The Far Time Incident Read online

  “Not mine,” Helen said. “We have a responsibility toward future archaeologists to disturb ancient sites as little as possible.”

  “If we take them, are we sure we’re not depriving some poor soul of light and protection during the eruption when it comes?” I somewhat agreed with Nate, but still felt compelled to ask.

  “I can’t guarantee that,” Helen said after a moment. “All I can tell you is that History would not have let us enter the Nigidii tomb if our being here would significantly impact someone’s life. This tomb might be destroyed in the eruption, or buried under layers of ash only to be looted by vandals, or left untouched until excavated in our own time—or possibly as yet undisturbed. Still, I suppose we need the cloaks to get into town. We can put them back when we are done. They might be needed for a family ceremony. We’ll have to go in pairs so that we can all get water,” she added.

  We decided that Helen, with her academic-if-not-vulgar knowledge of Latin, should go through the town gate first. Kamal, who seemed to be the thirstiest of us, would accompany her, then Abigail and I would go, and finally Helen or Abigail would pay the town a second visit with the chief.

  “I’ll see if I can confirm the date. I wonder if people will find it odd if I asked if Titus has just succeeded his father as emperor.” Helen pulled the cloak over her head, adjusted the hood, then ran her fingers through her long silver hair in an effort to untangle the knotted strands. I could have used a comb myself.

  Kamal pulled the other cloak over himself, and he and Helen headed out and seamlessly became part of the street-of-tombs activity, a slice of which we could observe through the low arched door of the Nigidii tomb. A few locals milled about, presumably paying their respects at family tombs; merchants readied wares to supply the tomb visitors; weary animals pulling carts loaded with jars and wicker baskets holding farm produce passed us on their way into town, trying to beat the heat of the day. The cloaks were not quite long enough to cover Helen and Kamal’s shoes as the street took them in the direction of the town gate. Helen’s orange pumps looked particularly noticeable as they peeked out from under her cloak.

  As the three of us sat down to wait, I asked Abigail, “I don’t suppose we could chisel a message into stone and bury it for someone to find and pass on to Dr. Mooney—letting him know to bring an armed guard that fateful Monday night? Or a message telling ourselves not to step into STEWie’s basket?”

  It wasn’t easy to come to terms with the fact that we were permanently stuck in the past. The basket was gone. No one was coming. I threw out the questions even though I already knew the answers.

  She shook her head. “It wouldn’t work. If we did write a message telling Dr. Mooney to bring an armed guard with him, events would conspire so that the message wouldn’t be found until after Dr. Mooney’s murder and our getting stuck here. We can’t change stuff that’s already happened, right? So it doesn’t matter whether we chisel our message into stone in Latin or write it in pen on notebook paper in English. The note won’t be found before it can be found.”

  The security chief got to his feet and started to pace the small tomb, muttering to himself. “We need to tell them to question Gabriel Rojas and everyone else who had the door code in connection with the murder of Dr. Mooney. Maybe the guilty party could also be charged with attempted assault with a deadly weapon—a volcano?”

  Abigail unzipped her tiny backpack and tore a blank page of graph paper out of a lab notebook. She looked around for a handy surface to write on and settled on the wooden chest, sitting down cross-legged by it. She thought for a moment, then slowly wrote down a short paragraph in neat block letters with the Sharpie she had brought along in anticipation of a Beatles autograph. I was reminded that hers was a generation that didn’t have much use for cursive, or handwriting itself really. “I still think he’s too nice to do anything of the sort, but…” She passed the note to me. I read it, then passed it on to the chief, who read it aloud:

  FORWARD THIS MESSAGE TO ST. SUNNIVA CAMPUS SECURITY. DR. ROJAS SCATTERED DR. MOONEY ACROSS TIME, THEN SENT TO POMPEII GHOST ZONE THE FOLLOWING PEOPLE: DR. HELEN PRESNIK, SECURITY CHIEF NATE KIRKLAND, JULIA OLSEN, KAMAL AHMAD, AND ABIGAIL TANNER.

  The chief shook his head. “I don’t know about Dr. Rojas being too nice to commit murder, but there is such a thing as presumption of innocence, Abigail.”

  We left it at that.

  Helen’s eyes shone with wonder when she and Kamal returned a half hour later. It took her a moment to get the words out.

