Meridian

4

Maeve was the first to render assistance, Kelly at her side. Together they reached to cradle the visitor’s head from the hard wood floor of the study. A moment later, Paul helped Kelly lift the man and they carried him gently to the reading room where Nordhausen kept a small love seat. Maeve rushed in with another wet towel and began swabbing the old man’s forehead. She could see no signs of serious injury, but was concerned nonetheless.

“He’s light as a feather,” said Kelly. “Has a pallid look to him, doesn’t he? Do you think he’s had a heart attack?”

Maeve was taking his pulse and looking for other obvious signs of cardiac distress. “I think he just fainted,” she said. “Do you have anything to eat, Robert? The man looks half starved.”

As if to confirm her suspicions, the visitor’s eyes fluttered open and he looked about the room, clearly disoriented. “I seem to have fallen…”

“There now,” said Maeve. “You just fainted. Your pulse is a bit weak, but otherwise normal. You’ve been sweating with a bit of a temperature, I’m afraid. Let’s get something into your stomach and then you rest a bit. Perhaps a hot tea?”

“There’s very little time,” the man tried to return her smile. Then he seemed to remember the urgency of the moment and spoke again. “You must not worry about me,” he whispered. “The Arch… That is the only thing that matters now.” His eyes seemed to look right past her, watching the ceiling and the walls about him with growing anxiety. “No time…” he breathed.

“Yes, yes,” Maeve comforted him. She turned and waved at the others to shoo them out of the room. “You just lie here quietly and I’ll get you something to drink.”

She herded the others back out into the study area and made for the coffee station while Dorland and Nordhausen huddled near the shortwave. They tuned in a few other stations, moving from one emergency bulletin to another until Paul pursed his lips with resignation.

“Six hours,” he said. “Well folks, if we are going to do anything about this business, we had better get started. I’d like to have a word with Mr. Graves, and—”

“Don’t you dare,” Maeve wagged a finger at him. “Give the man a moment to recover, Paul. I’ll get some shortbread and tea into him while you work out a strategy.” She was pouring a cup of the Earl Grey Nordhausen had brewed earlier. “I don’t suppose coffee is the right thing just now, but a little tea will do anyone good.”

Kelly retrieved his laptop and came over to the study table to join the others. “We don’t have much time,” he said. “I’ve got all the algorithms here for the planned mission, but I’m going to need cycles on another Arion system to reconfigure.” He looked at his friend Paul with a puzzled expression. “Where to, boss?”

Dorland ran a hand through his thick, dark hair and cleared his throat. “Good question,” he began. “Any thoughts, Robert? You’re the historian.”

“Lovely,” said Nordhausen. “A madman we haven’t even heard of yet has blown up the island of Palma and we’ve got to find a way to undo the thing. This is a fairly tall order, Paul. The research could take months, years even!”

“We have six hours.” Paul fixed him with a determined look.

“Lord, a few hours ago Maeve was yammering to keep me from sneaking a peek at Shakespeare’s writing desk; now I’m supposed to save the world! Why don’t you go in and ask our visitor from the future? He must have some idea of what we were supposed to do.” He shivered with a sudden cold. “Did someone open the door?”

“Put on the heat, Robert,” said Maeve. She noticed the chill at once. The others felt it as well. “Here, let me get this tea in to Mr. Graves and then we can plan this thing out.”

“We’ll need time on an Arion system,” Kelly repeated. “I can’t log in from here because the phone line is dead. It’s two hours to the City with the traffic and this weather.”

“We’ll just have to try finding something closer,” said Dorland. “What about the system at U.C. Berkeley?”

“You have any time booked?”

“Well, who would be using it on a night like this?”

“Good point,” said Nordhausen. “I’ll bet they closed down and joined the panic out there. I’ve got a U.C. library pass. I just may be able to get us in with my credentials, even if I have to pull seniority to bump someone off the machine.”

“How much time will you need, Kelly?” Dorland was thinking hard.

“Well… That depends on what we need to do. I need at least a half hour to program the preliminaries, but the real work is in fine-tuning the temporal locus. Where are we going?”

Dorland looked over his shoulder. “Maeve? We really must talk with—”

Maeve was standing in the open doorway leading to the reading room, a cup of tea in one hand and a box of shortbread wafers in the other.

“Mr. Graves?” Maeve seemed as if she were calling a lost kitten. She started into the room. “Well that’s odd, he’s gone…” The howling of the wind continued outside, and the rain drummed harder on the roof.

Nordhausen hurried over with Dorland in his wake. “What do you mean he’s—” He came up short, staring into the empty reading room. The love seat was unoccupied, and there was no one by the piano on the far end of the room. Maeve walked to the window and saw it was still locked. There was no other way in, or out, of the room.

“Do you suppose he slipped out the front door?” Nordhausen craned his neck to look at the front entrance, but the door was shut tight, and the emergency chain was still in place.

Dorland said nothing as he entered the room, feeling the remnant of a palpable chill as he approached the love seat. He extended his arm, palm open as if he were feeling the air about him. The cold seemed to emanate from the surface of the love seat. When he touched the fabric he sensed a frosty tinge that was almost wet, and it prompted him to draw his hand back at once.

They just stood there, blank expressions on their faces, but Paul had an eerie sensation in his gut that something was wrong. He stepped back from the love seat, his mind slowly coming to a conclusion about what had happened. The others, Nordhausen in particular, seemed more flustered than anything else. The professor strode boldly across the reading room and leaned over to have a look behind the piano.

“Odd,” he mused aloud. “Very odd. One minute the man keels over and has to be physically carried, then, not five minutes later, he vanishes. Something is very wrong here, Paul. What’s happened?”

Dorland looked at him, and then back at the love seat again, still deep in thought. “I’m not entirely sure,” he began.

“I recall him muttering something about a void.” Nordhausen was still looking about the room, as if he thought he would spy some hint of where the man had gone: behind the music stand, the end table, the white lace curtains by the window. He finally satisfied himself that the stranger was not in the room. “What did he mean by that?”

“I think he knew he was taking a very great risk coming here tonight, just as Maeve argued that you would be taking a great risk by trying to steal away to the back offices at the Globe Theatre during the play. We haven’t even tried our experiment yet, but they have. They know what can happen. What was it he said a moment ago? Time is a harsh mistress. She may be a jealous one as well. Something tells me the whole notion of a Paradox is time’s way of protecting the continuum from contamination, and it’s not just a thorny puzzle. We may have just seen its handiwork. Paradox is real, he said. It kills. Didn’t he try to warn us? If we take the man at his word; if he was from a future time, then his actions here could have triggered some sort of temporal complication that impacted his own personal time line—he may have even created a Paradox.”

“He seemed positively terrified of the thought,” said Nordhausen. “Did you see how the man was perspiring? Why, the moment he sat down at the table it was as if he was afraid to open his mouth.”

Maeve came back from the window, sitting the tea and shortbread on the end table. “He was certainly frightened of something. Did you notice how he looked at you, Paul?”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, one moment it seemed as if he was about to burst out with something, and then the next—”

“He was afraid,” Nordhausen concluded.

