Blackout

Oxford-April 2060

POLLY HURRIED OUT BALLIOL’S GATE, UP THE BROAD, AND down Catte Street, hoping Mr. Dunworthy hadn’t glanced out his windows and seen her standing in the quad talking to Michael and Merope. I should have told them not to say anything about my being back, she thought, but she’d have had to explain why, and she’d been afraid he might emerge from his office at any moment.

Thank goodness she hadn’t gone blithely in and made her report. He already thought her project was too dangerous. He’d been protective of his historians since she was a first-year student, but he’d been absolutely hysterical about this project. He’d insisted on her drop site for the Blitz being within walking distance of Oxford Street, even though it would have been much easier to find a site in Wormwood Scrubs or on Hampstead Heath and take the tube in. It also had to be within a half-mile of both a tube station and whatever room she let. “I want you to be able to reach your drop site quickly if you’re injured,” he’d said.

“They did have hospitals in the 1940s, you know,” she’d said. “And if I’m injured, how exactly will I walk half a mile?”

“Don’t make jokes,” he’d snapped. “It’s possible to die on assignment, and the Blitz is an exceptionally dangerous place,” and launched into a twenty-minute lecture on the perils of blast from high-explosive bombs, shrapnel, and sparks from incendiaries. “A woman in Canning Town got her foot entangled in the cord of a barrage balloon and was dragged into the Thames.”

“I am not going to be dragged into the Thames by a barrage balloon.”

“You could be struck by a bus which couldn’t see you in the blackout, or murdered by a mugger.”

“I scarcely think-”

“Criminals thrived in the Blitz. The blackout provided them with cover of darkness, and the police were too busy digging bodies out of the rubble to investigate. The death of a victim found dead in an alley was simply put down to blast. I don’t want to read your name in the death notices in the Times. A half-mile radius. That’s final.”

And that hadn’t been the only restriction. She was forbidden to let a room in any house hit by a bomb before the end of the year, even though she’d only be there through October, and the drop site had to be one that hadn’t been hit at all, which eliminated three sites that would have worked nicely, but that had been destroyed in the last big raid of the Blitz in May 1941.

It was no wonder the lab still hadn’t found a site. I hope they locate one before Mr. Dunworthy finds out I’m back, she thought. Or someone tells him. She doubted if Mr. Purdy would-he didn’t even seem to realize she’d been gone-and hopefully Michael Davies would be too busy attempting to get his date changed and Merope’d be in too much of a hurry to get her driving permission for them to mention that they’d seen her.

She felt bad about ducking out on her promise to speak to Mr. Dunworthy about Merope going to VE-Day, but it couldn’t be helped. And it wasn’t as if time was an issue. Merope’d said she still had several months left to go on her evacuee assignment. And I’ll only be gone six weeks, Polly thought. I’ll go see him as soon as I’m safely back and persuade him to let her do it.

If it was even necessary. He might already have changed his mind by then. In the meantime, Polly needed to keep out of Mr. Dunworthy’s way, hope the lab came up with a drop site soon, and be ready to go through the moment they did. To that end, she went to Props to get a wristwatch-this one radium-dialed, since the one she’d had last time hadn’t been and had been nearly useless-a ration book and identity card made out in the name of Polly Sebastian, and letters of recommendation to use in applying for work as a shopgirl.

“What about a departure letter?” the tech asked her. “Do you need anything special?”

“No, the same one I had last time will work-the Northumberland one. It needs to be addressed to Polly Sebastian and have an October 1940 postmark.”

The tech wrote that down and handed her thirty pounds.

“Oh, that’s far too much,” she said. “I’ll have the wages I earn after the first week, and I don’t expect my room and board to be more than ten and six a week. I’ll only need ten pounds at the most.” But the tech was shaking his head.

“It says here that you’re to take twenty pounds for unforeseen emergencies.”

Authorized by Mr. Dunworthy, no doubt, even though she had no business carrying that much money-it would have been a fortune to a 1940 shopgirl. But if she turned it down, the tech might report it to Mr. Dunworthy. She signed for the money and the wristwatch, told the tech she’d pick up the papers in the morning, and went over to Magdalen to ask Lark Chiu if she could stay with her for a few nights, and when she said yes, sent her to Balliol to fetch her clothes and her research and sat down with the list of Underground shelters Colin had done for her.

