The Far Time Incident (6 page)

“Still working, Julia?” said a strong voice that carried into every nook of my office, trained as it was by the years of public speaking that were at the core of a professor’s job. A familiar head of long, silver hair poked in through the open door.

I waved in Dr. Helen Presnik, historical linguist and a well-known face in the TTE lab for more than one reason. She sank into the visitor’s chair, deposited a thick sheaf of final exam essays in a free spot on my desk, and loosened her scarf. She had been letting her silver hair grow so that she would fit in better during her runs to Renaissance England, and it now reached halfway down her back. She looked at me and got straight to the point.

“I was in the reference section of the library all day. I just heard about Xavier.”

“I’m so sorry, Helen. Do you want a cookie?” I made a move toward the window cabinet.

She stopped me. “That’s not necessary. It’s certain, then?”

“Oscar saw him enter the TTE building but not come out. His bike’s still outside the building, and no one’s seen him or heard from him.”

She didn’t bother asking if Oscar could be trusted to report accurately on happenings in the TTE building. Everyone on campus knew Oscar. With his strange bodily rhythms, he was a favorite subject at the Sleep Lab in the School of Medicine across the lake.

I recapped what we knew so far, then added, “Chief Kirkland will keep an eye on Dr. Mooney’s house in case he went
somewhere without telling anyone and forgot to take his phone and his wallet—”

I stopped, aware how utterly ridiculous the scenario sounded.

Helen seemed to share my opinion. Her voice softening just a shade, but still brisk, she said, “I see.”

“Helen—did Xavier ever express any wishes about—well, what to do in a situation like this?” I paused to frame my words carefully. “Seeing as a funeral is not technically possible, Dean Sunder suggested a memorial service in the Great Hall of the Coffey Library on Friday evening, after the last of the exams, but if you have other thoughts on the matter—”

All softness forgotten, she snorted. “Colleagues and adoring students giving speeches about what a great educator and researcher he was? Xavier would have loved that. All the world’s a stage and Xavier liked his place on it. Is it true that it was an unauthorized run?”

I decided that the unadorned truth was the best way to go. I flicked on my computer and scrolled down STEWie’s roster. “I looked it up for Chief Kirkland. Xavier wasn’t on the roster until next month. Here—late January. He’d asked for a ten-day run to track down a long-lost Arabic manuscript. Al-Khwarizmi’s
The Book of Sundials
.”

“The Persian mathematician whose name was Latinized into
algorithm
? Another wild-goose chase. Perhaps Xavier was trying to get a head start on locating it,” she added, somewhat contradicting herself.

“You mean he might have been testing the viability of the landing site coordinates or something of the sort? Could be. It might explain why he changed out of his everyday clothes and into—well, we’re not quite sure what. You know what the travel apparel closet is like. It’s impossible to tell what’s missing. For now, Dr. Rojas is operating under the assumption that the scheduled
calibration stalled for some reason and that Xavier was checking the equipment when the mirror-laser array lost focus, causing him to slip into a ghost zone. Maybe there was some technical reason why modern clothes couldn’t work for what he had in mind.” I had a sudden thought. “Helen, would you like a glass of wine?” In the white cabinet under my office window, behind the backup boxes of cookies, paper plates, and napkins, I kept a couple of bottles of the stronger stuff. For those times when things went more wrong than they ordinarily did.

“Thank you, Julia, but I better not.” She sighed, the news about Xavier clearly foremost in her mind, and ran a displeased eye over the stack of exams. “I need to grade these tonight. The first one I looked at seems to be half-full of Internet slang. A paper for my class, can you believe it?” Helen’s specialties included classical Greek and Latin, along with Shakespeare’s English. “I can’t even understand the title. Look”—she tapped the paper—“four acronyms one after another: WRT F2F NBD IMO. Brevity is the soul of wit, but this is taking things too far. It’s like trying to decipher a vanity license plate.”

“Wait, I know that one.
With respect to face-to-face, no big deal in my opinion.
Can’t say that makes much sense, however. What was the topic of the paper?”

“The difficulty of personal interaction with the local populace on time travels to Shakespeare’s London.”

“Ah, there you go.”

“I wanted the students to roll up their sleeves and think about what a STEWie research run entails.” She tapped the paper again. “I don’t think there’s a single comma anywhere. It will be returned with a
Redo
instruction.”

“I suppose one could argue that it’s a language in the making,” I said, trying to appeal to the linguist in her and glad for the brief change of topic.

“Until it
is
a language of its own, it has no place in an academic setting. And by the time it does, I’ll be long gone,” she said, whether referring to future retirement as a professor emerita or the other outcome, I wasn’t sure. “I wish we could ban the things from campus,” she added.

“What things?”

“Cell phones and laptops and e-readers and tablets and such. I’ve tried telling the students I don’t want their electronic devices in my classes, and they all nod like they understand, but I see fingers twitching and moving under desks as they text and tweet and blog and who knows what else. I never know if they hear a word I say anymore.”

“I’d think we’d have a mutiny on our hands if we tried to ban cell phones and laptops in classrooms, Helen, though I do somewhat agree with you.” I relayed the story of the cell phone and the biology exam.

“Is my complaining a sign that I’m getting old? Don’t answer that.” She added, “I suppose I have to give credit where it’s due—technology made it possible for me to have the honor of watching the very first performance of
Hamlet
at the Globe”—she sighed again, but this time happily—“as an audience member. That was my first STEWie run and Xavier accompanied me. We had to put our differences aside. Speaking of which, how have you been doing, Julia?”

“You mean since Quinn left? Quite well, actually.”

“I know you’ve been telling everybody that it was the cooking—”

“It was. Why did he have to rely on me for his meals? He’s a grown man.”

