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Kamal,” I said firmly.
    Dr. Baumgartner was eying Kamal as if she still thought the whole thing might turn out to be an end-of-the-semester student prank gone wrong. Dr. Rojas came to his rescue. “I’ll start running tests this afternoon to see what I can find out. Until then, let’s keep all this guessing to a minimum.”
    “Surely you’re not planning on going on any STEWie runs, Dr. Rojas,” I said. “I don’t think Dean Sunder is ready to approve anything of that sort yet—”
    “And he would be quite right, Julia. No, the Genetics Department is lending us a fish so we can run tests and pinpoint the malfunction that caused the mirror-laser array to lose focus—”
    “—and send Mooney into a ghost zone,” Dr. Little finished the sentence for him. “The dangers of cutting-edge research,” he added matter-of-factly, offering the well-known platitude (one that, I had to admit, I’d used myself in composing the dean’s press statement). “Instead of arriving at whatever year and location Mooney wanted, he found himself trapped in a ghost zone with no way out.” As if to add emphasis to his words, the young professor broke the cracker in his hands in two with a snap. I winced and noticed that Abigail, next to me, had scrunched up her eyes, like she was either getting ready to cry, or getting very angry. I rather fancied it was the second. Her spiky, neon-orange hair made her look like a petite warrior. Kamal, next to her, wasn’t looking too happy, either.
    “And a ghost zone is…?” Chief Kirkland asked Dr. Little, who was deftly toothpicking one of the Gouda cubes. Our newestprofessor looked like he was well on the road to gaining the tenure-track twenty and contradicting his name in the horizontal dimension, I noted somewhat uncharitably as I got up to empty a fresh package of crackers onto the platter.
    Dr. Little disposed of the Gouda cube and said, “A ghost zone is the easiest way for History to protect itself.” Like everyone connected to the TTE program, he spoke the word with reverence, a capital
H
, as if History was a force to be reckoned with. “Nothing cleaner than sending a time traveler to the bottom of the ocean, or into outer space, or onto the Bikini Atoll on the morning of March 1, 1954. The traveler would be able to move quite freely on the atoll. Not for long, though. That’s what a ghost zone is—you perish seconds after you step foot out of STEWie’s basket, your body decomposes as time passes, nature spreads your molecules all around…so you do come back to the present, just not in one piece. We call it being scattered across time.”
    He reached for another cracker and Dr. Rojas took the opportunity to clarify things for the chief and an agog Officer Van Underberg. “That’s why we perform a calibration before each run, to sidestep any possible ghost zones. Our early tests with fish and robotic vehicles resulted in quite a few losses.”
    I brought up a thought I had been holding on to. “What if Dr. Mooney arrived safely but was for some reason unable to get back to STEWie’s basket? Would the professor be able to contact us?”
    “You mean, could he carve a message into stone and leave it somewhere for us to find?” Dr. Little liked to pounce when a scientific point came up, especially if someone had inadvertently spoken with imprecision. “First, the basket would never have returned empty. That only happens if the traveler is—”
    “Dead,” Kamal croaked out the word.
    “And second, even if Mooney did somehow manage to write a message for us, it wouldn’t matter.”
    “Why not?” I hoped Dr. Little wouldn’t ridicule me for what I was about to ask. “Couldn’t we send a rescue basket after him if we found a message telling us what went wrong?”
    Dr. Little opened his mouth to answer but Dr. Rojas got there first. He briefly shook his head. “It’s all in the past, Julia. He would have already lived out his life.”
    “Right, of course,” I