The Far Time Incident

by Neve Maslakovic

  “Ah, my teaching assistant brought the exam papers to my office. I haven’t had a chance to read them yet.” Dr. Little looked up from the laptop and reached around it to spread a lavish layer of goat cheese onto a cracker. “And how did you find the test? Too easy? Not long enough?” He popped the cracker into his mouth.

  “Uh—well, I wouldn’t say it was too easy, no,” Kamal said. “As to last night’s calibration, it was kind of Dr. Mooney to offer to take over. I had no idea what would happen… If I had known…”

  “No one is blaming you, Kamal,” I said firmly.

  Dr. Baumgartner was eying Kamal as if she still thought the whole thing might turn out to be an end-of-the-semester student prank gone wrong. Dr. Rojas came to his rescue. “I’ll start running tests this afternoon to see what I can find out. Until then, let’s keep all this guessing to a minimum.”

  “Surely you’re not planning on going on any STEWie runs, Dr. Rojas,” I said. “I don’t think Dean Sunder is ready to approve anything of that sort yet—”

  “And he would be quite right, Julia. No, the Genetics Department is lending us a fish so we can run tests and pinpoint the malfunction that caused the mirror-laser array to lose focus—”

  “—and send Mooney into a ghost zone,” Dr. Little finished the sentence for him. “The dangers of cutting-edge research,” he added matter-of-factly, offering the well-known platitude (one that, I had to admit, I’d used myself in composing the dean’s press statement). “Instead of arriving at whatever year and location Mooney wanted, he found himself trapped in a ghost zone with no way out.” As if to add emphasis to his words, the young professor broke the cracker in his hands in two with a snap. I winced and noticed that Abigail, next to me, had scrunched up her eyes, like she was either getting ready to cry, or getting very angry. I rather fancied it was the second. Her spiky, neon-orange hair made her look like a petite warrior. Kamal, next to her, wasn’t looking too happy, either.

  “And a ghost zone is…?” Chief Kirkland asked Dr. Little, who was deftly toothpicking one of the Gouda cubes. Our newest professor looked like he was well on the road to gaining the tenure-track twenty and contradicting his name in the horizontal dimension, I noted somewhat uncharitably as I got up to empty a fresh package of crackers onto the platter.

  Dr. Little disposed of the Gouda cube and said, “A ghost zone is the easiest way for History to protect itself.” Like everyone connected to the TTE program, he spoke the word with reverence, a capital H, as if History was a force to be reckoned with. “Nothing cleaner than sending a time traveler to the bottom of the ocean, or into outer space, or onto the Bikini Atoll on the morning of March 1, 1954. The traveler would be able to move quite freely on the atoll. Not for long, though. That’s what a ghost zone is—you perish seconds after you step foot out of STEWie’s basket, your body decomposes as time passes, nature spreads your molecules all around…so you do come back to the present, just not in one piece. We call it being scattered across time.”

  He reached for another cracker and Dr. Rojas took the opportunity to clarify things for the chief and an agog Officer Van Underberg. “That’s why we perform a calibration before each run, to sidestep any possible ghost zones. Our early tests with fish and robotic vehicles resulted in quite a few losses.”

  I brought up a thought I had been holding on to. “What if Dr. Mooney arrived safely but was for some reason unable to get back to STEWie’s basket? Would the professor be able to contact us?”

  “You mean, could he carve a message into stone and leave it somewhere for us to find?” Dr. Little liked to pounce when a scientific point came up, especially if someone had inadvertently spoken with imprecision. “First, the basket would never have returned empty. That only happens if the traveler is—”

  “Dead,” Kamal croaked out the word.

  “And second, even if Mooney did somehow manage to write a message for us, it wouldn’t matter.”

  “Why not?” I hoped Dr. Little wouldn’t ridicule me for what I was about to ask. “Couldn’t we send a rescue basket after him if we found a message telling us what went wrong?”

  Dr. Little opened his mouth to answer but Dr. Rojas got there first. He briefly shook his head. “It’s all in the past, Julia. He would have already lived out his life.”

  “Right, of course,” I said.

