Meridian

1

“I warn you, if the outcome is anywhere close to the preliminary readings, then we have a problem; and a very serious problem at that.” Dorland allowed himself a sip of coffee, his eyes dark ovals in the haze of steam above the rim of a Styrofoam cup.

“Oh, Paul,” Maeve Lindford was at the bookcase squinting at the spine of a volume in the literature section of the study. “When will you learn to drink from a proper mug?”

“When I can find someone to wash the damn thing,” said Dorland with the same dire intensity.

“Well, don’t worry about the numbers until they get here,” said Maeve. “We worked hard on this solution. Everything will be fine.”

“Yes,” said Dorland. “Fine as rain. The preliminaries show a .0027 percent discrepancy value for the entry zone. We aren’t sure where the target will be in the time frame the professor has chosen, and that makes me nervous.”

“It’ll be fine, Paul.” Professor Nordhausen spoke up from his place at the study table. “He’ll be there, I assure you—probably up in the gallery with the important guests.”

“Well I wish I could be so certain.” Dorland was shifting uneasily in his chair by the table, obviously upset about something, though he seemed more frustrated than angry. “What time is it?” He craned his neck about to have a look at the study clock on the mantle overlooking the fireplace. “Where’s Kelly? Is he going to make us wait until morning again?” There were four chairs around the study table; three showing obvious signs of occupation, with coats and scarves draped on the polished wood uprights and stacks of books and papers heaped on the table. The odd chair was waiting for the fourth member of the group, Chief Technician Kelly Ramer, running numbers in the computer lab, and he was always late.

“You know how hard it is to get time on an Arion mainframe these days, Paul,” Maeve chided again.

“Damn near impossible.” Professor Nordhausen shifted in his chair and eyed Dorland over the dark rim of his reading glasses, an irritated expression adding definition to the wrinkles etching his forehead. In his late-forties, the professor had settled into a comfortable agreement with his deeply receded hairline. Dorland remembered when he sported a full head of curly hair in his college days, for the two had a long history. Nordhausen had long since given up on the effort to cultivate what little remained of his hair. “We need another Arion unit on site if the project surprises us and actually works.” He wagged a finger at Dorland as he finished.

“I’d have three if I could,” said Dorland, “but the budget is strained enough as it is. An Arion mainframe will run us another ten million. Care to write me a check? Until then, we’ll have to stand in line and lease time on the university machines, like everybody else.”

While simple desktops had tremendous computing power, the computational requirements of the Dorland Project would require a network of several thousand PCs. There were, however, a few Arion mainframes deployed in universities and government facilities for runtime sessions requiring intense computation like weather modeling or exotic 3D-Holography. Named for the mythical horse endowed with the gift of speech and prophecy, the Arion series computers were massive parallel processing units with enormous computational power. A typical Arion system could now do the work of three high-end Cray machines. They were usually booked the whole year through, but Dorland had managed to secure five coveted sessions to run the crucial calculations necessary for his project. The computer genius of the group, Kelly Ramer, was finishing the last session tonight and was scheduled to bring in the numbers on a laptop for the meeting. He had to go all the way into the City, however, as there was no time left on the closer machine at U.C. Berkeley.

“Well, I wouldn’t worry too much about it,” Nordhausen sighed, his tone shifting noticeably. “If you ask me, the whole thing is a waste of valuable comp cycles.”

“You aren’t going to start in on that again, are you?” Dorland was drumming his fingers on the oak tabletop now, visibly agitated. His long slender hands moved in a graceful motion, index finger tapping out a steady rhythm.

“Waste of time,” Nordhausen said again, obviously intending to stir the kettle, though Maeve shot him an admonishing glance just the same. “It won’t work,” he pressed on. “Even if the theory is sound, as it may very well be, I still think the whole thing is impossible. So it doesn’t matter if the target is there or not, Paul. We may never know.”

“So certain again, are you?” Dorland shot him an annoyed glance. “Honestly, Robert, one minute you’re absolutely convinced that everything will be fine, and then the next thing out of your mouth is this damned pessimism! What’s your problem?”

“I’m just being realistic,” Nordhausen corrected. “It’s not pessimism. I have my doubts, that’s all. Hawking said it best: if it really is possible to travel in time then why aren’t we awash in time travelers? You’ve never answered that one, you know. Don’t you think they’d be just a little bit interested in a meeting like this, for instance?”

“Oh please,” Dorland rolled his eyes in obvious dismay. He had heard this complaint before; argued it many times in fact, but Nordhausen was still as stubborn now as when he had first broached the subject with him three years ago. “You really don’t expect a team of future researchers to just come barging in and join us for coffee, do you? Hello,” he acted the part, with a clear edge of sarcasm in his voice to let Nordhausen know he wasn’t happy to be launched on this course again. “Please excuse us, but we’re from the future and we understand this to be a particularly important meeting. Mind if we just stand here off to one side while you folks make a bit of history. We promise not to make any noise.” He looked away, obviously frustrated.

“Well, to be honest I really don’t expect much of anything at all—and that’s exactly my point, Paul. Nothing is going to happen! Therefore this isn’t a particularly important meeting and, assuming your theory is correct, that’s why nobody is crashing the party. It’s simple, really, when you think on it.”

“Oh, he’s thought on it,” Maeve put in with a smile, secretly pleased to find herself the referee again in another sparring session between the two senior researchers. Dorland was the Master Of Sciences on the project, and Nordhausen was Chief Historian. They had argued Time Theory many times before, but now that the project was at the very edge of their first real attempt at opening the continuum, the debate had begun to heat up again. Nordhausen, ever the devil’s advocate, was constantly jabbing at Dorland’s theory, in spite of his enormous commitment of time and resources to the effort that had brought them all this far. It was, however, the last thing Dorland needed just now. Healthy skepticism was one thing, but lately Nordhausen had begun to show real signs of backing out of the project altogether.

“Well it’s obvious that he hasn’t given it much thought,” said Dorland over his shoulder at Maeve. “I mean there are any number of ways I could answer his argument.”

“Indulge me.” Nordhausen folded his arms with a smug look on his face. “And will you please stop drumming your fingers on the table!”

Dorland looked at his hand, and then ran it through his full brown hair. Unlike Nordhausen the ravages of time lay gently on him. They were the same age, but Paul still looked ten years younger, and some even thought he was still in his thirties. “Alright,” he began, “let’s put your pessimism aside for a moment and suppose we’re successful tomorrow. If that’s the case then we will have accomplished something that will have the most profound effect I can imagine on the future course of history.”

“Yes, yes,” said Nordhausen, conceding the point. “All future time lines would be vulnerable to alteration if we’re successful.”

“All time lines,” said Dorland, “both future and past. That makes the experiment tomorrow a Deep Nexus, which would make this whole milieu a Point of Origin—closed to any temporal contamination according to my theory—unless it’s done by one of us here on the inside. So that’s why we don’t have visitors in the back of the room slurping coffee, Professor. It’s really simple, if you think on it.” He mocked his adversary to make his point, but the grin on his face betrayed the long friendship between the two men, in spite of their obvious intellectual differences. It was this bond, forged over some thirty years, that had kept Nordhausen involved in the project, though at times he was a reluctant warrior.

“Well there wouldn’t be enough to go around anyway,” Maeve chimed in as she slid another volume from the bookcase, frowning at the dust on the binding. “Make another pot, Paul. It looks like we’re going to be here for a while. Did you bring Peets?”

“Guatemala,” said Dorland absent mindedly as he flipped through the pages of a notebook, still hot on the trail of his argument with Nordhausen.

“I thought you were going to bring Major Dickason’s blend tonight. Guatemala is a good breakfast coffee but we’ll need something a little stronger if Robert starts digging his heels in again.”

“Oh come now, Maeve,” Nordhausen protested mildly. “I’m just trying to make him think about his own theory here. He dreamt up all this stuff, remember? The idea of a time ‘penumbra’ is convenient, but nothing more than pure speculation. I think my argument still holds up quite well. If they could visit a pivotal event like this, they would visit it. And since we can’t even seem to get Kelly to join us in a timely manner, I’m not expecting anyone else to show up either.”

Maeve was frowning at the spine of a volume of The Norton Anthology of Literature. “Don’t you ever clean in here, Robert? I could spend a whole day getting the dust off these books.”

“Be my guest.” Nordhausen warmed to the offer immediately, but Maeve shook a warning finger at him. He tacked back to the argument with Paul, as if suddenly remembering something. “I thought you said a Prime Mover was the primary causative factor for an Imperative, and that only an Imperative event can cast a time penumbra.”

“Precisely,” said Dorland as he scribbled a brief note in his journal.

“Getting a bit overconfident, aren’t we?” Nordhausen needled his friend again. “I mean if the experiment does become a Deep Nexus then the first moment when we open the continuum would be an Imperative event, an event that must happen—is that what you’re starting to think now, Paul?”

“Why shouldn’t I? If I had your attitude I would have torn out my hair long ago over this business, and given up.” He gave Nordhausen an accusing glance but the other man brushed it aside. “If you’re so convinced this is all poppycock, then why are you here? Could it be that there’s just a thimbleful of faith in your heart as well?”

“Believe me,” said Nordhausen, “If there’s any possibility that you might actually gain access to the continuum tomorrow, then someone has to be certain you don’t start mucking things up.”

“Oh, I see,” said Dorland. “You want to supervise again, is that it?”

“He ought to hire a maid,” said Maeve again from the bookcase.

“What are you doing over there, Maeve?” Nordhausen took advantage of the interruption to veer away from the conversation with Dorland for a moment. The two had quarreled in recent weeks over who should have final authority over the experiment. Up to this point it had been Dorland’s team of science experts and physicists that had been the key players in the project. The time and investment required to build the project launch site, with its massive computing and power requirements, had been the mainstream of their effort thus far. Nordhausen worked on the sidelines with his team of historical researchers to isolate an appropriate target for their first experiment. Now that the project plant was fully operational, he argued that the historians should exercise primary operational control. Dorland was too close to the effort expended thus far to relinquish control, and the friction between them had been building as the launch date neared.

Nordhausen slipped away from his place at the table and headed for the coffee station. He tugged on a gold chain attached to his sweater and drew out a pocket watch. “Eight-forty,” he muttered. “Wasn’t the meeting scheduled for eight? What’s Kelly up to? I know,” a mischievous glint brightened his eyes as he turned to Dorland. “He’s botched up the numbers again, and the whole thing is off. That’s why we don’t have visitors tonight. Kelly never shows and the meeting gets cancelled.” A satisfied grin dressed his features as he bent over the coffee station.

“He’ll be here,” said Maeve, defending their missing compatriot. “He’s probably just stuck in traffic with all this weather. My lord—” She was squinting through the rain drizzled pane of the study window now, still clutching the volume of the Norton Anthology under her arm. “What’s going on out there? You’d think it was rush hour.”

“Probably a concert letting out over at Sidney Hall,” said Nordhausen. “I think they were presenting a Verdi set tonight.”

“Not exactly the type of crowd you’d expect to be rushing about like that. Especially in the rain. Maybe there was a fire or something.”

