Meridian

10

They arrived in a haze of icy fog, surrounded by the darkness of night. As the wet mist around them slowly dissipated they felt the chill of another world embrace them; another time. They had come from the heart of a great metropolitan city in the 21^st century, and arrived in the empty darkness of the open desert, half a world away. The one common element these two places shared was the rain. They left one rain storm lumbering in from the Pacific Ocean to find another in the midst of a starless, gloomy night. The heavy overcast obscured the sky with a dreary weight.

Paul opened his eyes, groping forward with his free arm into the inky blackness around them. As the misty vapors dissipated, the dark shapes of low, rolling hills emerged in his forward field of vision. He took a deep breath, amazed at the strange smells in the air as he drank in his first taste of another time. They were through the Arch, and alive. It worked! His elation thrilled him to the bone and he was taken with an involuntary shiver.

Nordhausen still held his right arm in an iron grip, but he slowly let go. Paul could hear him breathing heavily and caught the vapor of his breath in the cold night air. “We made it through,” he said.

Nordhausen was looking around them in all directions, trying to immediately place some familiar object in his new frame of reference. He felt a queasy, dizzy feeling, as though he had just been spun around and around, and then let go to grope his way in the dark. He dropped to his knees.

“You all right?” Paul knelt beside him.

Nordhausen put a hand down to steady himself, feeling the clammy wetness of the ground broken by sharp, flinty gravel. He took a deep breath. “Amazing!” he exclaimed. “It’s so dark.”

“No city lights, no cars, no streetlamps,” said Paul. “And on a night like this we won’t even get much starlight. Did you bother to check the phase of the moon?”

“Yes,” said Nordhausen, “It was very regular that month. Full on the 1st of the month, a half moon on the 7^th, dark on the 14^th, and full again on the 28^th. If we’re on target we should see a waning crescent for the 10^th. Do you see it? It should be up by now, unless this is a pre-dawn hour.”

“Can’t make out a thing in this weather, but you’re right. It’s dark as hell. And cold!”

“We’ll find out soon enough, I suppose,” said Nordhausen.

“Are you all right?” Paul put a hand on Robert’s shoulder.

“That was weird. Breathtaking! Did you open your eyes?”

“Are you kidding?”

“You mean you closed your eyes? Oh, Paul, it was awesome. The range of color and the movement of the light was head spinning. It had a discernable rhythm to it, though. Almost… musical in organization. I’m just a little dizzy, that’s all. It’s passing. Here, help me up off these wet stones!”

“We should find some cover. It’s cold! I thought this was the desert.”

“It is the desert, but it can get down near freezing here in the winter. You don’t have much fat on those bones. I hope you dressed for the rain. I tried to warn you.”

Paul extended a hand to help Nordhausen to his feet. Their eyes were gradually adjusting to the darkness, but the light drizzle of rain masked the surrounding skyline and they could barely make out the formless undulation of the ground.

“I can see how Lawrence’s men would miss the first train,” said Nordhausen. Is that a hill over there?”

“Looks like a low ridge. There may be a wadi at the bottom that isn’t flooded out, or even a cave. Let’s move in that direction. If we can get ourselves out of the rain and hunker down until dawn, we should be able to see the Hejaz Railway from the top of that rise.”

Robert nodded his agreement and the two men began to pick their way over the broken ground. It was slow going, for the area was littered with sharp-edged rocks that were slick with the rain and made for very treacherous footing. Nordhausen nearly slipped and fell, righting himself at the last minute. He stooped for a moment, to get his breath, and his eye caught something on the ground that he didn’t expect to find.

“That’s odd,” he murmured to himself as he picked up a smooth rock and hefted it in his palm. He squinted about him, noting how the minimal light seemed to be reflected from similar stones here and there. Paul came up behind him and he struggled up onto his feet again. “A bit out of shape, I see,” he breathed.

“Me too,” said Paul. “The air seems so heavy. Maybe we’re just feeling the effects of the time shift.”

“Or the creep of old age. We’re both over forty now, you know.”

They struggled along, eventually reaching a low shelf of stone at the base of the ridge. At one point the effects of erosion had cut away the softer ground near the bed of the wadi and formed an overarching rim of rock that provided some shelter from the rain. By the time they had sloshed their way across a thin stream of runoff, they were wet, tired and shivering with the cold. They huddled in the dark, their backs pressed against the hard stone behind them to avoid the occasional wet gusts of drizzle and rain.

“What miserable weather,” said Paul.

“Not what you expected, I know,” Nordhausen replied. “At least the rain seems to be tapering off.”

“What’s that smell?” Paul screwed up his face. “Where’s all that sweet, unpolluted desert air?”

“Yes, I noticed that too. And the rain has a bitter taste to it as well. Very odd…” Nordhausen was still rolling the small rock in the palm of his hand, noting the smooth, even surface, deep in thought. He leaned out, squinting up past the lip of overhanging stone to try and spy out the moon or some guiding star. “Moon must be down,” he said. “But I think the sun will be up soon. See that red smear off there? I think we may be getting close to dawn. It seems to be growing lighter up ahead. That would be east, then. At least we’re heading in the right direction.”

“Want to look for a way up this ridge? Might warm us up.” Paul was tired, but driven by the urgency of their mission. He stood up, stooping to avoid the outcropping of rock overhead, and started down into the wadi, grateful to be moving to get some blood flowing through his limbs. The rainwater had run off quickly, and they were able to make their way along the wadi using little islands of gravely rock embedded in a fine reddish silt. Paul angled to the right, looking for a safe way up the side of the ridge and picked out a path that seemed promising. He looked over his shoulder every so often, and saw that Nordhausen was falling behind him as he climbed. The professor seemed to stop now and then, picking at the ground or peering at an occasional clump of withered plant growth. Paul gestured at him to hurry.

It was another ten minutes of hard climbing, but they eventually reached the top of the ridge. Paul squinted towards the blood-red dawn to the east, looking for some sign of the railway, but it was still too dark. Nordhausen huffed up and sat down on a flat shale, winded and perplexed.

“Should be light soon,” he said. “Look how red the horizon is. There must be heavy clouds out that way, or smoke. The light seems too diffused.”

