Dooms Day Book

He looked at the muffler she was holding up for his inspection. It was of dark gray plaid wool. He would not have been caught dead in it when he was a boy, and that had been fifty years ago. “Yes,” he said, and turned back to the thin-glass.

“What is it, James? Is something wrong?”

Latimer picked up a small brass-bound casket, and then looked vaguely around, as if he had forgotten what he intended to do with it. Montoya glanced impatiently at her digital.

“Where’s Gilchrist?” Dunworthy said.

“He went through there,” Mary said, pointing at a door on the far side of the net. “He orated on Mediaeval’s place in history, talked to Kivrin for a bit, the tech ran some tests, and then Gilchrist and Kivrin went through that door. I assume he’s still in there with her, getting her ready.”

“Getting her ready,” Dunworthy muttered.

“James, do come and sit down, and tell me what’s wrong,” she said, jamming the muffler back in its box and stuffing it into the shopping bag, “and where you’ve been. I expected you to be here when I arrived. After all, Kivrin’s your favorite pupil.”

“I was trying to reach the Head of the History Faculty,” Dunworthy said, looking at the display screens.

“Basingame? I thought he was off somewhere on Christmas vac.”

“He is, and Gilchrist maneuvered to be appointed Acting Head in his absence so he could get the Middle Ages opened to time travel. He rescinded the blanket ranking of ten and arbitrarily assigned rankings to each century. Do you know what he assigned the 1300’s? A six. A six! If Basingame had been here, he’d never have allowed it. But the man’s nowhere to be found.” He looked hopefully at Mary. “You don’t know where he is, do you?”

“No,” she said. “Somewhere in Scotland, I think.”

“Somewhere in Scotland,” he said bitterly. “And meanwhile, Gilchrist is sending Kivrin into a century which is clearly a ten, a century which had scrofula and the plague and burned Joan of Arc at the stake.”

He looked at Badri, who was speaking into the console’s ear now. “You said Badri ran tests. What were they? A coordinates check? A field projection?”

“I don’t know.” She waved vaguely at the screens, with their constantly changing matrices and columns of figures. “I’m only a doctor, not a net technician. I thought I recognized the technician. He’s from Balliol, isn’t he?”

Dunworthy nodded. “He’s the best tech Balliol has,” he said, watching Badri, who was tapping the console’s keys one at a time, his eyes on the changing readouts. “All of New College’s techs were gone for the vac. Gilchrist was planning to use a first-year apprentice who’d never run a manned drop. A first– year apprentice for a remote! I talked him into using Badri. If I can’t stop this drop, at least I can see that it’s run by a competent tech.”

Badri frowned at the screen, pulled a meter out of his pocket, and started toward the wagon.

“Badri!” Dunworthy called.

Badri gave no indication he’d heard. He walked around the perimeter of the boxes and trunks, looking at the meter. He moved one of the boxes slightly to the left.

“He can’t hear you,” Mary said.

“Badri!” he shouted. “I need to speak to you.”

Mary had stood up. “He can’t hear you, James,” she said. “The partition’s soundproofed.”

Badri said something to Latimer, who was still holding the brass-bound casket. Latimer looked bewildered. Badri took the casket from him and set it down on the chalked mark.

Dunworthy looked around for a microphone. He couldn’t see one. “How were you able to hear Gilchrist’s speech?” he asked Mary.

“Gilchrist pressed a button on the inside there,” she said, pointing at a wall panel next to the net.

Badri had sat down in front of the console again and was speaking into the ear again. The net shields began to lower into place. Badri said something else, and they rose to where they’d been.

“I told Badri to recheck everything, the net, the apprentice’s calculations, everything,” he said, “and to abort the drop immediately if he found any errors, no matter what Gilchrist said.”

“But surely Gilchrist wouldn’t jeopardize Kivrin’s safety,” Mary protested. “He told me he’d taken every precaution—”

“Every precaution! He hasn’t run recon tests or parameter checks. We did two years of unmanneds in Twentieth Century before we sent anyone through. He hasn’t done any. Badri told him he should delay the drop until he could do at least one, and instead he moved the drop up two days. The man’s a complete incompetent.”

“But he explained why the drop had to be today,” Mary said. “In his speech. He said the contemps in the 1300’s paid no attention to dates, except planting and harvesting dates and church holy days. He said the concentration of holy days was greatest around Christmas, and that was why Mediaeval had decided to send Kivrin now, so she could use the Advent holy days to determine her temporal location and ensure her being at the drop site on the twenty-eighth of December.”