The Runestone Incident (The Incident Series, #2) (8 page)

I was amused to read about a much more elaborate prank that had been pulled by a group of grad students from one of our nearby academic competitors, the University of Minnesota, which involved a runestone. In 1985, the students had headed to the hill Nate and I had just returned from, armed with a hammer, a chisel, and a copy of the runic alphabet. Runestone Hill turned out to be “too public” for their purposes, so they headed to a nearby one instead. During this stage of the proceedings, one of them managed to get caught in a barbed wire fence and needed to get a tetanus shot later. After selecting a boulder, they started chiseling it. Finding the process more difficult than they’d imagined, they wrapped things up after carving
AVM
, one runic word, and the supposed date (1363), after which they tried to turn the boulder over so that the inscription faced downward. They weren’t able budge it. When the stone was found
sixteen yea
rs later, I read, there was some excitement, but two of the former grad students, now university professors, confessed. All of which went to show two things—it was both easy and hard to pull off a good hoax.

Pulling out my yellow legal pad, I drew a vertical line down the middle of the page and, in what I hoped was a scholarly fashion, penned
Pros
on top of one column and
Cons
on the other. It was time to see if the evidence weighed more heavily on one side. I did the pros first to get them out of the way and ended up with six items:

1. Olof Ohman, unlikely hoaxer
   . The immigrant farmer, father of nine, never had any run-ins with the law and never tried to make money off the stone.
   
2. The Norse
   . They built a settlement in L’Anse aux Meadows at the turn of the millennium, so surely it was plausible, perhaps even likely, that their descendants had ventured farther inland over the next four hundred years.
   
3. The length of the inscription
   . Two-hundred-some runes. As far as hoaxes went, it was an unnecessarily elaborate one, requiring days of carving. Something shorter—say,
   Ole and his buddies from Vinland were here—
   would have been
   easier
   to carve in the privacy of a barn and might have been more convincing to historians and linguists. Why go to the effort of crafting what was essentially a tale complete with protagonists, action, and an enemy?
   
4. The stone itself
   . Geologically sound, with tree roots traced into it.
   
5. History.
   If there was one thing that had come out of the STEWie program, it was the realization that History was rarely neat and tidy. A stone that didn’t make much sense at first glance might actually do so.
   
6. Finally, and somewhat personally, there was Magnus Olsen’s account, which corroborated Olof Ohman’s. Was it really fair to blame Magnus for the way his grandson turned out?
   

I did the cons next, taking my time with them:

1. Olof Ohman, likely hoaxer.
   The elephant in the room: What were the chances that an immigrant of Scandinavian descent would find an artifact of Scandinavian origin?
   
2. Where were the other artifacts
   ? Finding the skeletons of ten men of European ancestry or their campsite would have helped matters greatly.
   
3. The inscription
   . The stone’s very appearance, with its neatly carved rows, felt modern. The length of it must have required several days of carving, surely unlikely under the purported circumstances. The men’s comrades had just died a sudden, violent death. Why linger in the vicinity?
   
4. The stone itself
   . Unusual, so out of place, mysteriously under a tree.
   
5. Minnesota, in the middle of the country
   . Venturing inland from Vinland, other than rhyming quite nicely, would have required a light boat, portages, and a lot of luck and drive. It would have been no small undertaking, even for a crew of hardy Norsemen.
   

 


And, finally:


 


6. Magnus Olsen was related to Quinn, and Quinn had been known to stretch the truth on more than one occasion when it suited him.
   

I stared at the list for a moment. Well, it was maddeningly even. How did historians cope before STEWie? It was no wonder Dean Braga was besieged with requests for roster spots. Depending on how you looked at it, the stone and its runes either exhibited unique characteristics or tell-tale signs of fraud. I tried reading the arguments from the linguists, but all I could gather was that some of the runes were too modern. I decided that the thing to do would be to talk to Dr. Holm a second time. She
herself
had mentioned that there were issues with the runes. I was pinning my hopes on that.

Consulting her would have to wait until work hours on Monday, however. I’d done what I could for now. Besides, there was apple pie to be made. I folded my list of pros and cons into my bag and went outside to wait for Abigail and Sabina. They were on their way back from the orchard with Celer, Wanda, and a basket of apples, and were swinging by to pick me up. Boy, did I have a story to tell them, and it didn’t involve the runestone.

Nate had invited me to dinner.

8

Monday brought a pile of paperwork. I found time to send a text message to Dr. Holm asking if she could meet with me at her earliest convenience, then rolled up my sleeves and got to work. Just before noon, when the stack of information packets for prospective students had reached an impressive height on my desk, I checked my phone—no reply from Dr. Holm yet—then grabbed a sandwich I’d brought from home and a can of pop from the vending machine and headed out to the lake. After dodging a couple of bicycles, I settled myself on my usual bench and dug into the sandwich and tried to enjoy the view. Ducks bobbed on the surface of Sunniva Lake, sending ripples through the buildings, trees, and fluffy clouds reflected in the water. Students milled to and from classes on bikes, skateboards, and occasionally on foot. I kept an eye out for Quinn, expecting him to appear any minute, Sabina’s photo in one hand and a video camera in the other at the ready for the STEWie run he imagined I was going to take him on.