“Can’t make out much from here,” said Paul. “God, I hope the spatial coordinates were accurate. What was that business Kelly said about shading a variable or taking off a second or two on the numbers?”

“What? Oh the variable shade would have been a temporal adjustment I asked for. Kelly wanted to be sure we arrived before the 10th. The spatial data was approximate, of course. It was the best I could do on short notice. We certainly seem to be in the desert, but who can say where?”

“That’s what worries me.” Paul flapped his arms to try and warm himself, his long robes flowing in the dim light. “We could be miles and miles away from the rail line. Lawrence and his men had camels to get around, but we’re on foot. If the spatial coordinates are off, we could be in trouble.”

Nordhausen was quiet for some time. When he spoke, his voice had a tentative quality to it, as though he was feeling his way through something in his mind, not quite certain. “It’s the temporal coordinate that worries me more. The land forms here seem too fresh and sharp.”

“What do you mean?”

“This ridge we just came up,” he explained. “There was too much smooth rock face. It should be heavily eroded—in terraces—at least that’s the typical structure of the land in this region. These hills seem odd: too unweathered; too young.”

“Well I wouldn’t worry too much about that. There’s plenty of variation in nature. Maybe we’ve climbed a big hunk of basalt.”

“That’s an igneous rock, and there shouldn’t be much of it around.”

“Well, there were basalt deposits in Egypt that served as good quarries for the pyramids, and some in the Sinai as well.”

“Not here, Paul. Most of that geology in Jordan is farther north, above the Red Sea. The landforms here should be sedimentary rock: calcite, and dolomite limestone, and perhaps some flints or marl clay beds thrown in as well. If we’re in the lower Trans-Jordan region, where we’re supposed to be, there should be very little basalt exposed to the surface like this. That rock would have to be very old.”

“Look there!” Paul pointed east toward the red horizon where the smoky clouds parted and the sunlight streaked through in hues of deep auburn and amber. The sudden illumination shocked them with the vision of a broiling sky, thick with dark, knotted clouds that seemed to smolder and glow, replete with red embers wafting up on heavy smoke. Nordhausen looked around, a troubled expression on his face.

“What a storm,” Paul exclaimed. “Beautiful, isn’t it? And terrible.” Paul’s eyes widened at the at the sight, but his excitement left him when he saw the look on Nordhausen’s face. “What’s wrong?”

The professor stood up, sniffing the cold air, clearly disturbed. “That’s not a thunderhead, Paul. Smell that?… A kind of musty, sulfuric odor, yes?”

“Almost volcanic.” Paul was noticing things now, his senses attuned to the land and sky about him as the growing light revealed more features on the gloomy landscape. He had a sinking feeling that something was amiss.

“The only volcano of note in the area would be down near Ma’an. It shouldn’t be active, however.”

“What about all the volcanic wastelands out east?”

“Dormant for thousands of years,” said Nordhausen.

“You studied that map of yours well.”

“That and a few other notes on the geology before we left.” Nordhausen was hefting the stone in his hand. “Have a look at this,” he said as he extended the polished rock to Paul. “I saw a lot of them on the ground back there.” His arm gestured down the pathway where they had struggled in the rain earlier. “It’s quartz,” he said with an air of finality. “Shocked quartz, to be precise. Notice the striations under the surface? This is very rare, but look how the lowland glitters in places out that way.” He pointed at the gravely plain. “More of these quartz deposits, whatever they are. I found several pieces of it, and lots of little glassy beads on the ground as well.”

“I’m not a geologist, Robert. What’s up?”

“Shouldn’t be here.” Nordhausen shook his head as he shielded his eyes, straining to pick out more features to the west. “We’re in the wrong place. We may have shifted east into the volcanic debris fields after all.”

“You’re telling me you can make that kind of judgment based on a few rocks?”

“Well let me put it to you this way—” Nordhausen had that tone in his voice that was just skirting the edge of sarcasm. “You wouldn’t expect to find palm trees in a conifer forest. These rocks are out of place—or we’re not where we were supposed to be. See any sand out there? It should be a broad flat plain rolling east from the rift valley edge, a dry and sandy region with occasional wadis and lots of multi-tiered islands of sedimentary rock. And this sky…” Nordhausen craned his neck up at the heavy clouds overhead. “The air is heavy, alright. It’s laden with sulfur and ash and other airborne particles. Look here.”

He stooped and groped the flat rock he had been sitting on, holding up his hand as evidence. A ruddy smear stained his palm. “I’ll wager this is all over the place. And it’s not only the rocks.” The professor held up a small blanched leaf.

“Taking samples, Robert? I thought you were interested in history, not botany and geology.”

“Couldn’t help but notice this bit here.” Nordhausen offered his last exhibit. “Fern,” he said quietly. “Nothing I recognize, exactly, but the leaf structure is very apparent. Now, how can I be plucking dead fern leaves out of the Jordanian desert in 1917?”

Paul looked at him, wanting to argue the point for hope’s sake but seeing that Nordhausen was very confident about his assessment. The sinking feeling grew to a pit of anxiety in his gut. “Great,” he said. “That’s just great. We have one chance to save the world and we botch up the coordinates. Well, if we’re not in the Arabian desert, then where the hell are we? Can you tell me that much?”

“I don’t think it’s a question of where, Paul. I think it’s a question of when.”

The implications of what Nordhausen was saying finally hit home. Something was terribly wrong in the setting all around them. The sun was struggling to rise, laboring up through the menacing sky, but it didn’t seem to be getting much lighter. The wan light was filtered by the brooding clouds, casting an eerie henna glow on all the land about them.

“But Kelly said he was just going to shade the variable a bit.” Paul’s protest seemed futile. “He said it was too late to change the time coordinate; that all he could do was nudge it a bit. I don’t understand.”

“Oh, he nudged it, alright. Lord!” Nordhausen’s eyes were alight with a sudden realization. “Shocked quartz, glass tektite bead deposits, withered fern…” Before he could voice his conclusion Paul pointed at something down on the eastern slope of the ridge.

“What’s that?”