Colin. She’d have to ask him not to say anything to Dunworthy. If he was still here. He’d probably gone back to school, which, in light of what Merope had said, might be just as well.

She memorized the Underground shelters and the dates and times they’d been hit and then started on Mr. Dunworthy’s list of forbidden addresses, which took her the rest of the night to commit to memory, even though it only included houses that had been hit in 1940, during the first half of the Blitz. Had every house in London been bombed by the time it was over?

The next morning she went over to Wardrobe to order her costume. “I need a black skirt, white blouse, and a lightweight coat, preferably also black,” she told the tech, who promptly brought out a navy blue skirt.

“No, that won’t work,” Polly said. “I’m posing as a shop assistant, and department store employees in 1940 wore black skirts and white long-sleeved blouses.”

“I’m certain any dark skirt would do. This is a very dark navy. In most lights, one can’t tell the difference.”

“No, it needs to be black. How long would it take to have a skirt like this made in black?”

“Oh, dear, I’ve no idea. We’re weeks behind. Mr. Dunworthy suddenly made all sorts of changes in everyone’s schedules, and we’ve had to reassign costumes and come up with new ones on no notice at all. When’s your drop?”

“The day after tomorrow,” Polly lied.

“Oh, dear. Let me see if I have anything else which might work.” She went into the dressing room and emerged after a bit with two skirts-one a 1960s mini and the other an i-com cargo kilt. “These are the only blacks I could find.”

“No,” Polly said.

“The kilt’s cellphone’s only a replica. It’s not dangerous.”

But it also hadn’t been invented till the 1980s, and the cargo kilt hadn’t been invented till 2014. She made the tech put in a rush order for a black cut on the same pattern as the navy blue and then went over to the lab to tell them where she was staying and see if by some miracle they’d found a drop site.

The door of the lab was locked. To keep out historians irate at having had their drops canceled? Polly knocked, and after a long minute a harassed-looking Linna let her in. “I’m on the phone,” she said and hurried back to it. “No, I know you were scheduled to do the Battle of the Somme first,” she said into it.

Polly went over to Badri at the console. “Sorry to bother you. I was wondering if you’d found a drop site for me yet.”

“No,” he said, rubbing his forehead tiredly. “The problem’s the blackout.”

Polly nodded. The drop couldn’t open if there was anyone nearby who might see it. Ordinarily the faint shimmer from an opening drop wasn’t all that conspicuous, but in blacked-out London, even the light from a pocket torch or a gap in a house’s curtains was instantly noticeable, and ARP wardens patrolled every neighborhood, looking for the slightest infraction. “What about Green Park or Kensington Gardens?”

“No good. They’ve both got anti-aircraft batteries, and the barrage balloons are headquartered in Regent’s Park.”

There was an angry knock, and when Linna went to the door, a man in a fringed suede jacket and a cowboy hat stormed in, waving a printout. “Who the bloody hell changed my schedule?” he shouted at Badri.

“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.

Mistake. He clearly took her silence for encouragement. “It’s not as though I were asking for any sort of commitment,” he said. “All I want is for you to give me a chance to catch up to you, and then, when we’re both the same age-or, wait, do you like older men? I can shoot for any age you like. I mean, not seventy or something: I don’t want to have to wait my entire life, but I’d be willing to do thirty, if you like older men-”

“Colin!” she said, laughing in spite of herself. “I have no business letting you talk to me like this. You’re seventeen-”

“No, listen, when I’m the right age, whatever it is, if you don’t like me or you’ve fallen in love with someone else in the meantime-you haven’t, have you? Fallen in love with someone?”

“Colin-”

“You have. I knew it. Who is it? That American chap?”

“What American chap?”

“Over at Balliol. The tall, good-looking one, Mike something.”

“Michael Davies,” she said. “He’s not an American. He had an American L-and-A implant. And he’s just a friend.”

“Then which historian is it? Not Gerald Phipps, I hope. He’s a complete stick-”

“I am not in love with Gerald Phipps or any other historian.”

“Good, because we’re absolutely made for each other. I mean, a contemp won’t work, because either they’ve died before you were born, or they’re ancient. And there’s no point in falling in love with someone in this time because even if you start off at the same age, after a few flash-time assignments you’ll be too old for him. And they can’t come rescue you if you get in trouble. So the only thing left’s another historian, and as it happens, I’m going to be an historian.”

