The Far Time Incident Read online

  “Uh—I’ve got it, Dr. Little—send a balloon with a camera back in time. Then, when it reaches altitude, have it snap pictures of Earth iced over.”

  Dr. Little, who seemed oblivious to my presence and the fact that something out of the ordinary was going on, pounced on the student’s statement as they passed by. “Yes, that’s all very well, but how would you solve the problem of getting the balloon back into STEWie’s basket?”

  They walked out of earshot and I called out Abigail’s name in an undertone. She and Kamal were standing just inside the open door of the grad student office, talking in hushed voices. Jacob Jacobson’s head bobbed out occasionally as he kept an eye on the developments and, I suspected, sent out tweets to fellow students and the rest of the world against my explicit instructions.

  Abigail hurried back and I said, “The bike lock combination?” As she entered the numbers (18-6-7, I noticed, the birth year of one Maria Sklodowska, a.k.a Marie Curie), I asked, “Where is Dr. Rojas?”

  Dr. Rojas was a senior TTE professor, along with Dr. Mooney.

  “In the Coffey Library giving his Physics for Poets students an oral exam. Kamal and I weren’t sure whether we should call and interrupt him.”

  “I’ll take care of it. You didn’t inform Dr. Little?”

  “It never occurred to us.”

  I decided I might as well wait for campus security inside the lab and typed in the access code. Abigail followed me in, having left the bike lock hanging from one of the door handles in a droopy coil. The doors creaked shut behind us, reminding me that I’d been meaning to put in a call to Maintenance to have them check and oil the hinges.

  “I’ll try Dr. Mooney again,” said Abigail, dialing the phone in her hand. “I keep getting his voice mail. I’ve also sent him an e-mail, posted an inquiry to his CampusProfs page, and sent several text messages to his cell.”

  “He’s okay with students sending him text messages?”

  “He’s the only professor in the department that allows it.”

  “I’m not surprised. Not that Dr. Mooney lets his students send texts, I mean—well, that doesn’t surprise me either—but also that other professors don’t. It’s hard to explain to students that there is a fine line between—wait, where is that coming from?”

  “I hear it, too.”

  We looked around the cavernous lab, with its labyrinth of lasers and mirrors under a balloon roof. A faint ringing emanated from somewhere, breaking the monotony of the quietly humming equipment. The ringing stopped abruptly, and through the phone in Abigail’s hand I heard Dr. Mooney’s voice offering the caller the option of leaving a message, followed by a very long beep.

  “I’ll redial,” Abigail said.

  The ting-ting of a phone started up again.

  “There.” I pointed.

  We moved toward the corner of the lab where there was a short row of head-height lockers for storing personal effects during STEWie runs. Three of them gaped empty, their metal doors ajar. The door to the fourth was shut, but the lock, like the bicycle one that Abigail had left on the lab doors, hung loose. Abigail and I exchanged a look, the eeriness of the deserted lab starting to get to us. My heart in my throat, I reached out—I could almost feel the gray metal vibrating with the faint ringing coming from within—and swung open the narrow door.

  3

  What was the matter with me? I don’t know what I expected to see. Besides the cell phone, the only things in the locker were a black wallet, a winter hat with a bicycle headlamp still attached, and a man’s leather belt.

  I sent Abigail to the grad student office to make sure Jacob and the other students weren’t tweeting about Dr. Mooney’s disappearance, and turned away from the locker, moving toward the heart of the lab to wait for campus security. My wet boots squeaked on the tile floor and I subdued an impulse to shout into the cavernous space to see if my voice would echo. To me, STEWie had always looked like a dishwasher—a giant’s dishwasher, if such a thing existed. Like gleaming tableware, mirrors fanned out from the array center, the smallest the size of a file folder and the biggest almost reaching the balloon ceiling, all gently curved into a dish shape. The dim floor lighting threw soft shadows on the ring lasers that circulated around the mirrors.

