The Doomsday Book

by Connie Willis

  “Badri,” he said urgently, “you said something was wrong. Did you mean something went wrong with the fix?”

  “I got the fix,” Badri said, frowning.

  The male medic, attaching Badri to a daunting array of displays, looked irritated.

  “Did the apprentice get the coordinates wrong? It’s important, Badri. Did he make an error in the remote coordinates?”

  Mary climbed into the ambulance.

  “As Acting Head, I feel I should be the one to accompany the patient in the ambulance,” Dunworthy heard Gilchrist say.

  “Meet us in Casualties at Infirmary,” Mary said and pulled the doors to. “Have you got a temp yet?” she asked the medic.

  “Yes,” he said, “39.5 C. BP 90 over 55, pulse 115.”

  “Was there an error in the coordinates?” Dunworthy said to Badri.

  “Are you set back there?” the driver said over the intercom.

  “Yes,” Mary said. “Code one.”

  “Did Puhalski make an error in the locational coordinates for the remote?”

  “No,” Badri said. He grabbed at the lapel of Dunworthy’s coat.

  “Is it the slippage then?”

  “I must have—” Badri said. “So worried.”

  The sirens blared, drowning out the rest of what he said. “You must have what?” Dunworthy shouted over their up-and-down klaxon.

  “Something wrong,” Badri said, and fainted again.

  Something wrong. It had to be the slippage. Except for the coordinates, it was the only thing that could go wrong with a drop that wouldn’t abort it, and he had said the locational coordinates were right. How much slippage, though? Badri had told him it might be as much as two weeks, and he wouldn’t have run all the way to the pub in the pouring rain without his coat unless it were much more than that. How much more? A month? Three months? But he’d told Gilchrist the preliminaries showed minimal slippage.

  Mary elbowed past him and put her hand on Badri’s forehead again. “Add sodium thiosalicylate to the drip,” she said. “And start a WBC screen. James, get out of the way.”

  Dunworthy edged past Mary and sat down on the bench, near the back of the ambulance.

  Mary picked up her bleeper again. “Stand by for a full CBC and serotyping.”

  “Pyelonephritis?” the medic said, watching the reads change. BP 96 over 60, pulse 120, temp 39.5.

  “I don’t think so,” Mary said. “There’s no apparent abdominal pain, but it’s obviously an infection of some sort, with that temp.”

  The sirens dived suddenly down in frequency and stopped. The medic began pulling wires out of the wall hookups.

  “We’re here, Badri,” Mary said, patting his chest again. “We’ll soon have you right as rain.”

  He gave no indication he had heard. Mary pulled the blanket up to his neck and arranged the dangling wires on top of it. The driver yanked the door open, and they slid the stretcher out. “I want a full blood workup,” Mary said, holding on to the door as she climbed down. “CF, HI, and antigenic ID.” Dunworthy clambered down after her and followed her into the Casualties Department.

  “I need a med hist,” she was already telling the registrar. “On Badri—what’s his last name, James?”

  “Chaudhuri,” he said.

  “National Health Service number?” the registrar asked.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “He works at Balliol.”

  “Would you be so good as to spell the name for me, please?”

  “C-H-A-” he said. Mary was disappearing into Casualties. He started after her.

  “I’m sorry, sir,” the registrar said, darting up from her console to block his way. “If you’ll just be seated—”

  “I must talk to the patient you just admitted,” he said.

  “Are you a relative?”

  “No,” he said. “I’m his employer. It’s very important.”

  “He’s in an examining cubicle just now,” she said. “I’ll ask for permission for you to see him as soon as the examination is completed.” She sat gingerly back down at the console, as if ready to leap up again at the slightest movement on his part.

  Dunworthy thought of simply barging in on the examination, but he didn’t want to risk being barred from hospital altogether, and at any rate, Badri was in no condition to talk. He had been clearly unconscious when they took him out of the ambulance. Unconscious and with a fever of 39.5. Something wrong.

  The registrar was looking suspiciously up at him. “Would you mind terribly giving me that spelling again?”

  He spelled Chaudhuri for her and then asked where he could find a telephone.

