The light from the net flared and enfolded me. “Wait!” I said as it closed, and thought I heard a splash.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

Wherever I was, it wasn’t the lab. The room looked like one of Balliol’s old lecture rooms. There was a blackboard on one wall and, above it, the mounting for an old-fashioned pull-down map, and on the door were a number of taped-up notices.

But it was obviously being used as a lab. On a long metal table was a row of primitive digital-processor computers and monitors, all linked together with gray and yellow and orange cords and a clutch of adaptors.

I looked back at the net I had just come through. It was nothing but a chalked circle, with a large masking-tape “X” in the center. Behind it, and attached to it by an even more dangerous-looking tangle of cords and copper wires, was a frightening assortment of capacitors, metal boxes studded with dials and knobs, lengths of PVC pipe, thick cables, jacks, and resistors, all taped together with wads of wide silver tape, which had to be the mechanism of the net, though I could not have imagined trying to cross the street in such a contraption, let alone going back in time.

A horrible thought struck me. What if this was the lab after all? What if the incongruity had altered more than Terence and Maud’s marriage and the bombing of Berlin?

I strode over to the door, hoping against hope the printed notices didn’t say 2057. And weren’t in German.

They weren’t. The top one said, “Parking is forbidden on the Broad, Parks Road, and in the Naffield College car park. Violators will be towed,” which sounded fascist, but then the Parking Authority always sounded fascist. And there were no swastikas on it, or on the railway schedule beside it. A large notice on pink paper read, “Fees for Hilary term are now past due. If you have not paid, please see the bursar immediately.”

And, inevitably, below it, “Orphans of the Pandemic Jumble Sale and St. Michael’s at the North Gate Charity Drive. April fifth, 10 A.M. to 4 P.M. Bargains. White elephants. Treasures.”

Well, it definitely wasn’t Nazi England. And the Pandemic had still happened.

I examined the notices. Not a sign of a year on any of them, no dates at all, except for the upcoming jumble sale at St. Michael’s at the North Gate, and even that wasn’t certain. I’d seen notices over a year old on the notice board at Balliol.

I went over to the windows, pried the tape off one corner, and pulled the paper aside. I was looking out at Balliol’s front quad at a beautiful spring day. The lilacs outside the chapel were in bloom, and in the center of the quad a huge beech tree was just leafing out.

There was a chestnut tree in the center of the quad now, and it was at least thirty years old. Before 2020, then, but after the Pandemic, and the railway schedule meant it was before the Underground had reached Oxford. And after the invention of time travel. Between 2013 and 2020.

I went back over to the computers. The middle monitor was blinking, “Push ‘reset.’ ”

I did, and the veils above the net descended with a thunk. They weren’t transparent, they were dusty dark-red velvet that looked like they belonged in amateur theatricals.

“Destination?” the screen was blinking now. I had no idea what system of coordinates they’d used in the Twenties. Mr. Dunworthy had told me stories about the point-and-shoot time travel they’d done in the early days, without Pulhaski coordinates, without safeguards or parameter checks or any idea of where they were going or whether they’d get back. The good old days.

But at least the computer spoke English and not some primitive code. I typed in, “Current location?”

The screen went blank and then began blinking, “Error.”

I thought a minute and then typed in, “Help screen.”

The screen went blank again and stayed blank. Wonderful.

I began punching function keys. The screen began blinking, “Destination?”

There was a sound at the door. I looked round wildly for someplace to hide. There wasn’t any. Except the net, which was no place at all. I dived into the red velvet curtains and yanked them together.

Whoever was at the door was having difficulty getting in. There was a good deal of rattling and jimmying before the door opened.

I retreated to the center of the net and stood very still. There was the sound of the door’s closing, and then silence.

I stood there, listening. Nothing. Had whoever it was changed their mind and gone out again? I took a careful step toward the edge and pulled the curtains a millimeter apart. A beautiful young woman was standing by the door, biting her lip and looking straight at me.

I fought the impulse to jerk back. She hadn’t seen me. I wasn’t sure she was seeing the net either. She seemed lost in some inner vision of her own.

She was wearing a calf-length white dress that could have been from any decade from the 1930s on. Her red hair was long and looped up in the knotted ponytail of the Millennium era, but that didn’t necessarily mean anything. Historians in the Fifties wore them, too, along with braids and snoods and coronets, anything to keep the long hair they had to have for their drops out of the way.

The young woman looked younger than Tossie, but probably wasn’t. She was wearing a wedding ring. She vaguely reminded me of someone. It wasn’t Verity, though her determined expression made me think of Verity. And not Lady Schrapnell or any of her ancestors. Somebody I’d met at one of my jumble sales?

I squinted at her, trying to get a fix. Her hair was wrong. Should it be lighter? Reddish-blonde, perhaps?

She stood there a long minute with the look Verity had had-frightened, angry, determined — and then walked rapidly in the direction of the computers and out of my line of sight.

Silence again. I listened for the quiet click of keys, hoping she wasn’t setting up a drop. Or typing in directions for the veils to rise.

I couldn’t see from this angle. I moved carefully to the next break in the curtain and peered through. She was standing in front of the comps, staring at them, or, rather, past them, through them, with that same look of determination.

And something else I’d never seen on Verity’s face, not even when Terence had told us he and Tossie were engaged, an edge of reckless desperation.

There was a sound at the door. She turned and immediately started toward the door. And out of range again. And the person at the door obviously had a key. By the time I’d moved back to my original vantage point, he was standing in the open door, looking at her.

He was wearing jeans and a ragged sweater and spectacles. His hair was light brown and the longish indeterminate cut historians adopt because it can be maneuvered into almost any era’s style, and he looked familiar, too, though it was probably just the expression on his face, which I would have known anywhere. I should. It was the expression I had every time I looked at Verity.