The Runestone Incident (The Incident Series, #2) (20 page)

21

“Ja
cob,” I called, perhaps a touch more loudly than I’d intended, causing Dr. B to drop the granola bar she had just taken out of her backpack. She grabbed it before it had time to gather any dirt. “Is something wrong, Julia?”

“I don’t see Jacob.”

I scrambled to my feet. I had promised Dean Braga I would keep an eye on the student and here we had already lost him. I’d happened to be in her office with some paperwork she needed for a tenure meeting when Jacob had popped in to ask if he could go. Clutching his backpack, in which he had swapped his books and lab notebooks for so many camping items that the zipper across the top couldn’t be closed, the ginger-haired student had pointed out politely that Dr. B had already said he could come along and he only needed Dean Braga’s okay because of the unorthodox nature of the situation. Besides, we had already allowed him go to 1898. And if she thought it best, he promised not to bring his new cell phone, although it would come handy for taking pictures, and was it really that different from a camera?

Dean Braga had finally given in and waved him away.

I remembered thinking that it might be good for Jacob to see that the Internet would do just fine without him for a whole week. Given the way that time travel worked, though, it wouldn’t really be that long for the Internet, just for Jacob.

Now I felt bad for my cavalier attitude and was about to alert Nate to the young student’s disappearance when Jacob emerged from behind a tree. He had his sleeping bag in his arms—a Star Wars–themed one, it looked like, though in the darkness I couldn’t really tell—and was glancing around uncertainly.

“Ah, there he is,” said Dr. B and went back to eating her granola bar.

I dropped back down to the ground and let out a sigh of relief. The feeling that we were being watched was still with me, and I had been sure that Jacob had wondered off and gotten into trouble—though how or from whom, I couldn’t say. I was about to chastise him for disappearing on us for so long, but I realized what the problem was as he continued to look around uncertainly. He was the only student in the group. Ruth-Ann and Ron were already snug in their sleeping bags and had pulled out matching e-readers and settled in to read, using their backpacks as pillows, their faces feebly illuminated. I found it amusing that while we hadn’t been able to start a fire or light the camping stoves, the e-readers’ artificial lights, tinny and scentless, worked just fine. I hadn’t thought to bring one because there was no room in my backpack, and also because it had seemed prudent to leave modern devices behind. Perhaps we should have done a better job of explaining History’s rules to the Tuttles, I thought.

In any case, the pair seemed like they didn’t need a third. Nate wasn’t exactly sending off the vibe that he wanted company either. Having taken off his socks, he was drying his feet with a small towel. That left me and Dr. B, and I could tell that Jacob thought it would be weird to bunk next to his advisor.

“Jacob,” I said firmly.

Jacob eyed me. “Yes, Julia?”

“Unless you want to bunk with Chief Kirkland up there—”

“I’m not sure…uh, that there’s enough room.”

“Then here.” I pointed to the ground next to me, on the opposite side from Dr. B.

Jacob sent me a grateful look and set up his sleeping bag, which I now could see was covered in small green Yodas, before disappearing again behind the pine tree. I made myself comfortable and, since we were out of luck as far as hot food went, dug some crackers out of my backpack. I offered a few to Dr. B, but she shook her head.

“No thanks, Julia, I’m good.” She finished off her
granola
bar
as if that constituted an adequate dinner and washed it down with a swig from her water bottle. After digging around in her backpack, she took out a tiny toothbrush and squeezed a minimal amount of toothpaste on it. Brush in mouth, she said, “There’s one in your backpack as well.”

“Thanks.”

I wondered what Ruth-Ann and Ron were reading, if they were looking at maps and planning our itinerary for tomorrow, or if perhaps one of them was a fan of whodunits and the other of steamy romances. I rather pegged Ron as a closet romance reader, maybe because the colorful beads in his beard made him seem like he had an unexpected side to his personality.

Nate passed by wearing a dry pair of hiking socks on his way to the food bag. I noticed him raise an eyebrow at the Tuttles’ e-readers.

