The Far Time Incident (5 page)

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 She seemed to have accepted that something had gone badly wrong in the TTE lab, and her anger had been replaced by a certain grimness.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 of 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—”

“Ah, my teaching assistant brought the exam papers to my office. I haven’t had a chance to read them yet.” Dr. Little looked up from the laptop and reached around it to spread a lavish layer of goat cheese onto a cracker. “And how did you find the test? Too easy? Not long enough?” He popped the cracker into his mouth.

“Uh—well, I wouldn’t say it was too easy, no,” Kamal said. “As to last night’s calibration, it was kind of Dr. Mooney to offer to take over. I had no idea what would happen… If I had known…”

“No one is blaming you, Kamal,” I said firmly.

Dr. Baumgartner was eying Kamal as if she still thought the whole thing might turn out to be an end-of-the-semester student prank gone wrong. Dr. Rojas came to his rescue. “I’ll start running tests this afternoon to see what I can find out. Until then, let’s keep all this guessing to a minimum.”

“Surely you’re not planning on going on any STEWie runs, Dr. Rojas,” I said. “I don’t think Dean Sunder is ready to approve anything of that sort yet—”

“And he would be quite right, Julia. No, the Genetics Department is lending us a fish so we can run tests and pinpoint the malfunction that caused the mirror-laser array to lose focus—”

“—and send Mooney into a ghost zone,” Dr. Little finished the sentence for him. “The dangers of cutting-edge research,” he added matter-of-factly, offering the well-known platitude (one that, I had to admit, I’d used myself in composing the dean’s press statement). “Instead of arriving at whatever year and location Mooney wanted, he found himself trapped in a ghost zone with no way out.” As if to add emphasis to his words, the young professor broke the cracker in his hands in two with a snap. I winced and noticed that Abigail, next to me, had scrunched up her eyes, like she was either getting ready to cry, or getting very angry. I rather fancied it was the second. Her spiky, neon-orange hair made her look like a petite warrior. Kamal, next to her, wasn’t looking too happy, either.

“And a ghost zone is…?” Chief Kirkland asked Dr. Little, who was deftly toothpicking one of the Gouda cubes. Our newest
professor looked like he was well on the road to gaining the tenure-track twenty and contradicting his name in the horizontal dimension, I noted somewhat uncharitably as I got up to empty a fresh package of crackers onto the platter.

Dr. Little disposed of the Gouda cube and said, “A ghost zone is the easiest way for History to protect itself.” Like everyone connected to the TTE program, he spoke the word with reverence, a capital
H
, as if History was a force to be reckoned with. “Nothing cleaner than sending a time traveler to the bottom of the ocean, or into outer space, or onto the Bikini Atoll on the morning of March 1, 1954. The traveler would be able to move quite freely on the atoll. Not for long, though. That’s what a ghost zone is—you perish seconds after you step foot out of STEWie’s basket, your body decomposes as time passes, nature spreads your molecules all around…so you do come back to the present, just not in one piece. We call it being scattered across time.”

He reached for another cracker and Dr. Rojas took the opportunity to clarify things for the chief and an agog Officer Van Underberg. “That’s why we perform a calibration before each run, to sidestep any possible ghost zones. Our early tests with fish and robotic vehicles resulted in quite a few losses.”

I brought up a thought I had been holding on to. “What if Dr. Mooney arrived safely but was for some reason unable to get back to STEWie’s basket? Would the professor be able to contact us?”

“You mean, could he carve a message into stone and leave it somewhere for us to find?” Dr. Little liked to pounce when a scientific point came up, especially if someone had inadvertently spoken with imprecision. “First, the basket would never have returned empty. That only happens if the traveler is—”

“Dead,” Kamal croaked out the word.

“And second, even if Mooney did somehow manage to write a message for us, it wouldn’t matter.”

“Why not?” I hoped Dr. Little wouldn’t ridicule me for what I was about to ask. “Couldn’t we send a rescue basket after him if we found a message telling us what went wrong?”

Dr. Little opened his mouth to answer but Dr. Rojas got there first. He briefly shook his head. “It’s all in the past, Julia. He would have already lived out his life.”

“Right, of course,” I said.

“Any message he might have left for us could only have served one purpose—by letting us know what happened, it would help us avoid future incidents.” Dr. Rojas continued in the same pensive tone. “I wonder why Xavier decided to do a run alone, though it’s not unlike him to go off protocol—”

“Exactly,” said Dr. Baumgartner bluntly, looking up from the journal article she had discreetly started editing. She had a while to go before acquiring tenure (the holy grail of academia, a professorial position that could not be terminated). “Xavier was always full of ideas and eager to tinker with things.” She said it with admiration, not criticism. Dr. B had been a postdoc in the school (the shortened version of her name had been coined by fellow postdocs) before being offered a joint tenure-track position in TTE and History of Science. She herself seemed to prefer action to theory. “Most likely, Xavier probably saw that something needed tweaking when he was overseeing last night’s calibration, so he jumped in STEWie’s basket to test a Band-Aid solution he’d come up with—and it failed badly. Isn’t that what everybody’s thinking but no one wants to say it?”