“Good!” said Nordhausen. “They should never have built that hall, if you ask me. The acoustics are terrible in the place. In fact, there isn’t a decent concert hall on this side of the bay. You have to go into the city if you really want to hear anything.” The professor taught at U.C. Berkeley, and he kept a private study on the northwest fringe of the city as it reached towards the East Bay community of Orinda. It was a small apartment that was more of an office, completely furnished as a library and work area. The professor maintained living quarters elsewhere and was generous enough to donate the study as the primary meeting place for key project team leaders. It was convenient for his work, but he hated having to cross the Bay Bridge any time he wanted to pursue his love of classical music. He had chosen this place for his study because of the proximity of the newly built Sidney Hall, but was soon disappointed in the acoustics there. He frowned at the near empty coffee pot, tilting it to try and dribble the last of the coffee into his mug.

Maeve saw what he was doing and came away from the window. She went straight over to the study table and plopped a heavy volume of the Norton Anthology down with a thud. “Paul,” she said with a stern glance. “Where’s that Peets you said you brought?”

“What?” Dorland was preoccupied with his notebook. “It’s over by the sink.”

“Good,” said Maeve, her hazel eyes flashing as she reached out and snatched away Paul’s pen to interrupt his scribbling. “Go make some.”

Paul started to protest, but one look at Maeve quashed that idea. She had signed on two years ago with the history team to chart potential outcomes and consequences for the experiment. A slim woman in her middle thirties, she had a no-nonsense manner about her, a penchant for cleanliness, schedules and an almost maniacal insistence for structure in the way she ordered her work. She had been a key research leader for the Outcomes Committee, and the considerable force she was able to exert on the group mechanics had soon demonstrated that she was not a person to be trifled with. She smoothed back a lock of her reddish blond hair and fixed Paul with the same patented stare that had cowed the wayward elements of the Outcomes Committee. “Now.” The single word added just enough emphasis to set Paul in motion.

“Alright,” he offered a meek defense. “I’ll make another pot. Just give me a second here.” He reached for his Styrofoam cup as he retreated to the coffee station.

“Better hurry,” jibed Nordhausen, “the visitors could show up any moment. If they get here and find the hospitality lacking they might just pack up and leave.” The sarcasm in his voice was laced with just enough humor to soften its sting.

“Very funny,” said Maeve. “No doubt the mess in this place would be reason enough to send them on their way.” Nordhausen shuffled off to the bookcase as though he wanted to see just how bad it was before he dared to say anything. He thought his argument with Dorland offered better prospects, however, and returned to the coffee station while Paul ground a bowl of fresh coffee beans he had poured from a dark brown bag. The noise of the grinder imposed a moment of silence on the conversation, but Paul started right in when he was done.

“Your problem is that you are just too wedded to your own subject, Robert.” He tilted the coffee grinder on its side and tapped the contents of the bowl into the protective lid.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Nordhausen was quick to defend himself, and Maeve smiled to herself as the two men warmed up the argument again.

“I mean you love your history so much that you simply can’t bear the thought that anyone could go back and ‘muck it up’ as you are fond of saying.” He was rinsing out a coffee press and wiping it down with a paper towel. The aroma of fresh ground coffee was already thick on the air as he worked.

“Well someone ought to be concerned enough about it to put in a good word or two for history’s sake—don’t you think? Can you imagine the potential nightmares we could have if this thing actually works? What if someone botched up the continuum and we end up losing Shakespeare, or Milton or Da Vinci?”

“We’re the only ones who would know about it,” said Dorland falling back on his inscrutable theory again. “Once the continuum changes, all trace of the altered past is gone forever. If Shakespeare ended up dead before he ever started writing, then no one would ever know about it—unless they were in the Nexus Point where the Meridian was altered.”

“Oh they’d know,” Nordhausen countered. “They’d know in their gut. There would be an immense hole in the entire progression of Western thought and expression that would leave us all the more impoverished. And if this be error upon me proved—” he began to quote one of the sonnets, and Maeve quipped in the finishing line for him.

“Then I never writ, and no man ever loved.” She was secretly delighted with the discussion, for it was just the sort of temporal conundrum that she so enjoyed sorting through. While her primary academic interest had been in Byzantine History, she was very well read and could hold her own in a discussion on almost any subject involving history, literature, and the other liberal arts. But the real reason she had been selected from among the thousands of applicants for the project was the incredible analytical ability she seemed to have. Her scores on the outcome variable testing were right at the top of the list, and she could back up each and every answer she gave with a hundred references and logical arguments. “That’s why I’m here, Robert,” she continued. “Don’t worry. It’s my job to be certain no one does drown Shakespeare before his time, and I can assure you that Hamlet and Othello have nothing to fear.”

Nordhausen smiled at her, convinced that she meant exactly what she said. Maeve Lindford would set a guard on the hallowed halls of history like no one else. It was precisely her research on potential Outcomes and Consequences that would stand that watch, and a sudden thought occurred to him.

“There you go, Paul,” he angled over to Dorland where he was impatiently waiting on a simmering water kettle. “Why not put Outcomes in charge of the operational phase of the project? Good Maeve here would be a formidable defender for us both, don’t you think? You theoreticians set up the equipment and parameters, and the historians will find you that needle in the haystack of time you’ll be wanting to get at. But we need someone like Maeve to knock our heads together when we can’t agree on what we should do. Outcomes and Consequences—Isn’t that what it’s really all about in the first place? Let Maeve’s committee exercise final authority on the operation and keep Shakespeare and Milton sleeping comfortably in their graves.”

“Here, here!” Maeve smiled at the thought of knocking a few heads together, and she knew exactly where she might begin.

The whine of the water kettle interposed itself and Paul quickly rescued it from the electric burner, pouring the hot steamy water into the coffee press. The aroma of the coffee redoubled. He was already looking for his Styrofoam cup to pour in his favorite creamer, a blend of powdered Carnation milk with a hint of hazelnut.

Maeve shot him a disapproving glance as he heaped the powder into his cup. “I can smell that way over here,” she said with an edge of complaint in her voice.

“What?” said Dorland as he stirred the coffee in the press with a long-handled spoon. “You mean my precious powders?”

“Whatever,” said Maeve with a half smile. “Are you sure you really like coffee? Why don’t you just mix up a batch of hot water with that stuff and enjoy your hazelnut.”

Nordhausen was quick to take her side. “I’ve always said that most of Paul’s problems can be attributed to an excess of hazelnut in his coffee.” They laughed together, the mood lightening a bit as Paul began pressing the coffee.

“Seriously,” said Dorland, trying to tack back to the heart of the discussion. “This gets at the crux of the matter, doesn’t it?” He filled his Styrofoam cup and Nordhausen watched the creamer billow up as he poured. “Now, the way I see it, the Old Bard would have to be a Prime Mover all on his own. He simply influenced too many lives with his writing to be so easily erased from the time continuum. I mean, anyone who has ever read the man seriously could not help but be changed by his poetry and plays in some way. Shakespeare is a perfect example of my theory on Primes. He’s just too damn important to be shunted aside, and history will do everything possible to see that it could never happen. A little help from Maeve in the bargain would be all the assurance you need, my dear Professor. See what I mean? Prime Movers cast a kind of protective shadow on the time line. They aren’t easy to derail.”

“Here we go. He’s going to give us that penumbra nonsense again,” Nordhausen complained.

“Well think about it, will you?” Dorland took a sip from his cup and extended the pot to Nordhausen as he spoke, filling the other man’s mug with the rich, black coffee. “You’re the man who is so adamant about protecting our cherished past. Perhaps the time continuum has a way of protecting its own, if you will. A man like Shakespeare or Milton is simply too important to the progression of Western culture to be lightly tampered with. Isn’t that why we picked Shakespeare for our first target? So, the continuum surrounds such a man with a protective aura of some kind. Such men stand so tall in the course of history that they cast a deep shadow about them once they first give birth to a work of art or science or whatever it is they do to become so important to the future. The shadow deepens as their influence on other lives grows and changes the progression of the time line. It soon reaches a point where their influence is so great, where they have altered so many individual lives, that it cannot be undone. The shadow they cast on history is so deep that it simply cannot be penetrated—That’s the penumbra surrounding the Prime Mover and insuring the Imperative such a person or event must give rise to. Shakespeare must write Hamlet, Othello, The Tempest and all the rest. ”

“Yes, but there’s a problem with that,” said Nordhausen. “What’s the Imperative, the man or the message? Is it Shakespeare that is important to the time line, or Hamlet?”

“To be or not to be? That is the question,” quipped Maeve.

“Well, we darn well better answer it, my friends,” said Nordhausen. “They still aren’t sure if Shakespeare even wrote half of the stuff that has been attributed to him.”

“Oh, now don’t drag in that silly theory about Sir Francis Bacon again,” Maeve protested, a warning in her eyes as she sidled over to the coffee station, mug in hand.

“Suppose it’s true,” said Nordhausen. “Then Shakespeare, the man, would be irrelevant. It’s Hamlet that matters, no matter who wrote the damn thing. I mean, suppose it was written by a squire somewhere and Shakespeare simply bought up the manuscript and published it for the local playhouses—grist for the mill.”

“So now it’s a simple country squire who’s doing the writing for you. Does he happen to work for Sir Francis Bacon?” Maeve jabbed him in the ribs with a firm fingertip.

Nordhausen laughed at this, letting the humor cover his retreat as he made his way to his seat at the study table again.

“The point is, it was published,” said Dorland. “Whether it was written by Shakespeare, or Bacon or his squire doesn’t matter.”

“And what are you getting at?” Nordhausen had reached his chair and was settling in again with a glance at his pocket watch. He snapped it closed and slipped it into his sweater. “Nine-ten.” He muttered.

Paul continued. “It’s the whole milieu of the time that surrounded Shakespeare’s life that gave rise to Hamlet, by one means or another. You can’t separate the man from his environment, and all of the history that gave rise to it. The two arise mutually—hand in glove. If Shakespeare were alive today he couldn’t write Hamlet, or Romeo and Juliet or anything even remotely like the plays and sonnets that made him famous. He was a man for his time, and the time produced the man. Don’t you see? It was an era where all the social and cultural elements that allowed a play like Hamlet to be written just came into the proper focus. Someone simply had to write Hamlet, no matter who it turns out to be.”

“Someone did write Hamlet,” said Maeve with an air of finality. “It was Shakespeare.”

Dorland filled her coffee mug with a smile. “Sure you won’t try my hazelnut creamer?”

“Don’t press your luck,” said Maeve, and she went over to the study table to retrieve the copy of the Norton Anthology of Literature she had dragged out of Nordhausen’s bookcase.

Dorland was momentarily distracted by a honking horn outside. He glanced through the study window and noted the traffic only seemed to be getting worse out near Sidney Hall. He saw a group of people running, and thought it a bit unusual for a classical music concert to be so unruly at this hour of the night. His attention to the time produced that brief surge of anxiety in his chest again. “Now where is Kelly?” He was getting more and more exasperated as they waited, as if the commotion outside the room was slowly invading the quiet atmosphere of Nordhausen’s study and stirring up all his old fears about the project again. Here he was, on the most important night of his life, perhaps the most important night of history since the Nativity, and Kelly was late again.

“He’s probably trying to get through that crowd out there by now.” Maeve took a sip of her coffee, and frowned. “You didn’t wait long enough before you pressed this,” she said. “It’s too weak. I thought you were going to bring Major Dickason’s blend?”

“Sorry,” Dorland apologized. “The professor here had me all caught up in this Shakespeare business and I wasn’t watching the time.”

“Don’t blame me, Paul.” Nordhausen was quick to defend himself. “Do not infest your mind with beating on the strangeness of this business.” He quoted Shakespeare again. “You’re the coffee expert here. You should know better.”

