The Far Time Incident (38 page)

“Jacob Jacobson? What about him?”

“His tweets.”

“What about them?”

“I want to take a look at them.”

We found the ginger-haired grad student at his desk in the graduate students’ office, eating ramen noodles with a plastic spoon while he worked on a paper-and-pencil physics homework problem.

“You’re—you’re back,” he managed to utter. The pencil had fallen out of his hand and lodged in the ramen noodles, right next to the spoon. “We thought you were all—”

“Dead?” Nate said. “Well, as you can see, we’re not. What year is it?”

“The year? Uh, 2012.”

“And month and day?”

“Friday, May eighteenth.”

We had been gone almost five months.

Abigail slid behind her desk. Everything on it was covered in a thin layer of dust. “My stuff is still here, good.”

“We’ve been in a sort of limbo, with the big accident and all—Dean Sunder said that come fall, we would regroup and make some changes in office space assignments and leadership—”

“How have you been, Jacob?” I asked.

“How have I—well, things are going a bit better with my classes. Oh, and I’ve started a blog, for when I want to say something that won’t fit in a tweet. I’m calling it
The Eternal Student
.”

“You’ve started a blog?” Abigail said, turning her computer on. “Good. Boy, have we got a story for you and it will
not
fit into a hundred and forty characters.”

“Dr. Rojas has been arrested for the murder of Dr. Mooney and the rest of you. Who’s that?” asked Jacob.

“That’s Sabina, and next to her, Celer. Be nice to them, they just lost their family,” Abigail said as she waited for her computer to boot up. “It’s a long story. Never mind that for now. We
need to take a look at your tweets from last week—I mean, from December.”

“Really?”

“Are they archived somewhere?”

“Yup.” Jacob pushed away his homework and the ramen noodles, and coasted over to Abigail’s desk in his chair. Helen, Nate, and I came over to look at her computer screen from over their shoulders. Kamal went into the hallway and came back with two paper cups filled with water. He gave one to Sabina and put the other on the floor for Celer, who proceeded to drink it in slow, pink-tongued slurps. Sabina looked at the paper cup in her hand for a long moment, then drank. Kamal went back out into the hallway to fetch water for the rest of us.

Abigail tut-tutted. “Jacob, there are—you’ve gotta be kidding me—there are over seven hundred tweets since December. How long
have
we been gone?”

“My tweets tapered off a bit after I started the blog.”

“We want the ones from the day we left.” I was running on pure adrenaline. “December twentieth,” I added, then with parched lips downed the water that Kamal had brought over to me.

A stocky body with a caramel-colored mustache burst into the room. “Oscar called me.
I knew it
.” It was Officer Van Underberg, looking a little more seasoned and comfortable in his campus security uniform. “No one wanted to believe me, but I knew you weren’t dead.”

“Thank you, Lars,” the chief said.

It took us a minute or two to read through Jacob’s stream of tweets from the day we’d prepared for a one-hour trip to see the Beatles and had instead ended up battling time itself. Sandwiched among Jacob’s thoughts on other matters and his replies to his
friends was a very telling sequence of tweets, ordered by time index, with the last ones first:

They are not coming back #imsad

Missed all the excitement. Something went wrong with Beatles run. Will try to find out more.

Stomach rumbly, off to cafeteria. Almost collided with Dean Sunder in hallway & he tut-tutted over my tweeting-while-walking #closecall

Dr Rojas just passed by grad office, some kind of delay in STEWie lab?

Kicked out of lab, back in office. Will try to wrap up some projects.

Campus policeman Kirkland questioning Dr Presnik. VERY curious!

I’m in STEWie’s lab. Team going to watch Beatles land at JFK. Not invited :(

The updates from the rest of the day told of a department in uproar, of shocked reactions from students and staff, of Dean Sunder vowing to continue the program.

“Jacob, why didn’t you tell anyone that Dean Sunder was in the building during our send-off?” I asked.

Jacob looked at me blankly. “I did. It’s right there in my tweet.”

“Never mind,” I said.

“If you’d like, I can put it all up on my blog. I don’t have that many followers yet. Classmates, mostly, but everyone will be thrilled that you’re back.”

“Not everyone. That reminds me, I should let Penny Lind of the
Les Styles
blog know we’re back. I owe her a good story.”

Nate had said that we couldn’t just march into Dean Sunder’s office and arrest him on the spot. Helen and Xavier agreed with him, pointing out that a visit to the hospital was our first priority. They were right, of course, and Oscar called us an ambulance. We would all go to the university hospital, me to be pumped up full of antibiotics, the others to be checked out, and Sabina—well, that was a more complicated matter. Vaccines and other stuff to begin with, I supposed. And a visit to the vet for Celer would be needed, too.

Under the guise of needing to use the bathroom, I sneaked out of the TTE building and hurried over to History of Science, leaving Nate and the others to relate the details of our story to Jacob and Officer Van Underberg. I had a few minutes before the ambulance got here. The EMTs would find me easily enough.

The tidy brick building that housed History of Science looked the same as it always had, but Hypatia in her ankle-length dress in the photo by the front door seemed more real now that I had on a similar one. On the oak that shaded her image from the noonday sun, hummingbirds chirped on branches bursting with early spring leaves. The bags of road salt just inside the front door were gone. Five months had passed here; much less for me.

I went in.

The door to my office stood open. A young woman sat at my desk, her blonde hair tied back in a ponytail. She looked perky
and young enough to still be in high school. There were potted plants all over my office—green, thriving ones. And she had replaced the window cabinet, where I kept my cookie jar, with a little fridge. I had been looking forward to a cookie.

She glanced up at the sound of dismay that must have left my lips.

“Can I help you with something, ma’am?”

“Maybe later.”

I continued one door down, unsteadily.

