The Far Time Incident

by Neve Maslakovic

  As the chief and I passed under the town gate, I noticed that it seemed a little askew, perhaps due to displacement from recent earthquakes. The square building next to it was the town’s water reservoir—the castellum aquae, Helen had called it. I could hear the gurgle of water as the aqueduct, which started in the mountains beyond the town and ran somewhere underneath our feet, emptied into the brick building. I reached out to touch one of the thin orange-red bricks of the castellum aquae, but was unable to do so, as if the mere gesture would have immediately pegged me as an intruder. We turned away and I asked the chief, “Which of our TTE professors do you suspect?”

  With the caution of a law enforcement officer, he said, “Anyone can pull the trigger under the right circumstances. If one of them felt their survival or long-desired goals were at stake—well. It might not even have been personal. Do you understand what I mean?”

  I didn’t answer. I was too caught off guard. It was clear that I’d have to throw all my preconceived notions about life in a Roman town out the window. I’d been picturing toga-clad citizens standing around in fancy gardens dotted with gleaming white statues, debating the finer points of law and aqueduct building. What I saw was much different. The town teemed with life—shops, eateries, and workshops lined the narrow cobblestone street on both sides, shaded by the awnings and wooden overhangs of the cream-colored buildings whose terra-cotta roofs we’d seen from Mount Vesuvius. The men wore tunics and the women had on long dresses and wraps of ochre, red, blue—the colors fresh, the cloth, though not fancy, nothing like the long-faded, drab, depressing historical costumes one sees in museums. There was not a white toga in sight. Probably they were reserved for the upper crust, people who didn’t do their own errand running. I expected that togas would be more plentiful around the Forum, which, according to Helen, stood on the opposite side of the town, facing the harbor.

  “Here,” said the chief. We waited for our turn at the fountain. A faucet protruded from the carving of a flask and emptied into a square tub. The water was cool and it tasted of the mountains, or so I imagined, as I cupped my hands under its flow and drank deeply, then splashed my face. As the chief took his turn, I noticed a peculiar wall painting above one of the shops. The subject matter made me raise an eyebrow but I decided not to point it out. “Let’s keep walking,” I suggested after Nate had splashed his face and taken his fill of the water. “The others will be waiting, but going in just a bit farther won’t hurt.”

  “Yeah.”

  It was easy to see why the others had taken their time, too.

  Brightly painted gods and goddesses stared at us from above shop entrances—a blue-gowned Venus on a chariot pulled by elephants, a plump Hercules wrestling a snake, Bacchus draped in a cloak of grapes, and a host of others I didn’t recognize. Some had clearly been composed by experts, and others were just crude sketches. The colors were bold and brilliant—rich ochre, cornflower blue, warm red with a hint of orange… There were also the other decorations, a lot of them. I decided I’d have to ask Helen about that later. The street seemed to be a main one, with deep ruts worn into the paving stones by long years of cart traffic. It gradually sloped downhill and was narrow by modern standards. It was lined with a raised sidewalk, and a half a dozen steps, or three hops on the large stepping-stones that served as pedestrian crossings, would get you across it. The building facades were painted reddish orange up to head height and were covered with notices and signs for businesses. I spotted long cracks in the plaster here and there—more damage from the recent or past earthquakes.

  Near a bakery (probably the one we owed money to) we stepped off the sidewalk onto a stepping-stone crossing, which allowed us to avoid the animal refuse, kitchen trash, broken pottery, fish bones, and other elements lodged among the cobblestones. The mixture had baked in the sun, releasing a foul smell. I imagined rain torrents rushing down the sloped street in the winter, washing the caked refuse in the direction of the sea.

  A narrow side lane caught our eye and we turned into it, dodging a bucketful of slops that had been thrown from above. The side lane was quieter, with no shops fronting it, only back doors. A mousy-looking man with a line of warts down his nose worked in the shade of one of the walls, squinting at a half-finished line of text, a brush in one hand, a small pot of paint in the other. Graffiti? Or perhaps an ad or an election poster? I was curious, but my legs suddenly felt heavy again, stiff, like I had been transported to a planet with a stronger pull of gravity. I came to a stop with no choice in the matter.

