The Far Time Incident Read online

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Text copyright © 2012 by Neve Maslakovic

  Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint excerpts from The Complete Pompeii by Joanne Berry. © 2007 Thames & Hudson Ltd., London. Reprinted by kind permission of Thames & Hudson.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by 47North

  P.O. Box 400818

  Las Vegas, NV 89140

  ISBN-13: 9781611099096

  ISBN-10: 1611099099

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2012951474

  To John and Dennis

  CONTENTS

  PART ONE: GONE

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  PART TWO: IN THE SHADOW

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  PART THREE: ADRIFT

  26

  27

  28

  PART FOUR: HOME

  29

  30

  31

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  1

  The door to my office flew open with a bang.

  “Julia—the professor—he’s been scattered across time!”

  A parka-clad student had brought the news. Kamal Ahmad stood in my doorway trying to catch his breath, his sneakers heavy with wet snow.

  I pointed him to a chair and went back to giving directions into the phone. Hoping the person at the other end hadn’t heard what I strongly suspected was a student prank in progress and not an actual emergency, I said, “Sorry, where was I? Right. From Highway 94, turn onto Eagle Creek Road and stay on it for nine miles, then take the left fork at the old red barn. Follow it to the campus visitor parking lot—not bar, barn.” I paused to let what sounded like a truck, an especially loud one, rumble by. It had been snowing steadily since midnight and the blogger who was driving up from Minneapolis to tour STEWie’s lab this morning was caught in slow traffic. If I was wrong and this turned out not to be a prank—well, the lab tour could be canceled once she got here. I went on, “My office is next to Dean Sunder’s, in the Hypatia of Alexandria House—no, Hy-pay-sha. You’ll know you’re in the right place by the photo out front. Long black hair, strong cheekbones—”

  Before ending the call, I warned the blogger about the current hazard on campus, finals week. Bundled-up students with dark circles under their eyes bicycled the slippery St. Sunniva University walkways on their way to and from tests without much regard for pedestrians. You had to keep an eye out if you didn’t want to get run over.

  I hung up the phone, pushed my glasses farther up my nose, and gave my full attention to Kamal, who was slumped in the chair across the desk, still drawing air into his lungs in large gulps. Finals week was peak practical joke time. From previous experience I knew that students usually waited until after the last of the exams on Friday afternoon to hide research notebooks, glue lab doors shut, and so on. It was only Tuesday. Still—

  “Kamal, did I hear you right? The professor—which one?”

  “Dr. Mooney.”

  “Has been—”

  “—scattered across time, Julia, yes.”

  That seemed pretty unlikely. Dr. Mooney was one of our senior professors. If I had to put together a list about him, it would go something like this: (a) popular with students; (b) knew his stuff; (c) took it in stride when budgetary decisions didn’t go his way; and (d) had wowed everyone with his didgeridoo playing at the Science Quad Thanksgiving party—and had brought along a homemade pumpkin pie.

  Kamal Ahmad, on the other hand, was a graduate student. More specifically, he was Dr. Mooney’s senior graduate student and the teaching assistant for some of the professor’s classes. Grad students have their own list. From (a) to (d), they are an underpaid, underfed, underslept lot, and often the source of a lot of trouble for the science dean’s office. I took stock of Kamal’s unzipped parka and his inside-out woolen hat, whose π is a mathematician’s dessert logo was still readable backward. Had he run over from the Time Travel Engineering building in the snow, which was still coming down fast? Maybe this wasn’t a prank after all. I said the first thing that came into my mind.

  “What year?”

  “Year? I don’t know—all of them, I suppose. What should we do, Julia? He’s gone. Gone.”

  I reached for the phone again. Dean Sunder relied on his assistant—that’d be me, Julia Olsen. A descendant of Norwegian immigrants to a coal-powered nineteenth-century Minnesota, I had nevertheless ended up with solidly brown eyes and hair—which was a bit of a mystery, as I looked nothing like my parents, and the family photos of my grandparents all showed light-haired, prim-mouthed Scandinavian types. Where was I? Right. I was about to say that Dean Sunder liked to leave routine problems in my hands.

