The Far Time Incident

by Neve Maslakovic

  “You’d do the same for us,” Abigail said.

  “You don’t know that. I might not.”

  She patted my shoulder. “I know you would, Julia. Besides, we all want to go home, right?”

  “We gotta come up with a better name than portable STEWie,” Kamal said in a show of bravado. “Mini-STEWie? STEWie Jr.? Slingshot?”

  “Slingshot it is,” Abigail concurred.

  “Slingshot, then,” said their professor, wiping soot off of his device and laying it on the floor. “If only I had a way of computing a safe trajectory. All I can do is point us in the right direction. I’ll try to do it in as few jumps as possible—” He stopped speaking as a fit of coughing overtook him. It was getting harder to breathe.

  “We have a problem,” I said, thinking of Secundus, who was so trusting of his gods and goddesses even in the face of total disaster. I nodded toward Sabina, who was whispering something into the goddess Diana amulet as she crouched by the professor, her face pale with fear and ash. Next to her, Celer panted as he tried to get enough air.

  “We’re not leaving her here,” said Abigail.

  “Maybe she was meant to walk out of town,” Kamal said like he didn’t believe his own words.

  “Are you suggesting we send her out there alone, into that shower of fire and rock?” Abigail protested. “Why don’t we just bring her with us?”

  “I have considered it,” Xavier said without looking up. “Nothing like that has ever been tried. Besides, if she is meant to live, we won’t be able to yank her from her own time period. And if she she’s meant to die, it still might not work. What if her remains—or what’s left of them—have been found already? The plaster cast of her body might reside in the museum at Naples for all we know.” He sounded gruff, but I knew better.

  An extended quake rumbled the ground under our feet, sending marble busts crashing onto the tomb floor. It seemed to go on and on, as if a subway train was passing beneath us. Debris and ash were piling fast in the archway; soon Nate and Helen’s way back in would be blocked.

  “We don’t have much time,” Dr. Mooney said. “If there’s any hope of saving us, it has to be now.” Hunched over the Slingshot, trying to shield it from debris, the professor entered commands into it in a rapid sequence.

  I was at the tomb door, trying to clear some of the fallen pumice with my good hand, having wrapped it in a cloth so I wouldn’t get burned. The gray projectiles piled up faster than I could work. “We can’t go yet, Nate said to give him fifteen minutes.”

  Abigail and Kamal were on their knees, helping me clear away the debris.

  “Look, all of you. This all started with my coming here,” Xavier said and went into a fit of coughing. “If I had left a note—cough—none of you would be here except for Sabina and Celer. I don’t want to be responsible for your deaths. We can’t wait any longer, we’ll be buried in here—cough, cough—there is no time—”

  A voice broke in through the opening, which we were just managing to keep clear.

  “I knew you were hiding something, Xavier. Didn’t you think this portable STEWie of yours was important enough to share with the rest of the scientific community?”

  Helen, balancing her orange purse on her head for protection. And behind her, Nate. They scrambled in over the pile of pumice, Helen first, then Nate.

  Xavier’s face lost some of its pallor. “I left the blueprints on my desk. I’m surprised that nobody found them.”

  “It’s been only a week or so,” I answered automatically, as if any of this mattered at the moment. “We haven’t had a chance to go through your stuff yet.”

  “We’re calling it the Slingshot,” Abigail said, helping Helen shake ash off her clothes.

  “I’m sorry to say I’ve lost almost all of our twenty-first-century items. I dropped the bundle with the clothes and shoes—everything got trampled. I was hurrying—I thought you might leave without me and then I ran into the chief here.” Helen’s eyes came to rest on Sabina’s dark head. “Oh, Xavier.”

  “We can’t leave her, Professor Presnik,” Abigail said with a determined look on her young face.

  Helen perceived the complexity of the problem at once. “It would severely violate time travel protocol in a way that, frankly, hasn’t even been defined yet, not to mention that it might just be wrong. Who are we to decide what would be better for her? And she can’t make the decision on her own—she doesn’t know how different our world is from hers.”

