The Far Time Incident (35 page)

One by one, we stumbled into a tomb barely large enough to hold us all. Sabina hesitated by the door as if she wasn’t sure she wanted to come in. Xavier made the decision for her, pushing her inside.

We had not meant to bring her with us.

With a lamp in his hand and a blanket over his head, her father had left to look for Faustilla, but not before entrusting Sabina to us.

Xavier had attempted to explain that we ourselves were leaving, urging him to follow us out of town, but to no avail. Secundus, resolve firm in those deep, dark eyes of his, had been adamant that he needed to find his mother. He would not, in any case, want to leave his shop. If the gods decreed it to be so, he would die in peace as long as he knew that Sabina was safe. Besides, he had added in a sudden burst of practicality, who could guarantee that the gods’ anger didn’t extend to Nola as well?

We had no answer that we could give.

Still, he had seen the STEWie device slung over Xavier’s shoulder by its leather strap—had even extended a calloused hand to touch it. Plastic was two millennia away and the device with its wires and buttons and display screens had held his attention for a long moment. Perhaps it was that more than anything that had made him place Sabina in our care. “Friends, take her with you to a safe place,” he had said, looking straight at me for a long moment before turning to go. “Diana will keep an eye on her.”

And so we had brought Sabina with us, and she had brought Celer.

As we helped each other swat ash off our clothes, Xavier turned back toward the tomb archway. “Wait here. I’ll go back outside to see if I can find Helen.”

Nate pulled him up by the shoulder. “You’re the only one of us who knows how to operate that portable STEWie of yours, Professor. I’ll go. If I’m not back in fifteen minutes…” He tied the cloth back around his face, grabbed a pillow for his head, and, bending his head, headed back out through the tomb archway.

“Hurry,” Xavier yelled after him, but Nate probably didn’t hear him above the clatter of pumice on the tomb roofs and street stones.

I was having doubts, serious ones. “I don’t think we should do this on my account. This portable STEWie thing sounds very dangerous.”

“You’d do the same for us,” Abigail said.

“You don’t know that. I might not.”

She patted my shoulder. “I know you would, Julia. Besides, we all want to go home, right?”

“We gotta come up with a better name than portable STEWie,” Kamal said in a show of bravado. “Mini-STEWie? STEWie Jr.? Slingshot?”

“Slingshot it is,” Abigail concurred.

“Slingshot, then,” said their professor, wiping soot off of his device and laying it on the floor. “If only I had a way of computing a safe trajectory. All I can do is point us in the right direction. I’ll try to do it in as few jumps as possible—” He stopped speaking as a fit of coughing overtook him. It was getting harder to breathe.

“We have a problem,” I said, thinking of Secundus, who was so trusting of his gods and goddesses even in the face of total disaster. I nodded toward Sabina, who was whispering something into the goddess Diana amulet as she crouched by the professor, her face pale with fear and ash. Next to her, Celer panted as he tried to get enough air.

“We’re not leaving her here,” said Abigail.

“Maybe she was meant to walk out of town,” Kamal said like he didn’t believe his own words.

“Are you suggesting we send her out there alone, into that shower of fire and rock?” Abigail protested. “Why don’t we just bring her with us?”

“I have considered it,” Xavier said without looking up. “Nothing like that has ever been tried. Besides, if she is meant to live, we won’t be able to yank her from her own time period. And if she she’s meant to die, it still might not work. What if her remains—or what’s left of them—have been found already? The plaster cast of her body might reside in the museum at Naples for all we know.” He sounded gruff, but I knew better.

An extended quake rumbled the ground under our feet, sending marble busts crashing onto the tomb floor. It seemed to go on and on, as if a subway train was passing beneath us. Debris and ash were piling fast in the archway; soon Nate and Helen’s way back in would be blocked.

“We don’t have much time,” Dr. Mooney said. “If there’s any hope of saving us, it has to be now.” Hunched over the Slingshot, trying to shield it from debris, the professor entered commands into it in a rapid sequence.

I was at the tomb door, trying to clear some of the fallen pumice with my good hand, having wrapped it in a cloth so I wouldn’t get burned. The gray projectiles piled up faster than I could work. “We can’t go yet, Nate said to give him fifteen minutes.”

Abigail and Kamal were on their knees, helping me clear away the debris.

“Look, all of you. This all started with my coming here,” Xavier said and went into a fit of coughing. “If I had left a note—
cough
—none of you would be here except for Sabina and Celer. I don’t want to be responsible for your deaths. We can’t wait any longer, we’ll be buried in here—
cough, cough
—there is no time—”

A voice broke in through the opening, which we were just managing to keep clear.

“I knew you were hiding something, Xavier. Didn’t you think this portable STEWie of yours was important enough to share with the rest of the scientific community?”

Helen, balancing her orange purse on her head for protection. And behind her, Nate. They scrambled in over the pile of pumice, Helen first, then Nate.

Xavier’s face lost some of its pallor. “I left the blueprints on my desk. I’m surprised that nobody found them.”

“It’s been only a week or so,” I answered automatically, as if any of this mattered at the moment. “We haven’t had a chance to go through your stuff yet.”

“We’re calling it the Slingshot,” Abigail said, helping Helen shake ash off her clothes.

“I’m sorry to say I’ve lost almost all of our twenty-first-century items. I dropped the bundle with the clothes and shoes—everything got trampled. I was hurrying—I thought you might leave without me and then I ran into the chief here.” Helen’s eyes came to rest on Sabina’s dark head. “Oh, Xavier.”