  “Marvelous, my dears, marvelous. The people, the buildings, the smells, the colors…a historian’s dream. We went a little way into town and peeked into shops and doorways. I wish I had my audio recorder. I want to take notes on the local dialect. And photos with Abigail’s Polaroid camera.”

  “Of us?” I asked as Helen pulled the cloak off over her head and passed it to me. “To include with the message Abigail wrote?”

  Helen caught sight of Abigail’s message where it lay on the wooden chest, read it, and raised an eyebrow. “I’ll see if I can reword it. The photos wouldn’t be of us but of the town—for future archaeologists, should STEWie be put out of commission because of what has happened. I’d like to visit the Forum, the Amphitheater, the public baths…Kamal and I didn’t make it that far in before History stopped us, just a block or two. I think it was the shoes.”

  “Money,” Kamal spoke for the first time since he and Helen had bent their heads to reenter the tomb. “We need local money. We passed a bakery. It smelled so good—” He rolled his eyes upward.

  Abigail cocked her head. “I’ve got an idea. Julia, do you mind if Kamal goes again with me?”

  “Well—all right.” I handed her the cloak.

  “Of the two future Nobel Prize winners, whose name would have come first?” the security chief asked as Abigail readied herself. I noticed that his eyes were still fixed on the note.

  “Dr. Mooney,” Kamal said without hesitation.

  I sat down on the wooden chest and thought for a moment. “It’s the eternal question, isn’t it—which came first, theory or experiment? The two of them attacked the question of time travel from complementary directions—Xavier Mooney was a tinkerer and Gabriel Rojas is more interested in the theory of it all, so they made a good pair, wouldn’t you say, Helen? It took them years to get STEWie up and running, theory propping experiment, experiment propping theory. Along the way Dean Sunder lent them as much support as he could in the form of grants.” I added, “The dean brought on two junior professors to expand the program and inject some fresh ideas into it now that we’re about to have competition from the bigger schools. Dr. Erika Baumgartner—Abigail’s advisor—has a joint appointment with the History of Science Department. Dr. Steven Little—you remember him from the TTE meeting, Chief Kirkland, on the short side, sweater-vest—”

  “I know him.”

  “Despite the name of the lab—Time Travel Engineering—he’s the first professor with an engineering background to actually work on the project. Both he and Dr. Baumgartner are impatient to prove themselves. It made for somewhat of an awkward quartet, I suppose. Dr. Little, in particular—”

  Kamal interjected, “Dr. Little seems to channel Ernest Rutherford,” as he helped Abigail wiggle into the cloak, which was a couple of sizes too large for her.

  “Who?” Chief Kirkland asked.

  “The father of nuclear physics,” Kamal answered, the unsaid of course hanging in the air.

  “Ah, that Ernest Rutherford,” the chief said. (One of the first tasks I had set for myself after being hired as the science dean’s assistant was to read up on my science history. I began with the names that graced the science buildings, all of them of women: Mary Anning, Marie Curie, Emmy Noether, Hypatia of Alexandria, Rosalind Franklin, Ada Lovelace, Maria Mitchell. I was by now quite well versed in the subject.)

  “Lord Rutherford was of the opinion that physics is the only real science and that the rest is just stamp collecting.�
�� Kamal snorted. “Ironically, the Nobel Prize he went on to receive was in chemistry, for his work in radioactivity.”

  “And he ended up being on a stamp, in his native New Zealand. Serves him right for being so mean to everyone else,” Abigail said, pulling her cloak tight around her. It dragged on the ground behind her by a good inch.

  “Steven Little has been doing simulations to try to figure out if time travel runs can be implemented in parallel,” I said. “So far the answer seems to be no.”

  “Apparently you can’t have two STEWie baskets side by side in the same time period,” Kamal explained further.

  “And Erika Baumgartner?” the chief asked.

  “She has a lot of Dr. Mooney in her. For her, STEWie isn’t about the physics of time travel, but about what you can do with it. She’s been researching the lives of eighteenth-century scientists as she works on optimizing landing zones in that century. She has each of her graduate students pick a historical figure from that era.”