  STEWie. The SpaceTimE Warper, a.k.a, the Time Travel Machine. Sort of. It wouldn’t always take you where you wanted to go, only where History allowed. All summer, a team from the Linguistics Department eager to decipher Rongorongo had tried to interact with the fifteenth-century inhabitants of Easter Island. They hadn’t been able to take more than a step away from STEWie’s basket, as their attempts at getting their clothing and mannerisms right had fallen far short of what was needed for them not to disturb history. Similarly, a recent attempt to get footage of Galileo spotting Jupiter’s moons had failed, even though the History of Science team had arrived at night—they could not move stealthily enough to get near the telescope and its builder and were forced to turn back.

  The square of thick glass mounted on a knee-high base in the center of the array felt cold to the touch, as usual. A steel frame sat rather incongruously on top of it, like a waiting elevator. But this elevator had no walls, no ropes attached to it, and didn’t go up or down. The frame and platform delineated STEWie’s basket, which was visible only to instruments.

  The basket was, as Kamal had said, quite obviously empty.

  I shivered. The lab was always chilly—the result of the cryogenic equipment under the floor, needed to keep STEWie from overheating during time travel send-offs.

  The project badly needed funding for a new generator—after the first whirlwind year, the excitement had worn off somewhat and the prospect of yet more panoramic photos of battlefields and unflattering close-ups of secondary historical figures, yellow teeth and all, had been greeted with a large yawn from the public and with mumbling about more practical ways of spending money. Not to mention that MIT and other schools were starting work on their own time travel labs with bigger and better STEWies. Maybe they would have more luck getting close to the men and women who anchored history, I thought, moving away from STEWie’s basket.

  My cell beeped, interrupting my chain of thought. Oscar, the building doorman, with a two-word text message: Security here.

  I looked up from the phone to see two shadowy outlines appear outside the opaque lab doors: a solid, square one and next to it, a harder-to-make-out tall one. Campus Security Chief Kirkland stuck his head through the door. “Ah, Ms. Olsen.”

  His squat companion was a uniformed campus officer I hadn’t met before. They were an odd pair: while the officer’s uniform looked a size too small—the fabric stretched tight across his wide thighs—Chief Kirkland’s looked like it had been custom-made. It might have been, given his lanky height. The chief’s parka was unzipped, as if we were in the middle of the March melt-off and not in the grips of December, and he had his hands in his pants pockets, not in a slouchy way, but in a comfortable-in-his-own-skin kind of way. He had once told me—in a rare personal slip—that his grandparents hailed from here and from north, east, and west of us: the Dakota peoples, Quebec, Scotland, and Sri Lanka, which explained his dark complexion and hard-to-place features.

  “Van Underberg,” the security chief introduced his new officer after the two of them had filed into the room. “This here is Ms. Olsen.”

  “Ma’am,” Officer Van Underberg said politely. As the lab doors closed behind him with their usual uncomfortable creak, the officer removed his fleece hat and took a somewhat nervous look around. His superior surveyed the room, too—calmly, with interest. No one could fail to be impressed by their first look at STEWie.

  In the seven months since our previous chief had retired, Chief Nate Kirkland and I had crossed paths a few times. He mostly kept to himself and had a square jaw that he used sparingly for conversation, as if he was the one with the Norwegian ancestry, not I. He had come to us from the state park system, and at first he’d struck me as being somewhat out of p
lace at St. Sunniva, where there was not much for the security office to do except (a) issue parking permits, speeding tickets, and fishing licenses; (b) provide directions to visitors who were confused by the circular campus layout; and (c) intervene in the occasional fender bender or student party gone out of control. This, however, seemed to suit Chief Kirkland just fine. The most recent problem we’d called him in for had involved petty theft of food from a shared fridge in the Rosalind Franklin Biology and Genetics Complex. A well-hidden camera had revealed the culprit to be a visiting research fellow with a somewhat loose definition of public property. But he had also been quite brilliant in his subject, experimental genetics, so we’d put up with the nuisance until his three-month term ran out. He was now somebody else’s problem.