“Yes, and I’m afraid that without him our task has become immeasurably more difficult.” Paul took one last look at the love seat, and then led them back out into the study. The radio droned on, and the rain fell heavily on the rooftop lending to the atmosphere of somber strangeness in the room. Paul saw Kelly sitting at the study table, deep in thought. He had taken a small notebook out of his pocket, and his pen was poised above the page, as if he was trying to decide just what to write. It was his word trap, Paul knew. Kelly was secretly a poet, and a darn good one at that. He always carried a little notebook with him so he could jot down a word or phrase when it bloomed in his mind. Paul walked over to him, immediately interpreting the look on his face and sensing his distress. “What’s the matter, mister?”

Kelly looked up at him, his eyes alight with the inner fire of his reverie. “This is weird,” he said. “I was supposed to die tonight. I mean… We’ve been working on this thing for over three years, Paul. I put my sweat and tears on the line with each of you—not to mention my bank account. Now we find out the damn thing pays off, and pays off big. I’m alive right now because the project works. But don’t you see? I’m not supposed to know that! I’m supposed to be lying on a slab in the morgue right now with a hang-tag on my big toe and a couple of late night med-techs futzing about my corpse until they get around to my autopsy. This isn’t my life any more. It’s… something else now, and it’s just weird, that’s all. This whole thing seems like a dream. It just can’t be real.”

“You’re right, my friend.” Paul put his hand on Kelly’s shoulder to reassure him. “It’s weird for all of us. We’re in a Deep Nexus Point—very real to us, but very strange. Time is dreaming now, and in a dream anything can happen. From this point, all possible futures extend out to infinity. I think I understand what the visitor was trying to tell us now. This is a null spot; a void. The volcano has been blown apart and a massive surge of ocean is about to radically alter the continuum. But, for the next few hours, we will occupy a brief interval of time where it remains possible to exercise some influence on what actually happens.”

“Something already has happened,” said Nordhausen.

“Yes,” said Dorland “but don’t you see? We’re right in the middle of the dream! In fact, I would go so far as to say that we are the dreamers; waking dreamers with a chance to determine how this whole thing plays itself out. What we do in the next six hours will be absolutely crucial to the fate of countless individual time lines. If we can take the obvious fear and distress of our guest as any indication, it may be crucial to the survival of the human race.”

“I don’t follow you,” said Nordhausen.

“They were desperate, Robert. They had the benefit of the most powerful technology ever devised at their disposal and they were desperate. It was all they could do to get one man through the shadow cast by the Palma Event. There was only one interval in time now where they could do anything to change their fate, the fate that will befall all of us if that tsunami strikes the east coast in the morning. Think of it. How many died on Palma? Hell, the population of the Cape Verde Islands is probably half a million by itself. Add in all the other islands: the Azores, Madeira, and then what about Western Sahara, Casablanca, Lisbon and the coast of Portugal? The web of time is already ripping asunder, people. The hundreds of thousands of life-strands are snapping and twisting in the void under the assault of that wall of water. The fabric of the continuum is tearing, and we’ve got to dream up something here tonight to mend it again—and fast. It’s going to be dangerous—the most dangerous thing we’ve ever done in our lives. I can see that now. Do you realize the power we have in our hands? Yet, the greatest peril we face is ourselves. Right now, at this moment, we’re the most dangerous people on earth. We can be saviors on the one hand if we manage to sort this thing out, but if we fail, for whatever reason…”

Nordhausen stared at him, a grim determination settling itself onto his features. “But what will we do? We’re wasting time!” He looked at Kelly, and then Maeve. They all stared at each other, each waiting for one of the others to speak. Kelly was looking at Paul, and Paul’s eyes caught the professor’s with a question in them that was needing his help. It was clear to them all that they had to act; had to do something, but what? Where should they go? Where would they even begin to look for that one single moment of insignificance that could make the difference in the endless weave of time?

“This is cruel,” said Dorland. “Here we had the answer to that very question sitting at our study table and resting on the love seat, and then he was snatched away from us.”

Nordhausen began to think. “It must be something to do with the rise of Islamic radicalism in modern times. Lord, the roots of the conflict between the Moslem world and the West go back centuries! Where do we start?”

“What about the Crusades?” Kelly offered an obvious guess.

“Which one? They started in 1096 and extended all the way to 1254.” Nordhausen wasn’t making things any easier, but he needed to impress the enormity of the problem on them. “Should we start at the beginning and try to prevent Pope Urban II’s speech in 1095 where he exhorted the faithful to come to the aid of the Byzantine Empire? Supposing that was the right place in time, how would we find Dorland’s pushpin in all the moments leading up to that incident?”

“Pushpoint,” Dorland corrected him.

“Whatever!” Nordhausen was clearly flustered now. “The point is that it will be absolutely impossible for us to find this thing—the one insignificant moment in time that acts as a catalyst to energize that event. It could be anything. Do we try to delay the Pope on the road to Clermont where he gave the speech? Do we go back further to try and intercept the messenger that reached him from the Byzantine Emperor with an appeal for aid? Where is the decisive moment? Is it a rickety wheel on an oxcart that we must keep from repair; or do we just try and assassinate the man, God forbid? Don’t you see how useless this is? It will take months or even years of research to isolate a potential root cause for the Crusades. It may take us ten, twenty or even a hundred attempts: each one a mission to enact our latest best guess on the issue, and who knows what harm we’ll work upon the time line with our mistakes?”

“Well, it didn’t seem so difficult when we were discussing the Bermuda Pamphlets earlier,” Dorland argued.

“That was happenstance,” said Nordhausen. “The key to solving that event was in the timing of the storm. If the ships could be delayed in setting out from Plymouth, then it was very likely that there would have been no Bermuda Pamphlets. But this is different, Paul. The Crusades were a huge cultural, religious and political event—a wave of events that set Europe on a collision with the Moslem world for well over a century. Now the wave train is heading our way, and it would be like trying to stop the ocean with our bare hands. History has its imperatives, as you will be the first to admit. I’m afraid the Crusades are one of them. We’ve no hope in that area. They must occur.”

“Then it has to be something else, perhaps closer to modern times.” He looked at the clock over the mantle. “We can’t just stand here gaping at one another. We have to move. We can talk about this on the way to U.C. Berkeley. Kelly—get your laptop. We’ve got to secure that comp cycle you need for the numbers.”

“But—”

“No questions, let’s go. Maeve, would you grab that coffee and the coffee press?” Paul was scooping up his papers and notebook, and stuffing everything into his briefcase. “Come on, professor. We’re going to need you more than ever now. You’re the historian. Start thinking! Are there any books or references here you may need to bring?”

Nordhausen gave him a hopeless look, but then came to some inner conclusion on the matter and nodded his head. “Quite right,” he said as he made for the bookcase. Impossible or not, he would give it his best try.

Maeve threw the coffee makings into a bag, and followed them with anything edible she could find in Nordhausen’s cupboards. Then she ran to the closet to fetch the coats. The others gathered up their things and Kelly and Paul were making for the study door.

“Hold on,” Maeve yelled at them. “It’s raining something fierce out there. Take your coats and umbrellas.” She reached into the closet and then stopped cold, her eyes wide. “Wait!” She shouted as Kelly opened the door and a blast of cold, wet air blew into the room.

“It’s just a little rain,” said Kelly. “Meet us outside. We’ll warm up the car.”

