The Far Time Incident

by Neve Maslakovic

  “Yeah, without the glasses you kind of are, Julia,” Kamal said, temporarily distracted. “You do look younger, not at all like you have a real job. Your face is round and your nose is so small—”

  Chief Kirkland grunted in agreement (I couldn’t tell which way he meant it—whether he preferred the baby-faced look or my usual look of efficiency and can-do) and took a few steps forward to examine the grapevines, his back to me.

  In every movie I’d ever seen with a female assistant or librarian as a character, the assistant would at some point remove the glasses and hair clip that had up until then inexplicably hidden her glamour, beauty, and luxurious locks. Then she would proceed to sweep the hero off his feet. If only. Besides, I had no intention of trying to sweep anyone off his feet—Kamal was a student, and the security chief… Well, his jaw was too square and he called me Ms. Olsen. Not to mention that I wanted a roommate, not a romantic entanglement.

  Helen emerged from the overgrown grass by the edge of the stone road. She was holding one arm awkwardly, her eyes following the diminishing outline of the oxcart as the road took it down the gently sloping terrain. All around us lay a veritable tapestry of orchards, farmhouses, and sun-drenched vineyards. In the direction the cart had come from, the road steepened. We had landed on the lower flank of a small mountain.

  “There you are, my dears,” Helen said, turning. “We have clearly arrived somewhere rustic. Has anyone spotted a landmark of any use? An electrical post? A plane—or the contrail of a plane? Heard the sound of a car?”

  It took me a moment to figure out that by “landmark” she meant an anchor not in space but in time.

  “Well, we’re definitely not at JFK airport,” Chief Kirkland pointed out the obvious. “Nor does this look like any part of New York state that I’m familiar with. Could we have arrived on the wrong coast? This place reminds me of California wine country. Napa Valley, I’d say, except for that mountain.”

  He had a point. It did remind me of California (Quinn and I had eloped in a quickie beach ceremony in San Diego). The sun had jumped higher in the sky and shone brightly and warmly, too warmly. It was a summer sun. I took another deep breath. Winter was a quiet season for the senses on the St. Sunniva campus; here the air hung heavy with heat and there was a sweet aroma to it, like a flower and herb garden in full bloom, and also something else. The unmistakable scent of marine life, of air heavy with salt, of a breezeless summertime seaside.

  “I’ll give you the sunshine and grapevines, Chief Kirkland, but the cart that just passed—it was carrying a wineskin, not exactly a modern contrivance.” Helen adjusted her right arm and winced. “I fell. It almost felt like the ground shifted a little just as we landed. Odd.”

  “Not so odd for California, perhaps,” Chief Kirkland said, watching a seagull pass high above us in a smooth, wide-winged glide. “And don’t you smell the ocean?”

  “Leather wineskins, dear Chief. Oxen. Stone roads…”

  “It could still be California,” he countered stubbornly. “They have cattle there. As for the cart—maybe we’re in the middle of a movie set.”

  I opened my mouth to point out the ridiculousness of the suggestion, when an almost imperceptible rumble shook the ground beneath us. A purple-green fig fell down by my boots, a large, five-pronged leaf still attached to it.

  “There it is again, see?” said Chief Kirkland. “A small earthquake. California. They have fig trees there, don’t they?”

  Helen carefully pulled her injured arm out of the sleeve of the fur-lined wool jacket, which would clearly not be needed in the mild climate of wherever we were, California or otherwise, and said briskly, “Mr. Ahmad and Miss Tanner, which one of you has the Callback?”

  “I do,” Abigail said, holding up what I’d assumed was a cell phone. On second glance, it didn’t look much like one. The device was more like an old, clunky handheld calculator, with a screen and a number pad.

  Chief Kirkland, who had been scanning the road with a frown that belied his insistence that we were on the West Coast in the middle of a movie set, turned back and asked, “What is that?”

  “STEWie’s Callback. It reconnects the basket sections and launches us on a reverse trajectory,” Kamal explained, not helpfully at all, I thought. He was glancing up occasionally, as if he expected an asteroid to come crashing down on our heads any minute. I didn’t think he was merely watching out for seagull droppings.

