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what happened to him, or his mother, Faustilla—whether they had met up and fled to safety or perished.
    I attempted to explain. “It would have been the prudent thing to do, yes, but remember that the details that anchor this decade for us—bellbottoms, smoking on campus, Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford election posters—would mean nothing to her. To her eyes, the campus would only appear slightly different than it does in the present.”
    “She must have been both curious and puzzled,” Abigail said.  
    “All right, so she wandered off,” Dr. Little said.
    We all realized that a methodical circuit of campus to check every single building and every single room would take impossibly long. We needed a better way.  
    “Maybe she’s trying to find us,” Abigail suggested. “Here, I mean. In 1976. Not me, obviously, but—well, maybe even me if she hasn’t figured out yet how far back in time she jumped, as you say, Julia.”  
    I nodded. “Yes, in which case she’d look for us where she expects us to be—the campus security office for Nate, Hypatia House for me…There’s no TTE building for her to look for you, Abigail…but perhaps she’s gone to the physics department to find Dr. Mooney.”
    “If she tried all of those already and didn’t find us, then the lake,” Abigail said. “It’s where she likes to go when she needs to think.”
    Sunniva Lake sat smack in the middle of campus, and Sabina often sat on its reeded shores when she got pensive. The lake’s gentle waters reminded her of her demolished seashore home.
    “Let’s check all those places,” I suggested.
    “I would argue that that’s a waste of time,” Dr. Little said. “You said that those places are the ones she would have gone to first, two days ago. Why would she still be there?”
    “Well, we have to start somewhere. Abigail, why you don’t make a circle of the lake? And once again, Dr. Little, you’ll probably blend into the physics department crowd more easily than us. I’ll swing by Hypatia House and the security office. Then we can meet back by the Open Book. In an hour, say?”  
    Abigail and I had the radios Nate and his officer had given us, but we would have no way of reaching Dr. Little. Nothing could be done about that, however. Something occurred to me. “Oh, and Dr. Little? I’ve been meaning to ask—will we get time-stuck less frequently here than we did in Pompeii? No one seemed to care that I was poking around the Registrar’s Office.”
    Dr. Little fought off a tired yawn and confirmed my suspicion. “Yes, you should find it easier to move around.”
    “Because the strands of History aren’t as deeply woven as they are in far time?”
    “Partly, but that’s balanced out by the fact that many of the far-time strands are dusty and irrelevant. The reason is simpler. We blend in. We’re not from so far into the future that we do not belong.”

    “What could be keeping Dr. Little?”
    Abigail and I had managed to keep in touch via the radios, though we had encountered interference, a testy voice instructing us to get off this frequency, as it was reserved for campus security. Abigail had done a full circle of Sunniva Lake, heading from the Science Quad down to the future English department at the lake’s south end, then up the other side past the tower clock, the library, and the dock, and back to her starting point at the Open Book. I had visited Hypatia House and then the security office, which was still where it was in the present, near the south parking lot. After turning off my radio so Abigail wouldn’t try to reach me at an inopportune moment, I had walked right in. I mumbled a weak cover story about having lost a wallet, looked around to see if they had Sabina anywhere, and left. The only bright spot was that the young officer who had promised to keep an eye out for my wallet had been a young and handsome Dan Anderson (in his late twenties, I guessed), our campus security chief before Nate took