“Two of my evacuees. I’m observing the children who were evacuated from London.”
“Which was when?”
“September of 1939 to the end of the war. Didn’t you attend any of your first-year history lectures?”
He laughed. “I meant
, when are you there?”
“Till May second, which is why I didn’t know about Dunkirk.”
“If the evacuation lasted till the end of the war,” he said, “maybe you can talk Dunworthy into letting you stay on to do VE-Day. Or you could just not come back.”
She shook her head. “The retrieval team would come after me. And even if I could elude them, staying would mean I’d have to put up with Alf and Binnie for another five—”
“Merope!” someone called.
Michael turned and looked across the quad. “Someone’s looking for you.”
It was Colin Templer. He loped up to them. “Do you know where Polly is?”
“At Wardrobe,” Eileen said.
“I thought she said she was coming here.”
“She was. She did. She came to see Mr. Dunworthy, but he’s in with someone, and she couldn’t wait.”
“What do you mean, he’s in with someone? Mr. Dunworthy’s not here. He’s in London. He won’t be back till tonight.”
Eileen turned to Michael. “But you said—”
“That damned secretary of his!” Michael exploded. “He didn’t say a word about Dunworthy’s being gone. He just asked if I’d care to wait, and I assumed—”
“This is dreadful!” Eileen said. “Now what am I going to do about my driving lessons?”
“How
late tonight?” Michael asked Colin.
“I don’t know,” Colin began, but Michael was already striding up the stairs and into Mr. Dunworthy’s office. “You said Polly’s over at Wardrobe?” Colin asked Eileen.
She nodded, and Colin took off at a run. Michael came back, shaking his head. “He won’t be back before midnight at the earliest. He went to see some temporal theorist named Ishiwaka. And here I wasted an entire afternoon—no offense,” he said. “It’s just that I didn’t have enough time to get ready for this drop as it is, and now—”
“I know. I only have two days, and now I’ll have to wait till tomorrow to get my driving lessons approved.”
“No, you won’t,” he said, digging in his pockets. “I got permission from him for lessons in piloting small craft when I thought I was going to Pearl Harbor. If he didn’t fill it out…” He pulled out a slip of paper and unfolded it. “Good, he didn’t. He just signed it. Here.”
“But won’t you need it?”
“Not till I get back from Dover,” he said. “I’ll tell him I lost it and need another form.” He handed it to her.
“Thank you,”
she said fervently. “You’ve saved my life.” She looked at her watch. If she hurried, she could make it to Props and get the driving authorization before they closed. “I need to go.”
“So do I,” he said, walking her back to the gate. “I need to go memorize the map of Dover and the names of the boats that participated in the evacuation, all seven hundred of them.”
They started out through the gate and nearly collided with Colin. “I thought you were going to find Polly,” Eileen said.
“I was,” Colin said breathlessly. “But when I got to Wardrobe, they asked me if I knew where you were, Mr. Davies, and I said yes, and they said to come tell you they need you to come talk to them straightaway. They said they’d had to give your costume to Gerald Phipps and they need you to come in to try on a new one.”
Look Out in the Blackout!
—BRITISH GOVERNMENT POSTER, 1939
Oxford—April 2060
BADRI ADJUSTED THE FOLDS OF THE NET AROUND MIKE. “I’m sending you through to 5 A.M. on May twenty-fourth,” he said.
Good, Mike thought. The evacuation wouldn’t start till Sunday the twenty-sixth, and the civilian boats wouldn’t start bringing soldiers back till the next day, so he’d have plenty of time to get to Dover and figure out how to get out to the docks.
“There may be slippage of an hour or two,” Badri said, “depending on who’s in the area and might see the shimmer.” But when they sent him through a few minutes later, it was much darker than an hour or two before dawn should be—a total, blanketing darkness. He waited for his eyes to adjust, but there was no light to adjust to.
He couldn’t see any stars or lights, though that could be due to the blackout. In May of 1940, no outdoor lights had been allowed, cars’ lights had had to be masked, and windows had had