  “Imagine that there’s a twisted elastic band that winds through time and connects us to the TTE lab,” Helen said. “A band stretched so thin it needs the merest touch, the smallest release, to unwind and send us home. That’s what the Callback does.”

  “Apparently not,” I said.

  “Here, let me try.” Kamal thrust out his arm.

  “It doesn’t matter who pushes the keys. It’s not going to work for you either,” said Abigail, but she handed it to Kamal anyway.

  “Maybe we’re too far away? Let’s all stand exactly where we were when we arrived,” Kamal directed us.

  Abigail shook her head, but she went back behind the tree. Helen took the lane between the vines back to the road where she had landed in the overgrown grass, and the chief and I went to crouch behind our respective boulders. Kamal returned to the fig tree, turning knobs and pressing buttons.

  Nothing happened.

  “I told you so,” we heard Abigail say.

  “Here, let me see it.”

  Kamal tossed Chief Kirkland the Callback. “The second knob on the left. Turn it counterclockwise, then press the Escape key.”

  The chief went into his crouch behind the boulder again, turned the knob counterclockwise, pressed the key. Nothing happened. He shook the Callback. “It’s broken, then?”

  “It’s not broken,” Abigail said in a small voice from behind the fig tree. “The basket is gone. We’ve been disconnected from the TTE lab.”

  The chief got to his feet and loosened his tie. “So. Dr. Mooney’s murderer has played another card.”

  10

  “Murderer?” Abigail asked for the fifth time.

  Kamal was perched on what I’d come to think of as my boulder, scratching his head.

  Helen, for her part, looked calm, like Chief Kirkland had merely confirmed her suspicions. “The sky doesn’t seem to be falling,” she said. She had taken off the yellow jacket to reveal a frilly white shirt and was resting with her back against the fig tree, legs stretched out, cradling her injured arm. I had joined her in the shade as our wait for rescue stretched on. I could see what she meant, I thought, swatting away a fly. If we were in a ghost zone, it sure seemed like a tame one. Butterflies fluttered all around, the unripe green grapes basked in the sun, fluffy clouds moved unhurriedly across a blue sky, cicadas chirped, the stone road stretched silent in the afternoon heat. It was, at a guess, a good sixty degrees warmer than the St. Sunniva campus.

  As if we were all thinking the same thing, Kamal spoke up from his perch on the boulder. “Yeah, this doesn’t seem like a ghost zone. Only—I can’t figure out why the basket left without us.”

  “Are we sure STEWie’s basket is gone?” I asked. “I mean, it’s invisible, right? How odd that is.”

  “It’s not that odd,” Kamal said. “All sorts of things in nature aren’t visible to our eyes—X-rays, oxygen, gravity waves, viruses… I’ve always imagined that if we could see STEWie’s basket, it would look like a blob of water suspended in midair.”

  “I’ve always pictured it as sparkling silver Jell-O floating freely in large clumps,” Abigail said.

  “There is no such thing as silver Jell-O,” Kamal said. “Trust me, I know. I’ve tried all the flavors in the grocery store.”

  “There is in my version of what STEWie’s basket looks like.”

  “So, the basket?” I prompted them.

  “It arrives in fragments, one for each traveler. In our case, there was one by this boulder for you, Julia, and another by that boulder for Chief Kirkland”—Kamal pointed—�
��and two behind the tree for Abigail and me. And in the ditch by the road for Dr. Presnik. That’s what the Callback does, it closes the loop between the basket fragments, and we’re sent back.”

  “I thought the basket only returned empty if the travelers were—”

  “Dead,” Kamal said.

  “And we’re not dead.”

  “No.”

  “So—?”

  No one had an explanation.

  Chief Kirkland had been circling the fig tree in what could only be called an angry stomp, stepping over its roots. “I didn’t think—I mean, there are five of us—safe, I thought, a middle-of-the-day run—a brazen move—” He stopped, took off his hat, and faced Abigail and Kamal, looking stricken. “I owe you two an apology. For letting you come along without giving you all the facts. Dr. Presnik, you as well.”

