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the job. It had been nice to see him at his prime, before old age ushered him into retirement and a gardening hobby.
    The blanket and bottled water were still there at the Open Book, where the basket—invisible, patient—waited to take us back home.  
    After cooling our heels for a good fifteen minutes past the allotted meeting time, Abigail and I decided to look for Dr. Little.  
    The lakeside footpath, tree-shaded in spots, took us to the Chemistry and Physics Annex. Marie Curie’s name would be appended to the building’s name one day, but for now its title was strictly utilitarian. The physics side of the annex was connected to its concrete twin by a glass-encased walkway appreciated by professors and students alike in the winter. It looked just the same as it did in the present, though the glass of the walkway was perhaps a little cleaner. Graduate students catching up on their research over the weekend trickled in and out of the coupled buildings, book bags on shoulders.
    Dr. Little was in the courtyard between the two halves of the annex, on a bench by a small fountain under the walkway. He was asleep, his duffel bag by his feet.
    I put a hand on his shoulder, and he jerked awake.
    “Sorry, it wasn’t my fault. I sat down to get a pebble out of my shoe and found I was time-stuck,” he said with no hint that he was aware of the irony of getting time-stuck right after he’d explained why we weren’t likely to. Like Abigail and me, he had retained his modern footwear under the bellbottom jeans—a five-toed sneaker on each foot—which I knew he preferred for walking. “I found that I couldn’t get up at all. There were two students talking—Good Lord, are they still there? Don’t they have work to do?” A male and a female student were chatting by the front doors on the physics side of the building. “What could possibly take so long?” Dr. Little’s tone suggested that he felt graduate students should have more important things to do than socialize.
    Abigail and I had taken a seat on either side of him. I tried to get back up, but my bottom might as well have been glued to the bench.  
    “Guess we’re all stuck now,” Abigail said.
    After a good ten minutes of waiting, punctuated by Dr. Little’s irritated sighs, the pair finally disappeared inside.  
    Abigail jumped up. “It’s okay now.”
    Dr. Little tentatively got to his feet, reached for his duffel bag, and slung it across one shoulder. As we headed toward the physics entrance, he explained, “I’ve visited this current iteration of campus twice already while working my way closer to my birth date. The grad student offices are in the basement. The stairs are at the end of this hall.” He led us down them into a dingy, windowless hallway.
    “This must be it,” Abigail said of the third door down.  
    The door didn’t have a list of names, only a piece of paper nailed to it that said If Physics Students You Seek, Look No Further . Abigail raised a hand to knock. She rapped softly first, then, when there was no response, more sharply.  
    There was still no answer. She sent a shrug in our direction and turned the handle. The door swung open with a gentle creak, and we filed inside.  
    The grad student office was larger than I had expected, but the dozen desks packed into it made it seem cramped. All of the desks were unoccupied at the moment. There were coats hanging on a rack by the door, as if several students were there for the day but elsewhere in the building, either in labs or in the physics library on the top floor. A large blackboard stood in one corner and held equations and a sketch. After a few seconds’ consideration, it dawned on me that the sketch represented an idealized version of STEWie—there were circles where the mirrors would be one day, wiggles for lasers, a square box for the generator, and a small oval for the basket. Abigail—and also Dr. Little, which was a little out of the norm for him—let out chuckles