“—but I know it was more than that.”

She was right, of course. I said, after a moment, “We just couldn’t make it work. Our jobs kept getting in the way. I think he
assumed that once we got married, I’d turn into someone who was happy to battle the home front problems while he went out and conquered the world. It’s just that”—I had no problem admitting this to Helen, who would know what I meant—“I kind of wanted to conquer the world myself, in however small a way. The bottom line was that Quinn didn’t like his job—any desk job, really—but I like mine. We had these never-ending arguments about my long work hours. His were nine to five, but school hours just aren’t like that, are they?” I was usually in by seven thirty and not home until seven, and often worked weekends. As for Quinn, his new project, flipping upscale houses in Phoenix, hadn’t come as a surprise. The last few months before he left, he’d spent much of his free time looking at online photos of Arizona bungalows and backyard pools as he searched for something grander than his then-job as an accountant for the town’s electrical plant. One morning, he’d emptied our joint bank account, taken the more reliable of our two cars, and headed south on I-35 with Officer Jones. At least the house was in my name only.

Helen got to her feet, the ungraded essays in one hand. “Well, you’re probably better off in the long run.” She paused on the way out to make one final remark. “I’ve always known he’d come to a bad end.”

The door closed behind her with an abrupt click.

I knew whom she meant, and it wasn’t Quinn.

Drs. Xavier Mooney and Helen Presnik were ex-spouses.

I had just gotten around to sorting a stack of office-supply request forms, which needed to be turned into orders by the end of the day, when Dean Sunder stuck his head in. “Julia, I’m going to take off now, unless anything else needs my attention.”

His suit still looked pressed to perfection and his salt-and-pepper hair was arranged just
so
. My hair, on the other hand, had slowly started slipping out of its clip as I’d fielded phone calls, e-mails, and text messages, finding its way into my eyes and onto my neck. I sat up, pushed my glasses up my nose, and grabbed a firm hold of my brown locks, pinning them back into submission. No matter how unusual the circumstances, slouching and loose hair went against the aura of efficiency and competence that I aimed to project. “We’ve been getting a lot of phone calls from anxious parents and reporters wanting a quote, but nothing I can’t handle.”

“Well, coddle the first and dodge the second, as usual,” he said from the doorway. “I was thinking—I’d like you to accompany campus security if they request additional interviews with our staff. We should extend them our full cooperation, of course, but I don’t like them wandering around the buildings, asking unnecessary questions. I understand the difficulty, since there’s no body and all…but this was just an unfortunate accident, after all. We’re all very shaken by what happened.” He added pensively, “It falls to me to think about what’s best for the school.”

I understood what he meant. Donations. We were in the middle of the end-of-the-calendar-year push. Alumni had a standing invitation to drop in on any departments and labs to look around and see what their old school was up to these days. We did not want anyone to be scared away by the sight of Campus Security Chief Kirkland and Officer Van Underberg roaming the halls. If I accompanied them, I’d be able to reassure everyone that the school had things under control.

To an outsider, Dean Sunder’s concern about alumni contributions at a time like this might seem crass, but in fact it was the opposite—where fundraising was concerned, the dean had always tried to take as much as he could off the shoulders of the
researchers in the science departments and onto his own. His efforts fell into two categories: tapping government grants, which usually favored safe, baby-steps research projects; and targeting alumni, private patrons, and foundations, who were more willing to take on risky research projects like STEWie. Ewan Coffey’s donations to the school had been instrumental in getting STEWie up and running. The actor had been following the project’s results with keen interest—and with the satisfaction, I thought, of a gambler who had backed the right horse. (After his morning meeting with the dean, Ewan had returned to his movie set; the actor was back in Minnesota for the shooting of what rumor had it was the thrilling tale of a cabin-vacationing lawyer battling an angry Bigfoot in a blizzard, all while trying to win the heart of his somewhat younger but equally attractive next-door neighbor. It would no doubt do as well as all his other flicks.)

Dean Sunder glanced behind him with that last sentence, as if there might be potential donors wandering around the 120-year-old halls of the Hypatia of Alexandria House at this late hour, or a few of Xavier Mooney’s molecules floating down the dimly lit hallway that his corporeal form had graced many times over the years. The dean turned back with a small shudder. “We really need more indoor lighting in here. It gets dark so early in the winter. See if you can get Maintenance to install a few more ceiling lights, Julia.”

“Lewis, you knew Xavier better than I did—did he have any family other than Helen Presnik?” I asked, immediately regretting my choice of words. I wasn’t sure I looked upon Quinn as family anymore and I had no idea what Helen’s opinions on the matter might be; ex-spouses were a gray area family-wise, their status to be determined on a case-by-case basis.

“I think there’s a sister. Mary and I met her at Xavier and Helen’s wedding.”

“I’ll see if Helen has her address. Helen didn’t know of any particular wishes he might have had regarding a memorial service. I’ll schedule the Great Hall in the Coffey Library for Friday evening, like we discussed. I called Ingrid, hoping she’d be able to put together a light buffet at short notice. She said it would be no problem.”

Ingrid was one of the linchpin personalities in town, always ready to take up a cause when someone needed help or to drop by with a stack of Swedish pancakes with lingonberry jam from her restaurant when a family was in trouble.

“I suppose we should have flowers?” the dean said.

“Sven’s Shop can provide them.”

“And some kind of music, do you think?”

“The Music Department offered to send over students to play something lively on Dr. Mooney’s collection of historical musical instruments. I also thought I might get an enlargement made of Dr. Mooney’s CampusProfs page picture.”

“You’ve thought of everything, Julia. I don’t know what I’d do without you. I’ll see you in the morning.”