  I had to give him credit. I felt guilty, too, but I hadn’t spoken up about it.

  “I understand what you said about Professor Mooney, Chief Kirkland, but what happened to us could still be an accident, right?” Abigail said.

  “It could be, but I think not. I think whoever attacked the professor has struck again. They never do the smart thing—lay low and let events take their course.”

  He didn’t say who they were, but he didn’t have to. I pushed out of my mind the image of Gabriel Rojas’s gaunt face, crisscrossed with worry lines since Dr. Mooney’s murder, in sharp contrast to his relaxed demeanor as he readied our coordinates.

  “Chief, what was your goal with this run?” Helen asked bluntly.

  The chief defended his method. “It didn’t seem like a risky thing to do. Dr. Rojas’s test runs with the fish went off without a hitch. Like I said, five of us, in the middle of the day… As to my goal, well, it was simple. I wanted to observe a run as they usually are, uh—run. To gauge how easy it would be for somebody to slip away unnoticed by the rest of the team, for whatever reason. I suspected it would be very difficult to do so. Meaning that someone who wanted a run to themselves might have chosen that Monday night to do it, perhaps with Dr. Mooney’s approval.”

  “No,” four voices said at once.

  “Well, without his approval then, which might explain why Dr. Mooney was sent on a ghost run and all the evidence was erased from the computer log.”

  “By Gabriel?” Helen said, considering the chief’s words. “Is that what you’re suggesting? That Gabriel wanted a run and Xavier got in his way, so Gabriel sent him into a ghost zone after he was done. And now he’s gotten rid of us, too. Forgive me, but that doesn’t make much sense. Why would Gabriel need an unauthorized run? TTE professors have priority where roster spots are concerned.”

  This was a bit of a sore point in the other departments.

  “Maybe he didn’t want people to know,” Kamal suggested.

  “He has no need for secrecy,” I said. “We don’t publish destinations until after the results are in. That’s just standard protocol.”

  “Maybe he didn’t want us to know,” Kamal elaborated.

  “Oh,” I said.

  “Maybe he needed a STEWie run for off-the-books research, maybe he needed it for personal reasons,” the chief said. “Or maybe we’re on the wrong track completely and it was an accident.”

  Abigail tapped a white-sneakered foot, her tiny, triangular backpack on the ground next to her. “I for one think Dr. Rojas did send us here by mistake. I know you all think it’s unlikely—”

  “Very unlikely,” Helen said drily. I felt a little surprised that she was so quick to condemn Gabriel, whom she’d known for years. She turned the conversation to practical matters. “We’re not in New York City of 1964 and the basket is gone. Does anyone have any idea where we could be?”

  “Somewhere where they have figs and grapes,” Kamal said.

  “This farmland looks irrigated. Wherever we are, we can’t have gone that far back in time,” the chief said.

  “Dr. Rojas will look for us,” Abigail tried again. “He’ll figure out we didn’t make it to JFK airport. We’ve been here just about an hour. That’s only 133 seconds in the lab.”

  “At best it will take them a few hours to figure out what went wrong and recalibrate, which means that days will pass for us here,” Kamal said glumly. “Assuming this isn’t a ghost zone and we aren’t about to be caught in a sudden brushfire or something.”

  “And if Dr. Rojas just tells everyone that the basket returned empty?” asked the security chief.

  “Then there is no hope of rescue,” Helen said matter-of-factly. “Everyone will think we’re dead. I don’t know why STEWie’s basket returned without us. We can sit under this tree and discuss it further or we can go and find out where we are. I vote for the latter. We can always return here to see if anyone has been by looking for us. Besides, I don’t expect we’ll get far dressed like this.” She pushed herself to her feet with her uninjured arm and rolled her jacket into a ball and shoved it into a shrub. The rest of us did the same with our coats. Leaving the shade of the fig tree behind us, we took the lane between two rows of grapevines to the road, and turned in the uphill direction. The mountain—it struck me as being like a giant anthill, cone shaped, with a narrow flat area at the top—would offer a bird’s-eye view of wherever we were.

