Meridian

28

Kelly was working feverishly at the Chamber Mix Controls. The particle infusion looked good, but he was worried that the element levels would not give him enough density to trigger the final retraction. He nudged the levels again, adding weight to the mix until he satisfied himself that there was little more he could do. A glance at the clock set his heart racing. He had to get full power now, or they would lose Paul forever. He raced to the main console thumbing the intercom to shout through the microphone. “Clear that Arch corridor, Maeve! I need to ramp this baby up again.” There was a burst of interference and he passed a breathless moment, looking at Jen as they both listened for a response. Then Maeve’s voice returned, faint but audible.

“It’s Nordhausen, and we’re clear, Kelly. Go get Paul!”

“Roger that.” Kelly waved at Jen with a winding motion of his wrist, and she toggled a switch on the board to open the floodgates of energy required for a time shift. The building seemed to shudder in response, and Kelly only hoped the turbines would hold out another five minutes.

“Ninety-five,” Jen called out the readings. “One hundred!”

“I’m on it!” Kelly moved quickly, his hands streaking over the controls to enable the retraction scheme. “Those focal routines still look good,” he said aloud. “I think we have a pattern lock.”

Jen was a bit flustered in the excitement of the moment, but she fell back on familiar ground and began reading the shift monitor for temporal integrity. “Green at 1.00,” she said, excitement rising in her voice. “Zero variance.”

“Come on in, Paul. Come on now, buddy.” Kelly watched the neon glow of the progress bar until it traversed his screen to finality. “I think we’ve done it!” He clapped his hands with jubilation.

Even as he turned to flash a broad grin at Jen, a sharp spat of energy leapt from the main console and a shower of sparks cascaded from the winking rows of display lights. Kelly made a fast cutting motion across his neck. “Cut the power!” He yelled over the fuming explosion but was cut off from Jen’s station by a sheet of white flame.

“Shit! God damn electrical fire!” He whirled around, looking for an extinguisher.

Jen managed to deactivate the main power switch, and the explosive fury of the fire dissipated in a shower of sizzling sparks. Kelly was across the room, his elbow smashing the glass door of the extinguisher closet. He dragged out the dry chemical extinguisher and pulled at the safety tab as he ran back to the console. Jen was leaning back from the blazing panel and shielding her eyes from the white tongues of flame. Kelly waved her away, and the hollow whoosh of the extinguisher spat its chalky vapor on the blaze, enveloping it in a billowing fog. After three intense bursts from the extinguisher, the fire hissed out and thin curls of dark smoke spiraled up from the display board.

“Jen, get down and tell Tom to roll everything back through standby. He can take it down to zero in ten minutes. There’s nothing else we can do with the console in this shape. I only hope we managed to pull this off.”

A voice crackled from the intercom speaker below. “You’ve landed your last fish, Kelly.”

“Thank God.” Kelly suddenly felt faint. The tension of the last several hours all seemed to unwind and his arms and legs felt like jelly. “I better sit down for a minute.” He looked for a chair, wiping the sweat from his brow.

“Congratulations, Mr. Ramer.” Jen gave him a warm smile, glad that the project had been successful. Then she turned to run to the staircase. “I’ll tell Tom to shut everything down.” She slipped through the door and was gone.

Kelly slumped in a chair, breathing hard. He decided to lower his head to his knees to get some blood flowing. How could he be so light headed with his heart pounding like this? The adrenaline of the retraction and the fire emergency was still driving his pulse in a feverish rhythm. He gained a little clarity of thought and looked around the room.

We did it, he thought. We pulled the whole thing off! He glanced at the clock and saw that they still had another three minutes before the first tsunami waves were due to hit the coast off Cape Hatteras—if there was still any emergency at all. Where was that radio Nordhausen had with him? He looked around, hoping to see the shortwave sitting comfortably on a nearby console, but it was nowhere to be found. Then he remembered what Paul had told him about the book. If they altered the time line the book should change as well. All he had to do was read the passage Nordhausen had marked for him. How did it go? The echo of Paul’s words returned to him. He was supposed to read up on the second train. If it gets through without incident, everything would be fine. Everything fine…

He stood up, on unsteady legs, and shuffled to the desk where they had hidden the book away. The drawer was slightly ajar, but he gave it no heed. He reached down, missing the drawer handle at first and groping to take hold and pull it open. There was nothing there but a few file folders. Did he have the right drawer? A check of the others came up empty. The book was gone.

Kelly stood there, a bemused expression on his face. It was gone. Something had happened, he thought. Something knocked old Lawrence right out of the God damned time line! He never wrote his book! It was the only possible explanation, and he pinched the bridge of his nose, suddenly dizzy.

“Crap…” he said aloud in a low voice. His mind played out a thousand possibilities, imagination painting the images in his head in a flashing rush. They did something to contaminate the time line, he thought. Lawrence may have been exposed or even killed. Maeve tried to warn us about this. You don’t fool with a Prime Mover! Something happened to prevent him from writing his book.

A voice intruded on the stillness of the room “You there Kelly?” It was Maeve speaking over the intercom again.

