The Far Time Incident

by Neve Maslakovic

  13

  Pompeii.

  The word conjured up images of hot ash and scorched rock, of a mountain erupting and changing the outlines of land and sea forever, of a town and its residents entombed by a fiery flow. Vesuvius, which had seemed like a peaceful mountain gracing an idyllic seaside town, now positively loomed over it—and us.

  A cold wave of panic had coursed through my body at Helen’s words. My feet moved of their own accord, away from the town wall and back to the open road. Stretching into the sky above us, the volcano was silent. A misleading, pregnant silence. Because ghost zone meant only one thing. An eruption—surely any second—followed by oblivion.

  “The mountain reminded me of Mount St. Helens before the 1980 eruption,” the chief said quietly. “Didn’t want to say so.” He had walked up beside me, and Kamal and Abigail were silently trailing him.

  “Helen!” I called out.

  “Yes, Julia?” she said, joining the rest of us after a short delay, as if reluctant to leave the tablet with its telling inscription.

  “Should we seek shelter in the town? Find a road that will take us away from the mountain? Check to see if anyone has come to look for us yet?”

  “Is there any point in trying to flee? The eruption must be imminent.” She started listing the salient points as if she were holding an impromptu workshop on the matter. “One, the basket returned to the lab without us. Two, the twenty-fourth of August in the year 79 is believed to be the day of the eruption—and the Vulcanalia festival, with its sacrifice of small fish meant to appease the god of fire, took place on the evening of the twenty-third of August, just like it did every year.” She went on, still pale, in the same calm tone. “Three, the ease with which we’ve been able to move around. Four, the tremors we’ve been feeling… You can’t outrun an eruption, can you?”

  “I don’t think you can outrun them on foot, no,” Chief Kirkland said. “Ships?” he added as if he were suggesting that we hail a taxi. He pointed in the direction of the sea and the town’s harbor. “Can we get on a ship and escape that way?”

  Helen started. “Yes, I suppose we could try. The letters by Pliny the Younger to the historian Tacitus—the only surviving eyewitness account of the eruption we have; I assign it to my Intermediate Latin students on occasion—the two letters tell of the death of his uncle, Pliny the Elder.” She pronounced the name to rhyme with skinny. “The elder Pliny was a scientist and a scholar, and also the commander of the Roman fleet, which was stationed at the port of Misenum, across the bay—is stationed at Misenum—as I said, the younger Pliny wrote about the death of his uncle and also gave a very touching account of what he himself, in his late teens, went through during the eruption—”

  “Helen!” I said.

  “So this Pliny junior—obviously—survived,” Chief Kirkland prodded her.

  “He and his mother were staying at his uncle’s house in Misenum, just out of reach of the worst of the eruption. It’s been a while since I’ve reread Pliny’s account myself, but I recall him saying that the disaster began with a cloud appearing over Vesuvius, then there were extended earthquakes…the sea retreated…and the cloud descended down the mountain—”

  “A pyroclastic flow,” Chief Kirkland said in an emotionless voice.

  Helen nodded and went on. “The older Pliny left the safety of Misenum and sailed into Pompeii’s harbor in an attempt to get a closer look at the strange phenomenon and to help save friends and others. He never made it out. He died on the beach from toxic fumes.” Facing the volcano and shading her eyes with one hand from the sunlight, she gave it a piercing look and added, as if we needed more grisly details, “The town of Herculaneum, some ten miles up the coast, will be buried completely in ash and volcanic debris. Pompeii, though not buried quite as deeply as Herculaneum, won’t fare much better.”

  Somewhere far off, a sheep bleated, then another. Cicadas chirped. The street of tombs lay deserted in the heat of the afternoon and the silence of what was essentially a cemetery was punctuated only by the sheep and cicadas and the sounds of activity on the other side of the town wall. For a moment, I was aware of my own heartbeat, which sounded as loud as a jackhammer, but then realized that the steady beat was actually a blacksmith’s tool hammering metal in a workman’s shop somewhere close by.

