Nexus Point

13

Nordhausen was more shocked than hurt by the blow. The leader of the Arab band still fixed him with a darkly threatening stare, his eyes searching, as though trying to decide what to do with him now that he had trespassed upon this secret lair in Wadi Rumm. What was so important about this place? There were a hundred caves like this scoring the striated flanks of the canyon walls. What was so special about this one? Perhaps these men had secreted away a cache of weapons. Before the professor could react the man strode forward and snatched up the flashlight.

“Move,” he said curtly. “Inside!”

Now what, thought Nordhausen? Does he mean to get us neatly out of sight so he can do us in? Given the circumstances, however, it seemed wise to comply. He needed to ascertain Paul’s whereabouts and status. The unaccountable silence in the cave was disturbing, and he wondered what could have happened to his friend. No doubt the Arabs were wondering the same. The first guard had returned with a shrug, so it was clear that Paul had not been found. Perhaps he had sized up the situation and was hiding in some darkened nook of the cave, waiting for an opportunity to do something.

They worked their way back into the throat of the cave, with the leader close behind the professor and the two guards hugging the walls. “If you value your life, and that of your friend,” he said “then you will convince him to show himself—and quickly!” His voice seemed very edgy, almost rattled. Why should he be so upset about this, Nordhausen wondered?

He called out for Paul again, but to no avail. Either he was stubbornly hiding, or something had happened to him. Could he have wandered off into another series of caverns? Nordhausen turned to his captor with a look on his face that was half apologetic and half bemused.

“He was just through that cleft,” he pointed. “We heard water and I went back for my canteen.”

The revelation did little to ease the tension. The Arab seemed even more disconcerted when he saw where the professor was pointing. He shouted orders to the two guards, and they came up to Nordhausen, seizing him roughly while the leader edged his way to the cleft Paul had found. The man spoke to the gap in the rock now, his voice slipping through in a hollow echo, carefully controlled, yet laden with emotion.

“Look here,” he said. “We have your friend. If you wish him well you will show yourself.”

The echo rebounded to silence.

The faint sound of water washing over stone was all they could hear, a distant, forlorn resonance in the shadowy cave, bereft of the promise of relief that Nordhausen had first heard in it. The leader set the flashlight down and approached the cleft cautiously. He slipped through and it seemed an interminable lapse before he returned, muttering angry words in Arabic as he came.

“You followed the water?” The man came up to Nordhausen, eyes wide, his face a livid mask of shadow in the subdued light of the cave. “You are certain this was the way you came?”

“Yes, he was just there,” said the professor. “Look, what is so important about all this?”

“You fool!” the man went to strike Robert again, but he held his hand at bay, his lips pressed tight, anger flaring in his eyes. “You saw the water?” He asked the question with an unaccountable urgency.

“Yes, but it didn’t look drinkable, so we probed a bit deeper into the passage and—“

“Not drinkable? What do you mean?” Again, the urgency, as if the man was pulling an answer from the professor that he already knew, but did not wish to hear.

“Why, it had this odd greenish glow about it, and a touch of—“ A sudden thought occurred to Nordhausen. The radiation! Paul had been going on and on about that Oklo reaction the French had discovered in Africa, but now Nordhausen began to suspect something else. Suppose these men were members of some terrorist cell. What if they were secreting away a nuke in this cave? That could account for the low level readings that activated Paul’s dosimeter. But that strange glow in the water, and the eerie milky phosphorescence in the stream just didn’t make sense.

“You say it was green,” the Arab leader seized on the remark and pulled hard. “With such a glow that you could make your way in the dark, yes?”

“Well… yes.”

The man spoke harshly to the guards, and they quickly produced a length of twine and roughly bound Nordhausen’s hands behind his back. When they had finished they ran off, each taking a separate passage as though intent on searching the whole network of caves to be certain Paul was not hiding.

Nordhausen’s assumption piled up in his head and began to finally generate some real anxiety for him. If these were terrorists, then the situation took a very dark turn. “Look,” he tried to reason with the leader now. “We mean no harm here, and we haven’t seen a thing. There’s bad water here. So what’s the harm in that? Hopefully your men will find my friend and we’ll be happily on our way to Akaba and leave you all in peace.”

