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Authors: Neve Maslakovic

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BOOK: The Far Time Incident
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As if he could tell what I was thinking, the chief explained, “It’s my job to expect the worst from people. While hoping for the best, of course,” he added as Dr. Rojas hurried back into the lab. He looked like he had splashed water on his face but was still wearing the same set of rumpled and slightly smelly clothes. He had a granola bar in one hand.

Chief Kirkland, wasting no time, said to the professor, “STEWie and time travel. Tell me more about how it works.”

Dr. Rojas, looking somewhat taken aback by the security chief’s abruptness, sank onto a lab chair and said, “Where to begin?” He absentmindedly unwrapped the granola bar and took a large bite as if it was the first thing he’d eaten all day (which it probably was), then waved the security chief over to a second lab chair. Chief Kirkland shook his head and indicated to Officer Van Underberg that he should sit. The officer plopped himself down and readied his spiral notepad and pencil.

I noticed that Jacob Jacobson had followed the professor in. The ginger-haired youth had taken a seat at a desk by the lab lockers, propping a textbook open in front of him. Jacob’s parents ran the town bookshop/antique store, I’d found out, so he biked home every night. I’d also heard that he was having trouble in some of his classes and had requested extensions to finish all of his projects. I could see his fingers moving behind the textbook, like he was typing something. I wondered how the chief intended to keep the happenings in the lab quiet. I thought I’d better inquire, “Chief Kirkland, do you want me to limit the audience?”

“What? I mean, I beg your pardon, Ms. Olsen?”

I indicated Jacob with a nod of my head.

The chief turned on his heel. “Didn’t see him there in the corner. Yes, let’s get the students out. I’ll get to them later.”

Jacob, who had heard the exchange, scurried out the door, head down, phone in hand, fingers still moving. I suspected he was in the middle of tweeting something along the lines of,
Kicked out of STEWie’s lab, what in the world is going on???

Dr. Rojas, having finished off the granola bar, sent the wrapper flying into a trash can in a gentle arc. “Time travel. You wanted to know how it works. Hurtling yourself into a time period not your own and then finding a path once you’re there—well, it’s like trying to navigate a tricky maze with high walls.” He seemed to be choosing his words with care, like he was explaining time travel theory to a journalist or a potential donor. “First you need to find a maze entrance—that is, a place to step out of STEWie’s basket.” I couldn’t stop myself from looking in the direction of the basket, but one of the larger mirrors blocked our view of it from this angle. “Popular places to aim for are just inside a forest line at dusk, the outskirts of a city at daybreak, a beach after sunset. Once you arrive, invisible maze walls present
themselves, limiting your ability to move with freedom, the reason for which is self-evident.”

I winced. I had, more than once, strongly suggested to our academics that they refrain from using phrases such as
self-evident, obvious
, and
of course
when talking to visitors, donors, and journalists.

“Because, of course,” the professor went on, making me wince again, “we can only tiptoe around in the past. We are mere visitors. Physical paths open up in a loop, permitting a walk there, a quick photo here, a minute’s worth of video footage or five minutes’ worth of eavesdropping. Perhaps even a conversation with a local, who might snicker at our outlandish accent but will soon forget about us. Our presence in the past never leaves a trace, our footprints on the path of history remain invisible.” (As I said, we all took pains to underline this fact at the drop of a hat.) “From a practical point of view, this means that it’s easy enough to move within, say, the confines of a forest, but once you leave its borders, the probability of encountering a person or situation that could be affected by your presence grows rapidly and your options diminish accordingly. Simply put, you can only go where you can.”

