The Feline Affair (An Incident Series Novelette) (6 page)

A bespectacled man with dark hair sat at a
neat desk, his face in profile to the window. He was bent over a
book, one of several open ones that covered the desktop, with a
notebook on one side. Occasionally, he would pause in his reading
to jot down a thought. I pictured Abigail squatting under the
window, holding her phone just above the sill. The footage shook
slightly, then steadied again.

At one point the man looked over one shoulder
in the direction of the open window, as if suddenly aware that
someone was watching him. Since Abigail was in period-correct wear,
it was possible for her to be seen but unlikely—spotting a stranger
lurking in his garden would have no doubt impacted the course of
Schrödinger’s day. Schrödinger seemed to shake the feeling off and
gave his attention back to the reading. But he was in the
background. Closer to the camera—and thereby larger in the video
feed—a row of potted plants lined the windowsill. Between these
plants, directly in the path of the sunlight streaming inside,
lounged an elderly cream-colored cat. It lay on its back, its
not-insignificant belly up in the air, its paws loose in every
which direction. It was the mellowest cat I’d ever seen and nothing
like the energetic cats that had populated my strange dream. Every
so often one of its eyes would fly open and then slowly close.

“Meet Milton,” Dr. Mooney said.

“Schrödinger’s cat is named Milton?” I
whispered back, as if the man at the desk could hear us. I had been
imagining—if there
was
a cat—that its name would be Quantum
or Atom or some German version thereof.

“The Schrödingers would hardly have fled
Berlin with a cat in tow. Milton must have been the house cat at 24
Northmoor Road. He was probably already there when they moved
in.”

“How do you know his name is Milton?”

“Just watch.”

Another minute or two passed, during which
nothing much happened except the cat’s paws twitching occasionally
in its dream state. The man at the desk sighed and shook his head
as if in exasperation. After carefully marking his place with a
used postcard, Schrödinger put down the book and closed it. He
pulled his chair back and tidied a bit, then commented in the
direction of the cat in a very slight German accent, “Ah, Milton,
my friend. These matters do not trouble you, do they? This cannot
be the real state of affairs, uncertainty affecting tangible and
visible things…”

Milton certainly didn’t seem troubled by
anything tangible or not, as he didn’t even bother to acknowledge
the mention of his name by waking up. He had an air about him of
the perfect test subject, one so deeply asleep that he could not
ruin any possible experiment under the sun by messing with its
mechanisms.

I was eager to hear more of what the famous
physicist had to say, but the door opened, and I had a brief
glimpse of a woman entering the study before Abigail’s hand—and
thus the camera—shot down fast, as if History had pushed it down,
which it might well have done.

The video cut out with one last shot of the
cat lying on the sill.

Somewhat reluctantly, I handed the cell phone
back to Dr. Mooney. As he set about importing the video footage
into the lab computers and making a backup copy before emailing it
to Dr. Rojas, I voiced a thought. “Do you think that was the very
moment that Schrödinger devised his experiment? Right there when he
got to his feet and saw Milton on the windowsill?”

“Could be…but I doubt it. That would be the
time-travel equivalent of sticking a hand into the proverbial
haystack and pricking it on a needle by accident. If we mounted a
camera inside the study at 24 Northmoor Road and left it there for
a while, popping in occasionally to retrieve footage, we’d probably
catch Schrödinger setting his experiment to paper. But as to when
he
thought
of it…Let us instead say that this was
a
moment, one of many that ultimately led Schrödinger to formulate
his concerns via a steel box and Milton’s theoretical twin.”

I ran into Dr. Mooney again about a week later,
outside Hypatia House.

“How did Dr. Rojas take it? Losing the bet?”
I asked.

“He’s buying me lunch this afternoon. I think
we’re about fifty-fifty on the lunches—he keeps closer track of the
score than I do. Here—I stopped by to give you something.”

He handed me a picture of Milton, a
screenshot from the video just before it had cut out. One of
Milton’s eyes was open and focused in the direction of the camera,
almost as if the cat had sensed Abigail’s and the others’ presence
at the very end. The professor went on, “By the way, what happened
with your fridge phantom, Julia?”

“He’s been found. Dean Sunder and Dr. Oshiro
decided not to do anything about it.”

“Ah. Someone who’s here at St. Sunniva for
only a short time?” There was a note of understanding in his voice.
He had undoubtedly seen stranger things in his three and a half
decades in academia.

