The Far Time Incident

by Neve Maslakovic

  “Grizzlies don’t hunt people,” the chief interrupted him. “They only attack if they’re surprised or if they’re protecting their food or offspring. But point taken.”

  “Rule number three. Blend in.”

  He wrote that on the blackboard under History protects itself and I added it to my notepad under (3).

  “To take even a step or two away from the landing site, it’s necessary to minimize how peculiar you appear to the locals. When Dr. Presnik’s team went back to Shakespeare’s time to prove that he wrote the plays, they made sure to don seventeenth-century clothing, dull the whiteness of their twenty-first-century teeth, and avoid indulging in period-inappropriate behavior like washing hands before eating. We’re only sending you back for a short hop,” he continued, “so hand washing and white teeth shouldn’t be a problem. Even so, on occasion you might find yourself unable to take a step farther or to speak—say, if you were about to interfere with someone’s walking route or inadvertently divulge knowledge from the future, such as telling them that it’s a good idea to invest in instant noodles but not in slide rules.”

  “Is it possible to meet yourself in the past?” asked Chief Kirkland as if the thought, which had nothing to do with the investigation, had just occurred to him.

  I opened my mouth to answer—I knew this one—but Dr. Rojas was already shaking his head. “History only allows a person to travel to a time period before they were born. Observing and documenting your own life, that’s for the memoir-writing folks over at the English Department.” He gestured toward the squat building by the bend in the lake, which was just visible through the wide windows of his office. “Since you’ll want to stick close to the present, we’ll go by the birth date of the oldest person on the team.”

  Yikes, I thought. I hadn’t been keen on telling people my age since I’d passed the three-decade mark four and a half years ago. As for Chief Kirkland, who was sitting on my left, intently following Dr. Rojas’s remarks, my best guess was that he was in his late thirties or early forties. Clothes were usually helpful for this sort of thing, but the campus security uniform ruled that out. Plus something about him discouraged speculation, as if he was who he was and a data point as irrelevant as age would never be of consequence in his professional or personal life. It added to the air of mystery the man carried around with him. What had made him leave his job at the BWCAW? I supposed I could check the security office hiring records if I really wanted to find out (that would tell me his age, too) but doing it that way seemed a bit underhanded.

  Dr. Rojas continued, “The birth date of the oldest person on the team will determine the threshold year—”

  “Yes, that would be me.” Dr. Helen Presnik stuck her head into Dr. Rojas’s office and saved me from having to answer. “Before anyone asks, I turned forty-seven in June.”

  This surprised me. Helen wasn’t one of the professors under my care, but I had chatted with her many a time at school-wide events over the years, and had always assumed her to be at least a decade older. But some people acquired gray hair early in life.

  “Dr. Presnik, good to see you,” Dr. Rojas said from the blackboard, perhaps a touch more formal than he usually was.

  “Hello, Gabriel. How’s Lane? And the triplets?” Lane was Dr. Rojas’s wife and the triplets were all grown up and out of the house.

  “Fine, fine,” he said.

  “Dr. Presnik, thank you for agreeing to come with us on this STEWie run,” said our security chief.

  “Helen, this is Campus Security Chief Kirkland,” I introduced him.

  “You’re most welcome, Chief Kirkland,” said Helen. “Are you almost done here, Gabriel? Erika is impatient for us to get going so that she can proceed with her run. She says that a blogger’s coming to observe her.”

  “Penny Lind of the Les Styles blog,” I explained. “Ear muffs. Pencil-thin eyebrows. Not a walker.”

  Without changing his facial expression, the chief said, “I’m sorry I’ll miss seeing her.”

  “She’ll probably be here when we get back.”

  “Her blog has hundreds of thousands of followers. It’s a real coup for Erika,” Helen said. “Shall I tell her you’ll be a few more minutes?”

  “I just need to explain rule number four and then we’ll be right over.”

  “Rule four…that’s the most important one, isn’t it?”