“Thank you, Prospero,” Maeve was quick to pick up Nordhausen’s reference to Shakespeare. “Well, our coffee expert had better learn how to use a press properly. This is too weak.” She pushed her cup aside and began flipping through the pages of her Norton Anthology.

“Looking for that quote?” Nordhausen ventured.

“Looking for trouble?” Maeve shot him a disapproving glance. “The Tempest: Act Five, Scene One.” She knew the play well and didn’t need her anthology to zero in on the reference.

Nordhausen gave her a contented grin. “Oh? I liked the second scene in that act better,” his voice had a teasing edge.

“There wasn’t a second scene,” Maeve was not in any mood for nonsense, and Nordhausen thought the better of prodding her further.

Paul was staring at the coffee press, his feathers ruffled somewhat by Maeve’s last comment. He did fancy himself a bit of a connoisseur when it came to his coffees. After years of swilling down run-of-the-mill Columbian beans off of supermarket shelves, he discovered Peets on the Internet one day and his long habit finally exulted with a brew that was truly addictive. He tried every one of the many blends over the years, finally settling on a few favorites. Major Dickason’s blend was not one of them, but it was a favorite of his good friend Kelly, and Maeve seemed to like it as well. “Sorry, Maeve,” he apologized again. “I just forgot. I had the Guatemalan in my cupboard, so I just grabbed it and ran out to catch BART. If I had known Kelly was going to be this late I could have stopped by and bought something fresh. Can I get you a tea?”

“No thanks,” Maeve was resigned to content herself with the Norton Anthology for a time. “You two can go right on arguing, if you want. Don’t mind me.”

Dorland struggled to contain his frustration. He never thought it would be like this. Here he was on the night before the launch and Kelly was late and he was fussing with a coffee press and arguing with Nordhausen again! He had looked forward to this moment for so long that the seeming inconsequentiality of the events that were playing themselves out just didn’t seem to measure up to his expectations. In one sense, it confirmed a major principle of his own time theory: that most of the time line was littered with insignificant moments that simply flowed along, like bubbles in a stream. These were the ‘Thousand nothings of the hour’ as he liked to call them after a line from Matthew Arnold’s Buried Life. Somewhere in the stream, he knew, there was one tiny bubble that would give rise to Shakespeare and Hamlet and The Tempest. Which one?

He had puzzled over his theory for years before the ideas really seemed to gel in his mind over a cup of coffee one day. It was odd the way it happened. He wasn’t even trying to think about his theory that night. He was simply relaxing in an idle moment with the TV and scrolling through the channels with his remote. After skirting away from a score of commercial messages and the latest political scandal to hit Washington, he settled on a science documentary about genetics.

The narrator was explaining how only a tiny fraction of human DNA differed from that of a Chimpanzee, or from all the other animals on earth. He remembered the event so clearly now: how the narrator had emphasized that the human genome was littered with thousands of strands of unused, excess genetic material that served no real purpose. It had simply gathered there over the eons of mutation, redundant snips and errant strands of genetic flotsam and jetsam produced by the trillions of subtle errors DNA would make over time. Yet it was exactly these errors, the mutations arising in insignificant bits of protein, that gave rise to all the variety of life. If DNA were perfect in the way it replicated itself, the world would be awash in countless strands of DNA, and nothing else. Now, however, after a trillion, trillion errors, only a tiny fraction of all the DNA in the genome was actually useful, yet it still needed the supporting structure of all the trivial material around it in order to continue to move forward in the stream of evolution.

Time was like that, he suddenly thought. The idea shot through him like a bolt of lightning and gave him the last critical tenet that had so eluded him in his search for an understanding of time theory. His life was transformed from that moment on. The incident became the founding principle of his theory of time: that all of history’s most crucial events arose from their opposite, from some single moment of utter insignificance that served as the key trigger for the event.

What was it that had led him to the science documentary that night? Somewhere, he knew, there was some insignificant incident that led him to that single split second of insight. He did not know exactly where that moment in time was, but he knew it was there, a single point in time that gave rise to some compelling and truly significant event in the time line of history—a Pushpoint as he came to call it.

Now he was here on a night that should be saturated with significance—the night before the project launch; the final briefing! He was fidgeting with a coffee press and listening to Nordhausen, and trying to keep Maeve content with a decent cup of coffee. Was there another Pushpoint hiding in the insignificance of all these trivial events?

A peal of thunder rumbled in the distance, and the rain pattering on the rooftop began to beat down more heavily. Dorland set the coffee press aside and went over to join the others at the study table. “Well,” he said, “there’s no use wasting any more time tonight.”

“Good,” said Nordhausen looking around for his overcoat.

“Don’t get any ideas about leaving yet,” Dorland cautioned him. “I meant we should get on with the briefing. We can always fill Kelly in when he gets here.”

“I was afraid you were going to say that,” Nordhausen sighed. “I suppose it’s a bit wild out there with this storm blowing through. Let’s get on with it then. I’ll start with the history briefing, unless you have more time theory to discuss.”

“Be my guest,” Dorland proffered a slight bow in the professor’s direction.

“Shakespeare’s Tempest,” Nordhausen began. “A fine night for the subject, isn’t it? Now, unless Kelly finds something in the numbers to screw things up, our plan remains the same. The temporal locus is the early winter of 1612, at the Globe, of course. Our intention is solely observation. We’re going to watch the play. The Tempest was written in the fall and winter of 1610-11 and probably first produced at court in 1611. This particular event was a special showing at the Globe, probably part of the festivities preceding the marriage of Elizabeth to the Elector Palatine. Oh, we’re going to nose around a bit, but there won’t be any real interaction with the locals.”

“Nose around a bit?” Maeve was immediately on guard. “What exactly is that supposed to mean? You said observation only—remember?”

“Well you don’t expect us to simply take a seat, watch the play and then leave do you? What’s the point of opening the continuum if we don’t learn anything?”

“At this point I’d be satisfied to simply get there and return safely,” said Dorland “If we actually manage to take in a scene or two of the play, all the better.”

“What do you mean, nose around a bit?” Maeve fixed Nordhausen with those riveting hazel eyes and he squirmed a little as he answered.

“Nothing out of the ordinary,” he started to explain. “I thought we might just have a look about the theatre—at least one of us—while the others enjoy the play.”

“Where?” The tone of Maeve’s voice made it perfectly clear that Nordhausen had better come to the point, and fast.

“Well, there’s been a lot of controversy surrounding the origin of this play,” the professor ventured out onto the ice, choosing his words carefully. “I thought we might find something that would shed light on a few questions, that’s all.”

“What questions?” Maeve was still waiting and Nordhausen took a deep breath and finally let his idea tumble out.

“Source material, for one thing. There is no known source for the story, you see. As far as we know it was one of only two original plots Shakespeare came up with, the other being Love’s Labor’s Lost. There are some, however, who feel he was heavily influenced by the Bermuda Pamphlets, and—”

“This wasn’t in your task list, Professor.” Maeve’s look made it clear that she wasn’t happy.

“Yes it was,” said Nordhausen. “I put it in under observation of grounds and theatre.”

“Bermuda Pamphlets?” Dorland was confused.

“You expect a copy of the Bermuda Pamphlets to just be lying around somewhere for your perusal?” Maeve was on to something now.

“What are you two talking about?” Dorland was only too glad that it was Nordhausen who was going to be the recipient of Maeve’s attention for a while, but he tried to get his footing in the conversation anyway.

Nordhausen sighed and turned to explain. “Nine ships set sail from Plymouth for the colony of Virginia in June of 1609. The new governor of the Colony, Sir Thomas Gates, was on Sea-Venture, commanded by Sir George Somers. Well, the fleet hit bad weather on July 24, a tempest, if you will. Sea Venture was separated from the rest of the ships and was presumed lost at sea. Then, to everyone’s great surprise, the survivors of the ship’s contingent turned up in Jamestown the following May! They were adrift on two makeshift vessels they managed to build during a long sojourn on the isle of Bermuda—thought to be a devil’s island at the time. The reports and letters about the incident reached London in 1610, just before Shakespeare started work on The Tempest. It was very big news, you see, and particularly for Shakespeare.”

“Why is that?” asked Dorland.

“Because he had close relations with the folks who sponsored the expedition in the first place. Some even think he may have had a share in the profits of the planned Virginia Company. In any case, much of what we know about the incident comes from letters and reports that have been loosely called the Bermuda Pamphlets—William Strachey’s letter in particular.”

“I knew you would try to pull something like this,” Maeve was getting angry now. “I won’t allow it, Robert!”

“Oh come on,” Nordhausen tried to pacify her. “I have just as much interest in preserving the continuum as you do—even more, in fact. You know how I feel about the history.”

“Only too well,” said Maeve. “That’s what worries me. Now, I’ll ask you one more time. Just where do you think you might go strolling?”

Nordhausen had a flustered look on his face. There was no getting around her, he knew. Not on the night of the final briefing. He decided he had better come clean and see if he could get Dorland to chime in with something from his time theory to smooth the wrinkle over. “Just a quick peek in the rear offices,” he ventured. “Only one of us—while the others enjoy the play.”

“Whose offices?” Maeve narrowed her eyes, knowing the answer to the question before Nordhausen had a chance to answer. “No, I’m sorry, but I won’t allow it. This was not on your list—at least not specifically, and we can’t run formulae on potential outcomes without exact details. I’m amazed that you would try to pull something like this at the last minute. I won’t hear of it!”

“Whose offices?” Dorland was feeling a bit shipwrecked himself.

“But I won’t be more than a few minutes,” Nordhausen’s voice seemed to plead now. “I’ll just slip away for a moment and take a quick peek at the old man’s study, that’s all. He might have copies of Strachey’s letters there.”

“They weren’t even published until 1625,” Maeve put in adamantly, her arms folded with finality.

“Yes, the public version of the report circulated in 1625, but we know all the senior members of the Virginia Company must have seen Strachey’s letters much earlier; immediately, in fact. I’m certain that Shakespeare must have been privy to them—probably even had a copy; perhaps in his study at the Globe. And there may be other documents or books there that would shed light on this question. Perhaps I’d find a copy of Thomas’ History of Italy. Many of the characters names in the play are thought to be derived from that narrative.”

He looked at Dorland, reaching for some support. “Look here, Paul. This may be one of those little threads in the weave of time you’ve been talking about. What if there had been no real tempest at sea when the fleet set out?”

“That’s an Imperative,” Dorland explained. “The weather on a given day is not subject to a willful act by any person. It can’t be changed.”

“Fine.” Nordhausen brushed the point aside and pressed on. “What I’m saying is, that if we can establish a clear link between Shakespeare and the Bermuda Pamphlets at the time he wrote the play, then you may have a chance to hunt down one of those little insignificant moments in time that gives rise to The Tempest, one of Shakespeare’s last, and greatest, plays. Why, some even think it was the summation of his work. First we find Strachey’s letters; then we try and hunt down your intersection somewhere on the Meridian—”

“Pushpoint,” Dorland corrected him.

“Whatever,” the professor hurried on. “We do other missions to follow that lead back in time and see what might have really seeded the incident. It had to be something that happened at Plymouth before the expedition put out to sea. Look, the fleet left on June 2^nd. We have the date right in Strachey’s report. If they had set sail a few days earlier or later, then no storm at sea; no shipwreck on Bermuda; no report reaches London in 1610, and perhaps no play! What a paper that would make!”

“No!” Maeve’s eyes widened with her exclamation. “No, Robert. Absolutely, positively and authoritatively: No. Are you crazy? What if Shakespeare is there when you decide to take a peek into his office.”

