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said.
    “Any message he might have left for us could only have served one purpose—by letting us know what happened, it would help us avoid future incidents.” Dr. Rojas continued in the same pensive tone. “I wonder why Xavier decided to do a run alone, though it’s not unlike him to go off protocol—”
    “Exactly,” said Dr. Baumgartner bluntly, looking up from the journal article she had discreetly started editing. She had a while to go before acquiring tenure (the holy grail of academia, a professorial position that could not be terminated). “Xavier was always full of ideas and eager to tinker with things.” She said it with admiration, not criticism. Dr. B had been a postdoc in the school (the shortened version of her name had been coined by fellow postdocs) before being offered a joint tenure-track position in TTE and History of Science. She herself seemed to prefer action to theory. “Most likely, Xavier probably saw that something needed tweaking when he was overseeing last night’s calibration, so he jumped in STEWie’s basket to test a Band-Aid solution he’d come up with—and it failed badly. Isn’t that what everybody’s thinking but no one wants to say it?”
    Again, it wasn’t said as a criticism, but a sudden awkward silence did descend on the room.
    “Dean Sunder,” I said into it, “has canceled this year’s December holiday party. We’ll be holding a memorial service onFriday, after the last of the exams. Anybody who wants to say a few words about Professor Mooney or share any memories from his almost four decades at St. Sunniva, please let me know.”
    “Let’s try and get to the bottom of this unfortunate matter as soon as possible,” Dr. Little said, resuming his typing. “Everyone has work to do. Who’ll take over Mooney’s courses, Julia?”
    “Dean Sunder will try to figure something out before the start of the next semester. As for his current classes, Introduction to Time Travel Physics had a final project and no exam. Dr. Mooney had already graded the projects before his accident. There was a list of final grades on his desk. Ghost Zones in Time: How to Find Them and Avoid Them has a final project as well, doesn’t it, Kamal?”
    Kamal, who was the teaching assistant for that class, nodded. “He sent me the final grades yesterday.”
    “I took Ghost Zones in Time last year,” Abigail spoke up for the first time. “In that classroom, just around the bend of the hallway. For the final project we had to propose a historical event or geographic location that constitutes a ghost zone, suggest an itinerary that circumvents it, and compute coordinates. I chose the Tunguska Event of 1908.”
    Erika Baumgartner looked up from her journal article again. “It would be quite interesting, wouldn’t it, to travel to Siberia of that year and settle the question of whether an asteroid or a comet impacted in the area? It wouldn’t be relevant to your thesis topic, Abigail, but perhaps we could get a paper out of it,” she said, then stopped abruptly, as if remembering why we were all gathered here.
    I didn’t begrudge her the editing of the journal paper (
publish or perish
was the imperative phrase in academia), nor her momentary lapse of memory. This was merely a department meeting to figure out how to deal with the aftermath of Dr. Mooney’saccident; the memorial service would come later. It was also true that sometimes people dealt best with bad news by focusing on other matters.
    As everyone started to shuffle out of the room, Chief Kirkland raised a hand. “I have a question,” he said in a quiet tone that nevertheless made everyone stop and turn in his direction. (The chief seemed to have a talent for bringing other people’s conversations to a halt. Maybe it was the uniform. I usually had to pull on sleeves and tap shoulders.)
    Dr. Rojas shifted in his chair to face the chief. The gray-haired professor had not eaten anything, I noticed, and looked too distracted