The Far Time Incident Read online

  “The vending machine has hot chocolate but no lattes, sorry,” I said. A quick peek at the Les Styles blog while I was on the phone with her earlier had revealed that most of its glossy photos had little to do with Minneapolis and its dress styles and much more to do with what celebrities were wearing in two more-trendsetting cities, one on each coast. Also that my whole wardrobe was just not it.

  Penny Lind stretched out her feet in the soggy boots to one side of the desk. She glanced with disdain (mixed with perhaps a touch of envy) at my treaded, puffy, waterproof boots. “I had no idea it was such a long walk from the parking lot.”

  “We encourage walking and biking at St. Sunniva,” I explained, sitting down across from her.

  “I’ve always thought of walking and biking as summer activities.”

  “In the winter we encourage bundled-up walking and biking.”

  “Of course you do. Who’s Sunniva?”

  “Patron saint of Norway’s west coast. She was a tenth-century Irish princess. As the legend goes, she fled aboard a ship to escape marriage to a heathen king. She and her followers hid in a cave on the island of Selja, just off the coast of Norway. They died after a rockfall. We’re working on confirming the story,” I added as an aside, then went on. “St. Sunniva was founded in 1890 as an all-girls Lutheran school by an immigrant couple, Knut and Agnes Hegge. In 1968, we turned coed and nondenominational.”

  “And the dark-haired, strong-boned woman whose photo is by the front door?”

  “Hypatia? A scientist and a philosopher in Roman Egypt. A story with an unhappy ending. She was murdered by a religious mob.”

  I saw her eye one of the black-and-white photos on my wall, this one taken the usual (not time travel) way, which showed the 1929 varsity football team. The cheerfully grinning women wore bulky and very non-revealing gym uniforms. They wouldn’t have made it onto Les Styles even if blogs had existed back then. Below the photo was a large world map riddled with pushpins. I stuck one in after every successful STEWie run. Without saying anything, she got to her feet. “Right. Shall we get to it? The Time Travel Machine isn’t far, is it?”

  I hated to break the news that the only place she’d be going was back to her car. A quick glance through the window showed me that the campus path had yet to be cleared; a bundled-up student was pushing a bicycle in the direction of the glass-encased Emmy Noether House for Mathematics.

  “Ms. Lind, I’m afraid—”

  “Penny.” She slipped on thin leather gloves and swung her purse across one shoulder.

  “Penny, I’m afraid we’ll have to postpone the tour of the TTE lab. Sorry. Unforeseen circumstances. We’ve had to temporarily halt all STEWie runs.”

  Her eyes narrowed under her pencil-thin eyebrows, and her perfect nose wrinkled ever so slightly, like a well-groomed dog picking up a scent. “I thought I heard something over the phone. Unforeseen circumstances, you say…I think I might have that hot chocolate after all.”

  I got up and returned a couple of minutes later with two hot chocolates in Styrofoam cups. Penny Lind had her cell phone out. She flashed the screen at me, her voice taking on a salesman’s tone. “My readers have left a lot of comments. They’ve been looking forward to the photos Dr. Baumgartner promised me—pouf hairstyles, gowns, men in wigs and stockings—”

  I set the hot chocolates down on the desk, leaving one in front of Penny. I wondered what she would have made of Dr. B’s clogs, peasant dress, and egg basket. Erika Baumgartner’s research subject, the chemist Antoine Lavoisier, had, like Hypatia, met with an unhappy end, his involving a guillotine in revolutionary-era France. His wife, Marie-Anne, was Abigail’s thesis topic. The professor’s choice of peasant-wear had been a strategic one. The rule of thumb was that foot soldiers—maids, milkmen, washerwomen, chimney sweeps, and so on—usually went about their jobs unnoticed. Donning the mantle of an average Jane or Joe made it much easier to move about in the past.

  Looking about as far from a peasant as humanly possible, Penny Lind took a delicate sip of the hot chocolate, which left a mustache above her upper lip, and asked, “Is it true that Erika Baumgartner would have been back in less than an hour with the photos?”

  “Yes—a day in the field takes about fifty minutes of lab time.” I waved that aside. “I can give you a tour of our other science buildings if you’d like—”

  “Will there be any time travel in them?”