“Don’t worry, Julia,” Dr. B spoke up quietly from beside me. She slid her toothbrush back into its case and put it away. “No one blames you for this incident or for Quinn’s behavior.”

I bit into another cracker and, chewing it, said, “Thanks, but I feel I should have foreseen this.” I realized that Erika and I had never talked about anything personal. All our interactions had been limited to school business. It occurred to me that she and I were about the same age. “Uh—how’s the other Dr. Baumgartner doing?”

This was Soren, Erika’s husband, who was a professor of modern poetry. Rumor had it that their marriage was on the rocks, which seemed to be going around. Both wife and husband were extremely busy with their tenure-track positions, hers being a joint one in TTE and History of Science and Soren’s being in the Creative Writing Department.

“Soren?” Dr. B busied herself with the contents of her backpack, unnecessarily unfolding and refolding a spare shirt. “He’s going on a sabbatical starting in November. Japan. Six months.”

I hadn’t heard
that
.

“Sorry,” I said.

Erika smoothed out imaginary wrinkles in the shirt. “If you don’t mind my asking, Julia, do you find that between work and love, work is often easier to manage?”

“Yes.”

She chuckled. “I didn’t mean the current situation with Quinn. I meant as a general rule.”

I considered the question again. “It can be—but I think I stumbled into a job that was a good fit for me and a marriage that wasn’t. It’s probably the other way around for many
people
. And if you’re
really
lucky, maybe you do well in both.” Then I added in a lower voice, “Ruth-Ann and Ron seem like they’ve found a good balance, wouldn’t you say?”

Ron was helping Ruth-Ann adjust her backpack in its capacity as a pillow so that she would be more comfortable.

“The nomadic lifestyle in the RV does seem to suit them,” Erika said. “I don’t know how I’d feel about not having a steady paycheck.”

“There is that,” I allowed.

She rolled the shirt into a cylinder and stuffed it back into her bag. “Well, maybe it will do Soren and me some good to spend a few months apart. What about you? There’s a rumor going around about you, Chief Kirkland, and Pompeii.”

I suppose it was only fair that there were campus rumors about me as well. “Really? I don’t know where people get their ideas. We’re not dating or anything.”

“So you’re not interested in him?”

Where was Jacob? He seemed to be positively wedded to that tree.

“I have a lot on my plate at the moment,” I said.

“Just curious. He is rather good looking, isn’t he?”

“Is he?” My voice sounded a little funny even to my own ears.

“He’s a bit reserved, though. I can’t seem to get him to call me Erika. Even Dr. B would be better.”

“He prefers to keep things formal on all official business,” I said, quoting what Nate had told me back when he still used to call me Ms. Olsen. “In his book, anything that happens on campus, including in the TTE lab and wherever STEWie’s basket happens to go, is official business.”

Jacob shuffled back, a bag of pretzels in hand.

“We thought you’d gotten lost on your way back,” I said.

“Sorry. No, I was just—oh, it’s no good. I can’t keep a secret. I was looking at my phone.”

“There’s no Wi-Fi or 3G in the fourteenth century,”
I pointed out.

“I was just catching up on tweets. I didn’t get a chance to do that earlier because I was so busy getting my gear together. The tweets stop at nine this morning.”

This was when we had left.

“It’s something you’re going to have to get used to if you want to stay in this field,” Dr. B reminded her student, curling up in her sleeping bag. “Time travel means being out of touch for hours, days on occasion.”

“I guess.” Jacob plopped down on his sleeping bag, pulled open the pretzel bag, and started munching.

“Well?” I said. “Anything interesting in the world of the Internet?”

I had meant it as a gentle poke at his nomophobia, but I also had an underlying concern, my usual one. I was worried that one day he would come by to tell me that Sabina’s name was trending worldwide. Jacob knew the whole story, having been the first to greet us when we’d returned with Sabina, all of us covered with ash from Vesuvius.