  Once, right after he’d taken up the post, I had asked the security chief to call me Julia—everyone did—but his answer had been that he preferred to keep things formal on all official business. I hadn’t repeated the offer since.

  Chief Kirkland tore his gaze away from the largest of the mirrors and turned to me. “What happened here, Ms. Olsen?” Officer Van Underberg readied a pencil and a little spiral notepad from his parka pocket.

  I opened my mouth to speak, then closed it, realizing that blurting out that a respected physics professor had been scattered across time was probably not the best place to begin. Chief Kirkland waited, not exactly patiently, while I composed my thoughts. I took my hands out of my jacket sleeves, where I had slid them in an effort to keep my fingers warm, and plunged into the story, pointing to STEWie’s basket and the lab lockers at the appropriate points in the narrative. After I finished there was silence. Officer Van Underberg, who had stopped taking notes about halfway through, stared at me wide-eyed, rather like Kamal had when he’d brought the news to my office. The tip of his pencil had broken off. Even Chief Kirkland, who always seemed perfectly composed, looked a bit disconcerted.

  “Let me begin again,” I said. “Surely you’ve heard of STEWie?”

  Chief Kirkland beckoned me to go on, but Officer Van Underberg looked at his pencil sadly and said, “Pardon me, ma’am, is this—is STEWie the Time Travel Machine?”

  The Time Travel Machine was what everyone outside the academic world called STEWie.

  “It’s not quite as exciting as it sounds,” I explained quickly. Officer Van Underberg had a chubby, caramel-colored mustache that he kept stroking nervously with the back of one hand. His freshly trimmed hair—regulation for new officers?—contrasted with the chief’s black strands, which hung below his ears to his shoulders. “STEWie ferries researchers to past places and times, where they can take notes and photos, even footage on occasion. But they cannot change anything of significance, however small.” I always tried to emphasize this; it was everyone’s first question. “That is, they can’t go wherever they want, or near anyone they want. The photos and eyewitness accounts go into the History Alive exhibit at the university museum. Our researchers also write articles and books, deliver presentations and workshops, and teach classes. Most of the travel slots go to the History Department, including History of Science, where the dean’s offices are, but we also get archaeologists, linguists, anthropologists, paleontologists, evolutionary biologists, the occasional geologist—”

  “In a nutshell, then,” Chief Kirkland summarized, “STEWie is like a tourist bus. Travelers carry cameras, go where the bus takes them, and come back with photos. And this Dr. Mooney?”

  “You’ve probably heard his name before. One of the original minds behind the project. A physicist who applied his talents to time-travel engineering.”

  “And he is missing.”

  I shivered again and wrapped my arms around my body. It was a toss-up between whether it was colder inside or outside. “I’ll take you to see Kamal Ahmad and Abigail Tanner in a minute. They were first on the scene. The joint grad student office is just down the hall. You’ll probably also want to talk to Oscar. And Dr. Rojas. He and Dr. Mooney are—were—the two senior professors in the TTE Department.”

  “Oscar?” inquired Officer Van Underberg, his stubby pencil hovering above the notepad.

  “The doorman who walked you in. Aged, wiry-looking fellow with alert eyes who looks like it would be a bad idea to cross him? Ex-Marine. Raises miniature roses in his greenhouse and rarely sleeps. That big pile of toys in his station is for Toys for Tots.”

  “We’ll also need Dr. Mooney’s home address,” the chief said.

  “It’s on file in my office. I can text you the information, if you have a cell number where you can be reached—”

  Chief Kirkland nodded to his officer. “Van Underberg.”

  I watched as Officer Van Underberg scratched down the number for the phone sticking out of his parka pocket. He carefully tore the page from his notepad and handed it to me.

  “We’ll need to see Dr. Mooney’s office,” Chief Kirkland added. “Is it in this building?”

  “On the other side of that wall. The door is open. Anything else?”

  “We’ll probably have more questions for you as the accident investigation progresses, Ms. Olsen.”

  “You know where to find me, Chief Kirkland.”

