The Far Time Incident (22 page)

“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…

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.”

“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.

Helen poked her head out of the tomb at the commotion. I heard her emit a gasp as Abigail let the camera fall to the ground and tore out of the tomb, jolting to a stop in front of the cart. Both donkeys brayed in protest, bells jingling furiously. Abigail dodged the donkeys and ran into the professor’s arms for a bear hug.

Helen stared at her ex-husband, framed in the tomb archway like an angry goddess.

“Xavier,” she said with a touch more timbre to her voice than usual. “Not dead, then?”

“As you see, Helen.” He added, looking down, “Let me breathe, child.”

Abigail released the professor, but did not move away, as if she were afraid he might disappear again. “I was hoping for something like this when the same thing happened to us.”

“Not quite the same thing. The professor came here of his own free will,” Nate said, making it sound as if we were having a normal conversation.

“We thought you had been scattered across time, Xavier.” This from Helen. “Couldn’t you have left a note? It would have saved everyone a great deal of trouble. We had a memorial for you.”

“You did? Did you go, Helen?”

“Xavier, you made a fool of all of us.” Helen turned on her heels and stalked back into the tomb. If there had been a door to slam, she would have slammed it.

Xavier rubbed the spotted donkey’s mane without seeming the least bit apologetic. “Really, I thought I was being perfectly clear. I left Scarlett unlocked in the bike bay for whoever wished to take her. I put all my affairs in order. My will has long been on file—I left everything to St. Sunniva. And I graded the final projects for my classes and left them on my desk. Julia, did you find them?”

I was sweating, in desperate need of a shower, and my boots were hurting my feet. I tugged at the shirt that was sticking to my back under the itchy cloak. “We found the graded projects, Xavier. A note clipped to them saying that you had decided to relocate into the past would certainly have been helpful.”

He led the donkeys into the shade of the Nigidii tomb, tied the reins to a tree, and accompanied us inside. “I didn’t want anyone stopping me or coming after me, pestering and badgering me to come back. I programmed the computer to erase my destination from memory by having it randomly move the mirrors after I left so that no one could trace me. How did you manage to find me?” He caught Helen’s eye and went on. “The night I left, I folded my biking clothes on a lab chair—again, I thought I was being perfectly clear—changed into a tunic I had made, and left my watch, cell phone, and other small items in the locker.”