Chapter 5
I returned to the campus the next morning.
It was Saturday, and, as Maggie promised, the campus was quiet. There were a few hardy joggers and bike riders out, but that was all. The professor waited for me at Chamberlin Hall. It was still a few minutes before seven.
She smiled and waved as I neared. “Don’t worry, you aren’t late. I’m chronically early.”
“Oh. Good.” I came to a stop a few feet away, feeling awkward. “Thank you again for helping me.”
“Well, again, wait to thank me until after I do some good. How was your day yesterday?”
“Long. I suppose that’s a good thing, considering.”
She motioned toward the front door. “Shall we? The lab’s in the basement.”
I followed her inside.
The building was quiet. Our shoes clacked on the shining floor, the sound reverberating down the silent hallways. Doors stood shut. The building had an old, well-used smell to it, like a heavily thumbed paperback. I hadn’t really picked up on that before, when there had been more people about.
“Did you have any luck?” I asked. I was trying to distract myself. I was about to abandon my family again, this time for over two weeks. I tried not to remember Amy’s face the night before. Tears of frustration and anger and fear. The hollowness in her eyes this morning at breakfast.
“With the equipment? Some. There’s no precedent for this, so I’m not sure what to use for instrumentation.
But I checked with friends in other departments and rustled up some goodies.
” She led me down the steps into the basement.
From there we walked down another series of twisting, empty hallways that ended in a pair of wide-open double doors.
Maggie went through first and I followed at her heels.
I felt displaced. Out of my narrow comfort zone.
The physics laboratory was small. There were black counters with scarred tops dotted with pulleys, levers, and pieces of electrical equipment with dials, switches, and diodes.
Exposed circuit boards sat next to humming computers.
Wires lay in tangled rat’s nests all over the room, spilling out of plastic bins and dangling from countertops.
It was bright inside, brilliant low-Kelvin overhead lights beaming down, eradicating all shadows and rendering the room flat, almost colorless.
A young man and woman, both in lab coats, looked up as we entered.
“Mr. Treder, this is Adam and Juliette, two of my grad students. They’ve kindly agreed to help with our little experiment. Observation.” She grinned. “Whatever.”
I bobbed my head at the two students. They stood near a torn and faded desk chair, around which were clustered several boxy machines with square screens and industrial-looking dials.
The students looked at me with mixed expressions.
Maggie had told them what was happening.
I took it as a sign of their respect for her that they showed up at all.
“What do you need me to do?” I asked.
“Have a seat. We’d like to take some baseline readings. Get some good measurements of everything before it happens.”
I licked my lips and sat in the chair. It creaked, but the wheels were locked, and it didn’t move as I settled my weight into it.
The female grad student, Juliette, gave me a professional smile as she bent toward me, holding flat gray pads attached to wires. “Can you sit back so I can place these on your chest, please? I’ll have to raise your shirt.”
“Um, sure.” I settled into the chair and lifted my arms as Juliette slid her hands under my shirt. I twitched when the cool gel on the pads touched my chest. Behind her, Adam bent over a computer, typing. Maggie settled against a nearby countertop and folded her arms.
“So,” I said, trying to ignore the cold pads on my chest as Juliette worked. “What are we measuring, exactly?”
“Static electricity in the immediate environment,” Adam said without looking up. He was tall, with curly brown hair thinning to a bald spot at the top of his head. “As well as the electrical currents in your skin.”
“Brain waves,” Juliette said. She held up a set of electrodes. They reminded me of the splayed toes of a gecko. “These go on your head.” She settled them onto my temples. Gel trickled into my hair, tickling my scalp. My heart rate picked up, and I took a long breath.
The headache pulsed. Persistent little bastard.
“Relax, Scott,” Maggie said. “Let us do the work. Just … do whatever it is you do to make it happen.”
“I don’t do anything. It just happens. And I wish to Christ it didn’t.”
Juliette frowned, but I didn’t apologize. My head throbbed. It was too bright, and the ceiling in the lab felt too low. I closed my eyes.
“Are you all right, Scott?” Maggie asked.
“Yeah. Yes. Just hope you guys can get something out of all this.”
“Me too,” Adam muttered.
