Nexus Point

Prologue

The train reached the station at precisely 12:00 noon, and Nordhausen smiled at the legendary British sense of punctuality. It was the daily run out of London to Oxford, making its way there in a roundabout way by following the meandering line of the Thames as it curled north of Windsor. It was stopping at Reading now, near the confluence of the Kennet River and the Thames. They would hold over here for half an hour, and then turn north to cross the Berkshire Downs and come up upon Oxford from the south.

The professor had been very careful in his research this time, following every clue he could dig up on the matter that was now afoot. He was very pleased that he had been able to dress himself so well for the part he hoped to play here, a stolid English gentlemen in dark wool and pinstripes topped off with a typical derby of the period. His shoes were immaculately polished, and this time they were very well fitted. The memory of his trek across the desert in those tight leather boots still sent a twinge to his toes when he thought of it. A gold chain adorned his vest, linking smartly to the pocket watch his grandfather had given him years ago. Even though Maeve had not had the chance to subject him to her careful scrutiny before he left, he was well satisfied that there was nothing about his appearance that would arouse the slightest suspicion or undue interest. He seemed the perfect English banker, out on business, which is exactly the image he intended to project.

In spite of all his research and careful preparations, however, Nordhausen was a bit worried. It occurred to him that, behind all his rationalizations, he still entertained a hint of misgiving about this trip. He had wrestled with the matter internally for some time, and he knew it was risky to go off on a time jaunt without authorization. That last mission to the desert had been enough to convince him that Paul’s theory was correct. Changes in time hinged on the simplest of things: loose knots, a casual stumble, a chance meeting, something inadvertently dropped, or lost, or found. All one had to do was find these things in the research—a task that could take years, depending on the complexity of the situation. The number of potential variables was enormous! How could anyone ever hope to uncover just the right pinprick of time? It was an intimidating proposition.

The research went something like this: once you determine the thing you want to change you must then isolate all the key Meridians flowing into that Nexus Point of time and determine which one offered the best prospects for success. Any solution you devise might cause some alteration in the stream of causality, yet the change may not be the one needed to accomplish your purpose. Time had a way of accounting for small errors and deviations, like a meandering stream that eventually found its way back into the main channel.

It all seemed an impossible game of hit and miss to him, until Paul convinced him that somewhere, lost on a single wayward thread of time, a moment existed that was mated to every great event on the continuum, a whisper of inconsequential absurdity that was forever paired to the great conquerors of history, like the slaves who would ride with Ceasar in his triumph to remind him that all glory was fleeting.

The trick was finding the correct moment to alter, and the surprise was that it would never be something big, something obvious. Try to stop an asteroid from striking the earth on the day of the event and no amount of force applied at that moment might be enough to do the job. But get to it while it is far enough away, and it would only take the slightest nudge to divert its course and save the world. Try swatting aside the rifle of an assassin at the moment before he shoots, and time would find a way to frustrate your every attempt. But let the air out of the tire of his car three weeks before the day of the shooting, and all history will change.

You had to feel your way along the Meridians, groping for those little moments of insignificance that would have the right effect. Who would have thought that a disaster on the scale of Palma in 2010 could have been reversed by a train wreck in the Jordanian desert of 1917? How could one make a connection of cause and effect from such disjointed events? The research could take years. He knew now that they could never have finished that first mission without the timely help of their visitor from the future, and the subtle clues he left behind.

Yet, what a mission it was! They had set out to save the Western World from Ra’id Husan al Din, a man so bent on his war against the “Infidel” that he would sacrifice the lives of tens of millions of innocent people in a single moment of terror. It was not a symbolic stroke, as his forerunner Osama Bin Ladin had made in his September attack against the World Trade Center. No, Husan al’ Din came up with something truly awesome in scope. By comparison, it made the 9/11 attack seem like the barest foreshock to the real catastrophe that lay in store for the West: on the night before Memorial Day of the year 2010.

Husan and his operatives had finally acquired their weapon of mass destruction—a warhead of sufficient power and yield to serve in the incredible plan they had spawned. It was inevitable that someone would eventually get their hands on a nuke, but the genius of the plan led to consequences far beyond the destruction of a single city. The device was buried deep in the unstable western flank of the volcano that made up the bulk of the Island of Palma. When it went off, it super-heated huge pillars of standing water that had percolated down into old lava tubes in the side of the mountain. As the water expanded, driven by the fierce explosive venting of an eruption triggered by the blast, the flank of the volcano gave way and a massive landslide rumbled into the ocean a little after midnight, GMT. The resulting tsunami was unlike anything ever seen in modern history. It surged across the Atlantic, promising to swell up in immense waves topping three hundred feet by the time it struck the Eastern Seaboard. There was no ground on Manhattan island that high, and the loss of life would have been unthinkable in that city alone. The whole of the western shoreline of the US was doomed to share the same fate, but it never happened, and Nordhausen could still not figure out why.