“Highly unlikely,” Nordhausen argued.

“Why? You seemed so certain he would be at the site earlier tonight, right, Paul?” Maeve gave Dorland a quick glance, beginning to pull him over to her side on the matter.

“He’d be there, alright,” said Nordhausen, “but he’d be in the upper gallery watching the play. There were official guests to be coddled. He wouldn’t be futzing about in his office during the performance.”

“Say something, Paul.” Maeve gave Dorland a disparaging look. “If he bumbles into someone, he could introduce variations in the Meridian. Am I right?”

“Well…” Dorland thought carefully before he spoke, and they both waited as he tapped his finger on the table, catching up to the implications of the argument at last. “The professor may be right that the Old Bard would probably be in the gallery, but probabilities are the province of Outcomes and Consequences.”

“There,” said Maeve, seizing on the moment to assert herself again. “You should have submitted this idea in detail, Robert, along with all this business about the Bermuda Pamphlets, and Strachey’s letters and God only know what else you may be after with this. We can’t run probability numbers without specifics. You, of all people, should know that!”

“But really,” Nordhausen made one last sortie. “What would be the harm? I’m not talking about some dolt blundering into Shakespeare’s offices and rifling the place for lost documents—”

“No,” Maeve interrupted him. “You’re talking about a bemused history professor on a quest for primary source material in the office of one of the most significant ‘Prime Movers’ of the last 500 years, right? Are you telling me you’re going to be careful once you get your beady eyes on that man’s desk? You mean to say that you could resist the urge to open that desk drawer, or to slip a volume or two out of his bookcase? Lord, I wouldn’t be surprised if you actually tried to make off with something significant and bring it back!”

“Well I’m not that daft,” Nordhausen was getting angry.

“That would be a serious violation,” Dorland put in matter of factly.

“Damn right,” said Maeve. “I just won’t allow this, so get it out of your head. If you plan on going tomorrow, then I am going to be glued to your right arm. Understand?”

Nordhausen gave her a sheepish look. “Oh, what’s the use,” he said sullenly, a defeated look on his face. “I mean what good is the experiment if you don’t try to answer questions like this? Don’t get all bent out of shape now, Maeve. Nothing’s going to happen anyway. We’ll get all dressed up for the play and the Arch won’t work. Mark my words.” He fished out his pocket watch again, snapping it open to look at the time. “Nine-thirty-five,” he muttered. “Where’s Kelly and his numbers machine? Are we going to sit here all night?”

Dorland saw that, with the loss of his fishing expedition, Nordhausen was going to lapse into his famous brooding intellect again. Lightning flashed in the sky outside the study, and it seemed there was a great deal of noise out on the street. He suddenly felt that the whole evening was spinning off kilter for him. All of the restless excitement he had brought with him to the meeting was dissipating into a rising sense of anxiety. He felt odd, and strangely out of place. One moment he had the reins of the project tightly in his grasp, and now he seemed to feel things slipping away from him. Maeve was clearly angry and Nordhausen was brooding and they were out of coffee and Kelly was nowhere to be found. The noise outside, and the roiling of the storm, seemed to mirror his inner states, leaving him adrift and unsettled in his mind about the outcome of the project. For the first time in many long years he faced a yawning sense of doubt about it all. What were they about to do?

What if they really could open the continuum and visit the Globe on the night of The Tempest? What if Nordhausen did something stupid and introduced a Variation—or even worse, a Transformation? What if they got too damn curious and started tugging on one of those errant threads of time, to look for clues and answer those nagging questions that were sure to present themselves? Suppose Nordhausen was right and they managed to travel back to Plymouth before the fleet set out in 1609: what if they disturbed something, ever so slightly, and the fleet leaves on June 4 instead of June 2? The professor would be correct! The storm at sea happens on schedule, because it’s inevitable. But if they don’t run into the storm, and the Sea-Venture never gets separated from the group, then they don’t run aground on Bermuda and make that miraculous appearance a year later. Strachey has nothing to write about, and there are no Bermuda Pamphlets circulating among the higher ups of the Virginia Colony investors. Shakespeare never sees the damn thing, and then, perhaps… he never writes The Tempest! A sudden idea struck him in the face like blowing rain.

“Wait a second,” he began. “Just a minute now…”

Nordhausen was still sulking and fidgeting with his pocket watch. Maeve was flipping pages in her Norton Anthology and sending the professor unfriendly glances. She reached for her coffee mug, took one sip and then frowned again.

“Robert’s got me thinking,” Paul began. The professor perked up a bit, looking in Paul’s direction. “He may be right, you know.”

“What?” Maeve closed the Anthology abruptly, ready to do battle with this unexpected column reinforcing Nordhausen’s position.

“Hear me out. Suppose everything Nordhausen says is true. Suppose we establish a link between the Bermuda Pamphlets and the origin of The Tempest. Like you said at the beginning, Robert: Shakespeare always got his plots from somewhere, and this is one of two plays that seem unusual. No one has found a source for the plot.”

“Get to the point,” Maeve was ready to squash the objection the instant she heard it.

“Well, if we do start looking around, and we go back to Plymouth before the fleet sets sail…” He laid out his line of thought for them. “Don’t you see? A Pushpoint is the triggering event that leads to something really significant in the time line—like the writing of this play. Yet, even though it is so powerful in its influence, it can be disturbed very easily—even prevented from happening altogether. If we were to go to Plymouth we could do something to interfere with the fleet’s departure date without even knowing it, no matter how careful we are to avoid contamination.”

“That’s why we can’t allow it,” said Maeve.

“No,” Dorland corrected her. “That’s why Time won’t allow it. We’d create a Paradox!”

“Oh, here we go again,” said Nordhausen. He had hoped Paul was coming around to his side on the issue, but now he saw that he was spinning off into Time Theory again.

“Think about it,” said Dorland. “If that fleet doesn’t leave Plymouth on June 2^nd, and Nordhausen is correct in his idea about the Bermuda Pamphlets, then maybe Shakespeare never writes the damn play!”

Maeve was starting to get angry again, but her head began to filter through the possibilities and she settled into thought. After all, Outcomes and Consequences were her department. She should have seen the Paradox immediately. She was a little perturbed that Paul would happen on it first, but granted him a moment’s respect.

“Paradox.” Paul let the word hang for a moment, and a timely roll of thunder seemed to accent the moment and add just the right dramatic effect. A dog started barking in the rain outside, disturbed by the flash of lightning. “The continuum is very uncomfortable with Paradox, you see, and so I’m afraid we can’t pull on this string, Robert. If we prevent the play from being written then where the hell would we be going tomorrow? Certainly not to the Globe in 1611 to watch a play that was never written!”

“We don’t know that, Paul,” said Nordhausen. “Something else could become the source of the play.”

“Too much haze,” said Dorland. It was a term he used when events became obscured in the time line, and probability algorithms became particularly convoluted. “I was worried about that .0027% discrepancy on the preliminaries, but now I think the possibility of Paradox is very real here. We may have to work this through a bit. Sorry, Robert, but I’ll have to weigh in with Maeve on this one. We watch the play, but nothing else.” He was starting to think that the prospect of Paradox had cropped up all too easily in this scenario, where he least expected it. They had chosen the play as a way of avoiding any potential complications on this first mission. Now, the slightest variation in their planned activities presented problems. Perhaps, he thought, any time travel would eventually lead to some kind of Paradox. Perhaps Nordhausen was right again, and nothing was going to happen tomorrow—nothing at all.

“What’s wrong, Paul? Don’t let that man get you all depressed about this.” Maeve could see that something was clearly bothering him. He was biting at his lower lip as he considered the situation, very agitated. The weather outside rattled the windows, and they caught the sound of voices carried on the wind and rain. The voices seemed to be in Paul’s head as well, a tempest of doubt and uncertainty. Kelly was supposed to bring in the last crucial numbers for their launch, and he was late. Could the annihilating effects of Paradox already be at work?

“I don’t think we’re going to the play tomorrow,” the words just slipped out, and Paul seemed to slump a bit in his chair, clearly upset. They would have to think this through a bit more. They had to be certain nothing would go wrong. Before he could say anything more, however, there was a noise on the stair well outside the study door. Someone was running up the steps with almost frantic footfalls marking his progress. They all turned to look at the door.

“Well, it’s about time Kelly showed up,” Nordhausen put in. The door handle rattled and then the door flew open. Kelly was standing in the entrance, wet, bedraggled and clearly out of breath. His laptop computer was encased in its satchel under his right arm. The gray hood of his rain coat was thrown back and his short brown hair was thoroughly soaked. There was a cut on his forehead, and his normally amiable features were drawn with concern.

“Good Lord,” he panted, “I made it. Never thought I’d get here alive!”

“Kelly, what’s happened?” Maeve had noticed the gash in Kelly’s forehead, and the dribble of blood down one side of his cheek. Nordhausen snapped his pocket watch shut.

“Well I suppose you brought your numbers, yes?” The professor was oblivious to Kelly’s state. “Close the damn door, man!” He turned to look at Kelly when he felt the cold draft, and his eyes widened with surprise.

“Haven’t you heard?” Kelly was still panting.

“What do you mean?” Dorland was up from his chair. Maeve was rushing to get a wet towel from the coffee station.

“You haven’t heard?” Kelly staggered in and reached for the back of a chair. “Well,” he said, swallowing hard. “We aren’t going to see the play tomorrow, that’s for damn sure.”

Everyone just looked at him.

2

There was a brief moment of paralysis and then the room animated again as Dorland spoke. “What haven’t we heard? Was there a fire at Sidney Hall?”

“Fire?” Kelly had a confused look on his face. Maeve rushed to his side with a towel soaked in hot water. She waved at Paul to help get Kelly’s raincoat off, but Dorland’s mind immediately shifted back to the project when he caught sight of Kelly’s laptop computer.

“Did you manage to finish your comp cycle?” He was already easing the satchel strap off of Kelly’s shoulder.

“Put that down,” said Maeve. “Can’t you see he’s hurt?”

Paul noticed the cut on Kelly’s forehead for the first time, and winced. Kelly Ramer was one of his oldest and dearest friends. The two men had met in high school and had grown up together, sharing the rich mythology of their adolescence together, a history that often re-emerged in secret shared phrases that carried a wealth of meaning between them, but sounded like childish nonsense to anyone who had not lived out the experience they referred to.

They clowned together, and made silly tapes that they stored away over the years in the ‘Eternal Tape Archives,’ a record of priceless moments they had lived together. They shared the same music and appreciation for literature, and an almost mystical fascination for computers that had become so prevalent in the culture these days. It was Paul who had first caught the computer bug, and he quickly persuaded his friend to acquire one of the very first ‘personal computers’ that could be bought in the mid 1980s, a Commodore 64. From there they both graduated to an Amiga 1000 and then jumped on the first 286 series computers that began to circulate as ‘IBM clones’ when the PC age began to gather steam. Kelly went on to specialize in computer networks and the arcane science of Information Technology. They were in their early twenties then, and now, over 25 years later, Kelly was ready to celebrate his 48^th birthday, though no one would guess he was that age to look at him. While he carried a little extra weight through the mid-section, he had a full head of dark brown hair, and a sharp, animated intelligence that found him interested in virtually everything. He gave his friend a look of wild eyed surprise, and Paul stopped what he was doing, immediately sensing that there was something very wrong.

“Good Lord,” said Kelly. “You mean you three have been in here locked away in a meeting all this time?”

“Yes,” said Nordhausen from across the room, “and where have you been all this time?”

