The Far Time Incident

by Neve Maslakovic

  “We’ll manage, Julia.”

  “And we can build a doghouse for Celer in the yard,” I said. “Speaking of Celer, where is he?”

  “The vet wants to keep him for a few days, for shots and stuff.”

  There was only one bit of bad news—Dave, Abigail’s boyfriend in the Athletic Department, had not waited for her. “I can’t blame him.” Abigail shrugged. “He thought I was dead. He offered to break up with his current girlfriend, but I said no. It would have been too weird.”

  As she and Sabina left, I heard Abigail explaining what a mall was in a mixture of English and Latin—like a long Pompeii street of shops, only indoors—and saying that a shopping spree might be in order. I heard Sabina exclaim at the idea that one’s clothes should be changed and laundered daily.

  For dinner, the nurse brought me a tray with orange juice, fruit, toast, and a strangely colored Jell-O that reminded me of Abigail’s vision of what STEWie’s basket might look like. I was supposed to be replenishing my fluids and, as I nibbled on the fruit cup and sipped the juice—I couldn’t say that I had much of an appetite yet—a thought kept rather unexpectedly popping into my head. Why hadn’t Nate stopped by? Perhaps he was busy. There were reports to be given, Lewis Sunder to be processed, and he had to catch up on everything he’d missed during the time we were gone. I had just managed to convince myself that his absence meant that he was just swamped at work, when a gruff voice said, “That wasn’t very smart, confronting Lewis Sunder like that.”

  His uniform was back on, as if we had never left. The small dog at his feet set about sniffing the room, its long chestnut ears vibrating with excitement above a chestnut-and-white coat.

  “I suppose it wasn’t,” I admitted. I pulled the hospital blanket farther up. The visit from Penny Lind had left me keenly aware that the hospital gown was not the most flattering of outfits. At least I had showered and my hair was clean and combed. “I wasn’t thinking clearly. I don’t think I’ve ever felt sicker in my life—I thought I was going to die.”

  “You did look like crap.”

  Well, he was certainly being a lot less formal. Of course, the case was over.

  “I went into Dean Sunder’s office—he’s not the dean anymore, is he?—into Lewis’s office because I wanted to look him in the eye. I had to know for sure if he had done it…and why.”

  Wanda, having finished her examination of the small hospital room, came over and put her front paws on the bed to let me rub her silken ears and head. She seemed a cheerful sort. I wondered how she and Celer would get along. “Are dogs allowed in hospitals?”

  “Probably not.”

  “She seems all right.”

  “Van Underberg’s been taking care of her just like you said he would.”

  “Nate, why did you leave your previous job? At the Boundary Waters Canoe Area?” I asked, letting Wanda have some of what had turned out to be peach Jell-O.

  He moved from the bed to the window and stared through it for a long moment.

  “I resigned. There was an incident. It’s a bit of a long story, but let’s just say I got involved with a suspect. Someone had been setting fires throughout the BWCAW. I was positive the arsonist was one of the teenage kids camping in nearby Voyageurs Park, perhaps a group of them, not this one—uh, person who was up for the summer.” He turned back to face me. “She was a photographer and I had been taking her out in my canoe in my free time. She had pretended to be a canoeing novice. Wanda was her dog.”

  “And it turned out that it was her all along?”

  “She borrowed the canoe after hours to set fires at various points on the islands. Pretty soon we had our hands full fighting the spreading fire.” His voice grew deeper. “The fire got out of hand and we lost someone.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “I was blinded by her interest in me. No blame came my way, but I felt I had to resign. I applied for the job here and got it. Chancellor Evans, well, she seemed to think I would do fine here.”

  The door opened before I could say anything and the nurse shooed Nate and Wanda out, saying that dogs were not allowed, and in any case, visiting hours were over. I settled back down on my pillow as she checked my temperature, and thought about things.

  It was the wrong time for both of us. I was working on living alone, not to mention that I had no idea if my divorce from Quinn had gone through after its weird legal limbo of five months. I’d have to give him a call and let him know I was alive. As for Nate—he had to come to terms with the fact that he was merely human, just like the rest of us. Mistakes were made, people got hurt, and sometimes it took time to move on. Still, I understood him a little better now. He had to learn to trust again.

  I did notice one thing. He hadn’t gone back to calling me Ms. Olsen, but he hadn’t called me Julia either.

  31

  The enormity of what we had done took a while to sink in. We got chewed out by Chancellor Evans for breaking a long list of rules by (a) pulling Sabina and Celer out of their own time and (b) roaming around campus without first undergoing the necessary decontamination procedures. If plague-ridden fleas and lice appeared on campus, Chancellor Evans said, she would know who was to blame. But she did help us conceal some of the details of our story to protect Sabina’s privacy. That part of the story did not make it onto the news. We also took pains to protect Dr. Mooney’s reputation. Almost everyone on and off campus assumed that his disappearance to Pompeii had been an accident, one that had been exploited by Lewis Sunder; none of us corrected that mistaken impression.

