questions the way he thought Carolyn would. He remembered her saying her husband was a coach, so he answered yes to “I am lonely a lot of the time.” He also answered yes to the question that said, “I sometimes fantasize about someone I know,” even though he was sure that was wishful thinking.

Under the test it said, “Give yourself one point for every yes. 0-5: You’re not ready. 6-10: Getting there. 11-15: Ready or not, here it comes. 16 and up: DANGER!”

Carolyn got a four.

He stared out the window a while and then took the test himself, rewording the questions so they would apply to him. To eliminate sexual bias, he answered no to every other PMS question and no to the one that said, “I find myself thinking a lot about an old flame.” Stephanie Forrester was not who he thought about while he was staring out the window, and he didn’t see how Carolyn Hendricks could qualify as an old flame when all he had ever done was know where she was in the dark.

He scored a twenty-two. He went back and marked all the PMS questions no. He still got a seventeen.

Dr. Young didn’t seem any more upset about losing Carolyn than he had about losing Andrew. In fact, as he recited number strings to Troy Yoder, he looked positively cheerful. As soon as he was finished, Dr. Lejeune offered to get the next first grader and went up to the office. “Have you found those tests yet?” she asked Sherri.

“No,” Sherri said disgustedly. “I am knee-deep in chicken pox, and he decides the milk money accounts should be double entry. The second I get a chance, I promise I’ll look for them.”

“It’s okay,” Dr. Lejeune said.

“If you’re in a hurry, you might ask Heidi Dreismeier’s mother,” Sherri said. “She probably sneaked copies of the tests home to try on Heidi.”

“Heidi Dreismeier’s mother?” Dr. Lejeune asked. “How many people exactly did Dr. Young test?”

“Well, he started out by screening the staff and volunteers and all the homeroom mothers, but that was just an interview kind of thing. Then he narrowed it down to five or so and gave them the whole battery.”

“Who were those five?”

“Well, Carolyn Hendricks, of course, and Heidi’s mother, and Francine Williams …”

Shannon’s mother?” Dr. Lejeune asked.

Yes, and who else?” She thought a minute. “Oh. Brendan James’s mother. It’s a good thing she didn’t come in first, isn’t it? And Maribeth Greenberg. She taught fourth grade here last year.”

“How old was she?” Dr. Lejeune asked.

“Forty,” Sherri said promptly. “We had a birthday party for her right before she quit.”

“She didn’t happen to run off with anybody, did she?”

“Maribeth?” Sherri said. “Are you kidding? She left to become a nun.”

Liz didn’t look too bad when Carolyn picked her up at the high school, but by the next morning she was covered. “What am I going to do?” she wailed. “My senior picture appointment is next week.”

“I’ll call and change it,” Carolyn said, but the phone rang before she could find the number.

“More bad news,” Sherri said.

“Wendy?” Carolyn said, thinking, please let them get it at the same time.

“No. Monica and Ricky Morales. I can’t get in touch with their mother. She’s in real estate. And your name was on the emergency card.”

“I’ll be right there,” Carolyn said. She checked on Liz, who was sleeping on the living-room couch, and drove to the elementary. On the way over she stopped at the grocery store and stocked up on 7-Up, Popsicles, and calamine lotion. She also bought some Dr. Pepper, which she had decided was the missing ingredient in Allison’s suicides.

When she got to school, Monica and Ricky were sitting in the office looking flushed and bright-eyed. “We’ve had five cases since this morning,” Sherri told her. “Five cases! And Heidi Dreismeier threw up, but I think it’s just her nervous stomach.” She helped Monica into her jacket. “I’ll keep trying their mother. The office said she was showing apartments to some bachelor.”

Carolyn took Monica and Ricky out to the car. Ricky promptly lay down on the backseat and wouldn’t budge. Carolyn had to put the groceries in the trunk so Monica could sit up front beside her. She fastened Monica into the seat belt and started the car.

“Wait, wait!” Sherri yelled, pounding on the window on Monica’s side. Carolyn leaned across and opened the window. “You’ve got another one,” she said breathlessly. “It wasn’t nervous stomach. Heidi’s chest is covered with them. Oh, and I forgot to tell you. Don called. He tried to get you at home. He’s going to be late. Two of his girls have got it, and he and Linda have to work up a beam routine with one of the freshmen.”

