Robert went into Dr. Othniel’s class. “The prevalence of predators in the Late Cretaceous,” Dr. Othniel was saying, “led to severe evolutionary pressures, resulting in aquatic and aeronautical adaptations.”
Robert tried to get his attention, but he was writing “BIRDS” in the chalk tray.
He went out in the hall. Sarah’s TA was standing outside her office, eating a bag of Doritos.
“Have you seen Dr. Wright?” Robert asked.
“She’s gone,” Chuck said, munching.
“Gone? You mean, resigned?” he said, horrified. “But she doesn’t have to.” He waved the green paper at Chuck. “Dr. King’s going to do a preliminary study, a—what does he call it?—a preinitiatory survey of prevailing paleontological pedagogy. We won’t have to worry about him for another five years at least.”
“She saw it,” Chuck said, pulling a jar of salsa out of his back pocket. “She said it was too late. She’d already paid her tuition.” He unscrewed the lid.
“Her tuition?” Robert said. “What are you talking about? Where did she go?”
“She flew the coop.” He dug in the bag and pulled out a chip. He dipped it in the sauce. “Oh, and she left something for you.” He handed Robert the jar of salsa and the chips and dug in his other back pocket. He handed Robert the flight brochure and a green plastic square.
“It’s her parking sticker,” Robert said.
“Yeah,” Chuck said. “She said she won’t be needing it where she’s going.”
“That’s all? She didn’t say anything else?”
“Oh, yeah,” he said, dipping a chip into the salsa Robert still held. “She said to watch out for falling rocks.”
“The predatory dinosaurs flourished for the entire Late Cretaceous,” Dr. Othniel said, “and then, along with their prey, disappeared. Various theories have been advanced for their extinction, none of which has been authoritatively proved.”
“I’ll bet they couldn’t find a parking place,” a student who had written one of the letters to the Parking Authority and who had finally given up and traded his Volkswagen in on a skateboard, whispered.
“What?” Dr. Othniel said, looking vaguely around. He turned back to the board. “The diminishing food supply, the rise of mammals, the depradations of smaller predators, all undoubtedly contributed.”
He wrote: “1. FOOD SUPPLY
2. MAMMALS
3. COMPETITION,” on the bottom one fifth of the board.
His students wrote “I thought it was an asteroid,” and “My new roommate Terri is trying to steal Todd away from me! Can you believe that? Signed, Deanna.”
“The demise of the dinosaurs—” Dr. Othniel said, and stopped. He straightened slowly, vertebra by vertebra, until he was nearly erect. He lifted his chin, as if he were sniffing the air, and then walked over to the open window, leaned out, and stood there for several minutes, scanning the clear and empty sky.
WHEN YOU TELL PEOPLE YOU WRITE SCIENCE FICTION, they say, “Oh, spaceships and aliens,” and then want to know your qualifications. “How do you think up those strange worlds?” they ask. “I suppose you majored in science.”
It’s best to nod, even if you majored in English. You won’t get anywhere trying to explain that you subscribe to the Miss Marple theory of literature, which maintains that you don’t have to go farther than your front yard to understand the universe. (Even though Jane Austen subscribed to it, too.) And it’s no good telling them that your qualifications are that you’ve seen some strange worlds, all right, and you didn’t need a spaceship to get to them. They probably wouldn’t understand.
I’ve sung in church choirs, had Mary Kay facials, put on garage sales. I’ve been to the mall and the orthodontist and the second-grade Valentine’s party. I’ve even been to Tupperware parties—only slightly stranger than Venusian eyestalk-bonding ceremonies—at which you participate in arcane contests (“How many words can you make out of ‘Tupperware’?” “Warp, put, upper, rue …” I always win. It’s the only thing majoring in English is good for) and eat ritual preparations of Cool Whip and graham-cracker crumbs and purchase plastic boxes that burp.
Science fiction? Piece of cake. (“Pert, rat, paw, tarp, prate, weep, apt, true, wart, Ra …”)
TIME OUT
“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 o
ut 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 obv
iously 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.