“We can’t leave her, Professor Presnik,” Abigail said with a determined look on her young face.

Helen perceived the complexity of the problem at once. “It would severely violate time travel protocol in a way that, frankly, hasn’t even been defined yet, not to mention that it might just be wrong. Who are we to decide what would be better for her? And she can’t make the decision on her own—she doesn’t know how different our world is from hers.”

“It’s better than—
cough
—dying,” I said as another rumble sent us all to our knees on the dirt floor.

“I say we ignore protocol”—Nate grimaced, eying the roof—“and get the hell out of here. All of us.”

“I second that,” I said.

Abigail and Kamal were already standing by Sabina’s side.

“Helen?” This from Xavier. He would leave the final decision to her. It had to be unanimous.

“But will it even work?”

“No way to know.”

The corner above Nate’s head had started to sag dangerously. “Now or never,” he said.

After a pause that lasted so long I wanted to scream, Helen said, “The goddess Fortuna favors the bold. I think we have to try, Xavier.”

Xavier swore. “All right then. We’ll do this by experimentation. If it works, it works. Link hands, everyone!” he commanded.

I grabbed Sabina’s hand to pull her to her feet and encountered something hard. She was clutching her Diana amulet so hard that her knuckles had gone white. Abigail grabbed Sabina’s other hand. “Hold on,” I reassured the girl as Abigail and I pulled her upright. “We’ll be out of here in a jiffy.” Sabina seemed to relax just a bit, perhaps trusting my tone even though she did not understand my words. I hoped I was right.

“How many?” Kamal yelled out above the volcanic hail as we all formed a circle. He had picked up Celer, whose brown coat was streaked with gray ash, his normally droopy eyes wide and round with alarm.

The professor was balancing the Slingshot on one arm. He hooked Helen’s elbow with the other. “We’ll need only one or two, I hope,” he shouted back.

“One or two of what?” This from Nate.

“Jumps—
cough
—into time’s ghost zones.”

The air was clean. I tore the cloth off my mouth, took a deep breath that sent a shudder down my spine, and collapsed into a fit of coughing. I was coated with dust and ash—it was on my clothes, in my throat, on my hair, in my nose.

I willed myself to breathe normally. Small, regular breaths.

Someone was coughing next to me. Sabina. My uninjured hand was still wrapped around hers and I released it, tapping her on the back to help clear her passageways. On her other side Abigail was doing the same thing. I whipped around to check for others and breathed a sigh of relief. We were all there in one long, curved, limb-connected line with Sabina and me at one end. Pillows and blankets tumbled off heads and shoulders. Lamps were dropped onto the sand under our feet as we all fought for breath and our minds adjusted to the sudden change in our circumstances.

Wherever we were, it seemed to be just after daybreak; the sun warmed the marble temples and columns of a wide, sheltered harbor. Besides being wonderfully clean, the air smelled strongly of marine life. The sand felt soft under the leather of my sandals. For a moment I thought we had jumped forward in time to a calmer, posteruption beach on the Pompeian coast, but the mountain was nowhere to be seen and the sun arose to the right as we faced the sea, not to the left. And the sea—

The sea was gone.

The dry white sand under our feet met darker, wet sand five or six steps farther down the slope of the beach; beyond, gentle hills and valleys blanketed the exposed floor of the circular harbor. These were covered with writhing sea creatures, fish and starfish and octopuses. White-sailed wooden ships, beached, lay on their sides, towering over locals who milled around, gathering the defenseless sea life. A few nimble youths were trying to make their way onto the deck of a ship that rested on its side, climbing up its mast like gymnasts on a slanted balance beam. At the entrance to the drained harbor, on an offshore island linked to the mainland by a causeway, stood a lighthouse, multitiered and gleaming white.

History doesn’t really want to kill us, Xavier had explained back at the tomb, coughing as he readied the Slingshot. It doesn’t care that much. It just wants us out of the way. Getting us safely back to our own time period was the best way to accomplish that, even better than throwing us into an underground cave or in the middle of the desert.

“Wouldn’t our bodies with their anachronistic trimmings cause a paradox if we ended up in a desert?” I’d asked as pumice pounded the tomb roof.

“Not if they were quickly covered up by sand,” the professor had explained, fighting for breath with each word. “We’re like a mosquito—History might give a general swat in our direction, but we still have a chance. With every ghost zone we drop into, I’d say the odds are even that we’ll get through.”

“So it’s a coin toss whether we’ll make it home or not.” Under the circumstances, those were odds I was willing to take.

“No, weren’t you listening, Julia?” Kamal had interrupted. “Our chances of surviving a
single
ghost zone are one in two. If we fall into
two
ghost zones, our chances of making it out are one in four. If we fall into
three
, they’re one in eight—” And that
was when Xavier had turned on his device with one last warning. “Surfing ghost zones is like a cog slipping in a mechanical clock—we’ll move in some combination of distance and time as I sling us forward.”

The first jump had landed us here, wherever
here
was. We weren’t going to have much time to figure it out. In the forty seconds or so we had been on the beach trying to get our bearings, a roaring sound had been increasing in intensity. Beyond the waterless sea floor, a wall of
something
approached, something reflective that sparkled in the morning light. And it was moving fast and getting bigger by the second, about to engulf the harbor and its residents.