  “I’m afraid not.”

  It was not a good idea to send her into the office of the probably still-fuming Dr. Baumgartner, that was certain. For a wild moment I considered walking Penny over to the museum so she could snap a few photos of Ewan Coffey for her blog, but decided the actor might not appreciate that. And we did need his checkbook, as crass as that sounded. Probably now more than ever, the unpleasant thought shot through me, given what had happened to Dr. Mooney.

  Penny tapped an impatient leopard-print boot.

  “How about this? I’ll arrange for you to observe a second project after we resume STEWie runs.” I flicked on my computer and opened STEWie’s roster. “Maybe with someone from the History Department—let’s see—yes, here we go—there’s a team scheduled to travel to 41 BC to gather data on Cleopatra, the last of the Egyptian pharaohs.”

  Whatever had gone wrong last night with STEWie, I hoped it would be dealt with soon; otherwise there were going to be a lot of unhappy researchers roaming the halls and snapping at the students who remained on campus during the winter break.

  I went on, “The Cleopatra team will try to find out if the source of her power was her beauty, as has been rather fancifully reported down the ages, or if it was the more practical combination of intelligence, charisma, and political smarts. Should they return with photos, the question will be answered once and for all.”

  “The question?”

  I leaned forward. “Did she have a large nose?”

  The day’s exams proceeded as scheduled; school life, like the proverbial show in Ewan Coffey’s line of work, had to go on. After resolving a problem that had arisen during the freshman Human Biology test (there was a reason cell phones, with their memory and messaging capabilities, had been banned from exam rooms), I printed out the press statement I’d prepared for the dean’s review. I usually e-mailed inter office documents to him, but something stopped me from doing that this time.

  To seek company is the instinctive human response to death.

  Though I was keeping my fingers crossed that the professor would be found at home or in the special collections section of the Coffey Library attending to the formerly lost volumes whose copies he had obtained on STEWie runs, I did not hold out much hope. Officer Van Underberg had kept me updated on the progress of the investigation via a series of texts. Chief Kirkland and the officer were checking all the obvious places for any sign of the professor, starting with Dr. Mooney’s house on the edge of campus, on the off-chance that he had changed his mind about biking home once he saw the snow and had made it there by walking or hitching a ride, and then overslept after a long night in the lab, missing our many calls to his home phone number. They were not back yet.

  Dean Sunder stood at the wide windows of his office, lost in thought. At first I assumed he was looking out at the still-falling snow, but then saw that he had a PhD thesis in his hands. It was bound with the red cover the school had used before switching to blue in 1980, fifteen years before I enrolled in the Business Administration program at St. Sunniva. Xavier’s old PhD thesis, I suspected, from the dean’s personal collection. I cleared my throat and Lewis turned toward me. He shut the volume, put it aside, then held out his hand. “Julia. Is that it?”

  He took a minute or two to read over the press statement. I had taken care in crafting it. It wasn’t very long, just a paragraph or two explaining that the school was looking into the incident, with some inspirational words at the end. Well-respected scientist at the tail end of his career may have sacrificed all for the benefit of mankind and the advancement of kno
wledge, that kind of thing. Whatever the reasons for Dr. Mooney’s unscheduled run, I was sure that my words weren’t far from the truth.

  “Yes…well done, Julia.” The dean reread the statement, slipped it into his briefcase, and opened one side of the mahogany cabinet that took up a wall of his office. Extra shirts, assorted ties, and a bottle or two of hair spray waited inside. He loosened the lively red tie he’d worn to the museum breakfast meeting with Ewan Coffey—which had turned out to be very productive, he said—and hung it on the tie rack. Like me, the dean seemed to have a need to talk. “What a terrible thing—for Xavier—and the department. I know Chief Kirkland is still checking, but at this point it’s a formality. The basket came back empty and there’s only one thing that can mean… Nothing like this has ever happened on my watch. This has been my office for a long time, coming up on, what, nineteen years?” he said, rummaging among the ties without seeming to really notice them.

  I couldn’t help but throw a glance at the diplomas, awards, and photos with St. Sunniva’s chancellor, Jane Evans, and other dignitaries that graced the wall behind his desk. I corrected him gently. “Twenty this January, Lewis.” I’d already ordered a silver wall clock for his office with an appropriate inscription. To Lewis Sunder. From his grateful students, professors, and staff.