  “I’ll never get used to this,” the chief said next to me.

  “Maybe we stand out because the street is mostly deserted?” I suggested in a low voice as we made a U-turn. “Or the sign painter might be a crux person—someone nameless, an ordinary local who is key to history in some fashion that they themselves will never know. It’s almost like there’s an impenetrable bubble around such a person, I remember Dr. Mooney saying.”

  “Or maybe it’s simpler than that. We might have startled him and caused his hand to slip.”

  “Dr. Mooney would have probably pointed out that possibility, too.”

  As we merged again with the shoppers, merchants, and well-tanned children running about on the water-reservoir street, he asked, “You miss Mooney, don’t you, Julia?”

  It was the first time he had called me Julia. It was an odd moment for him to have chosen to do so, but life is full of odd, seemingly unimportant moments.

  “A dean’s assistant isn’t supposed to have favorites,” I said.

  “If Gabriel Rojas wasn’t the one who got rid of the professor, it must have been one of the others.”

  Earlier, he had asked me again about the door code to the TTE lab. “It’s like I told you before,” I’d replied. “The TTE professors and their grad students have the code, as well as our postdoc researchers. The cleaning staff. Professors and researchers from other departments with spots on the STEWie roster, like Helen here—”

  “My code didn’t work this time. Gabriel had to let me into the lab,” Helen had said.

  “New policy,” I’d explained, smacking my head with the heel of my hand. I’d completely forgotten to mention it, but the code had been changed after Dr. Rojas had found evidence of sabotage. The dean’s office had been giving out the new code on a strict need-to-know basis. “I’d just started giving out the new code to teams with runs scheduled this week, starting with yesterday’s for Dr. Baumgartner. Today’s run would have been Dr. Little’s. Tomorrow—Thursday back home—would have been Dr. May’s from the History Department, but I hadn’t gotten around to giving her the code.” I added, “None of the students had the new code yet.”

  “I did,” Kamal said. “Dr. Rojas gave it to me when I volunteered for this trip.”

  “Me, too,” Abigail said. “And I gave it to Jacob. But only because he needed to go in and out and he was on the authorized list.”

  “No one suspects Jacob Jacobson,” I said and continued talking as Nate opened his mouth to say something. “Did you give the code to any other students, Abigail? Sergei went home to St. Petersburg for the winter break, didn’t he?”

  “Dr. B wasn’t too happy with him. And Tammy is still working at home because of the broken leg. Skiing accident.”

  Sergei and Tammy were Abigail’s other office mates. Sergei was one of Erika’s graduate students, and Tammy was Dr. Little’s.

  The chief had summarized. “So besides us, three professors had the new code—Rojas, Baumgartner, Little—and one student, Jacob Jacobson. I’m confident of one thing,” the chief said, ending that conversation. “Between the five of us, we can figure out which of them did this and why. One of us must know something without realizing it.”

  It wasn’t until we were strolling down a sunny Pompeii street, trying to do our best to fit in, that I noticed the worry lines etched onto his face. It dawned on me that he felt responsible for the five of us being here. I understood how he felt. I felt guilty for having let Abigail
and Kamal climb into STEWie’s basket.

  The chief ticked off the names on his fingers. “Drs. Rojas, Baumgartner, Little; and one student, Jacob Jacobson. How I would love to sit each of them down and have a little conversation. As it is—let’s take them in turn. We’ve already talked about their backgrounds, but what are their flaws?”

  “Flaws?”

  “Yes. Everybody has at least one character flaw. Nothing wrong with that. It’s what makes us human. One of these days I’ll tell you all about my character flaws. Let’s start with Gabriel Rojas. From what I’ve been told, he’s a gentle man, happily married, devoted to his work and his wife and three grown sons. No one has said a bad word about him. So what’s his personal flaw?”

