The Far Time Incident

by Neve Maslakovic

  “Julia, we want to help find out what happened—”

  “Dr. Mooney was my advisor—”

  “Not mine, but he welcomed me to the lab—”

  It was Dr. Rojas’s turn to raise a hand. “Hold on, everybody. Even if we get Dean Sunder’s approval for this—I leave that to you, Julia—there are still protocols to be followed. No one, not even campus security, can climb into STEWie’s basket without adequate training.”

  “When do we start?” Chief Kirkland asked.

  Dean Sunder did not like the idea at all.

  “Why does he want to go?”

  “Chief Kirkland said,” I explained, handing the dean a guest list for the wine-and-shrimp afternoon fundraiser he was about to attend, “that the only way to solve a crime is to feel it, to get under its skin, so to speak.”

  (More precisely, Chief Kirkland had said, “If a wallet is stolen, I like to know its color, thickness, whether it was leather or man-made, carried in the left back pocket or the right or in a bag… It gives valuable insight into both the victim and the perpetrator. I try to imagine how it feels to rifle through another person’s belongings, to take what you wish. Since Xavier Mooney was lost to time, then I must find out all I can about STEWie: who had access to the machine, the knowledge to program it, the impulse and the need to use it as a weapon. In other words, I need to know everything, which includes getting into STEWie’s basket and trying it out myself.”)

  Dean Sunder ran a practiced eye over the guest list I’d handed him for the fundraiser. It was being held at the observatory. “Anything I should be aware of?”

  “Don’t mention STEWie to Mrs. Butterworth. I don’t think she’s ever forgiven us for proving that Shakespeare did write his plays by snapping a photo of the bard penning—or would it be quilling?—Romeo and Juliet, given her firm conviction that it was actually Sir Francis Bacon.” I added, “Since she also has an interest in astronomy, perhaps a private viewing session this evening with one of our researchers?” That sounded vaguely inappropriate, so I amended the statement. “A viewing session of the night sky at the observatory for Mrs. Butterworth and the other members of the Butterworth Supporting Science Foundation. That’s always popular. By the way, Ewan Coffey’s assistant called to say the donation check for the new STEWie generator is in the mail.”

  “Excellent, especially since my meeting in St. Paul yesterday didn’t bear any fruit. The donor had heard about the accident in the TTE lab.” The dean added, “I have to say, I’m not convinced that someone did this on purpose and I plan to tell the board that.” The dean’s conference call with the Board of Trustees and Chancellor Jane Evans was set for 6:00 p.m. “I think Chief Kirkland put the idea into Gabriel’s head by hanging around the lab, asking all those questions. I hope he’s not spreading the story around.”

  “Chief Kirkland asked that we keep things under wraps for now. He’s still calling this an accident inquiry.” The trustees would have to be told, of course. There were legal and other ramifications to consider.

  “Still, these things have a way of getting out.” He folded the guest list into his pocket, adjusted his cuff links, and reached for his coat. “There hasn’t been a murder on campus in twenty years, certainly not in the short time he’s been security chief here. Where did Chief Kirkland get so much experience with serious crime that he sees it everywhere? In the parks?”

  I had wondered about that myself. The chief hadn’t been very forthcoming with the details of his years at the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness (BWCAW), with its thousand small lakes near the Canadian border, or why he had left the Forest Service, where he had been a member of law enforcement. (I’d once asked my soon-to-be-ex, Quinn, what he and the chief talked about when fishing. “Fish,” he had said.)

  “Should I tell Chief Kirkland that he can’t go on a run, then?”

  Dean Sunder cocked his head. “No. I still don’t like the idea, but I suppose we’ll have to let him have his test run.”

  I took that to mean that it was okay for me to tag along, too.

  The dean added as I followed him out, “If it was murder, let’s hope the chief finds whoever is responsible quickly and that it leads away from the school. See if you can help him in any way. And Julia?”

  “Yes?”

  “I suppose it’s too much to hope that the story will stay under wraps for long, but let’s do what we can.”

