Connie Willis - Blackout

“I’ll let you know as soon as I’ve found something,” Badri said to Polly, and this obviously wasn’t the time to ask them to please hurry.

“I’ll come back later,” she said.

“You can’t cancel it!” the man in the cowboy hat shouted. “I’ve been prepping to go to the Battle of Plum Creek for six months!”

Polly ducked past him and started for the door, waving at Linna, who was still on the phone. “No, I realize you’ve already had your implants-” she was saying. Polly opened the door and went out.

And nearly fell over Colin, who was sitting on the pavement, his back to the lab’s wall. “Sorry,” he said and scrambled to his feet. “Where have you been? I’ve been looking all over Oxford for you.”

“What are you doing out here?” Polly asked. “Why didn’t you come in?”

He looked sheepish. “I can’t. It’s off-limits. Mr. Dunworthy’s being completely unreasonable. I asked him to let me go on an assignment, and he phoned the lab and told them I wasn’t to be allowed in.”

“Are you certain you didn’t attempt to sneak into the net while someone else was going through?”

“No. All I did was say that on certain assignments someone my age could provide a different point of view from an older historian-”

“What assignment?” Polly asked. “The Crusades?”

“Why does everyone keep bringing up the Crusades? That was something I wanted to do when I was a child, and I am not-”

“Mr. Dunworthy’s only trying to protect you. The Crusades are a dangerous place.”

“Oh, you’re a fine one to talk about dangerous places,” he said. “And Mr. Dunworthy thinks every place is too dangerous, which is ridiculous. When he was young, he went to the Blitz. He went all sorts of dangerous places, and back then they didn’t even know where they were going. And the place I wanted to go wasn’t remotely dangerous. It was the evacuation of the children from London. In World War II.”

Where she was going. Perhaps Merope was right.

“Speaking of dangerous,” he said, “here are all the raids. I didn’t know when you were coming back, so I did them from September seventh to December thirty-first. The list’s awfully long, so I recorded it as well, in case you want to do an implant.” He handed her a memory tab. “The times are when the bombing began, not when the air-raid alert sirens went. I’m still working on those, but I thought I’d better get the raid times to you in case you were going soon. And if you are, the raids generally began twenty minutes after the sirens sounded. Oh, and by the way, if you’re on a bus, you may not be able to hear the sirens. The noise of the engine drowns them out.”

“Thank you, Colin,” Polly said, looking at the pages. “You must have put in hours and hours of work on this.”

“I did,” he said proudly. “It wasn’t easy to find out what had been hit. The newspapers weren’t allowed to publish the dates or addresses of specific buildings that were bombed-”

Polly nodded, still looking at the list. “They couldn’t print anything which might aid the enemy.”

“And a lot of the government’s records were destroyed in the war and afterward, with the pinpoint and then the Pandemic. And there were lots of stray bombs. It’s not like the V-1 and V-2 attacks, where they have the exact times and coordinates. I’ve listed the major targets and areas of concentration,” he said, showing her on the list, “but there were lots of other things hit. The research said over a million buildings were destroyed, and this only lists a fraction of those. So just because the list says Bloomsbury, it doesn’t mean you’re safe wandering about some other part of London. Particularly the East End-Stepney and Whitechapel and places like that. They were the hardest hit. And the buildings on the list are only ones that were completely destroyed, not those that suffered partial damage or had their windows blown out. Hundreds of people were killed by flying glass or shrapnel from anti-aircraft shells. You need to keep as close to buildings as you can for protection if you’re out during a raid. Shrapnel-”

“Can kill me. I know. You’ve been spending too much time with Mr. Dunworthy. You’re beginning to sound just like him.”

“I am not. It’s just that I don’t want anything to happen to you. And Mr. Dunworthy’s right about its being dangerous. Thirty thousand civilians were killed during the Blitz.”

“I know. I’ll be careful, I promise.”

“And if you do get hit by shrapnel or something, don’t worry. I promise I’ll come rescue you if you get in trouble.”

Oh, dear, Merope was right. “I promise I’ll stay close to buildings,” she said lightly. “Speaking of Mr. Dunworthy, you haven’t told him I’m back, have you?”

“No. I haven’t even told him I’m here. He thinks I’m at school.”

Good, then she needn’t worry about him giving her away. “Thank you for the list. It’s enormously helpful.” She smiled at him, then remembered that wasn’t a good idea under the circumstances. “I’d best get on with my prep,” she said and started across the road.

“Wait,” he said, running to catch up with her. “Is there any other research you need me to do? Besides the siren times, I mean? Do you need a list of the other shelters in case you can’t get to an Underground station?” he asked eagerly. “Or a list of the types of bombs?”

“No. You’ve spent too much time helping me already, Colin, and you’ve your own schoolwork to do-”

“We’re out on holiday all this week,” he said, “and I don’t mind. Truly. It’s good practice for when I’m an historian. I’ll go do them straightaway,” and he loped off down the street.