“Hopefully…” The man took off his pith helmet and revealed a dark stringy mane of hair. “But if your friend went in there, there’s no telling where he will end up. The moon is not yet full!” He gestured to the opening of the cave. “It will not be up for hours yet. The timing was all wrong! Don’t you see?” The man spent his anger letting it dissipate into a sullen resignation, as if some die had been cast and there was nothing to be done. Yet Nordhausen could still not discern what he meant.

“Who are you?” The leader asked the question with newfound suspicion. “How did you find this place? Tell me, before I have my men slit your throat for what you have done here today.”

The second death threat was not lost on Nordhausen. He cleared his throat and swallowed hard, realizing that by arguing he might be tempting fate with this man. But what else was there to say but the truth? “I’ve told you,” he said. “We were trying to remove a fossil from a dig. Now I’ll grant you that we were working the dig without proper permits and all, but that’s hardly a mortal offense. We stumbled in here to escape the heat, and for no other reason, I assure you. As for your green water, I know nothing about it, and I don’t care to know anything about it. We were supposed to be on a ship in the Red Sea by now. That damned helo pilot lost his nerve and dropped our cargo, and us along with it, here in the middle of nowhere. Now, that’s it! That’s all there is to say about it. Then you come along with your ill manners, accusations and death threats. And here I sit.”

The man’s eyes narrowed, and then a glimmer of a smile lit them, his lips sneering out, with little warmth. “In the middle of nowhere,” he repeated the phrase, but he did not mock. His expression transitioned, setting deeper with the same resignation the professor had heard in his voice earlier. “Well it seems you are not the only one marooned here now. I was supposed to go through, at moonrise, but the well is dissipated.”

“The well?” Nordhausen tried to ground himself in the exchange. “You mean to say this was a water cache you were worried about? Surely you would not have missed a liter or two. Besides, we haven’t even had a moment to drink. You were upon us before I could even fetch my canteen.”

The man looked at him, hand on his bearded chin now, considering. The guards returned, somewhat breathless, and shaking their heads in the negative. Words were exchanged in Arabic, and Nordhausen got the gist that Paul had not been found. The leader was decided. He glanced at the professor with a vacant look in his eyes. “It is done,” he said. “Your friend is not here, and if you are certain he was in that chamber then he has jumped through—or perhaps he merely fell through—but in either case the result is the same.”

“What in blazes are you talking about? Are you saying he fell into some chasm there? Have your men found… found his body?” There was real pain on Nordhausen’s face now, and he lashed himself inwardly for dragging Paul into all of this.

“My men found nothing,” said the leader. “Nothing at all. And the water you saw glowing in the dark no longer glows. The well is dissipated. If your friend went through then we are all in a Nexus Point now. Who knows how long it will last, or how deep it will reach.”

Nordhausen just gaped at him, not understanding what the man was saying at first, until he spoke those last few words and they jarred him with unexpected recognition.

“Nexus Point?”

The man shrugged, and smiled, his anger finally resolved. “You don’t have any idea what I am talking about, do you? Well, how do you Americans say it: we are all in the same boat now, yes? May Allah guide us safely home.”

It took Nordhausen a moment to absorb the full implication of what he was hearing. Nexus Point. It was part of Paul’s time theory. Could the man‘s use of the term have been mere coincidence? Now it was Nordhausen’s turn sink a line and tug out the answer to a question he dreaded to ask.

“What do you mean by that,” he ventured. “Nexus Point.”

The man gave him a derisive look. “You would not understand,” he said, and he seemed to speak more to himself than to Nordhausen. “What’s done is done. It will be at least another month now before the well can be used again. By that time the situation may have come to some resolution. As for your friend, that remains to be seen. At the very least it will introduce a variation, here… somewhere… Who can say? The well has been very stable, but the timing was off by at least four hours. The temporal locus may shift.” The man nodded his head, considering, almost oblivious of Nordhausen now. “There is no way to achieve any clarity here. I will just have to wait.” He looked up at Nordhausen as he finished. “ You have no idea what I am talking about, do you?”

