He wasn’t sure of the history behind it, but the oldest buildings in the Infinite Corridor dated back to 1916. By the middle of the twentieth century they comprised a linked chain of consistent design that shared a corridor about a quarter-kilometer long—not quite infinite, but a hike. It was precisely straight; twice a year students could prop the doors open and the setting sun would send a beam down 850 feet of suddenly not-dingy corridor.
Maybe they still did that, but sacrificed virgins. They used to joke that that was one thing you couldn’tdo at MIT, for lack of raw material. That might have changed. Depending on the theosophical attitude toward sex.
The campus wasn’t crowded, but it wouldn’t have been in August back in his time, either. The classrooms had been individually air-conditioned, to keep bills down, and the halls and unused rooms were ovens when it got into the nineties. It was close to that now. He walked up the stairs to the Infinite Corridor door and braced for a wall of heat.
It was dim and stuffy at this end, offices with closed doors. Plenty of light farther down, where there were classrooms with corridor windows and the dome’s skylight. It felt odd, walking down these halls, now yellowing whitewash instead of Institute Green, the woodwork centuries older, with amateur-looking repairs. Broken windows patched with plywood squares that didn’t look new.
The few students walked slowly and quietly, which was beyond odd. With the gloom at the periphery and overhead, and a whiff of mildew rather than the persistent subliminal tang of chemicals and machines, the place had the air of a monastery. Which it might now be.
In the rotunda windows, stained-glass panels that identified the Stations of the Cross, whatever that meant. On inspection, it was obvious that the windows had been moved here from some other source, probably a church. The panels were too small for their spaces and had to be framed in plywood, painted flat black for contrast.
Matt had noticed one improvement over the world of his last materialization, 2074, in that facial scarring was no longer the height of fashion. But it wasn’t completely gone; he’d seen a few scarred people walking the corridor, mostly older men. A few of the women had faint scar lines on their cheeks.
In fact, within the Infinite Corridor you could almost generalize that the older a man looked, the more scarred his face would be, and the scars weren’t particularly artistic. Parallel gouges on the cheeks and foreheads. Perhaps it was a fad that had recently petered out, possibly one with religious significance, and possibly more than meets the eye. God knew (presumably) what was under their robes.
Room 101 was General Administration, but the door was closed and locked. Of course; it was Sunday.
Beside the door was a handwritten list of curriculum changes for the Bachelor of Divinity degree. You now had to take Signs and Wonders 101 and 102 (instead of just Signs and Wonders 10) and Advanced Christian Ethics 111 and 112 simultaneously with two iterations of Preaching Workshop. Instead of Life Transformation, freshmen who could demonstrate their qualifications could opt for Interpretive Glossolalia.
A large man with one scar straight across his forehead came up. His cassock was blue and belted and he carried a heavy staff. He didn’t need a badge or a gun.
“You have business here, sir?”
“No, sir. I was just looking around.”
“The office will open tomorrow about ten. Until then, people who are not students or faculty ought not to be here.”
Matt didn’t protest that he wasfaculty, a genuine fake full professor. Instead, he meekly thanked the man and went out the front way.
It was still the impressive, sweeping colonnade, with marble steps down to the street. The steps were extremely rounded, worn down from millions of feet hurrying or trudging to class.
He had to find a place to stay and something to eat. And a bath and change of clothes; he was starting to smell like someone who had worn the same thing for a couple of centuries.
At the base of the stairs, next to what used to be a bus stop, a woman was selling clothes. A table displayed neat stacks of old shirts and trousers, and there was a rack of black academic robes, some less shabby than others.
He started looking through those, protective coloration.
“You’ll need an MIT ID to buy a robe,” she warned.
“Oh. Thank you.” He had one, of course, but the date on it might raise an eyebrow. He picked out a pair of sturdy jeans and a gray tee shirt with an MIT logo. That apparently didn’t require an ID.
It came to twenty-one dollars. She made change from an open box of bills and coins. No credit-card reader.
“I’m looking for a place to stay,” he said. “Not too expensive. ”
“You’re in the wrong place for that. You might get a room for fifty or sixty dollars up in Central Square. Magazine Street. Up Mass Ave a half mile or so.”
“Thanks. I’ll go check it.” In his time that had been a kind of artsy neighborhood. High crime rate but “interesting, ” full of transients and foreigners. He was both now.
He started up Mass Ave, and the smell of cooking stopped him in the second block. At an outdoor table he got a bowl of beans and potatoes cooked with onions and garlic, washed down with cool, thin barley wine, for five bucks. While he ate, a disheveled woman with one blind eye plucked a harp and sang. The last piece was a haunting blues, a vaguely religious song about unrequited love. He put a quarter in her cup as he left.
Most of the storefronts along Mass Ave were open, people selling pills, stationery, furniture, rugs. A large bookstore had textbooks of a general nature as well as religious texts. He leafed through a few mathematics ones and, unsurprisingly, they all started out with an inspirational chapter before getting down to geometry or calculus. But it was reassuring that students of theosophy still had to put up with the basics.
There were no physics textbooks, though. The light from the skylight was growing dim before he found things like Newtonian physics covered in the metaphysics section.
Thermophysics and basic electricity and magnetism. But no obvious treatments of relativity or quantum mechanics. Let alone chronophysics.
He’d have to come back later. He bought a text, Metaphysics and the Natural World, and headed on up to Magazine Street.
Dusk was closing in when he found a place with a card saying ROOMS AND BATH in the window. An old lady who smelled rancid took $40 and gave him a wooden coin that would pay for a bath once the sun came up. For an extra dollarhe got a candle with two matches, an admonition not to burn the place down, and directions to the outhouse.
The third-floor room was small, with just a bed, table, and chair. Moonlight came through a high window. He blew out the candle and sank gratefully into the soft bed.
12
Matt was half-awake, lying in a pleasant torpor,when church bells started banging next door. He dressed and went downstairs to a notice that said bath and breakfast would be available after church. On Monday? Not a good sign.
The outhouse was a little more hospitable with daylight filtering in; in the candlelight he’d been sure there were bugs everywhere, just out of sight. Instead of a roll of toilet paper, there were neat squares torn from church newsletters, which made the experience more pleasant than he’d expected. It also bespoke a certain level of civilization, he realized. In primitive cultures there were less sanitary expedients.
He went around front with the idea of going for a walk, but hesitated. There was nobody else in sight. No traffic up on Mass Ave. Maybe everyone was in church at this hour; maybe being anywhere else was illegal.
Back in the parlor, he stood still and listened. No one else up and around. An invitation to snoop.