  “Just down the corridor,” she said. “Age?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Twenty-five? He’s been at Balliol for four years.”

  He answered the rest of her questions as best he could and then looked out the door to see if Gilchrist had come and went down the corridor to the telephones and rang up Brasenose. He got the porter, who was decorating an artificial Christmas tree that stood on the lodge counter.

  “I need to speak to Puhalski,” Dunworthy said, hoping that was the name of the first-year tech.

  “He’s not here,” the porter said, draping a silver garland over the branches with his free hand.

  “Well, as soon as he returns, please tell him I need to speak with him. It’s very important. I need him to read a fix for me. I’m at—” Dunworthy waited pointedly for the porter to finish arranging the garland and write the number of the call box down, which he finally did, scribbling it on the lid of a box of ornaments. “If he can’t reach me at this number, have him ring the Casualties Department at Infirmary. How soon will he return, do you think?”

  “That’s difficult to say,” the porter said, unwrapping an angel. “Some of them come back a few days early, but most of them don’t show up until the first day of term.”

  “What do you mean? Isn’t he staying in college?”

  “He was. He was going to run the net for Mediaeval, but when he found he wasn’t needed, he went home.”

  “I need his home address then and his telephone number.”

  “It’s somewhere in Wales, I believe, but you’d have to talk to the college secretary for that, and she’s not here just now either.”

  “When will she be back?”

  “I can’t say, sir. She went to London to do a bit of Christmas shopping.”

  Dunworthy gave another message while the porter straightened the angel’s wings, and then rang off and tried to think if there were any other techs in Oxford for Christmas. Clearly not, or Gilchrist wouldn’t have used a first-year apprentice in the first place.

  He put a call through to Magdalen anyway, but got no answer. He rang off, thought a minute, and then rang up Balliol. There was no answer there either. Finch must still be out showing the American bell ringers the bells at Great Tom. He looked at his digital. It was only half past two. It seemed much later. They might only be at lunch.

  He rang up the phone in Balliol’s hall, but still got no answer. He went back into the waiting area, expecting Gilchrist to be there. He wasn’t, but the two medics were, talking to a staff nurse. Gilchrist had probably gone back to Brasenose to plot his next drop or the one after that. Perhaps he’d send Kivrin straight into the Black Death the third time round for direct observation.

  “There you are,” the staff nurse said. “I was afraid you’d left. If you’ll just come with me.”

  Dunworthy had assumed she was speaking to him, but the medics followed her out the door, too, and down a corridor.

  “Here we are, then,” she said, holding a door open for them. The medics filed through. “There’s tea on the trolley, and a WC just through there.”

  “When will I be able to see Badri Chaudhuri?” Dunworthy asked, holding the door so she couldn’t shut it.

  “Dr. Ahrens will be with you directly,” she said and shut the door in spite of him.

  The female medic had already slouched do
wn in a chair, her hands in her pockets. The man was over by the tea trolley, plugging in the electric kettle. Neither of them had asked the registrar any questions on the way down the corridor, so perhaps this was routine, though Dunworthy couldn’t imagine why they would want to see Badri. Or why they had all been brought here.

  This waiting room was in an entirely different wing from the Casualties Ward. It had the same spine-destroying chairs of the waiting room in Casualties, the same tables with inspirational pamphlets fanned out on them, the same foil garland draped over the tea trolley and secured with bunches of plastene holly. There were no windows, though, not even in the door. It was self-contained and private, the sort of room where people waited for bad news.

  Dunworthy sat down, suddenly tired. Bad news. An infection of some sort. BP 96, pulse 120, temp 39.5. The only other tech in Oxford off in Wales and Basingame’s secretary out doing her Christmas shopping. And Kivrin somewhere in 1320, days or even weeks from where she was supposed to be. Or months.

  The male medic poured milk and sugar into a cup and stirred it, waiting for the electric kettle to heat. The woman appeared to have gone to sleep.

  Dunworthy stared at her, thinking about the slippage. Badri had said the preliminary calculations indicated minimal slippage, but they were only preliminary. Badri had told him he thought two weeks’ slippage was likely, and that made sense.