Nordhausen followed the line of his arm, noting a strange form on the ground a few hundred yards below them. They instinctively started towards it, drawn by its smooth regular shape and blanched color in contrast to the reddish-yellow cast of the ground around them. If they had brought any sense of caution with them, it was quickly abandoned when they finally reached the spot. Nordhausen could barely believe his eyes.

“Look at this! It’s in almost pristine condition.” They were staring at a strangely familiar shape embedded in the rock face. It was an almost perfectly preserved fossil, over two meters wide; a beautifully regular shell that curved in a graceful arc from the edge of the ridge. There were long, tubular extensions from the base of the shell that reached out for several feet in curvy parallel lines before they vanished beneath the russet crust of the ground.

“What is that?”

“It’s an Ammonite!” Nordhausen smiled. “They were large squid-like creatures—very ancient. Look at the preservation! I’ve never seen anything like it; particularly exposed to the elements like this. It’s hardly calcified.”

“But what’s it doing here?”

“Oh, they’ve found quite a few fossils like this in the region,” said Nordhausen. “This whole area was once a shallow sea bed swarming with these big fellows. But that was millions of years ago. In some locations in Jordan, such as the Ajloun region, Ammonite fossils were found in building stone. Most of the time you can hardly recognize them, as their hard shells are deeply embedded in the soft limestone. You’d never see one like this!” He circled the find with obvious admiration. “Why, it’s too complete, and too well preserved.” His voice began to take on a hollow tone, losing its enthusiasm.

“It’s too young.” Paul came to the obvious conclusion, and each one looked at the other, as though waiting for an answer that would lead them out of the dilemma that was becoming ever more apparent to them.

“Shocked quartz, glass tektite bead deposits, withered fern—”

“And Ammonites.” Paul folded his arms, as much to console himself as to fend off the chill of the morning. They stared at the fossil and then looked around them at the roiling sky. The horizon was still blood-red, lightening to shades of ocher and orange. The sun was making no headway against the overriding gloom above them.

“What’s it all mean, Robert?”

“Well,” Nordhausen gathered his caliph’s robe about him and sat down, square on the smooth rounded shell of the Ammonite fossil. “It means we may very well be in Jordan, but I’m damn well certain it’s not 1917.”

11

Maeve stood in the great oval entrance to the Arch corridor. The sliding doors were open and she could still see the strange, milky auroras of light swirling between the metallic ribs of the Arch itself. There was a solid yellow line on the floor, and she edged toward it cautiously, keeping well back. The sound of the generators was slowly winding down, and the vibration under her feet stilled itself. She called out for Paul and Robert, peering into the montage of dissipating color, but heard only the returning echo of her own voice.

They were gone.

A flood of emotions arose as she considered the full implications of that. On the one hand she was relieved to see that the two men were not lying dead on the cold metal flooring of the corridor. The breaching sequence had worked—it had all worked—and the two men had vanished from the present Meridian into the ocean of time. Where they would emerge was anybody’s guess. They could be anywhere, though she hoped Kelly’s optimism might prove true. Now her mind returned to the error readings on the temporal vector display. The error had been numerically small. It might only be a matter of hours or days, which was the whole point of shading the temporal breaching point on the negative side of the event. Nothing could be done if they arrived too late. Early was always workable, she concluded.

Satisfied that there was nothing she could do here for the moment, she turned and headed back toward the elevator shaft, her mind still cluttered with thoughts of Kelly and the strange call from her mother. The digital clock on the elevator wall gave her a moment’s anxiety. It was nearly 3:00 AM!

Up in the control room she found Kelly hunched over his laptop, his finger tapping on a touch pad as he scrolled through a long series of numbers and formulae.

“Looking for footprints?” Maeve leaned on the back of his chair, and he gave her a tentative glance. She could see the guilt in his eyes, and the fear.

“They got through, didn’t they.”

“They went somewhere,” said Maeve. “I hope you’re going to tell me where in a second. What was the variance on the temporal readout?” She looked at Jen, but the young woman had an odd look on her face, not following what they were talking about.

“Mr. Ramer?” Jen hesitated to answer the question, prodding Kelly for help.

Kelly took a deep breath before he spoke again. “Well,” he began, “I found the error. Must have been typing fast when I entered the shading variables. I was trying to type a number sequence and I accidentally hit the shift key with my other hand.”

“And?” Maeve was waiting for the implications of Kelly’s confession.

Kelly looked at Jen for a moment, ready to come clean. “I triggered a macro I had programmed for my calculations and one of the numbers was interpreted as an exponential…”

Maeve just stared at him. “An exponential? Good God, what was the number?”

“A big one, relatively speaking.” Kelly rubbed at a trickle of perspiration on his forehead. “It raised the temporal locus variable by powers of ten instead of single integer increments. That means the readout on Jen’s board is actually reporting a much greater temporal shift than I first thought.”

“Powers of ten?” Maeve’s jaw dropped as her mind spawned a hundred fears from Kelly’s statement. It was not a matter of hours or days any longer. It was long years; decades; centuries. If they went back too far they could even run the risk of materializing under a primordial ocean! It was all too much for her, and she covered her eyes with her hand, not wanting to wrestle with the problem for a moment.

“But I have a plan,” Kelly offered. “Remember the loop command I sent through the system? I attached the pattern signatures of both Robert and Paul—you know, from the infusion data.”

“What? Kelly, the loop command was for a temporary suspension of the breaching cycle. You can’t loop the system after the infusion’s occurred!”

“Yes, under normal circumstances that would be right. But when I realized what was happening I had to do something. It was the only thing I could think of, short of simply cutting the mains and shutting the damn thing down. That probably would have killed them both in the Arch, so I ran the numbers and keyed a looping variable instead.”

“You ran the numbers? I was there, Kelly. You never went anywhere near the logarithmic generator.”

“Well… I did the calculation in my head…” The statement sounded feeble, but it was the truth and Kelly owned up to it, a bit flustered but determined. “I knew what I was trying to key for the variable, and I did the math in my head.”

“Without machine verification?” Maeve was staggered. “You mean you just took a random shot in the dark, right?”

“Well give me some credit. Look, I can’t talk about this now. I’ve got a twenty minute window and I need to make some adjustments on the chamber.”