  As for Sabina herself, short of trying to organize exploratory time-travel runs, we had no way of knowing for sure what had happened to her father and grandmother. Going back to search for them would have been the time equivalent of looking for a needle in a haystack. I found peace by deciding that Secundus of the soulful eyes had found his mother and they had made it out of Pompeii. They had lived out their lives with the knowledge that Sabina and Celer were somewhere safe with us.

  Abigail said that Sabina sometimes sat on the shore of Sunniva Lake in silence, watching the finger-size fish flit about. I suppose it was as close as she could get to the seashore she’d left behind. She had taped the photos we’d taken of her hometown above her bed; Abigail had promised her that the two of them would one day go to modern Pompeii and fulfill Sabina’s vow to the goddess Diana. Not a blood sacrifice of a goat or a pig (which was what Sabina had wanted), but a less messy one in the form of a few drops of wine sprinkled onto the still-standing stones of the Forum temple where Diana’s statue used to stand across from her brother’s. Hopefully that much could be done without the tourist site guides noticing. For now Abigail and Sabina were taking it a day at a time and having fun with (and some odd discussions about) modern conveniences like pretzels, ice cream, computers, bras, toothbrushes, TV, hair conditioner, and chocolate.

  For his part, Celer seemed to have decided that the whole house belonged to him, and he spent equal amounts of time sleeping in their part of it and in mine.

  I had added a pushpin of a different color, red, to the smattering of blue ones on the STEWie map on my office wall.

  There were only two problems. One, though Sabina’s spoken English skills were improving drastically day by day, her writing skills were not keeping pace. In the end Abigail decided not to worry about it and to let Sabina use the computer, where the spell-checker was her friend. Sometimes I heard them laughing about a funny post on Jacob’s blog.

  Two, I hadn’t heard back from Quinn yet and had no idea if I was divorced or not.

  One particularly warm July afternoon, as I jotted down a note to call Maintenance to inquire when they would get around to spraying the rapidly multiplying mosquitoes on the lake, a knock came at my open office door. It was our security chief.

  “Just stopping by to drop off some papers for Sabina and to ask for your advice about something—where are you going?”

  Nate had a manila envelope in his hands, I noted as I rush
ed past him. “I left something in the microwave.”

  He followed me to the building kitchenette as I explained, “I’m preparing a cheese fondue for the new science dean—it’s going to be Dr. Braga from the Department of Earth Sciences. She’s moving into her office this afternoon and I wanted to welcome her properly.” I opened the microwave door to reveal a congealed and unappetizing-looking yellow mess. “Well, that didn’t work at all. Perhaps they’d let me use one of the Bunsen burners over in chemistry or a laser in one of the physics labs.”

  Nate threw an expert eye over the cheese bowl. “We’ll have to start over. Do you have more of the cheese?”

  I pointed to the hefty chunk of Gruyère sitting on the counter, of which I’d only used half.

  “We’ll need a touch of flour. Wine or brandy, too, if we can get our hands on some.”

  “There’s cornstarch in the cupboard, left over from the non-Newtonian goo we made for Halloween, and I keep a bottle of wine in my office. For emergencies and such,” I explained, leaving the room to get the wine.

  My white cabinet had been in storage along with my other office things, and I had reinstated it next to Brittany’s fridge, which I had decided to keep—it would come in handy for stockpiling snacks for department meetings. I had also kept Brittany, who was a graduate student in the Astronomy Department, first to help me out until I got back on my feet, and then as my part-time assistant. The school was happy to let me do it. The trustees were no doubt relieved that none of us had decided to sue, and I was almost tempted to ask if, once the excitement over our return and Lewis Sunder’s arrest had died down, we could go see the Beatles after all.

  I brought the wine back to find that Nate had scrubbed out the congealed cheese at the sink, dried the bowl, and cubed the rest of the Gruyère. He uncorked the bottle and added a good dollop of the white wine to the cubed cheese, which he’d already sprinkled with cornstarch and what looked like nutmeg. He seemed to be fitting in better on campus, I decided, though I don’t know why the sight of him stirring wine into cheese would have led me to that conclusion. He placed the mixture in the microwave and turned it on. “By the way, I pulled some strings to get a birth certificate and a social security number issued for Sabina.” He nodded at the manila envelope sitting on the counter. “That’s what I came by to drop off.”

  “You did something illegal?” I was touched by this unexpected side of him.

  “Not at all. Just pulled a few strings with Chancellor Evans’s help. Turns out she has a lot of connections.”

  “Chancellors tend to.”

  “Really, it was no more than what would be done for someone who was headed into the Witness Protection Program. Everything she needs is in that envelope—a birth certificate that’s a translation from an ‘original’ Italian one that’s also in there, immigration papers, a newly issued social security card. We’ve made Abigail her legal guardian.”

  “Good. It will make enrolling her in school easier. What was the second thing?”

  “Hmm?” The microwave beeped and he stirred the cheese mixture, adjusted the power level, and set it for another minute. “Oh, that. Sabina’s birthday present. I don’t know what to get her.”