“I said wait!” This time her voice carried a note of urgency that took hold of the men by the door and spun them around. Maeve threw two jackets and an umbrella onto the floor, then emerged from the closet, holding a dark, gray trench coat in her arms. It was still damp from the rain. Paul recognized it at once.

“Hello,” he said, his mood lightening.

“Our visitor may have vanished,” said Maeve, “but his coat was still hanging just where I left it in the closet!” She extended the trench coat to the others, the light of discovery glistening in her hazel eyes. Paul and Kelly rushed to her side. They each had one thing in mind—to search the pockets for any sign or clue. Maeve knew what they intended, and she clutched the coat to her breast, an arm extended to ward the others off.

“Stand where you are,” she warned them. “I’m not going to let you two tear this thing to pieces. Outcomes and Consequences will handle this, if you don’t mind.” She rushed to the study table, and set the coat down with an almost reverent sense of care. She stared at it for a moment, one arm still extended to hold Paul and Kelly at bay. She was afraid to take her eyes off it, as if she thought it might just disappear into nothingness if she turned her head to look at any of the others. Then she smoothed the fabric out on the study table and slipped her hands into the outer pockets. There was nothing inside.

“Well?” Paul was hovering over her shoulder, restless with anticipation. She folded the coat open, her hand sliding along the smooth inner lining to find the interior pocket. She almost held her breath as she reached inside. She felt something—a piece of folded paper!

“What’s that?” Kelly could not contain himself. Nordhausen had finally realized what had happened and was looking over his shoulder from the bookcase, frozen in the moment, his arms full of books he had pulled from the shelves.

Maeve unfolded the paper and something fluttered out, slipping on to the floor. Kelly and Paul dove and it was Kelly who came up with it first. “Be careful you idiots!” Maeve scolded them, but Kelly’s excitement quickly faded when he saw what he had recovered.

“It’s just a receipt,” he said, somewhat deflated. “For the coffee: One pound, Major Dickason’s blend.”

“What about this,” said Maeve. She still held up the paper the receipt had been riding in and there was something written on it. “Looks like the address here at the study, and… What’s this? How odd. It’s your name Kelly, and an English name: Lawrence. Then this other…” She pointed at the paper, tilting it at last so Paul and Kelly could see. They leaned in, squinting. Paul angled to one side to keep from casting a shadow on the note. “What was the name of that terrorist?”

“Ra’id Husan al Din.” Nordhausen hurried over. “And something about the Holy Fighters.”

“No,” said Maeve. “That’s not what’s written here. It looks like Masaui—Is that a ‘u’ there near the end? And what are these numbers: 11101917 – K172? There’s another word. Can you make it out Paul?”

“It looks like another Arabic word: ‘Hejaz.’ Could that mean something, Robert? Can anyone remember any reference to those names on the news in recent months?”

“Masaui? How is that spelled,” Kelly asked? “Wasn’t that the name of the 20^th hijacker during the World Trade Center incident?”

“Yes, he was the guy the FBI picked up before the event. I remember the trial now.” Dorland was reaching for details in his mind. “But I thought that name was spelled differently.”

The clock on the mantle chimed, as if it signaled their time was up and the mystery would escape them, but Nordhausen’s eyes narrowed with thought. He put the armload of books he was carrying on the table, and reached out to take the note. Maeve released it to him, but kept her eyes glued to the paper. Kelly had gone around behind her and was poking about in the outer pockets of the coat.

“What did you say about this interval, Paul. This Nexus Point business, and all.” Nordhausen was pulling on a thread of some recollection, staring at the note and scratching the back of his neck.

“What?”

“You said time was dreaming—that we were the dreamers; that we were the most dangerous people on earth right now. Damn!” He rushed back to his bookcase, his finger tracing over the third shelf. “Now don’t tell me I left that book in my office library. No, here it is!” He had a thick volume out of the shelves and was flipping through the pages, a broad smile on his face. The others hurried over, but Maeve snatched up the trench coat, afraid to let it out from under her nose. Nordhausen read from his book.

“All men dream,” he began, “but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act out their dream with open eyes, to make it possible.” He smiled at them, snapping the book closed with an almost jubilant air. “T. E. Lawrence,” he said to them. “You know—Lawrence of Arabia! It’s one of his most famous quotes. This is the Seven Pillars of Wisdom. He spent years dawdling over it. Had the whole thing in manuscript and then lost it on a train ride. Can you imagine that? Well, he set about to re-write the damn thing from memory! A dangerous man indeed, that one.”

“Very poetic,” said Kelly. “But we’re running out of time, professor. I’ve got to get to U.C. Berkeley and fire up that Arion system. What in blazes does it mean?”

“It means our visitor inadvertently left us a little clue. Oh, he probably only meant to reinforce his memory. Look here, he wrote down the address, then your name, Kelly, then the name Lawrence.”

“So you just thought you’d offer us all a nice quotation.” Kelly was getting frustrated. “This isn’t a word association game!”

“Well don’t be a dolt, man. Everything on this page is significant. He wrote the place he had to be, and the person he had to save. And look here, he’s given us these other names as well, along with a date.”

“A date?” Paul’s eyes widened.

“Yes, it’s right here,” said Nordhausen. “The first part of this number: 11101917. That would be November ten, nineteen seventeen. It so happens, my dear friends, that a certain Lawrence of Arabia was in the desert that very year, helping the British in their campaign against the Ottoman Turks in the First World War. He was campaigning in the region of Hejaz. That’s on the paper as well. This other name must be a person of some importance from that time, or perhaps a place. Here, let me see if I can find a reference.” He flipped through the index, but was frustrated. The name was not there. “That’s odd,” he muttered. “I was certain I’d find it… Perhaps in my other volumes…”

“You won’t,” said Paul. “If what you say is true that last name is the needle in the haystack. See how its been underlined?”

“Then it should be easy enough to track him down.” Nordhausen was nosing at his bookshelf again.

“Just the opposite,” said Dorland. “He won’t be in any of your books because he’s a person of absolutely no significance whatsoever—at least to the time and place he lived in. Lawrence, there, is our light post. He’s the great romantic hero of the tale—at least for us in the West. Lawrence was certainly a Prime Mover, but the real mover and shaker of the world is this other fellow: Masaui, and he’s not the 20^th hijacker. I’m certain of it.”

“You’re on to something there.” Nordhausen was still flipping through his volume of the Seven Pillars. “It’s perfect! This was the time and place where the Arab people first rose up in rebellion for their independence against foreign colonial powers. The long conflict with the modern West was just getting started. The First World War just got in the way, and the British, true to form, made the Arabs promises they could not keep while they used them to master the Turks. Lawrence was a bridge between both worlds. He was a British serving officer, but in his heart he had come to know and love the Arabs and he was helping them win their freedom, or at least he thought he was.”

“Yes,” said Dorland. “And the British used Lawrence, even as they used the Arabs. Then they went and made a hero out of him to sweep it all under the rug.” He took a deep breath. “You were right, Robert: we could have never completed the research for a mission in the few hours remaining to us. They had to know that as well. They were trying to reach us here because we have a viable Arch in place on this side of the Palma Shadow. The minute I suspected who our visitor really was I knew he must be here with vital information. Our visitor has given us a nudge in the right direction after all. We’ve got our clue! Bring that book, professor. We’ll need it. Come on, let’s get over to U.C. Berkeley. Something tells me this Masaui has something to do with this. We find him, and we become the dreamers of the day. Let’s move!”

