A bookshelf behind him held the professor’s collection of musical instruments, most of which he’d collected on STEWie runs before his illness. The didgeridoo that used to lean against the wall had been lost in the eruption of Vesuvius (it was the one little bit of home that the professor had brought with him), and the spot of honor was now taken by a pair of mismatched Cuban conga drums.
When the professor shifted his position to better apply the tape, he caught sight of me. “How do you like it, Julia? It’s a timeline of social inventions.”
I squatted on the floor next to him and looked over his creation. Each of the printouts had a horizontal line down the middle and short chunks of text above and below the line at irregular intervals. A mark at 1888 caught my attention and I saw that it was a tick for under-arm deodorant, the commercial kind. From there my eyes automatically flicked to the end of the fourteenth century, the date on the runestone still fresh in my mind.
“King Richard the Second invented the handkerchief?” I said, looking over at Xavier. “I didn’t know that.”
“Not many people do. Which is why the timeline is going up on the wall in STEWie’s lab. I figured people could use a quick reminder before each run—no handkerchiefs on runs to pre-fifteenth-century Europe unless you want to get odd looks. Here, can you help me with the tape?”
“How was the physics conference?” I asked as I took charge of the tape. Last year there had been rumors that Dr. Mooney and Dr. Rojas, as the co-inventors of STEWie, were on the shortlist to win the Nobel Prize in physics. The notion had been put on hold since everyone had suspected Dr. Rojas of murdering his colleague. That had turned out to be very much false—Dr. Mooney was clearly alive and well—but the scandal had placed their Nobel chances on hold. The Nobel committee tended to err on the side of inaction.
“Everyone was most interested in the Slingshot. I gave a presentation on the steps I’ve taken to address the stability problem. There are still some kinks to be worked out, of course. A bit more tape?”
The Slingshot had a tendency to send time travelers into ghost zones. As the first human testers, we had been sent to a sequence of them after escaping Pompeii: a beach in advance of a tsunami, the Great Fire of London, a blizzard, the shores of a Tunguska lake just before the great meteorite impact, and a World War II air raid. We had been extremely lucky to make it back alive. Now that the professor could no longer go on time travel runs, he had focused all his energies on fine-tuning the device.
I helped him roll up the chart and we met in the middle.
“I just came by to check on Kamal’s slides,” I explained.
“Ah yes, how’s he holding up?”
“He’s nervous. Given his topic, I expect he’ll draw a larger crowd than usual. Come to think of it, perhaps I’d better double up on the refreshments.” I had meant to do it earlier, but worrying about Quinn had pushed the thought out of my mind.
After helping Dr. Mooney tack his timeline onto the wall in STEWie’s lab, I hurried back to the Hypatia House to make sure I had enough food for Kamal’s defense and ran into Dean Braga just outside the building kitchenette. She was wearing what might be deemed a power suit and killer shoes and had stopped to grab a cold bottle of water from the vending machine on her way to her office. “Whoever decided that shoes with heels should be considered dress-up attire should be shot. I wonder if that’s how men feel about suits and ties. What are those, Julia?”
I had been scrolling through the pictures of the runestone on my cell phone while I waited for the spinach dip to heat up. Dean Braga replaced her science dean’s hat with her geologist one and looked over the photos. “The runestone, yes. It’s nothing I’ve worked on personally…Has there been a STEWie run request from someone?”
“Uh, sort of. It’s still the thing with my, uh, husband.” Could I call Quinn my ex now that the divorce papers were signed and in the mail, or did I have to wait until they arrived on my doorstep? “There is a personal connection to the event on his side of the family. I went to Alexandria over the weekend to look at the runestone. What is graywacke anyway? I get the gray part—it’s a gray slab of rock—but what about the wacke part?”
She shifted her weight from one uncomfortable shoe to the other. “It’s a type of sandstone. Did you notice the striae on the back, from glacial action?” She zoomed in on the photo for a closer look. “There are some other lines here.”
“From roots. The runestone was found under a tree.”
“Right, that makes sense. The growing roots probably leached iron and magnesium out of the stone.”
“How old does the inscription look to you? From what I’ve read, geologists seem to lean toward yes but historians and linguists strongly disagree.”
She shook her head. “I can’t tell you anything just from the photo. Before STEWie, I would have recommended further geological testing and peer review. As it is, if someone from Geology, History, or the Department of Linguistics writes up a well-funded proposal, it could make for a worthy STEWie run.” Before I had the chance to tell her that Dr. Holm had tried and failed, she handed the phone back to me with a final remark that gave props to her own field of expertise. “Without a STEWie run, all I can say is this—given the choice between the soft sciences and the hard sciences, go with the hard sciences. Geological results can be double-checked and reproduced. Now if you’ll excuse me, I really need to get out of these shoes.”
