19

To judge by the increasing redness of his ears on the drive to Kendra’s across campus, Officer Powell was not comfortable in her presence.  Nevertheless, he gallantly insisted on seeing Kendra to her door.  Visited by images of the creeps who had recently cropped up in her life, she accepted gratefully.  The awkward silence on the painfully slow elevator ride to the nineteenth floor, became unbearable as Powell shifted, cleared his throat, and shot quick looks in her direction when he thought she wasn’t looking.  Had the thought of rape or the “r” word itself unhinged Powell.  He shifted nervously again.  Kendra couldn’t bear it any longer, and turned to face him.

“How long have you been with campus security, Officer Powell?”

The young security officer flinched.  “Um, fourteen months?”

 She nodded.  Stupid question, she silently berated herself, having no idea how to follow up.  The elevator doors opened, and she sighed with relief.

“I’ll check your apartment,” Powell said with surprising certainty.

Kendra thought she would prefer to risk a run in with Matt, vampires, or Xenopoulos rather than spend another minute with Powell.  She had enough tension in her life.  “That won’t be necessary, thank you,” she said, but he insisted.

After he had checked every room, he shifted and cleared his throat in her doorway.  Kendra waited, but he didn’t say anything.  She thought about recommending that he call Phil…she needed to reschedule the appointment she’d missed.

Kendra thanked Powell, then shut and locked her door.  She quickly lowered the blinds and turned on all the lights.  Before the empty silence in her apartment could scare her, she hurried to her laptop.

Phil had his usual emergency slots open at the end of the day, but even better, he’d had a cancellation at 10 a.m. the next day.  Kendra booked the slot.  At least hacking the Stamford computers remained uncomplicated.  Now for the rest of my life.

Kendra hunted for a yellow legal pad and a pen, her preferred tools for all problems that had nothing to do with physics.  She few minutes later she flopped on the couch, pad and pen in hand.

“Me” she wrote in the center of page and, after a moment’s hesitation, drew a bull’s-eye around it.  She scattered ‘Xenopoulos’, ‘Matt’, ‘American Missile’, and ‘vampires’ in a ring around the bull’s eye.  Neil was in an outer orbit on his own.  After a moment’s thought, Kendra added Elle’s name near her own at the center of the target.  She wrote “Professor Healy” near the bottom of the page with a list of the rest of her colleagues in the PhD program, no knowing where or if they fit in.

Next she added motivations:  ‘profit’ for American Missile and probably Matt and Neil.  She wondered if it were personal for Xenopoulos.  The spy seemed so emotionally involved, but why?  Kendra had never met her before Healy introduced them, at least not in her current timeline.  She wrote ‘future insult?’ near Xenopoulos.  Kendra had not yet tried to jump ahead in time.  She felt a little thrill at the suggestion that she would succeed. 

Of course, it could be that she reached the future the usual way, by living.  That would mean that Xenopoulos learned at some point in the future how to jump back in time.  Kendra frowned.  Having to consider the influence that future events might have in current problems would make it infinitely more complicated to figure out what was going on.  She left the “future insult?” note, and worked around it.  She jotted down more obvious incentives like ‘job security’ for Xenopoulos…Matt too.  Matt, she stared at his name.  What was she missing?  That’s when it clicked--the population curves that both Matt and Elle had come up with for vampires.  Could the curve explain their motivation?

Pleased to have finally reached the math of the problem, Kendra opened her laptop, and went to work.  First she recreated the curve that showed unchecked growth of the vampire population, then she did her best to recreate the gash she’d seen in Matt’s graph.  If his graph did indeed represented the vampire population, then that gash represented vampire extinction.  It would begin very soon and end quickly.  Kendra wrote “survival?” on the yellow pad near ‘vampires’.  That might explain their having rescued her, but what would happen in the future to make her research important for vampire survival?

Kendra studied the natural vampire population curve again, the one that did not end with extinction.  The graph she’d created rose logarithmically, but her memory of the curves created by Elle and Matt rose until the fifteenth century, and then declined until the Industrial Revolution was in full swing four-hundred years later.  What had she failed to account for during all those years?

