Connie Willis - Blackout

She felt bad about ducking out on her promise to speak to Mr. Dunworthy about Merope going to VE-Day, but it couldn’t be helped. And it wasn’t as if time was an issue. Merope’d said she still had several months left to go on her evacuee assignment. And I’ll only be gone six weeks, Polly thought. I’ll go see him as soon as I’m safely back and persuade him to let her do it.

If it was even necessary. He might already have changed his mind by then. In the meantime, Polly needed to keep out of Mr. Dunworthy’s way, hope the lab came up with a drop site soon, and be ready to go through the moment they did. To that end, she went to Props to get a wristwatch-this one radium-dialed, since the one she’d had last time hadn’t been and had been nearly useless-a ration book and identity card made out in the name of Polly Sebastian, and letters of recommendation to use in applying for work as a shopgirl.

“What about a departure letter?” the tech asked her. “Do you need anything special?”

“No, the same one I had last time will work-the Northumberland one. It needs to be addressed to Polly Sebastian and have an October 1940 postmark.”

The tech wrote that down and handed her thirty pounds.

“Oh, that’s far too much,” she said. “I’ll have the wages I earn after the first week, and I don’t expect my room and board to be more than ten and six a week. I’ll only need ten pounds at the most.” But the tech was shaking his head.

“It says here that you’re to take twenty pounds for unforeseen emergencies.”

Authorized by Mr. Dunworthy, no doubt, even though she had no business carrying that much money-it would have been a fortune to a 1940 shopgirl. But if she turned it down, the tech might report it to Mr. Dunworthy. She signed for the money and the wristwatch, told the tech she’d pick up the papers in the morning, and went over to Magdalen to ask Lark Chiu if she could stay with her for a few nights, and when she said yes, sent her to Balliol to fetch her clothes and her research and sat down with the list of Underground shelters Colin had done for her.

Colin. She’d have to ask him not to say anything to Dunworthy. If he was still here. He’d probably gone back to school, which, in light of what Merope had said, might be just as well.

She memorized the Underground shelters and the dates and times they’d been hit and then started on Mr. Dunworthy’s list of forbidden addresses, which took her the rest of the night to commit to memory, even though it only included houses that had been hit in 1940, during the first half of the Blitz. Had every house in London been bombed by the time it was over?

The next morning she went over to Wardrobe to order her costume. “I need a black skirt, white blouse, and a lightweight coat, preferably also black,” she told the tech, who promptly brought out a navy blue skirt.

“No, that won’t work,” Polly said. “I’m posing as a shop assistant, and department store employees in 1940 wore black skirts and white long-sleeved blouses.”

“I’m certain any dark skirt would do. This is a very dark navy. In most lights, one can’t tell the difference.”

“No, it needs to be black. How long would it take to have a skirt like this made in black?”

“Oh, dear, I’ve no idea. We’re weeks behind. Mr. Dunworthy suddenly made all sorts of changes in everyone’s schedules, and we’ve had to reassign costumes and come up with new ones on no notice at all. When’s your drop?”

“The day after tomorrow,” Polly lied.

“Oh, dear. Let me see if I have anything else which might work.” She went into the dressing room and emerged after a bit with two skirts-one a 1960s mini and the other an i-com cargo kilt. “These are the only blacks I could find.”

“No,” Polly said.

“The kilt’s cellphone’s only a replica. It’s not dangerous.”

But it also hadn’t been invented till the 1980s, and the cargo kilt hadn’t been invented till 2014. She made the tech put in a rush order for a black cut on the same pattern as the navy blue and then went over to the lab to tell them where she was staying and see if by some miracle they’d found a drop site.

The door of the lab was locked. To keep out historians irate at having had their drops canceled? Polly knocked, and after a long minute a harassed-looking Linna let her in. “I’m on the phone,” she said and hurried back to it. “No, I know you were scheduled to do the Battle of the Somme first,” she said into it.

Polly went over to Badri at the console. “Sorry to bother you. I was wondering if you’d found a drop site for me yet.”

“No,” he said, rubbing his forehead tiredly. “The problem’s the blackout.”

Polly nodded. The drop couldn’t open if there was anyone nearby who might see it. Ordinarily the faint shimmer from an opening drop wasn’t all that conspicuous, but in blacked-out London, even the light from a pocket torch or a gap in a house’s curtains was instantly noticeable, and ARP wardens patrolled every neighborhood, looking for the slightest infraction. “What about Green Park or Kensington Gardens?”

“No good. They’ve both got anti-aircraft batteries, and the barrage balloons are headquartered in Regent’s Park.”

There was an angry knock, and when Linna went to the door, a man in a fringed suede jacket and a cowboy hat stormed in, waving a printout. “Who the bloody hell changed my schedule?” he shouted at Badri.

“I’ll let you know as soon as I’ve found something,” Badri said to Polly, and this obviously wasn’t the time to ask them to please hurry.

“I’ll come back later,” she said.

“You can’t cancel it!” the man in the cowboy hat shouted. “I’ve been prepping to go to the Battle of Plum Creek for six months!”