He forced himself to move, leaning in the direction he wanted to go and hoping his feet would stay under him. The microphone on the desk… The microphone…

“You there, Kelly? Answer me!” Maeve’s voice had a frantic edge to it.

He reached out for the mike, getting one hand on it as he spoke. “Book’s gone…” His voice sounded so strange to him, thin and distant.

“What? Kelly? Thank god! You’re OK.” The sound of someone else speaking in the background came to him and he recognized the voice of his long time friend. “Hey there, mister! Spent a lovely couple of hours in the park. Nice going, Kelly. I knew you could do it.”

The voices sounded far away, like distant memories. It was Paul! He was alive and well. Kelly smiled, lowering himself slowly to a chair by the microphone. “The book…” he tried to speak but his voice was unwilling.

“I’ve got it here!” Maeve seemed elated as she spoke, yet her words were an echo in Kelly’s mind now, quavering through his thoughts with an almost haunting resonance.

What did she say? She had the book? She must have taken it when she went down to help Nordhausen! Then everything was all right after all! He sighed to himself, feeling warm and satisfied. Lawrence was unharmed, or at least he lived long enough to write his Seven Pillars of Wisdom. Everything was fine now. Paul and Robert were safe and sound. It was wonderful… Wonderful…

He was thinking of poetry now. The words just came to him at times like this, and he found himself reaching into his shirt pocket for the little notebook and pen he always kept there. He would write things down when the words came. It was the only way to keep them from evaporating into the ether of his mind. There was a thought wrapped up with the words, as if some inner voice was speaking a great truth to him, knowing something he only now began to guess at, and gently calling him to listen.

He heard the voice speaking the words and at last he knew why he was dizzy, and why Maeve had the book, and why Paul was happily safe with Robert in the chamber of the Arch. It had all worked out fine. Only now he would face the truth that had been whispering from some dark corner of his soul ever since the first knock of the visitor on Nordhausen’s study door.

He was very tired, drained of all energy, but he managed to drag his pen over the notebook, wanting to write down the words in his head. They were not his words this time, but they spoke with the resonance of his innermost soul. He tried to scrawl them on the narrow page, but his hand moved with a languid slowness, and he could not write. So he just sat quietly and listened to the words in his mind.

It was the great bard himself, whispering in his ear. Shakespeare had something for everyone. He passed a fleeting moment, thinking how it would have been so wonderful to go back to the Globe as they first planned. Just to see the play, he thought; just to sit there quietly and watch the old master at the flood tide of his life. Then everything had changed when the news came over his car radio. Everything had changed.

Yes, he thought. They came back for me, but I wasn’t supposed to make it this far. I wasn’t supposed to be here… His mind grew quiet, but his hand still struggled to move, managing just one word on the page that captured the essence of Shakespeare’s verse. Would it stay there when I go, or vanish like the memory of my life? Would any of it stay put for very long?

He didn’t know.

29

“He’s OK!” Maeve was beaming as she greeted Paul with the warmth they deserved. “Kelly is fine!”

“Good man,” said Paul. He looked at Nordhausen where he was just coming around again after passing out on the floor. “What happened to Robert?”

“Oh, don’t worry. He was just disoriented from the retraction. Look, he’s coming to now.”

“I’ll vouch for that. If you open your eyes it’s, fabulous, but it will make you sick to your stomach when your finish the shift. I’m a bit light-headed myself, but I think I’ll be fine.”

Maeve was helping Nordhausen up onto one elbow. “Look at the two of you! You look like a pair of pups who’ve been out playing in the mud!”

“Well, it was raining. You try sneaking around in the Jordanian desert in the rain and mud for twelve hours and see what your laundry bill looks like.”

“Twelve hours?”

“At least that long,” Paul explained. “After we got to our proper coordinates, that is.”

“Kelly botched the numbers.” Nordhausen was getting his wits about him and returned to the same tired complaint he had been making all along. “He sent us half way to eternity!”

“That gave us quite a scare,” said Maeve. “He was rushing to key the final numbers and accidentally put something in as an exponent. You shifted by powers of ten.”

“Good lord!” Nordhausen’s eyes were focused now, and registering the proper touch of outrage. “That would account for the Ammonite fossil we found. We were probably way back in the—”

“In the late Cretaceous.” Maeve finished for him. “We got the readings and I nearly wet my pants. Kelly did something during the tachyon infusion, however. He sent a loop command through the system and got a double reading on your pattern signatures. Then he used one copy to move you back on target. The last one brought you both home.”

“Thank God for that,” said Paul. Then he pointed an accusing finger at Nordhausen. “Where the hell were you?”

“What? Well I was going to ask you the same thing. Weren’t you the one warning me about not stepping on the plants and such. Then you go wandering off and the next thing I know I’m face down in a pile of wet sand. What happened to you?”

“I came back to the fire and found you gone. Before I had time to get mad about it I must have shifted forward. I’m not sure where I ended up at first. The shift surprised me and I saw too much.”

“Did you open your eyes this time?” The professor had an excited look on his face.

“Too long,” said Paul. “It made me sick and dizzy. I was stumbling along in the desert and came upon the rail line. Then the Turks came up and—”

“The Turks!” Maeve gave him a wide-eyed look. “I’ll bet that was fun.”

