The Feline Affair (An Incident Series Novelette) by Neve Maslakovic

1
    “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