  “Any message he might have left for us could only have served one purpose—by letting us know what happened, it would help us avoid future incidents.” Dr. Rojas continued in the same pensive tone. “I wonder why Xavier decided to do a run alone, though it’s not unlike him to go off protocol—”

  “Exactly,” said Dr. Baumgartner bluntly, looking up from the journal article she had discreetly started editing. She had a while to go before acquiring tenure (the holy grail of academia, a professorial position that could not be terminated). “Xavier was always full of ideas and eager to tinker with things.” She said it with admiration, not criticism. Dr. B had been a postdoc in the school (the shortened version of her name had been coined by fellow postdocs) before being offered a joint tenure-track position in TTE and History of Science. She herself seemed to prefer action to theory. “Most likely, Xavier probably saw that something needed tweaking when he was overseeing last night’s calibration, so he jumped in STEWie’s basket to test a Band-Aid solution he’d come up with—and it failed badly. Isn’t that what everybody’s thinking but no one wants to say it?”

  Again, it wasn’t said as a criticism, but a sudden awkward silence did descend on the room.

  “Dean Sunder,” I said into it, “has canceled this year’s December holiday party. We’ll be holding a memorial service on Friday, after the last of the exams. Anybody who wants to say a few words about Professor Mooney or share any memories from his almost four decades at St. Sunniva, please let me know.”

  “Let’s try and get to the bottom of this unfortunate matter as soon as possible,” Dr. Little said, resuming his typing. “Everyone has work to do. Who’ll take over Mooney’s courses, Julia?”

  “Dean Sunder will try to figure something out before the start of the next semester. As for his current classes, Introduction to Time Travel Physics had a final project and no exam. Dr. Mooney had already graded the projects before his accident. There was a list of final grades on his desk. Ghost Zones in Time: How to Find Them and Avoid Them has a final project as well, doesn’t it, Kamal?”

  Kamal, who was the teaching assistant for that class, nodded. “He sent me the final grades yesterday.”

  “I took Ghost Zones in Time last year,” Abigail spoke up for the first time. “In that classroom, just around the bend of the hallway. For the final project we had to propose a historical event or geographic location that constitutes a ghost zone, suggest an itinerary that circumvents it, and compute coordinates. I chose the Tunguska Event of 1908.”

  Erika Baumgartner looked up from her journal article again. “It would be quite interesting, wouldn’t it, to travel to Siberia of that year and settle the question of whether an asteroid or a comet impacted in the area? It wouldn’t be relevant to your thesis topic, Abigail, but perhaps we could get a paper out of it,” she said, then stopped abruptly, as if remembering why we were all gathered here.

  I didn’t begrudge her the editing of the journal paper (publish or perish was the imperative phrase in academia), nor her momentary lapse of memory. This was merely a department meeting to figure out how to deal with the aftermath of Dr. Mooney’s accident; the memorial service would come later. It was also true that sometimes people dealt best with bad news by focusing on other matters.

  As everyone started to shuffle out of the room, Chief Kirkland raised a hand. “I have a question,” he said in a quiet tone that nevertheless made everyone stop and turn in his direction. (The chief seemed to have a talent for bringing other people’s conversations to a halt. Maybe it was the uniform. I usually had to pull on sleeves and tap shoulders.)

  Dr. Rojas shifted in his chair to face the chief.
The gray-haired professor had not eaten anything, I noticed, and looked too distracted to bother with class arrangements or asteroid-event discussions. “Sorry, Chief Kirkland, I should have made sure that we’d clarified everything. What is your question?”

  “The Time Machine—STEWie—even if we don’t know what went wrong, wouldn’t the machine settings show where Dr. Mooney had been aiming to go? We know he left his clothes behind. What kind of costume did he put on?”

  “We’ve all taken a look at the travel apparel closet,” Dr. Rojas said. “Impossible to say for sure what’s missing. As for STEWie’s settings revealing Xavier’s intended destination—” The bags under Dr. Rojas’s eyes seemed to deepen. “That’s the really odd thing. They don’t.”