  I considered the mild-mannered, gray-haired Gabriel Rojas, who spent much of his time lost in thought. “Well, he tends to forget to show up for meetings and turn in department forms. That’s about as far as his failings go, I’d say… Except for one thing. He’s been reluctant to forgo the chalk and blackboard and embrace modern teaching methods like smartboards and online homework problems. He prefers to have his students take notes in class. By hand. He says it helps them think more deeply about knotty physics problems. We’ve tried suggesting that some changes might be in order, with no luck. I’ve heard that the students call him the Dinosaur. To be honest,” I added, “the dean hasn’t pushed very hard. The promise of a Nobel Prize doesn’t come to St. Sunniva often—we’re a small school. We take a lot of pride in Dr. Rojas’s and Dr. Mooney’s work. And with Dr. Mooney now gone—” I caught myself. My good opinion of him aside, Gabriel Rojas was still the most likely suspect. He had a motive, after all.

  We passed a street shrine for a goddess holding a shield and a spear. I didn’t recognize her, but her broad shoulders and height reminded me of the taller of our two junior TTE professors. “As far as Erika Baumgartner goes,” I said, “she’s eager to prove herself, helpful on committees, and stretched thin between her research load and her teaching load to the point where, rumor has it, her marriage is beginning to suffer.” I could sympathize with that, I thought but didn’t say. “She’s taken to going for long jogs each morning—cross-country ski runs lately. As to a flaw—that’s easy. An inability to ask for help, to admit that she has taken on too much.”

  “There’s no weakness in asking for help, but sometimes it’s hard to see that. Will it be easier for her to get tenure with Dr. Mooney gone?”

  “You mean because of the empty spot? Possibly. I know Dr. Mooney did suggest to her in passing that she might want to cut down on her teaching load, and I suppose she could have interpreted that the wrong way. She might have thought he was implying she couldn’t handle all the hats her position required—teaching, research, mentoring—and that he’d turn in a negative vote come tenure review.”

  “And Steven Little?”

  “Rude to the point of being insufferable, avoids committees assiduously, and, like Erika Baumgartner, stretched thin between his research load and his teaching load. I haven’t heard any rumors about his marriage, other than that he and his wife are expecting their first child in the spring. He came over from a postdoc position at Berkeley, where he was a small fish, but prolific in publishing journal articles.” The image of the clean-shaven professor hunched over his keyboard in his trademark button-down vest, fingers moving swiftly, came to my mind. “I know that Dr. Mooney and Dr. Rojas have tried to get him to see the importance of more involvement with students and the rest of the faculty, with mixed results. I would say that’s his flaw—Dr. Little always puts himself first. He often pounces on perceived inequalities in the assignment of STEWie roster spots.”

  “So he views the academic world as being an unfair place?”

  “Which it is, in many ways. Things can get very political.”

  “Like the assignment of roster spots?”

  “The assignments go through the dean’s office and I sometimes have to juggle them and soothe frayed nerves, yes.”

  “And finally, Jacob Jacobson,” he said as we shook our heads at a toothless jewelry hawker who had approached us hopefully, a multitude of medallions and amulets—gods, goddesses, and gladiators—hanging around his neck and both arms. He moved on down the street, continuing to call out the dubious merits of his wares.

  “Jacob’s navigating the pitfalls of graduate school as best as he can, I think. It’s too early to say if he’ll find a place for himself in academia. Not everyone is cut out for a PhD, and sometimes it’s not even a matter of academic ability. Dr. Rojas aside, the stereotype of the mild-mannered professor working serenely in his lab for years on end doesn’t apply anymore—if it ever did. Once Jacob chooses a research topic, he’ll have to become skilled at actively seeking funds, guarding his results, publishing as much as possible…and somewhere in there he’ll also need to learn how to run a lab and teach.”

  “And Jacob’s flaw?”