  “It’s better than—cough—dying,” I said as another rumble sent us all to our knees on the dirt floor.

  “I say we ignore protocol”—Nate grimaced, eying the roof—“and get the hell out of here. All of us.”

  “I second that,” I said.

  Abigail and Kamal were already standing by Sabina’s side.

  “Helen?” This from Xavier. He would leave the final decision to her. It had to be unanimous.

  “But will it even work?”

  “No way to know.”

  The corner above Nate’s head had started to sag dangerously. “Now or never,” he said.

  After a pause that lasted so long I wanted to scream, Helen said, “The goddess Fortuna favors the bold. I think we have to try, Xavier.”

  Xavier swore. “All right then. We’ll do this by experimentation. If it works, it works. Link hands, everyone!” he commanded.

  I grabbed Sabina’s hand to pull her to her feet and encountered something hard. She was clutching her Diana amulet so hard that her knuckles had gone white. Abigail grabbed Sabina’s other hand. “Hold on,” I reassured the girl as Abigail and I pulled her upright. “We’ll be out of here in a jiffy.” Sabina seemed to relax just a bit, perhaps trusting my tone even though she did not understand my words. I hoped I was right.

  “How many?” Kamal yelled out above the volcanic hail as we all formed a circle. He had picked up Celer, whose brown coat was streaked with gray ash, his normally droopy eyes wide and round with alarm.

  The professor was balancing the Slingshot on one arm. He hooked Helen’s elbow with the other. “We’ll need only one or two, I hope,” he shouted back.

  “One or two of what?” This from Nate.

  “Jumps—cough—into time’s ghost zones.”

  26

  The air was clean. I tore the cloth off my mouth, took a deep breath that sent a shudder down my spine, and collapsed into a fit of coughing. I was coated with dust and ash—it was on my clothes, in my throat, on my hair, in my nose.

  I willed myself to breathe normally. Small, regular breaths.

  Someone was coughing next to me. Sabina. My uninjured hand was still wrapped around hers and I released it, tapping her on the back to help clear her passageways. On her other side Abigail was doing the same thing. I whipped around to check for others and breathed a sigh of relief. We were all there in one long, curved, limb-connected line with Sabina and me at one end. Pillows and blankets tumbled off heads and shoulders. Lamps were dropped onto the sand under our feet as we all fought for breath and our minds adjusted to the sudden change in our circumstances.

  Wherever we were, it seemed to be just after daybreak; the sun warmed the marble temples and columns of a wide, sheltered harbor. Besides being wonderfully clean, the air smelled strongly of marine life. The sand felt soft under the leather of my sandals. For a moment I thought we had jumped forward in time to a calmer, posteruption beach on the Pompeian coast, but the mountain was nowhere to be seen and the sun arose to the right as we faced the sea, not to the left. And the sea—

  The sea was gone.

  The dry white sand under our feet met darker, wet sand five or six steps farther down the slope of the beach; beyond, gentle hills and valleys blanketed the exposed floor of the circular harbor. These were covered with writhing sea creatures, fish and starfish and octopuses. White-sailed wooden ships, beached, lay on their sides, towering over locals who milled around, gathering the defenseless sea life. A few nimble youths were trying to make their w
ay onto the deck of a ship that rested on its side, climbing up its mast like gymnasts on a slanted balance beam. At the entrance to the drained harbor, on an offshore island linked to the mainland by a causeway, stood a lighthouse, multitiered and gleaming white.

  History doesn’t really want to kill us, Xavier had explained back at the tomb, coughing as he readied the Slingshot. It doesn’t care that much. It just wants us out of the way. Getting us safely back to our own time period was the best way to accomplish that, even better than throwing us into an underground cave or in the middle of the desert.

  “Wouldn’t our bodies with their anachronistic trimmings cause a paradox if we ended up in a desert?” I’d asked as pumice pounded the tomb roof.

  “Not if they were quickly covered up by sand,” the professor had explained, fighting for breath with each word. “We’re like a mosquito—History might give a general swat in our direction, but we still have a chance. With every ghost zone we drop into, I’d say the odds are even that we’ll get through.”

