“Would you like to sit down?” she asked, and before he could say no, the telephone rang, and she went to answer it. “No, sir, he’s sending someone through right now,” he heard her say to the person on the other end. “No, sir, not yet. He’s going through to Oxford.”
Well, he’d been close. He wondered what he was researching in Oxford in the 1930s. The Inklings? The admission of women to the university?
“No, sir, it’s just a recon and prep,” Linna said. “Phipps doesn’t leave for his assignment till the end of next week.”
A recon and prep? Those were only used for especially complicated or dangerous assignments. He looked interestedly over at Phipps, who’d moved to the net. What could he be observing in 1930s Oxford that was that complicated? It couldn’t be anything dangerous—he looked too pale and spindly.
“No, sir, he’s only going to one temporal location,” Linna said into the phone. A pause while she consulted her console. “No, sir. His only other assignment was to 1666.”
“Stand in the center,” Badri said, and Phipps stepped under the draped folds and stood on the positioning marks, pushing his spectacles up on his nose.
“You want a list of all the historians currently on assignment and scheduled to go this week and next?” Linna asked the person on the telephone. “Spatial locations or just temporal?” A pause. “Historian, assignment, dates.” She scribbled it down, he hoped more legibly than Shakira had with the note she’d left him. “Yes, sir, I’ll get that for you straightaway. Do you wish to remain on the line?” she asked, and he must have said yes, because she laid the receiver down and scurried over to Badri, who was still getting Phipps into position, then over to an auxiliary terminal.
“All set?” Badri said to Phipps.
Phipps reached into his tweed jacket, checked something in the inside pocket, then nodded. “You’re not sending me through on a Saturday, are you?” he asked. “If there’s slippage, that will put me there on a Sunday, and—”
“No, a Wednesday,” Badri said. “August seventh.”
“August seventh?” Phipps asked Badri.
“That’s right,” Linna said, “1536,” and Michael looked over at her, confused, but she was back at the phone, reading off a printout. “London, the trial of Anne Boleyn—”
“Yes, the seventh,” Badri said to Phipps. “The drop will open every half hour. Move a bit to the right.” He motioned with his hand. “A bit more.” Phipps shambled obediently to the right. “A bit to the left. Good. Now hold that.” He walked back over to the console and hit several keys, and the folds of the net began to lower around Phipps. “I need you to note the amount of temporal slippage on the drop.”
“October tenth 1940,” Linna said into the phone, “to December eighteenth—”
“Why?” Phipps asked. “You’re not expecting more slippage than usual on this drop, are you?”
“Don’t move,” Badri said.
“There shouldn’t be any slippage. I’m not going anywhere near—”
“Cairo, Egypt,” Linna said into the phone.
“Ready?” Badri asked Phipps.
Phipps said, “No, I want to know—” and was gone in a shimmer of light.
Badri came over to Michael. “I assume you received my message?”
“Yeah,” Michael said. “What the hell’s going on?”
“There’s no need to swear,” Badri said mildly.
“That’s what you think! You can’t change my schedule at the last minute like this. I’ve already done the research for Pearl Harbor. I’ve already gotten my costume and papers and money and had an implant done so I sound like an American.”
“It can’t be helped. Here’s the new order of your drops.” Badri handed him a printout. “Dunkirk evacuation,” the list read, “Pearl Harbor, El Alamein, Battle of the Bulge, second World Trade Center attack, beginning of the Pandemic in Salisbury.”
“You’ve changed all of them?” Michael shouted. “You can’t just move them around like this! They were in the order I gave you for a reason. Look,” he said, shoving the list under Badri’s nose. “Pearl Harbor and the World Trade Center and the Battle of the Bulge are all American. I scheduled them together so I could get one L-and-A implant. Which I’ve already had! How am I supposed to be a London Daily Herald war correspondent reporting on the evacuation from Dunkirk with this accent?”
“I apologize for that,” Badri said. “We attempted to contact you before the implant. I’m afraid you’ll have to have it reversed.”
“Reversed? And then what the hell do I do about Pearl Harbor? I’m supposed to be an American Navy lieutenant. You’ve