Food is the key to a well-run thesis defense. Let me repeat that. Food is key. Not for the defending PhD candidate, though I suppose it doesn’t hurt to feed him or her either, but for the committee and audience members who might, if crabby and hungry, ask inconvenient questions that the candidate would be hard-pressed to answer. If well fed, the questions would still get asked, but more kindly. Before my time, the policy in the science departments had been that defending students provided their own refreshments, giving them yet another thing to worry about, but Dean Braga’s predecessor had instituted a change. In the eight St. Sunniva science departments, from the Mary Anning Hall of Geology to the Maria Mitchell Astronomical Observatory on the main campus hill, the dean’s office did the honors.
People were starting to trickle in as Oscar and I wheeled in drinks and snacks on a trolley. We parked it just inside the door, to one side of the podium, so that people could serve themselves as they entered. Xavier and Helen lingered by the side of the room while we were setting up.
“I’m surprised to see you here, Helen. I didn’t know you had an interest in Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon interactions,” I heard Xavier say.
“Neanderthal speech is something every linguist wonders about,” Helen said calmly. Any questions she or the rest of the audience had for Kamal would have to wait until the end of his presentation, after which the room would clear out, and the committee would decide whether to give his work a thumbs up or a thumbs down as PhD-worthy material. “I don’t see why we’ve concluded that they didn’t have the ability to speak based on their more robust anatomy.”
“It’s not a conclusion,” Xavier countered. “More like an assumption.”
“Assumptions have no place in research.”
“You won’t get an argument from me there, but you have to start somewhere.”
“I would prefer to give them the benefit of the doubt. Really, a five-minute recording ought to do it,” Helen said. “Language should be easier to address than the question of why they went extinct.”
“True enough, I suppose. Dinner at Ingrid’s?”
“How about Panda Palace instead? Eight o’clock?”
“How about seven? Should I pick you up?”
“Let’s meet there,” Helen said, turning to the food trolley.
Their strong personalities had always grated on each other, but they had at last realized that it wasn’t a sign that they shouldn’t be together, merely that they shouldn’t take disagreements personall
y. Helen had told me in confidence that she and Xavier were talking about moving back in together.
Oscar headed back to his post to point newcomers to the right classroom, and Dr. Mooney took a seat in the front row. I followed Helen up the auditorium stairs—I didn’t stick around for every thesis defense, but would have for Kamal’s even if I wasn’t hiding from Quinn. The auditorium was the larger of the two TTE classrooms; the seating was stadium-style, with half desks attached to each seat. Although the Neanderthal story had yet to break widely (a press conference was planned for next week if Kamal passed his defense), rumors of lurid Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon footage had spread throughout campus, and people were steadily streaming into the room. Judging by what I had seen of Kamal’s slides, unless anyone was fascinated by the technical issues regarding safe landing zones in the Neander Valley, most of the audience was going to be very disappointed.
Kamal stood fidgeting by the large Smart Board as he waited for the proceedings to begin. Dr. Mooney and Dr. Little were in the front row, level with the speaker’s stand. Dr. Mooney was doodling on a napkin—many great scientific ideas sprang from idle thinking—while Dr. Little, clean-shaven and dressed in his trademark button-down vest, sat hunched over his laptop, his fingers moving furiously. Dr. Payne had yet to show. I hoped he hadn’t forgotten about the defense—a faux pas not unheard of in the over-scheduled world of academia. I sent a small wave of encouragement in Kamal’s direction, but he didn’t notice. I muted my cell phone, which was just about the only thing I could do to help besides providing the food.
Dr. Payne hurried in at last, extinguishing his cigarette on his way in and flicking it into a wastebasket (I hoped it wouldn’t cause a flare-up). He took a seat next to Dr. Mooney, who, as the chairing member, nodded at Kamal to begin. Dr. Little continued typing furiously for a bit, then closed his laptop and settled back into his seat.
His nervousness dissipating after a few minutes, Kamal slipped into what came naturally to him, speaking about a subject he loved. His nervousness had not sprung from a fear of public speaking, but from the fact that the three people seated closest to the podium would decide whether he would receive his PhD at the end of the semester. Most thesis defenses went well. Occasionally, a committee member would recommend additional research, and the student’s graduation date and near-term job prospects would have to be adjusted accordingly. Rarely—I had only seen it once—a committee or audience member would spot a significant flaw in the work, something that made both the student and the mentoring professor, who in this case was Dr. Mooney, look bad. Dr. Little was already familiar with Kamal’s work, so Dr. Payne was the only one likely to throw a wrench into the proceedings.
Kamal had started by explaining that stepping out of STEWie’s basket into the land of our closest prehistoric relatives (and their chunkier cousins) presented its own set of risks, beyond the usual perils inherent to time travel like ghost zones and exposure to now-eradicated diseases. If you got time-stuck, the list of threats was long: hunger, thirst, the elements, wildlife, cannibalistic tribes—of both Neanderthals and early humans—and so on. Dr. B and Abigail, who were next door readying for their run to eighteenth-century France, could be reasonably sure they wouldn’t be murdered by a thieving local or struck by lightning in a storm. There was a simple reason for that. Either scenario would expose the strangeness of the visitors from the future, from the manufactured undergarments under their period clothes to their unusually white teeth to the camera equipment and notebooks hidden in their satchels. But when you jumped thirty thousand years into the past and got hit by lightning, the most likely fate for your charred, injured body was that it would be consumed by an animal. Your hiking boots and clothes would decompose to nothing over the millennia, changing History not one bit.