Polly went over to Research and had Colin’s list of raids implanted so she wouldn’t have to waste time memorizing them, picked up her papers and letters from Props, and then went over to the Bodleian to study. She’d already memorized all this material once before, when she’d thought she was going to the Blitz first, but she’d forgotten most of it in the interim. She went over rationing, the blackout, the events a contemp in the autumn of 1940 would know about-the Battle of Britain, Operation Sealion, the Battle of the North Atlantic-and then committed the map of Oxford Street to memory. She debated doing the same with the Underground map, but those were posted in every tube station. Instead, she’d better memorize the numbers of the buses and-

“I’ve been looking all over for you,” Colin said, flopping down in a chair across the table from her. “I forgot to ask you, where will you be living while you’re there? There are thousands of shelters in London.”

“Somewhere in Marylebone, Kensington, or Notting Hill. It depends on where I can find a room to let.” She told him about Mr. Dunworthy’s mile-and-a-half-from-Oxford-Street restriction.

“I’ll begin with the shelters inside that radius, then,” he said, “and if there’s time, I’ll map the rest of the West End. Oh, and when are you coming back? So I can mark the shelters you should stay out of.”

“October twenty-second,” she said.

“Six weeks,” he repeated thoughtfully. “And then you’re doing the zeppelin attacks. How long will you be in 1914?”

“I don’t know. It hasn’t been scheduled yet. I can’t afford to think about it just now. I’ve got to concentrate on making it through this one. Look, Colin, I’ve got a lot of studying to do. Were the dates all you needed?”

“Yes. No. I need to ask a favor of you.”

“Colin, I’d be glad to put in a good word for you with Mr. Dunworthy, but I doubt very much if he’ll listen. He’s adamant about not letting anyone go to the past until they’re twenty. And I know you’ve already been to the past and probably one of the most dangerous places you could ever go, but-”

“No, it’s nothing like that.”

“It’s not?”

“No. I want you to go real-time when you go to the Blitz, not flash-time.”

“I am,” she said, surprised. That certainly wasn’t what she’d been expecting him to say. “Mr. Dunworthy insisted on a half hour on-and-off in case I’m injured, so it has to be real-time.”

“Oh, good.”

What was he up to? “Why do you want me to go real-time on this assignment?”

“Not on this assignment. On all your assignments.”

“All my-?”

“Yes. So I can catch up. In age. The thing is…” he paused and swallowed hard. “The thing is, I think you’re simply smashing-”

Oh, dear. “Colin, you’re-” She stopped herself from saying “a child” just in time. “-seventeen. I’m twenty-five-”

“I know, but it’s not as though we were ordinary people. If we were, I agree, it would be rather off-putting-”

“And illegal.”

“And illegal,” he conceded, “but we’re not, we’re historians. Or, at least you’re an historian, and I will be, and we’ve got time travel, so I needn’t always be younger than you. Or illegal.” He grinned. “Listen, if I do four two-year assignments or six eighteen-month assignments, and I do them all flash-time, I can be twenty-five by the time you come back from the Blitz.”

“You can’t-”

“I know, Mr. Dunworthy’s a problem, but I’ll think of some way to convince him. And even if he prevents me from going to the past till I’m third year, I can still manage it so long as you don’t do any more assignments flash-time.”

“Colin-”

“It’s not like I’m asking you to wait years and years. Well, it would be years and years, but mine, not yours, and I don’t mind. And it wouldn’t have to be all that many years if you took me with you to the Blitz.”

“Absolutely not.”

“I don’t mean to do the Blitz. If I get killed, I’ll never catch up to you. I’d go north to where the evacuees went.”

“No,” Polly said. “And I thought you wanted to catch up to me. If you go with me, our comparative ages will stay the same.”

“Not if I don’t come back with you. I could stay till the end of the war-that would be five years-and then come back flash-time. That would make me twenty-two, and I’d only have two or three assignments to go. I could do those flash-time as well, so you wouldn’t have to wait any time at all.”

She must put a stop to this. “Colin, you need to find someone your own age.”

“Exactly. And you’ll be my own age as soon as-”

“This is ridiculous. You’ll change your mind a thousand times about what you want between now and when you’re twenty-five. You changed your mind about wanting to go to the Crusades-”

“No, I didn’t.”

“But you said-”

“I only tell people that so they won’t try to talk me out of it. I fully intend to go there and the World Trade Center. And I won’t change my mind about this either. How old were you when you knew you wanted to be an historian?”

“Fourteen, but-”

“And you still want to be one, don’t you?”

“Colin, that’s different.”

“How? You knew what you wanted, and I know what I want. And I’m three years older than you were. I know you think this is some sort of childish calf love, that seventeen’s too young to be in love with someone-”

No, she thought, I know it’s not, and felt suddenly sorry for him.