Again, it wasn’t said as a criticism, but a sudden awkward silence did descend on the room.

“Dean Sunder,” I said into it, “has canceled this year’s December holiday party. We’ll be holding a memorial service on
Friday, after the last of the exams. Anybody who wants to say a few words about Professor Mooney or share any memories from his almost four decades at St. Sunniva, please let me know.”

“Let’s try and get to the bottom of this unfortunate matter as soon as possible,” Dr. Little said, resuming his typing. “Everyone has work to do. Who’ll take over Mooney’s courses, Julia?”

“Dean Sunder will try to figure something out before the start of the next semester. As for his current classes, Introduction to Time Travel Physics had a final project and no exam. Dr. Mooney had already graded the projects before his accident. There was a list of final grades on his desk. Ghost Zones in Time: How to Find Them and Avoid Them has a final project as well, doesn’t it, Kamal?”

Kamal, who was the teaching assistant for that class, nodded. “He sent me the final grades yesterday.”

“I took Ghost Zones in Time last year,” Abigail spoke up for the first time. “In that classroom, just around the bend of the hallway. For the final project we had to propose a historical event or geographic location that constitutes a ghost zone, suggest an itinerary that circumvents it, and compute coordinates. I chose the Tunguska Event of 1908.”

Erika Baumgartner looked up from her journal article again. “It would be quite interesting, wouldn’t it, to travel to Siberia of that year and settle the question of whether an asteroid or a comet impacted in the area? It wouldn’t be relevant to your thesis topic, Abigail, but perhaps we could get a paper out of it,” she said, then stopped abruptly, as if remembering why we were all gathered here.

I didn’t begrudge her the editing of the journal paper (
publish or perish
was the imperative phrase in academia), nor her momentary lapse of memory. This was merely a department meeting to figure out how to deal with the aftermath of Dr. Mooney’s
accident; the memorial service would come later. It was also true that sometimes people dealt best with bad news by focusing on other matters.

As everyone started to shuffle out of the room, Chief Kirkland raised a hand. “I have a question,” he said in a quiet tone that nevertheless made everyone stop and turn in his direction. (The chief seemed to have a talent for bringing other people’s conversations to a halt. Maybe it was the uniform. I usually had to pull on sleeves and tap shoulders.)

Dr. Rojas shifted in his chair to face the chief. The gray-haired professor had not eaten anything, I noticed, and looked too distracted to bother with class arrangements or asteroid-event discussions. “Sorry, Chief Kirkland, I should have made sure that we’d clarified everything. What is your question?”

“The Time Machine—STEWie—even if we don’t know what went wrong, wouldn’t the machine settings show where Dr. Mooney had been aiming to go? We know he left his clothes behind. What kind of costume did he put on?”

“We’ve all taken a look at the travel apparel closet,” Dr. Rojas said. “Impossible to say for sure what’s missing. As for STEWie’s settings revealing Xavier’s intended destination—” The bags under Dr. Rojas’s eyes seemed to deepen. “That’s the really odd thing. They don’t.”

Nightfall, hushed and starless, came early. (We were only ten days from winter solstice, the shortest day of the year and the traditional date of St. Sunniva’s Science Quad holiday party. This year we would have a much less jovial event, one which I had already started organizing.) Outside my office window, snow still fell thick and quiet. The phone had been ringing all afternoon. Mostly with expressions of condolences from various parties and questions from news reporters, but I had also fielded quite a few calls from worried parents. One had demanded that her son, a junior who was on the far side of campus in a Method Acting workshop for his School of Drama degree and had probably never set foot in the Science Quad, be kept at what she termed a
safe distance
from the TTE building.

“We’re not sure yet who will be teaching the course, but there will be no disruption to the schedule,” I’d reassured a parent who was curious about who would teach his daughter’s Introduction to Time Travel Physics: Part II spring semester class now that Dr. Mooney had been lost to time. “I’m sure one of Dr. Mooney’s colleagues will be happy to take over the course—”

I had dealt with all the condolences, questions, and outright demands as patiently as I could, but I was approaching some kind of wall and was glad that the ringing of the phone and onslaught
of e-mails had tapered off. I turned away from the window. In a few minutes Dean Sunder would go home to his family. With the Science Quad empty save for a handful of grad students and research staff monitoring lab experiments, I’d finally be able to get around to finishing the day’s paperwork, a task that had gotten pushed aside given the odd events of the day.