Rollback

Another hot August day. Don had headed downtown again, but this time it wasn’t for a job interview, and so he was actually wearing clothes appropriate for the weather: cutoff denim shorts and a light-blue T-shirt. He was grateful for them as he effortlessly climbed the stairs from the subway station, and exited out into the muggy, searing heat.

Sarah, along with the rest of the SETI community, was still trying to find the decryption key for the second message from Sigma Draconis, and last night an idea had occurred to her. But to try it she needed some old paper records that were stored down at the University.

It was only a short walk from Queen’s Park subway station to the McLennan Physical Laboratories tower, which housed the University of Toronto’s Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics. On its roof were two observatory domes. Don remembered what he used to think when he saw them: that they couldn’t possibly do any good, surrounded by the glare of downtown Toronto. But, to his surprise, as he glanced up at them now, he found himself thinking that they looked like a nice, firm pair of breasts.

As he came out of the elevator on the fourteenth floor of the tower, he saw that along one wall of the corridor there was a display about famous people who had been associated with the department. Included were Dr. Helen Sawyer Hogg, dead for fifty-five years now, whose weekly astronomy columns Don remembered reading as a boy in the Saturday Star ; Ian Shelton, who discovered Supernova 19873 in the Large Magellanic Cloud; and Sarah herself. He paused and read the placard about Sarah, then looked at her photo, which must have been taken at least forty years ago; she hadn’t worn her hair that long since.

Ah, well. Timeworn photos were appropriate here. Universities themselves were an anachronism, bucking the long-established trend to do everything online, everything by telecommuting. Hallowed halls, ivory towers — the synonyms his mental thesaurus provided just underscored how quaint and old-fashioned such institutions were. And yet, somehow, they endured.

He looked again at the photo of Sarah and found himself grinding his teeth. If things had gone the way they were supposed to, his wife would be even younger-looking now. This photo would be of what she’d have had to look forward to, when she gracefully entered middle age for a second time… around 2070, he supposed.

He headed around a bend in the corridor, the walls now lined with framed astronomical photos, until he found the door he was looking for. He knocked lightly on it. Old habits die hard, he realized; he’d long ago given up fervent rapping, since it used to hurt his arthritic knuckles, but now he wondered if anyone could have possibly heard him through the thick wood. He was about to knock again, and more loudly, when he heard a female voice call out, "Come in."

He entered, leaving the door open behind him. A young red-head, seated at a computer workstation, looked up at him expectantly.

"I’m looking for Lenore Darby," Don said.

She raised a hand. "Guilty."

He felt his eyebrows going up. Now that he saw her, he did remember that there’d been a redhead among the grad students at the last Christmas party, but he’d forgotten, or, more likely, had failed to notice then, just how pretty she was.

Lenore looked to be twenty-five — a real twenty-five, no doubt. Her orange hair cascaded down to her shoulders, and she had freckled white skin and bright green eyes. She was wearing green denim shorts and a white T-shirt that said "Onderdonk" on it, which he guessed was the name of a musical group. The shirt’s lower half had been tied in a knot around her stomach, revealing a couple of inches of midriff that hadn’t bunched at all even though she was sitting down.

"Can I help you?" she asked, smiling a perfect smile. So many of Don’s contemporaries had spent their whole adult lives, as Don had until recently, with various dental imperfections — misalignments and gaps, overbites and underbites — but young people today almost always had perfect teeth, brightly white, totally straight, and completely free of cavities.

He steeled himself for giving the spiel, then: "I’m Don Halifax," he said. "I know I—"

"Oh, my goodness!" exclaimed Lenore. She looked him up and down, causing him to feel embarrassed and awkward, and probably even to blush. "I’d been expecting — well, he must be your grandfather. Are you named for him?"

She’d met an eighty-seven-year-old man back in December named Don Halifax, and she’d been told someone with that name was coming by to pick up some papers for Sarah, so…

So, yeah, it was a perfectly reasonable guess on her part. "That’s right," he said.

Indeed, what she’d suggested was in fact true, just not in the way she meant it. His full name was Donald Roscoe Halifax, and Roscoe had been his father’s father’s name.