The Far Time Incident

by Neve Maslakovic

  Xavier grabbed the Slingshot off the ground, where he’d dropped it as he stretched his fingers in the warmth of the summer morning, and barked, “Abigail, what date, remind me?”

  “June seventeenth, 1908,” she said promptly.

  “You’re sure?”

  “No, wait, that’s the Julian calendar. Gregorian—June thirtieth. And it’s just after seven in the morning. Good to have previous experience with a subject, right?” she added.

  “Previous experience—yes, of course,” I said.

  “Julia?” said Helen.

  “Maybe she’s becoming delirious,” Abigail whispered loudly, as if I couldn’t hear her. “Her hand looks really bad.”

  “I’m not delirious. Ask me later. Let’s get out of here before the sky falls in.”

  “Unless we want to stick around to see if any large fragments will hit the ground?” Abigail suggested. “It’s a matter of some debate, whether the whole thing exploded above and there was just a huge shock wave, or if a piece actually impacted—”

  “Julia, are you all right?” I heard someone say as wooziness overtook me and I staggered where I stood, which was in a columned square of some sort, in a pleasant night. Suddenly there were arms supporting me, steadying me as I sat down abruptly. I felt odd, both hot and cold at the same time, and my head swam and swayed. Helen felt my forehead under my hair. “Julia, you’re burning up—”

  “He did it,” I said, struggling to break through the fog in my brain. “Dean Sunder did it.”

  28

  “Where are we?” asked Abigail. “Back in Pompeii? This looks like the Forum.”

  Sabina certainly seemed to think so. She looked around the town square, its columns like blank, branchless trees in the night, with a mixture of relief and apprehension. The Siberian wildflowers fell out of her hands. I heard her inhale deeply, as if confirming that the scent of this place matched home. The moonless night didn’t reveal any details beyond the columns, just vague outlines of stone walls and archways. Sabina’s fingers clutched the amulet of Diana over her ash-stained dress, as if the place might disappear if she let go. Celer, by her feet, seemed spooked, like he didn’t like being out at night. He inched as close as he could to Sabina’s leg and started nervously chewing on the wildflowers.

  “Did we go backward for some reason, Professor? Back to a pre-eruption Pompeii?” Kamal said slowly. “We do seem to be jumping all over the place.”

  “The device is turning out to be far less stable than I anticipated, but we should not have gone backward, no.”

  “We haven’t gone backward.” Helen carefully stepped over to examine one of the columns. She touched it gently. “It is the Forum. We’re right by the temple of Jupiter, but the decorations are faded and mostly gone. There are weeds growing all around. This site has been excavated. We must be back in our own time.”

  Xavier heavily sat down on the ground by me, as if a large weight had just fallen off his shoulders. The Callback landed between us with a thump.

  “You did it, Professor. You brought us back,” Abigail said. She gave Sabina a hug as Kamal punched the air with a whoop.

  I felt the stress leave my body. We had made it—defeated a volcano, a tsunami, a fire, a blizzard, an asteroid hurtling toward Earth…really, History itself. We were home. Now that my eyes had adjusted to the darkness, I could see the outlines of several modern-looking crates stacked by the temple of Jupiter, its columns bare and stunted, its glory long since faded. The marble pavement of the Forum was gone, too, dirt in its place. The equestrian statues that had stood regally in the front of the temple were missing, taken by the volcano or looters, or perhaps safe in some museum. Antibiotics were nearby and so was a good meal, a bath…and an airport. And the first thing I would do when we got back home would be to march, not into Dr. Little’s office, but into Dean Sunder’s, and look him straight in the eye.

  Kamal and Abigail were giving each other high-fives and trying to teach Sabina, who looked utterly confused, how to do them. In her halting Latin interspersed with English, Abigail explained to Sabina that we were all voyagers in time and that she was one now, too. A traveler. Viator.

