The Far Time Incident

by Neve Maslakovic

  “And you, Abigail?” the security chief asked.

  “I had exams all day Monday and spent the evening in the library, finishing a project. I didn’t come into the lab until Tuesday morning.”

  “But you did go into Dr. Mooney’s office this week,” I said.

  “What’s this?” the chief asked, sitting up under the pomegranate tree and bumping his head on one of the lower branches.

  Abigail, sounding embarrassed, explained how she had gone into Dr. Mooney’s office after his memorial and spent some time looking at the books, photos, and musical instruments the professor had collected on his time travels. She pulled apart another pomegranate to expose its honeycomb interior of bright red seeds and white pith and offered Kamal a segment. He looked a little green at the prospect of sucking on more of the tart pomegranate seeds. “The didgeridoo was missing. That was odd, I suppose,” Abigail went on. “But I did tell you about it, Julia.”

  “And I told Chief Kirkland.”

  “What’s this about the didgeridoo being missing?” Helen asked, puzzled.

  “It wasn’t in his office,” I explained.

  “The instrument’s absence was duly noted in Officer Van Underberg’s notes. That can’t be why we were targeted. But I wonder if someone watched you go into Dr. Mooney’s office, Abigail, and perhaps thought you were on to something—but what?” Chief Kirkland swore under his breath. “None of this makes sense.”

  Helen shook her head. “Not in the least, my dear Chief.”

  A warm, breezy evening approached. Occasionally we’d hear the rattle of a cart returning from town and the drivers’ banter; then the cart would pass and there would be another period of silence. Activity in the harbor had mostly ceased. The repetitive swoosh of the sea as it gently washed against the rocky shore drifted up to the ridge. Stars had started to come into view, a whole lot of them, like coarse salt crystals shaken onto a dark tablecloth.

  Kamal tossed a picked-over pomegranate shell through the invisible barrier History had placed around us and said, “Pretty.”

  The entire Astronomy Department would have given an arm and a leg for this view. The moon had not risen yet. Faint pinpoints of light on Vesuvius’s slopes revealed the locations of villas and farmhouses. The mountain carved a tipless triangle into a sky alive with stars, unspoiled by light pollution from headlights, streetlamps, and overilluminated car dealerships. I thought about home. Quinn wouldn’t have to bother with the divorce paperwork, a temp would take over my work duties until a permanent replacement could be found, Wanda the spaniel would need a new home.

  I was about to say something befitting the moment when Helen turned on the light on her wristwatch and said, “I’d like to set it to local time—nine o’clock, perhaps? I’ve been trying to remember what time the eruption started, as described in Gaius Pliny’s account.”

  “Too bad I didn’t choose Mount Vesuvius as my project for Dr. Mooney’s Ghost Zones in Time: How to Find Them and Avoid Them,” Abigail said. “We might have a better idea what time of day the eruption occurred, right? No, I had to go and choose Tunguska.”

  Helen sounded as if Abigail had just leveled an accusation of incompetence at her. “When you read as much history as I do, Abigail, the details sometimes get put aside, but I assure you—”

  “Oh, I didn’t mean that, Dr. Presnik—”

  We were all tired, snippy, and in need of food, water, and a safe haven far from the danger of the volcano.

  “Perhaps you better put the watch away, Dr. Presnik. For blending-in purposes,” Kamal said, coming to Abigail’s rescue. He had been periodically getting to his feet to check if the invisible wall was still there and he got up to do so again.

  “I usually do not permit students to address me by my given name, but given our situation you can call me Helen, Kamal. You, too, Abigail.”

  “Okay, Helen,” Abigail obliged.

  “Everyone—most everyone—calls me Julia already,” I said.

  The security chief cleared his throat and said, “How’s it looking, Kamal?”

  Kamal was at the edge of the orchard, on the side where the builders were working, trying to poke his foot through. We heard him give a small cheer.

  “They’re gone,” he called out. “The guys working on the addition to the villa.”

  Chief Kirkland scrambled to his feet. “Is that why we’ve been stuck here? Until the workers finished up for the day?”