  Helen’s head disappeared from the doorway and Dr. Rojas turned back to face the blackboard. “Which is—There’s always a way back.” He wrote that under the other three rules (I did the same on my list), then turned back to face us. “If it seems like you’re stuck with no way out, unable to take a step in any direction, that’s just History protecting itself by keeping you in place. That is, you won’t be able to leave the area until the maze paths have had the opportunity to rearrange themselves and it’s safe to proceed. If that happens, wait it out. Circumstances can change quickly. Sometimes,” he added, “they change painfully slow. My team was once stuck for seven hours behind a rocky outcrop in the New Mexico desert, with only one bottle of water and half a granola bar among us. Finally, at long last, as the sun was sinking below the horizon, a small band of Anasazi passed us on their way westward and we were able to move. Only later did I realize that had we crossed the plain earlier, the Anasazi would have noticed our footprints in the dust of the desert floor.”

  I had a sudden vision of being unable to move and speak, like a temporary paralysis of limb and tongue, and for the first time experienced a doubt whether volunteering for the run was a good idea.

  Noticing my expression, Dr. Rojas added gently, “It’s not as weird as it sounds, Julia. Well, not once you get used to it.” He himself had never gotten used to it, I thought. Gabriel rarely went out on runs, preferring to do his research with pencil and paper, while others stepped into STEWie’s basket. The professor added, “Remember, we can’t go wherever we want in our own time period either. We don’t try to walk through trees or buildings, we automatically go around them.” He wiped chalk dust off his fingers and onto his slacks. “Any questions?”

  “Only one,” I said. “Where are we going?”

  “Let’s keep it simple. Given Helen’s birthday and age, we’ll be able to send you to, let’s see…May 1964 or earlier.”

  It occurred to me that going back in time by a week and staking out the TTE lab would be a good way of figuring out who had killed Dr. Mooney, only we’d need to send a newborn or a mounted camera. The arrival of either would have probably startled anyone who happened to be working in the lab.

  “I was going to leave the choice up to you,” Dr. Rojas continued, “but it’s a good idea to keep it simple and not go back too far. Let’s stick with the sixties.”

  The sixties. I was a child of the eighties and nineties; the sixties, so different from anything that came later, had always held a certain fascination for me.

  “Perhaps you’d like to snap a photo of Penzias and Wilson ruling out that pigeon droppings were causing the strange signal in their antenna, thereby discovering cosmic microwave background radiation?” Dr. Rojas suggested. “Or shoot footage of Rosalind Franklin taking the first X-ray photos of DNA? Or—”

  “The best destination for our purposes,” Chief Kirkland, who really was getting accustomed to dealing with academic types, said firmly, “might be a crowded site like a sporting event or a racetrack. Someplace where we won’t stand out much.”

  I pushed my glasses farther up my nose and raised my hand.

  “Can we go see the Beatles?”

  8

  I was pretty sure that my question had been driven by my desire to contribute to the investigation by suggesting a practical destination, and had nothing to do with the fact that the Beatles had always been my favorite band.

  Even though the British Invasion of the United States was pretty well documented already, Dr. Rojas agreed that traveling to catch a glimpse of a young John, Paul, George, and Ringo, while not exactly the epitome of aca
demic seriousness, would be acceptable. Having STEWie slip us directly into New York’s Carnegie Hall without tickets was overruled as being too delicate a maneuver for a test mission, so we settled on plan B—watching the Beatles’ first press conference on US soil. A busy airport and thousands of fans would nicely fit Chief Kirkland’s criteria of a crowded urban site.

  Helen, the chief, and I relocated to the TTE conference room, where we spent fifteen minutes watching black-and-white footage of the Fab Four stepping off their Pan Am flight 101 from London to the roar of thousands of airport-roof fans. Then we headed off in separate directions to procure sixties-style clothes, leaving Dr. Rojas in the lab to oversee the necessary calculations. He assured us that a short hop into a well-mapped area such as New York’s still-existing airport would require only a quick calibration.

