Connie Willis - Blackout

Before she’d gone a quarter of a mile, it began to rain harder, but that was actually a good thing. Even the inquisitive Hodbins wouldn’t try to track her down in this downpour. She turned off into the woods and hurried along the muddy path to the ash tree.

Please don’t let me have just missed it opening, she thought. The drop only opened once an hour, and in another hour it would be dark. The drop was far enough into the woods that its shimmer couldn’t be seen from the road, but with the blackout, any light was suspect, and the Home Guard, for lack of anything better to do, sometimes patrolled the woods, looking for German parachutists. If they or the Hodbins-

She caught a flicker of movement out of the corner of her eye. She turned quickly, straining to catch a glimpse of Alf’s cap or Binnie’s hair ribbon. “What are you doing here?” a man’s voice said from behind her, and she nearly jumped out of her skin. She whirled around. There was a faint shimmer next to the ash tree. Through it she could see the net and Badri at the console. “You’re not supposed to go through till the tenth,” he was saying. “Weren’t you notified that your drop had been rescheduled?”

“That’s why I’m here,” another man’s voice said angrily as the shimmer grew brighter. “I demand to know why it’s been postponed. I-”

“This will have to wait,” Badri said. “I’m in the middle of a retrieval-”

Eileen walked through the shimmer and into the lab.

At the time, we didn’t know that it was a vital battle…. We didn’t know we were quite so close to defeat, either.

“THEY’RE SENDING YOU TO DUNKIRK?” CHARLES ASKED when Michael got off the phone. “What happened to Pearl Harbor?”

“That’s what I’d like to know,” Michael said. He stormed over to the lab to confront Badri.

Linna met him at the door. “He’s preparing to send someone through. Can I be of help?”

“Yes. You can tell me why the hell you changed the order of my drops! I can’t go to the Dunkirk evacuation with an American accent. I’m supposed to be a reporter for the London Daily Herald. You’ve got to-”

“I think you’d better speak to Badri,” Linna said. “If you’ll wait here-” and walked quickly over to Badri at the console. He was busily typing figures into the console, glancing up at the screens, typing again. A young man Michael didn’t know stood behind him watching, obviously the historian who was going to be sent through. He was dressed in threadbare tweed flannels and wire-rimmed spectacles. A 1930s Cambridge don, Michael thought.

Linna leaned over Badri briefly and came back. “He said it will be at least another half hour,” she reported. “If you don’t want to wait, he can ring you up at-”

“I’ll wait.”

“Would you like to sit down?” she asked, and before he could say no, the telephone rang, and she went to answer it. “No, sir, he’s sending someone through right now,” he heard her say to the person on the other end. “No, sir, not yet. He’s going through to Oxford.”

Well, he’d been close. He wondered what he was researching in Oxford in the 1930s. The Inklings? The admission of women to the university?

“No, sir, it’s just a recon and prep,” Linna said. “Phipps doesn’t leave for his assignment till the end of next week.”

A recon and prep? Those were only used for especially complicated or dangerous assignments. He looked interestedly over at Phipps, who’d moved to the net. What could he be observing in 1930s Oxford that was that complicated? It couldn’t be anything dangerous-he looked too pale and spindly.

“No, sir, he’s only going to one temporal location,” Linna said into the phone. A pause while she consulted her console. “No, sir. His only other assignment was to 1666.”

“Stand in the center,” Badri said, and Phipps stepped under the draped folds and stood on the positioning marks, pushing his spectacles up on his nose.

“You want a list of all the historians currently on assignment and scheduled to go this week and next?” Linna asked the person on the telephone. “Spatial locations or just temporal?” A pause. “Historian, assignment, dates.” She scribbled it down, he hoped more legibly than Shakira had with the note she’d left him. “Yes, sir, I’ll get that for you straightaway. Do you wish to remain on the line?” she asked, and he must have said yes, because she laid the receiver down and scurried over to Badri, who was still getting Phipps into position, then over to an auxiliary terminal.

“All set?” Badri said to Phipps.

Phipps reached into his tweed jacket, checked something in the inside pocket, then nodded. “You’re not sending me through on a Saturday, are you?” he asked. “If there’s slippage, that will put me there on a Sunday, and-”

“No, a Wednesday,” Badri said. “August seventh.”

“August seventh?” Phipps asked Badri.

“That’s right,” Linna said, “1536,” and Michael looked over at her, confused, but she was back at the phone, reading off a printout. “London, the trial of Anne Boleyn-”

“Yes, the seventh,” Badri said to Phipps. “The drop will open every half hour. Move a bit to the right.” He motioned with his hand. “A bit more.” Phipps shambled obediently to the right. “A bit to the left. Good. Now hold that.” He walked back over to the console and hit several keys, and the folds of the net began to lower around Phipps. “I need you to note the amount of temporal slippage on the drop.”