5

They gathered their things and were soon huddling in Kelly’s Subaru Forester, shivering with the cold yet fired by the urgency of their mission. Kelly started the vehicle and backed it off the curb where it had come to an abrupt halt when he rushed to the scene with his news. The vehicle jolted off the pavement, and Nordhausen complained from the back seat where he sat with Dorland.

“Now have a care, mister, no need to get us all killed along the way.”

“Relax,” said Kelly. “I’ve been living up here for over 30 years. I know just the route to take, panic or no panic. Besides, it seems to be settling down out here. People have gone indoors to get out of this rain. I’ll bet everyone is huddling around their TV sets or trying to call friends and relatives back east.”

Nordhausen folded his arms, and Dorland noted that he gave Kelly a strange look, as if he expected trouble from some quarter. It occurred to him that the professor might be afraid Kelly would suddenly vanish, leaving them all in a driverless vehicle, careening along some rain swept street to their doom.

“I wouldn’t worry,” he leaned over to Nordhausen with a whisper.

“What?”

“He’s a Prime Lever; possibly even a Free Radical now. Didn’t you hear what the visitor said? I don’t think we have anything to fear just yet.”

“Well what if…” Nordhausen lowered his voice. “What if time tries to undo our visitor’s intervention and there’s an accident waiting for us out there? And what happened to Mr. Graves? How can you be sure that time won’t find some way to make amends for his mischief? Perhaps she already has. The man just disappeared!”

“What are you two talking about back there?” Maeve leaned around, her arm draped over the back of the front seat.

“Nothing,” said Nordhausen. “Just running through the history in my mind again, that’s all. How much time will you need to program the temporal locus, Kelly?”

“If that date is good, not much time at all—twenty minutes. I’ll need time for the Arch configuration, however. Perhaps half an hour.”

“How long to U.C. Berkeley?” Dorland was getting worried.

“Maybe twenty minutes, considering the condition of the roads tonight.”

“Then figure an hour on the Arion system, for your calculations and anything Maeve might need. It’s another ten minutes up to the lab. If you need time on the Arch we’re going to lose Bermuda. We’ll only have three hours left!”

“If I go any faster I’ll get us all killed,” said Kelly, but he nudged the accelerator just the same and the SUV sped along, the windshield wipers battling with sheets of rain. The professor gave Paul another worried look.

“What about the spatial locus?” Dorland changed the subject, trying to pull in all the loose threads he could and give each one at least a moment of his own computing time.

“Ask the professor.” Kelly begged off on the question.

“What about it, Robert. Know where we’re going yet?” Maeve was eager to get a handle on the situation so she could start considering her outcome algorithms.

Nordhausen thought for a moment. “Well, we’ve got the date and a few other clues on that note. When we get to the university I’ll look up the references and see what I can find.”

“This is worrying me.” Maeve wasn’t satisfied. “I’ll need time for Outcomes and Consequences as well, Paul, and I can’t do a thing until Robert gives us a target. What are we trying to accomplish?”

“Masaui,” said Paul. “That’s the key name. It’s something to do with him.”

“But how do you intend to find the man? We’ve got a good date, and a general idea of where to go, but we could end up a thousand miles from any place where we could do some good. We haven’t the time to do the research.”

“I’ll find the references,” said Nordhausen. “Just quiet down and let me think. Our friend from tomorrow was very succinct. He gave us the year and he must have given some information on the spatial locus as well. There was another number on that note…” He lapsed into silence and Maeve rolled her eyes, giving Dorland a disparaging look.

“He’ll work it through, Maeve,” said Paul. “You can use the time to run over to the Drama Department and see what you can do for us in the way of costuming. I mean, we can’t very well go barreling through the Arch in these clothes: rain jackets and umbrellas in the desert, not to mention blue jeans and sneakers.”

“Good point.” Maeve was eager to latch on to something to do. “OK, everyone. Give me your sizes for shirts, pants, coats and shoes. I’ll write it all down and rifle the costume wardrobes while Nordhausen fine-tunes the target.” They complied as she wrote the information down. Then Paul returned to the problem at hand.

“What about that last number?” Dorland was still turning things over in his own mind. “What was it Maeve?”

“K17 something,” said Maeve. “But it looked as though it was part of the date sequence.”

“Was it hyphenated?” Kelly spoke up as he took a corner a little too sharply and the tires squealed on the wet pavement. The SUV tilted ominously, but righted itself and revved up as Kelly sped down the road.

“Watch what you’re doing!” Robert gave Kelly a wide-eyed look.

“Don’t worry,” said Kelly. “Some SUVs used to roll over a lot about ten years ago, but they widened the wheel base and lowered the center of gravity. This one never had the problem. It’s got four wheel drive.” He gave Robert a reassuring smile. “Was the number hyphenated after the date sequence?” His hand was on the stick, down shifting as they went around another bend.

“Yes,” said Maeve. “I’ve got the note right here.” She reached into the pocket of her coat, groping around and coming up empty. Dorland watched as she shifted to search another pocket. “Give me a second.”

“It’s a location.” Kelly’s voice had a definitive tone to it. “I started combining temporal and spatial coordinates in my final algorithm sequences last month. But I wasn’t using alphanumerics. The ‘K’ thing is odd, but I was coding the location right after the primary date sequence, and using a hyphen to separate the data. It should have been another long number for longitude and latitude, right down to the hours, minutes and seconds.”

Dorland smiled to think how spatial coordinates still used a temporal metaphor to fine-tune their location on the planet. Everything was described as being a given number of hours, minutes and seconds on one side of the Greenwich mean or another—the Prime Meridian, as it was called. “What was that number again, Maeve?”

She was still fishing through her pockets in silence and, as he watched her, it suddenly dawned on Paul that the note was gone. He had been thinking about the disappearance of the visitor for some time, and it bothered him. It was clear that the man just didn’t get up and walk out. Yes, there was that moment when it seemed that someone had opened the front door. Nordhausen even commented on it. Yet the security chain was still in place, and the windows in the reading room were locked from the inside as well. When he extended his hand to the place where the visitor had been resting on the love seat the chill in the air was palpable. He knew then that the visitor had been reclaimed by the continuum in some way—but how? Was it a complication of time caused by the fact that he had tampered too directly with the lives of everyone else in the room? Was it the nullifying power of a Paradox that snatched him from the love seat? Or was it simply that his comrades had yanked him out of the moment, calling him back to some distant future?

What was that future, he wondered? His own theorem of time dictated that it was impossible to return to any moment on the continuum when you actually lived. The visitor was an elderly man in his seventies. That meant he came from a time at least seventy years in the future—from the end of the twenty-first century, or beyond. What had happened to him?

He considered the possibilities while he watched Maeve’s ever more frustrated search for the note. One thought gave him hope: if the mission Mr. Graves had been sent on was to succeed, then the Palma Event would be undone, and what reason would he have for being here in the first place? Paradox, in all its confounding majesty, loomed heavily over the situation. Would that explain his sudden disappearance? But why now? We haven’t gone through the Arch yet, and might never go through the Arch. We still have to work out the numbers and time is running short. Yet Graves had vanished. If it was Paradox that had reclaimed him, then something has already altered the time continuum so radically that his mission here was made ludicrous. Could the answer lie with Kelly? With the note? Was there another Pushpoint trigger hiding in something as simple as Maeve’s inherent civility that led her to take the man’s coat?