“No shit!” Paul could still fee the hard clutch of the Colonel’s fingers on his throat. He spent a few moments recounting his ordeal in the officer’s coach, and his chance escape because of the loose buckle on the leather strap. “See what I mean, Robert? It was just a loose thread or two that ended up setting me free. Otherwise I might have been strung up for the Colonel’s pleasure the whole damn time. I can only imagine the effect on the man if I was still tied up when the retraction shift started.”

“Well, it all worked out because of one of your little push pins,” said the professor. Paul frowned at him for getting the terminology wrong again, but said nothing. “So tell me,” Nordhausen leaned forward, “how did you manage to sabotage the wires?”

“What?” Paul gave him a surprised look. “I was hoping you managed to do that. I never got near them.”

“What are you saying?” Nordhausen sat up straight. “I was close, you know. Very close. I even saw Lawrence! It was amazing. He came up from the rail line and set his exploder right by the little bush he talks about in Seven Pillars. I could barely contain myself. He seemed to have this aura around him—at least I thought I saw an odd corona about his form.”

“Little bush?” The professor never filled Paul in on all the details he crammed into his head before the mission started.

“Yes, there was a bush where he was planning to hide the ends of the wire so he could get to them easily when the train came.” He told the story of his encounter with the two Arabs in the desert, and how he stole away in the early dawn to see what he could do on his own. “I gave them the slip,” he beamed, “and I swear, I was within thirty yards of that bush when everything started to get fuzzy on me. The final retraction must have pulled me out, but I never touched the exploder, or the wire for that matter. I was hoping you would finish the job, Paul.”

“I wish I could take credit, but I never got anywhere near the wires either.” They both looked at Maeve, hoping she would produce the answer for them.

“Well,” she said, “this confirms my argument about wandering around in history, doesn’t it. Who knows what you actually did to change things, but you did something. It could have been anything at all. We may never know in the end.”

“I suppose you’re right,” said Nordhausen. I’ve studied history for decades and I’ve often remarked how much of it just seems to happen on its own. Oh yes, the kings and princes and generals and emperors thought they had it all firmly in hand. In the end, however, they were doing little more than blundering about, just as we were. In fact, Lawrence expressed the same feeling about the writing of his book. How did he say it? ‘Things happen, and we do our best to keep in the saddle.’ Those were the words of one of your Prime Movers, Paul.”

“Doesn’t sound very comforting, does it?” Paul scratched the back of his head. “The notion that we change things unknowingly, that history turns on the slightest whim, is unnerving. Now do you know why I was so concerned about contamination?”

“Yes, but did it change?” Nordhausen was pointing at the book lying on the floor of the safety lock chamber. “Did you read it, Maeve?”

“Yes. I was frightened out of my wits, but I found the passage and read it just before Paul came through. Our assumption is correct. We all remember clearly that the second train was the one Lawrence blew up, right?”

“That’s how I remember the narrative,” said Nordhausen, and Paul gave him a nod of agreement.

“Right then,” Maeve continued. “As it reads now, the second train rolls on by without incident. Well, not entirely without incident. Lawrence was sitting with his exploder and the damn thing failed to ignite the charges.” She recounted the passage she had read, relating how Lawrence had been exposed on the open ground, waving at the Turks on the train with a silly grin on his face. “Look here,” she said with some delight. “He even penned an illustration into this version of the narrative!”

She flipped open the book and they were amazed to see that Lawrence had drawn a little cartoon to illustrate his plight. “And it goes on to show that they waited for the third train, just as we hoped. Lawrence managed to fix the exploder box—apparently that was the Pushpoint, Paul. He recounts working on the interior of the box to set it right, and when the third train showed up their mine went off without a hitch. But we still came very close to ‘mucking things up,’ as you would say professor. Do you know who was on the third train?”

Paul and Robert waited her out, speechless. “Jemal Pasha, the Commander of the whole Turkish Corps in that region. He was traveling with his Headquarters Company to try and get closer to the disintegrating front in that area.”

“Yes,” said Paul. “The Colonel and I had a little chat about it. He spoke English fairly well. Allenby had just pushed the Turks out of Beersheba.”

“Well, we could have gotten the man killed!” Maeve gave him a peeved look. “But lucky for the both of you, he survived the attack. Lawrence and his men grabbed some booty and fled into the desert. I don’t know what you did, exactly, but it altered the mechanism of the exploder box and changed this narrative dramatically. I can only hope it changed the rest of the continuum as well…” Her voice trailed off a bit as she said that, and a squall of concern clouded her features.

“Where’s Kelly,” said Nordhausen? “He should be down here celebrating with us!”

“He’s late again,” Paul chimed, still rummaging through his memory of the trip to try and figure out what he could have done to cause the exploder box to fail.

“Get him on the intercom.” Nordhausen was pointing at the call box on the far wall.

“You mean you haven’t checked the radio yet, Maeve?”

“Checked the radio? Well, as you can see, I’ve been a little preoccupied these last few minutes.”

