11

Kendra woke when the sunlight streaming into her living room hit her face.  She pushed down hard on the lounger’s footrest, and launched herself to her feet.  It had to be noon!  She hadn’t slept in her bed, so she hadn’t heard any of her alarms.  Damn.

The events of the day before came back to her while she showered.  The fear she had felt, the long bus ride, and her run across campus all seemed absurd.  Spies and devious math majors did not harass quiet, geeky doctoral candidates in physics, and shadows did not conceal monsters, not in real life.  Xenopoulos, unless she was psychotic, must have been embarrassed when Matt confronted her--that had to be what he’d actually done.  The spy, thus shamed, would leave campus.  If she showed up again, Kendra would lodge a complaint with the university.  The woman probably wasn’t even a spy.  American Missile wouldn’t jeopardize its standing with Stamford University, with all universities really, for some graduate student’s research, not even hers.  The lady doth protest too much methinks.

“Ha!” Kendra dismissed the Shakespearean warning that issued forth from some dusty corner of her subconscious.  Her stomach growled.  She dried off and padded into her tiny kitchen.

Kendra realized as she checked first the fridge, then the freezer, and finally the cupboards that her prospects for a meal were exotic at best, but didn’t want to lose any more time.

 “Dry roasted peanuts and dill pickles it is then,” she said, and ate enough to fill her stomach.  She planned to spend the day working on her dissertation.  Essentially a meta-analysis of the available physical evidence for a space-time continuum with some new conclusions tacked on, her dissertation was as closely related to her real research as baby steps were to walking on the moon.  The dissertation was what the world—and any future employers--would see, though, so it had to be done well.  No joy there.

“Maybe I should hop back in time with names of the Preakness Stakes winners for the last five years, then go live on a beach,” she muttered as she left her stark apartment.

The walk through the bright and populated afternoon to the university’s science library reinforced Kendra’s new sense of security.  The day was beautiful and brisk, the sunlight warm on her face.  With her dissertation to finish, she had no classes to attend or teach in her final semester.  Her schedule was up to her, and best of all, as far as she knew, she was the only one in the world who could travel back in time.  She felt a rare flash of pride.

As she pushed open the library’s heavy glass door, Kendra felt the little thrill that places of learning gave her.  The science library in particular had become her haven in her early, most confusing months of graduate study.  It felt almost as homey as her lab, more so since time travel had improved her circumstances.

The journal reading room at the back of the first floor seemed little more than a large glassed-in box when viewed from the main floor.  The magic was inside, where the wisdom of the best scientific minds in the world whispered from between the pages of the journals.

She gathered the most recent edition of each of the forty physics journals, and settled in at an available carrel.  It was set between two windows, and the student in the carrel to her left stared out at the beautiful day.  Kendra never saw the appeal of any sort of window gazing.  If she wanted to be elsewhere, she would go.  When she was in the library, her focus was on her work—or so it always had been.  She scanned the tables of content and abstracts for articles having to do with space-time, and rapidly separated the few relevant journals from the stack of others, which she piled on a nearby return cart.

It should have been a simple matter to read the eight articles, and she tried, but Kendra’s subconscious, no longer soothed by the warmth of sun or shower, derailed her train of thought again and again, filling her with the fear she’d felt on campus the night before.  

The students in the carrels to either side of Kendra shot annoyed looks in her direction.  Not until they stared pointedly in her direction did she realize that she was rhythmically kicking the wall beneath the desk of her carrel.  She stilled her foot, but worked out some frustration by glaring back at her critics until they looked down at their work.

Kendra tried to follow suit, but her subconscious had successfully broken through the veneer of calm that denial had laid over the worrisome events of the night before.   She did not want to feel that out of control again.   She also couldn’t afford to be distracted.  Both her dissertation and her real research called for her time and attention.  She kicked the carrel.  Instantly her neighbors’ heads whipped toward her.  She stopped her foot mid-swing.

Fine.  If I can’t work through it, I just have to face it head on.  Kendra made a few hasty notes, and left for the main library.