“Something like that.”

“Well, at least you know who it is. Sorry to
cut our chat short, but I’m on my way to the Coffee Library for
some research books I want to peruse over the weekend.”

“For a future STEWie run?”

“It’s nothing that’s on the roster yet. Just
early preparations for one I’m planning to take soon.”

As he set off with a friendly wave in the
direction of the library, I felt a slight but unmistakable pang of
envy. All of it—the Shakespeare footage Dr. Presnik had proudly
released to the media, the photo in my hand of a cat named
Milton—seemed like, well, great fun. STEWie had been described in
many ways in PR releases, research proposals, and submissions for
roster spots (“a new, textbook-changing paradigm” was the example
that came to mind), but isn’t that what it all came down to? Yes,
STEWie was advancing our knowledge and understanding of the past,
but underneath it all…

Back in my office I slid into my desk chair
and opened my mailbox to find a dozen emails with new STEWie
proposals for me to go through. The ones that had all the necessary
forms and attachments would go on to Dean Sunder. I sent the first
of the proposals to the printer.

It had been quite a week. I had helped solve
a campus crime, along the way discovering that our new chief of
campus security didn’t seem to like me very much for some reason.
Well, that would sort itself out in time hopefully. I gave a small
shrug and got up to fetch the printout under the watchful eye of
Milton, who stared at me from the corkboard to which I had tacked
his photo. I slid back into my chair to read over the proposal. Dr.
Baumgartner was asking for an eighteenth-century run to France for
some data on the chemist Lavoisier. She had secured a grant, there
was a firm research topic she wished to address, and she was
planning to take three students. If Dean Sunder signed off on her
proposal, Dr. Baumgartner and her team would be on the roster in
mid-December. It all seemed in order, so I collected the pages
together with a paper clip and set the proposal aside to start a
stack for the dean.

I sent the next proposal to the printer and
took a cookie from the jar. Perhaps I was more on the sidelines
than I would like to be, but the bottom line was that I was lucky
to be part of the STEWie project, even in a limited capacity. It
would have to do.

Then again the future was just budding
History, and if there was one thing that had already become clear
from STEWie runs, it was this: History never failed to surprise. I
had reasoned correctly that Schrödinger had owned a cat…but a cat
named Milton? Who could have guessed that?

I reached for a second cookie. The future was
an as-yet-unopened box brimming with possibilities, a Schrödinger
experiment of its own. There was no way to predict what lay in
store until the box was opened.

But in my wildest dreams I could not foresee
what was to come.

###

THE FAR TIME INCIDENT (BOOK 1) A deadly
accident rocks St. Sunniva University's time-travel lab and it's up
to science dean's assistant Julia Olsen and campus
security chief Nate Kirkland to figure out what went wrong. When
the investigation points towards murder, Julia and Nate find
themselves caught in a deadly cover-up—one that strands
them in ancient Pompeii on the eve of the eruption of the
world’s most infamous volcano. Now Julia and Nate must outwit
history itself and expose the school’s saboteur before it's too
late.

THE RUNESTONE INCIDENT (BOOK 2) St. Sunniva's
Julia Olsen and Nate Kirkland find themselves hot on the trail of a
fourteenth-century artifact, a missing runic specialist, and an
all-too-familiar kidnapper who has used the university's time
machine for a joyride deep into America's past.

THE BELLBOTTOM INCIDENT (BOOK 3) Julia and
Nate, St. Sunniva University’s time-traveling crime-stoppers, are
facing their toughest challenge yet: Sabina, their adopted niece
from the lost city of Pompeii, has gone missing—in the bellbottom
decade, of all places. The only clues to her whereabouts are
hidden in a Kurt Vonnegut novel. Can Sabina be rescued before the
final, unstoppable showdown with History? 

The Incident series is available in trade
paperback and ebook. Find out more at
http://www.nevemaslakovic.com
.

Neve Maslakovic is the author of the Incident
series (time-travel whodunits) as well as a standalone novel,
Regarding Ducks and Universes
. Neve’s life journey has taken
her from Belgrade, Serbia to a PhD at Stanford University's STAR
Lab (Space, Telecommunications and Radioscience Lab) to her dream
job as a full-time writer. She currently lives with her husband and
son near Minneapolis/St. Paul, where she admits to enjoying the
winters. Booklist called her debut novel,
Regarding Ducks and
Universes
, "Inventive... a delight."