The contents of Minerva's stomach hit the floor with a wet, smacking sound. When she straightened up, Scrimgeour handed her a handkerchief.
"Are you all right?" he asked as he Vanished the mess at her feet.
She nodded, still dabbing at the corners of her mouth with the handkerchief. At least she'd decided on bland oatmeal for breakfast this morning, in the hope that she'd get to do another trial. The last few had been short jumps, just a day or two, but the longer the interval, the worse the nausea. She'd been gobsmacked when the head of the Time and Space Division, George Muldur, had given her leave to go back an entire month.
"You got the time recorded?" she asked.
"Right here," Rufus said, tapping his notebook with his wand.
He performed the spell to unseal the door to the jump lab, and Minerva followed him into the Time Room.
"Are you sick?" he asked as she sat down at her desk.
She quirked her mouth up at him. "No, I'm fine. It's just a little nausea. I expected it," she said as she took her lab notebook and a quill from a drawer to make her notes. She thought for a moment, then wrote herself a reminder:
Talk w/? at St M re: anti-emetic potion. Direct effect on dig. tract or systemic? If direct, won't work?
She looked up when she felt him staring at her.
"What is it?" she asked.
"You're not ... you don't think you're ..."
"What?"
"You know. In trouble."
It took her a few moments to twig to what he meant.
She laughed. "Of course not! What in the world gave you that idea?"
He looked at her for another moment, then crossed the room to fetch the tea kettle.
She turned back to her notes and murmured a thanks without looking up when he set a cup down beside her. His hands on her shoulders made her jump.
Throwing her quill down on her desk, she asked, "Rufus, what are you doing?"
"What do you mean?"
"I've asked you before not to do that."
"What?"
"Touch me like that."
He laughed, and she swivelled around in her chair to look up at him, annoyed. He wore the knowing smile that alternately infuriated and enchanted her.
The smile slipped from his face.
"You're serious?"
"Of course. Your pawing at me isn't helping us get our work done."
He opened his mouth as if to say something, then snapped it shut, his oddly yellow eyes seeming to cloud over.
"Yes. Right. Sorry, Minerva."
He took his teacup and went to his desk. Instead of drinking it or pulling out his notebook, though, he just sat, gazing across the room to the Bell Jar, where the hummingbird was making its way to the top. Minerva followed his gaze, and when the bird fell and became a chick, once again locked into its egg, a wave of melancholy passed over her.
She looked back at her notes, focussing her mind on the work at hand.
"Rufus, can you read back to me what you got from Feynman on time-reversal symmetry?"
"Come again?"
"When you saw him last week. There was something he said about the self-energy problem, but I can't remember what you told me."
"I didn't see Feynman last week."
"Of course you did. You went to California."
"Minerva, I never went to California. Remember? I ... er ... I forgot to get the authorisation for the Trans-Continental Portkey. I sent the form in yesterday, though. I thought we were going to go together this weekend."
Minerva looked down at her notebook and went back a few pages. An icy feeling swept over her as she looked, turning page after page. There were notes there, but they were scant, and different from what she remembered writing. It was as if they'd done little over the past few weeks. But they'd been working late into the evenings at the lab, Rufus getting more and more familiar, Minerva's resolve to keep their relationship strictly professional becoming harder and harder to maintain.
Oh, Merlin.
She fingered the prototype around her neck, wondering what would happen the next time she tried it.
Her quill raced across the parchment:
Trial #6 – 02/07/56. Target = 29.75 days (1785h)
Jumper: Minerva McGonagall
Control: Rufus Scrimgeour.
Retrotemporal Jump
Location: Timejump Laboratory, Department of Mysteries, Ministry of Magic, London.
Departed: 02/07/1956; 14:53:42h
Arrived: 03/06/1956; 08:54:26h
Rotations: 36 , anticlockwise
Observations: Nausea +4, disorientation +2. No other biological sequellae noted.
R-control (Rufus Scrimgeour) confirmed arrival date & time. R-control exhibited surprise, but no other observable reaction.
Established time-jump protocol followed, with one deviation: R-control provided a cup of water for jumper, but no other contamination of the timeline was observed.
Protemporal Jump:
Departed: 03/06/1956, 09:02:13h
Arrived: 02/07/1956: 14:53:51h
Rotations: 36, clockwise.
Observations: Nausea +6, disorientation +1. No other biological sequallae noted.
Conversation between jumper and control suggestive of significant timeline contamination.
She hesitated for a moment, then added:
Prev. notes on trials hv disappeared. GRANDFATHER PARADOX?????
"I remember now. The jump must have disoriented me more than I thought," she said.
Reading from his notebook, Rufus said, "So that was a three-second interval for a two-hour jump. That gives us a 0.025 lapse coefficient. Not bad, but it's bigger than for the one-hour jump."
As he read, Minerva carefully tore the page she'd just written out of her notebook and slipped it into her pocket.
He was frowning down at his notes. "If we don't work it out, we'll never be able to go more than a couple of hours without risking serious temporal anomalies. And if your nausea is any indication, it could do serious harm to the jumper."
She was about to tell him that she still wasn't feeling well and needed to go home, when the door opened and Muldur strode in, obviously furious about something. His heavy brows were knit together until they almost touched, and Minerva noticed with a start that his wand was in his hands, almost as if he were going to hex someone.
"Scrimgeour. My office. Now."
As Rufus crossed the room, flushed and stoop-shouldered, he shot a baleful glance at Minerva, and she got the impression that he knew what Muldur was so angry about. It couldn't be about the latest problem, could it? Muldur couldn't know about it, and besides, he would have called them on the carpet together.
Merlin's bloody balls.
She got up and crossed the empty room to table that held the Bell Jar, leaning on her elbows to watch the bird in its Sisyphean flight.
Up.
Down.
Up.
Down.
Her nausea was gone, replaced by cold panic.