Doomsday Book Read Online Free PDF

blue-and-white Mary next to the figure of Joseph. It fell over. He set it carefully back up.
    "It should be comforting, James," she said briskly. "Because it's obvious you've thought of every possible dreadful thing that could happen to Kivrin. Which means she's perfectly all right. She's probably already sitting in a castle having peacock pie for lunch, although I suppose it isn't the same time of day there."
    He shook his head. "There will have been slippage -- God only knows how much, since Gilchrist didn't do parameter checks. Badri thought it would be several days."
    Or several weeks, he thought, and if it were the middle of January, there wouldn't be any holy days for Kivrin to determine the date by. Even a discrepancy of several hours could put her on the Oxford-Bath road in the middle of the night.
    "I do hope the slippage won't mean she'll miss Christmas," Mary said. "She was terribly keen to observe a mediaeval Christmas mass."
    "It's two weeks till Christmas there," he said. "They're still using the Julian calendar. The Gregorian calendar wasn't adopted till 1752."
    "I know. Mr. Gilchrist orated on the subject of the Julian calendar in his speech. He went on at considerable length about the history of calendar reform and the discrepancy in dates between the Old Style and Gregorian calendars. At one point I thought he was going to draw a diagram. What day is it there?"
    "The thirteenth of December."
    "Perhaps it's just as well we don't know the exact time. Dierdre and Colin were in the States for a year, and I was worried sick about them, but out of synch. I was always imagining Colin being run over on the way to school when it was actually the middle of the night. Fretting doesn't work properly unless one can visualize disasters in all their particulars, including the weather and the time of day. For a time I worried about not knowing what to worry about, and then I didn't worry at all. Perhaps it will be the same with Kivrin."
    It was true. He had been visualizing Kivrin as he last saw her, lying amid the wreckage with her temple bloody, but that was probably all wrong. She had gone through nearly an hour ago. Even if no traveller had come along yet, the road would get cold, and he couldn't imagine Kivrin lying there docilely in the Middle Ages with her eyes closed.
    The first time he had gone through to the past he had been doing there-and-backs while they calibrated the fix. They had sent him through in the middle of the quad in the middle of the night, and he was supposed to stand there while they did the calculations on the fix and picked him up again. But he was in Oxford in 1956, and the check was bound to take at least ten minutes. He had sprinted four blocks down the Broad to see the old Bodleian and nearly given the tech heart failure when she opened the net and couldn't find him.
    Kivrin would not still be lying there with her eyes shut, not with the mediaeval world spread out before her. He could see her suddenly, standing there in that ridiculous white cloak, scanning the Oxford-Bath road for unwary travellers, ready to fling herself back on the ground at a moment's notice, and in the meantime taking it all in, her implanted hands clasped together in a prayer of impatience and delight, and he felt suddenly reassured.
    She would be perfectly all right. She would step back through the net in two weeks' time, her white cloak grubby beyond belief, full of stories about harrowing adventures and hair's- breadth escapes, tales to curdle the blood, no doubt, things that would give him nightmares for weeks after her telling him about them.
    "She'll be all right, you know, James," Mary said, frowning at him.
    "I know," he said. He went and got them another half pint apiece. "When did you say your great-nephew was getting in?"
    "At three. He's staying a week, and I've no idea what to do with him. Except worry, of course. I suppose I could take him to the Ashmolean. Children always like museums, don't they?