  “Twenty, Julia, really? You’ve been my assistant for, what—”

  “Seven years. How about this one? Dark gray is always appropriate.”

  He took down the somber dark-gray tie and faced the mirror inside one of the cabinet doors. “Did you know that Chris, my assistant before you, retired early to grow palm trees in Florida? It wasn’t the winters that drove him away, he said. He’d had enough of students and their problems and wanted to work with something that wouldn’t complain all the time.” He chuckled, then grew serious again as he wound the tie into a perfect knot. “Xavier and I go way back, have I ever mentioned that? He and Gabriel Rojas and I worked on early attempts at spacetime warping technology as graduate students, back when time travel was just an idea on the back of a napkin. We were young and full of ideas—practical, ambitious, doable, impossible. It was difficult to get funding, a constant struggle. We were barely able to keep things going from one semester to the next. I moved on to other things. After tenure, I had the honor of being offered this post and I jumped at the chance. From that point on, I made it my mission to expand the science departments, bring in new talent, and do all I could to help my researchers.”

  He had certainly done that. St. Sunniva’s eight science departments, from the Mary Anning Hall of Earth Sciences to the Maria Mitchell Astronomical Observatory, owed a lot to him. He had fought for support for many a student and project, and had helped Dr. Mooney and Dr. Rojas scrape for funding at the bottom of the budget barrel until their joint project and the budding Time Travel Engineering Department had taken off. There had been criticism, too. There had been those who felt that St. Sunniva’s past as an all-girls school would be best honored by giving admission preference to female students. Lewis Sunder had been adamantly against that and had voted for blind (or as near as could be) admission decisions. But he had also done his best to bring women faculty members into the science departments and had been the one to suggest that naming buildings after Marie Curie and other women scientists would be a tangible way of honoring St. Sunniva’s past.

  “This will shake up the TTE lab—we’ll have to regroup, start fresh. And I have no idea how it will affect our chances in Stockholm. Don’t go spreading this around, but I’ve heard that Xavier and Gabriel were high on the list.” Lewis sighed and brushed a bit of lint off his suit. It wasn’t just vanity; he represented the science departments through good times and bad. They were expecting him at the campus TV station for the taping of a special announcement. “By the way, I’ve had to promise Erika the first spot when STEWie runs resume,” he added before picking up his briefcase and coat. I followed him out and then headed down to the building kitchenette. I grabbed cheese and grapes from the fridge, stacked several boxes of crackers on top, and hurried over to the TTE building. A meeting to discuss Dr. Mooney’s accident had been called; since Lewis was needed for the TV taping, I would be representing the dean’s office.

  Chief Kirkland was in the conference room. He’d taken a chair not at the rectangular table, but by the narrow windows at the far end of the room, where the blinds were drawn against the falling snow, giving a cozy feeling to the otherwise rather utilitarian space. He sat there with one of his long arms draped over the side of the chair, watching Dr. Mooney’s colleagues shuffle in—and his students, too. The professor had made many friends and connections in his years at St. Sunniva. Everyone wore that slightly stunned look people get when something bad happens unexpectedly. I hoped there would be enough refreshments to go around. (Providing a food spread wasn’t technically part of my job description, but I found that it made meetings run more smoothly, and thought that it might be especially needed today.)

  As I walked in carrying the food, Chief Kirkland shook his head at me, seeming a little less standoffish than usual. “He wasn’t at his house. Neighbors had no idea where Dr. Mooney could be or where he might have been planning to go. Things were in a bit of a disarray inside the house,” he added. “Old books were strewn all over, with notes penciled in margins. Also a lot of chocolate bar wrappers and empty pie containers.”

  “Dr. Mooney had a bit of a sweet tooth. And the books wouldn’t be unusual for any of our professors,” I said, trying to wrestle open a goat cheese log by puncturing its wrap with a plastic knife. As Kamal came in and took a seat near the door, I finally succeeded in getting the package open and plopped the goat cheese down, rattling the platter of food. Abigail hurried in a few minutes later. While we waited for Gabriel Rojas—the mild-mannered professor often forgot about meetings, though I was sure he would make this one—I offered cheese to Officer Van Underberg.