“Adjustments? We’ve got to get them back, Kelly.”

“That’s what I’m trying to do—at least get them back on the correct coordinate.”

Maeve didn’t understand. “You planned for an emergency retraction, didn’t you?”

Jen heard the word and remembered her brief conversation with Dorland before he had left. “Doctor Dorland said something about—”

“Then do it, Kelly.” Maeve interrupted, her attention fully focused on Kelly. “As soon as possible! The world will just have to suffer for this. If you can get them back somehow…” She looked at the telephone that was still hanging limply over the edge of the desk by its cord and remembered her mother again. There was nothing she could do, and the tension and frustration of the moment welled as tears in her eyes as she spoke.

“Take it easy, Maeve.” Kelly was up, extending an arm to comfort her. “This is all my fault, but I have a plan. You’ll see.” He nodded to Jen, waving her away from the scene so he could talk with Maeve in private. “Why don’t you see about getting some tea for us all,” said Kelly. “Or better yet, I think Maeve has a bag of fresh Peets coffee we could brew. How about it, Jen?”

“Sure,” Jen helped Maeve to a chair, and Kelly noticed the dangling telephone. He walked over and hung the phone up, winking at Maeve as he did so.

“You’ll call her in the morning,” he said confidently. “Coffee, Jen. I have about fifteen minutes left to make this adjustment, and I don’t want any more mistakes.”

“Then everything is OK with Mr. Dorland and the Professor?”

“They’re fine,” said Kelly.

“I think I left the bag in the changing room with the costumes.” Maeve waved halfheartedly at the doorway.

“Right.” Jen ran off to fetch the coffee, leaving them alone for a moment.

“Trust me.” Kelly raised his eyebrows looking at Maeve. “I can do this,” he explained. “I was even sure I had the right number when I did the factor mentally. Just give me ten minutes here and I’ll have things straightened out again.”

“But how?” Maeve wanted to be convinced, but her mind could see no way out of the dilemma.

“It’s a theory I’ve been working on. I know it hasn’t been run through your committee yet, but let me explain. When the tachyon infusion floods the corridor we get a good signature on anyone inside and store it in the pattern buffers. I connected the buffers to the retraction module for situations just like this. I was trying to figure a way we could retract on command in an emergency instead of waiting for the half-life decay sequence. So… I entered a loop command during infusion, and got two signatures.”

He smiled, holding up two fingers to emphasize his point. “When the system rolls data in the pattern buffers through the retraction module I’ll have two chances to plan an operation. Normally the retraction sequence can only operate when the target time has been reached. We used the particle half-life scheme as a fail-safe at the end. If they go back too far to reach the target date, the half-life in the chamber expires and they get pulled out. But if I can plan an operation, and time it for a very specific point in the half-life decay sequence, there’s a chance to move them before the fail-safe kicks in at the end. With the loop method I can program a retraction sequence for every loop I enter. In this case I just divided the half-life duration by two and set a point for the first retraction opportunity. That gives me a chance to bring them home at the mid-point in the half life sequence… Or a chance to move them somewhere else.” He let that last bit hang, watching Maeve’s reaction carefully.

Maeve was struggling to follow the theory. “Move them?”

“Right. I can try to push them forward in time to the correct temporal coordinates! They went back too far. We both realize that now. If it was more than a few decades—”

“Hell, it was more than a few centuries, Kelly. Probably millennia!”

“Same difference,” Kelly said quickly. “They would die long before they reached the target time, so we can’t use it for retraction. That only leaves one other chance to move them—the emergency retraction sequence that was keyed to the particle half-life setting.”

“But Kelly,” Maeve still had an exasperated look on her face. “Have you looked at the time? The tsunami sequence is going to slam into the east coast in less than two hours!”

“Yes, but I can alter the half-life timing by removing material. I’ve thought about this for some time, Maeve. If I enrich the particle medium I can get a longer half-life sequence in the chamber, but if I thin it out…”

“That’s dangerous, Kelly.” Maeve had a warning in her eyes. “If you upset the particle generation you could loose the whole array. Then we’d have nothing to time the emergency retraction.”

“We’ll have to risk it.”

“That’s easy for you to say,” she protested. “You’re alive.”

“Yes, I know. I’m supposed to be dead.” Kelly looked away from her.

Maeve softened her tone. “I’m sorry, Kelly. I didn’t mean it like that.”

“But it’s true nonetheless. A lot of other people are going to be dead as well, unless I pull this thing off.” He paused for a moment, meeting her eyes. “Look, Maeve. Tell me you absolutely forbid this as head of Outcomes and Consequences, and I’ll stop right now. Then Paul and Robert languish in the void and, if they manage to survive, the retraction sequence will pull them out… whatever is left of them. In the meantime the whole Eastern Seaboard pays a visit to the bottom of the sea. Now—If I pull this off, and I’ve got ten minutes left, I have a good chance of moving them forward to the correct coordinates. I’ve already corrected the variables. All I have to do is time the particle chamber for the decay. Then, when the sequence reaches the half-way marker, the loop I sent through the system will run the retraction module as if it were bringing them home—only it will target the new coordinates I set instead. I can move them, Maeve. You’ve got to believe me.”

He stared at her, waiting in a long, tense moment. She looked at the floor, uncertain. All of her instincts screamed at her to forbid the whole thing. It was bad enough that they were tampering with the root ends of fate itself. What were they doing here? Paul was right, she thought. This is dangerous. We are dangerous—the most dangerous people in the world.

“They’re my friends.” Kelly put in one last word as he waited her out.

She decided.

“Do it.”

The words slipped out, but she gave Kelly a sympathetic glance, trying to force a smile to her lips. “But get the math right, damnit!”

“Already done,” said Kelly. He was heading for the element chamber controls when Jen came in with a carafe of coffee. “I’ll take the first cup over here.” He pointed at the half-life chamber monitors, and Jen hovered over with a steaming hot cup of Major Dickason’s blend. Kelly took one whiff and his mind was suddenly clear on what he had to do.

“Love this stuff,” he said as he settled into a chair.