“Colin, you are seventeen-”

“But I won’t be soon. You’ll feel differently about this when I’m twenty-fi-”

“You are seventeen now, and I have work to do. This conversation is over. Now go away.”

“Not until you at least promise me you’ll do your zeppelin assignment real-time.”

“I’m not promising anything.”

“Well, then at least promise me you’ll think about it. I plan to be devastatingly handsome and charming when I’m twenty-five.” He grinned his crooked grin at her. “Or thirty. You can let me know which you’d prefer when I bring you the sirens list.” And he raced off, leaving Polly shaking her head and smiling.

She had a feeling he was right-with that reddish-blond hair and disarming grin, he was going to be fairly irresistible in a few years. And she wouldn’t be surprised if ten minutes from now, he showed up with another question and more arguments as to why they were made for each other, so she took the maps back to Lark’s rooms to memorize, stopping on the way to ask Wardrobe when her black skirt would be ready.

“Three weeks,” the tech said.

“Three weeks? I told you to put in a rush order.”

“That is a rush order.”

Which meant she’d better settle for the navy blue. She didn’t want the lack of a skirt to keep her from going. For want of a nail, the shoe was lost… she thought, quoting one of Mr. Dunworthy’s favorite adages.

She told the tech she’d decided the navy blue would work after all. “Oh, excellent,” the tech said, relieved. “Will you need shoes?”

“No, the ones I have will work, but I’ll need a pair of stockings.”

The tech found her a pair, and Polly took the clothes over to Magdalen, memorized the map, and reread her notes on department stores. She was only halfway through them when the phone rang.

Colin, I do not have time for this, she thought. But it was Linna. “We’ve found a site, believe it or not, but the problem is, I can’t fit you in till a fortnight from now unless you can get here in the next half hour. If you’re not ready yet-”

“I’m ready. I’ll be there,” Polly said and scrambled into her costume, nearly running her stockings in her haste. She grabbed her ration book, identity card, departure letter, and letters of recommendation, and crammed them into her shoulder bag. Oh, and her money. And Mr. Dunworthy’s twenty extra pounds. And her wristwatch.

And now all I need is to run into Mr. Dunworthy, she thought, putting it on as she dashed out of Magdalen and hurried along the High, but her luck held, and she arrived at the lab with five minutes to spare. “Thank goodness,” Linna said. “I was wrong about that slot a fortnight from now. The next open time I have is the sixth of June.”

“D-Day,” she said.

“Yes, well, your D-Day’s exactly five minutes from now,” Badri said, coming over. He positioned her in the net, taking measurements and then adjusting her shoulder bag so it was farther inside the net. “You’re going through to 6 A.M. on the tenth of September.”

Good, Polly thought. That will give me the entire day to find a flat and then go apply for jobs.

Badri adjusted the folds of the net. “Ascertain your temporal-spatial location as soon as you go through, and note any slippage.” He went back to the console and began typing. “And make certain you use more than one landmark to fix the location of your drop, not just a single street or building. Bombing can change the landscape, and it’s notoriously difficult to judge distances and directions in a bombed-out area.”

“I know,” she said. “Why do you want me to note the slippage? Are you anticipating more than usual?”

“No, the estimated slippage is one to two hours. Linna, ring up Mr. Dunworthy. He wanted to be notified when we found a drop site.”

No, Polly thought, not when I’m this close.

“He’s in London,” Linna called back. “He went to see Dr. Ishiwaka again. When I phoned his secretary with the slippage data, he said he won’t be back till tonight.”

Thank goodness.

“All right, never mind,” Badri said. “Polly, you’re to report back to us as soon as you’ve located a place to live and been hired on.” The draperies began to lower around her. “And note exactly how much slippage you encounter when you go through. Ready?”

“Yes. No, wait. I forgot something. Colin was doing some research for me.”

“Is it something necessary for your assignment?” Badri asked. “Do you need to postpone?”

“No.” She couldn’t risk Mr. Dunworthy canceling her drop, and she had the times of the raids. Colin had said the sirens had generally gone twenty minutes before the raids began, and she could get the list from him when she came back through to tell them her address. “I’m ready.”

The net immediately began to shimmer. “Tell Colin-” she said, but it was too late. The net had already opened.