I saw Officer Van Underberg jot that down. The pair of whiteboards behind the officer held maps and lists of coordinates and destinations—one of them being Norway’s island of Selja. (Dr. Edberg of the History Department was hoping to run into Sunniva herself, but her goal had thus far gone unrealized.) The whiteboards were also loaded with snapshots. Lots of snapshots. So many, in fact, that they had overflowed onto the walls (except for where the built-in wire shelves held rows of reference books), even the floor. Faces of ordinary people, caught on camera in villages and fields and battlegrounds. The subjects were usually poorly dressed, in some cases ill or underfed, and always unaware
of the photographer as they went about the task of shaping their particular brick in the edifice that was History. Inequality in life had followed them here. A few of the photos might make it into the
History Alive
exhibition or into a journal article, but most of them wouldn’t.

As for the photos that were destined directly for the exhibition, the ones of notable historical figures, we had an undergrad doing touch-ups and making enlargements.

The professor got to his feet and wound his way through several of the mirrors to STEWie’s basket, with Chief Kirkland and me following and Officer Van Underberg bringing up the rear. The officer barely managed to avoid slipping on the icy patch under the platform that had been formed by the water dripping from the tank. I saw Chief Kirkland catch sight of the fish. He raised two dark eyebrows. “A zebra tilapia?”

“An experimental one. This one has been bred to withstand environments much cooler than its usual temperate habitat. I’ve sent it on a few trips.” Dr. Rojas might have been talking about a leisurely weekend drive to the North Shore or an unhurried afternoon cross-country skiing in the woods on the east side of campus.

“Where did the fish get to go?” the chief asked.

“We started out with near time, the students and I. We sent the tank bobbing into the middle of Sunniva Lake of last August, then brought it back. Then into Sunniva Lake of 1890, the year the school first opened. Since those two runs went off without a hitch, we then jumped—so to speak—into the fifth century. Far time.”

“Far time? Near time?” Chief Kirkland asked as Officer Van Underberg furiously took notes, his neat block letters degenerating into hasty scribbles as he cupped his notepad in his right hand and wrote with his left, his boots firmly planted on the chilly lab floor.


Near time
is what we call the past two, three hundred years, a time period for which we have reasonably accurate historical accounts and maps, making it relatively simple to find landing sites—entrances to the maze. Calculations are fast, ghost zones are easily avoided, and location errors, both temporal and physical, are small. For example, Chief Kirkland, if you told me that you wanted to snap a photo of the Declaration of Independence being signed, I wouldn’t send you to July fourth of 1776.” He chuckled and cracked the first smile I’d seen on his face since Dr. Mooney’s accident.

I shook my head. I was having trouble getting used to the thought that it wasn’t an accident.

Dr. Rojas went on. “Though that was the day the Continental Congress approved the wording of the declaration, the formal signing didn’t take place until early August. So we’d want to send you there almost a full month later. Now getting you
into
the chambers of the State House in Philadelphia, well, that would require some real thought and planning…” He drifted off into contemplation of the problem.

“And far time?” Chief Kirkland inquired in the manner of one who was becoming accustomed to dealing with academic types.

“If you go a few hundred years into the past—sooner for some places, Minnesota being of them, much further back for others—well, things start to get complicated.
Far time
. Maps are vague, or simply wrong, or don’t exist. Dates are, at best, educated guesses. Historical accounts are inaccurate, exaggerated, or wedded to myth and folklore. Ghost zones become more of a danger. Depending on what part of the world and era you want to go to, we usually end up making a best guess for where STEWie’s basket can land safely.” I saw Officer Van Underberg scribble down,
Far time: maps vague, ghost zones a danger.

“So how did the zebra tilapia do in far time?” I asked.

“The fifth-century trip to Sunniva Lake—it was bigger then, by the way—didn’t take. There must have been someone in a canoe or on the banks of the lake, watching. Instead we did a somewhat wild and quick run into 10,000 BC, when this area consisted of mostly ice fields.”

“What did the tilapia think of all that?” asked Officer Van Underberg. He sent a sympathetic look in the direction of the fish. He hadn’t seen it eat, of course.

“It seemed to get crabbier. Not because it didn’t like the tour of Sunniva Lake through history, I think, but because we kept jerking it back. It seemed to enjoy being deposited, tank and all, just below the lake surface and then slowly popping to the top each time. At least it always came back with its stripes looking a bit brighter.”