He was soon hard at work, running a few calculations on his laptop and keying information into the chamber controls. He was going to thin out the mixture, and the particle density should fall off to a point where his first retraction trigger should kick in. All he had to do was time it to a certain density. He slid over to the retraction module, noticing how Jen seemed to be staring at the controls there with a worried expression on her face.

“Excuse me, young lady.” Kelly slipped into the chair. Maeve came up behind them and was looking over his shoulder as he worked. There were still five minutes until his first retraction opportunity. He flipped a series of switches and gave a command to feed the original pattern signature data into the retraction module. A red warning light flashed on the screen, catching him by surprise.

“Now what is this?” He squinted at the computer dialogue, which read: Out of memory. Please close applications or clear module memory before proceeding.

Jen started to say something. “I was going to say that Doctor Dorland told me—”

“There should be plenty of memory in this module!” Kelly was not happy. He moved the mouse pointer to view the registers and saw something he did not expect. “Who’s been screwing around with this thing?”

“Well I was going—” Jen tried again, but Kelly’s mind was racing ahead to a wrong conclusion.

“You did? You know you aren’t supposed to touch these modules!”

“I didn’t,” Jen blurted out. “But Doctor Dorland said I was supposed to watch it very closely, that’s all.”

“Paul? When did he say that?”

“Just before he left.”

“Well did you do anything here? There’s data written all through the banks and I need space to get these algorithms initiated.”

“I didn’t do a thing,” Jen defended herself. “Doctor Dorland just said to watch it closely and if the readings were to fall into the yellow, I was supposed to run some routines…” She fidgeted, searching her memory, but obviously disturbed in thinking she was being blamed.

“What routines?” Kelly’s voice had an added edge to it. The clock was spinning towards the three minute mark and he was running out of time. He was connecting his laptop even as he spoke, his attention shifting from Jen to the interface cable.

Jen closed her eyes, her smooth tan brow suddenly furrowed with concentration. “The focal routines on terminal three!” She remembered what Paul had said.

“Terminal three?” Kelly looked to his right. He moved the mouse cursor on the screen and took a look at the registers there. “Hello…”

“What is it?” Maeve leaned in to inspect the screen more closely.

“There’s code here—a lot of it.” Kelly was scrolling through the data. “What did Paul tell you?” He looked at Jen again, one eye on the time.

“He just said to run this routine if the retraction module went into the yellow.” Jen pointed at the code on the screen.

“Well, he must have worked this out with a programmer and set it all up on his own. Did you hear anything about this, Maeve?”

“Not a whisper.” There was just over two minutes left on the clock.

Kelly’s mind rushed through the possibilities. What was Paul up to? If the retraction module signal went into the yellow it would mean that there was a loss of integrity on the pattern. The focal routine was probably intended to tighten things up, but it now occupied a huge chunk of memory in the retraction module and there was no room for Kelly’s operational algorithms. Something had to go. He looked at the screen, fighting off a feeling of quiet panic. If he wanted to retain Paul’s focal routine he had to delete something else. There were only two other data banks in the unit: one was occupied by the target date retraction scheme, and the other with the fail-safe half-life trigger. One of these had to go.

“Jen!” He yelled. “Take the power up to 100% again, now!”

She ran to obey, the urgency in his voice a sure prod to action.

What should he do? He had to move them or everything was lost. He decided quickly and flushed the memory for the target date retraction scheme. They were in the wrong time, and it was useless now. An error trap message dialogue flashed onto the screen: You are about to clear system critical data. Proceed?

“Yes, damnit! That’s why I pressed the clear key!” Kelly yelled at the computer screen as he gave the enter key another hard jab. The memory cleared and he swiveled quickly to engage his laptop and press the send command. Data began pouring into the retraction unit, the speed of light racing time as the seconds ticked away. He had a green board with thirty seconds to spare.

“How’s that power reading?” He shouted as he lunged toward the main console.

“Ninety-five percent,” Jen called back. They could hear the turbines shuddering somewhere in the bowels of the facility beneath them.

“It will just have to do,” said Kelly. “On my mark…” He opened three covered switches and enabled the first two, finger hovering over the third. The digital timer sounded a single tone and he pressed the last button, his face and forehead glistening with perspiration.

The particle half-life decay sequence in the chamber had reached the mid-point, the density was just right, and the retraction module lit up with an array of fluttering LEDs. Kelly was back at the screen, watching as the data was graphically displayed in a chart.

“Get over to the temporal monitor, Jen. Tell me what’s going on there.”

Jen turned to heed him and there was a noticeable dimming in the overhead lighting. Buzzers started going off all around the console as surge suppressing units warned of a major variation in the power flow.

“Not now!” Kelly shouted at the ceiling, his attention pulled there by the flickering lights, but he knew the problem was really under foot, down with the massive generators that were spinning up to provide the enormous power required for the operation. Something was wrong. There didn’t seem to be enough power available.

“Are we still at ninety-five percent on the power?” Kelly gave Jen a wide eyed look.

“Eighty-seven.”

The lights flickered again and went out. As the room plunged into darkness the battery backup units fed their long coveted energy into the consoles to keep the system LEDs glowing. They could provide power for about fifteen minutes in an emergency—just long enough to shut everything down and back up the data.

“Oh God!” Maeve said in a low voice. “I was down in the corridor… and I think I forgot to close the inner doors.” She could see the red glow of the system warning lights reflected from Kelly’s eyes in the darkened room.

12

“Where are we, Robert?” The question was ludicrous, Paul knew, but asking it with the expectation that Nordhausen would hand him a convenient answer seemed to comfort. “Nothing seems to fit with contemporary times here. Is that what you’re saying?”

The professor looked at the lump of stone in his hand, fingering it in his mind as well. “Shocked quartz,” he muttered. “You might get this sort from a particularly violent volcanic eruption.”

“Or perhaps as ejecta from a large impact,” Paul put in.

“I was afraid you were going to say that.” The professor knew all too well of Paul’s life-long fascination with great disasters.

“Well look at the sky,” said Paul. “It’s well after sunrise and the atmosphere is laden with smoke and dust.”

“Consistent with an eruption.”