Nordhausen gasped inwardly as the man finished. He had picked out two other terms that Paul often used when he talked about time. In fact, the other man’s words only made sense in that very context—time. Yet his anxiety only increased as his confusion abated. How could this man be spouting terms right out of Paul’s lexicon on time theory? His throat was dry and he swallowed to clear his voice. There was one surefire way to synchronize his thinking with this stranger. He looked him straight in the eye and spoke.

“Nexus Point… Variation… Clarity… Temporal Locus…” He plucked out the words and handed them back to his captor, watching him closely as he finished with one final addition of his own: “Pushpoint.” The man’s eyes widened with surprise. He had been staring past Nordhausen, deep in thought as he gazed back along the winding throat of the cave to the gloaming amber of Wadi Rumm. Now he fixed the professor with a hard, stare, his eyes alight with emotion.

“So,” he breathed. “Then you are not what you seem after all! You are a member of the Order! How quaint. I should have guessed as much. This story you concocted was too wild and preposterous to be believed. What was it you buried in the Wadi, eh? Did you bring in equipment?”

“Now, just a moment,” said Nordhausen. “You used those words yourself. Where did you hear them? What exactly did you mean?”

“Don’t be coy with me. It does not become you.”

Nordhausen glanced at the two guards, who were watching the conversation indifferently from the back of the cave hollow.

“Oh, do not concern yourself with them,” said the stranger. “My men do not speak English, and, even if they did, they would not understand what we were talking about. My, my, what a fool I have been to ramble on like this. You are very clever, professor—if that is how you prefer to be thought of. Tell me: how did you discover we were operating here?”

Nordhausen’s mind was racing with every phrase the man uttered. A moment ago it seemed that they had reached some common ground, but now the man was veering off onto another tangent, leaving confusion in his wake. The stranger waited for him to answer, but he could only burst out with a question of his own.

“Who in God’s name are you?”

The stranger smiled, this time with a little warmth, as though he had come to some new assessment of the professor and perceived him as an equal now—not simply someone to be bullied about for his trespass here.

“In God’s name? Yes, in Allah’s name I will tell you. I am Abdul Hakam, Servant of the Arbitrator. That is a given name, but also very telling. Others call me Rasil, the Messenger. And you? What is your given name?”

“Robert,” said the professor. “Robert Nordhausen.”

“Ah!” The man smiled broadly now. “Then you are named after a real warrior—one we call Badi al Zaman: the Marvel of Time. Many tales are told of Boulos and the Badi al Zaman. In fact, he lives this very moment. You even bear a resemblance. Tell me, when did you arrive? The penumbra has kept us all at bay for so long that it is surprising anyone is able to get back past the event now. What a day that was! We call that one the Day Of Retribution, but you found a way to nullify our advantage. Yes, I was in the Deep Nexus when everything changed, and I remember how it all was before things solidified again. It was a good time for us then, but now all is overthrown.” His eyes clouded over with a vacant darkness, resolving to a carefully controlled squint of anger.

“What age are you?” The question was curt and sudden, demanding in the voice of the captor again.

Nordhausen did not quite know what to make of it, or why his age would be relevant. “My age? Well, I was born in the 1960s,” he began.

“Ah, then you are of the seventh age—I am of the ninth—so you would not know of what I speak. I will tell you then, for we are safe in a Nexus now, and no harm can be done. The Moslem world once stretched to a third of the surface of the earth. The muezzin’s call to prayer reverberated from a hundred thousand minarets, all over the world. When the hajj came, the multitudes thronged to Mecca in numbers that would stagger the imagination. Do you have any idea what it was like? The sea of pilgrims became an ocean of believers clothed in the simplicity of the iraam. They would stretch for miles and miles on the roads leading into the city. There were so many that the holy days had to be extended to accommodate them. They smothered the plains about Mount Arafat, flowing in to the sacred Mosque of Haram and circling the Ka’ba in an endless murmuring stream of prayer that had no end. We were nearly three billion strong then! Now…” The darkness returned to his eyes, then flared with the light of determination. “Things are different now, and I suppose you know as much about that as any man, yes? That was truly a masterstroke, my friend! You will have to tell me how you accomplished it! Strange that the Order recruits from this time—but agents are kept in every era now, by both sides. The struggle continues, so do not rest easy. We have a saying: ‘nothing is written,’ and we hope to see the pilgrims clot the roads to Mecca again one day—rest assured.”

