All Clear by Connie Willis Page A

We find Verity and Ned before they go back and have them tell the lab where we are and that our drops won’t open and to reset the drop so it opens in our time. There’s no reason we can’t do that, is there?”
    “Yes, there is. Because we didn’t.”
    “You don’t know that.”
    “Yes, I do. If we’d found them and told them what had happened, Oxford would have known what was going to happen when it sent us through.
We’d
have known what was going to happen.”
    He considered that. “Maybe they couldn’t tell us because it would create a paradox. If we knew we were going to be trapped, we wouldn’t come, and we had to come because we
had
come.”
    “But Mr.
Dunworthy
wouldn’t have let us come. You know how overprotective he is. He’d never have let you come knowing they couldn’t get you out after you were injured.”
And he wouldn’t have let me come knowing I had a deadline
.
    But she couldn’t say that. “This is a man who was worried I might get my foot caught in a barrage-balloon rope,” she said instead. “He’d never have let us get trapped in the Blitz. Or let you go to Coventry to get us out. The entire city burned. It would be suicide for you to go there. You’re here to observe heroes, not die trying to be one.”
    “Then we need to come up with somebody besides Ned and Verity. Who else was here? Didn’t Dunworthy go to the Blitz at some point?”
    “He went several times, but—”
    “When?”
    “I don’t know. I know he observed the big raids on May tenth and eleventh, because he talked about watching the fire in the House of Commons, and that happened on the tenth.”
    “And you said before that the ninth and tenth were the worst raids of the Blitz?”
    “Yes. Why?”
    “Nothing. We need something sooner. When else was he here?”
    “I don’t know. I remember him telling a story about attempting to get to his drop, and the gates at Charing Cross Railway Station being shut and him not being able to get in.”
    “But you don’t know the date?”
    “No.”
    “But if he told you he was trying to get to his drop, that means it must have been somewhere in Charing Cross.”
    “No, it doesn’t. He might have been taking the train to his drop. He could have been going anywhere.”
    “But it’s a place to start, and we can’t afford to leave any stone unturned. I want you to go check it while I’m at Beachy Head. Unless one of these names I got at Biggin Hill turns out to be Phipps’s airfield. Speaking of which, what’s keeping Eileen?” he asked, glancing at his watch. “Ineed to read them to her. I managed to wangle a ride to Beachy Head, and the guy’s leaving at two, but I don’t want to waste my time there if Gerald’s at one of these other airfields.”
    Eileen hurried in just as Mike was paying the bill, saying, “Sorry, I was applying at Mary Marsh, and they kept me waiting.”
    Mike read her the list. She shook her head decisively at each of the names.
    “Okay, then, it’s Beachy Head,” he said. He hurried off to catch his ride. “I’ll be back before the fourteenth.”
    So you can go to Coventry
, Polly thought.
    She had to keep him from doing that. Which meant she had to find Gerald’s airfield.
    Over the next few days, she spent her lunch breaks going to Victoria and St. Pancras Stations to copy down two-word names beginning with B and P from the departure boards and her evenings incurring Sir Godfrey’s wrath by trying to get additional airfield names from Lila and Viv, but they were almost no help at all.
    “We nearly always go to the dances at Hendon,” Lila said.
    “There’s one on Saturday,” Viv told her. “You and your cousin could come with us.”
    She nearly accepted. They could ask the airmen they danced with where else they’d been stationed. But she was afraid if they weren’t there when Mike came back, he’d decide to go to Coventry, which would be not only dangerous but pointless.
    Because if Mike had found Ned and Verity