Carolyn shut off the car. “Why do I have to take Heidi?” she said. “Her mother doesn’t work.”

“She’s at a three-day seminar on Spending More Time with Your Child.”

Andrew went straight to Dr. Gillis’s office as soon as he got back to the university to tell him he’d resigned. “Yes, yes, Max called and told me all about it,” Dr. Gillis said. “It’s too bad, but if they need you in Tibet, well, then, I guess our project will just have to wait. Now what can we do to expedite your getting back to Tibet?” He called Duke University and the U.S. envoy to China, made arrangements for Bev Frantz to give him a cholera booster, and found a place he could stay on campus until he left.

That last was a bad idea. The dorm room reminded him of the one he had had his junior year at Stanford when he had been in love with Stephanie Forrester. He should have met Carolyn Hendricks his junior year instead of Stephanie. She wouldn’t have been Carolyn Hendricks then. She wouldn’t have been married and had two kids, and he could have fallen in love with her instead of the kind of girl who would ask her old boyfriends to usher at her wedding. The head usher had been an old boyfriend, too. He had told Andrew that, after a half-dozen clockstoppers or so, and they had both decided they needed a few more. He didn’t know how many, but it must have been enough, because the next morning he hadn’t been able to remember a thing, and he was completely over Stephanie.

A sure-fire cure. It was too bad liquor wasn’t allowed in dorms.

Dr. Young refused to give up on the project, even though by the end of the first week there was almost no one left to test. “We’ll work with the data we’ve got until the epidemic’s over,” he said, not at all upset. “How long does it take to get over the chicken pox?”

“Two weeks,” Dr. Lejeune said, “but Sherri says these outbreaks usually last at least a month. Why don’t we go back to the university until it’s over? We could leave the equipment here.”

“Absolutely not!” Dr. Young thundered. “It is that kind of attitude that has undermined this project from the start!” He stomped off, presumably to go to work with the data they had.

We don’t have any data, Dr. Lejeune thought, going up to the office, and my attitude is not what’s undermining this project. She wondered why he was so upset. Andrew’s leaving hadn’t upset him, Carolyn’s leaving hadn’t upset him, not even the chicken pox had upset him. But the suggestion of leaving here had turned the top of his bald head bright pink.

Sherri was dabbing calamine lotion on a fourth-grader. “I finally found the tests,” she said. She handed them to Dr. Lejeune. “Sorry it took so long, but I had six kids go home this morning, three of them to Carolyn Hendricks’s house.”

Dr. Lejeune looked at the tests. The one on the top was the Idelman-Ponoffo that they’d been giving the kids, and under it were an assortment of psychological tests.

“And as if that isn’t bad enough, Old Paperwork decides he wants me to alphabetize the field-trip release slips.”

The last test was something called the Rick. Dr. Lejeune didn’t recognize it. She asked Sherri if she could use Mr. Paprocki’s office and place a call to the psych department at the university.

“It tests logical thinking, responsibility, and devotion to duty,” the graduate assistant said.

“How about fidelity?” Dr. Lejeune asked.

“Oh, yes. In fact, Dr. Young over in the physics department just used it in a project of his. He wanted to test the likelihood of affairs among forty-year-olds.”

“Say someone scored a six hundred ninety-two on the Rick, what would their chances of having an extramarital affair be?”

“Six hundred ninety-two?” the graduate assistant said. “Nonexistent. Seven hundred’s a perfect score.”

Perfect, Dr. Lejeune thought. “You wouldn’t happen to have Dr. Andrew Simons’s score on file, would you?”

“I know Dr. Young did a Rick on him, but I’m not sure where it—”

“Never mind,” Dr. Lejeune said. “I already know what he got.”

Carolyn checked Wendy’s stomach every morning for two weeks, but she didn’t show any signs of getting the chicken pox, even though at one point Carolyn had five patients on Wendy’s bed, her and Don’s bed, and the family-room couch. “I can’t get sick,” Wendy told her, yanking her T-shirt down after Carolyn had checked her stomach. “We’ve got a game this afternoon. I have to start. Sarah Perkins got sick yesterday. Coach Nicotero had to call a time out and everything.”

That’s what I need, Carolyn thought, driving her to practice. A time out. Only there aren’t any in this game.