“Did someone have the note?” Maeve looked around, giving the others a glance that was half accusing but was becoming ever more sheepish as each second passed.

“It’s gone, isn’t it.” Paul spoke in a quiet voice.

“You had it for a moment, Robert, didn’t you?” Maeve pointed an accusing finger.

“I just left it on the bookcase,” said Nordhausen. “Didn’t you take it with you?”

“Well, I thought I had it right here in my pocket.” Maeve looked around as if she might find it on the seat of the vehicle.

“Did you bring the man’s coat?” Nordhausen pressed her.

“I left it on the study table, but…”

“It’s probably gone as well.” Paul folded his arms, still thinking.

“What are you getting at?” Nordhausen nudged him.

“The man is gone, the note is gone; you get my point, professor. Something’s happened to the continuum.”

“What? Are you saying things have already changed?”

“Yes,” Paul was certain now. “Kelly’s alive, for one thing. We’re heading for U.C. Berkeley in his car instead of the hospital in my car. We’re in a Deep Nexus now, a kind of no man’s land on the time continuum. None of this was supposed to happen, so it’s very tentative until we achieve our final outcome. It’s not fixed yet; not solid. I’m not quite sure yet, but I think Mr. Graves’ job was accomplished. A Meridian of time is in play here, and he’s stuck the first needle in.”

“He said that,” said Nordhausen. “Those were his exact words!”

“No,” Paul corrected him, “he said we had to stick the needle in. It’s like acupuncture.” The image was clear in his mind. “The Palma Event was so traumatic to the continuum that it needed intervention at more than one point on the Time Meridian. Mr. Graves stuck the first needle in when he stepped in front of Kelly’s car and prevented the accident that was supposed to take his life. The rest is up to us. The coat and the note were very odd. Without Maeve’s polite manner we might never have had those clues. This may seem strange, but I’m beginning to think time is on our side in this one. The horrible violence of the Palma Event has somehow been such a violation that she may just be smiling on us now. Yes, some sort of complication may have snatched away our visitor, but at least we all saw the note—right? We all remember it.”

“Then what was that last number?” Nordhausen reiterated his quest. “If Kelly’s right then it must be the last coordinate—the spatial coordinate we need for the Arch.”

No one could remember the number. They had been so taken by the rush of the moment that it just didn’t have time to register in anyone’s head. “I know it was K17 something,” Maeve repeated.

Nordhausen had a small pocket flashlight out and was squinting at his Seven Pillars of Wisdom. He was certain there would be some reference in the book to the number—but what? The thing to do was to find Lawrence’s diaries for the month of November, 1917. What exactly was he up to that month? He renewed his search with dogged determination, certain he could unravel the last clue.

“Let me think,” he spoke aloud. “They had already taken Akaba that summer by mounting a raid from the landward side. After Lawrence crossed the Sinai to bring news of the raid to Cairo, he eventually rejoined his Arab cohorts. Now what was he up to in November? Ah! Here it is.”

“What is it?” Dorland leaned over trying to see where the professor’s finger pressed against a line of text in a circle of wan yellow light from the flashlight. The light fluttered and grew weaker.

“November, nineteen seventeen…” Nordhausen read aloud. “I have rejoined Auda and his followers with the aim of causing some mischief along the route of the Hejaz…” The flashlight suddenly went out.

“Damn!” Nordhausen shook the light, and it fluttered on briefly before failing again. “Of all the time for the batteries to fail! Has someone got a match?”

“Does that help?” Kelly switched on a small ceiling light.

“Good man, Kelly” The professor bent over his volume again, angling the book to cast as much light as possible on the page of interest. “Yes, it’s right here. Lawrence was asked to put pressure on the Hejaz Railway. He made raids against the line at numerous points in October and November; the first at Kilometer 587, then at Kilometer 489 and later at 172.”

“That’s it!” Maeve was certain of the last number on the note now. “It was K172. What an elegant way to note the exact spatial location! We have to be at Kilometer 172 on the Hejaz Railway when Lawrence makes his raid. You were correct, Robert. Everything on that note was of great significance. Our visitor managed to deliver his message, in a way he never intended, but deliver it he has.”

Nordhausen snapped the book shut. “Great!” He was relieved to have the burden of making the exact call on the spatial coordinates removed from his shoulders. “You know it could have taken us months to discover that. Oh, we could have just picked a time and place in November of that year, but then we’d be right back in the same situation as with the Crusades. Where do we go? What do we do? Now we at least have a good fix on the where.” He came up short, meeting another obstacle in his thinking. “Lord, how are we going to manage this? We can’t just appear in the middle of the attack—or worse yet, on a moving train.”

“Train? Why would we want to be on the train?”

“Because that’s where Masaui is likely to be. It’s his fate that matters most here.”

Paul agreed with him at once. “Yes, then we have to board the train before it starts off on its journey. When we get to the Computer Library focus your research on finding us a good boarding point. We’ll need to configure the Arch to open a breaching point at a place where we won’t be noticed by the locals. Then we get on the train and it takes us out to Kilometer 172 for the raid.” He smiled. All we have to do is discover who this Masaui is and what we have to do about him.”

“That may be trickier than you think,” said Maeve. “You say this train is operated by the Ottoman Turks? Well, what would four English speaking passengers be doing aboard? We’ll need much more than appropriate clothing. We’ll need some sort of documentation to justify our presence on the train. For that matter, what about effects? We’ll need period specific money and who knows what else. The devil is in the details, you know. We could run into trouble right from the beginning if we don’t plan this correctly. Suppose we have trouble boarding the train?”

“We’ll have to work something out.”

“I’ll dig up everything I possibly can on the incident. But Maeve makes a good point. Suppose we do manage to slip onto the train unnoticed. Suppose we even manage to make the ride out to Kilometer 172 without any undue attention being paid to us. There’s still the matter of the raid.”

“Yes,” Kelly piped up from the driver’s seat. “I saw the damn movie! They weren’t taking prisoners on those raids.”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” Nordhausen chided him. “You can’t base your history on the dramatic portrayal of the movie.”

“Well he still makes a good point,” said Maeve. “It’s going to be dangerous. We’ll be riding on a train that will come under attack, and who knows what could happen.”

“I said it was going to be dangerous,” said Paul. “A far cry from sitting quietly in the Globe and watching Shakespeare. But whatever the risk, we have to try. The consequences of failing are just too great.”

“Outcomes and Consequences,” said Maeve, lapsing into thought for a moment. “God only knows what happens if the water hits the east coast in the morning. Whatever it was, it was enough to send them back here on a very risky mission. Perhaps it cost Graves his life. Are we prepared to risk the same?”

She let that sink in for a moment, and they all sat in silence. Kelly shifted the gears as they rounded the bend and entered the U.C. Berkeley campus. He was soon speeding toward the library and, as he drove, a thought suddenly occurred to him. He, of all people, wasn’t supposed to be here.

“Do we all have to take the risk?” His thought emerged.

“What?” Nordhausen looked up from his book.

“I mean… why do we all have to go? Doesn’t that just complicate matters for us on that end?”