“Look at the time,” said Nordhausen. “It’s 4:20 AM. You said the first waves were scheduled to hit the coast at 4:11. Come on! I left my radio in the changing room upstairs. Let’s get up there and see what else has changed.”

Paul helped the professor to his feet, and they opened the outer door of the safety lock, making their way back to the elevator for the long ride up to the surface. Paul tried the intercom on the way up, but no one answered. “I wonder where Kelly went,” he said. The low moaning sound of the descending turbines added a somber note to the scene. It sounded like a pack of howling dogs, lost and forlorn in the distance.

Maeve stood in sullen silence. Each mention of Kelly’s name seemed like a lash upon her and, as the seconds passed, the cruel whip of her understanding began to score her with a growing pain. She already feared what the others had not even begun to guess at, though the look on Paul’s face began to betray a small hint of anxiety as the elevator doors swished open at the top. He’s thinking about it now, she thought. God, don’t let it be so.

They reached the last great door and activated the controls to swing it back on the gleaming metal hinges. It glided open and they stepped through the portal to the control room, eyes adjusting to the darkness. A purple haze drifted over the consoles, and the emergency lighting projected long radiant cones through the vapors. Paul rushed in, almost tripping on a swivel chair that was square in the center of the room. The circular control consoles arched around him, still dimly lit by battery power. He sniffed the air, smelling something wrong.

“What happened, here,” he began? “Smells like they had a fire. Where’s Kelly?”

“Looks like they put it out there at the main console.” Nordhausen pointed at the streaks of dark char on the silver plating of the console panels. There was obvious evidence of a fire, and the whole area was dusted with the white powder of a chemical extinguisher that was lying on the floor. “Kelly?” he called out, but no one answered. “Well, perhaps he’s gone down to see Tom about shutting this contraption off. Can you hear the turbines winding down? We must have tripped circuit breakers all over the Bay Area with all the power this thing requires.”

“Yes,” said Paul, “that must be it.” He gave Maeve a quick glance and was disturbed to see a single teardrop well at the corner of her eye and trace a solitary path along her cheek. Was it the smoke in the room irritating her eyes? He started to say something but held his thoughts for a moment.

“I’ll get the radio.” Nordhausen diverted his attention to getting some news on the Palma Event. He rushed off towards the changing room, nearly tripping on the sodden robes of his costume as he went.

Paul was looking around the room, and he spied a chair off by the communications console. He walked over, eyes searching the area for any sign or clue. He did not know exactly what he was looking for, but his senses were keenly alert just the same. When he reached the chair he encountered a palpable cold spot on the misty air and shuddered.

I’m just suffering from the cold and the rain in the desert, he tried to tell himself, even though he knew better. He extended an arm, feeling forward to the chair like a blind man groping the darkness. He felt a frosty tingle, the cold handshake of Time, and he knew why Maeve was crying. Something in him resisted the thoughts that welled in his mind. He did not want them to be so. Then his eye spied a crumpled notebook on the console that seemed oddly out of place.

Maeve was padding softly to the scene behind him. She wrapped her arms close about her when she encountered the icy chill near the chair. Then she stopped, as if frozen with emotion, unwilling to take one single step further and have her senses confirm the terrible sadness that seemed to settle on her now. Paul looked at her with knowing eyes.

He reached for the notebook and strained to see the single word that was written there. Tears welled in his eyes as he read it. Then he slowly extended the note to Maeve. She stepped back, one arm out in front of her as if she thought to ward off the inevitable truth by refusing to look. Then she softened, her hand opening with gentle affirmation, and taking the notebook from Paul. She held it for a moment, then raised it to her breast, a sacred object that branded her with memories and hopes that she could neither embrace nor shun. She looked at the notepad and recognized the errant scrawl of Kelly’s handwriting.

There was only one word: ‘Goodbye.’

Nordhausen came running up, breathless with elation. “We did it,” he shouted. “I’ve tuned in the BBC and there’s not a hint or a whisper of anything wrong! Oh, there’s some news about a high water warning because of a minor earthquake on the Canary Islands. Isn’t that odd? It was augmented by a storm surge from an early hurricane, but no real threat seems to be developing. The season normally begins this weekend, but hurricane Auda is running up a six foot storm surge off the Carolinas. Word is Bermuda got hit pretty hard, but nothing all that threatening to the coast. They posted a warning, but no mandatory evacuation order.”

“Yes, we know,” said Maeve softly. She was still staring at the notepad.

“What do you mean?” Nordhausen looked at them, surprised to see the wet, sad eyes and long faces. “What’s wrong with you people? Don’t you understand? We were successful! Old Ra’id Husan al Din and his Holy Fighters never blew up their volcano. We saved millions of lives tonight and you’re standing there like it was a funeral or something. Why, what would our visitor from the future think to see you like this?”

Paul gave him a vacant look, taking a long slow breath before he spoke. “He never came, Robert.”

“What’s that? Who never came? Now where is Kelly—has he come up to hear the good news yet?”

Paul was not quite sure how to explain things. He looked at Maeve, and saw that she was giving him the same searching eyes, hoping he might understand something she had overlooked, something that would work just one more magical change on the continuum and bring Kelly back to them.