  Sabina said something back, and Helen translated for me as she lowered herself to the ground by the neighboring column. “Sabina made a vow to Diana asking her to watch over us and keep us safe. Apparently Diana complied.” She added, “It’s too dark to make our way out of the ruins now. We’d be risking broken ankles. Julia, do you think you can wait another hour or two? It’s almost dawn. The site guides and tourists will start arriving soon.”

  “I’ll be fine.” I hoped that was true.

  “Did you say you think Lewis Sunder is to blame for all of this? Do you have proof?”

  “I remembered what’s been nagging at me. It was such a small thing. The day it all started—the day you disappeared, Xavier—I went into Dean Sunder’s office to bring him the press statement. The dean was at his office window with an old thesis in his hands. He wasn’t perusing it—he was studying it. I assumed it was yours, Xavier, but it had a red cover.”

  “What did?”

  “The thesis.”

  “I’m not following.”

  “You all worked together for a while, didn’t you, Xavier—you and Gabriel and Lewis? He graduated with a physics PhD a couple of years before you and Gabriel, didn’t he?”

  “That was a long time ago. We weren’t having much luck with our experiments and our funding had dried up. Lewis got fed up with having to scrounge for funds in a speculative scientific field—time travel was a technology that few people felt had any promise—and went with a safer topic. Good for him. Once he had tenure, he decided he could help out—he’s good at getting people to see the big picture when it comes to research and donate big—so he ended up overseeing all of the science departments. I’d say he’s been very good at it. What are you thinking he did, Julia?”

  “I think he got the idea of a copycat accident while we were still trying to figure out what had happened to you. What year did you graduate?”

  “Nineteen eighty-one.”

  “Exactly. That’s what I’m saying. Your thesis would have had a blue cover. The school had switched to blue the year before.”

  “How do you know that?” Nate asked.

  “I work in the dean’s office. Believe me, things like this come up all the time.” I added, “Was he rereading his thesis to give himself a refresher course on the physics, to help him compute the Pompeii coordinates? Does that even make sense, that he would forget the practical issues of something he himself had worked on as a graduate student?”

  “You’d be surprised,” Kamal said. He and Abigail had wandered over to listen in to our conversation while Sabina puzzled over the transformation of the Forum. “I myself have forgotten research ideas I jotted down only weeks before.”

  “So he wasn’t reading my thesis,” Xavier said. “My thesis wouldn’t have helped him in figuring out how to send you to Pompeii. It was a first pass at a workable STEWie design. Quite wrong, as it turned out. His own thesis addressed spacetime coordinate systems without touching on the question of time travel. Like I said, it was a safer topic at the time. But that’s hardly proof of anything.”

  I thought of something else. “And at first he wasn’t enthusiastic about the idea of the chief going on a test run, but then suddenly changed his mind. I thought it was because he wanted the investigation over as quickly as possible, but now I wonder.”

  Nate was leaning against the nearest column, his face concealed by darkness. “Did you ever suspect him?” I asked.

  “You said all door codes were made available to the dean’s office in case of an emergency. Dean Sunder had access to the code to the TTE lab, just as you did, Julia, did he not?”

  “Yes, why didn’t you remind me of that?”

  “I wanted to give your subconscious a chance to work on the problem.”

  “But why would Dean Sunder do such a thing?” Abigail said.
After some circling, Celer made himself comfortable by her feet.

  “Julia?” the chief asked.

  “My subconscious may have spewed forth instances of Dean Sunder’s odd behavior, but as far as motive goes…” I remembered his list of the usual suspects: Greed. Jealousy. Desire. Fear. Desperation. A list. Excellent. I could work with that. Sitting down—and being safe—was helping, but I still wasn’t feeling all that great. “Not fear,” I said, then added, thinking of the dean’s suave demeanor, “and not desperation either.” He was successful man, comfortable in his own skin, or at least seemed to be. “Jealousy and desire—perhaps. But I think, yes, greed might fit the bill.” I was thinking of the one thing that Dean Sunder could be said to be passionate about.

  “Money?” the chief said.

