Doomsday Book (Oxford Time Travel, #1) - Connie Willis Page 0,188

On the back of a flyer?”

“Then fetch me a sheet of paper!” he shouted.

Colin’s eyes widened. “I will. You wait here, all right?” he said placatingly. “Don’t leave.”

He dashed back inside and reappeared immediately with several sheets of hardcopy paper. Dunworthy snatched it from him and scrawled the orders and Basingame’s name. “Go and fetch your book. I’ll meet you at Brasenose.”

“What about your coat?”

“There’s no time,” he said. He folded the paper in fourths and jammed it inside his jacket.

“It’s raining. Shouldn’t you take a taxi?” Colin said.

“There aren’t any taxis.” He started off down the street.

“Great-aunt Mary’s going to kill me, you know,” Colin called after him. “She said it was my responsibility to see that you got your enhancement.”

He should have taken a taxi. It was pouring by the time he reached Brasenose, a hard slanting rain that would be sleet in another hour. Dunworthy felt chilled to the bone.

The rain had at least driven the picketers away. There was nothing in front of Brasenose but a few wet flyers they had dropped. An expandable metal gate had been pulled across the front of the entrance to Brasenose. The porter had retreated inside his lodge, and the shutter was down.

“Open up!” Dunworthy shouted. He rattled the gate loudly. “Open up immediately!”

The porter pulled the shutter up and looked out. When he saw it was Dunworthy, he looked alarmed and then belligerent. “Brasenose is under quarantine,” he said. “It’s restricted.”

“Open this gate immediately,” Dunworthy said.

“I’m afraid I can’t do that, sir,” he said. “Mr. Gilchrist has given orders that no one be admitted to Brasenose until the source of the virus is discovered.”

“We know the source,” Dunworthy said. “Open the gate.”

The porter let the shutter down, and in a minute he came out of the lodge and over to the gate. “Was it the Christmas decorations?” he said. “They said the ornaments were infected with it.”

“No,” Dunworthy said. “Open the gate and let me in.”

“I don’t know whether I should do that, sir,” he said, looking uncomfortable. “Mr. Gilchrist …”

“Mr. Gilchrist isn’t in charge anymore,” he said. He pulled the folded paper out of his jacket and poked it through the metal gate at the porter.

He unfolded it and read it, standing there in the rain.

“Mr. Gilchrist is no longer Acting Head,” Dunworthy said. “Mr. Basingame has authorized me to take charge of the drop. Open the gate.”

“Mr. Basingame,” he said, peering at the already-blotted signature. “I’ll find the keys,” he said.

He went back in the lodge, taking the paper with him. Dunworthy huddled against the gate, trying to keep out of the freezing rain, and shivering.

He had been worried about Kivrin sleeping on the cold ground, and she was in the middle of a holocaust, where people froze to death because no one was left on their feet to chop wood, and the animals died in the fields because no one was left alive to bring them in. Eighty thousand dead in Siena, three hundred thousand in Rome, more than a hundred thousand in Florence. One half of Europe.

The porter finally emerged with a large ring of keys and came over to the gate. “I’ll have it open in a moment, sir,” he said, sorting through the keys.

Kivrin would surely have gone back to the drop as soon as she realized it was 1348. She would have been there all this time, waiting for the net to open, frantic that they hadn’t come to get her.

If she had realized. She would have no way of knowing she was in 1348. Badri had told her the slippage would be several days. She would have checked the date against the Advent holy days and thought she was exactly where she was supposed to be. It would never have occurred to her to ask the year. She would think she was in 1320, and all the time the plague would be sweeping toward her.

The gate’s lock clicked free, and Dunworthy pushed the gate open far enough to squeeze through. “Bring your keys,” he said. “I need you to unlock the laboratory.”

“That key’s not on here,” the porter said, and disappeared into the lodge again.

It was icy in the passage, and the rain came slanting in, colder still. Dunworthy huddled next to the door of the lodge, trying to catch some of the heat from inside, and jammed his hands hard against the bottoms of his jacket pockets to stop the shivering.

He had been worried about cutthroats and thieves, and all