  A physics professor scattered across the vastness of time was definitely not a routine problem.

  2

  By phone, I reached Dean Sunder at the History Alive exhibition just as he was pitching the need for a new STEWie generator to his guest, the actor Ewan Coffey, the university’s most famous former attendee. (Everyone knew the story: As a junior, Ewan had packed a duffel bag and taken the train west to Portland, then a bus down the coast to Hollywood. The rest was movie history.) The dean was not pleased to be interrupted. After hearing what I had to say, however, he excused himself and stepped into the curator’s office so that we could speak privately. The dean’s voice carried strong over the line. “Julia, this is the last thing we need. Is Dr. Mooney’s student sure about this? Let’s get all the facts before we sound the alarm.”

  He instructed me to keep him updated and went back to wooing Ewan Coffey with the bagels, cream cheese, lox, and champagne I’d ordered for the occasion. I hung up the phone. Kamal had taken off the woolen hat and was twisting it in his hands, compacting the logo to read π is dessert. His breathing had calmed but he still had a glassy-eyed look. I got up and went over to the cabinet nestled under the winter-frosted window of my office to fetch the cookie jar I kept there. My approach to any crisis, large or small, was this: (a) offer food, and (b) make a list of things that needed to be done. I handed Kamal a napkin with a couple of butter cookies, then sat back down across from him, leaving the cookie jar open on the desk. Kamal wrapped his gloveless and icy-looking fingers around one of the cookies and wordlessly took a bite.

  “I suppose you’ll have to find another graduate advisor,” I said. “I hear Dr. Little is taking on new students—”

  I stopped to allow his coughing to subside.

  “Julia,” he said reproachfully, sounding more like his normal self, “how can you be so efficient at a time like this?” He hiccupped, then finished off the cookie as I pulled out my yellow legal pad to start a list.

  “Tell me what happened. You went on a STEWie run with Dr. Mooney. What went wrong?” Something occurred to me. “And who else was with you?”

  He quickly polished off a second cookie. “No one.”

  “It was just Dr. Mooney and you?”

  “N
o, Julia. Dr. Mooney was alone, according to the log. Just him.”

  I looked up from the notepad, not about to write that down. No one went alone. STEWie teams consisted of a professor and a couple of grad students, with perhaps a postdoc or a visiting researcher tagging along for good measure. Three to four was the standard.

  “It’s my fault—though I don’t know why Dr. Mooney went on a run—”

  I pushed the open cookie jar toward him. “You’d better start at the beginning.”

  He reached into the jar. “It was my shift in the lab last night. I tried to switch with Abigail so I could get some last-minute studying done for Spacetime Warping: Theory and Practice—the exam is at noon today—there’s going to be a written section and a practical one—it’s Dr. Little’s class and his tests are always hard—I still have a couple of hours left to study—that’s not important, is it? The point is, I tried to switch with Abigail, but she has two finals today. Jacob was swamped with projects, and I couldn’t reach Sergei, so Dr. Mooney offered to take over for me—he does that for his students sometimes—I had no idea, Julia, that he would—” Kamal stopped, as if he wasn’t sure he should voice his thoughts, and bit into another cookie.

  My pencil hovered above the blank page. “Kamal, are you saying that Dr. Mooney went on an unscheduled run last night and something went wrong?”

  Kamal leaned forward, planted his elbows on the desk, and waved the cookie in my direction. “Dr. Mooney logged in around midnight. He never logged out. The basket came back empty. You know what that means.”

  It was only when I looked at my hand that I realized I’d reached for a cookie myself.

  Kamal added, “I sat there for a while, trying to figure out what to do—your phone was busy—then Abigail came in, so I left her to guard the lab and ran over here.” He sat back up in the chair. “Julia, we have to take STEWie off-line until we figure out what went wrong.”