“Possibly…” Paul looked at the strange fossil they had discovered. “What about this Ammonite thing. How long ago did they live?”

Nordhausen thought for a moment. “They were prevalent through the later Cretaceous, and perished with the dinosaurs. This one seems quite young, but who knows when it died. Still… the other clues seem to point to the late Cretaceous as well. Ferns were flourishing; there was active continental drift going on in the plate tectonics and that would produce a lot of volcanic activity.”

“God, how long ago was that?”

“Some sixty-five million years.” Nordhausen looked around at the bleak landscape. “I suppose that would account for the lack of weathering on these ridges. Kelly sure shaded his damn variable, alright. I told you we didn’t have enough time to plan this operation. It’s nice to be early, Paul, but sixty-five million years? Good God!” The professor was finally realizing what had happened. He sat down, as though felled by the impact of the emotion. The first thing that came to him was finding a way home. “How the hell are we going to get back?” he looked at Paul, a dumbfounded look on his face.

Paul was pulled with a strange conflict of emotions. On the one hand he was still in the throes of the elation he felt in making the time shift alive. The danger inherent in the operation was obvious. Even the visitor from the future had hinted that they had suffered many deaths in the Arch. His gratitude at being alive was fed by a surge of pride and satisfaction in the accomplishment. They were through; they had shifted in time! But to where? If Nordhausen was correct then the temporal coordinates were well off the mark. It was not merely an error of hours, minutes or even days. Nordhausen seem to believe they were many centuries off—even millennia.

“You sure about this, Robert?” He didn’t want to believe that they could miss their target date so badly.

“Look around, Paul. Kelly screwed the whole thing up, can’t you see that?”

The more he stared at the ominous sky, the more Paul came to realize the truth. They were lost—buried in time. They had gone so far back that humans had not even evolved. The thought staggered him for a moment, and his face betrayed a curious mixture of awe and fear.

“Now, how the hell will we get back, would you please tell me that?” Nordhausen had already transitioned from denial to anger, and he voiced the one obvious concern that he hoped Paul could quickly amend.

“Don’t worry,” Paul was wide eyed as he looked at the terrain with new apprehension. “We won’t be here long.”

“What do you mean?” Nordhausen latched on to the statement.

“The machine is set to pull us out,” Paul explained. “Besides, Kelly is standing the watch on the shift. He’ll see what’s happened.”

“Kelly? He’s the one that got us into this fix!” Nordhausen took no solace from Paul’s argument. “It’s a miracle he didn’t have us materialize inside solid rock, or somewhere up in that, so we could just plunge to our doom.” He gestured at the smoldering sky.

“That can’t happen, “ Paul explained. “The pattern buffers prevent that sort of thing. The shift accounts for differences in the landforms over time, and moves us appropriately based on the reference point of the mass and gravity—” He stopped his explanation, seeing how Nordhausen’s face dropped as he started in on the physics. “Humans are never found alive while embedded in solid rock, or hovering a thousand feet above the atmosphere. The machine accounts for these things. Just take my word for it, OK?”

“Well this wasn’t supposed to happen either, was it?” Nordhausen would not be put off so easily.”

“Look, we missed our breaching point, that’s all.”

“Missed it? You make it sound as if we just missed a damn BART train! We landed in the middle of the fucking Cretaceous, Paul—Do you realize that?”

“Well what do you expect me to do about it?” Paul warmed to the argument a bit.

“Get us out of here, that’s what!”

“Calm down, Robert. Kelly’s will take care of us. He must have entered a bad variable.”

“No shit!”

“And he’ll find out what’s happened and take the appropriate action. Besides, the fail-safe will pull us out in time. Remember? We don’t belong here, and Time will see us safely home again.”

“Well I wish I could be so certain.” Nordhausen was still frustrated, but he slowly composed himself, accepting his fate.

Paul fingered the thin film of reddish-white substance on the rocks. “I’ll bet there’s iridium in this stuff.”

“Iridium?”

“Yes, it’s a common byproduct that fits with the major impact theory.”

“There you go with that asteroid business again. You’re not going to just sit here and talk disaster theory, are you?”

“Well why not? You put the clues together a moment ago. If we are where you think we are, then we’ve got a unique look at what may have happened during the last extinction event. No sense moping about it. Let’s do some science while we’re waiting for the retraction. All those clues were consistent with a major impact, right?”

“I suppose your going to feed me that nonsense about some mysterious dark star.”

“It’s not my theory,” Paul protested. “Alvarez and a few of his colleagues came up with the idea at U.C. Berkeley. They found all this stuff was prevalent on the K-T boundary: iridium, shocked quartz, tektites, little glass beads, and it was followed by a fern spike when most of the other pollen breeding plants died out. It’s happened before, you know.”

“Only too well,” there was a complaint in Nordhausen’s tone. “Mass extinctions seem to occur on earth every 26 million years, so they came up with the idea that a small dark star called Nemesis was disturbing debris in the Oort cloud outside the solar system, and sending a rain of asteroids and comets down on us. Yes, Paul, I’ve heard that rubbish.”

“Hell, Robert, look around! I’ll bet we’ve landed smack dab in the middle of the last major extinction event! We’re probably right on the K-T boundary, perhaps only a few years after the asteroid hit.”

The Alvarez theory had been debated for some time in the scientific community after the discovery of a thin layer of sediments in old rock formations dating back to the Cretaceous period. Iridium had been found there in concentrations well above the norm. It was a relatively rare element on earth, usually deep under the surface, but was thought to be present in asteroids that would strike the planet at regular intervals. The other clues all supported this possibility as well. Tektites and shocked quartz were also byproducts of a massive collision where the ejecta would have been thrown up into the atmosphere, falling hundreds, even thousands of miles away. The resulting obscuration was made worse as raging fires added smoke and cinder to the mix. Sunlight struggled to reach the surface, and temperatures dropped very suddenly—not a good thing for cold blooded creatures like the Dinosaurs. Mass extinction followed as hundreds of thousands of species were wiped out. It had happened before, five times, throughout the earth’s long history. The K-T event, as it was called, ushered in the new era of the Tertiary period, where humans arrived very late in the process of evolution.

