5

A pinching sort of pain in her left jaw woke Kendra.  She opened her eyes to see a blurred close-up of her computer keyboard, and lifted her head.  She must have fallen asleep on her crossed arms, but at some point she had stretched her arms out as if reaching for something beyond her grasp, a thing she’d done in sleep since she was fourteen.  Kendra smiled, then frowned.  Was that a new memory, or a real one? 

She shook her head, and raised a hand to her left jaw.  It was pointless, she tried to reassure herself as she felt the furrow in her skin made by the edge of the keyboard, to think of “real” and “new” or even “old”.  Time was circular.  No doubt people from Earth’s future made trips into the past to alter it.  How else to explain the fall of the Roman Empire?  Any day now someone would go back and fix the Dark Ages.  Perhaps then world war, global warming, and over-population would never become issues.  She should keep an unalterable diary of these things, but hadn’t thought of a way to do so.  She glanced around her spacious lab at the evidence that changes in the past did alter the present.

“My thoughts have not changed, or I wouldn’t recognize the difference,” she muttered, afraid that trying to remember everything as it had been would drive her nuts.  The thought was not a new one and, having reached its usual endpoint, Kendra dropped it.  She wanted breakfast, but one look in the little mirror that she found clamped to the storage cubicles behind her told her that she needed a hairbrush and at least half an hour for the dent her jaw to vanish before she could face the unwitting public.

Kendra sighed and hunted for her reliable low-tech coffee maker:  a Bialetti espresso pot and a hot plate.  She had bet that they, like the mirror, the piles of electronic equipment, and all the other things she regularly used, would show up in every iteration of her lab during her stay at Stamford.  “--which soon will be over,” she thought as she spooned coffee into the bottom of the metal coffee pot.  New oscilloscope in mind, Kendra thought she wouldn’t have minded an espresso machine—maybe in the next version, if there was one.

She needed to find a suitable place to continue her work after graduation, an employer that would offer her money, but not seize her research for some warped military application.  Yeah, right.  She screwed the top onto the coffee machine and plunked it on the hot plate, then looked around her new lab for The List.  

She found it under the metro phone book.  It took her a long time to recognize the current version of The List because it was huge--half the thickness of the metro phone book.  In her diminutive lab at the far end of the hall, her list of job offers had filled half of one single page.   Kendra resolved to cut The List down to the ten or twenty best offers over breakfast--she glanced at the clock in her computer--in 28 minutes, more or less.  She checked the mirror, but could still see the dent in her jaw.  Her stomach growled.  She leaned against the bench.  How long had it been since she ate?  She ought to be able to remember.  Her brain ran over and over the events of the last two days, fixed on the fact that her memory was the only repository for the way things really were—or had been. 

Recognizing the fixation as a symptom of cerebral hypoglycemia, Kendra yanked open the drawers of her lab bench, and pawed through one after the other until she found what she was looking for--maltodextrin gel.  She tore open a packet and squeezed the contents into her mouth--boysenberry, not her favorite, but it would do. 

While she waited for the glucose to hit her brain, Kendra wandered to the window of her new lab and looked out.  She could see The Commons, as the quadrangle at Stamford was called, another confirmation that she really did have the best lab in the physics department.  Questions that would have occurred to most people sooner occurred to her then:  how long, in the time line she currently inhabited, had she had the lab?  Had she had some sort of media exposure that caused The List to be so big?

Still shaky, she hoisted herself onto her stool, then typed her own name into the Google search box.   “Whew!” she exhaled a few seconds later.  250,000 hits, and on the first three pages, most of the listings were actually about her.  She’d been interviewed by the major national papers.  All the major science journals had published her scholarly articles.  Feeling stronger and more coherent as the first molecules of glucose seeped into her neurons, Kendra leaned forward to squint at the titles. 

“Damn!”  She sat back.  For one entire year in the old time line she’d submitted those same articles to those same journals, and been rejected.  She shook her head, marveling at the length to which a self-made woman had to go to get published. 

“It was easy”, she replied to an imaginary reporter who asked how she did it, “hard work and good science.”  The tinge of bitterness in Kendra’s mouth made her snort.  Ten minutes to breakfast.

She noticed an article from People magazine, and opened it.

            Let no one say that science is boring, not with Kendra Tanagawa blazing a path across not only the physics firmament, but also the reign of time.  Need to go back in forty minutes to get to your dentist appointment on time?  “Certainly possible sometime soon,” says Tanagawa, a 5’2” hip 19-year-old, about to earn a PhD in physics…

Wow.  Two emotions warred within Kendra.  The first, she was embarrassed to admit, was pride.  When was the last time that physics had had panache--Richard Feynman?  The second worried her:  why had she blabbed about her research to People magazine if she were being coy with the scientific press? 

At least that solved one mystery.  The People article had probably set Xenopoulos on Kendra’s trail.  Why had she been so stupid as to talk to People?  Distracted, Kendra slid off her stool, and grabbed her book bag.  She stuffed The List--no wonder it’s so huge--inside, and walked out the door.  Only after the lock clicked behind her did she remember that she hadn’t brushed her hair.  Oh well, it wasn’t as if the press would lurk around the physics building at 7 a.m. on a Saturday just to click photos of Kendra Tanagawa.  She felt her jaw line.  At least the dent was gone.

4

Kendra made a perfect landing in her lab.  Why couldn’t Healy have been around for that one?  Maybe the unpleasantness with her boss would change in this version the day.  She squinted at the date and time on her computer, but it was so far away she needed to take several steps toward it before she saw that it was indeed 5 p.m. Friday once again.  Her lab was bigger.  Her oscilloscope was brand new!  Kendra threw her shoulders back proudly, and hurried to the door.  She stepped into the hall, turned toward the fire door, and stopped, shocked.  Hers was the lab closest to the door.  Yes!  The youngest PhD candidate was not only the best, but also at last the most well-funded.