The wave sequence was supposed to take over eight hours to cross the Atlantic and, in that brief interval of time, Paul Dorland’s theory had been proven correct. Someone came back on that storm drenched night and made it to the final briefing at the professor’s study. He carried an urgent message and an appeal for help. It would all work, he told them. Time travel was possible! Researchers from his own time had been trying to forestall the terror of Husan al Din for years, but they could not get back far enough on the Meridian.

From their vantage point, in some far distant future, they had discovered that the only way to save their world was to prevent the birth of the master terrorist himself. It was the key to preventing the Palma Event, a Radical Transformation according to Paul’s lexicon. Yet, try as they might, the team of future researchers who had built upon Paul’s unproven theory were foiled by another of his maxims: that great events cast a penumbra on the continuum, a time shadow that slowly calcified until it became impossible to penetrate

The interference of the Time Penumbra cast by the Palma Event had stopped every attempt the future researchers made to prevent it. They could not get through to the target year in the past but, somehow, they managed to send one man into the eye of the storm—into that calm interval between the eruption of Palma, and the arrival of the first towering wave sets on the East Coast of the United States. It was not the eruption, but the tsunami that caused the real damage. The eight hour interval was a Nexus Point, a place where time was holding it’s breath before it exhaled to some new certainty.

If someone could get back to that null point in time, they could try and help the team of researchers meeting in Nordhausen’s study find a way to use their own technology and complete the mission. Even that effort had been a chancy affair. Many died trying to penetrate the penumbra but, finally, one got through. It was a rough ride, however, and the visitor missed his mark by a full seven years. Nordhausen empathized, for he had found himself lost in the Cretaceous because of a single keystroke error that Kelly made with his calculations.

Poor Mr. Graves. He had arrived before the Arch project had even been initiated by Paul and the other team members. All he could think of doing was to find a safe place, sheltered from the mainstream of life, and wait out the days and years until the Nexus Point formed where he could do some good. The professor thought his decision to hide away in a monastery had been quite novel. He could fit himself into a routine, say virtually nothing, and minimize any chance of contamination. Nordhausen wondered how he occupied his mind for those seven long years until he could reach the hour when it would become possible to make his intervention count.

In the year 2010, Nordhausen’s time, there would be a fully functional Arch available at Lawrence Berkeley Labs. The darkening shadow of the Palma Event could not impede a traveler who left before the great tsunami had wreaked havoc on the Eastern Seaboard. That was the plan.

It seemed simple enough but, like all things that have simple beginnings, it quickly developed a momentum of its own. The first thing to be accomplished was to prevent the untimely death of one of the four central committee members, Kelly Ramer. He had been destined to die in a simple accident as he hurried to the meeting on the rain slick streets of the Bay area that night. A moment’s delay, a few seconds when a man in a gray coat stepped in front of his car, had been enough to prevent the unfortunate rendezvous and accomplish the task. Kelly was that same few seconds late to his intersection with death, and his life was spared when the traffic accident that was to kill him never happened.

That first intervention was the lever that would move all the other research team members: Paul Dorland, Chief Physicist and Theoretician; Maeve Lindford, the head of Outcomes and Consequences; Kelly Ramer, the Senior Computer Technician, and Professor Nordhausen himself, Chief Historian. They would be galvanized into action, flush with the knowledge that their experiment would work after all. Their original plan, a modest proposal to visit a performance of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, in the year 1612 was soon shunted aside. The future of the whole Western World was calling now, with an urgent appeal. They had to go back and finish the mission, back to find a way to prevent the birth of the terrorist Husan al Din—but how? Kelly’s life was spared, and the clues that had been left on a note in a raincoat from the future, had been enough to set their course.

Nordhausen took some small satisfaction in the fact that he was the one who first deciphered the meaning of the visitor’s note. It was just a series of numbers that he took to be a date. 11101917-K172 became November 10, 1917, and the alphanumeric after the hyphen turned out to be an exact location on the Hejaz rail line: Kilometer 172. They had a time and a place, but the real problem was to find just what they had to accomplish if they could reach that crucial moment in time. As it turned out, that location was the scene of an ambush staged by one Lawrence of Arabia on that very day. He was planning to blow up a train to raise the fallen spirits of his men after their primary mission, a plan to destroy a bridge, had been foiled by a loose strap that sent a rifle clattering into the stony gorge to alert the Turks.

That was a perfect example of the theory. Tighten that gun strap and Lawrence goes for the bridge. He never comes to Kilometer 172 on November 10^th, and a man named Masaui, fated to die in the raid, lives on instead. Somehow, that single life could change history and prevent Palma. That loose gun strap was going to change everything, and Lawrence’s ambush would end up destroying the entire Eastern Seaboard of North America.