Kelly slumped into a chair and Maeve was already dabbing at the cut on his forehead. “How in the world did you do this?” her eyes wrinkled with concern.

“It’s chaotic out there,” Kelly burst out.

“Well, I’ve heard of unruly crowds at concerts,” said Maeve, “but for Verdi?”

“Verdi?” Kelly gave them all a disoriented look. “Hell, the whole city is in an uproar! People are running around like madmen out there.”

“What in blazes are you talking about?” said Nordhausen. “It’s just a little rainstorm. People in California get positively silly with a little rain. They don’t know how to drive and they—”

“OK, Time out!” Kelly raised his voice, making the telltale sign of a ‘T’ with his hands as he spoke. “Turn on CNN. You’re not going to believe this.”

“I don’t keep a television in the study,” said Nordhausen. “I barely tolerate my set at home.”

“Then turn on a radio or something, there’s been one hell of an eruption in the Atlantic and the whole east coast is in a panic.”

“Eruption?” Dorland was immediately interested. “Where?”

“The Canary Islands, off West Africa.” Kelly took a deep breath. “Palma,” he continued. “The whole western flank of Cumbre Vieja has collapsed. There was a massive landslide.”

Paul had often talked about the prospect of such a collapse ever since he had first stumbled on the research of Dr. Simon Day around the turn of the millennium. Day, and his colleagues at the Hazard Research Center of University College in London, had been warning about a build-up of groundwater in vertical columns that seemed to be destabilizing the flank of the Cumbre Vieja Volcano on the Island of Palma. The research indicated that it could be some time, many hundreds of years, in fact, before an eruption capable of collapsing the flank would occur. Paul hesitated when he first heard the news, but he immediately began digging for all the information Kelly had. “When did it happen?”

“About three hours ago, from what I could pull in on the car radio. I had just finished my comp cycle and I was rushing to get over here. The traffic is crazy! People are all over the streets and BART stations are jammed. Hell, some idiot walked right in front of my car and just stood there. I leaned on the horn but old guy refused to budge. Then, he just looked at his watch and walked away. In any case, I got curious as to what all the commotion was about and turned on the car radio. Every channel had the same story!”

“Tsunami!” Dorland had already surmised the implications.

“Mega tsunami,” Kelly corrected him. “Remember that book by Bill McGuire we picked up at Borders a few years back?”

“You mean the book on natural catastrophes?”

“It’s happened! The coast of North Africa got slammed an hour ago. A 200 foot wave hit Western Sahara about an hour after the eruption.”

“Thank God that’s a sparsely populated coast,” said Maeve.

“Yes, but Casablanca got hit further north in Morocco and was all but inundated. The water wasn’t as high there. Some reports have it at under hundred feet, but that was on the back side of the event. The main force of the water dome will be directed west across the Atlantic and—”

“The east coast,” said Dorland. He ran over to the bookcase scanning about desperately. “Where’s your atlas, Robert?”

“Bottom shelf; to the right.” Nordhausen was up off his chair to assist. In a moment they had a thick volume of the Rand McNally World Atlas over on the study table and Paul was frantically flipping through the pages for a map of the Atlantic. “I’ll get my shortwave.” Nordhausen ran off and flung open a closet near the entrance. Maeve was still trying to dab the last traces of blood from Kelly’s cheek.

“Did you fall or something?” she asked, clearly as concerned for Kelly’s well-being as anything else. She had come to know him quite well since she joined the project three years ago, and they often worked together running calculations for Maeve’s Outcome studies. She was quite fond of Kelly, though a bit awkward with that emotion and too quick to hide it with the routine of their work.

“Like I said, it’s crazy out there. People are running around like idiots. I jumped on 280 to take it up to the Bay Bridge two hours ago and it was jammed.” Kelly was waving his arms about as he spoke. “It took me an hour to get over the bridge, and when I got up here it was almost nine PM. I tried to call, but couldn’t find my cell phone. Probably left it at the University. I got off at my normal exit and made for the pay phone near a Seven-Eleven. When I got out to make the call, some idiot came around the corner and damn near ran me down. I jumped back and slipped. Hit my head on a god-damned street sign! The guy never even stopped. People are running around like madmen out there. I was so pissed off that I just went back to the car and hurried over here.”

“We need to try and get more time on the Berkeley computers,” said Maeve. “It’s too hard going into the City, especially the night before the project launch. I told you we should have set the meeting later, Paul.” Maeve had a distracted, almost pained expression on her face, and she was still fussing with the towel, maneuvering to press a clean surface to the cut on Kelly’s forehead.

“I’ll be fine,” Kelly tried to smile.

“When was the eruption?” Dorland had found his map and was squinting over the page, his finger pressed on the blue surface of the Atlantic off the coast of West Africa. “Did you say three hours ago?”

“Quiet down people,” Nordhausen chimed in. “I can’t hear this thing.” He was fiddling with the dial of his combination AM/FM and shortwave radio, angling the antenna to try and improve the reception. A peal of thunder intruded and the sound of voices seemed to increase outside the study window.

“Three hours…” Dorland pursed his lips as he thought. “Did you say the wave that hit Western Sahara was over 200 feet?”

“Two hundred fucking feet!” Kelly still had the same look of amazement on his face. “Can you believe that? I heard this an hour ago and I still can’t get my mind around it.”

“Well if it was that high on the back end of the eruption I can only imagine what the water dome was like when the flank of the volcano went into the ocean. Are you sure it was the western flank of Cumbre Vieja?”

“That’s what they said on the news. Hell, Robert, why don’t you have a television in here?”

Nordhausen frowned at him, his ear pressed against the speaker of the shortwave radio as he turned the dial with his other hand.

“Let’s see,” said Dorland. The speed of the landslide had to be between 100 and 200 meters per second.” He was calculating something in his mind, brown eyes rolling towards the ceiling as he considered. “That’s going to push some mean water out into the Atlantic,” he concluded. “Three hours would put the wave-front of the tsunami sequence somewhere east of the mid Atlantic Ridge by now. Anybody who was living on the coastal regions of the Canary Islands is dead, and I wouldn’t give a rat’s ass for real estate in the Azores. Another ten or fifteen minutes and that place will be history, if you’re right about the eruption time.”

“I’ve got something!” Nordhausen rushed over to the study table and set the shortwave down next to the open Atlas. He adjusted the volume and they all leaned in to listen, faces blank with anticipation. Maeve bit at her lower lip, clearly upset.

“This is the BBC…” There was a wash of static as the signal faded briefly but the announcer came back on as Nordhausen jiggled the antenna.

“Get an AM station,” said Kelly, frowning at Nordhausen as he adjusted the antenna. “Will you let go of that?” Kelly shot him an exasperated look.

“I’m improving the damn reception.” Nordhausen’s body acted as an extension of the antenna when he touched the slim metal and Kelly hushed up, leaning in to hear the news.

“The eruption reported on the island of Palma in the Canary Islands has now been confirmed. Seismographic signatures reported at receiving stations in London set the time of the eruption of the Cumbre Vieja Volcano at a few minutes past four in the morning, Greenwich Mean Time.”

“That would be eight-o-clock our time,” said Paul. The signal faded briefly and Kelly shot a warning glance at Nordhausen, still convinced he was somehow interfering with the reception. Maeve went over to the sink at the coffee station, still listening as she rinsed the towel off under a stream of hot water. No one noticed as she eyed the telephone on the wall, picking the receiver up for a moment before putting it back in its cradle.

“…Damage reports are still sketchy at this time, and we have no official news yet from Santa Cruz de la Palma. Authorities have declared a state of national emergency in Morocco where tsunami waves struck a little before six in the morning, Greenwich Mean Time. It now appears that coastal cities and towns have been hit very hard there, and at Casablanca, a wave series exceeding 30 meters in height struck the city and harbor causing extensive loss of life and catastrophic damage. The tsunami is expected to strike the Straits of Gibraltar within the hour and all citizens are advised to seek the highest possible ground. Meanwhile, authorities in London estimate the speed of the tsunami sequence moving west from the Canary Islands into the Atlantic to be in excess of eight-hundred kilometers per hour. A high water tsunami warning is now in effect for the entire north Atlantic, and a severe flood warning has been issued for the Azores. Authorities also believe the coasts of Portugal, France and even the UK are in for extreme tidal surges in the morning hours of Wednesday. Evacuation orders are now being issued for all areas below fifty meters in elevation where citizens are advised to seek higher ground inland and migrate away from coastal regions immediately…” A burst of static interfered with the transmission again.

“They won’t get hit very hard,” said Dorland. “The Iberian Peninsula will take the steam out of the northern wave fronts. They’ll just catch secondary sequences rebounding from the coast of Portugal.”

“I’d hate to live in Lisbon,” Nordhausen put in. “The 1755 tsunami that hit after an earthquake in the Atlantic was estimated to be no more than 15 meters, but it still killed some 60,000 people.”

“Not to mention the tsunami after Krakatau blew its top in the late 1880s.” Dorland had always had a fascination for natural catastrophes. “That event produced wave run-ups of 30 to 40 meters above normal sea level. In flat-lying areas the water swept inland for many miles—right through dense jungle! There were over 30,000 killed there.”

“Wasn’t there an event in Alaska in recent times?” Asked Nordhausen.

“Lituya Bay,” said Dorland. “July, 1958. It was a combination of many forces after a strong earthquake in the eight-plus range. The ground motion of the quake triggered a giant rock-fall at the head of the bay. It was as if an asteroid had hit the bay and this caused a massive upwelling of water that actually lifted huge segments of glacial ice. The wave splash was thought to be over 1700 feet! Thankfully, the damage was mostly confined to the local area and it was sparsely populated.”

“What about us?” Kelly reached out to adjust the reception dial. “Can’t you get any local stations on that? I’m sure every station in the world has picked up the story by now.”

“What’s wrong with the BBC?” said Nordhausen. “Imagine what’s just happened, people. They’ve got nothing out of Palma because everyone’s dead. God only knows how they got the news on Casablanca!”

“Must have been reported by incoming airline traffic,” said Dorland. He was squinting at his map again, still calculating. “The Madiera Archipelago has probably been wiped off the face of the earth,” he said. The Azores and the Cape Verde Islands are next. Anyone who can’t get to high ground there had better find an airplane.”

“Those are all volcanic islands,” said Nordhausen. “They’ll have plenty of elevation, but I doubt the residents had much warning.”

“What about us?” Kelly asked again. He switched the reception dial to the AM position.

“Leave that alone!” Nordhausen was after him in a minute, reaching in to re-set the dial.

“We’re in no danger here, of course,” said Dorland “But the east coast has about six hours.”

“What?” Kelly had lost his battle with Nordhausen and folded his arms in resignation as he half listened for the shortwave signal again. Nordhausen adjusted the dial.

“You don’t think it will be that bad out east, do you, Paul?”

“Are you kidding?” Paul spun the map around so they could see better. “Most of the energy is heading west into the Atlantic. The wave front that hit Western Sahara was bad because it was so close to the initial eruption, but the damage in this hemisphere is going to be appalling. Wave heights will probably be well above fifty meters in northern Brazil. It’s likely they’ll see water that high coming ashore in Florida, New York, Boston, hell, all the way up to Greenland! It all depends on the initial velocity of the landslide during the collapse. If it exceeded a hundred meters per second we could see wave run-ups of at least ninety meters on the east coast. Water that high, with that much force behind it, will push inland for miles. This is going to be very bad.”