As the noon hour struck on the clock tower by the Coffey Library, the throng of students thickened and I spotted a familiar face. Not Quinn, but Sabina’s crush, Jacob Jacobson, on his way to the Time Travel Engineering building, where he had a desk in the grad student office. The hood of his sweatshirt hid his ginger hair as he propelled himself on his skateboard, weighed down by a heavy backpack. His attention was wholly engrossed by the cell phone in his hand as he weaved around the slower walkers. I hoped he wouldn’t run into anyone.

Seeing Jacob reminded me that I had meant to check on Kamal’s presentation for his thesis defense. Deciding that the rest of the information packets could wait—the mail didn’t go out until four o’clock anyway—I headed after Jacob. If Quinn dropped by, he wouldn’t find me at my desk, which was undoubtedly for the best.

I exchanged a few words with Oscar, who was at his post just inside the door to the TTE building, then headed to the graduate student office. Kamal was feverishly pacing around his desk. Clean-shaven, with freshly trimmed hair, he had on a slightly wrinkled gray suit and a tie dotted with mathematical symbols. He looked pale, like he was about to throw up. This was normal. All graduate students looked that way just before their dissertation defense. Kamal’s was set for three o’clock, so he had a good two and a half hours to get through.

“Where is everyone else?” I asked, looking around at the empty desks. “I thought I saw Jacob heading over.”

“He dropped off his backpack and then went to help Abigail prepare for her run with Dr. B. Well, not exactly
help
—more like Abigail’s helping
him
learn the ropes. Now that Jacob’s been here for a year, he
really
needs to pick a research topic and start going on STEWie runs. The department doesn’t like grad students hanging around without engaging in active research.” After this very mature sounding statement, Kamal added, “And everyone else went to lunch. I didn’t want to risk food stains on my suit. Besides, I’m not really hungry.”

“You should eat something. We don’t want you fainting during your defense.”

“I might if someone asks me a question I don’t know how to answer.”

“It’ll be fine.” I spotted a box of granola bars on Abigail’s desk and pushed one in his direction. “Here, eat this while I look over your presentation.”

He turned his laptop toward me. “Don’t tell me if you find a spelling mistake, Julia. Wait, no, tell me—I still have time to fix things.”

He took the granola bar, dropped into a chair, and started munching, contorting unnaturally to avoid getting crumbs on his suit.

I quickly looked over his slides—the ones featuring Neanderthal and early human coupling, while not exactly tasteful, weren’t any worse than others I’d seen in biology or
medical
sciences presentations. Most of the photos had been taken from afar, with a long-focus lens. Kamal had also included a few photos that showed just the prehistoric landscape, unspoiled by electrical wires or roads. The meat of the presentation was the computational method he had used to find safe landing zones, culminating with a 3-D map of the zones in Neander Valley and nearby locations, with time as one of the coordinates. There were also red dots on the map—ghost zones, like the one in Pompeii where he and I had almost perished. Ghost zones were wells in time you did not want to fall into.

I looked up from the last slide, the one titled
Acknowledgements
. Kamal had moved onto his second granola bar. He was lost in thought, and I had to ask my question twice. “Dr. Payne is on your committee?”

“Yeah.” He swallowed quickly. “I needed someone from outside the department. Why, have you heard anything I should know about? He’s not extra tough on students, is he?”

“I wouldn’t worry about it. Dr. Mooney and Dr. Little have followed your work closely and signed off on it. There’s no reason to expect anything but a positive outcome.”

“Whenever anyone tells me that, I worry even more.”

I left him to his worrying and, on my way out, caught sight of Xavier Mooney in his office down the hall. He was on his knees on the carpeted floor. I went in to investigate.

The professor didn’t hear my approach. He had printed out a dozen sheets of paper and placed them on the carpet in a long line. His graying hair, which he had kept shoulder-length after Pompeii, hung to one side as he bent over the sheets to tape them together. He was humming as he worked. I was happy that the professor seemed to be in a better mood—he had been a bit down since our return from far-time, which was understandable. Being grounded in the present and watching the two junior TTE professors, Erika Baumgartner and Steven Little, do the time jumping had been hard on Dr. Mooney. He was one of the original creators of STEWie, the other being his lab partner Gabriel Rojas, who was on his well-earned sabbatical. The symptoms of the immune disease that had sent Dr. Mooney into self-imposed retirement in ancient Pompeii had all but disappeared with a change in diet. Still, even a slightly subdued immune system made him at risk for bringing back an eradicated disease like smallpox—or worse, something we didn’t know how to treat.

A bookshelf behind him held the professor’s collection of musical instruments, most of which he’d collected on STEWie runs before his illness. The didgeridoo that used to lean against the wall had been lost in the eruption of Vesuvius (it was the one little bit of home that the professor had brought with him), and the spot of honor was now taken by a pair of mismatched Cuban conga drums.

When the professor shifted his position to better apply the tape, he caught sight of me. “How do you like it, Julia? It’s a timeline of social inventions.”