  “Who knows what kept us from leaving this place?” Helen said, joining him. “Quite often it happens that one simply does not know.”

  The first thing we did was to lower the bucket into the blackness of the well and, after some effort, as there only seemed to be a shallow pool of water at the bottom, gratefully drink. The water was lukewarm, not cool like I had expected, and tasted vaguely of earth.

  The second thing we did was walk over to the edge of the cliff. Below us, the steep path ended on a flat coastal plain and disappeared into the darkness of a rocky shore. We could see the outline of the harbor docks, the statues adorning them like still ghosts in the night. Figures holding pinpricks of light moved among the statues and on the decks of the ships.

  “On reflection, I’m not sure the harbor is a good idea,” Helen said. “Even at night, there will be crews attending to ships and their cargo. How would we manage to sneak on board?”

  The chief nodded. “All right then. We head out on foot and find a road that leads away from Pompeii and Vesuvius. Which way is Rome? All roads can’t lead there, regardless of the saying.”

  “Rome, yes. Northwest from here, probably a good week’s worth of travel up the coast. But even if we manage to obtain a horse and cart, we won’t necessarily be able to take any road we want—I don’t know if we can get far enough from the mountain in time—”

  15

  “Why aren’t we dead?”

  The security chief lifted the fedora, which he’d angled over his eyes during the night, and addressed our small party. Stubble covered the lower half of his face, under eyes puffy with little sleep.

  It was an apt question, given that we were in a tomb and it was morning.

  Kamal ran a hand across his hair—it continued to stand straight up—and said, “I noticed that, too. We’re not dead.”

  “I’ve been thinking,” Helen said. “By the way, my arm feels better. I think it was just a sprain. My neck, however—” She stretched her neck from side to side and added in a thoughtful tone, “We seem to be early.”

  Yesterday, as we left the pomegranate orchard behind, I’d pictured us rousing the nearest sleeping household, explaining the danger (Helen would need to be our spokesperson), and accepting the thanks of the grateful family and a horse and cart we could use to zigzag our way to Rome through History’s maze.

  But darkness—and History—had defeated us.

  With only my cell phone and Helen’s watch to serve as faint flashlights, we proceeded unsteadily through the unfamiliar terrain in the moonless night. The first villa we attempted to enter by knocking on the gate in its property wall may or may not have accommodated a horse and cart within. We never found out. The same for the second. Each time, History would permit us to reach the gate, but we were unable to raise a hand to knock. We could only pass by like ghosts, unseen by the inhabitants inside as they slept peacefully in the warm Pompeii night.

  We found ourselves back on the street of tombs, the one with the telling tablet bearing the town’s name. Silently admitting defeat and agreeing that the sturdy stone walls of a tomb would offer us more protection from the volcano’s wrath than an open road, we chose a house-shaped one whose shadowy, eerie niches held stone busts of those interned inside.

  In the utter, disconcerting blackness of the tomb, the silence punctuated only by an occasional cough or exhalation by one of us, we settled in to wait out the night. The volcano would do what it would. We couldn’t do a thing about it. I leaned back against the cool stones of the tomb wall and let my mind drift back o
ver the events of the past week. I almost felt like something had been nagging at me—something about that unfortunate Tuesday when Kamal had brought the news about Dr. Mooney. Was it something he had said? Or something that I had heard or seen later in the day but hadn’t internalized, distracted as I was by the day’s events? Not a new piece of information, more like a reminder of something I had already known… No, there was nothing. I gave up trying to figure it out and let my mind drift off into tired nothingness.

  Every disturbance outside, whether it was the shouts of drunken tavern patrons just inside the town gate or the clatter of cart wheels as dawn neared, jolted us out of an uneasy sleep and had us peering out of the tomb.