  The party was tonight. We were sticking to the calendar date for Sabina’s birthday, the Ides of Julius (that is, July 15) and had solved the math problems that had arisen from our jump in time by planning to double-celebrate her thirteenth birthday. Nate was making shrimp curry, Helen and Xavier were bringing walleye sandwiches, and I was contributing mint chocolate chip ice cream, Sabina’s new favorite.

  “I got her math books,” I said. “Everything from elementary to junior high. She’s been devouring them. There are no language barriers there, which I think helps a lot. That, and I think she’ll be a scientist one day, though people say that children never grow up to be what you expect them to be.” I thought of something. “You could get her a cell phone, she’s been asking for one.”

  He stirred the cheese dip some more and put it back in for a bit. “Do you think she’s ready for that?”

  “It would help her keep in touch with Abigail throughout the day. And with Jacob. I think she might be developing a crush on him. She’s fascinated by his tan eyebrows.”

  “Cell phones, crushes—I have to say, I’m not ready for that. I feel responsible for her, like I’m her uncle or something.” The microwave gave a final beep and he reached for the cheese bowl. “Ouch, hot.”

  I handed him a kitchen towel. “I know what you mean. Any day now, I expect she’ll start calling me Aunt Julia.”

  He watched me stack a box of crackers, a plate with apple slices, and the cheese bowl on a tray. I picked up the envelope, thick with documents, from the counter and slipped it under the tray. “See you at the party tonight. Come by early if you need help wrapping Sabina’s new cell phone.”

  He held the kitchenette door open for me. “Good luck, Julia.”

  “With what?”

  “The new dean.”

  “Well, she can’t be worse than the old one, can she?” I said, sliding past him with the tray and hurrying over to Dr. Braga’s office before the cheese dip crusted over.

  Just outside her office door, my cell phone rang. I managed to answer it, balancing the tray and the documents one-handed. A familiar voice said, “Hey, Jules, it’s Quinn. Not calling about the divorce paperwork. I know about Sabina. Don’t worry, your secret’s safe with me—but I need a favor in return. I want to go somewhere. The fourteenth century.”

  THE END

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  St. Sunniva University is purely a figment of this author’s imagination. There is no relation to St. Olaf College in Northfield, which is named after the better-known patron saint of Norway. I had more fun than I should have in painting the campus into Minnesota’s landscape of lakes and trees and choosing the names of the buildings.

  Like Julia, I am not a historian. It is an extraordinary thing to walk the ancient paving stones of Pompeii. I have taken the liberty of moving wall frescoes and a fountain found elsewhere in town into the as-yet-unexcavated parts visited by Julia and the others. The floor mosaic of Scaurus’s villa did indeed proclaim “Best fish sauce.” I have given Nigidius Maius a house and additional rental quarters beyond the ones he owned by the Herculaneum Gate.

  A full translation of Pliny the Younger’s eyewitness account can be found in Joanne Berry’s The Complete Pompeii. In addition to Berry’s book, I relied on Mary Beard’s The Fires of Vesuvius: Pompeii Lost and Found, Peter Connolly’s Pompeii, Jo-Ann Shelton’s As the Romans Did, and Alison E. Cooley and M.G.L. Cooley’s Pompeii: A Sourcebook as to what life might have been like in 79 AD. The 2007 article in the Journal of Volcanology and Geothermal Research by G. Rolandi, A. Paone, M. Di Lascio, and G. Stefani titled “The 79 AD Eruption of Somma” provided a helpful summary of wind direction studies and the debate surrounding the Vesuvius eruption date. Special thanks go to Tony O’Connor, tour leader extraordinaire, for patiently answering all the questions I pestered him with. (Where did the women go to the bathroom in the public baths?) It bears underlining that any errors, misinterpretations, or downright flights of fancy are my own.

  Thanks go out to my agent, Jill Marsal, and to the book’s awesome team at 47North: Alex Carr, Justin Golenbock, Katy Ball, and Patrick Magee. John Baron, Karen McQuestion, and Jill Marsal read an early draft (and, in the case of John, a late draft as well) and provided invaluable feedback. Angela Polidoro was the Jedi master of editing and wielded the editor’s lightsaber with a firm hand and much wit. Jenny Williams went over the manuscript with a sharpened copy editor’s pencil.

  The Moon landing hoax quote on page 73 is from a tweet written by Neil deGrasse Tyson on May 25, 2011.

  Thanks go out to both sides of the family, the Maslakovic side and the Baron side, for their unfailing encouragement and support. As always, my most grateful thanks go to my husband, John, and my son, Dennis, without whose support the journey in this book would
not have been possible.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Neve Maslakovic is the author of the highly praised debut novel, Regarding Ducks and Universes, which was published in February 2011 by AmazonEncore. Before she became a fiction writer, Maslakovic was hard at work finishing her PhD in electrical engineering at Stanford University’s STAR (Space, Telecommunications, and Radioscience) Laboratory. Born in communist Yugoslavia, she has called London, New York, and Silicon Valley her home and now lives near Minneapolis/St. Paul with her husband and son. The Far Time Incident is Neve Maslakovic’s eagerly anticipated second novel and the first book in a new series of time travel adventures.