  “So it’s a coin toss whether we’ll make it home or not.” Under the circumstances, those were odds I was willing to take.

  “No, weren’t you listening, Julia?” Kamal had interrupted. “Our chances of surviving a single ghost zone are one in two. If we fall into two ghost zones, our chances of making it out are one in four. If we fall into three, they’re one in eight—” And that was when Xavier had turned on his device with one last warning. “Surfing ghost zones is like a cog slipping in a mechanical clock—we’ll move in some combination of distance and time as I sling us forward.”

  The first jump had landed us here, wherever here was. We weren’t going to have much time to figure it out. In the forty seconds or so we had been on the beach trying to get our bearings, a roaring sound had been increasing in intensity. Beyond the waterless sea floor, a wall of something approached, something reflective that sparkled in the morning light. And it was moving fast and getting bigger by the second, about to engulf the harbor and its residents.

  “Get us out of here, Xavier!” Helen commanded from next to Nate.

  “I need a reference point in spacetime or we’re jumping blind—”

  “No time,” I said, my mouth dry. I felt Sabina squeeze my hand, hard.

  “Now, Xavier!”

  “Professor, I know where we are—Alexandria’s harbor—that’s the lighthouse—the Pharos!” Kamal shouted. Celer peered out from between his arms, his body rolled into a protective ball.

  “Alexandria, yes, the tsunami triggered by the undersea earthquake near Crete—but the year, Kamal, what year is it?”

  “Three hundred sixty-five—but I don’t know the day and month.”

  “Wait,” I said, “we can’t leave. If it’s Alexandria and the year is 365, we need to check if Hypatia has been born yet. The History of Science building plaque is still missing her birth year—”

  “Now, Xavier, the wave—”

  27

  We were on a narrow cobblestone street, the night sky a bright, smoky red, the air streaked with gently descending ash and glowing embers, a city ablaze all around us, carts upturned, streams of people heading every which way. My mind immediately went back to Pompeii, but then I caught sight of a cathedral, a large one with a missing spire and restoration work going on. The buildings all around it were burning and the wooden church scaffolding had just caught fire. Crackling orange flames shot up in the air, threatening to leap onto the timber beams of the cathedral roof at any moment.

  “Old—St. Paul’s,” Helen coughed out with effort. “The Great Fire of London—1666—we’ve jumped forward more than a thousand years. The church caught fire on the third day of the fire, September fourth—”

  Xavier was already entering commands into the Slingshot, shielding it with his body. Nate whacked at the professor’s tunic where an ember had landed—

  And then it was all like it had never been. Not if I did time jumps forever would I get used to this, I thought.

  And it was cool, blissfully cool, and after almost being burned alive twice, the cold felt so lovely on my face, on my hands, on my feet, that it took me the better part of a minute to realize that I was standing ankle deep in snow.

  We had arrived on train tracks. The snow was still coming down fast, the swirling, large flakes whipped into our faces by ferocious blasts of subzero-windchill air. We only had minutes before severe frostbite attacked our bare limbs and faces. A rotary or wedge plow engine had cleared off the majority of the snow, leaving behind a narrow tunnel—on either side of the tracks, snowbanks rose up to the height of a one-story house. I spun around in panic, certain that a train was about to strike us, but the snow had won: a brief respite in the wind revealed that the train was at a standstill farther down the valley on an offshoot of the main track. The black outline of the locomotive faced us, its smokestack smokeless and silent. The train and its railcars, which were stacked high with logs, had been abandoned until the blizzard passed. All there was around us was woodland and snow.

  Sabina, who had certainly never seen that much snow before, covered her face with her hands, as if the cold would go away if she didn’t look at the austere landscape. That we were back in Minnesota seemed likely, but where was the St. Sunniva campus and the safe haven it represented?

  Nate bent down and used his fedora to clear off a section of the track, then looked up in the direction of the train. “A white pine logging train,” he hazarded a guess. “Which would mean we’re past 1886 or thereabouts.”