  The farther back the historian was sent, the greater the average slippage. Twentieth Century’s drops usually had only a few minutes, Eighteenth Century’s a few hours. Magdalen, which was still running unmanneds to the Renaissance, was getting slippage of from three to six days.

  But those were only averages. The slippage varied from person to person, and it was impossible to predict for any given drop. Nineteenth Century had had one off by forty-eight days, and in uninhabited areas there was often no slippage at all.

  And often the amount seemed arbitrary, whimsical. When they’d run the first slippage checks for Twentieth Century back in the twenties, he’d stood in Balliol’s empty quad and been sent through to two A.M. on the fourteenth of September, 1956, with only three minutes’ slippage. But when they sent him through again at 2:08, there had been nearly two hours’, and he’d come through nearly on top of an undergraduate sneaking in after a night out.

  Kivrin might be six months from where she was supposed to be, with no idea of when the rendezvous was. And Badri had come running to the pub to tell him to pull her out.

  Mary came in, still wearing her coat. Dunworthy stood up. “Is it Badri?” he asked, afraid of the answer.

  “He’s still in Casualties,” she said. “We need his NHS number, and we can’t find his records in Balliol’s file.”

  Her gray hair was mussed again, but otherwise she seemed as businesslike as she was when she discussed Dunworthy’s students with him.

  “He’s not a member of the college,” Dunworthy said, feeling relieved. “Techs are assigned to the individual colleges, but they’re officially employed by the University.”

  “Then his records would be in the Registrar’s Office. Good. Do you know if he’s traveled outside England in the past month?”

  “He did an on-site for Nineteenth Century in Hungary two weeks ago. He’s been in England since then.”

  “Has he had any relations visit him from Pakistan?”

  “He hasn’t any. He’s third-generation. Have you found out what he’s got?”

  She wasn’t listening. “Where are Gilchrist and Montoya?” she said.

  “You told Gilchrist to meet us here, but he hadn’t come in yet when I was brought in here.”

  “And Montoya?”

  “She left as soon as the drop was completed,” Dunworthy said.

  “Have you any idea where she might have gone?”

  No more than you have, Dunworthy thought. You watched her leave, too. “I assume she went back to Witney to her dig. She spends the majority of her time there.”

  “Her dig?” Mary said, as if she’d never heard of it.

  What is it? he thought. What’s wrong? “In Witney,” he said. “The National Trust farm. She’s excavating a mediaeval village.”

  “Witney?” she said, looking unhappy. “She’ll have to come in immediately.”

  “Shall I try to ring her up?” Dunworthy said, but Mary had already gone over to the medic standing by the tea trolley.

  “I need you to fetch someone in from Witney,” she said to him. He put down his cup and saucer and shrugged on his jacket. “From the National Trust site. Lupe Montoya.” She went out the door with him.

  He expected her to come back as soon as she’d finished giving him the directions to Witney. When she didn’t, he started after her. She wasn’t in the corridor. Neither was the medic, but the nurse from Casualties was.

  “I’m sorry, sir,” she said, barring his path the way the registrar in Casualties had. “Dr. Ahrens asked that you wait for her here.”

  “I’m not leaving the Infirmary. I need to put a call through to my secretary.”

  “I’ll be glad to fetch you a phone, sir,” she said firmly. She turned and looked down the corridor.

  Gilchrist and Latimer were coming. “… hope Ms. Engle has the opportunity to observe a death,” Gilchrist was saying. “Attitudes toward death in the 1300s differed greatly from ours. Death was a common and accepted part of life, and the contemps were incapable of feeling loss or grief.”

  “Mr. Dunworthy,” the nurse said, tugging at his arm, “if you’ll just wait inside, I’ll bring you a telephone.”

  She went to meet Gilchrist and Latimer. “If you’ll come with me, please,” she said, and ushered them into the waiting room.

  “I’m Acting Head of the History Faculty,” Gilchrist said, glaring at Dunworthy. “Badri Chaudhuri is my responsibility.”

  “Yes, sir,” the nurse said, shutting the door. “Dr. Ahrens will be with you directly.”