  “Too much twe—tweeting—”

  I had come to a halt so abruptly the security chief ran into me.

  “Julia, what—”

  A familiar-looking donkey cart, loaded with sacks and pottery jars, was weaving its way up the street. The driver was walking beside the cart, his hand on the harness of one of the animals. The donkeys’ hooves moved in rhythmic unison, but while the chestnut-colored one gave the impression of weary acquiescence, the spotted one occasionally strained against its harness as if it wanted to move faster. The bearded figure accompanying them seemed to be singing into the spotted donkey’s ear, perhaps to calm him down.

  I elbowed the security chief in the side and shaded my eyes against the sun in an effort to see better.

  “What’s gotten into you?” Nate whispered.

  Then he, too, saw—or rather heard—what had stopped me in my tracks. The donkey guide’s merry song was accompanied by the jingle of cart bells and the clang of iron-wood wheel on stone pavement.

  I didn’t recognize the tune that came to my ears. The words, however—

  There’s no such thing as empty space

  it jitters

  it foams

  Wherever you roam

  There’s no such thing…

  16

  I opened my mouth to speak but no words came out. It wasn’t that I was struck silent by the sight or at a loss for words. I knew exactly what I wanted to say—the words simply would not come out. My tongue was frozen, immobile. In a flash I realized what the problem was. History. I had been about to shout at the top of my lungs, in the middle of a crowded Pompeii street, in English.

  I took a step forward and raised my hands.

  The cart ground to a halt. The spotted donkey, its nostrils flaring, brayed a hee-haw at me.

  I saw Nate open his mouth, then close it again. He looked at the bearded figure with its hand on the spotted donkey’s mane, and back at me. I realized he had never met the professor in person and made an attempt to introduce them. The words would still not come out.

  Standing still in the middle of the street like statues frozen in time, we were starting to attract attention. A raggedy child of indeterminate gender tugged on my sleeve and the donkey guide took a coin from the leather bag on his belt and passed it to the child, who gleefully took it and moved on.

  The donkey guide, for his part, seemed positively annoyed to see us. He gestured with his head for us to follow him.

  “Dammit,” the bearded figure said with feeling after we turned the corner into the lane where the sign painter had been, which was now empty, a single line of text left behind drying in the sun. “I thought I made it quite clear that I didn’t want to be found.”

  17

  “Nate,” I said, “this is Dr. Xavier Mooney, our missing TTE professor. Xavier, this is Campus Security Chief Nate Kirkland. I don’t believe you’ve met.”

  The men shook hands.

  Xavier Mooney, professor of physics and time travel engineering, saw me staring at his beard and said, “How long has it been since I left, Julia?�
��

  “Eight days,” the chief answered for me.

  That didn’t seem quite right. Xavier’s gray hair, usually trimmed to a close crop, hung below his ears. He sported a salt-and-pepper beard and a deep tan. The tan carried from his face and arms past his thigh-length tunic to his bare legs, all the way down to his feet, which were enclosed in strappy leather sandals. He smelled vaguely like fish stew.

  “Dr. Mooney, did I understand you correctly? You came here of your own accord?” Nate looked over the two donkeys and the cart’s cargo—the cloth sacks and tall earthenware vessels—as if the answer might lie there.

  “Let’s drop the titles, doctor and such, shall we? We’re a long way from the exalted halls of academia, unless you count the Greeks, of course, but Greece is far from here. Yes, I’m here of my own free will. I don’t need rescuing. Now go away.”

  “We’d like to,” I said. “It’s a bit more complicated than that.”

  Kamal was the first to notice the cart and its driver. He and Abigail were sitting cross-legged just inside the doorway of the Nigidii tomb. Abigail had her Polaroid camera out, as if they’d been furtively taking snapshots of passersby. Kamal got to his feet and nudged Abigail with one foot. I saw her mouth the word What? and then turn in our direction, the camera in hand. She slowly rose to her feet.