The Far Time Incident (2 page)

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.

“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.

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
S
pace
T
im
E W
arper, 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.