  4

  Nightfall, hushed and starless, came early. (We were only ten days from winter solstice, the shortest day of the year and the traditional date of St. Sunniva’s Science Quad holiday party. This year we would have a much less jovial event, one which I had already started organizing.) Outside my office window, snow still fell thick and quiet. The phone had been ringing all afternoon. Mostly with expressions of condolences from various parties and questions from news reporters, but I had also fielded quite a few calls from worried parents. One had demanded that her son, a junior who was on the far side of campus in a Method Acting workshop for his School of Drama degree and had probably never set foot in the Science Quad, be kept at what she termed a safe distance from the TTE building.

  “We’re not sure yet who will be teaching the course, but there will be no disruption to the schedule,” I’d reassured a parent who was curious about who would teach his daughter’s Introduction to Time Travel Physics: Part II spring semester class now that Dr. Mooney had been lost to time. “I’m sure one of Dr. Mooney’s colleagues will be happy to take over the course—”

  I had dealt with all the condolences, questions, and outright demands as patiently as I could, but I was approaching some kind of wall and was glad that the ringing of the phone and onslaught of e-mails had tapered off. I turned away from the window. In a few minutes Dean Sunder would go home to his family. With the Science Quad empty save for a handful of grad students and research staff monitoring lab experiments, I’d finally be able to get around to finishing the day’s paperwork, a task that had gotten pushed aside given the odd events of the day.

  “Still working, Julia?” said a strong voice that carried into every nook of my office, trained as it was by the years of public speaking that were at the core of a professor’s job. A familiar head of long, silver hair poked in through the open door.

  I waved in Dr. Helen Presnik, historical linguist and a well-known face in the TTE lab for more than one reason. She sank into the visitor’s chair, deposited a thick sheaf of final exam essays in a free spot on my desk, and loosened her scarf. She had been letting her silver hair grow so that she would fit in better during her runs to Renaissance England, and it now reached halfway down her back. She looked at me and got straight to the point.

  “I was in the reference section of the library all day. I just heard about Xavier.”

  “I’m so sorry, Helen. Do you want a cookie?” I made a move toward the window cabinet.

  She stopped me. “That’s not necessary. It’s certain, then?”

  “Oscar saw him enter the TTE building but not come out. His bike’s still outside the building, and no one’s seen him or heard from him.”

  She didn’t bother asking if Oscar could be trusted to report accurately on happenings in the TTE building. Everyone on campus knew Oscar. With his strange bodily rhythms, he was a favorite subject at the Sleep Lab in the School of Medicine across the lake.

  I recapped what we knew so far, then added, “Chief Kirkland will keep an eye on Dr. Mooney’s house in case he went somewhere without telling anyone and forgot to take his phone and his wallet—”

  I stopped, aware how utterly ridiculous the scenario sounded.

  Helen seemed to share my opinion. Her voice softening just a shade, but still brisk, she said, “I see.”

  “Helen—did Xavier ever express any wishes about—well, what to do in a situation like this?” I paused to frame my words carefully. “Seeing as a funeral is not technically possible, Dean Sunder suggested a memorial service in the Great Hall of the Coffey Library on Friday evening, after the last of the exams, but if you have other thoughts on the matter—”

  All softness forgotten, she snorted. “Colleagues and adoring students giving speeches about what a great educator and researcher he was? Xavier would have loved that. All the world’s a stage and Xavier liked his place on it. Is it true that it was an unauthorized run?”

  I decided that the unadorned truth was the best way to go. I flicked on my computer and scrolled down STEWie’s roster. “I looked it up for Chief Kirkland. Xavier wasn’t on the roster until next month. Here—late January. He’d asked for a ten-day run to track down a long-lost Arabic manuscript. Al-Khwarizmi’s The Book of Sundials.”

  “The Persian mathematician whose name was Latinized into algorithm? Another wild-goose chase. Perhaps Xavier was trying to get a head start on locating it,” she added, somewhat contradicting herself.