  Latimer set his umbrella on one of the chairs and Mary’s shopping bag on the one next to it. He had apparently retrieved all the parcels Mary had dumped on the floor. Dunworthy could see the muffler box and one of the Christmas crackers sticking out of the top. “We couldn’t find a taxi,” he said, breathing hard. He sat down next to his burdens. “We had to take the tube.”

  “Where is the apprentice tech you were going to use on the drop—Puhalski—from?” Dunworthy said. “I need to speak with him.”

  “Concerning what, if I may ask? Or have you taken over Mediaeval entirely in my absence?”

  “It’s essential that someone read the fix and make sure it’s all right.”

  “You’d be delighted if something were to go wrong, wouldn’t you? You’ve been attempting to obstruct this drop from the beginning.”

  “Were to go wrong?” Dunworthy said disbelievingly. “It’s already gone wrong. Badri is lying in hospital unconscious and we don’t have any idea if Kivrin is when or where she’s supposed to be. You heard Badri. He said something was wrong with the fix. We’ve got to get a tech here to find out what it is.”

  “I should hardly put any credence in what someone says under the influence of drugs or dorphs or whatever it is he’s been taking,” Gilchrist said. “And may I remind you, Mr. Dunworthy, that the only thing to have gone wrong on this drop is Twentieth Century’s part in it. Mr. Puhalski was doing a perfectly adequate job. However, at your insistence, I allowed your tech to replace him. It’s obvious I shouldn’t have.”

  The door opened, and they all turned and looked at it. The sister brought in a portable telephone, handed it to Dunworthy, and ducked out again.

  “I must ring up Brasenose and tell them where I am,” Gilchrist said.

  Dunworthy ignored him, flipped up the phone’s visual screen, and rang up Jesus. “I need the names and home telephone numbers of your techs,” he told the Acting Principal’s secretary when she appeared on the screen. “None of them are here over vac, are they?”

  None of them were there. He wrote down the name
s and numbers on one of the inspirational pamphlets, thanked the senior tutor, hung up, and started on the list of numbers.

  The first number he punched was engaged. The others got him an engaged tone before he’d even finished punching in the town exchanges, and on the last a computer voice broke in and said, “All lines are engaged. Please attempt your call later.”

  He rang Balliol, both the hall and his own office. He didn’t get an answer at either number. Finch must have taken the Americans to London to hear Big Ben.

  Gilchrist was still standing next to him, waiting to use the phone. Latimer had wandered over to the tea cart and was trying to plug in the electric kettle. The medic came out of her drowse to assist him. “Have you finished with the telephone?” Gilchrist said stiffly.

  “No,” Dunworthy said and tried Finch again. There was still no answer.

  He rang off. “I want you to get your tech back to Oxford and pull Kivrin out. Now. Before she’s left the drop site.”

  “You want?” Gilchrist said. “Might I remind you that this is Mediaeval’s drop, not yours.”

  “It doesn’t matter whose it is,” Dunworthy said, trying to keep his temper. “It’s University policy to abort a drop if there’s any sort of problem.”

  “May I also remind you that the only problem we’ve encountered on this drop is that you failed to screen your tech for dorphs.” He reached for the phone. “I will decide if and when this drop needs to be aborted.”

  The phone rang.

  “Gilchrist here,” Gilchrist said. “Just a moment, please.” He handed the telephone to Dunworthy.

  “Mr. Dunworthy,” Finch said, looking harried. “Thank goodness. I’ve been calling round everywhere. You won’t believe the difficulties I’ve had.”

  “I’ve been detained,” Dunworthy said before Finch could launch into an account of his difficulties. “Now listen carefully. I need you to go and fetch Badri Chaudhuri’s employment file from the bursar’s office. Dr. Ahrens needs it. Ring her up. She’s here at Infirmary. Insist on speaking directly to her. She’ll tell you what information she wants from the file.”

  “Yes, sir,” Finch said, taking up a pad and pencil and taking rapid notes.

  “As soon as you’ve done that, I want you to go straight to New College and see the Senior Tutor. Tell him I must speak with him immediately and give him this telephone number. Tell him it’s an emergency, that it’s essential that we locate Basingame. He must come back to Oxford immediately.”