Big mistake.  With the country’s economy in tatters, hordes of undergraduates were too broke to hang out in bars or cafes.  They gathered at the library instead.  To her dismay, Kendra found that her best superior-than-thou-graduate student glower had no effect on the flaunting or flirting noisemakers that clogged every aisle.  She jabbed a sharp elbow into a few of the beefier guys, but they brushed her off as if she were a pesky fly.  Kendra could not get to any of the computer workstations hard-wired to the university’s huge database, including the card catalog.

She thought about wandering the stacks until she found the books on self-defense that she needed, but the university’s general collection was huge.  Some work-study student would find her starved, desiccated corpse in the stacks someday if she tried to search them all.  Discouraged, she headed for the exit.

The sun had nearly set.  Kendra panicked.  What if she walked outside and felt that creepy feeling of being watched again?

A flier pinned to the battered bulletin board near the door caught her eye:  Best Coast Martial Arts Presents a Self-Defense Class for Women.  The first meeting was scheduled for Monday evening.  Kendra smiled.  In two days she’d learn something about keeping herself safe, but when she turned for the door, her brow wrinkled with worry.  She still had to get home--or did she?

Kendra hurried to the physics building, but hesitated when she reached it.  The lights in the old marble lobby always glowed warmly, but that night big shadows gathered in the corners.  Xenopoulos or Matt could step out of any one of them.

As soon as she started to hurry up the stairs, Kendra was sure that she heard footsteps behind her, and whipped around.  Nothing.  She hurried up the first flight, then stepped lightly into the carpeted hallway of the second floor.  Like the rest of the building, it had been modernized in the late sixties, and had none of the elegance and grandeur of the lobby.  She flattened herself against the wall to listen.

Soft footsteps reached the landing and hesitated.  Kendra held her breath, sure that whoever followed her must be listening at least as hard as she did.  Would they hear each other breathe?  The follower approached.  Kendra prayed that he would continue up the stairs.  Through the little wire squares of the glass in the fire doors, she saw a dark-clad form reach the landing.  She ran down the hall and up the back stairs to the fourth floor before she stopped again to listen.

Damn.  In the excitement Kendra had forgotten that her new lab, her big beautiful lab, was at the front end of the hall.  If the follower had continued up the front steps, he would cut her off before she could reach it. 

Why ‘he’? The thought came from nowhere.  It could be Xenopoulos.  Very illogically, Kendra knew that it wasn’t. 

She ran to her lab, slipped inside, and locked the door behind her.  A moment later she heard footsteps pass her lab.  A door down the hall creaked open.  She peeked out in time to see Neil disappear into his lab.  Kendra pulled her head back into her lab, and closed the door.  Had it only been Neil behind her?  She supposed that fear and adrenalin could have transformed ordinary footsteps into the unformed menace she had felt.  The eerie alternative was that Neil was not “only Neil”, but worked for Xenopoulos.

Kendra closed her door quickly and quietly, then locked it again.  She roused her sleeping computer, logged on, and started the computation for a time jump.

“Soon,” she muttered, “I’ll figure out how to do more than hop.”

When she was ready, she stood on the black spot on the floor of her lab, the key fob/ controller in hand.  She was about to press the switch, when someone knocked on her door.

“Ms. Tanagawa?”

It was Xenopoulos.

“I fear that we’ve gotten off on the wrong foot.  I’d like to make it up to you--”

Kendra shuddered, and pressed the button. “Like hell, you woul--”

“--D-uh.  Ow!”  Kendra landed on a hard surface in the dark. She’d bitten her tongue, and tasted blood.  Damn that Xenopoulos woman!  Kendra knew better than to talk during time travel, but it was more satisfying to blame the spy.  Xenopoulos probably never bites her own tongue.  She’s too beautiful and poised.  Kendra could easily imagine the spy biting someone else’s tongue though.  She tried to laugh, but it sounded garbled.

“What the fuck?” a voice above Kendra said.  It was a young female voice.  A light snapped on.  “Oh, it’s you again.”  Elle sounded disappointed, and bitchy.

Great.  Just what I need.