Jacob offered us some of the pretzels; Dr. B shook her head, but and I took a handful and offered him some of the crackers in return. “Not much that you’d find interesting,” he said of the Twitter news. “Yesterday was Scooby-Doo’s birthday.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“In home time, I mean. September was when the show’s first episode aired in 1969—it was called
What a Night for a Knight
.”

“I did not know that,” I said.

“Can’t say that I did either,” Dr. B said. “Are you a Scooby-Doo fan, too?” she said, with a glance at his sleeping bag.

“Never seen the show in my life,” Jacob confided. “I don’t watch much TV. I just saw it mentioned on Twitter. Is it about a big dog?”

“Something like that,” I said, suddenly feeling old.

We drifted off into silence. It was nowhere near night in home time—in jumping from morning to dusk we had undergone more of the time travel version of jet lag, like we had
traveled
east a dozen time zones—but given the inoperability of our flashlights and the lack of a fire, everybody was soon snug in their sleeping bags.

Not having been on a camping trip since childhood, I had forgotten the cacophony of sounds that lie over the woods like a soft blanket—the crunching and squeaking and the occasional hoot of an owl—all of them amplified in the darkness. As I already knew from the Pompeii run, the night sky of the past was something to behold, a treat. I spent a while looking up at it, admiring the starry dome undulled by smog or light pollution from malls and parking lot lights. Countless bright stars surrounded the rising full moon, its cratered surface scarred by millions of years of one asteroid hit after another. The faint light of the Tuttles’ e-readers only added to the sensation of yours truly being a very small mortal in a very large universe.

The fourteenth century. We were really here.

The Woodlands. It had been the homeland of the Dakota, Ruth-Ann had said, before their later migrations to the plains and prairie, before they started riding horses, and before they were called the Sioux by French fur traders.

I turned to one side. I had never been one for roughing it in the great outdoors, but this wasn’t too bad—the ground was relatively level and devoid of rocks. Tomorrow, with any luck, we would find Quinn and Dr. Holm and the whole incident would be over. I slid farther down into my sleeping bag, pulling the zipper up as far as it would go. It seemed like it was going to be a cool May night here in the woods.

Jacob, on one side of me, was already gently snoring amidst the Yodas.

22

A hand on my shoulder woke me up, making me gasp in surprise.

It was Nate and it was just before dawn. He held his finger to his lips and beckoned, for some reason pointing to the rise where he had slept. Dr. B stirred next to me. On the other side, Jacob was still fast asleep, his mouth slightly open. Without thinking, I reached for my phone to see what time it was before realizing that I didn’t have it. I yawned and fought my way out of the sleeping bag, managing to get the zipper tangled in a stray bit of string. I had spent most of the night tossing and turning, I was chilled to the bone, and I was sure that I had terrible sleeping-bag hair. Dr. B had unzipped herself from her sleeping bag and was on her feet, stretching to touch her toes several times. Her blonde hair, straight and thin, looked just fine. I ran my fingers through my own, wondered if the backpack she had given me included a comb in the little pocket of toiletries, and decided something right then and there. I was here to help bring Quinn and Dr. Holm back. I couldn’t worry about the way I looked.

Nate had gone over to shake the Tuttles awake and was still insistently pointing to the rise. Dr. B and I shrugged at each other and followed him. Rather oddly, just before he reached the top of the rise, Nate threw himself on the ground and began crawling forward.

Dr. B grabbed my shoulder and indicated that we should do the same. I dropped to my knees and inched up to where Nate was peering over the rise. Ruth-Ann and Ron were right behind us.

The trees were blackened silhouettes, and the sun hugging the horizon had dyed the sky a brilliant orange that was reflected in the sprawling lake below us. And beyond its still waters, on the far shore…

“The Psinomani,” Ruth-Ann whispered.