All of which made Kamal sound like he was the wiry, hardy sort, when in fact he was, like I said before, what might be charitably described as slightly overweight and more fond of mental exercise than the physical variety. My guess was that he’d been attracted to research in extreme far-time because he wasn’t expected to go near any of the locals, thus minimizing his chances of catching some exotic disease.
Helen sat up at one point when Kamal brought up one of the big questions—namely, Did Neanderthals speak? His team had heard shouts here and there as they took photos from afar, but whether these sounds could be classified as language or were mere grunts alerting others to danger or the presence of game, he couldn’t say, nor was it his job to do so. That was Helen’s specialty. I expected a request to land on my desk as early as the next morning for a STEWie run to one of Kamal’s landing zones.
After a good twenty minutes of slides crammed with equations, during which I may or may not have dozed off for a bit, Kamal tossed up a couple of slides that sent a chuckle through the audience and I sat up. They were the ones I had seen when I previewed the presentation at his desk. He had used software which mimicked pencil drawing to sketch out some of the stills from his footage, giving the more salacious photos the feel of a cartoon—and protecting the privacy, even thirty thousand years into the future, of the individuals involved. I saw the corner of Xavier Mooney’s mouth twitch as he turned back to glance at the audience, but he kept on his official committee member expression. It did seem like he was finally back to his normal self, and I was pretty sure Helen deserved much of the credit for that.
As Kamal neared the end of his presentation I leaned down to dig up my cell phone out of my shoulder bag to see if Dr. Holm had responded to my request for a second meeting—or if Quinn had been in touch. I flicked on the phone. There was a text message from Dr. Holm, but not the one I had expected. All it said was,
HELP
Before I could do more than raise a puzzled eyebrow, the auditorium door flew open. It was Dr. Baumgartner, Abigail’s advising professor, and the clatter of her wooden clogs was amplified in the silence that suddenly descended on the room as Kamal stopped mid-sentence. A white bonnet covered the professor’s blonde hair above her mushroom-colored bodice and drab, green ankle-length skirt. She struggled to get the words out. “STEWie’s basket—they’re gone—”
Dr. Mooney pushed himself to his feet. “Who’s gone?”
The professor jerked the bonnet off her head. “Someone has hijacked STEWie.”
Dammit, I thought. Quinn.
9
Drs. Mooney and Little hurried out of the classroom after Dr. B, leaving the thesis committee two short and Kamal openmouthed at the unexpected interruption to his defense. I scrambled down the auditorium stairs, following the three professors as they raced down the hallway to the double doors of STEWie’s lab, where Oscar was standing, concern writ large on his usually tranquil features.
“I’ve called campus security,” he said, stepping aside to let us pass. “They’re on their way.”
A single glance told us that all was not well at the lab. Abigail, dressed in period clothes similar to Dr. B’s, was at a workstation frantically tapping keys. Nearby, a computer monitor and several lab notebooks had been knocked to the floor, as if someone had passed by in a hurry. The monitor had landed against a chair leg, its cable still plugged into the floor socket, its screen cracked. On the whiteboards behind the workstations, STEWie destination ideas and taped-up photos from past runs remained undisturbed. Beyond the whiteboards was STEWie’s heart—a labyrinth of lasers and highly polished mirrors, some as small as a file folder and others almost grazing the lofty balloon roof of the building. Our view of the platform in the middle was concealed by one of the larger mirrors but residual heat from the STEWie send-off radiated from within.
I took in all of this as I registered snatches of conversation between the three professors and Abigail:
“They went in blind and didn’t calibrate!”
“What’s to be done?”
“We can’t just follow them, can we?”
Then I heard Dr. Baumgartner’s voice r
ise above the rest: “Why does stuff like this always happen just before my runs?”
How had Quinn done it?
One of the disturbed lab notebooks had fallen open to a page covered in spidery equations. A horseshoe-shaped object peeked out from underneath, sky blue and thin. I pushed the notebook off it with my foot and bent down to pick up the headband. It was Dr. Holm’s.
“In here.” It was Oscar, with Nate behind him and Officer Van Underberg bringing up the rear. The three professors turned to Nate and began to speak simultaneously.
“Unauthorized use of STEWie has occurred—”
“The basket is gone—”
“Someone who’s not on the roster has taken off in STEWie’s basket—”
Nate held up a hand. “Somebody fill me in,” he said in his security chief voice, the one that got people listening. “Who is it and where have they gone?”
Abigail pushed through between the professors. Her outfit was a smaller version of the period-appropriate attire Dr. Baumgartner was wearing, down to the bonnet. Rather inappropriately under the circumstances, I wondered what color her hair was under her bonnet. I had gone to work before she and Sabina made an appearance for breakfast.
The Runestone Incident (The Incident Series, #2) Page 8
