Allergic To Time Read Online Free PDF Page A

that if I stayed away from the others for too long they would decide to shut me out of whatever was   happening there.  
    The nurse turned to me and raised a sharp eyebrow. “He can’t breathe the air. At all.” She shook her head. “It’s like his lungs can’t process it. It’s like he’s allergic to it.”
    I stopped in my tracks, while she gave one last sharp look in the direction of the others and left the hall.  
    ***  
    “I’m telling you, I have to leave right now.” Martin was pacing again. “You’ll have to drive me back now, there’s not enough time to walk.” Martin was still concerned about making his 3pm seminar. In the six years I had been his student – on and off – I had never known him to miss a single class, cancel a single lecture. And I would know, considering that as an eager undergrad student I had never missed one myself.  
    “I think we have more important things to worry about than a missed class!” I said, pointing towards the blue hospital room.   Martin leant against the windows, his arms pressed up against the glass and his head towards the floor. When he didn’t reply to me I walked over. “Hey,” I said. “Calm down, you’ll get to your class on time. Don’t go getting so stressed.”
    “You don’t understand Anna.” He paused for a second. “Like I told you, you shouldn’t be here.” He checked around to see where the man in black was. He had made his way down to the other end of the hall where there was a window to the outside world that he was peering through. Still, Martin was careful, and whispered, “You can’t get caught up in this.”
    I leant in closer to both the window and Martin. “Caught up in what?” My voice was also low, though I was sure the man in black was faraway enough that he wouldn’t be able to hear us. And besides, I wasn’t sure why it would be such a big deal if he could.  
    Martin’s hands returned to his hair, golden brown strands just beginning to be infected with grey. In the six years I”d known him I had never seen him this ruffled, this badly composed. Not even four years previously, around the time that his fiancé had died. My thoughts briefly returned to that tragedy, but Martin’s hushed voice quickly drew me back to the present moment.  
    But it wasn’t like I hadn’t managed to find out on my own. Did he really think that I wouldn’t stumble upon his secret life during my research? I’d pieced together enough of the puzzle: the articles written under a pseudonym, the locked files in his office, the mysterious visits from the man in black. Of course, I hadn’t been ready to confront him about it till I was absolutely sure - or I would have looked like a total nutcase, accusing my university professor of working for a secret government agency that dealt with time travel mysteries. Instead I antagonised him with my thesis and my own research, pushing for time travel to be included in the syllabus, watching him squirm every time the subject came up in class. He continued to toe the company line - backed up by his own published book on the subject - that time travel was impossible. Full stop.  
    But here we were, finally, at the scene of the crime so to speak. I hadn’t expected Martin to come completely clean with me right away, but I had expected some degree of honesty. But he was denying even the possibility that the guy in the hospital bed in could be a time traveller. I was so over all of it: I was over Martin’s dogmatic lectures that he gave every year, telling his admiring students that time travel was a physical impossibility; I was over his hostile attitude towards my own research, his haughty attitude, and his covering up his own secret second career as a time travel investigator.  
    “Well, come on,” I said, pushing him for a response. “If there was anyone, anyone, who you should have involved in this, it is me.”
    I starred at him for a long minute, before he finally raised his head. He