  “More precisely, Ewan Coffey. He makes regular donations to the school and on occasion has given staggeringly large amounts. Hence the Coffey Library. Part of your research assistant funding, Abigail—and yours, Kamal—has come from his donations.” I saw Abigail’s eyes widen at the news of this personal connection she shared with Ewan Coffey. Xavier already knew this, having been on the receiving end of the funding. “However, he’s not always careful with his checks. Some have reached my desk with the ‘to’ field blank. There’s a large check on the way for STEWie’s new generator.” I added, “If Dean Sunder held on to it—we do send the actor a yearly summary for tax purposes, so a discrepancy might have been caught then—”

  “Unless the dean planned to doctor the paperwork,” Helen said, “so that Julia got the blame.”

  “If that’s true, he wasn’t trying to get rid of all of us—just you, Julia.” Nate sounded angry. I was rather angry myself. So. The dean had gotten fed up with procuring funds for others and had decided to keep some for himself. Maybe he wanted to upgrade his BMW to a Porsche or something.

  “It could be that he didn’t mean to kill us,” Abigail suggested, in what I thought was a far-too-kind interpretation of the events.

  Apparently Helen agreed with me, because she said crisply, “He sent us straight into what he thought was a volcanic eruption. Is there any way he could have found out your destination, Xavier? Did you leave any notes or calculations lying around?”

  “I did run into him one time at the Coffey Library—literally. I dropped an armful of books on Pompeii, and he helped me pick them up. He is also the only one who knew about my illness. I suppose he could have put two and two together when I disappeared and thought I committed suicide by sending myself into a ghost zone. You’re going to have to work harder than that to convince me he’s guilty, though.”

  “There’s one easy way of settling the matter. We’ll know when we see the look on his face after we walk through his office door,” I said, conscious of a note of spite in my voice.

  “Right.” This from Nate.

  Helen made herself more comfortable, her back propped against a column. “Be that as it may, there’s nothing we can do about it right now. We might as well all snatch an hour of sleep.”

  “I’m too hyped up to sleep, what with all the ghost zones and Dean Sunder maybe having tried to kill us,” Kamal said, opening his leather satchel, which had made it through with us in one piece. He crumpled a blank page out of Abigail’s notebook into a ball and tried to play catch with Celer without too much success.

  Sabina gave a small shrug at the strangeness of things and scrunched up against the base of a statue and closed her eyes.

  Nate sank down with his back against my column, his long legs stretched out in front of him.

  “Nate,” I whispered after a moment, watching Sabina’s gently rising and falling breast, “I’ve been thinking about death.”

  “You’ll be fine, Julia. We’re only a few short hours away from getting help.” He reached over and gave my arm a squeeze.

  Well, it was nice of him to be reassuring and all, but he’d misunderstood me. “I mean death in general,” I explained. “I don’t see how an afterlife would work.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “For one thing, what age would you be? And would you have all your memories, even of the moment of your death?” I was thinking of Secundus and Faustilla, but didn’t want to say so; in the eerie dark of the silent and deserted town, it felt as if their spirits hung over us. “Or maybe it wouldn’t matter how you had died because you’d arrive there at your best, at whatever time in your life you had peaked in happiness? But that would mean you’d lose all your later memories.” The questions poured out fast and uncensored. “And would you have a form? Hands to touch things with, a mouth to talk with…and if you did, what would you talk about after that first day of greeting long-departed family members and friends?” Secundus’s proud face came to my mind again, and Faustilla, with her dried, cracked heels and her scheming, unsuccessful manipulation of her son. “And would there be such a thing as a day? Or would you be stuck there indefinitely exchanging pleasantries? Are you allowed to be catty in heaven, to gossip, to be curious about how things work and ask questions?”

  “Can’t say I’ve ever thought about it, Julia.”

  “And if you found you didn’t need to use those things—hands, eyes, curiosity, reasoning skills—would you be completely alien to yourself?”

  I saw him give a small shrug in the dark. “Maybe that’s the answer. Maybe after death we end up on some distant planet in a faraway galaxy. Formless aliens, interacting with others of our kind, feeding on ideas. And then in their afterlife, they turn into stiff creatures with arms and legs who require organic food and sunshine, and so on in an endless cycle.”