“Well,” said Nordhausen, “I suppose there’s no reason for you and Maeve to come along. I’ll be needed for the history, of course, and if Paul would be so bold as to accompany me, then perhaps the two of us could handle it. Then Kelly could run numbers and work the Arch from this end, and Maeve could watch the variance factors and help program the retraction.”

“You can count on me, Robert.” Paul assured his friend he was willing to go.

“No, you don’t understand.” Kelly groped through his reasoning again. “I’m the one person here who is already supposed to be dead. Remember? I was… Well, I was just thinking that perhaps I should be the one to go. The rest of you stay here where it’s safe.”

“Oh no you don’t!” Paul moved to quash the idea at once. “Look Kelly, you may have a point. This whole notion of your death has really gotten to me. As I said earlier, we’re already off on some new Meridian now. Time is branching here in the Nexus Point. This is another life—not only for you, but for all of us. Whatever happens, I can’t let you take any unusual risks for a while. I couldn’t bear to loose you, buddy.”

“Nor I,” Maeve said quietly. She gave Kelly a lingering glance.

“Let’s everyone think this over while we run the numbers,” Paul suggested. “We’ll decide who goes and who stays later. In the meantime, we have to plan as if we were all going, Maeve. Work whatever magic you can at the Drama Department wardrobe. I know you’ll come up with something. Robert and I will work out the details.”

The SUV sped along Hearst Avenue to the North Gate of the University. Kelly squinted through the front windshield, looking for parking. He was fortunate to find something immediately and Nordhausen had the back door open in a moment, heedless of the rain. “Come on,” he shouted in at them. “Time and tide wait for no man!”

How appropriate, thought Dorland. He visualized the great swelling of the ocean as it hurtled west from Palma, fast leaving the shattered remnants of the Azores in its wake. They couldn’t save Bermuda, but the fate of the Eastern Seaboard was still riding in the whirlwind of time.

6

They made their way over the rain swept pavement past the Earth Sciences Building and the Memorial Glade until they reached the main library in the center of the campus. Thankfully, the lights were still on, and Paul started to lead them toward the entrance.

“Not that way,” Nordhausen called after him. “We’ll go in the back way. I have a pass key.”

Paul reversed his course, and the others followed until they reached a nondescript doorway in a sheltered alcove. The Professor fumbled with his wallet for a moment, extracting his pass key card to log in through the security gate. In a few moments they tramped inside, grateful to be out of the driving rain and cold. The moment of respite was a brief one, however, and they were soon animated by the urgency of their mission.

“Storm must have everyone hunkered down in the dorms,” said Nordhausen.

“That or the news,” said Dorland. He suddenly remembered it was also Memorial Day weekend, and the normal library traffic would be thinned out by the holiday. “I think our chances of finding an open computer terminal will be very good.”

“I’ll get right on it,” said Kelly, hastening off to find a terminal where he could interface his laptop with the Arion mainframe humming away in the lower level of the library. “Get me spatial data as soon as you can,” he shouted over his shoulder as he ran.

Nordhausen was already moving toward a catalog terminal to begin with his research queries. Paul and Maeve followed in his wake, still catching their breath from the rush across the campus grounds. Maeve caught the time on a wall clock. It was just after midnight.

“What about that costume run, Maeve?” Paul asked.

“Well, I need something more to go on than the date,” she replied. “Any ideas at this point, Robert?”

“Give me a few moments,” said the professor. “I’ll get Kelly his spatial numbers and then we can decide how we’re going to make our entry. God, I wish we had a week to plan this.”

“We’ll just have to pull it through as best we can,” Paul encouraged him as he settled into a terminal next to Nordhausen and keyed in catalog searches. “Many hands make for light work,” he smiled, but the tension was obvious as the two men hunched over the keyboards. “What should I look for, Professor?”

Nordhausen balled his fist at his chin for a moment. “Why not run genealogy queries on the names we have on the note? Don’t bother with Lawrence, of course. But give that other fellow a try—what was it, Maeve?”

“Masaui. But don’t ask me to spell it.” They were both thankful for her memory of the note, as it lived only in their combined recollection now.

“I doubt if we’ll find much locally,” said Paul. “I better ask for an Internet search as well.” He was soon discouraged to find thousands of useless references, and began scouring his brain to try and narrow down his search. Nordhausen saw what he was doing and tossed in a few ideas.

“Include the word genealogy,” he said. “You should get some common name combinations that way.” He flipped open his copy of the Seven Pillars, glancing at the brief introductory poem Lawrence had written there.

“What was that?” Paul was struck by the poignancy of the words.

“Lawrence,” said Nordhausen. “Funny how those same tides of men have now swelled the oceans with our impending doom. And the odd thing is, they’re still reaching for the same thing Lawrence wanted: their freedom. Why is it we can’t seem to understand that and find a way to give it to them?”

“Is it ours to give?” said Paul rhetorically. “If I’m not mistaken the Founding Fathers seemed to believe that all men were created that way—free. We’ve tried to be the guarantor of that over here, but I think this business with the Holy Fighters is more than a struggle for liberation. There’s hard vengeance in this act. You don’t go and do something like this without being dead inside; heartless and cruel. Nothing could condone the death of so many innocents.”

“True, this Ra’id Husan al Din is no saint, but who plunged the knife into his chest? This is a struggle that has been going on for a hundred generations, Paul. The Islamic world has lived in the shadow of the West for over a millennium. That shadow was once the threat of mounted knights on chargers marching to the holy land—now it has become something far more insidious. Face it, we’ve sucked the life out of these people like we’ve pumped the oil from under their desert. I would say they feel as threatened by us today as they ever did during the Crusades. They handled Pope Urban’s vigilantes easily enough, but how do you strike at something as all pervading as a culture? We don’t send soldiers to conquer our enemies any longer. We send television sets. These people have lived in the pristine clarity of their deserts for thousands of years until we came along with our thirst for petroleum. Now they’ve got McDonalds in Mecca, the Fifth Fleet plying the waters of the Persian Gulf, stealth bombers circling on standby over their heads and special forces teams out hunting down their heroes. I know, we see these men as murderers and terrorists, but to the average Moslem on the street, this Palma thing will be seen as holy retribution.”

“Hell, they killed their own people in the Western Sahara.”

“Martyrs,” said Nordhausen. “Yes, it’s a twisted thing in our minds, but that’s the way these guys see it. They won’t be satisfied until we pack up and leave them alone, and as long as they are sitting on the fermented remains of all those dearly departed dinosaurs—the oil—well, we want to be darn sure we get our daily deliveries. Something like this was bound to happen one way or another. Face it, the typical Arab ‘man in the street’ is a person without a credit profile. He wants to rise and take his morning prayer instead of running out to a one day sale event at Sears. They’re different. That’s the only thing we can come down to, and that difference has produced men like Husan al Din.”

“I can only imagine what the U.S. response will be to this if we fail to get it fixed. There was a desperate look in that fellow’s eyes—Mr. Graves, I mean. Whatever happened must have been terrible.”

“Let’s hope we never have to know about it. So… It all comes down to an ambush by Lawrence and his Arab freedom fighters at Kilometer 172. I guess it’s time for us to start writing our will across the sky in stars. We had better get busy.” He thought for a moment. “I’ll see if I can narrow that location down. It might help us figure out who this Masaui could be.” He began requesting period map searches from the cartography database while Maeve jumped on a third terminal and started calling up images of typical fashion and dress in the year 1917.