Back in her lab with the door shut, Kendra wondered if Healy would show up again.  She reflexively checked her wrist as if it would tell her when exactly he’d shown up last time.  She laughed.  She hadn’t worn a watch for over a year.  Her research made time meaningless, hence her triple alarm system.  Speaking of which--

She found her keyboard, and entered a digital reminder to talk with the department secretary Monday morning, in case Healy didn’t show up in this Friday.  She needed to get a feel for whether she was in his good graces or not.  Next Kendra wound the old alarm clock, then quickly reset the steps in her mechanical alarm.  She tore the bottom from some form--a bank statement with an impressive total, nice!--scrawled a note, and stuck it on a blunt fishhook before she cranked the old fish pole back into place--the last step in her Rube Goldberg alarm.  Finally, she added the third shield against missed appointments and forgotten tasks:  she set Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive” to play Monday morning on her old MP3 player.  It might be time for a more triumphant theme song, she thought, but then remembered her snarky colleagues and thought better of it.

Reminders in place, Kendra put Healy and department politics out of mind, and buried herself in her research.  If she could figure out why her latest landing had been perfect while others sprawled her across the floor, then she should have a clue how better to tweak the “where” of her travel.

An hour later a knock on her door jerked Kendra out of the complex middle of her very long equation.

“What?!” she snapped toward the door

“Ms. Tanagawa?  It’s Professor Healy.  May I come in?”

“Damn.”  So Healy had shown up again, just when she’d been making progress.  Kendra swore again, scribbled what she remembered on a print out of her equation, and stashed her work under a pile of books and papers--some things hadn’t changed in her new lab.  She slid off her stool (neither her Japanese father nor her Estonian mother had any of the genes for height) to answer the door.

“Oh,” she said, unsure whether or not she should mask her annoyance.  Healy had with him a woman Kendra didn’t recognize.  “Who’s this?”  She forced her frozen face into some semblance of a smile.

“This is Doctor Xenopoulos,” said Healy.  “She works with our biggest supporter.  She read the paper you published last month on the relationship between matter and light…?” Professor Healy’s voice rose, and Kendra was sure that he hadn’t read her article, nothing more than a summary of some of her early work--how had she known that?  She’d been unpublished in the previous time line. 

Dr. Xenopoulos glanced at Healy with her eyebrows raised, as if she, too, realized that the department chair had not read his best candidate’s latest work.  Even better, the visitor did not approve of that lapse.  Kendra felt herself warm to the stranger, who smiled and extended her hand. 

Kendra tried not to stare.  The woman looked just like Kendra’s vision of herself in front of the TED crowd, except that Xenopoulos was taller, and hair was wavy and a shade lighter in color.  She wore it in one of those lose buns that lingered as if with postcoital neglect.  Kendra had tried to twist, wind, or lump her hair into such a bun, but hers were either tight enough to make her look like a prison matron, or they fell down immediately.  There was nothing sexy about anything she did with her hair.

“I don’t want to interrupt you long,” Xenopoulos glanced unhurriedly around Kendra’s lab, “but I do want to encourage you to apply in our new grant cycle.  It opens next week.”  She smiled at Kendra again.

“Next week?” Kendra blurted.  “I thought--” she glanced at Professor Healy, but he just looked nervous.  About what?  Kendra turned her attention back to Xenopoulos.  “Sorry, but you are from American Missile, aren’t you?”

“Yes.”

“I thought you accepted grant applications only in January.”

“The board voted for a second cycle this year.”  The strange, elegant woman shrugged, and then spotted the Kendra’s computer.  She looked intently into Kendra’s eyes.  “Any chance one might peek at your current work?” 

Kendra frowned.  Xenopoulos had emphasized “current” as if she knew that Kendra was holding back.  

The corner of Xenopoulos’ mouth quirked up, as if she knew what Kendra was thinking.  Her gaze dropped to Kendra’s chest.

Kendra drew in a deep breath, eyes fixed on Xenopoulos as she stepped sideways until she stood between the imposing woman and her bench.  Had Xenopoulos just flirted with her?  The woman suddenly seemed exponentially more dangerous.  Kendra knew she couldn’t risk any more time near Xenopoulos without a lot more data and a very good plan.  She didn’t bother to look at Healy.  He seemed more a part of the danger than any step toward a solution. 

“Um, no, I’m afraid not,” Kendra answered Xenopoulos’ question.  “My work is at a very delicate stage.  In fact,” she felt bolstered by righteous indignation, “I must ask you to excuse me.  I really need to get back to it.”

“Of course,” Xenopoulos smiled, but her eyes looked disturbingly hungry, and as she turned for the door they swept Kendra’s body and her lab once more.

Healy took a deep breath, as if coming out of a trance, and looked around, momentarily confused until he spotted Xenopoulos’ curvaceous backside already at the door.  “Well,” he put his hands together and looked at Kendra, “that’s that, I guess.  Thank you, Ms. Tanagawa.”  The department chairman hurried after his guest with the lusty eagerness of a teenaged boy.  Maybe he was just a patsy in whatever was going on. 

As Kendra locked the door of her lab behind her unwanted visitors, it was to Xenopoulos that her thoughts turned.  What did the strange and dangerous woman really do for American Missile?  Spy sprang to mind. 

Kendra hadn’t anticipated that her research might prove dangerous to her, at least not in the way that attracted spies.  She felt a frisson of fear as she hopped onto her lab stool, but as her mind returned to her work, real world concerns about industrial spies faded.  After a quick glance around her lab, she forgot them entirely.