Page 50 of Under Story

“Don’t sell yourself short. You have the credentials.”

He’s laughing now. Laurel feels looser, as though she’s made it through the opening of a presentation.

“All right,” Eli says. “Let me see if I have this right. We cross over to the antiuniverse now, in 2017. We spend three years there, which rewinds the clock to July of 2014. I’m employed, with access to the antiuniverse’s fanciest equipment, and I’ve found another portal. We use it to cross back to our world. Then what?”

“We go home to Silas.”

“You think he’ll just be waiting?”

Laurel pictures it now: the cargo plane streaking north, rushing home from the Madison airport. They’ll fly upstairs to find Silas in bed. “Where else would he be?”

“Hang on,” Eli says. “We’ve both seen the time travel movies, and we’ve read the time travel books. They all pose the same problem: to go back in time is to change it. What if Silas doesn’t exist?”

Laurel considers this. “I guess I can accept that risk.”

“Why?”

“Well,” she says, “I already know the alternative.”

Eli furrows his brow. He’s watching her closely. Laurel searches him in return.

“It scares me, the way you’re acting,” he explains. “I need to know if you’re…trying to hurt yourself. I don’t want to have any part in that.”

“Oh.” Laurel exhales. “No. It’s not that, I don’t think. Maybe at one point, it would have been. Now it’s more like…like my life has already veered off course. I’m facing some other direction. So why don’t I just keep going?”

Eli’s forehead relaxes. He turns to looks out of the window. It’s as dark at eight in the morning as it was at midnight. The sky is specked with stars, which shine so brilliantly here, like emissaries with an urgent message.

“Tomorrow,” he says. “Ask Nita if she’ll meet us in the library after dinner.”

In March of 2013, Laurel biked through campus, dodging St. Patrick’s Day detritus: fake buckled hats, beaded green necklaces. Her electricity experiment had failed so many times that she could hardly imagine it succeeding. She recorded data with rote efficiency, unsurprised when it deviated from her old hypothesis. Surprise would mean that she had hope, and hope had become a path to disappointment.

She locked her bike and entered the Rhizotron. It was too late to design a new project. Other lab members avoided her, as if failure were infectious. Tess was still in the Netherlands, studying volatile organic compounds. Today, the only other person in the lab was Gloria.

Laurel sat down at a computer. She had just finished another round of the experiment, and Samir, the lab technician, had left the data on a flash drive. First, she reviewed the video footage, noting the time stamp when the mycelium branched. She still had the capacity to be amazed by it: threads reaching in purposeful unison, like a dance it knew the steps to in advance. The electrical data moved in waves. In a new document, Laurel overlaid the electricity plots and branching events. She was already thinking of what she’d make for dinner.

The initial spike in electricity came right before the first branch. This had happened in previous experiments: it wasn’t uncommon to find one or two points of correlation out of dozens. Laurel stopped musing about tofu enchiladas when the second spike and branch aligned. At the third, she called for Gloria, a strangled yelp.

It was exactly what she had written in her proposal three years before.

“My word,” Gloria breathed.

Laurel’s elation broke apart, becoming melancholy. The university had already denied her more funding.

“It’s too late, isn’t it?” she asked.

“Not if you can repeat the results,” said Gloria.

But Laurel couldn’t. When she ran another trial, the results reverted to randomness. She had a despairing sense of being teased, the door to Narnia turned back into a wardrobe.

“There is nothing here to be ashamed of,” said Gloria, that summer. “Scientists need imagination. Humility, too. Think of everyone who got it wrong! Aristotle thought Earth was the center of the universe. Einstein could never get his head around quantum mechanics. But maybe we needed every failed theory to get where we are now. I like to think of knowledge as an organism. We’re all feeding it, little by little. That’s how it evolves.”

Laurel nodded, but she didn’t share Gloria’s optimism. She felt the loss not only of her confidence, and her prospects, but also, somehow, of her father once again. As long as she pursued her research, some mystery—about life, about death—remained unsolved; and as long as there was mystery, Pete was not quite gone.

“I have an offer for you,” Gloria said. “Samir is leaving. That means we need a new technician.”

“Oh, God. I mean, thank you, but—”

“Think about it,” said Gloria. “You’d have a nine-to-five with decent pay. And in your spare time, you could work on bioelectricity.”