“Christ, no wonder everyone’s in a panic out there,” said Kelly. “They’re all running to get home and call grandma! Anybody have relatives on the east coast?”

“It will take eight or nine hours after the eruption for the tsunami front to cross the Atlantic,” said Dorland. “If the eruption occurred just after 4:00 AM, GMT, that would be 8:00 PM our time—just when we arrived here for the meeting. Add six hours and that would put high water on the coast of Brazil at about 2:00 in the morning our time, and the Eastern Seaboard of the US will get slammed about two hours later. Probably around 4:00 AM our time, or just about dawn back east.”

“But won’t the waves have time to dissipate as they cross the Atlantic?” Kelly was hopeful, but Dorland knew the worst of the disaster was still ahead.

“I’m afraid not. Actually, the waves won’t seem so bad as they cross the Atlantic—at least to ship traffic in deep water. They’ll notice the increased ocean swell, but not much else. When all that water begins to hit the continental shelf, however, we’ll begin to get real wave formation. The water has to go somewhere as it approaches the coastal shallows. The deep ocean swells will begin to build as wave run-ups.”

“You mean it actually gets worse as it reaches the coast?”

“Much worse,” said Dorland.

“It’s the end of the world!” Nordhausen chimed in.

“Hell, it’s not going to be funny, Robert.” Paul didn’t like the hint of levity in Nordhausen’s tone. “Do you have any idea how much damage a seventy meter wave sequence will do to the Eastern Seaboard? If it’s ninety meters or more this is going be a real catastrophe.”

“A lot of people live on that coastline. Can you imagine the panic back there? The roads must be jammed!” Nordhausen thought for a moment. “I mean, there they were, sleeping quietly while we were sitting here waiting for Kelly. Then word comes in that the entire Eastern Seaboard is threatened by a ninety meter tsunami—Lord, that’s approaching three-hundred feet—and everyone within twenty miles of the coast needs to be evacuated at once!”

“I’ve got a station in D.C.,” Kelly had taken good advantage of the time to wrest control of the shortwave. “Listen up…”

“…Please stay tuned to your local emergency broadcast frequency at all times. To repeat again, the Office Of Emergency Preparedness, in conjunction with the National Weather Service and FEMA, has issued a mandatory evacuation order for all coastal cities on the east coast of the United States. This affects all communities from Eastport, Maine and south to the Florida Keys. Citizens are advised to leave immediately and head inland to a safe distance of at least thirty miles from the Atlantic Seaboard. A severe tsunami warning is now in effect for the entire east coast of the United States and all Islands of the Caribbean Sea and Atlantic. Please stay tuned to your local emergency broadcast frequency at all times for important updates…”

The tension of the moment was broken by the clatter of a coffee mug falling to the floor. They all turned to see Maeve stooping to reach for it by the coffee station, a look of real distress on her face.

“Calm down, Maeve,” Nordhausen put in. “We have nothing to fear here on this coast.”

Kelly suddenly remembered something, and he got up at once, rushing over to Maeve’s side to help her up. He folded an arm around her slim shoulders and guided her over to the study table. “Come sit with us, Maeve.” His voice softened, comforting, understanding something the others were not aware of.

“It’s my mother,” said Maeve, her eyes glassy as she spoke. “She’s in Boston, and there’s no way that woman is going to hear about this tonight. She’s eighty two years old and…”

Kelly helped her into a chair and the others took in the moment with a bit of silence. The radio droned on and Kelly reached out to cut the volume. “Like I said,” he began. “We aren’t going to the play tomorrow.”

“Sorry, Maeve,” said Paul.

“Can I get you anything?” Kelly was very pleased to turn the tables on her now and take up the role of the caretaker.

“A cup of decent coffee would be nice, if you can find anything left in the professor’s larders.” Maeve rested her elbow on the study table, her chin in the palm of her hand.

“Guess I’m not so unlucky,” said Paul. “My folks died a peaceful death a few years back. I’ve got relatives in Western Pennsylvania, but the only danger they may be facing is the chaos that will likely result when the tide of refugees pours west from the coast. Who knows how far the water will push inland? Something tells me the human flood may be just as bad as the real thing. How about you, Robert—Any relatives back east? ”

Nordhausen was on the radio again. “Quiet everybody,” he said. “Just got report of an oil tanker in the Atlantic that put out an S.O.S. The report says the ship reported heavy seas and severe ocean swells, but she’s still afloat. She was about fifty nautical miles west of the Azores. It seems there’s an early hurricane out there to complicate things even further.”

“The Azores are gone,” said Paul. “Another three hours and the tsunami will reach Bermuda. It’s little more than a glorified sandbar. Elevation doesn’t exceed 80 feet anywhere on the island. The wave front will wipe that place clean and the east coast gets hit a bit later. You could still call your mother, Maeve.”

“The line is dead,” Maeve said sullenly. “I tried a few minutes ago.”

“Probably the storm, or everyone trying the same idea. The telephone circuits must be jammed.”

“I don’t suppose it would make much difference if I could call.” Maeve had a resigned look on her face. “She’s an eighty-two year old woman, Paul; with a bad hip. Should I call her up and tell her that a giant wave is about to…”

Kelly put his arm around her. Nordhausen went off to rummage about in his cupboards for a trace of coffee. Dorland had a vacant look on his face. “Well, I was wondering if we would see one in our lifetime,” he began, “and now I’m fairly certain we have. I thought nine-eleven came close back in 2001, but it will pale beside this. History is unveiling one of her most defining mysteries, people. We’re going to live through a Grand Imperative—though a lot folks on the east coast aren’t going to be so lucky. Sorry again, Maeve. I’ll shut up.”

“I’m all right,” Maeve raised a hand. “Better if we talk about it. I think it’s going to be a very long night.”

“And we’re out of coffee,” said Nordhausen. “Anyone for tea?” He came back to the table holding a tin of Earl Grey.

“The casualties will be extreme, I’m afraid.” Paul was rambling on. “A wave that high will sweep right over Manhattan Island. Hell, the highest ground in New York is only about 280 feet at Bennett Park. Ditto for Brooklyn and the Bronx. Staten Island has high ground at the landfill—I think over 400 feet, but how many people will want to be clinging to the top of a big rubbish heap when the tsunami hits?”

“What about the buildings?” Nordhausen set the tea tin down on the table. “The Empire State Building is over a thousand feet high.”

“If it stands,” said Paul. “Look how easy it was to topple the World Trade Center. The wave front will hit with tremendous force. To make matters worse, the weather channel said it was high tide tonight, and that hurricane off the coast will just make things worse. I wouldn’t be surprised if the initial wave front knocks down an awful lot of concrete on Manhattan. That will just be the beginning, though. This isn’t just one big wave heading west from Palma; it’s a sequence of waves.”

“Not exactly a tempest in a teapot.” Nordhausen set an empty tea pot down on the study table. “And this thing will effect the entire east coast?”

“As far north as Greenland,” said Paul. “Here…” he took out a pen and began tracing lines on the atlas map. “I hope you don’t mind, Robert.” Nordhausen gave him a dismissive nod, and Dorland continued drawing. He finished and slid the map into the center of the table. “That’s how the wave pattern should look about six hours after the eruption.”

Nordhausen stared at the map. His eyes narrowing with concern. “I see,” he said. “Brazil, Venezuela, all the Caribbean islands…”

“Florida is going to get hammered,” said Dorland. “I wouldn’t be surprised if the water sweeps all the way over the peninsula into the Gulf of Mexico. Hundreds of thousands of people are going to die when the sun comes up on the east coast tomorrow. Imagine it! All those time lines are going to be changed forever. The Meridians all end with the Palma Grand Imperative.”

“Good Lord, Paul,” said Nordhausen, “you aren’t going to start in with your time theory again are you? I’d take a clue from Kelly there. The project is off. We aren’t going anywhere tomorrow. I never thought we were in the first place, Grand Imperative or not.”

“Wait a second,” said Kelly. “Who said the project is off? It’s more important than ever now!”

“Oh, it’s a wonderful idea,” Nordhausen jibed at him, “but you don’t honestly think we would just excuse ourselves in the face of the greatest national catastrophe in history and amble off to the year 1612 to take in a play, do you?”

“Or look for the damn Bermuda Pamphlets.” Maeve took up the thread of her argument with Nordhausen again, but Kelly was shaking his head.

“You don’t understand,” he said. “We’ve got the project Arch all configured for 1612, but I can run new numbers for anywhere else you’d care to go. Perhaps we can do something about this.”

“It’s an Imperative, Kelly,” Paul frowned as he rubbed his chin. “It’s a natural event, not a willful event. There’s nothing we could possibly do to prevent the eruption.”

“Well we could warn people!” Kelly kept trying.

“Oh, that would be a sight,” said Nordhausen. “We’ll all dress up in emergency gear and take a short range jaunt, say five or ten days before the eruption? Then we can run around telling everyone the east coast is about to be destroyed.”

“You know that’s impossible,” said Dorland “We can only go back to a time beyond our own Life-Shadow. You can’t go to any time you actually lived. That’s Paradox with a capital P, and it can’t happen.”

“Of course it can’t happen,” said the professor. “The shortest jump we could make, assuming we could jump at all, would have to be to a time before any of us were born—well before we were born so we couldn’t possibly interfere with our own potential time lines.”

“It’s an Imperative event,” Dorland put in again. “We can’t change it, no matter where we go.”

A knock on the door surprised everyone in the room.

“Who could that be?” Kelly got up and started for the door.

“I’m not expecting anyone,” said Nordhausen. “Probably local police with a civil defense warning.”

“Probably one of those idiots running around in the street,” said Kelly. He twisted the door knob and pulled open the door. A frail, elderly man was standing in the shadows just outside. The noise of the tempest raging through the Bay Area surged into the room on a gust of cold air. “Yes?” Kelly poked his head around the edge of the door, peering into the darkness as he tried to make out the stranger’s face.

“Kelly Ramer?” The visitor’s voice spoke in a near whisper.

“Yes, I’m Mr. Ramer.” He could see that the man was dressed in a heavy overcoat, but that he didn’t seem to be wearing any kind of official uniform. “What is it?” He guessed. “Don’t tell me my car is in someone’s way out there.” The minute he offered the statement he knew how ridiculous it was. How would anyone know that the forest green Subaru with one wheel on the sidewalk outside Nordhausen’s private study belonged to Kelly Ramer?

“Thank God,” the man said. “You’re alive.”

“What?” Kelly was completely confused now.

“Who is it, Kelly?” Maeve came up behind him, her hand on his arm. “Well, invite the man in, dear.”

“Maeve Lindford?” The man stepped forward and the light from the study illuminated his face. He seemed old, perhaps seventy years by the well entrenched gray of his hair. His features were drawn with fatigue, and he paused a moment to look at his wrist watch. “10:45,” he said in a low voice. “I’m a bit early, but no harm. The tape has run out.” He looked up with a smile tugging at the lines around his eyes. “I’ve brought you a little gift, Maeve.”

The man reached into his heavy overcoat and drew out a small parcel. Maeve squinted, then saw what he was holding. A puzzled look came over her features. “A delivery? At this hour?” She instinctively reached out to take hold of the small dark brown bag in the man’s hand, recognizing it at once as a bag of Peets coffee. She raised it to her nose, taking in the aroma of freshly roasted coffee beans.

“May I come in?” The stranger smiled as Maeve looked at the label on the bag. It was Major Dickason’s blend.