  One question about this whole incident had been nagging at me. I returned to my office, spoke with Ingrid, the caterer, who reassured me that all was well for the observatory fundraiser, and had just reached for the phone again when it started ringing. A penetrating, insistent voice came over the line. I knew the type at once.

  “The final grades for fall semester freshman Human Biology,” I said, keeping my tone firm but polite, “are already in the system, but I can’t disclose your son’s grade to you and your husband… Why not? Well, your son is eighteen, is he not?”

  “Nineteen,” came the high-pitched answer through the phone.

  “And therefore an adult. Legally, we cannot release students’ grades to anyone without their permission…no, not for any of your son’s classes… I’m sure he did well in the class and will go on to be a fine doctor…it’s school policy, sir—” A gruff voice had replaced the shrill one on the line. “Yes, I understand that you’re paying for his education…you could ask your son directly…well, I’m sorry you feel that way—”

  The father hung up the phone after a few choice words. I shrugged off the conversation (calls like this were becoming more frequent as stronger-than-ever parent-child bonds were stretched to the limit when the newly minted adults arrived to face freshmen issues; a term had even been coined for the overprotective behavior—“helicopter parenting”) and rang Oscar’s post in the TTE building. He answered at once. I got straight to the point. “Oscar, I want to go over what happened the Monday night we lost Dr. Mooney.”

  “Like I told Chief Kirkland, it was a quiet evening,” Oscar began, his raspy voice crackling down the line. “Not too much student partying going on, what with the kids studying for the week’s exams. The campus was deserted except for the occasional kid out for a late-night snack or biking back from a study group—you could tell which it was by whether they were balancing a pizza box or textbooks on their handlebars. Just before eleven, I saw Dr. Mooney nearing the building, his headlamp visible from afar. The snow had just begun to fall. Chief Kirkland asked me if Dr. Mooney seemed upset or distracted and if that was why he forgot to lock up his bike. I told him that the professor seemed like his usual self. He dropped off an unwrapped gyroscope for Toys for Tots, but didn’t linger to tell me about his latest time travel trips, like he sometimes did. But that wasn’t unusual. He was a busy man. He seemed like he was in a hurry to get out of the snow and into the lab, that was all. Kamal Ahmad came out not long after the professor went in, maybe fifteen minutes later, carrying a stack of textbooks. He saw that it was snowing, said he wished he’d brought a knapsack for the books, waved good night, and left, stuffing the textbooks inside his jacket.”

  I knew Oscar hadn’t fallen asleep at his post, but everyone had bodily needs. I took a moment to compose the question delicately. “Did you, uh—did you have to leave your post at any time during the night, Oscar?” Had someone stood in the shadows as the snow fell, hidden, waiting?

  “Once, briefly,” he admitted.

  So someone could have sneaked in, I thought, though that late in the day the building would have been locked and an electronic pass would have been needed to get in, not to mention the door code to the lab. I wondered if Oscar, after the bathroom break, had noticed a trail of fresh footprints in the snow leading to the front door of the building, perhaps from one of the neighboring ones or from the direction of the visitor parking lot.

  He hadn’t.

  “Ms. Olsen, do you have a minute?”

  I almost dropped the stack of paper I had been about to feed into the printer. The inc
ident with Dr. Mooney had made me jumpy and I’d had to resist the urge to lock my office door. During winter break, the campus was quiet and the hallways emptier than usual. It was slightly spooky. I beckoned in Chief Kirkland and slid the pastel-green paper (for flyers about the upcoming science guest speaker series) into the printer tray. I hadn’t seen the chief since early afternoon, when I had committed to going on a trip into the past with him. I picked my glasses up off the desk and put them back on as the printer started spewing out copies with a repetitive whoosh-whoosh.

  Chief Kirkland took the chair across from me. He leaned forward and directed an intense stare at me. “I wanted to get something into the open.”

  I pushed the cookie jar—oatmeal chocolate chip this time—toward him, but he only shook his head. “No thanks, I’m not one much for junk food.”

  I took a cookie for myself and asked, “What is it that you wanted to get out into the open, Chief Kirkland?”

  “The word.”

  “Which?”

  “Murder.”