  Now it was morning and we were still alive. Very much so. My stomach growled with pressing hunger. The locals seem to be early risers and the increasingly familiar rattle of carts drifted into the tomb. We’d chosen it because of its size—it was bigger than the altar-shaped ones around it and had four sturdy walls and a roof. A family tomb, I decided; the six stone busts outside, in the niches above the archway, shared a name: Nigidius. A shaft of light streaming through the archway illuminated the prints of our twenty-first-century shoes in the dirt. Garland-decorated urns sat in the equidistantly spaced niches above our heads. In one corner was an object that I’d assumed in the dark to be a small bench, but the morning sunlight had revealed it to be an intricately carved wooden chest with a vase or urn on top. Kamal was sitting with his back against it.

  My stomach growled again and I suddenly remembered the snack I usually carried in my shoulder bag. What was the matter with me? I wasn’t thinking straight. I unsnapped the bag and started to rummage. “Wallet, keys, notepad, tissues—those might come in handy—cell phone… Here we go.”

  The package had gotten sandwiched between my cell phone, which was way out of range and whose signal bars were simply flat, and the bottom of the bag. I turned off the phone to conserve whatever was left of the battery and popped the plastic package open. Five thin crackers and cheddar cheese in a separate compartment, highly processed and an unnatural yellow. I gave everyone a cracker and we took turns dipping them into the cheese. It was not much of a meal, but it was something. The cheese, softened by the summer heat into a gooey mess, was particularly delicious. Then again, at that point anything would have been.

  “I don’t know if this is worthy of the name cheddar,” the chief said, “but I’m glad you had it in your bag.”

  “Do you have any more, Julia?” Kamal asked, licking cheese off his finger.

  I shook my head.

  “I think,” Helen repeated, “that we’re too early. For the eruption.”

  Nate lost interest in the cheese. “Hold on. You said the date seemed right, judging by the bonfires and all.”

  “I think yesterday was the twenty-fourth of August.”

  “Then—?”

  “But I believe we may have gotten here weeks, if not months, before the eruption. Whoever sent us here hasn’t spent much time reading recent journal articles about Pompeii.”

  “Let’s assume it was Dr. Rojas for argument’s sake,” the chief said.

  “I don’t like to assume, but if you insist. Gabriel—or whoever did this to us—may have thought he was sending us into a ghost zone. August 24 has long been assumed to be the date given by Pliny the Younger in his two letters to the historian Tacitus. But the letters, written a quarter of a century after the eruption, have been lost. We only have medieval copies—ones made by hand, of course, which is a far from perfect process, especially where Roman dates are concerned. Pompeii residents fleeing the town who didn’t make it”—she winced—“left behind impressions in hardened ash that suggest they were wearing heavy, warm clothes. And even if we assume that they overdressed to protect themselves from the ash, there is also the question of winds. High-level winds blow inland in the summer and toward the sea in the fall—and the ash cloud dispersal pattern carved into the landscape suggests fall winds, according to an article I read recently. I feared the worst when we found out that we were in Pompeii. It seemed inevitable that the twenty-fourth of August was the correct date after all. Ironically, I had planned on proposing a run to definitely determine Vesuvius’s eruption date.” She added, “If it was Gabriel, he clearly forgot his own unspoken fifth rule—Always check your dates.”

  The chief asked with some disbelief, “He meant to drop us into the middle of the eruption, but miscalculated? What about the tremors we’ve been feeling?”

  “They must be just early precursors.”

  “Are we sure about this?” I asked. I noticed that my voice sounded rather high. “All this yo-yoing is starting to get to me. First we thought we were in a ghost zone, then we decided we weren’t, then we decided we were after all, and now it turns out we aren’t?”

  “Seems like it,” Kamal said.

  “But why did the basket return without us, then?” Abigail was sitting with her knees drawn up to her chest, her back against the wall.

  Helen shook her head. “That I do not know. But I do know this—if History had dropped us into a ghost zone because of a STEWie equipment malfunction or software glitch, it wouldn’t have gotten the date wrong and we’d be dead by now. Which proves, once and for all, that there is a human hand behind this. Perhaps Gabriel’s, perhaps not. Either way, I’m afraid we’re on our own. We might be stuck in the past,” she continued, her voice strengthening, “but whoever did this hasn’t succeeded in killing us.”