  I hurried to my car, drove the five minutes home, left my boots in the mudroom, and went into the bedroom, leaving a trail of jacket, scarf, hat, and gloves on the furniture. I opened my bedroom closet. The sixties. Miniskirts, go-go boots, Twiggy, psychedelic colors. Fortunately, all of those postdated the arrival of the Beatles on US soil. Something a bit more prim and proper would be just the ticket. Wishing that Penny Lind of the Les Styles blog had arrived in time to provide some sixties fashions advice, I rummaged around the closet and finally chose a red button-down blouse, then dug up a basic black pencil skirt that had been a wardrobe staple in my twenties and which I had optimistic expectations might still fit. I wiggled my way into it, just managing to close the zipper on the side. Next, I pulled out my nicest pair of boots, black suede ones with a small but definite heel. The boots only came out on special occasions, like when I accompanied Dean Sunder to a fundraiser or a couple of weeks ago when I had gone to a lawyer’s office to initiate divorce proceedings. Seeing the Beatles in person definitely counted as a special occasion, and the boots would help keep me warm in the chilly February temperatures in New York City.

  I rummaged around the boxes at the bottom of the closet. I came across a box of Quinn’s fishing magazines (I wondered briefly if Chief Kirkland might want them), then a box of Quinn’s winter-wear, which would be going to charity, before finally finding what I was looking for in a box of miscellaneous items. Cat-eye glasses, black-rimmed ones with sparkly faux diamonds in the outer corners. I had bought them for a feline-themed Halloween costume the year Quinn went as a dog. I donned those as well.

  I had been hearing shrieks and other sounds of merriment as I readied, and finally took a look out the window. Students wearing ski masks were racing dorm-made sleds down the hill at the park end of the street. It looked like one of them had ended up lodged in a mailbox. I made a mental note to organize a winter safety seminar for the students later in the week and thought how odd it was that soon I’d be one of the crowd at New York’s airport. When the Beatles landed there, it had just been renamed John F. Kennedy airport, having previously been called Idlewild.

  I threw on a short chocolate-brown wool coat on the way out, decided against a hat—I wasn’t about to go see the Beatles with droopy and flattened hat hair—and hurried into the garage, leaving the front door unlocked. It was Tuesday, and Terry from Housekeeper’s Express always came around on Tuesdays. Terry had done wonders for the state of my little blue-and-white bungalow—he wielded a dust cloth with a fanatic’s touch, and had a secret formula for rendering bathroom surfaces sparklingly clean. Quinn’s departure had not affected things one way or another, as his contribution to the housework had essentially been nil. To be fair, my own contribution had been essentially nil, too, I conceded, folding myself into my aged Honda in the tight skirt. In retrospect, hiring a housekeeping service seemed like a no-brainer; but the issue of household maintenance had become a tug-of-war for Quinn and me. Whose turn was it to throw out the trash? To vacuum the living room? To make a grocery store run in the snow for milk? To cross the road to the mailbox to pick up the mail?

  Now Terry took care of the cleaning, I ran errands during my lunch hour, did the bulk of my grocery shopping on the weekends, and ate out often. Martha, my next-door neighbor, tended both her yard and mine—which was a good thing as I tended to kill plants—and in exchange, I did her taxes and helped organize her files and balance her checkbook.

  The Honda started up after a moment of cold-induced indecision and I inched back out of the driveway, which had been narrowed down to car width by my latest attempts at shoveling. Clearing the driveway was a job that Quinn and I had always shared. I made a mental note to stop by the hardware store first thing Saturday morning to pick up a gas-powered snow blower.

  I turned the street corner, sighing as I watched the bungalow disappear from my rearview mirror. The snow was a practical problem that could be tackled. As to the rest—I had gone from living with my parents to living with college roommates to being married. Quinn and I had moved into my parents’ old bungalow after they went to Florida to open a retirement community. Now that Quinn was gone, the discovery had crept up on me that living alone was a skill, one I was still working on developing. I was not a pet kind of person, so there was no one to greet me in the evening when I returned from work. Maybe renting out the tiny back bedroom with its separate entrance would be the way to go. Not to students, of course, but perhaps to visiting research and teaching fellows, who, despite the title, were women as often as men.