Lawrence of Arabia! Nordhausen smiled to himself as he recalled the eerie glow he had seen about the man that last morning of the mission. He had come within a few yards of a Prime Mover, one of history’s most colorful and yet enigmatic figures. There he was, silhouetted against the slate gray dawn on a miserable wet morning, and all Nordhausen could do was gape helplessly at the man in shivering silence.

It was forbidden, of course, to have any interaction with a Prime Mover. Maeve Lindford had beat that tenet into his head a hundred times before the mission. She had been verbally fencing with Nordhausen the night before they left, dead set on preventing him from doing any real research if the project worked… well it did work. They went back alright, but Nordhausen would be damned if he could think of a single thing he had accomplished to change the history. Paul swore the same. Neither man could put their finger on anything they did to unhinge the ambush the Arabs had planned at Kilometer 172. Yet they clearly did something, stumbling about in the cold and rain, confused, tired and bewildered by the experience of traveling in time. Some tiny, insignificant event was set in motion, or prevented, by one of them. Yet they could not discern what the "Pushpoint," as Paul called it, was.

Time moved on the whisper of nothingness, on the careless whim of a humdrum second or two that no one would give the scarcest notice. He always thought it would be great men, Prime Movers all, who would forge the shape of future days. Instead it was poppycock, happenstance, odd coincidence, chance moments in the stream of time. These were the things that carried the seeds of tomorrow.

They knew they had to alter Lawrence’s mission, but how? Where was the Pushpoint? Was it the wire leading to his igniter? Faulty charges in the gelatine? Did the Turkish colonel happen upon something when he searched the railroad tracks? Could he have crushed the Pushpoint under foot as casually as he might step upon a fallen cigarette butt, grinding it into the gravel of the rail bed? Whatever it was, they had been successful. The moment they returned Maeve read them the passage in Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom, and it had changed. Nordhausen had used the book to help them discover the crucial meeting point on the Hejaz rail line where all of future time was waiting to be born. If it were not for that wonderful book…

Thoughts of the Seven Pillars, and the three separate drafts Lawrence had penned, shook Nordhausen from his reverie. Lawrence’s detailed written account of his exploits in the desert had proved a saving grace. It had served as a road map for them on the first trip, and now it was the firm object of Nordhausen’s desire on this second trip.

Here he was, riding in coach number seven as it rolled into Reading Station west of London on a crisp November day in 1919. He would bide his time, watching carefully from his window seat until his quarry left the train and made his way over to the refreshment room for a mid-day tea and crumpet. The man would be carrying a messenger’s bag, of the sort they used to transport important papers, currency, or gold. Why his mark selected such a bag was beyond him. Surely it would be hard to overlook where he was going to leave it haphazardly under the table in the refreshment room. Surely it would be a severe temptation to anyone who found it.

Nordhausen planned to head for that very room in just a minute or two. He waited patiently, counting out the seconds, and then stood up with a clear resolve. He hefted the stout walking cane he had brought along, as if to test its strength for the odd use he had in mind. It was a solid piece of lacquered hickory, with a burnished brass cap. It would serve him quite well, he thought, as long as he kept a bit of guts behind it.

He would make his way into the station and take a seat in the Refreshment Room, very close to Lawrence himself. Yes, it was Lawrence he had come to see again. His presence on the train had been well documented, and Nordhausen was sure he would be here. The professor wondered whether he would still have that eerie glow about him now that he had fled from the heroics of his desert to the relative anonymity of the English countryside. Still, he would have his book with him—the manuscript, the very first draft of The Seven Pillars of Wisdom. Lawrence claimed it was stolen on this train trip, and Nordhausen would soon find out if that was true.

The version of the book the professor relied upon for their first excursion to the desert was actually the third draft Lawrence made of the story. The first he lost, on this very trip to Oxford. The second he destroyed himself, perhaps out of grief for what he failed to accomplish, or some hidden shame that would dog him the rest of his brief life. The third would survive to become the classic that had saved the Western World, but the first two copies of the manuscript were never found. There was no point trying to get at the second draft. The research was too hazy in that direction. But this first draft was right here on the train, in the bank messenger’s bag, and reputedly left under his table when Lawrence stopped here for a brief refreshment. Someone was going to try and make off with it, and that someone was going to feel the sharp crack of Nordhausen’s cane before the hour was through—unless the professor could get to the bag first.

Lawrence would reach Oxford, and realize his bag was gone. He would place a call to the Reading Station in the hopes that someone there would recover it. The professor thought about that for a moment. Should he turn the bag over to the Station Master? He would still be able to read it, as it would undoubtedly be published at some time. The more he considered the matter, however, the more he began to hear the snarl and growl of Paradox on the fringes of his surreptitious plan.