  “I need to fetch my pencil sharpener from the car,” said Officer Van Underberg, and he left to do so before I could point out that there was bound to be one somewhere in the lab.

  I led Chief Kirkland to the locker that contained Dr. Mooney’s personal things and pointed out a nearby office chair where a sweater, a jacket, and a pair of bicycling pants with reflective stripes along their length lay neatly folded. On top of the pile of clothing sat one of the lab cameras. “Dr. Mooney must have changed into period-appropriate clothes, but apparently he decided he didn’t need a camera.”

  “Period-appropriate clothes?” the chief asked as he examined the professor’s wallet.

  “We don’t yet know what era he was visiting, so I’m not sure what he might have been wearing. The TTE Department keeps a wide selection of outfits in the travel apparel closet across the hall. Tunics, sandals, robes, wigs, and so forth, whatever the professor might have needed. I’ll ask around to see if anything is missing… There was quite a bit of discussion,” I added, straying from the strictly relevant, “about whether the clothes should be kept unwashed and unmended and the shoes muddy and uncleaned to allow our travelers to blend in more easily in earlier time periods. The obsession with laundering is a relatively recent one. Some professors drew the line at personal—uh, odors. Others felt it was a necessity they were willing to put up with for the sake of knowledge and discovery. Xavier Mooney is—was—one of them. We settled on laundering everything and spraying the clothes with a synthetic compound that mimics human sweat and dirt as needed. And no one,” I added as we turned away from the lockers, “not even the researchers who prefer to appear authentic, minds the periodic bed bug treatments.”

  “How’s Quinn?” Chief Kirkland asked as he held the lab door open for me. “We haven’t seen him at the Walleyes lately.”

  While the security chief had never deigned to call me Julia, he was on a first-name basis with my ex. Both of them had belonged to the Walleyes, the town’s fishing club. I had already decided I wasn’t going to sugarcoat things when people asked me about Quinn. The reactions I had gotten to the disintegration of my marriage had ranged from expressions of condolences to comments of the I-never-liked-him variety.

  “Quinn took a job in Phoenix,” I said. “Real estate. He left town with Officer Jones. You didn’t know?”

  “So that’s why she quit so suddenly,” he said without a change of expression. “I wondered. I thought it was because she didn’t like me for some reason.”

  I snickered at this unexpected bit of humor from him and the awkwardness of the moment dissipated.

  “It was the cooking, mostly,” I explained half-seriously as we stopped outside the open door of the grad student office. No work or studying was being done inside. Kamal, Sergei, Jacob, Abigail, and two other
students stood huddled around Abigail’s desk talking about what had happened to Dr. Mooney.

  “Quinn didn’t like your cooking?” He sounded a little baffled.

  “He expected me to cook. There are many things I can do, but that’s one list that cooking is not on. Scrambled eggs mystify me. They always stick to the bottom of the pan. And my chicken invariably turns out dry and my pasta squelchy.”

  Chief Kirkland gave me a look I couldn’t interpret before nodding at me and heading into the student office. Taking that as my cue to leave, I hurried back to the Hypatia of Alexandria House. Penny Lind had already arrived and was tapping an impatient leopard-print, two-inch-heeled boot in front of my closed office door. Her face, framed by fluffy earmuffs, was pink from the cold above her cream-colored coat.

  “Penny Lind. Of the Les Styles blog, fashions past and current. Am I late? Professor Baumgartner hasn’t left, has she? The snow—”

  “No, you’re not late. She’s still in the present.” I opened the door and hung my jacket and scarf on the coatrack just inside of it. I offered Penny the chair that Kamal had sat in an hour ago. Her own coat, which she left on, had large splash marks down the back. I decided not to point them out.

  She draped her purse on the back of the chair before lowering herself into it, taking care not to sit on the coat. The purse was the kind that I would have trouble fitting a hand into, much less actual stuff. It matched the boots.

  I held open the cookie jar. She shook her head. “I wish. Carbs are the enemy—even for those of us who only work behind the computer screen. You don’t happen to have a fat-free latte on hand?”