Time passed almost unnoticeably as they worked, each one hot on the trail of some key element that would be needed for the planned mission. It would normally take weeks or months to gather and refine this ‘Approach Data’ as it was called. They had taken five weeks to plan the Globe Theatre mission to 1612. Now, without the luxury of that time, they focused on rooting out the essentials for the mission: where should they go, and what role should they assume in the time they were entering? Beyond that, the problem of how to identify the key moment in time, the Pushpoint, loomed as an ever more daunting obstacle.

Nordhausen was the first to narrow in on some useful data. He was still reading from his Seven Pillars of Wisdom, using a convenient date indexing scheme Lawrence had appended to the pages to aid his search. Soon he managed to locate a reference to Kilometer 172 in the narrative. “Here it is,” he said jubilantly. “It’s on the rail line between Deraa and Amman. Deraa was the lynch pin, of course. The rail line split just above that point and one spur headed for the coast at Haifa while the main line reached up to Damascus and beyond. South of Deraa, the line ran all the way down through the Hejaz region to Medina in Arabia. Here’s a good map, Paul.”

Paul left his terminal and scooted over to Nordhausen’s where the amber gold of a map file was displayed. It was labeled ‘SKETCH MAP: Adapted from War Office material as embodied in G.S.G.S. 2957, by permission of Controller, H.M.S.O.’ Nordhausen was reading quickly through the narrative of his Seven Pillars.

“Apparently this attack was a bit of a fluke,” he said. “Look here, the date is very precise: November 10, 1917. The odd thing is this: when they set out on the operation that resulted in this raid, they had no intention of blowing up a train. They were after a bridge in the Yarmuk Valley, but they were discovered as they approached it and had to flee. After some argument the idea for an attack on the railway grew out of their frustration—almost on the spur of the moment. They seized upon it to salve their failure at the bridge, and it resulted in the destruction of a heavily laden troop train that was heading north from Amman.”

Dorland thought about the situation. “Any reference to Masaui in the narrative?”

“Not a hint,” said Nordhausen, “but he had to be there, on one side or another.”

“Well, that’s an Arabic name,” Maeve added. “Perhaps he was one of Lawrence’s men.”

“A likely conclusion,” said Nordhausen, “but I’m afraid there were thousands of Arab soldiers in the Turkish Army—whole divisions of them, in fact. They were broken up and had their battalions scattered through the ranks after the Arab rebellion began. Masaui could have been a Turkish soldier on the train as well. This is maddening! Even if we solve this first riddle, and figure out which side Masaui was fighting on, how will we find him? Suppose he’s on the train. First we have to find some way of blending in with the Turks. If we somehow manage that, then what will we do: go from train car to train car and call the man’s name?”

“Oh, don’t be foolish.” Maeve chided the professor as she leaned in to take a look at the map. “There could be a way to inquire about the man discreetly. Suppose I go as a foreign nurse, and the two of you get bandaged up as wounded soldiers.”

“But we don’t speak the language!” Nordhausen was being difficult.

“Well, I can manage a bit of German, Robert. Weren’t the Turks allies of the Germans? We could make up a list and put Masaui’s name on it as if he was being selected out of the ranks for some inoculation.”

The professor thought for a moment. “It will be risky. Paul and I will have to play some ruse to keep our mouths shut.”

“I’ll just bandage up your throats or something,” Maeve sketched out her idea. “We can make it look like you’re simply too sick to talk—victims of a gas attack.”

“Good work, Maeve,” said Paul. “But we’re assuming Masaui is on the train. What if he’s with Lawrence?”

“For that matter what if he’s not even there?” Nordhausen folded his arms. “Suppose he’s at Amman selling tickets, or at the terminal destination of the train waiting to meet someone?”

The real difficulty of their situation was growing in Paul’s mind. He wracked his brain with the dizzying possibilities that flowed in from a thousand directions to this one moment. It would be absolutely impossible for them to consider all the contingencies. They had to choose something and get a focus on their mission. It was already well past midnight! The more he thought about the situation the more the weight of impossibility seemed to settle on him. Then the floorboard creaked in his mind and his thinking fell through to an obvious conclusion.

“Wait a minute!” He nearly shouted. “The visitor must have known we would encounter all this potential variation in our target search. We have to rely on the clues in the note. They must have done the research, and the time and location are very specific. What was the outcome? What happened, Robert?”

Nordhausen read a passage from his Seven Pillars. “Here it is,” he quoted: “When the engine was squarely over the mine I pushed down the handle of the exploder. The resulting explosion was even more effective than we had hoped. The old engine was lifted off the tracks, and her boilers were rent open in a cascade of steam and flying metal… Looks like they were successful.” He scanned forward through the narrative. “Many of the cars derailed, and the fire triggered a small ammunition cache causing further havoc. The Arabs attacked and butchered quite a few of the enemy in the confusion before they melted away.”

Dorland rubbed his forehead. “That has to be the event,” he said. “The train was destroyed, and Masaui’s fate was sealed in the resulting chaos. It doesn’t matter who’s side he’s on.”

“Are you suggesting he gets killed in the raid?”

“Most likely, but that doesn’t matter. Whether he lives or dies is not our concern. If they planned this correctly, and I have to believe they did, then the event we need to alter has to be something obvious in the milieu they’ve pointed us to.”

“But I thought you said it would be something utterly insignificant.” Nordhausen was confused.

“Yes,” Paul explained. “It will be. All the Meridians flow into this one Nexus Point. They knew it would be impossible for us to test every time line that feeds this point for a possible intervention. Yet, we have to do something to change the obvious outcome of this time milieu. Whatever it is must be right there in front of us. Think! You’ve been pointing out how impossible it will be for us to interact with the people on the train, or within Lawrence’s camp, to find this man. They must have known that as well. So I reason that we don’t even attempt to find him. To me it looks like the destruction of the train is the key lever here. That’s what we have to prevent. If we change that outcome, then I believe the fate of Masaui will be altered as well. Don’t you see? We can’t possibly figure out what Masaui does, or fails to do, that eventually gives rise to the Palma Event. But I’m willing to stake everything on the chance that this is the lever we have to alter. That train must not be destroyed. Right Maeve?” He looked to Outcomes and Consequences for support.

“It certainly has far less haze in the equation than trying to find Masaui,” Maeve agreed. “Yes, I like this. It has switch-like clarity. If the train blows up at Kilometer 172 on November 10, 1917, then we have history as we seem to know it now; as it reads there in Lawrence’s book. If the train fails to blow up, then something changes in the time line for Masaui. It’s not for us to know what that is. You’re right. This is the key moment. Kilometer 172 is both a time and a place—a precise moment on the Meridian. Our visitor knew that, and the clue is vital.”

“Then what should we do?” Nordhausen closed his book.

“Get us Arab garb at the Drama Department,” Paul said to Maeve. “Your idea about the German nurse was good, but it brings us into contact with too many people on the train. We’d have to open the continuum at Amman, and board there. It’s too complicated. If we go as Arabs, we can cloak ourselves easily, and just drop into the desert somewhere near Kilometer 172. It’s perfect! Then we wait for Lawrence to lay his charge and we find some way of preventing the explosion. We do it with as little contact with the locals as possible.”

