The Feline Affair (An Incident Series Novelette)

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THE FELINE
AFFAIR

An Incident Series
Novelette

Neve Maslakovic

The characters and events
portrayed in this story are fictitious. Any similarity to real
persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the
author.

Copyright © 2015 by Neve Maslakovic

All rights reserved. No part of this story may be
reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any
form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying,
recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the
author.

Excerpts from “The Present Situation in Quantum
Mechanics: A Translation of Schrödinger’s ‘Cat Paradox’ Paper” by
John D. Trimmer,
Proceedings of the American Philosophical
Society
, Vol. 124, pp. 323-38, 1980, quoted with
permission.

Cover design by Cynthia L. Moyer

This is a Westmarch Publishing book.

www.westmarchpub.com

“You want to go back in time to look for a cat, Dr.
Mooney?” I repeated my question. I had stopped by the lab to drop
off some paperwork and had run into Xavier Mooney, senior Time
Travel Engineering professor and well-liked campus figure. I had
asked in passing how his work was going.

“Hmm, Julia? A cat, yes. Precisely.”

He was by his workbench, rolling up a set of
blueprints. Behind Dr. Mooney towered STEWie’s mirrors, the heart
of St. Sunniva University’s time machine. STEWie, short for
SpaceTimE Warper, warps light to send our research teams to observe
History and return with photos, notes, and video. (Everyone on
campus refers to the world’s past with a capital
H
, as if
History were a living entity in its own right.) If Dr. Mooney got
his wish, an upcoming run into History would yield facts about a
famous feline, apparently.

“Gabriel and I are meeting at the Faculty
Club for lunch. You’re welcome to join us,” Dr. Mooney offered as
he tucked the blueprints into his lab locker. He turned back to
face me. “I expect that the topic of conversation will be…the
cat.”

I’m not a professor—back then I was the
science dean’s assistant, with an office next to Dean Sunder’s in
Hypatia House—so technically I didn’t belong at the Faculty Club.
On the other hand, no one had ever invited me before and I’d heard
that the food was worth trying. I checked the time on my cell
phone. Dean Lewis Sunder was on the other side of campus, touring
the latest exhibits at the History Museum before this evening’s
fundraiser, so the paperwork I needed him to sign had to wait
anyway. The new chief of campus security was going to stop by my
office at one o’clock, but there was no rush for me to get back, as
it was just past noon. “Thanks for the invite, Dr. Mooney. I’d love
to come.”

I followed him out the lab doors, which swung
shut behind us with a creak, but I was more interested in another
sound. “Is that Dr. Presnik’s team I hear in the apparel
closet?”

The excited chatter of several voices—the
equivalent of a wild party by academic standards—drifted out from
under the closed door across the hallway. I thought I’d recognized
one of them.

“It is. Helen and her students have just
returned from Bishopsgate. They’ve gone to change out of their
period wear.”

Bishopsgate
sounded like a historical
church scandal of some kind. Dr. Helen Presnik was a linguistics
professor, so it was quite possible she had gone into the past to
study the vernacular spoken by the participants in some sordid
affair or another. I didn’t remember seeing the term on STEWie’s
roster, though Helen did make frequent STEWie runs. As Dr. Mooney
and I exited the Time Travel Engineering (TTE) building and set a
course for the Faculty Club, he explained, “It’s a place.
Bishopsgate is a ward in the City of London—the City is the heart
of London, its oldest part. You may have heard of one of
Bishopsgate’s past inhabitants, a fellow by the name of William
Shakespeare. It was another one of Helen’s attempts to prove he
really wrote the plays.” We moved out of the way of a distracted
student on a bicycle (it was summer, but the campus still hummed
with current and visiting students) and he continued: “And she’s
finally done it. She has the proof she wanted.”

This was exactly the kind of thing for which
STEWie had been created—by Dr. Xavier Mooney himself in tandem with
his colleague Dr. Gabriel Rojas—with the first successful run
taking place just about a year before. Like other STEWie endeavors
such as cracking the ancient Greek script Linear B, Helen’s
discovery was the culmination of months of effort. Besides being an
excellent linguistics professor, Helen was a good friend of mine,
so I was happy to hear of her success. “I’ll have to carve out some
time in Dean Sunder’s schedule. We can put together a press release
and maybe he can make the announcement at this evening’s
fundraiser.” I sent Helen a quick text as we walked along, then
mused out loud, “So it turned out to be Shakespeare after all and
not Sir Francis Bacon or whoever.”

