The Bellbottom Incident (33 page)

I was suddenly at a loss for words. How to explain why we had plucked a thirteen-year-old out of the Pompeii ghost zone and brought her into the twenty-first century, why we had violated time-travel protocol? I took a deep breath and the story came tumbling out. It wasn’t so difficult to explain after all. “We met her on that run to ancient Pompeii, the one that was orchestrated by Lewis Sunder. Her father was Secundus, a fish sauce merchant with a small shop in town. He entrusted his daughter to our protection when the eruption started…We couldn’t just leave her there.” I slumped into the chair. “Sorry, we should have told you before.”
 

The apology felt inadequate.
 

Apparently she agreed. In a rare moment of unprofessional snippiness, she said, “You think?” She tapped a pencil, then said more mildly, “I apologize for my outburst. I suppose I can understand why you kept it secret. Making the details widely known would have cast a shadow on the TTE program and the school, not to mention the girl’s life here in the twenty-first century.”

“I—we just wanted her to have a little more time to get accustomed to her new environment. In retrospect, it may not have been the best plan. It was why she used STEWie. She was trying to go back to Pompeii because she thought she was a burden on us, and to find out what happened to her family.”

“I see. You understand that this is one secret that cannot stay that way?”

“I do.”

“Well, what’s done is done. I’m not heartless—of course I’m glad you were able to rescue her from Pompeii. But we can’t allow anything like this to happen again. I’ll have to give some thought to how to handle the PR angle, which will require some finesse on our part. There’ll be those who will argue that it’s not our job, our right, to play God. They’ll be right of course, but they can hardly make us send her back.”

We both knew that there were many who thought using STEWie was messing with the natural order of things and that the past was best left unexplored. But
growing pains were to be expected with any new technology, especially one as groundbreaking as time travel. Things would sort themselves out. I sat up and opened my notepad to start a list of what needed to be done, but she held up a hand.

“As I said, we can’t allow anything like this to happen again. You bringing her back from the Pompeii run and hiding it, this weekend’s events—it all reinforces what I’ve been considering for some time now. The STEWie program must be shut down. I’m going to make the recommendation to Chancellor Evans.”
 

The pen almost fell out of my hand. Dean Braga
wasn’t fond of time traveling herself, but I knew that that didn’t enter into her thought process. “Shut it down? Surely that’s an overreaction.”

“Julia, think about it. If there is one thing that has become abundantly clear, it’s that human nature and time travel
do not get along very well
. We’re not ready. Since STEWie’s first successful run, we’ve seen a sequence of inappropriate behavior from one researcher to the next—Dr. Mooney, Dr. Sunder, Dr. Holm, and now Dr. Little…and that’s only the actions we know about. What other secrets has the time-travel lab been privy to? I realize that some of the researchers had good intentions—”

“And some didn’t, that’s true.”

“But this cannot go on.”
 

“Still, to shut down the lab…”

“I share your disappointment, but for now it is the only course of action we can take. We’ll have to let the other schools know.” She meant MIT, the University of Beijing, and the two other schools that were building their own STEWies. “We can’t make them halt their lab construction, but I think public pressure might increase after Sabina’s story hits the news.” She pointed at the blank page in my notepad. “Let’s start by notifying everyone on the STEWie roster that I’m putting all runs on hold. Then we can release an official statement and see about scheduling a media Q&A and a meet and greet with Sabina.”

“If you don’t mind my saying so, you know there will be considerable opposition to shutting the program down from within the school. Unfinished research. Students unable to wrap up their PhDs. Unused funding. Upended work schedules.”

 
I’d dealt with angry tenured professors before. That’s what tenure guaranteed them—the right to speak their mind without the worry of being fired—and boy, did they use it on occasion.
 

“That can’t be helped. It’s the right course of action. I feel that strongly.” She shifted in the leather chair, as if uncomfortable. “Do you know what finally convinced me that it was impossible to separate personal issues from scholarly ones in time travel? The unsavory sides that surfaced in our researchers—these attempts at murder, blackmail, fraud…I could have put all those down to having bad seeds in the lab. But when I came right down to it, there was
one
matter I couldn’t ignore.”

“What was it?”

“Despite my dislike of the physical act of time traveling…”

“Yes?”

“I found myself fantasizing about going back in time. To, er, fix a small math error in my thesis.”

The few steps from Dean Braga’s office to my smaller one next door felt like a lifetime. I knew what
temporarily on hold
usually meant in academia—not days, not months, but
years
. Things did not move fast, especially where labs were concerned. Delaying the crafting of the message announcing the “temporary” shutdown to everyone on STEWie’s roster, I slid into my desk and put my hand under my chin. I couldn’t believe it. We were just on the cusp of finding out so many things about History. I scrolled through the rainbow of topics filling the STEWie roster: photographing art that had been lost in World War Two; recording Neanderthal speech; then a very challenging one—a jump to the moon and back, space suits and all, which would truly count as
space
-time travel…

There was so much we didn’t know about History, about ourselves.

I glanced up and was surprised to see a blank spot on my wall right across from the desk, where there hadn’t been one before. When she’d gone back to 1976, Sabina had taken not only the Fourth of July group photo and Dr. Mooney’s lab coat, which she said had reminded her of him, but Abigail’s purple hair extensions. All of her meager possessions, except the lab coat, had been in the Ford Mustang when it went into the water. I hadn’t noticed anything missing besides the photo—not that I’d had time to notice, really, as we raced to find her. Besides, she might not have taken anything at all to remind her of me, which would have been all right, of course. I was just Aunt Julia.
 