Eagerly Kendra opened the digital encyclopedia she’d bought on sale years ago to answer just such esoteric questions.  She skimmed the history of the Holy Inquisition.  The first and worst of it had started too early and not lasted long enough to account for the dip in the number of vampires.  She began to read vampire lore with the hope of finding some clues.  Her bobbed as she struggled to through the various descriptions of vampires, and drooped to the side in the middle of “Slavic and Chinese origins”.

Six hours later her neighbor flipped on his garbage disposal.  His kitchen was directly above Kendra.  She woke with a start that caused a sharp twang in her neck.

“Ow!”  She rubbed at it fruitlessly as she struggled to stand straight.   Her low back was frozen in full slump.  She glanced at the clock on her microwave--quarter to ten. 

“Shit!”  She had an appointment with Phil, who would not be pleased to see her even if she was on time.  He would almost certainly throw her out for good if she were late.  Kendra had no time for the hot shower that her stiff muscles cried out for.  Neither had she time for the coffee her somnolent brain wanted, nor the breakfast her weak and trembling limbs needed.  Instead, she hobbled to the bathroom, brushed her teeth and hair, then hurried to her appointment as well as she was able while hunched forward with her head bent to one side.

Kendra’s low back had loosened by the time she reached the counseling center right at ten, but she couldn’t turn her head to the left without a whole lot of pain.

Phil stepped into the waiting room a minute after she arrived.  “Tanagawa,” he snarled.  He glared at her briefly, causing the other students to look nervously first at Kendra, then at Phil, who ignored them.  He turned sharply back for his office without waiting to see if Kendra followed.  She did.

Before Kendra even had the door closed behind her he started.  “Miss Tanagawa, you missed your appointment Wednesday--time, I might add, that should have been available for a student with a real crisis--”

“And it was,” Kendra interrupted smoothly.  “You spent the last forty-five minutes of that appointment with another student, who I assume was in crisis.”

Phil gaped at her for a moment, his brow still drawn together with anger.  “Am I supposed to be impressed that you hacked the system, but refrained from reading confidential health records?!” he shouted.

“No.”  Kendra sat down.  “Do I detect a teensy issue with control?” 

Phil huffed and puffed some more, but eventually sat in the chair behind his desk.  He fiddled with the paper, pens, and a hinged photo frame for a few minutes.  Kendra waited.  Phil sighed.

“I give up.”  He sighed again.  “Why did you--I mean, are you all right?  Did something happen to keep you from your appointment yesterday?”

“Yes, but I don’t want to talk about all that, not yet anyway--and perhaps never.  I don’t think it would be safe for you.”  Kendra wished her brain was not so fuzzy.  She’d definitely wanted to see Phil, but now that she was here she couldn’t think why.  She looked up toward the ceiling and winced.

“You seem to be in pain.  Is something wrong with your neck?”

“Oh, yeah.  I slept sort of slumped on my couch.”  In the awkward silence that followed, Kendra mentally reviewed the mind map she’d drawn on the yellow pad.  Maybe Phil could help with motivation.

“I need your opinion on a few personalities.”

“Friends of yours?” Phil relaxed and smiled knowingly.

“No,” Kendra brushed aside the irritation that his smug smile caused.  “Almost certainly enemies.”

Phil frowned.  His frown deepened as Kendra described Xenopoulos and Matt and everything that had led up to her last time hop to Elle and the kidnapping that followed.

Pleased that she’d successfully cut the most crazy-sounding elements from her story, Kendra looked at Phil and smiled tentatively.  “So I’d like to know what you think motivates those two people.”

“Miss Tanagawa, do you lose track of time?”

Shocked, Kendra looked at him.  Did he know about her research?  How could he?  “Wha-What do you mean?” she stammered.

“Do you black out, and not know what you’ve done for chunks of time?  Do you find yourself in unexpected places, or in the middle of doing something that you don’t remember having started?  That sort of thing.”  He sounded carefully casual.

Kendra squinted at him.  “You’re checking to see if I’m psychotic.”  She rubbed her neck some more.  “No, I don’t black out, but even if I did, would you please humor a crazy physicist and answer the question?” 

To Kendra’s horror, a tear rolled down her cheek.  Oh yeah, that’s what I wanted to know--am I crazy?