  The levity of his answer punctured my dark mood. With all my heart, I hoped mother and son had made it through the eruption, but either way they were long gone now. All that was left of Pompeii were its aged stones and dusty roads. “Well, look for me when we’re both idea-gobbling aliens then,” I said and closed my eyes for a moment. Soon, the sound of Celer and Kamal playing faded into the distance.

  I woke up with a start. Dawn was still a while off, but the others seemed to be awake and on their feet.

  “That plane is kind of loud, isn’t it?” Abigail was saying.

  A plane. I realized that I’d been missing twenty-first-century sounds, ordinary ones like the hum of car engines and the music blaring from students’ iPods. Only this plane seemed to be droning above us steadily rather than roaring by.

  “Sounds like an old plane,” Nate said uneasily. “Is it possible we’re not quite home yet?”

  The faint drone of the plane had been steadily getting louder.

  “You mean we’ve fallen into another ghost zone? Another Pompeii eruption?” Abigail sent a worried glance at Sabina, who had opened her eyes at the commotion.

  “Could be. The last eruption was in 1944,” Xavier said. “But I don’t believe it affected the town. Helen, what do you think?”

  She just shook her head, uncertain.

  Nate was looking up into the moonless night sky. “That’s too loud to be just one plane—”

  Before he could finish, the sound of muffled thunder reached us.

  The thunder went on and on, in a repeating fashion, not at all like the open boom that had spelled the end of Sabina’s Pompeii.

  “Dammit,” said Xavier. “I know what this is and it isn’t another eruption. Helen, the Allied bombing—”

  “Of 1943? Yes, that’s got to be it.”

  Xavier reached for the Slingshot. “Helen, do you happen to know the day, the month?”

  BOOM.

  “Only that it took place sometime in the fall and that a hundred-some bombs fell on Pompeii. The Allies thought the German army was encamped here or storing ammunition. There was even a rumor that the Allied Powers wanted to bomb Vesuvius to set off an eruption—”

  “All right, so 1943, sometime in the fall,” Nate interrupted. “Great. Let’s get out of here, Dr. Mooney.”

  “Knowing the month would help—”

  “How prec
ise do we have to be?” I asked as the muffled thunder grew closer.

  The strain was beginning to wear on Xavier and he was showing it. “How precise do you want to be in arriving home? There is no danger of arriving early—History won’t let us travel into a time where we already exist—but I don’t want to badly overshoot home time either. If that happens, we might arrive after everyone we know is dead—”

  BOOM.

  “But we’ve been gone only three days. Won’t that be just a couple of hours in the lab?” I had been picturing us dealing with Dean Sunder before he even had a chance to leave his office for the day. “Or would it be more like a week, since it’s your basket that we’re hitchhiking in?”

  Even in the dark, I could see Xavier shaking his head as he readied the Slingshot. “We’re going to be coming in at such a high energy level that I’m afraid all bets are off. We can’t make any more intermediate ghost zone steps—I’m going to be born in seven years. It’s now or never. One last jump.”

  29

  For a moment I thought that it was late fall and that we had missed both the spring and the summer semesters. Then I saw the green buds on the trees and the geese bobbing on the lake, its level swollen from the melting snow and the spring rains. Late April or early May, I judged. If we had gotten the year right, we had been gone several months. We were ankle deep in water among the reeds at the north end of Sunniva Lake, by the boat dock.

  We must have been a sight to behold as we clambered out of the lake, our sandals dripping, our tunics and dresses stained with ash from Vesuvius and the Great Fire of London, our hair (and probably our expressions) wild. We drew a few strange looks as we took the path toward the science buildings, followed by a squat, slow-moving dog, but we did not get a lot of odd looks. St. Sunniva was a university campus, after all.

  “Jacob,” I said to Nate as we neared the Time Travel Engineering building, our feet leading us straight there as if we were being pulled by a homing beacon. I’d forgotten all about my throbbing hand and was focused on only one thing—finding proof of Dean Sunder’s guilt.