  I regretted my choice of footwear almost at once. Beneath our feet, blocks of gray stone lay fitted together like roundish jigsaw puzzle pieces, large ones, each the size of a chair seat or a side table. The road was not much wider than the cart that had passed in the opposite direction, and parts of it were overgrown with grass. Between the unevenness of the stones and the wagon ruts worn into them, the heels of my special-occasion boots kept getting caught and I had to concentrate to avoid falling.

  Something else was bothering me. Dr. Rojas had said to expect insurmountable maze walls as we moved around in a time period not our own, but so far I hadn’t noticed a single limitation on my steps, other than the awkwardness of my boot heels on the cobblestones. The decision of whether to hike up the mountain or walk farther into the plain had been our own, made with no interference from the overseeing entity called History. In fact, everything seemed perfectly normal, other than the fact that we had no idea where we were, which was very disconcerting. Could the chief’s first theory really be correct? Were we somewhere in California?

  Clusters of shady pines, palm trees, and what I guessed were olive trees lined the sides of the road. The upper slopes of the mountain, above the vineyards, were heavily wooded. The plateau at the top, where the ants would go in and out if the mountain were a large anthill, was bare.

  “What are you doing, Dr. Presnik?” Abigail asked the professor.

  Helen was peering into the roadside ditch. “Looking for trash. Not a soda can in sight. No gum wrappers, no cigarette butts. Just some animal refuse…a few pottery shards…”

  For a moment I debated whether to ask her if our freedom of movement was a point in favor of present-day California, but decided to hold off and see if I could run into any maze walls.

  I waved my arms in the air, twirled on my heels, and shuffled over to the side of the road.

  “Ms. Olsen?” Chief Kirkland asked.

  “Just testing one of Dr. Rojas’s rules.”

  Two graceful pines stood on my side of the road. Beyond them was a small vineyard with a farmhouse nestled at its center. With their broad, umbrella-shaped canopies, the trees blocked much of the sunlight, and the soil underneath was covered with a soft layer of pine needles and sparse grass. I proceeded to weave between the pines, touch the gray-orange cracked bark, and kick a pinecone, barely managing to avoid twisting an ankle in the process. I was sure I looked like an idiot.

  The boy staring at me from his perch on the crumbling log of a fallen pine must have thought so, too.

  I brought the arms I had been waving in the air like an overenthusiastic hockey fan down by my sides and said, “Well, hello there.”

  The small boy, his face tanned to a deep brown, was straddling the
tree trunk and whacking something on the other side with a leafless stick, raising a small cloud of gray dust. The thumb of his other hand was in his mouth. He had on a loose, rather grubby tunic and his sandaled feet were dirty and scratched up.

  “Hello, there,” I repeated. “I wonder if you could tell me where we are. Do you know the name of your town?”

  The boy glanced at the others behind me, stopped whacking whatever was on the far side of the log, and pointed the stick in my direction.

  “Suhl-way.”

  “What was that?” I said. I often have trouble understanding small children, especially if they happen to have something in their mouth.

  The boy took his thumb out of his mouth. “Suhl-way.”

  A call came from the farmhouse, a worried parental voice.

  The boy hopped off the tree trunk and over to where I stood and poked one of my boots with the stick.

  “Hey, kid, don’t scuff up my boots.” I caught a whiff of something in the air. The smell—rancid, like food gone bad—suddenly permeated the umbrella pines. For a moment I thought it was the boy, but then noticed all the flies on the far side of the tree trunk where he’d been perched.

  The boy poked my boot with the stick again and spoke a long sentence in a tongue that was completely unfamiliar to me. It wasn’t Norwegian or Spanish, which was about as far as my expertise went.

  The call came again, louder, and the boy took off in the direction of the farmhouse. I could hear a dog barking as it ran out to meet him. I hesitated a moment, then took a step over to the fallen pine to see what had so interested the boy.

  A swarm of flies buzzed above the blackened remnants of a bonfire. The odd thing was, the half-burned fish guts and bones scattered around the pale gray ash didn’t seem like the leftovers of someone’s dinner. They looked more like they had been thrown into the fire as part of some kind of ancient fish-burning ritual.