“The K-T boundary. Yes, that makes good sense.” Nordhausen was finally starting to get his mind around the situation. “Looks like we’ve jumped out of the frying pan and landed in the fire. We were happily watching the sixth major extinction event, and now we get to take a peek at the fifth.”

“Sixth extinction?”

“Of course! We’re losing some 30,000 species or more per year in our time. That’s equivalent to the same die-off rate of this time period, the last great extinction that wiped out the dinos. Everyone focuses on them, God rest their souls, though the extinction in the marine life was much more severe. Maybe it was a comet or asteroid, though I’m inclined to side with the gradualists. Probably a combination of many things: climate change, competition from egg-eating mammals, volcanic activity, disease. They all played a part in the K-T event, and the asteroid was probably just the icing on the cake. It was one of your imperatives, Paul. They used to call them ‘Acts of God’ before you dreamt up your time theory, and what God wants, God gets. No more dinos.”

“Strange,” said Paul. “Is it really that bad—back home I mean?”

“What, the extinction? Certainly! Normal background loss for species is only about four or five per year. But we’ve been hard at work, day in and day out, doing the job of the next asteroid. Human civilization has had such a terrible impact on the planet that, by the time the next big hunk of rock arrives, the sixth extinction will probably have run its course. The asteroid will just be the icing on our cake, and the end of everything.”

“You mean we’re causing the sixth extinction?”

“Who else? We’ve been at it for thousands of years: invading and destroying habitats, cultivating one species in favor of another, introducing alien germs and creatures in unfamiliar environments, not to mention the pollution we cause. Hell, we’ve bred all the diversity out of wheat so we can have our toast in the morning. Now that plant is totally dependent on human cultivation to survive. That’s just one tiny example—I could go on for hours. If you ask me, we’ve been up to a great deal of mischief, just futzing about trying to amuse ourselves. Unfortunately the planet has been paying the price. The dinos are long gone and perhaps we’re next in line if things keep on. These Holy Fighters who blew up Palma are hastening the process, but the rest of us are just as guilty. Talk about fiddling while Rome burns! We spend all our energy selling trinkets and trifles to keep the masses fat and happy, while the planet is dying right beneath our feet.”

“Join the Green Party, Robert.”

“You know I’m not political. I just do my bit in the classroom when I can. I figure if we can raise a few heads at a time something might be done about it. We treat this planet like it was our own private amusement park. We’ll just amuse ourselves to death, I suppose.”

“Roger Waters,” said Paul.

“What?”

“Never mind. It was a great concert. You should have been there.” Paul’s eyes brightened with a thought. “Think there’s any dinosaurs left around here? We found that Ammonite thing. What if we come across a big dino carcass!”

“Forget it, Paul. This isn’t a romp through Jurassic Park. Enough of this nonsense. What are we talking about? Kelly botched up the numbers, just like I said he would. How the hell are we going to get back? Would you explain that to me?” Nordhausen returned to the more immediate problem. He would leave the fate of the dinosaurs, and the planet, to another time.

“We obviously can’t wait around sixty-five million years for the target trigger to pull us out,” said Paul. “But the fail-safe trigger is keyed to the half-life sequence and it should take effect in due time.”

“You mean we’re stuck here for a while? Why can’t he just pull us out now?”

“Kelly’s probably working on it,” Paul chided him. “If we went back too far, as we obviously have, the fail-safe would be timed to pull us out in due course. It’s really only a matter of hours in laboratory time. That would give us another shot at things. Kelly may be trying to hasten the process and work another solution right now.”

“Is that what happened to the visitor?”

“I think he was pulled out by the target trigger. Remember, he said he landed seven years before the target event, which was the night of our meeting. They knew they only had one shot at getting through the shadow of the Palma Event, so they didn’t program a fail-safe retraction. It was all or nothing. Our visitor just had to live out the seven years until the night of the meeting. It was his only chance of getting home—or of accomplishing his mission.”

“Must have been hell for the man, sitting there in a monastery all that time.”

“That was damn clever of him, I thought,” said Paul. “He needed to minimize contact with the outside world to prevent contamination. Find a good Trappist monastery and you can live a nice contemplative life, keeping your mouth shut most of the time so you don’t let anything slip out that could cause mischief. The danger of contamination is very real. I suppose the farther back you go, the more severe the outcome if you tamper with anything important.” He looked at his feet as he finished, almost as if he were afraid he might be squashing some insect out of existence, and all the successive generations of its offspring as well. “We’d better watch what we’re doing here.”

Nordhausen was inspecting his robes, but soon became frustrated with the situation again. “So you’re telling me you have no idea how long we’ll be here? What are we supposed to do?”

“Did you bring anything for breakfast?” Paul was very hungry, and amazingly light hearted considering the dilemma they were in. The excitement over the success of his theory was beginning to push away the disastrous implications of their failure on the time coordinates. Nordhausen gave him an infuriated look.

“Breakfast? We were supposed to be on a quick sabotage mission in the Arabian Desert. Sorry, I forgot to bring a menu.” He stuck his hands inside his robe to warm them up when he remembered the small bundle Maeve had slipped into a pocket there. He fumbled for it, and pulled it out, sniffing at the rich aroma of the coffee beans inside. “I suppose we could brew this up, if you can find a Mr. Coffee machine around here.”

Paul fished inside his own garments. “Maeve stuck something in my pockets too.” He produced a small mess kit of WWI vintage, along with a flask of water.

Nordhausen was encouraged and he searched out all his other pockets. “I’ve got a knife,” he exulted, and an old fluid lighter!” He held out the lighter and flipped the cap open to thumb the flint roller. The lighter sparked and a tiny flame leapt up from the wick.

“Good for Maeve!” Paul smiled. “Let’s look around. You gather up some of those dried out ferns and I’ll look for some rocks. Be sure you only take things that are clearly dead—nothing living, got that?”

“You honestly think I can change the Time Meridian by simply plucking a live fern out of the ground? It’s got to be more resilient than that.”

“You never know,” Paul warned him.

“Well, if you’re going to be a stickler about things, we’ll be depriving the time line of all the fertilizer it might make of the dead leaves if we burn them.” Nordhausen gave him a smug look, pleased to hand him back his own fussiness by way of argument.