“Let’s get the baselines,” Maggie said. Juliette stepped back, and Adam tapped on the keyboard for a few minutes. “Huh.”
“What?” I asked.
“Nah, it’s just, these are totally normal. EKG, Geiger counter, the static array, everything.” He looked at Maggie. “Seems like he’s human.”
The look I gave Maggie must have been quite something because she started cackling. “Adam the comedian.”
Adam, for his part, was nonplussed. “Well, you can look yourself, everything’s nominal—”
Whatever else Adam said was lost as the world slipped sideways, fractionally, and reoriented.
I still sat on the chair, which apparently hadn’t moved an inch, but none of the electrodes and leads were there anymore. Even the ones under my shirt were gone, although my shirt was still there, as were all my clothes. I could feel the tingling cool of the gel where the electrodes had been.
Adam and Juliette and Maggie were all there, clustered around the chair, looking down at me. Adam and Juliette wore matching wide-eyed expressions.
Maggie nodded to herself, looking pensive. “Huh.”
They wore different clothes. And I saw, to my surprise, that I could tell Maggie’s hair had grown out since only a second ago. Adam had gotten a haircut.
“Did you read anything?” I asked.
Adam and Juliette both jumped away from me. “Holy shit,” Adam said.
“Nope, doesn’t get any less amazing or bizarre the second time you see it.” Maggie stepped around Juliette and Adam and took my hand. “How do you feel, Mr. Treder?”
“Scott.”
“Scott, yes, sorry. How do you feel?”
“The same as I did a moment ago.”
“A moment ago. Right.” She let go of my hand and straightened. “So, did we?”
Adam and Juliette were still staring at me, and it took them a moment to realize she was talking to them.
“Did we…?” Juliette blinked.
“Did we read anything?” Maggie asked, her tone sharpening.
Adam and Juliette looked at one another and bolted over to the computer monitors. They started tapping on the keyboards, muttering to one another, their eyes darting back and forth across the screens.
Maggie watched me.
“I’m guessing not,” I said.
“I wouldn’t bet against you.”
“Any ideas?”
“Not really, no. But there are myriad curiosities here.”
“Like what, besides the whole disappearing-man thing?” I struggled to keep the bitterness out of my voice. Sixteen days. I’d left Amy and Lyle alone again for sixteen days. I’d known it was coming. The math wasn’t hard. But to have it happen … Jesus.
“Well.” Maggie leaned against a nearby counter. It was the same position she’d been in before the time slip. “I mentioned how you’re reappearing in the same spot relative to the Earth, not to the Sun or the center of the galaxy or some arbitrary center of the universe.”
“That delightful image of me tumbling through space without a space suit.”
“That would be the one. There’s more. When you disappeared, you left behind all the instruments we’d placed on you, even the ones you didn’t know we’d put on you.”
I wanted to ask a question, but she pressed on before I could open my mouth.
“Except, your clothing and even your phone went with you. So, this thing, whatever it is, is not localized around or anchored to your biological form. It’s not the product of some quasi-random quantum-level wave fluctuation that’s latched on to your unique quantum-mechanical signature.
Or, at least, not entirely.” She sighed and rubbed at her eyes.
“This seems, for lack of a better term, like the product of something intelligent.”
“Intelligent?” I asked. I licked my lips, like I was tasting the word as it came out. It made the hairs on the backs of my arms and neck go up.
“I call it like I see it,” Maggie said. She looked toward the grad students. “Anything?”
“No,” Adam said.
“All normal,” Juliette said. “Of course, we didn’t have any of the skin-contact sensors attached when he returned, but…”
“We didn’t see anything out of the ordinary the moment you disappeared, either,” Maggie said, her eyes on me. “No radiation spikes. No sudden buildup in static electricity.”
“Great,” I said. “Just great.”
“We’ll keep working at it, Scott,” Maggie said.
She pushed away from the counter. I got the impression she wanted to kneel but couldn’t because of her age or some old injury.
“We’ll crunch the numbers on what little we did get, correlate with the baseline set, and see what aligns with the different theories we’ve come up with. ” She stopped, her brow furrowing.
“Yes?” I asked.
