Take a Lemon

“The camera thing worked?” I gasped. “We have pictures of the lab?”

“Well,” Eric replied cautiously, “The trigger went off, and I presume that means that the camera caught whatever there was to see. At any rate, it seems to have filled up its memory. I didn’t want to play around with it, though. I figure you know more about the camera than I do.”

“I don’t believe this!” I enthused. “We’re actually going to see the lab! Can you bring the camera over to my room? I’ll call Vicky, and you can invite Martin.”

“See in you a few minutes.”

Vicky was so excited I could swear she flew all the way to my dorm. “Did you get it?!” she exclaimed when I let her in.

“Get what?” Terry asked, as she came back from the bathroom, causing Vicky almost to swallow her tongue.

“Some friends are making a video with my Flip Cam,” I explained, having thought ahead this time for an explanation.

“Oh, cool! Let me see it when you’re done,” she said, vanishing into her bedroom. Oh well. I can always tell her it didn’t turn out, I guess.

“Eric’s on his way over with the camera,” I told Vicky. “Then I’ll import it so we can watch it all together.”

“How can you be so calm about this?” she almost shouted, following me into my room.

“I’m just trying not to get my hopes up too high, is all,” I said. “But I’m not calm. Look.” I held out my hand. “I’m shaking. I so much want this to give us all the answers. I want to see a big sign that tells us where to find Professor Davis. I want to see a journal that says that they’re all set to change back anybody who wants to be changed back.” I shook my head. “Don’t mind me, I’m just rambling.”

A knock on the outer door sent me running to open it before my roommates did. Martin and Eric were there when I opened it and I almost snatched my camera out of Eric’s hand when he offered it to me. “Come on in, guys!” I said. “Vicky’s already here.”

I turned to lead the way and spotted Lee Ann looking curiously at my guests. “Oh, Hi, Lee Ann,” I said, trying to sound nonchalant. “This is Martin and Eric. They’re working on something with me.”

“Oh. Hi,” she said, sounding a bit dubious. I guess having a couple of strange men visit early in the morning wasn’t typical for Marsha. “Are you not going to be eating with us, then?”

“Yeah, go on without me. I’ll grab something when we’re done.”

Back in my room, I wasted no time in hooking the camera up to my computer. And then we had to wait. “This is going to take a while to import, guys,” I said. “So… how is everybody?”

“I’m going to strangle you, you know,” Vicky said, with her eyes wide. “How long is it going to take?”

I laughed. “About two minutes, according to the manual. I’m just trying to ease the tension a bit.”

“Well, it’s not working!”

The guys just watched us, looking a bit amused, and before long the import was done and I moved the monitor so that they could see it from the bed. “Everybody ready?” I asked, and when they nodded, I pressed ‘play’ and quickly joined them on the bed.

We saw a man standing with his back to the camera open the door; unfortunately, his body blocked our view of the room. Then he moved aside to let another man enter and removed the key from the lock. As the second man entered the room, we caught our first glimpse of the interior over his shoulders.

“That’s the lab, alright,” I whispered, not wanting to drown out anything that we might hear from the video.

“But where is everything?” Vicky whispered back. “Didn’t there used to be something against that wall?”

Before I could answer, the first man followed the second into the room. And closed the door behind him.

For a moment, nobody spoke. Then Vicky found her voice. “That’s it?! All the build up for that?”

“They have to have come out eventually,” Eric noted.

I dashed to the computer and started fiddling with the time slider. “Right. As long as they came out before the memory was full…” For most of the timeline, the image was unchanged – just that same closed door. But then, at around forty minutes in, I saw the picture jump. “I’ve got it!” I exclaimed, and slowed down my search. I moved the slider to just before the earliest point where I’d seen something and hit play.

For half a minute, nothing happened – I’d obviously started too early. Then suddenly the door opened and the first man came out and secured it – only this time, we could see his face.

“I know him!” Vicki gasped. “That’s the grad student who signed me up for the experiment in the first place.”

“Yeah,” I nodded in agreement. Behind him, we could see the second man, who was clearly older, standing behind a crate that was about three foot high, and behind him we could see the lab again.