Polly ducked past him and started for the door, waving at Linna, who was still on the phone. “No, I realize you’ve already had your implants-” she was saying. Polly opened the door and went out.

And nearly fell over Colin, who was sitting on the pavement, his back to the lab’s wall. “Sorry,” he said and scrambled to his feet. “Where have you been? I’ve been looking all over Oxford for you.”

“What are you doing out here?” Polly asked. “Why didn’t you come in?”

He looked sheepish. “I can’t. It’s off-limits. Mr. Dunworthy’s being completely unreasonable. I asked him to let me go on an assignment, and he phoned the lab and told them I wasn’t to be allowed in.”

“Are you certain you didn’t attempt to sneak into the net while someone else was going through?”

“No. All I did was say that on certain assignments someone my age could provide a different point of view from an older historian-”

“What assignment?” Polly asked. “The Crusades?”

“Why does everyone keep bringing up the Crusades? That was something I wanted to do when I was a child, and I am not-”

“Mr. Dunworthy’s only trying to protect you. The Crusades are a dangerous place.”

“Oh, you’re a fine one to talk about dangerous places,” he said. “And Mr. Dunworthy thinks every place is too dangerous, which is ridiculous. When he was young, he went to the Blitz. He went all sorts of dangerous places, and back then they didn’t even know where they were going. And the place I wanted to go wasn’t remotely dangerous. It was the evacuation of the children from London. In World War II.”

Where she was going. Perhaps Merope was right.

“Speaking of dangerous,” he said, “here are all the raids. I didn’t know when you were coming back, so I did them from September seventh to December thirty-first. The list’s awfully long, so I recorded it as well, in case you want to do an implant.” He handed her a memory tab. “The times are when the bombing began, not when the air-raid alert sirens went. I’m still working on those, but I thought I’d better get the raid times to you in case you were going soon. And if you are, the raids generally began twenty minutes after the sirens sounded. Oh, and by the way, if you’re on a bus, you may not be able to hear the sirens. The noise of the engine drowns them out.”

“Thank you, Colin,” Polly said, looking at the pages. “You must have put in hours and hours of work on this.”

“I did,” he said proudly. “It wasn’t easy to find out what had been hit. The newspapers weren’t allowed to publish the dates or addresses of specific buildings that were bombed-”

Polly nodded, still looking at the list. “They couldn’t print anything which might aid the enemy.”

“And a lot of the government’s records were destroyed in the war and afterward, with the pinpoint and then the Pandemic. And there were lots of stray bombs. It’s not like the V-1 and V-2 attacks, where they have the exact times and coordinates. I’ve listed the major targets and areas of concentration,” he said, showing her on the list, “but there were lots of other things hit. The research said over a million buildings were destroyed, and this only lists a fraction of those. So just because the list says Bloomsbury, it doesn’t mean you’re safe wandering about some other part of London. Particularly the East End-Stepney and Whitechapel and places like that. They were the hardest hit. And the buildings on the list are only ones that were completely destroyed, not those that suffered partial damage or had their windows blown out. Hundreds of people were killed by flying glass or shrapnel from anti-aircraft shells. You need to keep as close to buildings as you can for protection if you’re out during a raid. Shrapnel-”

“Can kill me. I know. You’ve been spending too much time with Mr. Dunworthy. You’re beginning to sound just like him.”

“I am not. It’s just that I don’t want anything to happen to you. And Mr. Dunworthy’s right about its being dangerous. Thirty thousand civilians were killed during the Blitz.”

“I know. I’ll be careful, I promise.”

“And if you do get hit by shrapnel or something, don’t worry. I promise I’ll come rescue you if you get in trouble.”

Oh, dear, Merope was right. “I promise I’ll stay close to buildings,” she said lightly. “Speaking of Mr. Dunworthy, you haven’t told him I’m back, have you?”

“No. I haven’t even told him I’m here. He thinks I’m at school.”

Good, then she needn’t worry about him giving her away. “Thank you for the list. It’s enormously helpful.” She smiled at him, then remembered that wasn’t a good idea under the circumstances. “I’d best get on with my prep,” she said and started across the road.

“Wait,” he said, running to catch up with her. “Is there any other research you need me to do? Besides the siren times, I mean? Do you need a list of the other shelters in case you can’t get to an Underground station?” he asked eagerly. “Or a list of the types of bombs?”

“No. You’ve spent too much time helping me already, Colin, and you’ve your own schoolwork to do-”

“We’re out on holiday all this week,” he said, “and I don’t mind. Truly. It’s good practice for when I’m an historian. I’ll go do them straightaway,” and he loped off down the street.

Polly went over to Research and had Colin’s list of raids implanted so she wouldn’t have to waste time memorizing them, picked up her papers and letters from Props, and then went over to the Bodleian to study. She’d already memorized all this material once before, when she’d thought she was going to the Blitz first, but she’d forgotten most of it in the interim. She went over rationing, the blackout, the events a contemp in the autumn of 1940 would know about-the Battle of Britain, Operation Sealion, the Battle of the North Atlantic-and then committed the map of Oxford Street to memory. She debated doing the same with the Underground map, but those were posted in every tube station. Instead, she’d better memorize the numbers of the buses and-