The Bellbottom Incident by Neve Maslakovic Read Free Book Online Page A

back-to-back, and he was indeed wearing a tweed suit, though he’d loosened the tie as he leaned back in his chair. They both looked like they needed a good haircut, and there wasn’t a trace of the gray that would one day prevail.  
    They both had mustaches! I had to hold my lips tightly together to contain a laugh.
    Xavier took off his tie and waved it in Gabriel’s direction. “I didn’t mean boring in a technical sense, I meant from the bigwigs’ point of view. Hear me out. What if we go bigger , promise a jump of days, weeks, months back in time? Hell, why not years ? And not an object but a person! That would get their attention, wouldn’t it? And don’t talk to me about risk or energy expenditure,” he added before Gabriel could reply. “Those are just details, my good man, details.”  
    “But we can’t guarantee a weeklong jump. We can’t even guarantee a nanosecond one.”
    “Yes, but we might as well think big, don’t you agree?”
    “Hmm…I don’t know if I’m comfortable promising results which we’re not sure we can deliver.”
    “Isn’t that how the game is played? After all, if we already knew how to do it, that it would work for sure, we wouldn’t need their money. We’d be writing papers and filing patents and so forth.”  
    As Gabriel pondered the ethics of this, I felt someone elbow me in the side. It was Abigail, wanting a closer look. I moved to make room for her. “Xave,” Gabriel finally said after a while, “I think the prudent thing to do when seeking funding is to at least try to sound like your project isn’t straight out of a story by Asimov…But maybe we should ask Lewis his opinion.”
    “I did, on the way back here. He thinks it’s best not to mention the words time and travel together and stick instead to talking about warping spacetime. He’s being all political about it.”
    “He’s probably wise.”
    “He insisted that we not call it the Time Machine in our funding proposals. He suggested the Spacetime Warper.”
    Gabriel tested the phrase. “The Spacetime Warper. It doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue.”
    “It doesn’t, does it?…Wait, I got it. How about this? We take the s , t , and the last e from spacetime …and the w from warper . That gives us STEW.”
    “The STEW machine. It sounds a little mushy but could be worse.”
    “Better yet, let’s call it STEWie.”
    “Now that I like.”
    “Let’s remember to tell Lewis about it.”
    Lewis Sunder, I knew, would soon abandon the project to seek a safer topic for his own degree. Years later, when Xavier and Gabriel achieved fame and the promise of a Nobel Prize, he would regret the move, even though by then he would have a prestigious position of his own as the university’s dean of science. But that was years away. Much hard work lay ahead before STEWie would grow from a blackboard sketch into a working lab with a cement-and-steel home. Even then, years of false starts would follow, progress held back because they kept trying to jump into near time, after they’d already been born. The first successful run, in summer of 2010, would be to the sandy dunes of 1903 Kitty Hawk to watch a breakthrough in aviation take place, one that paralleled the astonishing breakthrough Dr. Mooney and Dr. Rojas had just made.  
    “In retrospect,” Dr. Mooney had said to me once, “Kitty Hawk was not the best site. The sandy dunes offered little cover, and we weren’t able to get very close. Not to mention all that time wasted on attempting near-time runs. They required less energy, we reasoned, and would be safer and easier to pull off as a demonstration. Little did we know…”  
    I wished I could tell the pair to try Kitty Hawk at once.
    “It maddens me that we have to suck up to pencil pushers,” I heard Xavier say, his voice muffled by the closet door. The young Xavier Mooney, brash and full of himself, reminded me of someone—someone besides his older self, that was—and I suddenly realized