“Is it my imagination–”, Martin started to say, but Eric shushed him.

“They’re talking!” he whispered.

And indeed the camera had picked up voices. “… why you brought this,” the older man said, lifting something that was sitting on top of the crate.

The grad student’s back was to us, so it was harder to make out what he was saying, but it sounded like, “… noticed it while I was unhooking the… -zer and wond- … group B might recognize it.”

“It’s risky,” said the other, “how would you introduce it?”

The student’s answer was lost as the two of them carried the crate with the object on it out of the room and down the hall, shutting the door behind them.

“Isn’t some of the equipment gone from before?” Martin asked, once the two were no longer audible.

“I think so,” I said. “We can always go back and check. Do you think that’s professor Davis?”

“Could be,” Eric said. “I think I’ve seen him around the department, only not for a while. The other guy, too,” Martin nodded.

“So what was that about ‘group B’?” I asked. “Does that mean that they did different experiments on different people?”

“Could be,” Eric repeated. “I wonder what that thing was that they wanted to show…”

“You recognized it, didn’t you, Marsh?” Vicky asked. “It was hanging over the table when we lay down on it.”

I shook my head. “I’m pretty sure I’ve never seen it before. Do you suppose that means that you and I actually did different experiments?”

She and I stared at each other. Maybe that was why I had changed sex and she hadn’t? But if so, which of us was ‘group B’ and why hadn’t we met anybody else who’d had the response that I had?

“But how are they talking to their test subjects?” Eric wondered. “None of the Strangers are cooperating. Do you suppose that some people didn’t join because they were still helping out? I think we’ve got more questions than answers, at this point.” He turned to Martin. “Did you recognize any of the equipment?”

“Well,” started Martin, “I thought I saw some counters, like you might use to detect subatomic particles. I didn’t recognize most of the stuff, though. I have no idea what I’d even expect to see in a time travel lab. It’s kind of uncharted territory, you know? Not sure why the particle detectors would be there, though. There was clearly some custom-made equipment, too. At least a lot of things looked breadboarded rather than mass-produced. But some things… there are some places that make one-off equipment, and I thought I saw an enclosure that could have been from one of them. I don’t remember the name, but I can check in my lab if we have something similar. That’s about all I can think of.”

“And I think there was printing on the crate,” Eric said. “Can we go back and look?” I backed up the video to the point when the crate was passing the camera. “Yeah, it looks like three words at the top. I think the middle one might be ‘MILLS.’”

“Or ‘HILLS,’” I suggested, looking closely and moving the video back and forth, looking for better angles. The word after it looks like it starts, ‘ENG,’” I think.

“It’s annoying,” Eric went on. “Their bodies are covering a lot of it, but I think there’s another ‘N’ later in the third word – or maybe an ‘H’.”

“The first word might end with ‘N’,” Martin observed. “Maybe… Malvern Hills, England?”

“England?” Vicky wailed.

“Hold on,” I said. “Why England?”

“Just a wild guess,” Martin said. “I’m just trying to figure out what the words could mean. I just happen to know that there’s a Malvern Hills in England.”

“I don’t think we have nearly enough information,” I said. “The last word could be ‘engine’ or something like that. Anybody know enough to make an internet search based on this?”

All I saw were blank looks. About all we were sure of was that Davis and his student were sneaking stuff out slowly, so I gave Eric the camera again, hoping that we would catch them the following weekend as well. Otherwise, we seemed to be out of ideas.

“Thanks for coming over, guys,” I said, standing up. “I think we’ve taken an important first step.” I walked the boys out, but Vicky stayed.

“Shouldn’t we talk about this some more?” she asked.

“Well, I’d like to,” I told her, “but I need to get ready for my call back audition.”

“Are you out of your mind? How can you put a show before…?” she looked around. My roommates weren’t visible, but she hurried me back into my bedroom and closed the door. “How can you put this before regaining your true self?”

“I’m not,” I protested. “But this problem isn’t going to get solved this morning, and the callbacks are on a specific schedule. I’ll call you afterwards and we can talk all you like.”

