The Feline Affair (An Incident Series Novelette)

by Neve Maslakovic

  “To be honest, as life philosophies go I’ve heard worse,” I said.

  Dr. Oshiro wrinkled her brow. “I can’t tell if his heart is in the right place and he’s just not seeing the problem or what.”

  “Hmm,” Chief Kirkland said, as if his opinion fell on the or what side of the equation.

  I was with him on that. “I can think of a reason why he might be doing it.”

  Chief Kirkland glanced over at me in some surprise but only said, “Yes, Ms. Olsen?”

  I was thinking of Schrödinger again and of his somewhat unusual lifestyle. “Dr. Cook is a rising star in his field, right, Dr. Oshiro?”

  “That he is.”

  “Maybe he’s working on acquiring a few quirks. You know, to cement his reputation as a brilliant, nonconventional scientist with a personality that makes for interesting media coverage.”

  Chief Kirkland looked doubtful. But Dr. Oshiro gave a small shrug. “Could be. Personally, I don’t have time for quirks, my own or other people’s.”

  “I can charge him with petty theft,” Chief Kirkland said. “But you don’t want me to do that, do you.”

  It wasn’t a question, but Dr. Oshiro still shook her head. “I don’t want to get embroiled in an unnecessary philosophical standoff over three sandwiches and a salad or two. We may just have to put up with it until he leaves. He’s here for the summer, so we only have a few weeks to go. It’s an inconvenience no doubt, but at least it’s an inconvenience with an expiry date. We’ll spread the word—unofficially—that everyone should keep their lunches at their desk until the end of the semester.”

  “Perhaps we could claim the fridge is malfunctioning and needs to be serviced,” I suggested. “It’s probably true anyway. How long has it been there? Twenty years? Thirty?”

  A figure appeared on the taped footage on Chief Kirkland’s screen. Based on the sad droop of the man’s shoulders, it was Andreas, and he had just discovered his food was missing. After checking all of the fridge shelves twice, he ended up getting something from the vending machine. Watching the video gave me an idea. “After Dr. Cook leaves at the end of the semester, how about if the dean’s office organizes an unofficial get-together for everyone in the building? To make it up to those who lost food items. The dean’s office will supply the refreshments. I’m sure Dean Sunder will be on board with the plan.”

  Dr. Oshiro nodded her approval. “Yes, thank you, Julia.”

  After thanking Chief Kirkland for his efforts, she moved to her computer, where work awaited. Chief Kirkland and I took the hint.

  “Well, can’t say I like how this ended,” Chief Kirkland commented after the building doors had closed behind us. “I hate seeing people get away with something like this.”

  “Welcome to academia,” I said.

  The nature of time travel was such that Dr. Mooney’s team would be back shortly. That is to say, the few hours, perhaps half a day, that they would need on-site in Oxford would pass much quicker in the lab—in mere minutes. So there was no point in me going back to my office, not really. I had almost changed my mind at the very end and transferred my name to the NO CAT side, but remembering Chief Kirkland’s words, I held off. Dr. Mooney and two grad students—Kamal Ahmad and Abigail Tanner, both of whom I knew slightly from various student issues that had come up—had gone to check Schrödinger’s home for a potential cat. If needed, they would also visit his mistress’s house to see if she had a cat. Officially, their task was to attempt to get footage from one of Schrödinger’s Oxford lectures.

  I took the opportunity to take a closer look at the mirrors and lasers that formed STEWie’s heart. The mirrors were of all sizes, like nesting dolls, except that they were turned every which way. I had never noticed that before. I walked over to the whiteboard with the YES, CAT/NO CAT wager list, which had gotten longer in anticipation of the trip, and wandered past it to the nearest wall, which was plastered with a medley of photos from previous runs. It was quite the pastiche—ancient Sumerians rubbed photo elbows with nineteenth-century Peruvian guano farmers.

  A warm whoosh of air made me look up. Dr. Mooney and the two grad students stepped off the platform looking tired and hungry but triumphant. The two men were dressed in suits appropriate for the era, and Abigail had on a pale-gray dress. Dr. Mooney held something up in the air with a flourish. A cell phone. “Here it is, Julia.”

  “You got it? I was—we—were right, and there was a cat?” I was ready to jump up and down with excitement.

  “Abigail here managed to sneak all the way up to the house window.”

  “Mine were the only shoes that didn’t leave noticeable footprints in the flower bed,” Abigail explained.

  “Yeah,” Kamal said. “Let’s put it down to the make of your shoes and not the fact that you’re smaller, lighter and, er, thinner than either Dr. Mooney or me.”