  “We seem to be bouncing between continents,” Kamal shouted into the wind, shivering. “An interesting side effect. It would make a good thesis topic. Might suggest it to Jacob when we get back since he’s looking for something to work on. Man, is it cold.”

  Through chattering teeth, I said, “My great-grandparents, the Olsens, moved to the state in 1894—wouldn’t it be something if we followed the train tracks to the station and got our bearings and managed to find them—”

  “And my grandmother’s family might be nearby, on a Dakota reservation,” Nate said. “But we’re not dressed for the conditions. We could try to make it to the train and seek shelter inside the locomotive, make an attempt to restart the engine.”

  “A poor proposition in terms of our survival, I’m afraid.” Snowflakes stuck to Helen’s eyelashes and cheeks, leaving streaks in the ash and grime. Her lips were turning blue.

  “The device wasn’t designed for this,” Xavier hastened to defend his invention. “I built it for jumping from a known location, Pompeii, around the Mediterranean for some sightseeing. Simple. This—”

  “I am not criticizing your device, Xavier,” Helen explained through chattering teeth. “In fact, I’m rather impressed by it. It will revolutionize time travel.”

  Xavier looked like she couldn’t have given him a bigger compliment if she’d tried. He reached for the Slingshot.

  And we were at the edge of a lush, green forest, on the shore of a large lake—one of Minnesota’s 11,842, I hoped.

  “Oh—looks like we’re still in Minnesota, but it’s summer,” Abigail said, surveying the area around us as we shook the snow off our clothes and bodies. “The trees seem right. And there’s a lake. We must be home.”

  “It’s so warm and sunny and bright that I don’t care where we are,” Kamal said. He let Celer down on the ground and blew on his fingers to warm them up.

  I willed my limbs to move to get my circulation going. My fingers and toes were so icy they felt like they were on fire. We had jumped to a pleasant summer morning in the woods, one perfect for canoeing or hiking or fishing, if you liked that sort of thing. There were plenty of mosquitoes on the lake. That seemed about right for Minnesota, too.

  Sabina had already shaken off the cold and was bending down to pick a wildflower. Even Celer seemed a touch energized. He started sniffing around and gave a short bark at a bird. He trudged after Sabina as she followed a trail of wildflowers deeper into the woods. Seconds later, we hea
rd the girl cry out in surprise. I saw that she was trying to nudge a small, moss-covered stone with her foot. History was blocking her. She reached for a second wildflower instead, a thin-stalked purple iris, and I moved closer to get a look at the mossy rock. My hand wouldn’t even wrap around it. For a moment I thought it was because my fingers were still icy and frozen stiff. Then it hit me. For whatever reason, the stone needed to stay in place. Now that Sabina was no longer in her own time period, she was subject to the constraints of History, just as we were. Celer, too. And that meant that we weren’t home, not yet.

  “What is that?” the chief asked suddenly, pointing to something above the treetops.

  I followed the direction of his arm.

  There were two suns in the sky.

  The normal, yellow one, was already well up above the horizon. Higher still, unbelievably, was a second one—fiery, streaking across the blue sky, such a strange addition to the daytime celestial dome that I could not process what I was seeing. I couldn’t look for long—it was impossible to stare at the fiery object for more than a moment. Whatever it was, it was nearing, getting closer by the minute.

  “I know what it is,” said Abigail calmly. She spun Sabina around by the shoulders so that the girl wouldn’t hurt her eyes. “We’re not in Minnesota nor are we in our own time period, so we’ll have to jump again. I wish we had more of the Polaroid film,” she added.

  “Abigail?” Nate asked.

  “We’re in Siberia, in the Tunguska region. An asteroid—or comet—is about to explode above us and emit a shock wave that will level eighty million trees in an area of over two thousand square kilometers. The largest impact in recorded history.” She sneaked a glance up. “I gotta say, to me that looks more like an asteroid than a comet—but it’s hard to say if there’s a tail with all that streaking.”

  Calmly I pondered where the moss-covered stone that wanted to stay in place would end up after the catastrophic event was over.