23

The village—living history before our eyes—lay spread out on high ground on the shore of a large, pear-shaped lake. A protective wooden palisade encircled a roomy cluster of birch-bark houses of varying sizes; there were cultivated garden beds both within and outside the palisade, as well as a row of burial mounds to one side of the village. The lake was not the one we had traveled on the night before, but its neighbor, whose still waters sparkled in the shafts of dawn light. Minnesota meant “the place where the sky tints the water,” and even I knew the name came from the Dakota language.

We lay motionless as morning broke over the land and the sun turned its eye on the lakes, streams, hills, woodland, and, somewhere just to the west, the tall grass of the prairie. Soon figures started emerging from the bark houses, first just one, a stooped old woman, then a few more, all unaware of our presence across the water and in the trees.

Something soon stuck me as odd. Mary Kirkland had
mentioned
that there were healthy Dakota populations in the
pre
-Columbian times, but unless most of the village was still fast asleep, there weren’t a whole lot of people there. The old woman and a couple of other figures bent over with age slowly attended to morning tasks, curious toddlers played in the dirt, and a handful of young women, clearly the caretakers of the two other groups, were engaged in the task of lighting a morning fire. Two men who seemed to be serving as village guards were positioned at opposite ends of the village. Judging from their relaxed poses, they didn’t look like they were expecting trouble anytime soon, if at all. I glanced at Ruth-Ann and saw her face scrunch up in puzzlement. Where was everyone?

Just as quietly as we had crept up the rise, we crept back down. Jacob had to be firmly shaken awake, but he seemed to instantly understand the need for silence. If we were in danger of being seen or heard, our options would diminish, and we might even get pinned in place. We gathered our things, remembered the food bag that we had left suspended from a tree branch, and carried the kayaks back down to our lake.

“What did you think?” Dr. B asked as she and Nate
paddled
across the water. The old-growth trees watched us silently from the lakeshore. Beads of dew glittered on the light-green spring leaves, reflecting the warming rays of the morning sun.

“Of what?” I yawned and stretched, careful not to tip the kayak over. It was morning here but nighttime according to my body’s internal clock.

“Of the Psinomani village.” That was what Ruth-Ann had called her woodland ancestors, gatherers of
psinh
, wild rice.

“That I would have paddled across the lake to meet them,” I said.

Nate said nothing. The others were behind us and I could hear Jacob regaling the Tuttles with stories of ghost zones in an excited whisper, not that he’d ever been to one. But the topic made it possible for me to pose the question without actually asking it. “The village seemed—rather empty. Only kids, old people, and caretakers.”

Dr. B, paddling with ease in the front of the kayak, without turning around said, “Hard to say what it means, if anything. We did drop into a single morning in the villagers’ lives and
history
, after all. Chances are it’s a perfectly ordinary day.”

“I wonder when Quinn and Dr. Holm will get here,” I said.

Dr. B nodded in thought. “I’ve been wondering if they’re basing their search on the runestone text only, like we are, or if they have a piece of information we don’t.”

“
I
have a piece of information that the rest of you don’t have yet,” I said.

“Julia?” Nate asked without breaking his smooth paddle stroke.

“I found a map in Dagmar’s office.”

“Oh?”

“It was sitting out in the open.” Inside a recycling bin,
anyway
. “I’ll dig it out of my backpack the next time we go ashore. Dr. Holm is after a bigger prize. She wants to find Vinland.”

I couldn’t tell if Nate already knew that or not, but he didn’t sound particularly surprised. “Does she? How?”

“I read a proposal she wrote. It’s for a STEWie run to L’Anse aux Meadows, which she’s assuming was a ship-repair station and a gateway to Vinland.” I cocked my head to one side. “Now that I think about it, this could be a problem. Because what if Quinn and Dr. Holm never come here? What if the place to look for them isn’t here at all, but on a Canadian island at around 1000 AD? Dean Braga said we only had one run. I suppose it’s a good thing we have the Slingshot 3.0, so we can jump there if we need to.”

“You didn’t tell her?” Dr. B said, glancing over her shoulder at Nate.

“Tell me what?”

