“None,” he said, looking worried. “Oh, dear, Mr. Lewis said something like this might happen.”
“Something like what?”
“Some of his Waterloo models showed aberrations in the net, due to the incongruity.”
“What sort of aberrations?” I said, raising my voice again.
“Failure to open, destination malfunction.”
“What do you mean, ‘destination malfunction’?”
“In two of the simulations, the historian was sent to some other destination on the return drop. Not just locational slippage, but an entirely different space-time location. Mexico in 1872, in one instance.”
“I’ve got to go tell Mr. Dunworthy,” I said, starting for the drop. “How long ago did you come through?”
“At twenty till ten,” he said, scurrying after me, taking out his pocket watch. “Twelve minutes ago.”
Good. That meant only four minutes till the next one. I reached the gazebo and went over to the spot where Verity had gone through.
“Do you think this is a good idea, sir?” Finch said worriedly. “If the net’s not working properly—”
“Verity might be in Mexico or God knows where else,” I said.
“But she’d have come back, sir, wouldn’t she, as soon as she realized it was the wrong destination?”
“Not if the net wouldn’t open,” I said, trying to find the spot where Verity had stood.
“You’re right,” Finch said. “What can I do, sir? I’m expected back from Little Rushlade,” he indicated the basket, “but I could—”
“You’d better take your cabbages to the Chattisbournes’ and then meet me back here. If I’m not here, you go through and tell Mr. Dunworthy what’s happened.”
“Yes, sir,” he said. “What if the net won’t open, sir?”
“It’ll open,” I said grimly.
“Yes, sir,” he said and hurried off with his basket.
I looked hard at the grass, willing the shimmer to start. I was still holding the cat, and I couldn’t just put her down. She was liable to walk into the net at the last minute, and another incongruity was the last thing we needed.
There were still three minutes left. I pushed back through the lilacs to where Tossie and Baine had been, intending to put the cat down where they could see her.
Things had apparently not improved. “How dare you!” Tossie said.
“ ‘Nay, come, Kate, come!’ ” Baine said. “ ‘You must not look so sour.’ ”
“How dare you call me Kate, as if I were a common servant like you!”
I squatted down and tipped Princess Arjumand out of my hands. She sauntered off through the bushes toward Tossie, and I sprinted back to the drop.
“I intend to tell my fiancé how insolently you spoke to me,” Tossie shouted. Apparently she hadn’t noticed Princess Arjumand. “When Mr. St. Trewes and I are married, I intend to make him run for Parliament and pass a law making it a crime for servants to read books and have ideas.”
There was a faint hum, and the air began to shimmer. I stepped into the center of it.
“And I intend to write down everything you said to me in my diary,” she said, “so that my children and my children’s children shall know what a rude, insolent, barbaric, common — what are you doing?”
The net began to shimmer in earnest, and I didn’t dare step out of it. I craned my neck, trying to see over the lilacs.
“What are you doing?” Tossie cried. “Put me down!” A string of screamlets. “Put me down this instant!”
“I have only your best interests at heart,” Baine said.
I looked at the growing light, trying to gauge how long I had. Not long enough, and I couldn’t risk waiting for the next drop, not with Verity God-knew-where. Mexico had had a revolution in the 1870s, hadn’t it?
“I shall have you arrested for this!” A series of thumps, as of someone beating on someone’s chest. “You arrogant, horrid, uncivilized bully!”
“ ‘And thus I’ll curb her mad and headstrong humour,’ ” Baine said. “ ‘He that knows better how to tame a shrew, now let him speak.’ ”
The air around me filled with light. “Not yet,” I said, and, as if in response, it dimmed a little. “No!” I said, not knowing whether I wanted the net to open or not.
“Put me down!” Tossie demanded.
“As you wish, miss!” Baine said.
The light from the net flared and enfolded me. “Wait!” I said as it closed, and thought I heard a splash.
“Can you row?” the Sheep asked, handing her a pair of knitting-needles as she spoke.
“Yes, a little — but not on land — and not with needles—” Alice was beginning to say, when suddenly the needles turned into oars in her hands, and she found they were in a little boat, gliding along between banks: so there was nothing for it but to do her best.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Wherever I was, it wasn’t the lab. The room looked like one of Balliol’s old lecture rooms. There was a blackboard on one wall and, above it, the mounting for an old-fashioned pull-down map, and on the door were a number of taped-up notices.
But it was obviously being used as a lab. On a long metal table was a row of primitive digital-processor computers and monitors, all linked together with gray and yellow and orange cords and a clutch of adaptors.
I looked back at the net I had just come through. It was nothing but a chalked circle, with a large masking-tape “X” in the center. Behind it, and attached to it by an even more dangerous-looking tangle of cords and copper wires, was a frightening assortment of capacitors, metal boxes studded with dials and knobs, lengths of PVC pipe, thick cables, jacks, and resistors, all taped together with wads of wide silver tape, which had to be the mechanism of the net, though I could not have imagined trying to cross the street in such a contraption, let alone going back in time.
A horrible thought struck me. What if this was the lab after all? What if the incongruity had altered more than Terence and Maud’s marriage and the bombing of Berlin?
I strode over to the door, hoping against hope the printed notices didn’t say 2057. And weren’t in German.
They weren’t. The top one said, “Parking is forbidden on the Broad, Parks Road, and in the Naffield College car park. Violators will be towed,” which sounded fascist, but then the Parking Authority always sounded fascist. And there were no swastikas on it, or on the railway schedule beside it. A large notice on pink paper read, “Fees for Hilary term are now past due. If you have not paid, please see the bursar immediately.”
And, inevitably, below it, “Orphans of the Pandemic Jumble Sale and St. Michael’s at the North Gate Charity Drive. April fifth, 10 A.M. to 4 P.M. Bargains. White elephants. Treasures.”
Well, it definitely wasn’t Nazi England. And the Pandemic had still happened.
I examined the notices. Not a sign of a year on any of them, no dates at all, except for the upcoming jumble sale at St. Michael’s at the North Gate, and even that wasn’t certain. I’d seen notices over a year old on the notice board at Balliol.
I went over to the windows, pried the tape off one corner, and pulled the paper aside. I was looking out at Balliol’s front quad at a beautiful spring day. The lilacs outside the chapel were in bloom, and in the center of the quad a huge beech tree was just leafing out.
There was a chestnut tree in the center of the quad now, and it was at least thirty years old. Before 2020, then, but after the Pandemic, and the railway schedule meant it was before the Underground had reached Oxford. And after the invention of time travel. Between 2013 and 2020.