  “Hear, hear!” Kamal said. “Not yet, anyway.”

  “I’ve thought of something.” I hesitated, then went on reluctantly. “There have been rumors, well-substantiated ones, that Dr. Rojas and Dr. Mooney were up for a Nobel Prize next year. This sounds stupid—but perhaps Dr. Rojas didn’t want to share.”

  “How would Dr. Mooney’s dying change that?” the chief asked.

  “You can’t get a Nobel Prize posthumously. And there is money involved. Quite a bit of it.” My firm conviction that Dr. Rojas couldn’t possibly be the murderer temporarily forgotten, I scrambled to my feet. “If that’s the case, let’s make sure he doesn’t get the Nobel Prize. Let’s make sure that justice, at least, is served. There must be a way to send a message back and let everyone at St. Sunniva know what happened. After that—well, we can make our way to Rome and fashion some kind of lives for ourselves.”

  “Hear, hear!” Kamal repeated. “I’ve always wanted to try my hand at being a gladiator. Just kidding. What did scholarly types do in ancient Rome? Scroll copying? Library tending? Teaching little Romans?”

  Even the chief seemed carried away by the moment. I could tell that the state of inaction we had been subjected to since yesterday afternoon had started to get to him. He pushed himself up to his full six feet something. “Sounds like a plan. A note letting them know what happened, perhaps with the guilty party’s name. You say we’re safe for the moment, Helen?”

  “More than a moment. Until the fall, it seems, which will give us plenty of time to get to Rome.”

  By now we were all on our feet. Though we were doomed to stay in far time, it felt good to have a goal, even one as strange as trying to fashion a message that would outlast us by two thousand years.

  Kamal disposed of the cheese-and-cracker container in the plastic bag that Helen had brought along in her purse (“I don’t like to leave trash items, however small, behind me on time runs,” she’d told us) and said, “The crackers made me even thirstier. I’m glad the volcano won’t kill us any minute now, because it means we can concentrate on important matters of survival, like finding food and water.”

  He had a point. A weight had been lifted off our shoulders—being stuck in the past with no way of getting back home seemed like small potatoes in comparison to being caught in a mammoth eruption—but it had also brought into sharp relief our immediate bodily needs.

  We’d all taken turns using impromptu bathroom facilities in the overgrown area behind the tomb as the sun rising above the mountain
ridge to the east did away with the cool crispness of the dawn. We had no choice but it still felt wrong—we had essentially spent the night in a cemetery and were now defiling it. It didn’t make me feel any better that the area was already filled with plenty of trash and donkey and dog refuse.

  “Maybe there’s something useful in here.” Kamal was on his knees by the wooden chest. He lifted the vase off, looked inside, and tipped it over. Dried rose petals, their original white yellowed with time and desiccation, fluttered to the floor. Setting the vase aside, he swept a thin layer of dust off the chest lid with the hem of his T-shirt, and opened it. We all leaned forward to look. Two matching bronze pots and a stoppered bottle made of thick glass sat upright on a length of folded brown wool. “Lamps and”—he uncorked the bottle and took a sniff—“oil for the lamps. Olive oil.” He clicked his tongue in disappointment.

  “This is Roman Pompeii. It will have fountains,” Helen reassured him.

  “I’ll be glad to get away from this street of tombs,” I said. “It’s a little creepy.”

  “Romans always built their tombs outside town walls—the town itself is only for the living. We do something similar, if you think about it,” Helen said. “We place our dead in carefully tended cemeteries, strictly separate from the rest of our lives, only to be visited on anniversaries and special occasions. No one wants to be reminded of death.”

  Kamal had lifted out the two bronze lamps. They were shaped like a left foot and a right foot, with a loop handle in the heel and a hole in each big toe for the wick and flame. Next he pulled out the brown woolen cloth on which the lamps had sat. Underneath was a second one. He shook each of them in turn, raising a cloud of dust, and coughed. “Cloaks.”

  “Those things will come in handy,” the chief said. “The dead don’t need them. Survival is our highest priority.”