“We did bring along the Slingshot,” Dr. B explained, “but not the 3.0. Dr. Mooney worked well into the night, but one of the laser casings that arrived yesterday was the wrong size. He didn’t get to finish.”

“You brought along Slingshot 1.0?” I sat up in the kayak, almost tipping it over. Once I had regained my balance, I said, “The device that sent us into five ghost zones, one after the other, on our way back from Pompeii? You’re kidding, right?”

“It was my idea,” Nate said. “All three professors—
Dr. Mooney, Dr. Little, and Dr. Baumgartner here—assured me that nothing like that could happen again.”

“Julia, when all of you were in far time, Xavier had no way of calculating a safe trajectory to home. The Slingshot, left to its own devices, sent you along an easy route—that is to say, it sent you along a chain of ghost zones. Luckily, we can calculate where we need to jump. I brought my laptop. It’s in a waterproof pouch in my backpack.”

I was sandwiched rather snugly between our three backpacks, which made me wonder what other unexpected items each of us had brought. Jacob had his cell phone, I had Dagmar’s map, Dr. B a laptop, Ron a sketching notebook, Ruth-Ann packets of coffee, and Nate—well, I had no idea.

“It’s a big continent, but we’ll find them,” Nate said grimly, and I was pretty sure he did not mean the Norsemen.

“Well, at least we seem to be nowhere near a ghost zone right now,” I said in an effort to lighten the mood. Jacob, in the other kayak, had launched into a story that seemed to involve the unlikely combination of quicksand and thin lake ice. (Not one of our researchers had ever come close to being sucked down into quicksand, if such a thing was possible. And the thin-ice incident had had a happy ending.) “Plus, it’s such a nice spring morning,” I added, taking in a lungful of wonderfully unpolluted air and the earthy scents of forest, lake, and soil that the rising sun had coaxed out.

Nate was having none of it. “There are natural dangers. We could run into a cougar or pack of wolves.”

Well, if he was determined to be such a sourpuss about the whole thing, there was not much I could do.

“Here, Julia, take the paddle for a bit. I want to check something.”

He handed me the paddle and consulted his compass and the map he had brought along, which he was using to mark our progress. We had started from what would one day shrink to modern Wally Lake on Nate’s map, though it was hard to tell for sure, and portaged twice, the first time barely a few steps, and the other a good half a mile, and now we were rowing on what he thought might be Quam Lake blended into Halleque Lake. “This map is not very useful because nothing on it matches…I don’t think we’ve reached Barsness Lake yet…Hmm.” He took his compass out. “North is that way—”

Dr. B interrupted him. “You know, right, that the Vikings used only the sun and the stars and oral accounts to navigate? No maps, charts, or astronomical instruments. My point is that
a day’s journey north from this stone
might just have meant that the sun rose roughly to their left and set to their right as they traveled.”

“We have to start somewhere, and we might as well head toward compass north.”

Now that we were actually here, the “triangle to the north” that he had drawn back in the lab seemed awfully big.

“We need a hill,” I suggested.

“Other than the runestone one?” Dr. B said from in front of me in the kayak.

“A high one, so that we can spot the Norse camp. Andes Tower Hills, where the ski area is now, isn’t that nearby?”

“We passed it a bit back,” Nate said, still studying the map.

“Wouldn’t it be something?” I had been trying to match Dr. B’s rhythm with my paddle, but it was tricky and we kept drifting to one side. “To see the Norsemen, I mean. I wonder what it was like for them, so far from home. Did they sit in the evening around a
campfire
, retelling the Norse sagas and resting their tired muscles? Just think, if we spot them first and snap a photo, then we’ll get the honor of returning with proof of pre-Columbian contact, n
ot Quinn.”

Nate held his arm out for the paddle. He straightened the kayak and said, “Are we here to find Quinn and Dr. Holm or to try to prove that the runestone is genuine?”

I never got the chance to answer him. There was a splash in the water behind us. Someone had tumbled out of the other kayak.