I squatted on the floor next to him and looked over his
creation
. Each of the printouts had a horizontal line down the middle and short chunks of text above and below the line at irregular intervals. A mark at 1888 caught my attention and I saw that it was a tick for under-arm deodorant, the commercial kind. From there my eyes automatically flicked to the end of the
fourteenth
century, the date on the runestone still fresh in my mind.

“King Richard the Second invented the handkerchief?” I said, looking over at Xavier. “I didn’t know that.”

“Not many people do. Which is why the timeline is going up on the wall in STEWie’s lab. I figured people could use a quick reminder before each run—no handkerchiefs on runs to pre-fifteenth-century Europe unless you want to get odd looks. Here, can you help me with the tape?”

“How was the physics conference?” I asked as I took charge of the tape. Last year there had been rumors that Dr. Mooney and Dr. Rojas, as the co-inventors of STEWie, were on the shortlist to win the Nobel Prize in physics. The notion had been put on hold since everyone had suspected Dr. Rojas of murdering his
colleague
. That had turned out to be very much false—Dr. Mooney was clearly alive and well—but the scandal had placed their Nobel chances on hold. The Nobel committee tended to err on the side of inaction.

“Everyone was most interested in the Slingshot. I gave a presentation on the steps I’ve taken to address the stability problem. There are still some kinks to be worked out, of course. A bit more tape?”

The Slingshot had a tendency to send time travelers into ghost zones. As the first human testers, we had been sent to a sequence of them after escaping Pompeii: a beach in advance of a tsunami, the Great Fire of London, a blizzard, the shores of a Tunguska lake just before the great meteorite impact, and a World War II air raid. We had been extremely lucky to make it back alive. Now that the professor could no longer go on time travel runs, he had focused all his energies on fine-tuning the device.

I helped him roll up the chart and we met in the middle.

“I just came by to check on Kamal’s slides,” I explained.

“Ah yes, how’s he holding up?”

“He’s nervous. Given his topic, I expect he’ll draw a larger crowd than usual. Come to think of it, perhaps I’d better double up on the refreshments.” I had meant to do it earlier, but worrying about Quinn had pushed the thought out of my mind.

After helping Dr. Mooney tack his timeline onto the wall in STEWie’s lab, I hurried back to the Hypatia House to make sure I had enough food for Kamal’s defense and ran into Dean Braga just outside the building kitchenette. She was wearing what might be deemed a power suit and killer shoes and had stopped to grab a cold bottle of water from the vending machine on her way to her office. “Whoever decided that shoes with heels should be considered dress-up attire should be shot. I wonder if that’s how men feel about suits and ties. What are those, Julia?”

I had been scrolling through the pictures of the runestone on my cell phone while I waited for the spinach dip to heat up. Dean Braga replaced her science dean’s hat with her geologist one and looked over the photos. “The runestone, yes. It’s nothing I’ve worked on personally…Has there been a STEWie run request from someone?”

“Uh, sort of. It’s still the thing with my, uh, husband.” Could I call Quinn my ex now that the divorce papers were signed and in the mail, or did I have to wait until they arrived on my doorstep? “There is a personal connection to the event on his side of the family. I went to Alexandria over the weekend to look at the runestone. What
is
graywacke anyway? I get the gray part—it’s a gray slab of rock—but what about the wacke part?”

She shifted her weight from one uncomfortable shoe to the other. “It’s a type of sandstone. Did you notice the striae on the back, from glacial action?” She zoomed in on the photo for a closer look. “There are some other lines here.”

“From roots. The runestone was found under a tree.”

“Right, that makes sense. The growing roots probably leached iron and magnesium out of the stone.”

“How old does the inscription look to you? From what I’ve read, geologists seem to lean toward
yes
but historians and
linguists
strongly disagree.”

She shook her head. “I can’t tell you anything just from the photo. Before STEWie, I would have recommended further
geological
testing and peer review. As it is, if someone from Geology, History, or the Department of Linguistics writes up a well-funded proposal, it could make for a worthy STEWie run.” Before I had the chance to tell her that Dr. Holm had tried and failed, she handed the phone back to me with a final remark that gave props to her own field of expertise. “Without a STEWie run, all I can say is this—given the choice between the soft sciences and the hard sciences, go with the hard sciences. Geological results can be double-checked and reproduced. Now if you’ll excuse me, I really need to get out of these shoes.”

Food is the key to a well-run thesis defense. Let me repeat that. Food is key. Not for the defending PhD candidate, though I suppose it doesn’t hurt to feed him or her either, but for the committee and audience members who might, if crabby and hungry, ask inconvenient questions that the candidate would be hard-pressed to answer. If well fed, the questions would still get asked, but more kindly. Before my time, the policy in the
science
departments had been that defending students provided their own refreshments, giving them yet another thing to worry about, but Dean Braga’s predecessor had instituted a change. In the eight St. Sunniva science departments, from the Mary Anning Hall of Geology to the Maria Mitchell Astronomical Observatory on the main campus hill, the dean’s office did the honors.