  “She gave me a choice of several scientists,” said Abigail, “including Gauss, Euler, and Fahrenheit. I suggested Marie-Anne Lavoisier. Dr. B pointed out that Marie-Anne wasn’t considered a true scientist. I countered that that made her an interesting research subject—if Antoine was the father of modern chemistry, was she the mother? She made sketches and kept records of her husband’s experiments and translated chemistry texts into French for him to read. I know I wouldn’t be able to translate a scientific text unless I knew a lot about the subject. It took a while to convince Dr. B to give me the chance.”

  “Could she have wanted to steal your idea for herself?” the chief asked.

  “It’s not that big of an idea as far as time travel research goes. Plus she gets her name on all journal articles I publish in any case, right?”

  “But your name would be listed first,” I pointed out. Every journal article published by a graduate student had the advising professor’s name on it, too. And Erika Baumgartner had a large contingent of graduate students. Which wouldn’t hurt come Dr. B’s final tenure review a few years down the line. Still, the journal articles where your name was the first one listed were the ones that really mattered.

  The chief looked over at me. “Hardly seems like enough to justify trying to murder five people.”

  I shrugged. “The tenure process is, well, what it is.”

  “Plus it wouldn’t explain what happened to Dr. Mooney.”

  Helen offered a frank evaluation of the four TTE professors, starting with her ex-husband. “Xavier tackled research problems on his feet and with his sleeves rolled up. Gabriel is more the sit-down-and-think-about-it type. As to Erika—she attacks problems head-on and sometimes too fast, in my opinion. It’s like she feels she doesn’t have the luxury of taking her time. The pressure of a tenure-track position, I suppose. And Steven Little solves problems virtually by running simulations and doesn’t seem to want to have much to do with people, students or otherwise. That last bit is, like with Erika, probably due to the pressures of a tenure-track position,” she allowed charitably.

  “Junior professors tend to mellow up a bit once they achieve tenure,” I said. Noticing that I had dirt streaks on my skirt, I attempted to swat them off.

  “I don’t think I have, Julia, have I? You should see some of the things my students have written on their class evaluations. Really, all I want is for them to perform their best, but much of the time they’d rather be surfing the Internet or partying. All in all, though, I’d rather set the bar too high than too low.”

  “So Xavier Mooney and Gabriel Rojas are the old guard,” the chief summarized, “and Erika Baumgartner and Steven Little the new. It can’t be easy trying to make your mark in the shadow of two potential Nobel Prize winners. Or to have young colleagues trying to muscle in with new ideas.”

  “I don’t know if I’d put it quite that way,” I objected. “And that doesn’t mean one of them did away with Xavier—”

  “A fish is most likely to be eaten by another fish,” the security chief said somewhat cryptically as Abigail and Kamal headed out.

  The grad students returned carrying something my nose registered before my eyes did. Bread. Round, about the size of a dinner plate, and marked into wedges by a design on the top. The sweet, yeasty aroma made my stomach growl with hunger. “Where did you get that?” I asked the pair as Kamal wiped his hands on his shirt (a useless gesture in terms of getting them clean, since his shirt was equally grungy). He proceeded to break the bread into sections and pass them all around.

  It was Abigail who answered, mouth full. “I—yum—distracted the bakery shopkeeper while Kamal borrowed the loaf.”

  “Borrowed the—Abigail! Kamal!” Helen chastised them, shocked.

  “You should have seen her,” said Kamal, who didn’t seem chagrined at all. “She all but fluttered her eyelashes at the baker.” He offered the professor a wedge. “Dr. Presnik, if any of our actions threatened to significantly impact someone’s life or change History, we wouldn’t be able to undertake them. You know that.”

  “Still—one does not alter one’s morals according to the difficulty of the circumstances, Miss Tanner and Mr. Ahmad.”

  It seemed to me that the opposite was true and that sometimes circumstances did need to dictate our actions. The bread must have been fresh out of the oven, and its oatmeal-white interior was warm and dotted with nuts and raisins. Suddenly realizing how ravenous I was, I attacked the piece. Kamal and the security chief proceeded to dig in as well.

  After a moment, Helen relented and took a bite. “I’ve always felt that our researchers should carry along a bag of gold nuggets for emergencies. When we get our hands on a denarius or two—no, I don’t have any ideas yet about how we can do that—we’ll go back and reimburse the baker.”

  “Fair enough,” the chief said through a full mouth. For a police officer, he sure didn’t seem too bothered by the idea of consuming stolen goods.