But if I’d had to venture a guess as to what might represent me, I might have gone with (a) a blank yellow legal pad from the stack in the drawer of my desk; (b) one of the many gel pens that populated my shoulder bag; or (c) a list from her room—perhaps the first one I’d made, of things everyone was expected to do in the mornings: brush teeth, shower, put on a fresh set of clothes, make the bed, and so on.

It wasn’t any of those things. She had taken the world map poster that was normally tacked to the corkboard on the wall of my office just under a row of vintage St. Sunniva photos. I stuck a blue pushpin into it for each successful STEWie run made by our researchers. There had also been two red pins, representing the places where I’d spent some time myself—Pompeii and the fourteenth-century Minnesota woodland. I had been about to reach for a new red pin, for 1976, when I noticed the map was gone. Sabina had left the pins in a paper cup on my desk. The two red ones sat among the blue ones like unwelcome guests.
 

The map, with its little punctures all over, had by now decomposed in the salty waters lapping Sanibel Island. I automatically made a mental note to buy another one, then remembered there would be no need. The program was to be shut down.

I glanced at the blank corkboard again. In a swap that neither she nor Udo could have anticipated, Sabina had lost her treasures to the sea but rescued Udo’s story. If I had anything to say about it,
The Skeletons of Eden
would see the light of day.

I might have done some introspection on why the map had reminded Sabina of me, or gotten started on the e-mail letting everyone know about Dean Braga’s decision. But I suddenly couldn’t wait any longer to demand answers from someone.

“Why didn’t you tell us you met us in 1976?”

Dr. Mooney was at his workbench, soldering something on the new Slingshot 3.0. At my words—I had tapped him sharply on the shoulder before uttering them—he turned off the soldering iron and set it aside. He blew gently on the wire connection he’d just made before speaking. “It was all so long ago, Julia,” he finally said. “I could make little sense of it, either at the time or after. I gave up on trying to figure it out, perhaps even started to believe I’d imagined the whole episode—the visit Gabe and I received from three people from the future. Then, one day years later, you showed up in the dean’s office, Julia. Not long after, Abigail enrolled as a graduate student and Steven wrote to apply for a junior professorship. It was all happening. I brought it up with Gabriel, but he didn’t remember meeting you all those years ago. When we brought back Sabina from Pompeii, I wondered…and then she disappeared into 1976 and it all came back clear as day. My three visitors and the missing girl they were searching for. I didn’t think Sabina was the name you had given me, but everything else fit. Only—”

“Only what?”

He was still wearing his safety goggles, behind which he looked rather like an unhappy fish. “Only I never found out what happened to her in 1976. None of you ever came back to campus to tell me. You were just…gone.”
 

“Oh.”

“So what could I have told you? That I was going to try my best to help you in 1976, but I had no idea if you’d find her or not? Would it have helped?”

“I suppose not.”

He slid off the goggles, mussing up his hair, which was grayer, shorter, and thinner now than it had been when he was a young man. He ran his hand through it. “There was a sense of familiarity when I first met Sabina in Pompeii, but I couldn’t figure out why. In retrospect, I must have recognized her from the photo you showed me all those years ago. I just didn’t make the connection. I’m ashamed to admit that I paid more attention to the smartphone with her picture on it than the picture itself. Then Steven started the experiments bringing him to 1976 and I began to wonder. Still, what could I say? I had two options, if I had them at all. One was to keep Sabina away from the TTE lab at all costs, and the other was to teach her about STEWie technology so she would have some tools at her disposal when and if she
did
get stuck in 1976. I chose the second. Or maybe I didn’t really have a choice at all, since I knew it had all happened already. The thought struck me then, you know.”

“Which one?”

“That some strands of the future must be as firmly fixed as the ones in the past.”

“You mean key future events are inevitable no matter what we do?”

“Not key events, necessarily…just
some
.”

I let the remark pass unchallenged. “It wasn’t our fault somehow, was it? Udo crashing his car?”

“You know it wasn’t. Four people—Sabina, Abigail, Steven, you—slipped into the past like a raindrop finding its way down a tree trunk, no more able to disturb History than the raindrop could harm the tree. Is anything bothering you? I am very glad Sabina is back. I only wish I could have helped more.”

“You did help, Xavier. That’s not it.”
 

I sighed and explained that Dean Braga was shutting down the STEWie program. He nodded, like he had expected it.

STEWie’s mirrors towered over us accusingly, as if pointing out that we had not treated what they represented, the grand things they could do, with enough respect. With the lab closed down and the STEWie program halted indefinitely, the mirrors and their companion lasers would be left to gather dust. For a second I had the wild idea of asking Dr. Mooney to send me into the past one more time, to a location of my own choosing. I could step into STEWie’s basket to find that dark-haired ancestor, or to get some answers about Abigail’s parents, though I didn’t think she would have wanted that, not like this. Or I could use STEWie to answer a question for the ages. An entry from STEWie’s roster popped into my mind, one made possible by Kamal’s recent thesis defense—he had found safe landing zones in Eurasia of thirty-some thousand years ago. Yes. Neanderthals. There was so much we didn’t know: Did they speak? Were they beefy and taciturn, as modern stereotypes would have it? What did they think of their artistic cousins? I would instruct Dr. Mooney, “Neander Valley, thirty-five thousand years back,” and he would give me a frank look, then reach for Kamal’s catalog of safe landing zones. “It’s a risky run for an untrained traveler, even one with experience,” he would point out.

“I’m not going to do anything foolish, just take a look around to see if I can spot a few of them.”

“Who?”

“The cave painters and their chunkier cousins.”