3

Lightening flashed in the open doorway, and they ushered in the stranger as the resulting peal of thunder rumbled in the distance. The man tramped in, his outer coat and hat sodden with the rain. There was a strange howling on the wind, as if a pack of dogs was trailing in the man’s wake. He paused for a moment, a glimmer of fear and uncertainty in his eyes. The cold air seemed to surround him with a pale, frosty aura. Everyone in the room just looked at him, until Maeve, her social sensibilities more honed than the others, extended an arm and pointed the way to the study table where Dorland and Nordhausen were still hunched over the atlas.

“You’ve come a long way in this weather.” Maeve was still a bit nonplussed. “Peets is on the other side of town.”

“A very long way indeed,” said the stranger.

“Here, let me take your coat and hat, and please make yourself comfortable. Was this a special order? I had no idea Peets would make a delivery like this, but I must say, you couldn’t have come at a better moment. Will you join us? We were just about to brew a fresh pot.”

“I’d be delighted.” The man nodded, his ashen mustache wagging a bit as his features strained to a smile. He had a pale aspect, and he seemed very frail.

“Let me make the introductions.” Maeve was shifting social gears nicely, glad for the odd distraction from the tension of the moment, and glad to put aside the thoughts that were simmering in her mind; the image of a titanic wall of water sweeping into Boston Harbor and obliterating the quaint New England style cottage where her mother was probably sleeping quietly in her bed—dreaming away the last few hours of a very long life.

“This is Paul Dorland, and Professor Robert Nordhausen.” She paused, a strange look in her eye. “You seem to already know Kelly, but I’m sorry, I can’t recall meeting you. Forgive me. I’m sure I’ve been in your store a hundred times. Perhaps we met there? Mr…?”

The obvious question in her voice invited the stranger to answer. She was helping him out of his overcoat, and he reached up to remove his hat as he spoke, smiling graciously. He ran a weathered hand through his sparse gray hair.

“Excuse me,” Kelly closed the door and came up from behind, thinking the man had come to see him about something. “Was there some problem I can help you with?”

“No problem, Kelly,” said Maeve. “He was just making a delivery.” She had the closet door open and was fishing for a coat hanger.

“Well it’s just that…” Kelly thought a moment, smiling. “You seemed surprised to see me a moment ago and—”

“Count your blessings,” Maeve shot over her shoulder. “For someone to come out with a pound of coffee on a night like this is well beyond the call of duty. Let me get my wallet here, before I forget, and I can pay you for this.”

“Please,” the stranger held up a hand. “Don’t trouble yourself. I’m afraid you misunderstand. Yes, I’ve just come over from Peets, but I—” He paused, hesitating for a moment and looking at his watch. “May I sit down?” The man seemed to be somewhat winded.

“Be my guest.” Nordhausen pulled out a chair at the study table and the visitor sat down as the others gathered around.

There was an awkward moment of silence before the visitor spoke up. “Well, I’m afraid this can’t be helped.” He looked at his wrist watch, and Kelly had a puzzled expression on his face as he seated himself. Dorland was watching the man very carefully, his forehead furrowed with concentration.

“Phillip Graves,” the man introduced himself. “I suppose you’ve heard the news?”

“Indeed!” Nordhausen scratched the back of his head. He had noted Paul’s silence, and suddenly had a funny feeling about the unexpected visitor. This was very odd. Why would Peets send over a pound of coffee at this hour of the night? They didn’t deliver coffee at any hour. He struggled to get on top of the situation, but Maeve asked the question first.

“Did one of you lovely gentlemen order this?” She held up the bag of coffee with a glint in her eye. “Robert?” It was logical to assume that Nordhausen was the guardian angel, as the coffee had come to his study address.

“I’d love to think I was that considerate, but I must confess I know nothing about this. Does Peets deliver?”

“Paul?” Maeve smiled in Dorland’s direction. “Did you place an order for tonight’s meeting and forget about it again?”

Dorland glanced at Maeve for a second, but his gaze slipped back to the visitor. He spoke to Maeve, but his eyes swept over the man, focusing on the stranger with a keen inner assessment. “Mr. Graves doesn’t work for Peets, Maeve.” There was a blunt tone to his voice. “He was just was about to tell us he’s come for some other reason.”

The statement focused immediate attention on the visitor, and another awkward silence ensued. The man met Paul’s gaze, a strange mixture of admiration and fear in his eyes. He seemed very anxious, and Nordhausen noticed a sheen of perspiration on the stranger’s brow in spite of the chill on the room from the blast of cold air. He looked at Paul, and then turned to the visitor again with a hint of suspicion adding definition to the corners of his mouth.

Maeve broke the silence, always the gatekeeper as her instincts prompted her to smooth Paul’s remark over. “You must forgive us,” she said. “It’s been a very long night, what with this news and all. We just can’t imagine what this is going to mean now. But, Mr. Graves, was it? Did you have news for someone here tonight?” She was angling for some understanding of why the man had come, taking refuge and comfort in simple politeness, her thoughts still with her mother.

“Yes,” the stranger began. “I’m afraid so, and there’s no other way to begin but this: I’ve come for your help. You’ve all heard the news tonight and, now that Mr. Ramer has arrived, I think it’s safe to proceed. I must ask a very great favor.”

Nordhausen’s eyes narrowed. “Why do I have the odd feeling that you seem to know us, Mr. Graves? You have us at a bit of a disadvantage here.” He was beginning to think the man might work for the government. They had gone to great ends to keep the project privately funded, but government inspectors were always intruding nonetheless, and Nordhausen was concerned that this was just another bureaucratic busybody with some annoying regulation in mind.

“Know all of you?” The man smiled, his manner still a bit anxious as he pressed on. “Why, I suppose I do, in a way. Yes, we’ve never met, though I had a close brush with Mr. Ramer there earlier this evening. You’re a very impatient driver, if I may say so.” He looked in Kelly’s direction with a wan smile.

Kelly was completely befuddled now. “What on earth are you talking about?”

“You were near the BART station earlier tonight after you got off the freeway. You always take that exit. I’m afraid I had to delay you for a moment. I suppose I’d have leaned on the car horn as well, but when you hear what I have to say I think you’ll forgive me. I’m only glad you’re safely here.” He looked at his watch again, as if to reassure himself about something. “I think it’s safe now,” he said looking from one to the other. “We’re in a void—a very deep Nexus Point. We don’t have long, but there’s still time.”

“Time indeed,” said Dorland. His suspicions coalesced into a wry smile and he knew who the man was at last. “What did I tell you, Robert?”

“What’s that?” The professor was looking from Dorland to the visitor, a moment’s uncertainty tugging at him, even as he, too, came to grips with what was happening.

“Don’t you see?” Dorland broke into a broad smile. “That was no chance meeting with Kelly near the BART station. You did that deliberately,” he pointed at the visitor. “You needed to delay Kelly somehow—just a gentle nudge, isn’t that so, Mr. Graves?”

“You are very shrewd, Mr. Dorland. But then, why not? This was all your idea in the first place. Wasn’t it? Well, I was fortunate enough to succeed with Mr. Ramer here, and if the good lady would be so kind as to make us all a cup of that wonderful coffee, I think we should get started.”

The rain on the roof seemed much louder in the silence that followed. Then Dorland broke out in a laugh, and Nordhausen joined in. Kelly and Maeve were staring at them both like they had suddenly been taken ill.

“What in God’s name is going on here?” Kelly gave them an exasperated look. “OK, I want to know who the hell you are, and what the hell is so damn funny!”

Maeve gave him a sharp glance and tugged at his sleeve in spite of her own confusion. But Dorland and Nordhausen just kept laughing and, as she stared at the visitor, she recalled the opening rounds of the running gun battle the two men had fought earlier that evening. “You mean to say that—”

“Someone’s come to join us for coffee after all!” The professor was beaming as he looked at Dorland, his smile conceding a point of long contention with his friend, and seeming to drain away the stress and tension of the night with his laughter.

“Then it works, Robert!” Dorland was ecstatic. “It works!”

“It might work.” The visitor interjected a sobering note. “We hope it will work,” he explained. “In fact, we think it will work, now that we’re on this side of the Shadow, but we’re not quite sure. In any case, we haven’t much time and the situation is desperate. We’re in a void now—a Deep Nexus. We have to get this underway before the tsunami hits the east coast and the event begins to solidify. It’s just a little past eleven. That leaves us another six hours and twenty odd minutes. I’ve saved Kelly, and he has his laptop with him. We need to get started!”

“Wait a second…” Kelly was slowly catching up with the men at the table. “What do you mean you saved me? And what was this business about the BART station? You mean you’re the guy I was honking at?”

“I had to delay you, Mr. Ramer.” The visitor gave him an apologetic glance. “It was only a matter of a few seconds, but it was enough. You were the Primary Lever, you see. We determined that from the tape of the meeting. I must say, I’ve listened to that tape a hundred times. I really feel I do know you, at least the three of you: Mr. Dorland here, and the good Professor, and of course you, my dear Maeve. I know you like we were old friends, and I will be very pleased to make your acquaintance, Mr. Ramer, now that I’ve managed to prevent your untimely death.” He let that statement sink in for a moment.

Kelly just stood there, his mouth half open, but the light of understanding was gleaming in Maeve’s eyes, and she put her arm around him, whispering something in his right ear.

“Gentle nudge indeed.” Nordhausen put in.

“Right in the rib of history!” Dorland smiled.

“You were taping this?” Maeve gave Paul a disapproving look.

“For history’s sake. But I think my tape has run out by now.”

“It stopped at twelve minutes after ten,” said the visitor. “I aimed to arrive here well after that, so as to avoid any… complications.”

Kelly just stared at them. As the realization of what they were saying swept over him, all he could feel was the pressure of Maeve’s arm around his shoulder, claiming him, welcoming him. He passed a brief moment of light headedness, and a sudden chill shook his frame. The visitor was looking at his watch again.

“It’s time,” he concluded. “You’re safe now Mr. Ramer, though I see from that cut on your forehead that the world still managed to take a swipe at you.”

“You’re from the future,” Kelly whispered, “and you’re telling me I was supposed to die tonight? You deliberately stepped in front of my car to delay me?” He kept replaying the close call he had when he stopped at the Seven-Eleven in his mind.

“As far as we know,” the visitor said in a low, serious tone, “you were killed by an onrushing vehicle as you went to cross the street at the intersection of—”

“Good God,” Kelly seemed to slump in his chair.

“It’s eleven-o-five,” said the visitor. “We’re a minute past your official recorded time of death now, so I suppose this is another life for you, Mr. Ramer—perhaps another life for us all. But we haven’t much time. The first wave is due to hit the Grand Banks of Newfoundland at eleven minutes past seven, Eastern Standard Time—just after 4:00 AM locally. After that the situation begins to spiral out of control. In another two hours it hits the Eastern Seaboard, and the damage will be too severe to reverse. The event will solidify. For the moment, however, we still have a chance. We’re in a void, you see. It’s a rare interval of grace; a little null spot, like the eye of a hurricane. The tempest rails all around us, but for the next six hours we have to make the most of it. We’ve only this one chance.”

Dorland was taking everything in, smiling to think that his theory on the possibility of time travel had been vindicated—proved beyond any doubt even before they had a chance to test it! His dear friend Kelly was to have died tonight, and he passed a moment of profound thanks that the amiable man was still sitting there, albeit a bit flustered, looking from the visitor, to Nordhausen and then Maeve. In the midst of his elation, however, a nagging thought came to him. He had explained it to the others just a few moments ago when Kelly had been arguing about juggling the numbers on the Arch coordinates.