“Would you like to see it?”
“See what?”
“We filmed it.”
“Isn’t that something you should have told me?”
Her smile returned. “Hell no. Never bias the subject. Come on, let’s have a look.”
The camera was a high-speed device used to study objects traveling at extreme velocities, taking thousands of frames per second.
The more frames, the slower the motion when those frames were played back at a normal thirty frames per second.
They’d hidden the camera behind some textbooks on one of the nearby shelves.
The lens was large, and I was disappointed in myself for missing it. Super spy I was not.
I stood next to Maggie and Juliette, the three of us clustered behind Adam.
“Okay,” Adam said. He worked the mouse and tapped a few keys. “Here’s the disappearance.”
A new window popped up on the screen, and Adam maximized it with a click.
He hit play, and the black image resolved into a harshly lit view of the lab.
On the screen, I sat on the chair, wires leading from me to various pieces of equipment.
I was listening to something, although even with the timestamp numbers on the bottom right rocketing upward, the image appeared almost dead still.
“We’re at a hundred and fifty thousand frames per second,” Adam said, nodding toward the timestamp numbers.
“We can only record about twelve seconds at that speed, so we had the camera set to start firing five seconds before seven fifty-two. I had to change out the fluorescents before you arrived so they wouldn’t flicker.
The university has special constant-burn plasma tubes in storage for ultraslow-mo studies.
Here, let me advance it some…” He clicked on the slider and the image jumped.
On the screen, I looked the same, though Adam’s mouth had opened, mid-speech.
The numbers advanced upward, the farthest ones on the right spinning in a blur of barely recognizable shapes, zero through nine.
Then I was gone. It was faster than an eyeblink, even at that frame rate.
I was there, on the chair, frozen in time and place, then I was gone.
The electrodes attached to my body hung suspended in midair.
As we watched, they began to descend, ever so slowly, pulled down by gravity.
“There’s no transition,” Juliette said. “We’ve watched this a hundred times in the last two weeks. We even got it down to two frames. One you’re there, the next you’re gone. It’s—”
“Impossible,” Adam said.
“Let’s look at today,” Maggie said, her tone soft.
When the transfer off the camera completed, Adam brought the new video up on the screen.
The four of us watched as the process we’d just seen—albeit with Adam, Juliette, and Maggie in different clothes and positions around the lab—reversed itself.
One moment I wasn’t there. The chair was empty.
Then I was there, with the same expression on my face and in the same position as the other video, where I’d vanished.
“Jesus,” I whispered.
“Yeah, it’s eerie.” Adam looked sideways at me. Juliette did, too. They both seemed to be waiting for me to break into laughter and reveal my amazing magic trick. If only.
“So, what now?” I asked, turning to face Maggie.
“I’d suggest you go home and see your family, because they haven’t seen you in over two weeks. But I’d like you to come back tomorrow.”
“What good will that do?”
“I’m not sure. But we’ve been gathering ideas and equipment for the last two weeks, so I’d like to try some things.”
I let out a long breath. “Okay. Same time tomorrow.”
“One more thing,” Maggie said.
“Yes?”
“You probably shouldn’t talk to anyone else about this.”
“Why?”
“Because if word gets out, it’ll never get back in again. Do you understand?” She watched my face. “The police, maybe the government, the military, will almost certainly get involved.”
“The military? Why?”
“Think about it,” Adam said. “Think about what they’ll see here.
Someone who can vanish, literally vanish, and pop up again days later.
Who knows what else you might be able to do?
Vanish and reappear somewhere else? Maybe you’re actually turning invisible, and you can walk around and listen in to everything people are saying.
How much do you think you’d be worth to the army?
Especially if they could figure out how to replicate it. ”
I felt a chill. “You’re serious.”
“As serious as you are about disappearing for exponentially increasing periods of time,” Maggie said.
“Jesus.”
“Maybe. But last I heard, he only walked on water.”
I eyed her and felt the edges of my mouth quirk despite myself as she broke into a smile.
“Back in front of the building tomorrow at seven,” she said.
“Okay.” I started out of the lab but stopped and turned back. “Thank you.”
“Don’t thank me yet.”