  “It’s all a matter of weight distribution.”

  “Don’t talk to me about weight,” said Kamal, loosening his tie and taking in a large breath of air.

  The two grad students left the lab to change, carrying on with their friendly banter all the while. While Dr. Mooney dealt with the more official footage, taken at Schrödinger’s physics lecture, I took a look at Abigail’s cell phone video. It began with a shot of a brick house on a leafy street, then narrowed in scope as Abigail approached the first-floor window, which stood wide open, as if the occupants wanted to let in the fresh air.

  A bespectacled man with dark hair sat at a neat desk, his face in profile to the window. He was bent over a book, one of several open ones that covered the desktop, with a notebook on one side. Occasionally, he would pause in his reading to jot down a thought. I pictured Abigail squatting under the window, holding her phone just above the sill. The footage shook slightly, then steadied again.

  At one point the man looked over one shoulder in the direction of the open window, as if suddenly aware that someone was watching him. Since Abigail was in period-correct wear, it was possible for her to be seen but unlikely—spotting a stranger lurking in his garden would have no doubt impacted the course of Schrödinger’s day. Schrödinger seemed to shake the feeling off and gave his attention back to the reading. But he was in the background. Closer to the camera—and thereby larger in the video feed—a row of potted plants lined the windowsill. Between these plants, directly in the path of the sunlight streaming inside, lounged an elderly cream-colored cat. It lay on its back, its not-insignificant belly up in the air, its paws loose in every which direction. It was the mellowest cat I’d ever seen and nothing like the energetic cats that had populated my strange dream. Every so often one of its eyes would fly open and then slowly close.

  “Meet Milton,” Dr. Mooney said.

  “Schrödinger’s cat is named Milton?” I whispered back, as if the man at the desk could hear us. I had been imagining—if there was a cat—that its name would be Quantum or Atom or some German version thereof.

  “The Schrödingers would hardly have fled Berlin with a cat in tow. Milton must have been the house cat at 24 Northmoor Road. He was probably already there when they moved in.”

  “How do you know his name is Milton?”

  “Just watch.”

  Another minute or two passed, during which nothing much happened except the cat’s paws twitching occasionally in its dream state. The man at the desk sighed and shook his head as if in exasperation. After carefully marking his place with a used postcard, Schrödinger put down the book and closed it. He pulled his chair back and tidied a bit, then commented in the direction of the cat in a very slight German accent, “Ah, Milton, my friend. These matters do not trouble you, do they? This cannot be the real state of affairs, uncertainty affecting tangible and visible things…”

  Milton certainly didn’t seem troubled by anything tangible or not, as he didn’t even bother to acknowledge the mention of his name by waking up. He had an air about him of the perfect test subject, one so deeply asleep that he could not ruin any possible exp
eriment under the sun by messing with its mechanisms.

  I was eager to hear more of what the famous physicist had to say, but the door opened, and I had a brief glimpse of a woman entering the study before Abigail’s hand—and thus the camera—shot down fast, as if History had pushed it down, which it might well have done.

  The video cut out with one last shot of the cat lying on the sill.

  Somewhat reluctantly, I handed the cell phone back to Dr. Mooney. As he set about importing the video footage into the lab computers and making a backup copy before emailing it to Dr. Rojas, I voiced a thought. “Do you think that was the very moment that Schrödinger devised his experiment? Right there when he got to his feet and saw Milton on the windowsill?”

  “Could be…but I doubt it. That would be the time-travel equivalent of sticking a hand into the proverbial haystack and pricking it on a needle by accident. If we mounted a camera inside the study at 24 Northmoor Road and left it there for a while, popping in occasionally to retrieve footage, we’d probably catch Schrödinger setting his experiment to paper. But as to when he thought of it…Let us instead say that this was a moment, one of many that ultimately led Schrödinger to formulate his concerns via a steel box and Milton’s theoretical twin.”

  6

  I ran into Dr. Mooney again about a week later, outside Hypatia House.

  “How did Dr. Rojas take it? Losing the bet?” I asked.

  “He’s buying me lunch this afternoon. I think we’re about fifty-fifty on the lunches—he keeps closer track of the score than I do. Here—I stopped by to give you something.”

  He handed me a picture of Milton, a screenshot from the video just before it had cut out. One of Milton’s eyes was open and focused in the direction of the camera, almost as if the cat had sensed Abigail’s and the others’ presence at the very end. The professor went on, “By the way, what happened with your fridge phantom, Julia?”