“Just a moment,” he interjected. “I’m as amazed as everyone else to hear all of this, but there’s something wrong.” The visitor smiled turning his attention to Dorland as if he expected the comment. “The eruption on Palma…” Paul continued looking from one face to another. “It’s a natural event, not a willful event. If you’re thinking we can somehow use these six hours to change things, I’m afraid you’ve come all this way for nothing. Oh, I assure you, I’m profoundly grateful if what you’ve said about Kelly is true. I don’t know what I’d do without him. But the fact of the matter is this: The Palma eruption is an Imperative—Probably a Grand Imperative, and it can’t be changed.”

“I’m afraid you are laboring under a misapprehension,” said the visitor. Everyone looked at him, waiting like supplicants at the throne of the Oracle. “The eruption was not a natural event. You’ll learn this momentarily if you keep your shortwave tuned to the BBC, Professor Nordhausen.”

“What did I tell you!” Nordhausen was up and reaching for the radio, intending to tune in the British news station again as he wagged a finger at Kelly.

“Not a natural event?” Now it was Dorland’s turn to swim in the eddies of confusion that seemed to pervade the room.

“I’m afraid not. Oh, it was probably going to erupt one day on its own, but this time it had a little help.” The visitor looked at his watch. “Let me be brief: The BBC is about to announce that there has been evidence of an unnatural explosive event at the time of the eruption. In point of fact, it was a twenty kiloton nuclear device that was smuggled on to the island by Islamic radicals over a year ago. The plan was in the works for some time, you see. They rented a small villa on the western slopes of the mountain—very secluded. After the World Trade Center incident, and all the talk about an Islamic bomb in Iraq, everyone was so concerned about security in the major cities that they never thought to look in a place like the Canary Islands. To make matters brief, they did their research and managed to get a device onto the island by helicopter. They were months drilling through the cellar level of the villa to get a pipe deep enough to plant the device where the blast would do them some good. We’ve got this first hand from… reliable sources. The recent upwelling of the magma dome on Cumbre Vieja was coincidental, of course, but it led them to believe they could trigger a major eruption with a device of sufficient strength. It so happened the volcano was amenable to their little plan, and the rest, as they say, is history. At least it was history. I’m hoping we can change that.”

“Listen,” said Nordhausen. “BBC is reading a statement that was supposedly sent by a group of the terrorists!” He adjusted the volume on his shortwave and they all leaned in to hear the news.

‘…We are patient, forgiving. We are seekers only of peace, but as Allah chooses, then the command is given for the seas to rise and pound the shore. We are but an instrument, to that power. As the oceans are made up of an uncountable number of individual drops of serene waters, when Allah commands, those drops come together to form the most powerful force on earth, the ocean of Believers, who’s waves of faith become the hammer upon which justice is delivered to all followers of Satan.’

“Then it was a willful event after all!” Dorland’s was breathing quickly as he spoke. “The Palma event was the work of a Free Radical.”

“Precisely,” said Graves. “It was the brain child of one Ra’id Husan al Din—Oh you’ll learn about him soon enough. If you thought Bin Ladin was a Free Radical, then just you wait. Well, as you know from your own time theory, Mr. Dorland, the work of a Free Radical can give rise to significant variations in all the time lines they cross. Sometimes these variations can be quite profound, as in the case of the Bin Ladin nine-eleven attack back in the year 2001. But this, ladies and gentlemen, takes the prize. The Holy Fighters of Husan al Din, as they came to be called in the West, came up with this little gem and set the whole world off its kilter. His name means the ‘Sword of the Faith,’ and appropriately so. He cuts the fabric of the time continuum so badly that chaos ensues.”

He looked at them, eyes flashing under his cinder brows. “The Palma Event was not a Grand Imperative, as you first concluded, Mr. Dorland. It was, however, a Radical Transformation: a catastrophic alteration of the time continuum due to the influence of a profound Free Radical. You said it yourself on the tape I’ve listened to so many times: hundreds of thousands of people are going to die when the sun comes up on the east coast tomorrow. All those time lines are going to be changed forever—unless we do something about it in the next six hours.”

A stunned silence fell on them all. Nordhausen was fiddling with the shortwave and a glint of satisfaction sparked in his eye. “He’s right!” He nearly shouted at them. “BBC is announcing evidence of unusually high radiation levels. The Brits sent a Canberra out of Gibraltar to over-fly the island.”

“It will be confirmed shortly by American Satellite Intelligence,” said Graves. “They picked up the initial explosion on their early detection system. By now the President is in an airplane heading west with a fighter escort, Section ‘R’ of the emergency government has been activated, and there’s quite a panic underway on your Eastern Seaboard. It’s just after two in the morning back there, and it’s going to be a long, terrible night.”

“No shit…” Kelly’s eloquence seemed to sum things up.

“There’s still something troubling me,” said Dorland. “We would have heard this news in time. The professor there is already piecing it together. Are you saying we found out about the terrorist attack and failed to act in time?”

“You failed to act at all.” The visitor looked at Kelly. “It was Mr. Kelly’s fate that preoccupied you this night, not the fate of the Eastern Seaboard. In the midst of the greatest tragedy in modern times, the simplicity of one man’s death had a profound effect on all three of you. Your telephone was supposed to ring about the same time I arrived at your doorstep. It was supposed to be the hospital, of course, with news of Mr. Ramer’s accident. I made sure nothing like that could happen by cutting the line an hour ago. It was just a backup plan in case my intervention failed to prevent the accident. In the history I know, however, the call came in and the three of you rushed across town in the midst of all this rain and growing alarm. We don’t really know why you never tried to use the Arch. There’s been a great deal of speculation, of course. Some think that Kelly’s computer savvy was the key to getting the right calculations in order; others attribute the failure to the deep depression that seemed to settle over Mr. Dorland there after the death of his friend. And you, my dear Maeve, were quite shaken by the events of this night. Still others felt that it was your input on Outcomes and Consequences that was most needed, and with the death of both your mother and your emerging…” He seemed to catch himself, pausing for a moment. “…The suffering of your new-found friends here,” he corrected himself. “It was all very traumatic.”

Maeve heard his comment about her mother, and her eyes hazed over with pain. The visitor continued, very intent on what he was trying to say.

“I could go on and on about this forever, and we haven’t the time. I didn’t come here to point history’s finger at any of you. We came to our own conclusions about why you never tried. The research was shunted aside, and not discovered again until… much later. The point is, we now think everything turned on the death of Mr. Ramer. The accident at the Seven-Eleven was a Primary Lever on all of you. I argued the point most eloquently, and the council finally acceded. There were many who saw the Palma Event as a Finality—so rooted in the stream of the continuum that it could not be altered. I had to quote them chapter and verse from your papers on the theory, Mr. Dorland. Eventually I convinced them that if they were correct in that assumption, there was one chance of altering the Radical Transformation. One slim chance.”

“Pushpoint…” Dorland spoke the words with an almost reverent whisper. “Every Finality creates one moment in time where the possibility of reversal blooms in a brief interval at one given point on the continuum. The two opposites arise mutually. Then, the event solidifies and the shadow it casts on the continuum becomes impenetrable.”

“I could not have said it better, Mr. Dorland.” The visitor took a deep breath, the lines of his face long and drawn, his eyes almost pleading. He was sweating profusely now as he spoke. “Dear me… I may have already said too much here…” The wind was still howling at the night outside, and the visitor eyed the windows with a glimmer of fear, harried a bit by the sound. He seemed to pause at the edge of a precipice in his thinking, and then leapt over.

“It’s too late for us—In the time of my natural life. We can’t see through the Penumbra, through the shadow cast on the time line by the Palma Event and all it gives rise to. We’ve tried to reason it out—we’ve thrown enormous computing resources at the problem, such as we had available in our time. It was leading us nowhere. Every attempt we made at opening up the continuum failed. Every time we tried to go back to the crucial moment we were stopped by the Penumbra of Palma. It acted as a great barrier. Then I came up with this little idea. We were trying to get back too far, I told them.” His thin hands waved about to add emphasis. “If we could focus all our resources on sending one man through; and if we could just reach any time at all close to the onset of the event, then there would be a chance to prompt action from here, from this side of the shadow—before the wave-front strikes the coast. We made six attempts. They all died in the Arch. The shadow was just too formidable for us. We made… adjustments. We tried something new, and I volunteered for the seventh attempt. Thank God, I made it through.”

“When did you arrive?” Dorland was spellbound.

“Seven years ago. We missed our mark, you see. Bit of a bumpy ride getting through the Penumbra. It’s a miracle I got through at all.”

“Seven years? Why, you had all that time to plan alternative action and you waited until the night of the event to do anything?”

“You don’t understand,” said the visitor. “The Lever was here—it was now. It was instrumental that I prevent the death of Mr. Ramer. That was all. There was nothing I could do to prevent the rise of Ra’id Husan al Din and his Holy Fighters in this time. They were part of a fire that started long ago, and we could not get far enough back to do anything about it.”

“But you had information—vital information that could have worked to change history in any number of ways. All you had to do was call the FBI and tell them about the bomb.”

“Who would have believed me?” Graves looked at them. “An anonymous tip called in among the thousands of anonymous tips in the deluge of misinformation and false alarms that became the heart of the terrorist strategy after the World Trade Center fell. Would you have even believed me, say, four years ago; before you dreamt up this project?

“But where have you been all this time?”

“In a monastery! I had to avoid contact and let things germinate on their own to prevent the possibility of Paradox. It’s very real, you know. It’s not just a clever twist of the mind. It kills. Time is a harsh mistress, Mr. Dorland. We have lifted her skirts once too often, you see, and many have died. We know better. That little stunt you were planning with the Bermuda Pamphlets, for example, could have gotten you all killed! The only way to be certain, to be safe, was to limit my influence on the time line as much as possible until the actual moment where I could do some good. All our research pointed to the death of Mr. Ramer as a Primary Lever on the three of you. We decided to gamble everything on that one throw of the dice. Outcomes and Consequences had very good numbers for us. They predicted that, if Kelly had lived, you would most certainly have tried something with your experiment. You wanted to visit the Globe in 1612 to take in the Tempest—it’s all on the tape we recovered. We had to decide what to do. Should we simply act on Mr. Ramer’s behalf and hope for the best, or take more drastic action?”

“Well you have certainly let the cat out of the bag with this little visit.” Dorland was pacing again, his mind a whirl. “The possibility of Paradox is very real now. You’ve revealed things here—”

“I know…” There was fear in the visitor’s eyes. “But we had to take the risk. It was our last chance at survival. I was resolved not to say anything to you here until we were safely in the void. I was very patient, Mr. Dorland. Very patient.” He clutched at his chest as he spoke, his fist tightly balled, eyes wide with the intensity of his argument. “It was your theory…” His breathing seemed to come faster as he spoke. “A moment exists, somewhere in time, and it can undo the catastrophe that is about to change the entire world. We must find it, and that quickly. We are in the eye of the tempest now. We have less than six hours before the wave-front is scheduled to make first landfall. You have a fully operational Arch ready here, and you must use it tonight.”

Nordhausen put down his shortwave and leaned heavily on the table. “Use it tonight? To go where?”

“You must find the Meridian and stick the needle in…” The visitor seemed pale and drawn as he labored to persuade them. “Oh my… I was hoping the void would keep me a while…” He gave them all a wild-eyed look. “Stick the needle in…” he said again, and then collapsed, fainting dead away and sliding off the chair onto the floor.