  A terra-cotta urn perched in a niche on a nearby altar suddenly fell, probably displaced by the last tremor we’d felt. It broke in two, spewing forth a small pile of gray ash and blackened teeth.

  We all lost our heads at that point. In unison we fled in the direction of the sea, away from the tombs, toward the azure water with its sprinkling of fluffy clouds above it. Always, the shadow of the mountain hung above us. We ran without regard for roads and paths, roughly following the line of the town wall, past villas and small orchards, across a second street of tombs, away from the danger of the mountain, the hot ash and fiery rocks that would surely come. I could hear Helen and Kamal panting as we followed a turn in the town wall, cut across a dirt road, and ran past a villa into an apple orchard. The heel of one of my boots came clean off and the chief caught my arm as I stumbled. “This way.” He pointed to where the land met the cliff’s edge, beyond which lay the sea, and pulled me along through the orchard—the dark-red fruit hung heavily, much more heavily than apples did—the cliff edge was within reach—pomegranate trees, the thought flew through my mind, not apple trees—and then that thought was replaced with nothing as I came to a jolting stop.

  The force of the impact knocked the breath out of me. I realized I was on the ground again, as I had been when we’d arrived, but this time it wasn’t an earthquake that had caused me to lose my footing. I put my hand up and felt the air in front of me.

  There was nothing there but I couldn’t push through.

  14

  The chief and Abigail had been able to stop themselves in time, but Helen was also on the ground, to my left. The chief picked up his fedora, which had flown off his head, pulled me up, then went to help Helen. Kamal was bent over as if his stomach was cramping from the run, his breathing uneven, reminding me of the morning he’d burst into my office with the news that Dr. Mooney had been scattered across time. Though barely a week had passed, it seemed like a lifetime ago.

  “Let’s back up a bit and try another way,” the chief said grimly, offering Helen a steadying arm. “C’mon, Kamal, get to your feet.” On the other side of the invisible wall lay some patchy grass and a glimpse of a steep path leading down the cliff to the harbor.

  “This is good news in a way, really,” Helen said, wincing as she got to her feet. “For the residents of the town, I mean. The more our freedom of movement is limited, the larger the percentage of the local population who will survive the eruption.”

  “That is good news,” I said, thinking of the boy by the pine trees with the dirty feet, and the older girl with the abacus.

  “Not this way either,” Abigail said from in front of Chief Kirkland. She had been forced to come to a stop.

  “There must be an exit,” Chief Kirkland said. He proceeded to move around the edges of the orchard, feeling his way around like a mime and trying to occasionally push a foot through. Abigail took the opportunity to scale one of the pomegranate trees, on which red fruit hung on long stalks like elegant Christmas tree decorations. “We’re a bit up from the harbor…I can see the statues on the piers…trading ships and fishing boats…warehouses… lots of activity… I suppose we’d have caused quite a commotion if we’d scrambled down the cliff face dressed like this and tried to board a ship or dive into the sea, right?” She jumped off as the branch swayed dangerously under her not-very-considerable weight.

  “What if we retrace our steps exactly—that is, we back out of the orchard as if we were never here?” I asked, since no one else seemed to have any suggestions.

  But History would not let us do that either.

  Abigail and Kamal exchanged a look and a shrug and joined Helen, who, looking grateful for the respite
, had lowered herself into the shade of one of the pomegranate trees after conceding, “We seem to be wedged in on all sides by historical paths that cannot be disturbed.” Abigail picked up a plump pomegranate from the ground and started attacking it with her nails. I joined her.

  The chief, having made another full circle, came back and sat down in defeat.

  “Does it matter who sent us here?” Helen asked, briefly looking up from her notebook. The linguistics professor was sketching what we could see of the town and its harbor to complement several photos Abigail had taken with the sixties Polaroid camera. (“We’re here, might as well make ourselves useful,” Helen had said.) I had helped her immobilize her injured arm by making a sort of a pillow of her purse by stuffing Abigail’s green sweater into it. The notebook was propped up on her knee as she worked.

  “Certainly it matters,” said the security chief.