  I drove back to campus humming “Strawberry Fields Forever.”

  Oscar complimented my cat-eye glasses as I hurried up the front steps of the TTE building. Once inside, I stopped to consider whether I should have dropped off my shoulder bag in my office. Dr Rojas hadn’t given us instructions one way or the other. I decided not to waste time making a side trip to the History of Science building. Besides, the black, square bag with a snap mechanism would fit seamlessly into 1964 (or many another modern time period) and would be handy in case I needed a tissue or something.

  “Julia,” a voice stopped me as I started down the hallway.

  Dr. Little, dressed in a blue-green plaid vest, had poked his head out of his office. I had a feeling that he’d been hovering just inside the door trying to figure out what was going on. Asking directly would have put him in the position of admitting to ignorance, something I suspected he disliked immensely.

  “I hear Kirkland is going on a run,” he commented, inviting more information.

  “He is.”

  “Where?”

  “It’s just a test run.”

  “Who’s accompanying him? I should have been contacted. Is it Erika?”

  “Dr. Helen Presnik.”

  “Dr. Presnik? From the English Department? That’s ridiculous.”

  “She’s been on many runs. Besides, it wasn’t up to me.” As far as everybody but Dr. Rojas, the dean’s office, the security office, and the board of trustees was concerned, a laser focuser had malfunctioned. Chief Kirkland had been the one to ask for somebody outside the department. Helen, while she had some personal involvement with the case, was the most experienced traveler who wasn’t a member of the TTE Department. Plus it would give Chief Kirkland a chance to ask the professor whatever questions he had for her.

  Dr. Little seemed to notice my outfit for the first time. “Are those new glasses?”

  “Sixties style,” I said noncommittally. “I really should go.”

  His eyes went from the cat-eye glasses to my boots, and back up. “I have great respect for Chief Kirkland,” he said slowly, “but in this case I think he’s overstepping his bounds.”

  “He is investigating a—an accidental death. There are no bounds.”

  “I’m concerned that he is merely using Mooney’s unfortunate demise to indulge in living out his fantasies.” He eyed my boots and glasses again, his eyes narrowing.

  “You think Chief Kirkland has a time travel fantasy?”

  “Everyone has a time travel fantasy.”

  He probably had a point there, but I wasn’t about to admit it.

  “Well, fantasies asi
de,” I said, “the chief needs to familiarize himself with STEWie so that he can write up his final report. Dean Sunder has asked that we give him our full cooperation.” Dr. Little looked like he was far from convinced that the security chief had anything to offer on what he (as far as I knew) assumed was a technical matter. I hoped I hadn’t said too much. “Unless you’d like me to convey to Dean Sunder that you disagree. I could do so later today, when he and I make a preliminary pass at next year’s budget—”

  “Of course, of course, I only meant…” He turned and stalked back into his office, mumbling something about STEWie roster priority, research deadlines, and—I was almost sure—uppity secretaries. I felt a sudden and totally underserved stab of satisfaction that I was a good half a foot taller than he was.

  Outside the TTE lab I ran into Dr. Baumgartner, who had her hand on the door handle to the travel apparel closet. “Julia, are you back? Has the chief found out what caused the focuser to malfunction?”

  “Back?” It took me a moment to parse what she meant. “No, we’re just on our way out. We’re moving as fast as we can,” I added somewhat snappishly. My exchange with Dr. Little had left me a bit testy.

  She seemed taken aback. “Julia, I didn’t mean—it’s just that Gabriel said that he exchanged the faulty focuser, so everything is fine now and I don’t see why the chief—well, let me know when you get back. I’ll change and then wait in my office.”

  “Thank you, Dr. Baumgartner. I’ll see you in a few minutes.”

  I heard the tap-tapping of heels and turned to see Penny Lind, paper coffee cup in hand, approaching in a whirlwind of activity. She greeted us, complimented me on my glasses—“The fifties are making a comeback, might get a pair myself”—and followed Erika into the travel apparel closet before I could explain that I had been aiming for a different decade.