“October tenth 1940,” Linna said into the phone, “to December eighteenth-”

“Why?” Phipps asked. “You’re not expecting more slippage than usual on this drop, are you?”

“Don’t move,” Badri said.

“There shouldn’t be any slippage. I’m not going anywhere near-”

“Cairo, Egypt,” Linna said into the phone.

“Ready?” Badri asked Phipps.

Phipps said, “No, I want to know-” and was gone in a shimmer of light.

Badri came over to Michael. “I assume you received my message?”

“Yeah,” Michael said. “What the hell’s going on?”

“There’s no need to swear,” Badri said mildly.

“That’s what you think! You can’t change my schedule at the last minute like this. I’ve already done the research for Pearl Harbor. I’ve already gotten my costume and papers and money and had an implant done so I sound like an American.”

“It can’t be helped. Here’s the new order of your drops.” Badri handed him a printout. “Dunkirk evacuation,” the list read, “Pearl Harbor, El Alamein, Battle of the Bulge, second World Trade Center attack, beginning of the Pandemic in Salisbury.”

“You’ve changed all of them?” Michael shouted. “You can’t just move them around like this! They were in the order I gave you for a reason. Look,” he said, shoving the list under Badri’s nose. “Pearl Harbor and the World Trade Center and the Battle of the Bulge are all American. I scheduled them together so I could get one L-and-A implant. Which I’ve already had! How am I supposed to be a London Daily Herald war correspondent reporting on the evacuation from Dunkirk with this accent?”

“I apologize for that,” Badri said. “We attempted to contact you before the implant. I’m afraid you’ll have to have it reversed.”

“Reversed? And then what the hell do I do about Pearl Harbor? I’m supposed to be an American Navy lieutenant. You’ve got these alternating, for God’s sake-British, American, British! This isn’t an ordinary mission where I’m there for a year. I’m only going to be in each of these places a few days. I can’t afford to spend it faking an accent and worrying about what to call things.”

“I understand,” Badri said placatingly, “but-”

The door opened and a burly young man charged in. “I want to speak to you,” he said to Badri and marched him over to the far corner of the lab. “What the bloody hell do you think you’re doing moving my drop up?” Michael heard him say, so apparently he wasn’t the only one whose mission they’d been messing with.

He looked over at Linna. She was still on the phone. “-to February sixth, 1942,” she read from the printout.

“How the bloody hell do you expect me to be ready by Monday morning?” the burly guy shouted.

“Denys Atherton,” Linna droned on, “March first, 1944-”

“I understand your vexation,” Badri said.

“My vexation?” the young man exploded.

Go ahead, Michael thought. Hit him. Do it for both of us, but he didn’t. He stormed out, banging the door behind him so violently that Linna jumped. “-to June fifth, 1944,” she said into the phone.

Jesus, how many historians did they have going to World War II right now? Charles was right. They were going to start crashing into each other. He wondered if that was why they’d changed the order of his drops. But if that was the case, they’d have sent him to Salisbury or the World Trade Center.

Badri came back over to Michael. “Can’t you pose as an American reporter?”

“It isn’t just the accent. It’s the prep. I can’t be ready in three days. I don’t have any clothes or papers and I’ve only done the general research, not the-”

“We’re aware you’ll need time for additional prep,” Badri said placatingly, “so we’ve moved the drop to Saturday-”

“You’ve given me one extra day? I’ll need at least two weeks. And now I suppose you can’t do that either.”

“No, no, of course we can reschedule,” Badri said, turning to the console, “but you’ll have to go with lab availability, and we’re extremely heavily booked. Let me see,” he peered at the screen, “the fourteenth might work… no… it will be at least three weeks. I think you’d do better to shorten the prep time with implants. The lab can arrange for you to-”

“I’ve already had my limit. You’re only allowed three, and an L-and-A counts as two. And I had ‘Historical Events-1941,’ which will come in really handy at Dunkirk.”

“There’s no need for sarcasm,” Badri said. “The lab can arrange for a waiver so you can have an additional-”

“I don’t want a waiver. I want you to change the order back the way it was.”

“I’m afraid that’s impossible. And the next open date we have is May twenty-third, which will throw your other drops later. There’s a possibility we might be able to work you in sooner if there’s a cancellation, but-” The screen began blinking. “Sorry. This will have to wait.”

“It can’t. I-”

“Linna,” Badri said, ignoring him. “Retrieval.”

The beeping became more insistent, and a faint shimmer appeared within the folds of the net. It brightened and spread, and Gerald Phipps was standing in the gauzy folds, pushing his spectacles up on his nose. “I told you there wouldn’t be any slippage,” he said.

“None at all?” Badri asked.

“Nearly. Twenty-two minutes. It only took me two hours to arrange everything. I posted the letters, made my trunk call, took the-”

“What about your return?” Badri asked. “Did the drop open on time?”