The callbacks actually turned out to be pretty straightforward. Marsha’s voice was clearly at least as good any that of any of the other girls, and my acting was better, and they announced then and there that I had the role. Jo got the Beggar Woman, so we’d be working together again. I joked about calling her, ‘Mom’ and she jokingly admonished me about eating my vegetables and being careful about boys.

But the obviously disappointed faces of the girls I’d beaten haunted me. They’d worked so hard to get themselves into a position to compete for the role, and I’d just woken up with this voice and hadn’t had to work for it at all. It didn’t seem fair. Not that I was going to give up the role, of course, but I did wish that there could have been some sort of consolation prize for them other than the chorus.

The conversation with Vicky basically went nowhere. Neither of us had any brilliant ideas on how to follow things through. We agreed that Martin’s suggestion about England was really unlikely, but I think both of us were a bit concerned that it fit what we knew about the writing on the crate.

My weekly call with my father and Chad that night was a lot more productive.

“England?” Chad scoffed when I told them what we’d learned. “You see that’s impossible, don’t you?”

“Well, it seemed unlikely,” I said, not quite understanding his confidence.

“Impossible,” he repeated. “Look, first of all, it sounds as though they are still interviewing test subjects, who pretty much have to be local – and yeah, they could do that over the internet, but… you also said that they’re taking stuff out bit by bit, right? So, assuming that they’re moving to another lab, it only makes sense that it has to be close by, no more than a few hours or so. There’s just no way that these guys are flying across the Atlantic Ocean every week to grab one crate and pack it up.”

“Couldn’t they be staying locally and just shipping it overseas?”

“Not with the secrecy you claim. I can’t imagine that they’re going to let this equipment sit away from them for months. They have to have been doing this for months, right?”

“Um, hold on,” I said, finally remembering to compare the state of the lab before and after they were in the room. “I’d say that this time they probably took out maybe a tenth to a twentieth of what was in there. It’s kind of hard to be sure from what I can see. And it looks like they’ve cleared about half the room by now, as far as I can see. So, yeah, it would make sense that they’ve been doing this for a while.

“So if you’re going to search for ‘something Mills Engines’ or ‘Engineering’…”

“It’s still too large an area, Chad,” I pointed out. “We don’t even have the first letter.”

“And that’s another thing,” he continued. “Why bother even labeling the crate of their carrying it themselves. They have to shipping it somewhere, right? But you didn’t see an address. So what’s up with that?”

“The address could have been in smaller print,” Dad suggested. “Or maybe the name is a fake, just in case somebody asks why they’re carrying a crate around. Or maybe different crates are going to different places and they have to keep track.

“Marsh, the problem is, you have no idea what the name means, and you don’t even have it in the first place. I don’t want to step on your toes, Honey, but may I make a suggestion?”

“Of course, Dad,” I said, fighting for some reason now not to call him, ‘Daddy.’

“Send me the images you have, showing the door – it has a number, I think you said – and the lab and the secrecy. That’s not normal. Let me get a court order to open that door, as well as the records of who’s using it. I think we have enough information now, don’t you?”

“I… guess so,” I admitted.

“Can you really get something like that, Mr. Steen?” Chad asked.

“I don’t know for sure. They could be questions of standing. But I might be able to bluff the school into providing some information, especially if I can get the backing of the other parents. You can get that for me, right, Marsh? The names of a bunch of parents who would be willing to throw their weight behind this?”

“I… think so… I’ll have to ask Eric, since we’re not supposed to contact the Strangers directly. But yeah, that sounds reasonable. What do you think, Chad?”

“I don’t know about bluffing, but then again, I don’t play poker. Only I have nothing better to offer. Maybe… see if the Better Business Bureau has a list of businesses names and search against them? But you’d need to contact a lot of agencies, I guess.”

“Maybe somebody in the Strangers is a comp-sci genius and can do it. OK, Dad, I’ll get you some names, and you can start doing what you need to do, OK?”

I didn’t want to get my hopes up, and I was starting to enjoy the life I was living for now, but it really did seem that there was a good chance that it would only be temporary. That had to be a good thing, right?