The Bellbottom Incident Read Online Free PDF Page B

weeded out Nate. I had expected it, but it was still jarring. I had never made a journey into the past without him, and I’d come to depend on him in more ways than one.
    No Sabina either. I don’t know why I’d expected her to meet us, as if she would have spent two days waiting by the book sculpture, but in the back of my mind I guess I had.
    I blinked in the bright sunlight, then let out my breath, which I had been holding in anticipation of being left behind. With my next breath, I took in the familiar scent of the campus—the sweetness of the decomposing fall leaves, sharp cooking smells from the nearby student cafeteria, pine needles…and a couple of less familiar ones. Car exhaust fumes and cigarette smoke were rife in the air, and cigarette butts and pop and beer bottles littered the ground by my feet. I resisted the urge to bend down to clean up the mess and instead reached out to touch the sculpture itself, which looked new, unweathered by thirty-plus years of alternating hot and cold seasons. Shaped like a large letter V laid on its side, it was a portrayal of a half-open paper book, its marble pages chiseled with famous quotations. ( A room without books is like a body without a soul. ) The three of us were inside its seven-foot pages, where we were sheltered from curious eyes.
    “I told Kirkland he wouldn’t be able to come and that I would arrive just fine,” Dr. Little said smugly as he took his duffel bag back from Abigail.  
    “And you were right.” I peered out from behind the sculpture. Students, individually and in clumps, were making their way across the plaza toward the cafeteria for lunch. We heard the campus clock tower across the lake chime one o’clock.  
    Leaving the blanket and water tucked under the sculpture in case Sabina returned, we emerged unhurriedly, as if we belonged on campus on the early afternoon of Sunday of October 31, 1976. Caution really wasn’t necessary. If it wasn’t all right for us to be seen, if our presence was likely to interfere with anyone’s path or the course of their day, then History would not have let us leave the shelter of the Open Book. We crossed the small green to the paved plaza. The campus, as familiar to me as the back of my hand, was both the same and disconcertingly different. The two-story Hypatia House, where I worked, was in its place farther up the lakeside path, which was no surprise as it was one of the original nineteenth-century buildings. The trees fronting it stood in a different configuration, though, and had shed most of their fall leaves. In the other direction, down by the bend in the lake, I could see that construction had begun on a future campus eyesore, the square cement building destined to house the English department. No work was being done on it at the moment, however, it being Sunday. Just a quiet autumn day on campus.
    Only one of the Science Quad buildings was missing—the balloon-roofed building that would eventually become the Time Travel Engineering lab. Its spot was occupied by five stories of stained concrete that looked to be a dorm. Perhaps its occupants were the ones responsible for the late-night party that had left the Open Book littered with trash.  
    Somewhere nearby, in the physics building some ways up the lakeside path or in one of the graduate student dorms, were a young Xavier Mooney, Gabriel Rojas, and Lewis Sunder, only a couple of years into their PhDs. The thought sent a tingle down my spine.
    I had forgotten that October 31 would be Halloween, of course. Decorations—skeletons and ghosts and such—hung here and there in dorm and office windows. I wondered what Sabina was thinking about this strange ritual.  
    We didn’t see any sign of her dark locks or Xavier’s white lab coat, if she was indeed wearing it, among the students crossing the plaza, so we turned toward the cafeteria. It looked just as it did in the present, except that the posters in its large windows advertised different