“We’ll just hasten the decomposition process, that’s all. A little more cinder won’t throw this environment out of whack. I think we can safely light a small fire here, Robert.”

“Unless we burn up one of your little pushpins in the effort.”

Paul rolled his eyes. “Just look for some kindling, will you? We can crush a few of the beans inside the bag and use some cloth as a strainer. A cup of Peets would be just the thing I need right now. Sound good to you?”

Nordhausen was finally persuaded. With nothing else to be done, they set about to find a dry spot for the fire. It took them some time, and several tries on the dampened fern leaves, but they were soon able to get a very small blaze going, sufficient for boiling Paul’s water in the mess kit tin. As Nordhausen labored over the makeshift fire pit a wry grin came to Paul’s face.

“Do you realize what this is?”

“It’s a real dilemma, that’s what it is.” The professor was in a sour mood. “It’s a disaster, a catastrophe, and a big joke.”

“Right,” said Paul. “And we’ve just lit the first campfire made by human hands in the whole history of the earth!”

Nordhausen gave him an odd look. “Why, I suppose you’re right. Now we’re going to sit here drinking coffee while we watch the dinosaurs die off. If anything else goes wrong on this mission we’ll probably end up getting stuck here.”

“Maybe we should have waited for Maeve,” Paul exclaimed with a wry edge of humor. “I mean, you and I can’t do much about launching the human race from this point.”

“Very funny.” Nordhausen was not amused. “What makes you think we would have to populate the earth from this point—to be certain the human race evolves? That’s a bit selfish, Paul. Under your theory the only moral thing we could do here if we don’t get pulled back would be to kill ourselves. I remember the issue being discussed in Maeve’s committee. They even planned a little painless suicide kit for stranded time travelers.”

Paul sighed heavily, his mood deflating considerably. “I almost forgot about that,” he said looking around.

“About what?”

“This suicide business.” They had missed the mark, by the widest possible margin, and the mission was turning into the same disaster that had initiated it. He wondered if Time had not simply played an immensely cruel joke on them, sending them off to the K-T event to watch how the dinosaurs died while preventing them from tampering with the event that would lead to the demise of their own species. Perhaps nothing could alter the accelerating momentum of the sixth extinction that Nordhausen had talked about. Perhaps the Holy Fighters were only feeding a little more fuel into the fire that would soon extinguish the human race on earth forever.

He thought about it all, as he sipped the coffee when it was ready. The steamy vapors and rich, earthy taste made him long for home. He no longer wanted to hunt dinosaurs or postulate on the theory of their demise. The professor was right. If anything else went amiss they might never see their own time again, and they would have to kill themselves. That thought sent him spiraling down to another level.

“Robert,” he said softly.

Nordhausen was savoring his coffee, studying the clouds overhead as they were driven by a rising wind. “What now?” He said, his reverie interrupted.

“You know you were right about that.”

“Right about what?”

“We do have to kill ourselves if we get stuck here.”

“What? God, you really are a piece of work. Things are bad enough and now you’re talking about suicide.”

“But we’d have to do it, Robert. Don’t you understand? This bit with the fire is the least of our worries. Did you notice that I used up all the water?”

“What’s that got to do with anything, were you planning on drowning me?”

“No, you idiot. I used all the water so we could boil it and prevent any organisms from getting into this environment.”

Nordhausen gave him a dismissive wave. “That’s nonsense. We’re both walking nurseries for a host of parasites, bacteria and possibly even viruses in our own bodies. In fact, if you want to look at things from an evolutionary standpoint, we’re just a convenient way for bacteria to get around on the planet. It once took take decades for bugs to migrate from one habitat to another. Now, when some idiot drinks bad water in Kinshasa and takes a midnight flight to Paris, everything in his gut is along for the ride! Look, don’t worry about this. The environment here is robust enough to deal with anything we’ve brought back with us. I’d be more worried about taking things forward in time, if I were you. Suppose this muck is crawling with some super bacteria that died out millions of years ago. If your fail-safe thing works, then we’d be bringing the damn bug home with a vengeance.”

“I guess we’d have to kill ourselves first then, wouldn’t we?”

“Oh, be quiet.” Nordhausen was tired of arguing with him.

“How would we do it?” Paul tacked on one last thought.

“I suppose I could wait until you go to sleep tonight and just bash your skull in with one of these rocks.” Nordhausen gave him a look that was intended to end the conversation.

“No,” Paul lapsed on foolishly. “I think the best thing would be to just find a high cliff somewhere and throw ourselves off. We’d have to hope you are right about the environment fending off the bugs in our gut. I’d hate to think about the prospect of burning ourselves alive.”

“Will you shut up about this!”

Paul held up an arm in a placating gesture. At least, he thought, he wouldn’t die here alone. He looked at the fire, seeing the flames burning low. “I’ll see about finding some more of that dead fern,” he said wandering off. He went round the shoulder of the hill and spied out some beds of dry grass and fern in the distance. By the time he had gathered enough for the fire and returned he was surprised to find Nordhausen gone.

“Robert?” The fire had gone out and the tin cup Nordhausen had been using lay tilted on its side. It was fearsomely cold. He was taken by an involuntary shiver as he looked around in the gloom for any sign of the professor. He shouted again, but his voice seemed to die in the heavy stillness of the air. Now where would Nordhausen go? Was he out collecting shocked quartz? He searched the ground for any obvious sign of disturbance but there were no footprints to be seen. A queasy feeling came to him as he squinted at the gloomy horizon.

“Nordhausen?” His voice seemed very distant, thin and distended, almost an echo. He realized that he was loosing consciousness, and he slipped to the damp, pasty ground, thinking that the noxious gasses in the atmosphere must be overcoming him. Maybe Nordhausen wandered off to look for something and collapsed. Maybe they weren’t going to make it out of here alive after all. They wouldn’t have to jump off a cliff or burn themselves up. The fire and brimstone of the fifth extinction was going to chalk up its first two primates, long before they ever had the chance to evolve… His head swam and his vision blurred.

He was very cold.