Paul cleared his voice and tried to speak. Emotion closed its fingers on his throat, like the cold, strong fingers of the Turkish Colonel. “Mr. Graves… the visitor. I don’t think he ever came last night.”

“What?” Nordhausen gave him an exasperated look. “Well of course he came. How else do you suppose we pulled this thing off?” A light of realization flashed in his eyes. “There you go with this time theory business again. What are you saying? I remember the man clearly. Don’t you remember him as well?” He looked at Maeve for support, noticing her tears for the first time. “What in God’s name is going on here?”

“It’s difficult…” Paul gathered his thoughts. “Do you still remember the meeting, Robert? Do you still recall our discussion about Shakespeare and all that business about the Bermuda Papers?”

“Of course I do. I may be a bit shaken up by this little excursion through the halls of infinity, but I’m not daft. What are you asking?”

“We can remember it all because we were protected in a Deep Nexus.” Nordhausen frowned at him and he tried to explain. “Yes, I remember the visitor as well. I’m sure Maeve will say the same. He said we were in a Deep Nexus, and that makes us all Free Radicals. Don’t you see? They created the Nexus when they came back here. It started when the visitor first stepped in front of Kelly’s car to delay him on the way to the meeting. The continuum was at risk from that very instant, and a Deep Nexus formed.”

“What the hell is this nonsense all about?” Nordhausen was in no mood for another long treatise on Time theory. He was tired and awfully hungry. He wanted food and coffee and a warm bed. They could sort it all through in twelve hours. A sinking feeling settled over him.

“A Deep Nexus is a point of maximum risk on any Time Meridian,” Paul went on, piecing things together in his mind as he spoke. Maeve listened silently, nodding inwardly as he retraced the pathways where her own fear had walked with her earlier. “Once a Nexus forms, it’s as if time is holding its breath. Any willful agent caught in the Nexus becomes a Free Radical, capable of making profound alterations in the eventual course of Time as it leaves that point. We were all caught up in this the moment Kelly was saved from the accident that was supposed to claim his life last night. A Deep Nexus is surrounded by Paradox, Robert. It’s Time’s way of isolating the Meridian and protecting it until it solidifies to some definite purpose, some new certainty. The Nexus held us all safe until we took some action to bring clarity to the situation. Who knows what we did while we were muddling about in the history, as you would say, but it was enough to reach a certain conclusion, and the Nexus began to dissipate. Once that happens, and the continuum is free to move forward again, Paradox will see to anything that doesn’t belong. It’s Time’s way of cleaning up after our mischief here. Do you understand?”

The professor listened in silence, his intellect slowly pushing his emotions aside as he struggled to grasp what Paul was saying. He had gone from confusion, to elation, to outrage and now this. A nameless sadness seemed to settle on him, and he thought he was beginning to appreciate the tears in the eyes of his friends. “Then, you’re saying the visitor never came? But I remember the man!”

“Yes, we remember him. We were protected in the void. Now Paradox is taking control of the situation and cleaning up any loose ends. Poor Kelly. Don’t you see, Robert? There was no Palma Event—not in the time continuum as it stands now. They never came back, because nothing ever happened. Yes, we all remember that Kelly’s life was spared by their intervention, but not in this time line—not in the world we have around us now. Paradox is real—that’s what the visitor tried to warn us about. I always thought is was just some impossible puzzle that would send your mind in an endless loop, but that’s not what Paradox is at all. It’s a natural force, a consequence, and it holds us all accountable for every action we take. Even if we remember the visitor, the change we made in the time line removed his reason for being here—cancelled out the effect he had on the continuum before we were all swept into the Nexus Point, because he never had any reason to come. It was as if he was never here.”

“And he never saved Kelly.” Nordhausen’s voice faded away. He set the shortwave on the console and moved closer to Paul and Maeve, arms extended, reaching for them, gathering them in to a wide embrace. They drew together, joined in their understanding and their sorrow, and shared a long moment of quiet tears in the silence of the smoky room. At last the professor spoke, reciting one of his old favorites. It just seemed to hit on the nub of the moment, and whispered the only consolation he could offer. “Destiny has two ways of crushing us,” he said softly. “By refusing our wishes and by fulfilling them.”

30

The green sward of the memorial park was broken by winding flagstone pathways, trimmed with well cultivated rows of carnations and roses. The sky was blue and clear, with a gentle breeze blowing in from the bay. Paul looked over his shoulder as he walked to greet the others, his eyes climbing the Berkeley Hills and reaching for the place where Lawrence Labs lay nestled there—a portal on infinity. He carried a small parcel under one arm, handling it with an almost reverent care. Up ahead, at the edge of a gently rising knoll, Robert and Maeve were waiting beside the freshly turned earth of a shallow grave. It was just large enough to hold the few things they had decided to inter here, for there were no remains of their friend to lay to rest.

Kelly had vanished without the slightest trace, except for the single word on his notebook. There was nothing to fill a casket, or even an urn, but in keeping with the traditions they had lived with, they had all decided to bury a few tokens of his life here in a quiet setting, watched by the hills where he had lived most of his adult years.