“I’ve narrowed it down to Vassar, Carleton, and Tufts,” Liz said when Carolyn got back. She was lying on the couch dabbing calamine lotion on her legs and reading college catalogs. “How important do you think VCRs in the dorms are, Mom?”

The phone rang. “I am so sorry to do this to you,” Sherri said, “but I didn’t know what else to do. It’s Shannon Williams. I called her mother at the bank. Do you think I should have done that?”

“Was she there?”

“I don’t know,” Sherri said, lowering her voice. “He answered the phone and he said she wasn’t there, but he sounded really angry and I think she was. So can you come pick her up?”

“I’ll be right there,” Carolyn said.

She settled Erin in Wendy’s bed with her popsicle and some of Wendy’s comics. “I’ve got to go get Shannon Williams,” she told Liz, who had given up on the catalog and was watching All My Children.

“Is her mother in real estate, too?”

“No,” Carolyn said. Her mother is in deep trouble if her husband finds out. And how did that happen? I know how it happened, Carolyn thought. She knew exactly where he was, and she wasn’t thinking about her husband or her kids because right then they didn’t exist. Talk about time displacement. It was as if that moment, as she stood there in the dark, knowing all she had to do was put her hand on the back of his neck and pull him down to her, was out of time altogether.

Only it wasn’t. Shannon Williams’s mother was just kidding herself that it was. It would be wonderful if people could step out of time as Dr. Young seemed to think they could, go back to when they were in college and unencumbered with families and responsibilities, but they couldn’t. And standing there in the dark, Shannon’s mother should have been thinking about how much this was going to hurt her husband. She should have been thinking about who was going to take Shannon to volleyball practice and the orthodontist after the divorce was final.

The phone rang. It was Don. “How are things going?” he asked.

“Great,” she said. “Erin Peterson is on the couch, I am on my way to pick up Shannon Williams, we are all out of Popsicles and calamine lotion, and you have just called to tell me you’re going to be late again.”

“Yeah,” he said. “I’m sorry to do this to you when you’ve got all those kids to take care of, but somebody erased all the floor ex music, and we’ve got a big invitational tomorrow. Luckily, Linda’s got a dual tape deck at her apartment, so we’re going over there. I’ll get home as soon as I can. And listen, you take it easy. You sound terrible.”

“Thank you,” Carolyn said coldly. She opened the refrigerator. They were all out of pop, too.

“That’s what I mean. You’re so edgy. Linda thinks you’re doing way too much with all these poxy kids. She says a woman your age has to be careful not to overdo.”

“Or my arthritis might kick up again?” she said. She hung up, called the bank, and asked for the head loan officer.

“You tell Shannon Williams’s mother that I don’t care if she’s there or not, but she has a sick child and she’d better come pick her up,” she said, and hung up.

The phone rang. “I have bad news,” Sherri said.

“I don’t care who it is,” Carolyn said. “Their mother has got to come arid get them.”

“It’s Wendy,” Sherri said.

By the end of three weeks, a few scabby children had started to trickle back, but Dr. Young showed no interest in screening them.

“If we’re not going to use the music room, why don’t we at least move some of that equipment out so the music teacher can get back in?” Dr. Lejeune suggested.

“You are not moving anything anywhere,” Dr. Young shouted, his bald head turning fuchsia. “It is that kind of attitude—”

“I know, I know,” Dr. Lejeune said, but she went down to the music room anyway. She could at least shift things around so the music teacher could get to the piano.

She dismantled the video camera and stuck it in the music cupboard. At the back between two xylophones was a flashlight. That would come in handy if the lights went out, Dr. Lejeune thought. She put it in her pocket and sidled over to the piano to get the temporal oscillator. The gray box that didn’t plug into anything was still on top of the piano, but the two smaller flat ones weren’t.

She went upstairs to the office and called Carolyn. “Did Dr. Young send anything home with you?” she asked.

“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?”

“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—”

“The pit from pole to pole,” the girl said.

He knocked over the chair. “I know you,” he said. “You’re Carolyn Hendricks.”

She shook her head. “I’m Carolyn Rutherford.”

“That’s your maiden name. Your married name is Hendricks.”

“I’m not married,” she said, starting to look scared again.

“Not yet you’re not. But you will be. You’ll have two daughters.”