  While the chief and I got ready for our expedition into town, Abigail tore up the note she’d written blaming Dr. Rojas. Using a pen from her purse, Helen reworded the note in neat cursive:

  Finder, please convey this message to Campus Security, St. Sunniva University, Minnesota. Marooned in Pompeii ghost zone. August 25, year 79. Presnik, Kirkland, Olsen, Ahmad, Tanner.

  “There,” she said. “Let them sort out the details at their end.”

  Next we needed something to encapsulate the note so that it would be protected from the destructive elements it would face. Helen’s purse turned out to be pristinely clean. All it held was more paper, pencils for sketching, pens for notes, and the plastic bag into which we’d placed Abigail’s crumpled-up note and the rest of our trash, mostly strips and backing from the Polaroid films.

  The camera took up most of Abigail’s backpack. There was also an extra pack of film, the useless Callback, and her research notebook.

  Nate and Kamal had nothing in their pockets.

  From my shoulder bag I pulled out my wallet and matching change purse, the cell phone, a couple of black-ink pens, a dozen paperclips, and a list of names, the first pass at the guest list for Dean Sunder’s annual π-day cocktail party (π being 3.14, the party was held on March 14, which also, in a cosmic coincidence, happened to be Albert Einstein’s birthday). I shook the shoulder bag but nothing else came out except for a palm-full of cracker crumbs and a piece of gum that had come loose from its packaging and was covered with lint.

  “I really should clean my bag more often,” I said, slightly embarrassed.

  But the others weren’t even looking in my direction. Their eyes were fixed on something in Kamal’s hand.

  “Perfect!” Abigail said. Kamal had retrieved the empty cheese-and-cracker package from the bag in Helen’s purse.

  “We’re going to bring someone to justice using trash?” I asked.

  Nate snapped the package open and shut a few times. “Why not? This should last a good while.”

  “Long enough for our p
urposes, I imagine.” Helen sighed at the thought of contaminating an archeological site. “Assuming the plastic doesn’t melt in one of Vesuvius’s eruptions, that is.”

  “Eruptions?” I said. “There’ll be more than one?”

  “Besides the upcoming one? Yes, there will be other, smaller ones through the centuries. One as late as 1944. We’ll have to choose a hiding place well.”

  “Why don’t we slip it into one of those urns?” Abigail suggested, pointing to one of them.

  “Abigail!” I exclaimed, shocked. “Somebody’s ashes are in that.”

  Helen took my spot on the wooden chest as I donned one of the cloaks. “Let me think about this. We need a hiding place that will be safe from the force and heat of the eruption, once it comes, and all of the subsequent ones, too. The note must stay undisturbed for two thousand years. From what I remember about Pompeii’s history, there was looting immediately after the eruption by rightful owners, thieves, and treasure seekers, who dug tunnels into the ash and looked either for their own valuables or those of others. In time both Pompeii and Herculaneum were forgotten… In the early eighteenth century, a villager digging a well came across marble—Herculaneum’s theater, as it turned out—and excavations began. Pompeii’s Forum and Amphitheater have long been excavated and well explored, so we can’t hide a message there.” She wrinkled her nose in thought. “I can try to remember which houses are currently undergoing excavation…the House of the Painters at Work…the House of the Chaste Lovers…but, to be honest, I have no idea how we’d figure out where they are in AD 79 without a modern map of the site.”

  Chief Kirkland and I left while she was still puzzling out the problem. Even though my cheeks were sunburned from yesterday’s wanderings around the foot of Mount Vesuvius, the sun felt pleasant on my face as we walked toward the town gate.

  “There is a fountain just inside,” Helen had instructed us. “Go straight in, you can’t miss it.”

  I adjusted my cloak. The itchy brown wool was musty and smelled like olive oil; I hoped fumes were the only thing it was harboring. On the plus side, keeping my balance on the large cobblestones was easier now that my boot heels were gone. After one of them had broken off, I had gotten rid of the other by whacking it against a stone. The chief had tried rubbing dust onto his black leather shoes in an effort to conceal their modernity, but his cloak reached well above his shins. In the end he’d removed his shoes and socks. “I hope I don’t step on anything sharp,” he’d said, rolling up his pant legs so they disappeared under the cloak. His calves, I noticed as we walked, were hairy and had round marks on them from the elastic in the socks.