Paul greeted his companions with a half-hearted smile. This moment weighed heavily on him, for Kelly was one of those very few people in his life where the shared roots of a long friendship reached deep into the past, even to the days of his youth. Nordhausen also carried the burden of sorrow heavily. He was one of the same inner circle that bound Paul and Kelly together, and they had gone to college together at St. Mary’s College in Moraga over twenty years ago. It would be very hard for both of them to say goodbye. Kelly’s death, his disappearance, his absence, would leave a gaping hole in both their lives that seemed impossible to ever fill.

It was said that Time would heal all wounds, but not this one, thought Paul. Not all the days and years that remained to him could measure the gulf that yawned in his soul. His friend was gone.

For Maeve, the sorrow was twofold. While she did not share the long years of friendship that made up Paul and Robert’s history with Kelly, she had harbored a slowly germinating feeling for him, one that she had guarded and nurtured over the brief time she served with the team. Three years seemed all too short a time to come to know someone, but she had learned a great deal about Kelly from the volume of poetry he had published not long ago. She still remembered when she first saw it on his coffee table during one of their Outcome briefings on the planned Shakespeare mission. Her curiosity had been aroused, and she sought out a copy to have a secret look the following week. How surprised she was to learn that, in addition to the endless ciphers of mathematics and computer networks that occupied his working hours, there was another side to Kelly that he kept very private. He was an avid reader, a lover of classical music, and a poet!

The hours she had spent with his verse, unbeknownst to him, had brought her into touch with this hidden, artful side of Kelly Ramer, deeply sensitive, wonderfully expressive, and laden with heartfelt understanding of the world. She read his poetry, taking it in a little at a time over the next month, and delighting in the secret tryst she had with his mind and heart each night before she slept. Oddly, she never said a word about it to Kelly. The business of their work together had not given her an opportunity to find the right setting, the right moment, to walk this new ground with him. But she knew, on some quiet level of her being, that his verse had wooed her heart in a way he might never have intended. She was falling in love with him, uncertain of her feeling, yet compulsively drawn to the flame his muse had ignited in her. Now he was gone. All she had left was the slim book of poetry under her arm—her token for the memorial service. She would read a few verses here and then lay the book to rest. It would be some time, she knew, before he really died. He would live in the feeling she still carried for years to come.

“Morning, Paul.” Nordhausen was the first to break the silence. “What did you bring?”

Paul looked at the parcel under his arm, thinking whether he wanted to say anything or not. He was carrying things that only the dearest of friends shared. Robert would understand, for his voice was one of those clowning on the CD copy of a tape the three of them had made over twenty-five years ago. “Something from the Eternal Tape Archives,” he said softly, and Nordhausen nodded his understanding, eyes betraying a gleam of wetness. Paul carried something else as well, but he would keep that to himself. It was another disk, this time an enhanced DVD file he had taken from the security camera system that monitored operations in the control room of their Lawrence Lab facility.

He was always one to document things. The tape recording of the meeting they held in Nordhausen’s study the night before the mission had turned out to be instrumental in allowing future generations to discover why they never acted to reverse the Palma Event themselves. He often wondered what they heard on that tape. The visitor said there had been a phone call with news of Kelly’s accident. The grief that struck them all when they learned of his death had been so debilitating, that they lost that one brief interval where they could have acted to reverse the terrible vengeance of Ra’id Husan al Din. He was struck by the irony of it all—a real ‘damned if you do; damned if you don’t’ conundrum. Now, here they were, grieving Kelly’s passing as they might have in the old time line, in the lives they had all brought to that fateful meeting the week before.

Along with his private archival copy of all their adolescent bantering, Paul also carried the visual record of the last few moments of Kelly’s existence in the Deep Nexus that had sheltered them all during the operation. Kelly was sitting on a chair by the communications console, with the most sublime expression on his face. He reached into his shirt pocket to pull out the dog-eared notebook he carried to catch and store errant phrases that often came to him in the course of his day. Many of them would end up in his poetry. This one was his last goodbye. Paul didn’t want the others to see the recording, though he had watched it over and over himself. No matter how many times he viewed it, the impact was always the same. He was there, alive and smiling at some great inner realization that was playing itself out in his mind, then he faded in a white mist, and was gone. Paul swallowed hard, emotion hobbling his voice. “What about you?” He managed to get it out, gesturing softly to a box Nordhausen was holding.

“A few mementos,” he said quietly. “And a bit of sheet music I wrote for him. I was going to try it on recorder, but I wrote it for piano. I’ll play it for you one day.”

They passed a few moments in silence, and then Maeve decided to begin the ceremony, stooping to light the four wreathed candles that were set by the shallow grave. She reached for words, wondering if she dared to express her true thoughts. Then she decided that truth was the one thing she owed him now, in gracious thanks for all the moments he had given her with his poetry.

“I loved him,” she said haltingly. Then she looked at Robert and Paul to let them see that in her face. “I found him in a place he never thought many people would look—in his verse. He kept it private for so long, but when I first read his poetry my whole understanding of the man was shaped anew. I would love to share a brief reading here with you. I know you’ve read it all before.”