“Yes, not Sir Francis Bacon.”

I looked over at the professor. He sounded a
tiny bit, for want of a better word,
peeved
about the whole
thing. “Wait—did you and Dr. Rojas have a bet riding on it?”

This would not have been unusual. Dr. Rojas
and Dr. Mooney, the two senior TTE professors, liked to engage in
the occasional friendly wager about whether a historical detail was
likely to be true or not. Dr. Rojas, as befitting a theoretician,
usually reasoned out an argument at his desk in his office down the
hall from STEWie. Dr. Mooney, as befitting the more hands-on kind
of scientist, would roll up his sleeves, step into STEWie’s basket,
and return with evidence that settled the matter one way or
another. If they did have a bet, this time Dr. Presnik had done the
traveling for them.

“Yes, and I lost…which is why I’m buying
lunch today at the Faculty Club. Gabe figured the simplest, most
logical assumption was that Shakespeare did write the plays.
Occam’s razor. I took the opposite point of view, that it would be
just like History if someone entirely unexpected turned out to be
the real author.”

History is quirky—that’s true enough—but my
guess was that the professor had chosen to take the non-Helen side
for other reasons. Xavier and Helen shared a past, though they
usually carried on professionally enough—in fact, he had
accompanied her on her first run, to attend a performance of
Hamlet
at the Globe. Dr. Mooney waved the matter away and
nodded amiably in my direction, “Anyway, I have a new bet to
propose to Gabe that may even the score.”

“Involving the cat?”

“Very much involving the cat.”

“Well, I’m all ears.” As we headed up the
stone steps of the Faculty Club, I remembered why I had stopped by
the TTE lab in the first place. “By the way, Dean Sunder wanted me
to pass on a suggestion—that you give a lab tour to Mrs.
Butterworth this afternoon before the History Museum
fundraiser.”

I saw him give an inward groan, but he only
nodded absentmindedly.

“Be nice to her, she’s rich,” I reminded him.
Mrs. Butterworth was one of our big donors.

“Well, perhaps she’ll buy us a new lab
generator.”

“And for God’s sake, don’t mention Helen’s
run,” I added as we went inside. “I think Mrs. Butterworth’s hopes
lie on the Sir Francis Bacon side of things.”

“Schrödinger,” I said.

“Yes. You’ve heard of him, surely? The famous
cat experiment he proposed in 1935?” Dr. Gabriel Rojas eyed me
above the fancy salad the waiter had set down in front of him. I
had ordered the safe choice, the day’s pizza special, and had
received a small, elegant-looking square pizza served on a matching
square plate. A knife and fork seemed to be in order, so I pulled
out the cutlery I’d been given with a resigned sigh. As for
Schrödinger and his cat—well, who hasn’t heard of them? I said as
much before trying the first forkful of the pizza.

“In my experience,” Dr. Rojas continued
between salad bites, “the best way to gauge if a student
understands a topic is to ask him or her to explain it to you.”

He stopped speaking after making that
statement and went on silently eating. I realized he was applying
that philosophy at that very moment and was, in fact, waiting for
me to explain about Schrödinger and his cat. I took another forkful
of pizza to give myself time to formulate a reply. Great. I had
come to lunch for a decent bite, not a quiz on quantum physics. My
college studies had consisted of a rather unfocused education,
which had led to a business administrator’s degree and my job as
science dean’s assistant. I wasn’t expected to have an in-depth
knowledge of the sciences in the eight departments under Dean
Sunder’s and my care. Still, I had found that a passing familiarity
with the big topics helped me understand budget proposals and
STEWie run requests. This one hadn’t come up yet.

“Uh,” I began, having taken as long as
possible to finish the mouthful of pizza, both because I was
formulating my answer and because I was trying to figure out what
kind of crust I was eating. It wasn’t just plain old pizza crust,
that much I knew. Whole wheat? Rice? Drawing on vague memories of
my one college-level physics course, I said, “There is a box with a
cat in it, right?”

“Go on,” Dr. Rojas said, still in
professorial mode—not that he was ever far from it. He wasn’t much
of a conversationalist when it came to chitchat or personal
matters. Science was where he felt the most comfortable.