  The word had been said before, but hearing him say it made it seem more official somehow. There was no going back.

  “The who, how, and why are the three questions that need answering,” he added.

  I almost jotted those three words down.

  He went on, “The how we’ll put aside for the moment. The who possibilities include everyone with a TTE building pass and the code to the lab—really, just the lab code. Someone could have hidden in one of the bathrooms or classrooms as the building emptied for the day. As to the why—I need you to think, Ms. Olsen. Who had a reason to kill Dr. Mooney?”

  “No one.”

  “Nonsense.” He ticked off potential answers on his long fingers. “One, a student unhappy with a grade. Two, an envious or slighted colleague. Three, a jilted lover. Four, the inheritors of his estate. Five—”

  I briefly closed my eyes, tired from double-checking budgetary forms, and stopped him. “Let me answer those in order. One—students. We get a disgruntled student or two every semester, that’s true, mostly undergrads. Occasionally one of them threatens St. Sunniva with a lawsuit or parents withholding donations if we don’t pass the student in all of the semester’s classes. But I can’t imagine that would lead to… Well, we don’t take too much notice of them, to be honest. Besides,” I added, “the door code to the TTE lab is changed monthly and never given to undergrad students, only to those grad students whose research requires it.

  “Two—Xavier’s colleagues. He got along reasonably well with all of them.”

  “You mean that they all worked well as a team, he and Dr. Rojas, Dr. Baumgartner, and Dr. Little?”

  I paused to eat a second cookie. “Academia is not like that. Think of it as…” At a momentary loss about how to describe the peculiarities of the academic world, I caught sight of the walleye pin that Quinn had once given me, now sitting in a little box of office odds and ends. It was from the fishing club that both he and the chief had belonged to. (I was pretty sure that Quinn, who was not particularly outdoorsy, had joined the Walleyes to have something to do on the weekends that wouldn’t interest me. Spending hours in waders in a fishing boat—or bundled in a parka in a fishing shack above a hole drilled in the ice—was just not my thing.) I’d used the pin to puncture holes in the wedding photo that used to sit on my desk. I had kept it because it was handy for opening envelopes.

  “Think of academia as a fleet of fishing boats bobbing on Sunniva Lake, each boat captained by a professor, manned by graduate students, and producing a steady catch of scientific finds and journal papers. Most of the catch is little fish but the fishermen bump into each other’s boats as they compete for the big fish—funds, grants, lab space, publicity, Nobel Prizes. It’s a rare person who can keep a level head and not get pulled into the fray. Xavier Mooney was that rare person. Not because of any conscious decision on his part—on the contrary, in fact. He was always so brimming with ideas that he was simply oblivious to the politics of it all.” I shrugged. “He didn’t notice that sometimes others would get heavily invested in a single idea, or were desperate for funding, or were holding on for dear life until tenure.”

  “Any recent or unusual conflicts that you know of?”

  I shook my head. “Xavier Mooney was an experimentalist and Gabriel Rojas is a theoreticist. On occasion they liked to engage in a friendly bet about whether a detail in history would turn out to be true, with Dr. Rojas trying to reason it out and Dr. Mooney insisting that History’s particulars were rarely predictable, even if you knew their outcome. Then one of them—usually Dr. Mooney—would go back and obtain photographic or video evidence. The results were about fifty-fifty either way.” I paused. “Xavier Mooney would have had a part in deciding whether the department should offer tenure to our two junior professors, Dr. Baumgartner and Dr. Little.”

  “Was he going to come down on their side?”

  “Too early to say. Junior professors are initially appointed to two-year contracts and an evaluation is done every two years until the tenure review in the eighth year. Dr. Little has been here just over nine months. Dr. Baumgartner’s first evaluation is coming up in the spring.” To obtain tenure, a young professor had to have it all—an excellent research and publication track, positive teaching and peer evaluations, successful supervision of grad students, and a glowing recommendation from Dean Sunder. Chancellor Evans had the final say. I added, “I suppose we could check Dr. Mooney’s notebooks and computer for any notes he may have jotted down on the matter. The movers have packed up his office, so we’ll have to pull his things out of storage. Or you could talk to Dr. Rojas about it.”