She opened her book and turned to the place she had marked. Then she began to read. It was a wonderful poem Kelly had penned about his experience riding at night in the front seat of the car with his father, a distant and mysterious figure that always seemed to haunt Kelly’s thoughts. They had stopped to see something in the sky—the Aurora Borealis, alive and moving in the night where they never expected it, above the back roads of Pennsylvania. She read from Kelly’s book:

The poem continued until it came to the sighting of the Auroras, and Kelly’s poem recounted the moment his father had held him up in his arms to see them for the first time. Both Paul and Robert knew it well and, as Maeve read, they could not help but think of the radiant light of the Arch and the amazing range of color and motion when they traveled through that portal.

Maeve’s voice broke at that point, choked with emotion. She could read no further, but repeated that last invocation, the words of Kelly’s father in the poem, but now her own. “You weren’t supposed to stay there… Come back!” Tears claimed her, and she lapsed into silence, but Paul knew the words of the poem by heart, and he recited them to himself while they waited, hearing Kelly’s voice in his mind.

He watched while Maeve closed her book, setting it in the shallow grave. Nordhausen placed his box there as well.

“He was a great friend,” he said.

“A brother,” said Paul.

“But he was always late,” said Maeve with a half smile lending a little light to her eyes.

“And he botched the numbers!” Nordhausen laughed now, and the moment lightened for them all. The distant sounds of the city all around them intruded on the silence. Paul looked and saw a dark limousine pulling into the park, and he gave it no second thought, another caravan to Auld Lang Syne.

He stooped and hovered over the four burning candles, giving Robert and Maeve a subtle glance to seek their approval. They nodded, and he reached out to pinch the tip of one candle, watching the thin curls of smoke that had once been such a vibrant flame. They dissipated on the light morning breeze, gone forever. Three candles remained, still burning, yet diminished.

‘Time is the fire in which we all burn,’ thought Paul, recalling a favorite maxim. At that moment he felt a shudder, and the strange sense that he had lived this moment before. He hunched his shoulders, standing up, and somewhat surprised to see that Robert seemed to be looking around him, as though aware of something odd in the setting; something vaguely disturbing.

“Did you feel that?”

“I felt something,” said Paul. “Did you feel it, Maeve?”

“Was it an earthquake?”

“Not much of one if it was,” said Paul. “Just the slightest ripple at my back and then this odd sensation that something had happened.”

Someone was approaching the knoll, wending along the curved flagstone pathway, face shrouded in the eaves of a coat, flowers in hand. Another mourner, thought Paul, though he could not see any other ceremonies staging on the grounds. It was probably someone come to lay flowers on his mother’s grave. He fingered the parcel he had brought, and stooped to lay it in the shallow grave next to the other tokens. When he stood up he was surprised to see that the interloper had come up behind them. Someone must have ordered flowers, he thought; perhaps Jen, or Tom, or one of the other project team members.

Someone spoke and they all turned to greet the stranger. “Well,” said the voice, “I now have the dubious distinction of being the only person to ever actually show up late for his own funeral!”

Paul’s heart leapt at the sound There was no mistaking it—Kelly! He was filled with an elation unlike any he could remember in his life. How could it be? He was alive. He was here! Robert and Maeve beamed with joy. Their astonishment had given way to emotion and, one by one, they embraced him by the knoll, tears of sorrow becoming the outward sign of their delight and wonder.

“You had better light that candle again, Paul,” said Kelly. “Then I’ll tell you what happened and we can all go over to Peets and have some coffee.”

They were flabbergasted, but Paul’s mind immediately began to try and reach for understanding, the tenets of his time theory dressing out the possibilities in his thinking. When Kelly began to speak, however, they could hardly believe what he was telling them.

“They pulled me out.” He began at the moment of his disappearance there in the lab. “Can you believe that? I thought I was dying—I thought Time was making good on its claim to my life at last, but they pulled me out.”

“What do you mean?” Robert was too shocked by Kelly’s appearance to even begin to reason things out.

“The Nexus was failing here, at our point in the continuum where we had been safe in the lab all those hours. You changed the time line—at least one of you did. I had been thinking about it all night. If you guys fixed this thing, then what reason would the visitor have to come back and save me?”

“Paradox,” said Paul.

“Bad ass Paradox,” Kelly reinforced him at once. “But as long as I was in the void, in the Deep Nexus, I was safe. It began to dissipate when you came back through the Arch. It was then that I knew my time had come. I was feeling light headed—very strange; all thin and distended, like a vapor. I closed my eyes and, to my surprise, I woke up on a glistening metal table, surrounded in a cone of yellow light. I thought I was about to meet my maker at last, but you know who leaned in to say hello? The visitor! Damn, was I shocked.”

“You mean Graves?” Robert was catching up, his mind following in the wake of his emotion.

“Hell yes!” Kelly gave them his famous smile. “You know what he said? Get this: ‘Did you find the note in my coat?’ The guy says this and I nearly shit my pants!”

That was one thing Paul loved about Kelly. For someone with his eloquence of expression when he turned his mind to poetry, he was wonderfully common and unassuming when he was excited, and could swear with the best of them. It was the magnificent duality of the man that made him what he was. He could listen to Mozart in one ear and Pink Floyd in the other.