“You’re Dr. Andrew Simons,” she said suddenly. “You spent the last five years in Tibet studying déjà vu.”

“I spent the last five years in high school and going to Stanford. And why would I study déjà vu? I’m an English major.”

“Were an English major. I think after tonight you’ll probably switch your major to psychology.” She sat back on her heels. “Hendricks, huh? I think there’s a guy named Hendricks in my psych class.”

“But you haven’t met him yet,” he said, no longer bewildered, no longer uneasy. “And I haven’t met you yet. But I will. In about twenty years.”

“Yes,” she said, “and I’ll be married and have two daughters, and you’ll be in Tibet.”

“And there won’t be any possible way for us to get together because the timing will be all wrong,” he said.

“All things are possible,” she said. “It’s three-thirty.” She smiled a little, leaning toward him on her hands. “They never check the rooms after midnight.”

“What about your roommate?” he said, and her sudden look of surprised joy almost staggered him.

“Oh,” she said happily, “this is the quarter Allison’s in Europe.”

“I couldn’t find you,” Don said. He was standing over her with a mug.

“Susy was in our bed,” she said sleepily. “How was the meet?” She sat up and pulled the afghan over her knees.

“We took second.” He got down on the bed and handed her the mug. “Jennifer Whipple got sick and couldn’t do her bar routine, and Linda quit. How are you doing?”

“Fine,” she said, taking a sip. “What is this?”

“A suicide,” he said. “I remembered you were crazy about them in college, so I stopped at the 7-Eleven and bought some ginger ale and—”

“Ginger ale!” Carolyn said. “That was what I couldn’t remember.” She took another sip. “It tastes just like the ones Allison used to make. Oh, and speaking of Allison, I finally remembered when I had the chicken pox. It was the quarter Allison was in Europe. It was the strangest thing. I … Linda quit?”

“Halfway through the vaulting. She didn’t even come home on the bus with us. I tried to call you.”

“To tell me she quit?” she said.

“No. To tell you you’d had the chicken pox. Jennifer got sick, and all of a sudden I remembered you’d had it in college. It beats me how I could have forgotten, since that’s how we met. I came to see you in the infirmary.”

“I know,” Carolyn said. “The doctor made me make a list of who I might have exposed, and I put your name down because you sat next to me in my psych class.”

“You looked terrible when I came to see you in the infirmary,” he said, grinning at her. “You were all covered with scabs. And sitting there looking at you, I had this funny kind of vision of the two of us married with two kids and both of them with the chicken pox. I don’t think Linda understood that part.”

“You told Linda?”

“Yeah. She was talking about how touchy you were on the phone. She said nobody could be that crabby unless they were coming down with something, and all of a sudden I remembered how I’d met you, and so I told her.”

“No wonder she quit,” Carolyn said.

“Yeah, I guess it was probably boring for a kid like her to have to listen to an old geezer like me talking about things that happened a long time ago. The funny thing is, it doesn’t feel like a long time ago, though, you know. It feels like it just happened yesterday.”

“I know,” Carolyn said. “That isn’t the only funny thing. I—”

“Listen, honey, I’ve got to go back to school,” Don said. He patted her knee. “I’ve got to unload the equipment. I just thought I’d better come check on you since you didn’t answer the phone.”

She draped the afghan over her shoulders and followed him into the living room. “I didn’t hear it ring,” she said. “And that’s not the only funny thing. I—”

“I decided on a college,” Liz said. She was sitting up on the couch dabbing calamine lotion on her arms. “NSC.”

“NSC?” Carolyn said. “I thought you’d narrowed it down to Vassar, Carleton, and Tufts.”

“Well, I had, but I couldn’t sleep because I was itching, and I got to thinking about how you and Dad are always saying how great NSC was, so I decided to go there instead.”

“It was great,” Don said. “That’s where I met your mother. She had the chicken pox and—”

“I know,” Liz said. “You’ve told that story about a million times.”

“The old geezer strikes again,” Don said. He kissed Carolyn. “I’ll be back in an hour if I don’t suddenly go senile while I’m unloading the bus.” He kissed Carolyn again.

“I don’t see how having the chicken pox could have been all that romantic,” Liz said after he’d left.

“It was,” Carolyn said.