  “You mean he might have been testing the viability of the landing site coordinates or something of the sort? Could be. It might explain why he changed out of his everyday clothes and into—well, we’re not quite sure what. You know what the travel apparel closet is like. It’s impossible to tell what’s missing. For now, Dr. Rojas is operating under the assumption that the scheduled calibration stalled for some reason and that Xavier was checking the equipment when the mirror-laser array lost focus, causing him to slip into a ghost zone. Maybe there was some technical reason why modern clothes couldn’t work for what he had in mind.” I had a sudden thought. “Helen, would you like a glass of wine?” In the white cabinet under my office window, behind the backup boxes of cookies, paper plates, and napkins, I kept a couple of bottles of the stronger stuff. For those times when things went more wrong than they ordinarily did.

  “Thank you, Julia, but I better not.” She sighed, the news about Xavier clearly foremost in her mind, and ran a displeased eye over the stack of exams. “I need to grade these tonight. The first one I looked at seems to be half-full of Internet slang. A paper for my class, can you believe it?” Helen’s specialties included classical Greek and Latin, along with Shakespeare’s English. “I can’t even understand the title. Look”—she tapped the paper—“four acronyms one after another: WRT F2F NBD IMO. Brevity is the soul of wit, but this is taking things too far. It’s like trying to decipher a vanity license plate.”

  “Wait, I know that one. With respect to face-to-face, no big deal in my opinion. Can’t say that makes much sense, however. What was the topic of the paper?”

  “The difficulty of personal interaction with the local populace on time travels to Shakespeare’s London.”

  “Ah, there you go.”

  “I wanted the students to roll up their sleeves and think about what a STEWie research run entails.” She tapped the paper again. “I don’t think there’s a single comma anywhere. It will be returned with a Redo instruction.”

  “I suppose one could argue that it’s a language in the making,” I said, trying to appeal to the linguist in her and glad for the brief change of topic.

  “Until it is a language of its own, it has no place in an academic setting. And by the time it does, I’ll be long gone,” she said, whether referring to future retirement as a professor emerita or the other outcome, I wasn’t sure. “I wish we could ban the things from campus,” she added.

  “What things?”

  “Cell phones and laptops and e-readers and tablets and such. I’ve tried telling the students I don’t want their electronic devices in my classes, and they all nod like they understand, but I see fingers twitching and moving under desks as they text and tweet and blog and who knows what else. I never know if they hear a word I say anymore.”

&n
bsp; “I’d think we’d have a mutiny on our hands if we tried to ban cell phones and laptops in classrooms, Helen, though I do somewhat agree with you.” I relayed the story of the cell phone and the biology exam.

  “Is my complaining a sign that I’m getting old? Don’t answer that.” She added, “I suppose I have to give credit where it’s due—technology made it possible for me to have the honor of watching the very first performance of Hamlet at the Globe”—she sighed again, but this time happily—“as an audience member. That was my first STEWie run and Xavier accompanied me. We had to put our differences aside. Speaking of which, how have you been doing, Julia?”

  “You mean since Quinn left? Quite well, actually.”

  “I know you’ve been telling everybody that it was the cooking—”

  “It was. Why did he have to rely on me for his meals? He’s a grown man.”

  “—but I know it was more than that.”

  She was right, of course. I said, after a moment, “We just couldn’t make it work. Our jobs kept getting in the way. I think he assumed that once we got married, I’d turn into someone who was happy to battle the home front problems while he went out and conquered the world. It’s just that”—I had no problem admitting this to Helen, who would know what I meant—“I kind of wanted to conquer the world myself, in however small a way. The bottom line was that Quinn didn’t like his job—any desk job, really—but I like mine. We had these never-ending arguments about my long work hours. His were nine to five, but school hours just aren’t like that, are they?” I was usually in by seven thirty and not home until seven, and often worked weekends. As for Quinn, his new project, flipping upscale houses in Phoenix, hadn’t come as a surprise. The last few months before he left, he’d spent much of his free time looking at online photos of Arizona bungalows and backyard pools as he searched for something grander than his then-job as an accountant for the town’s electrical plant. One morning, he’d emptied our joint bank account, taken the more reliable of our two cars, and headed south on I-35 with Officer Jones. At least the house was in my name only.