“It took a while for me to understand what had happened,” Kelly went on. “The Nexus was failing in our time, but they created the whole damn thing when they sent Mr. Graves back in the first place. In their time the Nexus was still holding firm. They’ve been at this a while, you see, and the equipment they have there is phenomenal. Paradox was the problem. You said it yourself, Paul: Paradox was waiting to clean up after our mischief, and I was right at the top of the list. Our friends from tomorrow knew that, however, and they pulled me out—in the nick of time, if you will.”

“But how is that possible?” Paul scratched his head. “You can’t move someone in time without getting a pattern signature on them from the tachyon infusion. There was no signature on you, Kelly. You were never even in the Arch.”

Kelly smiled. “That may be true now,” he said with a wry smile, “but there’s one other way you can pick someone up. It’s very difficult, damn near impossible, in fact. They don’t like to do it—in fact they have a rule against ever doing it, except in special emergencies like this. You have to know exactly where the person is—and I mean exactly. If you can get that as close to a certainty as possible, you can move someone. Let’s just say our friends from tomorrow have had a little more time to refine things.”

“But how would they know where you would be,” asked Robert? “Lord, they would have to target a specific place with the spatial coordinates, at precisely the right time.”

“That they did.” Kelly looked at Paul. “They had a little help in working that out.”

They all looked at him, not understanding what he meant with that. There was a great deal more he wanted to tell them, but he tried to sum up the situation quickly.

“It’s like this,” he concluded. “They were able to pull me to the safety of the Nexus on their end before it dissipated. It gave them enough time to neutralize the Paradox Reaction—Just their way of saying thanks for what we had accomplished, I suppose. They were able to stabilize me—it took several hours in their time; it was years in this Meridian.”

“You mean there was still a chance they could lose you?”

“It was a very close call,” said Kelly. “I was gone for some time. You all finished out your ceremony here and lived many…” He caught himself, suddenly afraid to say more, then nodded his head to one side, coming to a new conclusion. “What’s the harm. I was going to say you lived many long years without me in this Meridian, but that’s all changed now. They asked me if I wanted to stay with them, or go back. That was an easy choice for me, but they had to spend a long time with the issue in Outcomes and Consequences before I finally got approval for the move. If they sent me back it would revise this Meridian again, you see. So this is all new!” He raised his arms expansively, as if to take in the whole of the world about them. “And it’s all ours.”

Paul burst out laughing. “You changed the continuum?”

“Ran the numbers myself.”

“Hope you got the exponents right!” Robert could not help himself.

Maeve had been so quiet, just looking at the three of them with a broad smile on her face the whole time. She reached out and quietly took Kelly by the hand, as if to test for herself if he was real, substantial; if he was truly there.

Kelly looked at her warmly. “Something tells me I’m going to spend a long time with this hand in mine.” He gave her a reassuring squeeze.

“Well come on, people!” Nordhausen waved his hands in front of Kelly’s eyes to break the spell. “What are we standing here for? Let’s get over to Peets and we can talk the hours away over coffee. I want to hear all about this.” He stooped to recover his box. From the shallow grave, and Paul moved to get his parcel as well.

“Wait!” Kelly held up a warning hand. They looked at him, afraid that it had all been a mirage and that he would melt away into a cold fog at a moment’s notice. “Leave everything there,” Kelly whispered. The sound of a dog barked at the far end of the park, and he cocked his head to heed it, a strange look on his face. “Leave everything where it is. Let’s bury it in place and set the stone Maeve brought for the grave.”

Paul looked at him, slowly understanding. They had to know exactly where he was to pull him forward, he thought. Exactly! They saw the DVD file from the security camera. They must have excavated this grave site as part of their research on the incident. That’s why we have to leave it all here, safe and undisturbed.

“But this is all precious,” said Nordhausen. “It will be ruined.”

“Do exactly what he says,” said Paul, and he gave Kelly a knowing wink. There was only one last thing that was bothering him. As he understood things now, Kelly’s return was a round trip ticket. Once they took his pattern signature in the Tachyon infusion, the fail-safe systems would eventually reach the half-life trigger and pull him back to the future. Did they have some way of slowing down the decay sequence? “Kelly,” he whispered while Robert and Maeve began to bury the memorial tokens, “what about the final retraction sequence?”

“No pattern signature,” Kelly whispered back. “I insisted on it. This is a one way trip, Paul. They don’t have a signature on me any longer, so you’re stuck with me.”

“And Paradox?”

“Once this stone is in place I will be just fine. It’s the one thing I had to do—It’s our Pushpoint, Paul.”

They were setting the grave stone in place, smiling with the irony of it all. This planned memorial to his death would stand a guard on his life now, through all the days that remained to him. Kelly winked at Paul, excusing himself for a moment and walking to the cool green grass of the burial knoll.

“I’ve always wanted to do this,” he said with a grin, dancing a little jig on his own grave. Then they all joined arms and started back along the flagstone pathway of a new life together. They were going to begin it with good strong cup of Peets coffee—Major Dickason’s Blend.