Would Time punish him for this little transgression? No, he thought, this time the threat of Paradox favored his plan. If he turned the manuscript in, then Lawrence would not have to re-write the book as he did later that year. If the story was altered, ever so slightly, then the clues, which led them all to their rendezvous in the desert, might never be there. Everything could come unraveled in that event— everything. Maeve was really quite correct in the end. They would change things without even knowing it, just as they did at Kilometer 172. He couldn’t take the risk, so he decided to take the bag instead. After all, it was lost and never recovered. It was probably taken by some ignorant station worker who did not have the slightest appreciation of what he was stealing, or even who his poor victim was. All he had to do was make certain Lawrence was well away on his train before he recovered it, and if someone got to it first he had his cane.

Still, the feeling of uncertainty redoubled. The manuscript had not been recovered—not yet, but thousands of artifacts and art treasures of his day had been lost for millennia before they were finally found. What if someone was slated to find the manuscript in another hundred years? What if the find was to prove a very significant event in the life of that unborn person? Nordhausen realized that even this seemingly innocuous trip may have unforeseen consequences for future generations.

What might he do this time, and without even knowing it? He could return and find everything changed; everyone gone; lives askew and no one even realizing that the present they embraced was not meant to be; that it was all the heedless doings of a selfish man who refused to listen to the voice of caution. The misgivings spawned by Maeve’s warnings were riding him with each mile and dogging every step he took. What if he botched the mission? What if he bumped into Lawrence again at Reading Station? What if there was a struggle for the manuscript with the original thief? The prospect that he might be involved in a scuffle was not so palatable now, in spite of his sturdy cane. The more he thought, the deeper his misgivings became, but there was only one thing to do now that he was here. Get on with it! Get the damn manuscript and head home, with as little fuss and bother as possible. He would just have to suffer the consequences, whatever they might be.

Nordhausen steadied himself as the train approached the station and people began to jostle up from their seats. He was still a bit bemused by the effects of his time shift. Yes, he knew it was dangerous to open one’s eyes during transit time in the Arch, but he could not resist. The spectacle was so completely encompassing that it was worth the dizzying nausea that resulted. What would one endure, he thought, to but glimpse the face of God? Maeve did not know. She had stayed behind in the lab on the first mission. She never saw it, and Nordhausen knew that she would never understand until she stood there in the auroras and opened her eyes. There was no explaining it. You just had to open your eyes and take it in.

Perhaps he would not hear her chiding voice so sharply if she came along, just one time, and felt the exhilaration of that terrible moment in the stream of infinity. But Nordhausen was alone in this now. Nobody knew he was here—not even the simpleton of a graduate student he had press-ganged into a long night shift in the main lab facility. All the lout had to do was toggle a switch at precisely three AM; just a few hours of idle time in the lab, but eight hours for Nordhausen on his trip to England in the year 1919.

The train whistle blew its shrill warning as it slowed to enter Reading Station. The professor rubbed his hands in anticipation. He would see to the matter once and for all. If history could find no use for the precious draft, he would be quite happy to take it under his loving wing, and fly away.

And that is exactly what he did.

He accomplished his mission, and was greatly relieved to find that nothing seemed amiss when he finally returned to the Lab. The dutiful grad student he had secreted into the facility had done his job. He toggled the switch that set Nordhausen’s retraction scheme running, and the professor was pulled back through the open gateway in Time to reappear in the Arch. In spite of the temptation to look, he made a point of keeping his eyes clenched shut this time through, to minimize the effects of the shift. As soon as his senses were clear he raced up stairs to cover his tracks in the data module. A few deletions here and there would do the job. He sent the grad student on his way with a nice monetary treat so he could enjoy the rest of the holiday weekend.

Three hours after his safe retraction he was back in his study in Berkeley, gleefully paging through Lawrence’s handwritten notes. He would celebrate Independence Day by recounting Lawrence’s efforts to bring exactly that to his Arab friends.

It had all been so easy, he thought. So painless. All of his misgivings had been for naught—aside from the hefty deposit he would have to make to cover the added electricity usage that weekend. No matter. It would be well worth it. He didn’t even have to bother with the original thief! The bag was just sitting there unattended.

Nordhausen was very pleased with himself, but he would have had a lot to think about if he had seen what actually happened after he left Reading Station. If he had seen the dusky stranger shuffle into the refreshment room, he might have thought it odd how the man singled out one isolated table in the corner and stooped to look beneath it, as though he expected to find something there. He might have been surprised at the look on the fellow’s face when the bag he expected to find was not sitting there. He might have wondered at the curse the man uttered beneath his breath, in a strange and unfamiliar tongue, and the odd way in which he surveilled the room, his eyes laden with hostility and suspicion. There was no one else there for him to blame. Nordhausen was already ninety-one years away, with a glass of good Chianti in his right hand and a self-indulgent gleam of satisfaction in his eye.