  He shook his head politely. “No thank you, ma’am.”

  “There’s Brie, a goat cheese log—or what used to be a log—grapes, Gouda—”

  “Appreciate it, ma’am, but I’m on duty.” He took out his pencil, which appeared to have gone dull yet again, and sharpened it before tucking both the pencil and the sharpener—a square one that collected its own shavings—back into his uniform’s front pocket.

  “I find that a pen is more reliable than a pencil for taking notes, Officer Van Underberg,” I pointed out helpfully.

  “Yes, ma’am. It’s just that I’m worried about getting ink stains on my new uniform, ma’am.”

  I set the cheese tray back on the conference table and asked Chief Kirkland, who shook his head at the food, “Why does your officer keep calling me ma’am?”

  “Van Underberg’s new at this.”

  The security chief’s gaze barely brushed me before settling on Dr. Rojas, who had hurried in at last and taken a seat. I was a bit surprised by the chief’s demeanor, but supposed that even accidents merited a thorough investigation.

  From the head of the table, Dr. Baumgartner, her blonde hair falling freely around her shoulders now that she’d exchanged the peasant-wear for casual slacks and a sweater, nodded to thank me for the refreshments for the meeting she was about to chair. She seemed to have accepted that something had gone badly wrong in the TTE lab, and her anger had been replaced by a certain grimness. She cleared her throat and opened the meeting. “I am sorry this sad occurrence has brought us here. But,” she added, wasting no time in dispensing with the formalities, “let’s face it, we’ve always known that something like this could happen. It was only a matter of—uh, time.”

  Dr. Steven Little, the second of our two junior TTE professors, was seated on her right, across the table from Kamal, Abigail, and me. He grunted in agreement without looking up from his laptop. The clean-shaven professor was striking keys with astonishing speed, his fingers moving almost independently of the rest of him, his thickset shoulders hunched forward under the argyle vest. The newest o
f the four TTE professors—the others being Dr. Mooney, Dr. Rojas, and Dr. Baumgartner—Dr. Little had recently been wooed over from a postdoc position at Berkeley with promises of funding, plentiful STEWie roster slots, and tenure down the road. His first months at St. Sunniva had already shown me that he’d have to be goaded into doing his share of chairing meetings—he clearly felt that stuff was for minds less brilliant than his own.

  “I’ve canceled all runs indefinitely,” Dr. Rojas said from the other end of the table. Framed between an unruly mop of gray hair and equally gray and unruly eyebrows, his brow was deeply furrowed. He ran a hand through his hair, disheveling it further. “For as long as it takes to figure out what went wrong.”

  “Indefinitely? Let’s not be hasty,” Dr. Baumgartner said, her face falling. “This could still turn out to be a glitch in the computer log. I mean—are we absolutely sure that Xavier is gone?”

  In a few clipped sentences, Chief Kirkland summarized for the room what we knew so far. Oscar, the doorman, had seen Dr. Mooney arrive on his bicycle, wheel it into the bike bay, and enter the TTE building at about an hour before midnight. He had not seen the professor leave. Anyone else might have been suspected of dozing off on the job, but not Oscar, who was a well-known insomniac. According to him, the chief said, after Kamal had left for the evening, no one else had gone in or out till morning, when the usual crowd of professors, postdocs, and students had started trickling in, everyone a bit late due to the snow.

  The subject of Kamal having been the one signed up to oversee last night’s calibration came up.

  As Kamal opened his mouth to explain, Dr. Baumgartner clarified the process for Chief Kirkland’s benefit. “The equipment must be calibrated for the next day’s run. It’s a sensitive undertaking, so the graduate students take turns babysitting STEWie overnight.” I saw Officer Van Underberg, who was leaning against the wall next to me, pencil this down.

  All eyes in the room turned to Kamal. He squared his shoulders and sat up, his earnest young face pulling at my heartstrings for some reason. He gave his explanation unapologetically and with honesty, or at least he began to. “Dr. Mooney was kind enough to offer to take over my shift so that I could get in some last-minute studying for my Spacetime Warping: Theory and Practice exam. I mean, your Spacetime Warping exam, Dr. Little—I’ve just come back from it—”