Chief Kirkland reminded us of the event that had caused us to gather in the TTE lab. “And you’re saying someone purposely sent Dr. Mooney into a ghost zone. A nuclear test site, something like that?”

“Also known as death zones, cracks in time, and temporal quicksand. The landing zones that are easiest to get to—places where your presence won’t leave much of a trace. Of course, it won’t leave much of you, either. When a destination is decided on, the computer sifts through maps, photos, historical records, geological data, data from past runs, archeological archives, and so on until it finds a safe landing site like a forest—making sure to avoid forest fires and blizzards and such. Obviously this is easier to accomplish in near time than it is in far time. If someone disengaged the safety protocols we have in place—that is, bypassed the calibration which ensures that the next day’s run has a safe landing site…well.” He added after a moment, “On occasion we’ve sent our wheeled mobile robot to check for hazards or undertake the journey instead of human travelers. There is an inherent problem with sending WMRs, though.”

“And that is?” the chief asked.

“They don’t exactly blend in. It’s not like the WMR can throw on a cloak and a pair of sandals. Plus, they’re not great at deciding what makes a good photo and what doesn’t.”

“Even so, why didn’t you use the robot for your Sunniva Lake tests instead of the fish? Because it’s not waterproof?” the chief asked.

“Well, yes, the WMR isn’t waterproof, as it happens. But that’s not it. Our WMR had an—it had an accident last month. We’re building a new one.” Somewhat reluctantly, Dr. Rojas continued the story for Chief Kirkland and Officer Van Underberg’s benefit (I already knew it). “We sent the WMR to pre-
Beagle
Galapagos Islands for a Biology Department project, but the robot, uh—it sank on arrival. It zoomed right into the water and kept on going until it became wedged between two large boulders on the ocean floor. We sent someone after it, but it was no use. Come to think of it, the WMR is probably still there at the bottom of the Pacific three hundred years later, rusting.”

Chief Kirkland threw a glance in the direction of the fish. “And the night he was scattered across time, Dr. Mooney, having volunteered to take Kamal Ahmad’s place, came to the lab to oversee the calibration for Dr. Baumgartner’s eighteenth-century France trip.”

“Not much to it, really. Just making sure the program doesn’t get hung up. It can be indecisive sometimes when it needs to make a choice.”

“And instead Dr. Mooney stepped into STEWie’s basket… willingly or unwillingly. And then someone—”

“Sent him on a trip to nowhere.”

Dr. Rojas leaned against the frame of STEWie’s basket, causing the zebra tilapia to charge angrily in his direction. He backed up and spoke with pride of the complex arrangement of steel and reflective glass that dominated the cavernous lab. “The laser-mirror array is STEWie’s heart and soul. Would you like a short lecture on the theory behind STEWie’s being, Chief Kirkland, starting with the basic physics of spacetime warping by light—?”

“Perhaps later,” the chief said smoothly. “You found evidence of sabotage, you say?”

“Hmm? Oh, yes.”

“Which ghost zone was it?” I asked.

The professor shook his head. “No way to tell. Does it matter, Julia?”

“I’d like to know, that’s all.”

Dr. Rojas went on. “I wasted a week checking STEWie mirror by mirror and laser by laser…then with the fish. My underlying assumption was erroneous.”

“You assumed that it was an equipment malfunction?” the chief prodded him.

“Exactly. It wasn’t. Someone moved the mirrors into a random position after Xavier’s run, overwriting the original coordinates.” In a rare display of emotion, sounding almost angry with himself, he went on. “Xavier was responsible for the practical side of things—perhaps I should have let Dr. Little or Dr. Baumgartner assist me, like they offered. Too many cooks, I thought. Maybe they would have found the answer sooner. You might want to get Dr. Little in here, Chief Kirkland, to see if he can glean something further from the computer.”

BOOK: The Far Time Incident
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