“Will he be completely out of a job?”
“No,” she said wryly. “Religion’s nonessential, which means clergy are hard to come by. Rats deserting a sinking ship and all that. They’ve offered him the position of senior canon at Salisbury.”
“Good,” Jim said, too heartily. “Salisbury’s not on the nonessential list, is it?”
“No,” she said. “It has plenty of treasures. And Turner. It’s too bad he couldn’t have come to Coventry to paint. But you don’t understand. Bitty can’t bear to sell it. He’s descended from Thomas Botoner, who helped build the original cathedral. He loves the cathedral. He’d do anything to save it.”
“And you’d do anything for him.”
“Yes,” she said, looking steadily at him. “I would.” She took a deep breath. “That’s why I came to see you. I have a favor to ask.” She stepped eagerly toward him, and they both moved out of my line of sight.
“I was thinking if we could take people back through the net to see the cathedral,” she said, “to see it burn down, they’d realize what it meant, how important it was.”
“Take people back?” Jim said. “We have trouble getting Prudence to approve research drops, let alone tourist excursions.”
“They wouldn’t be tourist excursions,” she said, sounding hurt. “Just a few select people.”
“The Appropriations Committee?”
“And some vid reporters. If we had the public on our side — if they saw it with their own eyes, they’d realize—”
Jim must have been shaking his head, because she stopped and switched tactics. “We wouldn’t necessarily have to go back to the air raid,” she said rapidly. “We could go to the ruins afterward, or — or to the old cathedral. It could be in the middle of the night, when there wouldn’t be anybody in the cathedral. If they could just see the organ and the Dance of Death miserere and the Fifteenth-Century children’s cross for themselves, they’d realize what it meant to have lost Coventry Cathedral once, and they wouldn’t let it happen again.”
“Lizzie,” Jim said, and there was no mistaking that tone. And she had to know it was impossible. Oxford had never allowed sightseeing trips, not even in the good old days, and neither had the net.
She did know it. “You don’t understand,” she said despairingly. “It’ll kill him.”
The door opened, and a short scrawny kid with Asian features came in. “Jim, did you run the parameter—”
He stopped, looking at Lizzie. She must have cut a real swath in Oxford. Like Zuleika Dobson.
“Hullo, Shoji,” Lizzie said.
“Hullo, Liz,” he said. “What are you doing here?”
“How’d the meeting with Prudence go?” Jim said.
“About like you’d expect,” Shoji said. “Now it’s the slippage he’s worried about. What’s its function? Why does it fluctuate so much?” His voice became prissy and affected, imitating Lassiter’s voice, “ ‘We must consider all possible consequences before we initiate action.’ ” He reverted to his own voice. “He wants a complete analysis of slippage patterns on all past drops before he’ll authorize any new ones.” He crossed out of my line of sight and over to the computers.
“You’re joking,” Jim said, following him. “That’ll take six months. We’ll never go anywhere.”
“I think that’s the general idea,” Shoji said, sitting down at the middle computer and beginning to type. “If we don’t go anywhere, there’s no risk. Why are the veils down?”
There was no record of a time traveller from the future or the past suddenly materializing in Balliol’s lab. Which either meant I hadn’t been caught or I’d come up with an extremely convincing story. I tried to think of one.
“If we don’t go anywhere,” Jim said, “how are we supposed to learn anything about time travel? Did you tell him science involves experiments?”
Shoji began hitting keys on the keyboard. “ ‘This is not a chemistry class we are talking about, Mr. Fujisaki,’ ” he said in the prissy voice as he typed. “ ‘This is the space-time continuum.’ ”
The curtains began, awkwardly, to rise.
“I know it’s the continuum,” Jim said, “but—”
“Jim,” Lizzie said, still out of sight but not for long, and both of them turned to look at her. “Will you ask him at least?” she said. “It means—”
And I found myself in a corner of Blackwell’s Book Store. Its dark woods and book-lined walls are not only instantly recognizable but timeless, and for a moment I thought I’d made it back to 2057, and getting to the lab was going to be a simple matter of sprinting up the Broad to Balliol, but as soon as I poked my head round the bookcase, I knew it wasn’t going to be that simple. Outside Blackwell’s bow windows it was snowing. And there was a Daimler parked in front of the Sheldonian.
Not Twenty-First Century, and now that I looked around, not the end of Twentieth either. No terminals, no paperbacks, no print-and-binds. Hardbacks, mostly without dust jackets, in blues and greens and browns.
And a shop assistant bearing down on me with a notebook in her hand and a yellow pencil behind her ear.
It was too late to duck back into a corner. She’d already seen me. Luckily, men’s clothes, unlike women’s, haven’t changed that much over the years, and boating blazers and flannels can still be seen in Oxford, though usually not in the dead of winter. With luck, I could pass as a first-year student.
The shop assistant was wearing a slimmish navy-blue dress Verity would probably have been able to date to the exact month, but the mid-Twentieth Century decades all look alike to me. 1950? No, her pencil-decked hair was put up in a severe knob, and her shoes laced. Early 1940s?
No, the windows were intact, there weren’t any blackout curtains and no sandbags piled up by the door, and the clerk looked far too prosperous to be post-war. The Thirties.
Verity’s regular assignment was the Thirties. Maybe the net had mistakenly sent me to the coordinates of one of her old drops. Or maybe she was here.
No, she couldn’t be here. My clothes might pass, but not her long, high-necked dress and piled-up hair.
The range of times and places she could be without creating an incongruity just by her appearance was very limited, and most of them were civilized, thank goodness.
“May I help you, sir?” the shop assistant said, looking at my mustache disapprovingly. I’d forgotten about it. Had men been clean-shaven in the 1930s? Hercule Poirot had had a mustache, hadn’t he?
“May I help you, sir?” she repeated, more severely. “Is there a particular book you are looking for?”
“Yes,” I said. And what books would they have had in Blackwell’s in Nineteen-Thirty-What? The Lord of the Rings? No, that was later. Goodbye Mr. Chips? That had been published in 1934, but what was this? I couldn’t see a date on that salespad of the shop assistant’s, and the last thing we needed, with the continuum falling down around our ears, was another incongruity.
“The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,” I said to be safe. “By Gibbon.”
“That would be on the first floor,” she said. “In History.”
I didn’t want to go up to the first floor. I wanted to stay close to the drop. What was on this floor? Eighty years from now, it would be metafiction and self-writes, but I doubted they had either here. Through the Looking Glass? No, what if children’s lit was already in a separate shop?
“The stairs up to the first floor are just there, sir,” she said, removing her pencil from behind her ear and pointing with it.
“Have you Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat?” I said.