  I was with him on that. If I was about to be flattened into nothing when the mountain blew up, I wanted to know who was to blame. Now that I’d had some time to think about it, I didn’t believe that Dr. Rojas had done this to us. I said as much. It was a bit hard to explain why I didn’t think it was his hand that had sent us here, but it came down to this—I’d always thought I was a good judge of character, especially when it came to the people in my administrative care.

  Chief Kirkland looked unconvinced. “Mystery novels and crime shows aside, the person who’s most likely to be guilty usually does turn out to be guilty,” he said in what I’m sure he thought was a sensible statement. “The spouse. The company partner. The beneficiary of the will—”

  “But Dr. Rojas is a theoreticist!” I objected.

  “Meaning?”

  “It’s the experimentalists in our departments who tend to take matters into their own hands and hammer diplomas onto their office walls or put together office furniture, causing Maintenance to complain that their territory is being encroached upon. I can see Dr. Rojas mulling over murder as a theoretical problem, perhaps even deciding on it as an optimal solution, but to actually do it, to get his hands dirty—once for Dr. Mooney, and then again for us—very messy, to send five people into a ghost zone…”

  “It’s not a particularly elegant solution, is it?” said Abigail.

  “Poor Erika Baumgartner,” I said. “She won’t get to go on her run. After what happened to us, Dean Sunder will probably cancel all runs for a while, maybe permanently. She might never get to snap color photos of eighteenth-century French fashions and publish them on the Les Styles blog.”

  The security chief did not seem to think it was the right time to worry about Dr. B. “She’ll find something else to do.”

  I decided to add the main point in Dr. Rojas’s favor. “We didn’t actually see Gabriel operate STEWie, did we? The phone call. The one that got him to step out of the lab. Maybe someone sent him on a fool’s errand while they snuck in and changed our destination.”

  “Or,” the chief said, “Dr. Rojas set it all up and pretended to step out for Jacob Jacobson’s benefit.”

  There was no way to counter that. I remembered Jacob’s fingers moving speedily as he tweeted a play-by-play of the proceedings just before I sent him out of the room. It was certainly some kind of alibi.

  For a while we sat in silence. Sounds of activity drifted up from the harbor, the shouts and banter of fisherman, sailors, and merchants, the thwack of cargo being loaded and unloaded. Closer by, the rhythm and pulse of building work in a nearby villa rung out in the still air; occasionally, we caught sight of a young, muscular local in a loincloth (he reminded me of the movers in Xavier’s office) pushing a loaded wheelbarrow down the road, a pair of mangy dogs running around his feet. Helen jotted down some of the louder banter of the workmen, who were oblivious to our presence. It felt like an unseen hourglass hovered above us and the town, one only we knew about. And the sands were about to run out.

  “Look, only a handful of motives cause people to turn to crime,” the chief finally said. “We are all, every one of us, at the mercy of our emotions. The usual suspects, I find, are few: Greed. Jealousy. Desire. Fear. Desperation.”

  He listed them evenly, as if he’d never experienced any of them himself, which was ridiculous, of course. Everyone has. I had experienced at least four of them myself since we’d arrived—fear that I was going to die, a desperate desire to get home, jealousy of all the people at St. Sunniva who were safely snug in their offices and labs. Well, if he could keep it under control, so could I. “Five possible motives,” I said as matter-of-factly as I could muster, “and five intended victims? Or was only one of us the target and the rest of us happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time?”

  “That’s the question, isn’t it? On the surface of things, it would seem that the most likely target was myself,” the security chief said without a trace of vanity. “I am in charge of solving Dr. Mooney’s murder.” His voice deepened in thought. “Except that I don’t know why anyone would feel the need to get rid of me. Everything I learned during my investigation of Dr. Mooney’s murder was duly recorded by Officer Van Underberg and will be available to whoever replaces me on the job.

  “If I wasn’t the target, then our next possibility is you, Dr. Presnik,” he added. “You have a particular connection to Dr. Mooney.”

