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.