Nordhausen was still the devil’s advocate. “But suppose we run afoul of the Arabs, or even Lawrence himself? None of us speaks Arabic.”

Dorland’s mind worked quickly, brushing the argument aside. “Time will not want us anywhere near Lawrence,” he said quickly. “He’s a Prime Mover—or perhaps even another Free Radical, depending on your point of view. In any case, Time will not easily allow us to tamper with his history. That’s why Masaui is our target, and this incident becomes the Pushpoint that decides his fate.” He tacked on one last thought. “If we happen on the Arabs, we speak English.”

“English? What good will that do us?”

“We use Maeve’s first ruse. Say we’re a medical team that was captured by the Turks. Say we were on a train, but managed to slip away. Say we were taken in by an Arab family and—”

Nordhausen interrupted him. “Say all of this in English?”

“No!” Maeve held up a finger, her eyes brightening with an idea. “We just say one thing,” she concluded. “Aurens! That’s what the Arabs called him. We just invoke his name and point. Let his name be our shield and hope for the best.” They were all quiet for a moment before Maeve put in one last remark. “And a good retraction algorithm wouldn’t hurt either.”

Kelly came running up, breathless, a notepad in hand. “I’ve got all the preliminaries in for the temporal locus,” he huffed. “Where’s that spatial coordinate?”

“Just a second.” Nordhausen looked at Paul. “Arabs in the desert?”

“I think it’s our best bet, Robert.”

Nordhausen fidgeted a moment, consulting his book again. “The attempt on the Yarmuk Gorge Bridge was made in the pre-dawn hours on November 8^th. After it failed they fled to Abu Sawana, arriving tired and hungry as the sun came up. As you might imagine, morale was low and they were all quite discouraged. They had to do something to make the raid worthwhile, particularly if Lawrence hoped to gain the support of other local tribesmen in the area. A botched operation was not good for recruiting purposes, you see. That’s when they hit on the idea of blowing up a train. The rail was close at hand, and they still had explosive charges left. So they decided to set up an ambush at one of their old lookout posts well north of Amman.”

Nordhausen’s finger marked a place in his book. “They approached the rail line again near Minifir on the 9^th to lay their last explosive charge at the culvert near Kilometer 172. They fled east after the attack, across the line into the desert to reach Abu Sawana again. We should be on the west side of the line then, probably here.” He fingered a location near the rail line close to Minifir, then keyed a new query for the cartography data base. In a few moments he had coordinates for Minifir, and extrapolated from that location to choose a drop point. “I hate rushing like this,” he muttered to himself as he worked. Kelly leaned over his shoulder and began scribbling the coordinates down.

“Take off another second in each direction,” said Nordhausen. “Lord, it looks like open desert on the map, but we’ve no way of knowing what was really there. We could appear right in the middle of some wandering band of Bedouin vagrants, for all I know.”

“It’ll have to do,” said Kelly as he started off. “If anything changes, let me know at once.”

“I’ve got to get over to the Drama Department.” Maeve realized she had a lot of rummaging to do in the wardrobe.

Kelly came up short, fishing in his pocket and tossing her the keys to the Subaru. “Here,” he said. “You’ll have to drive yourself. I need another twenty minutes on the Arion system.”

“We’ll come with you, Maeve,” said Paul. “Now that we have our coordinates, we might as well carry on the preliminary briefing. Listen everyone. We’ve got to get up to Lawrence Labs as soon as possible. We’ll come back for you, Kelly, but if you finish ahead of us, take University Drive and head for the East Gate. Then we can take Gayley up to Hearst Avenue and head up past the Cyclotron to the lab.”

The Lawrence Berkeley Laboratories were just beyond the campus, up a winding way called Cyclotron Road. Born on the Berkeley campus, the facilities had grown considerably over the years, and eventually moved to the rolling green hills that overlooked the university. A host of scientific disciplines were rooted in the lab, which was a major center of research and a place where some of the most profound questions imaginable were asked, and sometimes answered, with the secret arts of Quantum Science. They took the universe apart, bit by bit, discovering atoms, protons, electrons, neutrons; and then breaking each one down into smaller and smaller particles, and watching how each one behaved. Once the physical structures of the universe were ferreted out and understood, science thought it would finally have the answer to how everything related to everything else. Soon, however, they began to encounter strange things in the corners of their vacuum chambers and cyclotrons. The deeper they looked, the more they found that the universe was playing with another set of rules altogether in the realm of the very small. Things that were once thought to be impossible, even unimaginable, suddenly became odd realities. Travel in time, long debated by physicists, was one of those unimaginable things.

One theory of time held that any given moment was simply a specific arrangement of every quantum particle that made up the universe. The particles, always in motion, created the perception of a forward progression in the flow of time, which was really nothing more than the constant variation of those particles, morphing from one state and position to another. To be in any place, or any time, all one had to do was find a way to tell all the particles of the universe to assume a given state or position in relationship to one another. Any reality that was ever possible could become this moment; this reality. The realization of the theory seemed impossible, however, for one could never know how to arrange each particle of the universe just as they were at the Globe Theatre in 1612. It was challenge enough to understand even one particle of the universe—but science held that the whole of the universe had sprung from one single point. If that were true, then any possible universe might arise in the same way.

The way, it was found, was through the seeming annihilation of a small black hole. Dorland found a theory, and the theory became an Arch. It was found that the crushing effects of gravity as one approached the singularity could be neutralized by simply getting the black hole to spin at a fantastic rate of speed. The resulting reality was like a dead spot of calm in a whirlpool, or the eye at the heart of a swirling hurricane. It was realized in the center of the Arch, and anything that passed within its aura was protected from the annihilation of the event horizon. The Arch opened and forged a safe pathway through the event horizon of a controlled black hole, and all that lay beyond it.

While it was impossible for humans to physically re-arrange the particles of the universe into a new pattern, a quantum singularity achieved this result effortlessly. Humans only had to tell the universe what they wanted—what shape and time to assume on the other side of the singularity. Mathematics was their voice, and the universe, being about nothing of any particular importance at any given moment, was kind enough to heed them and comply.

Three years later, after extensive research and with the backing of corporate sponsors and private funds, a project was born at Lawrence National Laboratories just outside the U.C. Berkeley campus in California. The government believed it was simply another particle chamber to test the theory Dorland expounded. They never dreamed that the project had reached such an advanced state, ready to actually send objects through the Arch and retract them safely. That secret, however, was closely held by the key project team leaders, project staff, and a few select individuals from Maeve’s Outcomes Committee.

Dorland was the guiding light, and a small band of dedicated physicists, engineers and mathematicians had built the first prototype of a mechanism they hoped would tame the universe at last. They had an idea, and a theory, and an Arch. They didn’t know if it would work, but had faith that it might—until a man appeared at Nordhausen’s study door that night, out of a driving rain at the edge of a storm; with a pound of Peets coffee and an answer to all their doubts. It would work.

That was the only thing that offered them consolation as they bent themselves to the feverish task of configuring the Arch that night. They were confident that they could create a new milieu that was very close to the moment they desired, but yet they were afraid nonetheless. Quantum Mechanics made promises, but would keep them at a whim, and who knows what mischief they might accomplish when they first sought to tamper with the fabric of being itself?