Dean Sunder was at his desk, sipping iced tea and working on something. He did not hear me at first, the soft step of my soggy sandals silent on the office carpet. He seemed to be readying a presentation of some kind. My eyes went to the title at the top.
The Way Forward: Proposed Changes to the TTE Lab Operating Procedure and Research Staff.

“Lewis.”

He couldn’t have been more surprised if I had appeared out of thin air in the form of a malevolent ghost with revenge on its mind. In fact that must have been the first thought to cross his mind as he pushed himself to his feet, his face ashen.

“Julia—how—”

“I’m back,” I said. “You’ll have to get rid of the new assistant. What’s her name?”

“Brittany,” he answered, still looking like a pale robotic version of himself. “But how—I don’t understand—”

“You’re wondering how I got out of the Pompeii ghost zone.”

“Well—yes, I am. What an unexpected development—a pleasant one, of course.”

“I can imagine.”

“How—how
did
you come back, Julia?”

“With a lot of luck and some help from the goddess Diana.”

The sheer exhilaration of being back had helped my headache a bit, but I still felt lightheaded, woozy. Against my express wishes—I wanted to face him standing—my body sank into the chair facing his desk. He sat back down and bent toward me, his face suddenly calculating and cold.

“Are you all right, Julia? You seem ill. Your hand—”

“A little infection I picked up in the past.”

That
made him pull back, I noted with satisfaction.

He was still studying me. “What happened to your glasses?”

“I don’t need them anymore.”

That probably didn’t make much sense to him, but all he said was, “I see. Well, it certainly is pleasant to have you back, Julia. Brittany has been helping out, but you’ve always been so efficient and capable of arranging everything so nicely—”

It was entirely the wrong thing to say to me. I was done being nice.

I wanted to jump out of my chair, accuse him, shake his expensive, crisply starched collar, but I didn’t have the energy to move. Instead my questions came out slowly, casually, like we were talking about the weather. “Why did you do it, Lewis? Was it the money? The check from Ewan Coffey for STEWie’s new generator?”

He stared at me for a long moment, then got to his feet. I felt like speaking was enough of an effort and turning my head to watch him would be too much, so I didn’t do it. I heard the door swing closed. He rounded the desk and sat back down, studying me as if seeing me for the first time in his life.

“Lewis—why?” I wanted to hear him say it
now
, before the lawyers and trustees and media came into the mix. “Was it the money?”

“You should know me better than that, Julia. I’ve had plenty of opportunities through the years to discreetly help
myself to funds, but I would have never robbed my researchers of the money. No, that wasn’t it at all.” He gave a sigh, not of sadness, but of newfound frustration. “I learned that Mooney and Rojas were at the top of the consideration list for this year’s Nobel.”

“But that’s good news, isn’t it?” What was he talking about? I didn’t understand. A Nobel Prize would bring publicity, funds, and prestige to the school. Not to mention that Xavier Mooney and Gabriel Rojas deserved it. I said as much. “Against all odds, the two of them managed to crack a monumental research problem—how to slip into the past. A shared Nobel Prize would be great for the TTE Department, good for the school—”

“And what about me?” he spat out suddenly. “The two of
them
deserve it? I’m responsible for bringing in every penny that built the lab, not to mention the salaries of everyone in it. I was the one who fought for grants and donations and publicity and built the program into what it is today. If it wasn’t for me, there would be no TTE lab, no STEWie in it, and no Nobel Prize on the horizon.”

“So you staged the accident to…what, shut down the lab?”

He fought to get himself under control and said more calmly, “It was so—easy. I called Dr. Rojas from his own office pretending to be a delivery truck driver who was at the dock parking lot. It’s happened often enough before. Rojas agreed to come pick up a generator part that had come in early. I went into STEWie’s lab after I saw him leave. Erika was getting ready for her run in the travel apparel closet so she wasn’t around. I had the Pompeii coordinates ready. It took only a minute to enter them in and send you on your way. Then—I waited. I’ve been waiting all this while. Come fall, I was planning on reopening the program after quitting my position as
dean, and taking over for Rojas as director of the TTE lab. He has been arrested. It wasn’t difficult for the police to figure out that the call summoning him from the lab came from his own office. They thought Rojas had rigged the phone to place an automatic call to the lab.”

I finally understood. It had been different in the past—Galileo had worked under the patronage of the Medici family, King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain had sponsored Columbus in his voyages of exploration—but nowadays…well, no one knew the name of the person or persons who had provided Albert Einstein with a desk and a pencil or organized funding for the Moon landing. A dean of science might get a plaque with his name on it upon retirement; scientists under his care, if lucky and brilliant, would have their names chiseled into History.

My eyes went to the diplomas, accolades, and photos mounted on the wall behind Lewis’s desk, one of them his own PhD diploma—a daily reminder of his early days at St. Sunniva, when he worked on the first unsuccessful attempts at time travel technology with Xavier and Gabriel, before STEWie. “One thing led to another,” he had told me once, “and here I am today.” Even then, I thought I had detected a hint of regret in his voice, like he wished he had stuck with the time travel engineering field now that it had shown itself to be a viable science.

In the end, for all of us, it came down to fighting for what was important. Faustilla’s wish had been to live near her firstborn son in the urban wonders of Rome. For Dean Sunder, it meant fighting his way back into the TTE lab to partake in the glory. Maybe he had visions of new breakthroughs in TTE technology, of time-traveling runs that would address historical questions yet unanswered, maybe even his own Nobel Prize. But life just didn’t work like that. Faustilla might have gotten her way if the
volcano hadn’t intervened, but it never would have worked for Lewis—because you couldn’t go back, ever, no matter what you had been—a child or a single, thinner version of yourself or a young physicist with a promising future. That’s why it had all gone wrong for him.