Dr. Lejeune went to see Andrew in the university infirmary. “Sherri Paprocki said to say hello,” she said. “She wants to know how you managed to get the chicken pox. The incubation period is only two weeks, and you didn’t catch it till five weeks after you’d left.”

“On the plane to L.A. I sat next to a little girl who must have been contagious,” he said. “It’s a good thing I decided not to go to Tibet.”

“Excuse me,” Bev Frantz said. She came in with a thermometer. “I need to take your temp.”

“Great,” Andrew said. “I was hoping I’d see you agai—”

She stuck the thermometer in his mouth and looked at the box. He smiled up at her. She concentrated fiercely on the LED readout.

He didn’t look sick except for the calamine-covered scabs all over his face and arms. In fact, he looked better than Dr. Lejeune had ever seen him look. Happier.

The box beeped. Bev took the sensor out of his mouth and shoved it back in its carrier. She turned to Dr. Lejeune. “Dr. Young’s been asking for you.”

“You really should go see him,” Andrew said. “I think he wants to apologize.”

“You’re the one he should apologize to,” she said, and then looked closely at him. “Or should he? Are you sure you got the chicken pox from that little girl?”

“Max really cares about you, you know,” Andrew said. “He told me the reason he started the project in the first place was to impress you.”

“Hmm,” Dr. Lejeune said. She told Andrew good-bye and went out in the hall.

“I wondered if I could talk to you about Dr. Simons for a minute,” Bev said. “I really like him, but when he was in here before for his cholera booster, I got the idea he was in love with somebody else.”

“He was,” Dr. Lejeune said. “A girl he knew in college. But that was a long time ago. I wouldn’t worry about it.”

She started out the door and then turned around and went into Max’s room. He looked terrible. He had chicken pox on the top of his bald head, and he was wearing a pair of mittens that were taped at the wrist. “Well?” he said. “Has he asked her out yet?”

“Who?” Dr. Lejeune said.

“Andrew. Has he asked Bev out? I told him he’d better latch on to her while he still has the chance. I’ve been trying to get them together ever since I got in here. It’s the least I can do.”

“I thought you said matchmaking was a substitute for sex.”

“It is,” he said. “So was my time machine. I wanted to go back in time and be young again.”

“You’re not that old. You caught the chicken pox, didn’t you?”

“Nothing happened, did you know that? All that energy released at once, and nothing. Carolyn slept through the whole thing.” He reached up with his mittened hand to scratch his face and then laid his hand back in his lap. She had never felt so sorry for anyone in her whole life.

“Would you like me to rub on some calamine?” she asked.

“Nothing happened to him either.”

“He caught the chicken pox.” She opened the bottle of calamine and dabbed some on his cheek. “Did you know when Carolyn had it in college, she was the only person in her dorm to get it? Nobody could figure out where she caught it from. Personally, I think she caught it from that poxy bunch of kids at her house. And now Andrew has the chicken pox, and nobody can figure out where he got it from.”

“He said he caught it from a little girl he sat next to on the plane.”

“Personally, I think he caught it from Carolyn.” She stood up and dabbed calamine on the top of his head.

“You mean—” he said, perking up noticeably.

“Your theory says that an entire hodiechron could be displaced. Including chicken-pox viruses. Suppose Carolyn caught the chicken pox from one of those kids she was taking care of and was contagious but she didn’t have any symptoms yet. Suppose she gave the chicken pox to Andrew when they were in college.”

“We could call the airlines and find out who the little girl was and if she came down with the chicken pox,” he said excitedly. He began trying to get the tape off his wrists with his mittened hands. “We can run the experiment again. Heidi Dreismeier’s mother scored a four-ninety, and we can surely find—” He stopped and laid his hands back in his lap. “We can’t run the experiment again. You were right. I had no business messing with people’s lives.”

“Who said anything about messing with people’s lives? Why can’t we run the experiment on ourselves? I worry about being old, I long for the past, and I’m about as desperate for sex as they come. I’d love to be shut in a cramped little room with you.”

Dr. Young took hold of her hands with his mittened ones. “I don’t think you’re old,” he said. He leaned forward to peck her on the cheek.

Bev came in carrying her thermometer. “Oops, sorry,” she said. “I’m obviously in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

“We may be able to do something about that,” Dr. Lejeune said.

Content

Time Out
by Connie Willis