  “My dear Chief Kirkland—perhaps we better dispense with the formalities if we are to be soon engulfed in a rain of rock and ash. I don’t think I know your first name?”

  “Nate.”

  “Nate, you mentioned a Wanda earlier. Is she a pet you have at home?”

  The chief nodded. “A spaniel. Cavalier King Charles.”

  I hadn’t expected him to have such a pedigreed dog. “I’m sure Officer Van Underberg will see to her,” I reassured him. “The basket returned without us, so Dr. Rojas will sound the alarm immediately.” He would do so whether or not he was the source of our current predicament.

  “About your connection to Dr. Mooney—”

  “What, that I used to be married to him? Other than work matters, I haven’t said more than a passing hello to the man in years,” Helen said.

  I could not recollect Helen ever saying a passing hello to Xavier Mooney in the seven years I had been the dean’s assistant.

  The chief clarified. “I meant someone might have assumed Dr. Mooney had told you something in confidence.”

  “Like I said, we did not speak much.”

  The chief turned to Kamal and Abigail. “Moving on, then. I don’t suppose you two saw anything around the lab that would have connected Dr. Rojas or anyone else to Dr. Mooney’s murder? No? Did one of you come up with a brilliant scientific idea in tandem with the professor that someone might have wanted to steal?”

  “I wish,” said Kamal, watching a lizard dart across a boulder.

  “Which brings me to you.” The chief turned his square jaw toward me.

  “What about me?”

  “You’ve been nosing around, asking questions, isn’t that true?” He sounded annoyed, like I had overstepped some boundary between civilian and soldier.

  I wasn’t going to deny it. “Dean Sunder asked me to see what I could find out. I talked to Oscar and also the cleaning staff in the TTE building, though I didn’t learn anything of interest from them. I didn’t mean to step on your toes, uh—Nate.” Why shouldn’t I call him by his first name? Besides, it wasn’t my idea, it was Helen’s.

  “Did you—hold on a minute.”

  The offshore breeze had picked up and stirred the orchard foliage, briefly parting two of the fruited branches to reveal a small, circular stone wall overgrown with ivy. It supported a wooden shaft on which a rope and a bucket hung.

  The chief sprung nimbly to his feet. (He hadn’t had to do all that running in high-heeled boots and a tight skirt.) He picked up a pebble and tossed it through the invisible wall of History and into the well. I thought I heard a small splash.

  “All right, then,” he said. “I’m just going to get some water. I
have no intention of leaving this sunny orchard…” He continued his commentary as he slowly and purposely headed for the well. “Quite happy to stay here, just need some water…”

  Kamal pursed his parched lips and looked away. We were all desperately thirsty by now.

  “I’m not sure History can hear you, Chief,” Helen began. But the security chief had already been brought to a full stop by the invisible wall.

  He came back, sat down without a word, and picked up where he had left off. “Dean Sunder asked you to see what you could find out.”

  “He relies on me to solve problems, small or large, that make their way into the dean’s office.”

  “Well, did you find out anything that you haven’t told us?”

  I shook my head, uneasily recalling how I had stood looking over Dr. Rojas’s shoulder at his workstation’s screen, the window into STEWie’s innards, which had revealed the fact that Dr. Mooney had been scattered across time on purpose. I hadn’t understood any of the information on the screen, but if Dr. Rojas had something to hide, he might have forgotten that not everyone who spent time around the TTE lab had savvy computer skills. I shook the thought off. No, I was sure he wasn’t responsible. Besides, why would he tell us that Dr. Mooney’s run had been sabotaged if he had been the one to do it? “If I had found something out, I would have said so.”

  The chief studied me for a moment, but instead of pushing me further, he moved the conversation along. “Well, one of us must have seen something. Kamal, you were probably the last person to talk to Dr. Mooney, other than the murderer.”

  Kamal looked pained, like he should have noticed whatever it was that he was supposed to have seen. “We exchanged a few words about the scheduled calibration, then I said good night and headed home in the snow. I miss snow.” He licked his dry lips. “I ended up pulling an all-nighter for Dr. Little’s exam.”