  “Speaking of Gabriel Rojas, can he be trusted? I have to take what he’s saying about STEWie’s software being tampered with at face value.”

  “I can’t think of a reason why he would have felt the need to get rid of Dr. Mooney—and then tell us about it.”

  “I can’t either. But that means nothing.”

  “I suppose not.”

  “At this stage everyone who had the door code is a suspect.”

  “Including me?”

  “Do you have the code to the TTE lab?”

  “Copies of all the security codes are made available to the dean’s office in case of emergencies.”

  “Would you have had the time-engineering knowledge to reprogram STEWie and make it seem like the focuser had malfunctioned?”

  “Would I have—no.”

  “Then you’re not a suspect.”

  I almost asked him if that meant he could call me Julia now that I had been cleared of any involvement in Dr. Mooney’s death, but, brow furrowed darkly, he steered the conversation back to his original question. “What about jilted lovers or inheritors of his estate?”

  “Xavier did go through a rather acrimonious divorce with one of our linguistics professors, Dr. Helen Presnik. But that was years ago, before my time here in the dean’s office. And,” I finished, “Xavier left all his worldly goods to the school. What’s number five?”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Earlier you were about to tell me about murder motive number five—”

  “Ah, yes. The incidental murder. The professor may have gotten in someone’s way at the TTE lab, someone who was bent on going on an unauthorized run. Speaking of which, Ms. Olsen—” He cleared his throat and looked straight at me. “Remember what we now know—in one of the science departments, probably the Time Travel Engineering lab itself, there is a person who presents a danger to others.”

  Was that a not-so-subtle warning for me to stay out of his investigation? It was all very well for him to say so, but he didn’t have researchers deluging him with messages asking—demanding—that STEWie be brought back online as soon as possible. Not to mention the fact that the dean had asked me to accompany the chief throughout his investigation.

  “You say Dr. Mooney was married to a professor?” the chief added. “Is she still here at St. Sunniva?”

&
nbsp; “Yes, Dr. Presnik works in the English Department.”

  “I’ll speak to her first thing tomorrow morning.”

  Chief Kirkland didn’t get the chance to speak with Helen Presnik first thing the following morning because we were both summoned to Dr. Rojas’s office. The professor had talked Erika Baumgartner into letting us squeeze in a run before hers. It wasn’t much of a concession on her part—a short near-time run for Chief Kirkland’s benefit wouldn’t delay her own run to eighteenth-century France by much. She was planning on being there just about a full day, which was fifty minutes in the lab; we only needed an hour or so, which would pass in a jiffy in the lab—133 seconds. (No one quite knew why precisely 133 seconds passed in the present for each hour you spent in the past. Dr. Rojas had spent the last five years trying to figure it out.)

  “There are three more rules you should know.” Dr. Rojas was giving the security chief and yours truly a crash course on time travel basics from in front of the old-fashioned chalky blackboard that took up one corner of his office. (It might have been the last one left on campus. Whiteboards, with their colored markers, had proliferated on campus like mosquitoes on Sunniva Lake in the summer, in offices, labs, cafeterias, meeting rooms, hallways. Someone had argued that we needed them in all the bathrooms as well, for impromptu discussions and exchanges of ideas, but that had been ruled out as being too exclusionary of one gender or the other.)

  Dr. Rojas picked up a piece of chalk and, just below One hour there = 133 seconds here, wrote in large, slanted letters:

  History protects itself.

  I jotted the two rules down in my notes as (1) and (2), even though I already knew them.

  He turned back to face his audience of two. (Kamal, Abigail, and Jacob had not been invited on the run with us despite all their pleading; and Helen, who would accompany us as the senior faculty member, didn’t need the crash course.) “Remember this well, Julia and Chief Kirkland. History protects only itself, never you. It’s not going to stop you from doing something stupid like falling off a cliff or being hunted down and eaten by a grizzly bear—unless it’s likely that someone would find whatever is left of your body and notice your modern tooth fillings or strange underclothes.”