  I wiped the cookie crumbs off my hands. “I’ll call campus security and send out a memo that Dean Sunder is canceling all runs until further notice.” I wrote that down under “(a)” and “(b),” then flicked my computer to life and opened STEWie’s roster. “A blogger is scheduled to observe this morning’s run—I was about to look up whose—”

  “Abigail and Sergei with Dr. B.”

  I got to my feet and reached for my goose-down jacket. “Dr. Baumgartner? Why didn’t you say so? We’d better hurry over to the lab. I can call campus security on the way.”

  Petite, blue-eyed Abigail Tanner, whose short hair was spiky and neon orange today, stood with her arms crossed and her back against the opaque glass doors of the Time Travel Engineering (TTE) lab, blocking her graduate advisor’s way. More than six feet tall, Erika Baumgartner towered over her student. I saw her jab a finger at the lab as Kamal and I rounded the bend in the hallway.

  “It’s my time slot and I’m going in—”

  “There’s no point, Dr. B. The calibration for our run—”

  “—you have five minutes to get ready, Abigail, so you better hurry into the travel apparel closet. And get a cap to cover that orange hair.” Anger had tinted the professor’s cheeks red below the tight-fitting bonnet that hid her own blonde hair, and a tiny bit of spit on one corner of her mouth threatened to fall onto the white chemise that stretched across broad shoulders under a mushroom-colored bodice. A drab green skirt, a checkered apron, and a pair of wooden clogs completed Dr. B’s peasant ensemble. Two cabbage heads and half a dozen eggs lay cradled on a bed of straw in the wicker basket on her arm.

  Sergei, another of Erika Baumgartner’s grad students, stood off to the side, also dressed in period clothes—a brownish tunic and breeches. Next to him was a mousy-looking, ginger-haired student, a recent addition to the TTE lab, who looked very interested in the proceedings. As Dr. Baumgartner turned to the security keypad to the right of the lab doors and started punching in numbers, the student said politely to me, “Good morning, Ms. Olsen.” I saw his fingers inch toward the cell phone sticking out of his T-shirt pocket.

  I wiped wet snow spots off my glasses with my sleeve and then slid them back on. “Call me Julia. And you are—?”

  “Jacob Jacobson. Dr. Rojas’s new graduate student.”

  “Jacob, that’s right. Welcome to the lab. How are you settling in?”

  “Fine, fine,” he assured me, still very polite. Besides the ginger hair, he had an oval face and delicate, tan eyebrows. Like Abigail, he sported the normal student uniform, one that didn’t change much with the seasons—jeans, T-shirt, and sneakers.

  The security keypad had beeped green, but the lab doors did not yield to Dr. Baumgartner’s insistent push. I saw why. Abigail had coiled a bike lock around the door handles and secured it. Good thinking on her part. (As a rule, young grad students were like scared sheep when it came to their advising professors, and understandably so—an advising professor had all but total control of a student’s funding, access to lab time, graduation date, and future prospects. Abigail, however, was made of stronger stuff.)

  “This is ridiculous,” Erika Baumgartner, who clearly didn’t agree with that assessment, bellowed in her deepest professorial voice. She shook the door handles again. “It’s impossible for anyone to get scattered across time. STEWie has redundant safety systems built in. Xavier must have forgotten to sign out, that’s all. It’s happened before.”

  “The computer log says the basket came back empty, right?” Abigail said. “Besides, the calibration for our run was never done, Dr. B.”

  A look of terror crossed Kamal’s face as the professor whipped around to face him. “Why was the calibration never done?” Before Kamal had a chance to answer, the professor turned to me, barely pausing for breath, the lace on her bodice threatening to come undone. “Julia, a blogger’s coming to observe my run. She should be here any minute. We’re going to bring back footage of Antoine Lavoisier conducting one of his combustion experiments. Also a few photos of, uh—other things. Penny Lind blogs about celebrity fashions…” The professor trailed off, a note of embarrassment in her voice.

