Temporal Exploring 101 - First Transit

I.34 Incident at the library

Upon our return to St. Albert's I lost no time contact Sara and Mira via the ansible to inform them about what I had learned concerning the origin of the signet ring, and about the mysterious person Jake to whom it had been given by its original owner, Sir Colin Firth.

As it turned out, my Temporal Instructor and her grad student had news for me as well.

Running a distributed search on the Grid for newsworthy events that had happened on September 25, 1950 or a few weeks before that in the area of Greater London had yielded no results. Only when they had added the symbol of two crossed lilies as a correlated entity and considered the events of the entire year 1950, their efforts had proved successful.

"The two crossed lilies were the emblem of the East London Pendergast's Clinic and Children's Hospital," Mira who had done the research proudly told me. "On April 4, 1950,  a fire broke out at Pendergast's that completely destroyed the clinic. That event made it to the national news, that day. All the patients were saved, except for one small child, referred to as 'Infant 41'."

It was unclear if Infant 41 had actually become a victim of the fire. All that could be said was that the child had disappeared. The efforts to save people from the fire had been conducted in a somewhat uncoordinated if not chaotic manner, so it could not be ruled out that one of the rescuers or would-be rescuers had taken the baby and made off with it.

"So you think that Natty is Infant 41?" I marveled. "But that means you must know also where she came from, who her parents were and all that. Surely that must have been documented at the hospital."

"Unfortunately, it is not as easy as that," Sara cut in. "It turns out Infant 41 was a foundling, discovered on the front steps of the clinic only a few days before the fire. It made for a sad and mysterious story that occupied the tabloids for weeks after the event."

"Great Gauss! But what happened with the child between April 4 and September 25, then?"

"It is possible that she stayed with the young man who later delivered her to the orphanage. But we don't really know that, at this point."

We talked some more before we closed the connection. I walked back to my dorm room, lost in thought. It appeared that the more we found out about Natty and her origins, the more new questions came up.

If I needed any additional demonstration of the controversial role that Natty played at St. Albert's, my roommate herself provided such a demonstration on the very next day.

Our History teacher had divided our class into study groups of three girls each and had set each group a separate task. Those tasks involved researching certain aspects of the lives of ordinary people in various historical eras. Each group was supposed to give a presentation of their results in front of the class, a week from now.

In the 1960s, doing that sort of research meant visiting the local library – in our case, St. Albert's school library. Remember that in the 1960s not only did the Grid not yet exist, but also its predecessor, the World Wide Web, had not been set up yet, nor for that matter, any other service of the so-called Internet – a basic global network that, as you know, would be severely damaged if not completely destroyed during the Cataclysm only about a hundred years later.

So, off to the school library we went. Two girls of the Upper Sixth who were on library duty at that time were checking our credentials at the entrance. Their badges identified them as prefects. Their names were written on small cards placed in front of them on top of the counter: Marcia Evans and Clara Lang.

When it was Natty's turn to present her library card, Evans looked at it and shook her head.

"I am sorry, but I can't let you in."