  “He’s been found. Dean Sunder and Dr. Oshiro decided not to do anything about it.”

  “Ah. Someone who’s here at St. Sunniva for only a short time?” There was a note of understanding in his voice. He had undoubtedly seen stranger things in his three and a half decades in academia.

  “Something like that.”

  “Well, at least you know who it is. Sorry to cut our chat short, but I’m on my way to the Coffee Library for some research books I want to peruse over the weekend.”

  “For a future STEWie run?”

  “It’s nothing that’s on the roster yet. Just early preparations for one I’m planning to take soon.”

  As he set off with a friendly wave in the direction of the library, I felt a slight but unmistakable pang of envy. All of it—the Shakespeare footage Dr. Presnik had proudly released to the media, the photo in my hand of a cat named Milton—seemed like, well, great fun. STEWie had been described in many ways in PR releases, research proposals, and submissions for roster spots (“a new, textbook-changing paradigm” was the example that came to mind), but isn’t that what it all came down to? Yes, STEWie was advancing our knowledge and understanding of the past, but underneath it all…

  Back in my office I slid into my desk chair and opened my mailbox to find a dozen emails with new STEWie proposals for me to go through. The ones that had all the necessary forms and attachments would go on to Dean Sunder. I sent the first of the proposals to the printer.

  It had been quite a week. I had helped solve a campus crime, along the way discovering that our new chief of campus security didn’t seem to like me very much for some reason. Well, that would sort itself out in time hopefully. I gave a small shrug and got up to fetch the printout under the watchful eye of Milton, who stared at me from the corkboard to which I had tacked his photo. I slid back into my chair to read over the proposal. Dr. Baumgartner was asking for an eighteenth-century run to France for some data on the chemist Lavoisier. She had secured a grant, there was a firm research topic she wished to address, and she was planning to take three students. If Dean Sunder signed off on her proposal, Dr. Baumgartner and her team would be on the roster in mid-December. It all seemed in order, so I collected the pages together with a paper clip and set the proposal aside to start a stack for the dean.

  I sent the next proposal to the printer and took a cookie from the jar. Perhaps I was more on the sidelines than I would like to be, but the bottom line was that I was lucky to be part of the STEWie project, even in a limited capacity. It would have to do.

  Then again the future was just budding History, and if there was one thing that had already become clear from STEWie runs, it was this: History never failed to surprise. I had reasoned correctly that Schrödinger had owned a cat…but a cat named Milton? Who could have guessed that?

  I reached for a second cookie. The future was an as-yet-unopened box brimming with possibilities, a Schrödinger experiment of its own. There was no way to predict what lay in store until the box was opened.

  But in my wildest dreams I could not foresee what was to come.

  ###

  READ BOOKS 1-3 IN THE INCIDENT SERIES:

  THE FAR TIME INCIDENT (BOOK 1) A deadly accident rocks St. Sunniva University's time-travel lab and it's up to science dean's assistant Julia Olsen and campus security chief Nate Kirkland to figure out what went wrong. When the investigation points towards murder, Julia and Nate find themselves caught in a deadly cover-up—one that strands them in ancient Pompeii on the eve of the eruption of the world’s most infamous volcano. Now Julia and Nate must outwit history itself and expose the school’s saboteur before it's too late.

  THE RUNESTONE INCIDENT (BOOK 2) St. Sunniva's Julia Olsen and Nate Kirkland find themselves hot on the trail of a fourteenth-century artifact, a missing runic specialist, and an all-too-familiar kidnapper who has used the university's time machine for a joyride deep into America's past.

  THE BELLBOTTOM INCIDENT (BOOK 3) Julia and Nate, St. Sunniva University’s time-traveling crime-stoppers, are facing their toughest challenge yet: Sabina, their adopted niece from the lost city of Pompeii, has gone missing—in the bellbottom decade, of all places. The only clues to her whereabouts are hidden in a Kurt Vonnegut novel. Can Sabina be rescued before the final, unstoppable showdown with History?

  The Incident series is available in trade paperback and ebook. Find out more at http://www.nevemaslakovic.com.

  About the Author

  Neve Maslakovic is the author of the Incident series (time-travel whodunits) as well as a standalone novel, Regarding Ducks and Universes. Neve’s life journey has taken her from Belgrade, Serbia to a PhD at Stanford University's STAR Lab (Space, Telecommunications and Radioscience Lab) to her dream job as a full-time writer. She currently lives with her husband and son near Minneapolis/St. Paul, where she admits to enjoying the winters. Booklist called her debut novel, Regarding Ducks and Universes, "Inventive... a delight."