  “Penny couldn’t reach you, so she called the dean’s office to say that she’s running late because of the snow,” I said. Erika was one of our junior professors and needed the name-recognition boost that a popular blog could provide. STEWie runs were expensive, and Dr. B’s research into the life of an eighteenth-century scientist, even if he was the father of modern chemistry, paled in comparison to more marketable time travel projects. One that had recently gotten a lot of media attention belonged to Dr. Presnik of the English Department; she had gone on a few well-planned runs to confirm that Shakespeare had written all of his plays.

  I had assumed that Penny was coming in for the usual lab tour and to take a look at our steadily growing stock of snapshots from the past. She hadn’t mentioned that she’d made a deal for exclusive photos of revolutionary France haute couture in exchange for publicity for Dr. B’s pet research project. Nothing wrong with that. It was just that the dean’s office liked to know about these things.

  Jacob was typing something into his cell phone. Over his shoulder I read Something wrong with STEWie—Dr. Mooney gone, Dr. B furious, her run cancel—

  “Don’t tweet that,” I said, which turned out to be unnecessary. Hitching the wicker basket farther up her arm, Dr. Baumgartner snatched the phone from Jacob. She deleted the tweet and let out an angry explosion that shook the basket, cracking two of the eggs against each other. (I knew that underneath the eggs and the cabbages was a hidden stash that included a pen, a notebook, and a miniature camera, along with hand and nasal sanitizer—standard time travel gear.) “It’s almost ten! I tell you, there must have been a glitch in the log—”

  “Then where,” said Abigail, who seemed to be doing just fine even without my help, “is the professor?”

  “Let’s check the bathroom, the cafeteria, the lake—maybe he went ice fishing. Or he’s coming in late this morning because of the snow—”

  �
�Dr. Mooney’s not answering his cell,” Kamal spoke up from his position of safety behind me. “And his bike is right outside, in the bike bay.” He jerked his thumb in the direction of the front steps of the Time Travel Engineering building. We had spotted the professor’s bike in the glass-encased TTE bike bay on the way in. It was one of a kind and hard to miss: the body was a very-visible-in-all-seasons bright red, the handlebars stuck out at an odd angle that the professor claimed worked wonders for his back, and the bike’s nickname, Scarlett, was etched on the seat.

  Across the hallway, the door to Dr. Mooney’s office stood wide open, and I could see the professor’s desk, which was overflowing with books and papers. The chair behind it was empty. A bookcase along one wall held his collection of antique musical instruments, most of them acquired on STEWie runs.

  “Dr. Baumgartner, I’m afraid we’ve got to assume the worst. Campus security,” I added, raising my voice a notch but keeping my anger in check (I was aware of the pressure Erika Baumgartner and other untenured professors were under to produce publishable research), “will be here any minute, as soon as they deal with a snow emergency. They’ll take statements and help clarify what happened. Until then, I suggest we all go back to our offices. Thank you, Abigail, I’ll take over from here.”

  Abigail scurried off into the graduate students’ office down the hall before I could remind her to take off the bike lock. Kamal followed, looking relieved to be out of the line of fire. Having retrieved his phone from the professor, Jacob resumed typing and just managed to avoid a collision with the doorframe of the student office on his way in.

  “No tweeting, Jacob,” I called after him, but I wasn’t sure if he heard, as I was distracted by the withering stare Dr. Baumgartner shot in my direction. Clogs echoing on the tile floor, she stormed into the travel apparel closet. Sergei looked down at his tunic and breeches, shrugged, and headed for the vending machine farther down the hallway.

  I was leaning in, trying (unsuccessfully) to catch a glimpse of the interior of the lab through the crack between the double doors, when the sound of approaching conversation made me turn. It was Dr. Little, the younger and shorter of our two junior TTE professors, in a buttoned argyle wool vest. “Using STEWie to confirm the Snowball Earth hypothesis has academic merit, Ty, but how would you do it?” he was saying to the grad student accompanying him.