Rasil’s eyes glowed as he spoke, a challenge in his words and a smile animating the dark stubble of his beard. “But forgive me.” He gestured to his guards, indicating that they should release the professor’s bonds. “There is no need for this now, and I understand your outrage at the treatment you received. Forgive my poor manners. I did not know! You are very clever, my friend. So, how did you learn of this place?”

Now Nordhausen was truly flustered. The stranger, Rasil as he called himself, was talking like one of the lab techs at the Arch complex in Berkeley! He used yet another of Paul’s favorite terms: Penumbra. Who was this man? He tossed about possibilities in the twinkling of a moment’s thought: was he a government agent trailing the two of them on their trip to Jordan? He discarded that card at once, for it had been mere happenstance that the helicopter landed here—unless the damn pilot was in cahoots all along—but no, he had forced the pilot to land at gunpoint. This meeting was entirely random, yet this man was talking like he had been in on the time project from the very first.

Then the notion that he had been avoiding finally tackled him and he fell flat on his belly with the realization.

This man is a time traveler. He’s another one of Mr. Graves band of meddling miracle workers from the future! It was the only thing that made any sense. How else could the man know these terms and speak them in such a clearly related context? And he thinks… by God, he thinks I’m a time traveler as well, or at least some agent in that enterprise. That’s why he’s changed his manner and gone all civil and polite of a sudden. A moment ago he was threatening to cut my throat, and now he’s grinning at me like a Cheshire cat.

A time traveler! Paul argued it himself: the clearest evidence that time travel was possible would be visitations from the future. Nordhausen knew only too well that anything was possible now that the Arch had torn its first fateful breach in the continuum. The notion that this new technology would survive into future generations, and be used, was not a difficult leap. But what would this man be doing here in the middle of Wadi Rumm? A sudden answer came to him, all in that same fleeting instant. Paul…

“Something’s happened to my friend, hasn’t it? You knew we would be here,” he was groping in his thinking now, “and you were trying to intervene somehow, just like you did with Kelly, yes?” The notion that Paul had suffered some accident in the cave preyed upon him with a vengeance as he finished. “But you were too late.”

“Too late? You mean too late to stop you? No, my friend, I was right on target. I came through from… Let us just say that I was timely enough with my arrival. But you have not answered my question. How did you discover this place? When did you arrive, and, since we are both safe here in a Nexus, what were you about?”

Nordhausen was still struggling with the idea that some dire accident had befallen Paul, when an inner sense put the subtle clues in the man’s words together and handed him the solution.

This man thinks I was sent here; on some kind of mission. He’s asking me about arrival times, and I damn well know he doesn’t mean my flight to Amman. Nordhausen covered his mouth with his hand for a moment, as though unwilling to let his mind blurt out any of his confusion and bewilderment. One thought still clawed at him: Paul.

“Damn, I wish I had never dragged him into this now. What’s happened to him? Do you know?”

“Ah, you are worried about your friend. I understand. Then he did not intend to jump here? Do you mean to say that he was merely sent to observe? I see!” Rasil nodded his head with inner confirmation. “That is why you arrived early. You meant to establish yourselves here as observers—perhaps you set up a monitor in the Wadi to try and analyze the vectors. But you did not expect us at this hour and our meeting was mere coincidence. Am I correct? Then your friend became restless and wandered into the cave for a closer look. Too close, perhaps. If you are telling me the truth, and he did not intend to jump, then it is almost certain that he has fallen.”

Nordhausen clasped his forehead, straining to get his mind around all of this. The man’s words would lead him through a thorny path, and then land him right smack in the middle of his greatest fear. Paul must have slipped over some unseen ledge in the heart of the stony cavern.

“Fallen?” He repeated the word, his worry and self-recrimination wrapped about it like a wet blanket.

“That is not good,” said Rasil. “He was not prepared, and this will certainly be hard on him, if he gets through safely at all. And it will introduce a variation, at the very least; possibly even a more significant transformation if he is not very careful at the other end. We will just have to wait and see. I will be interested to hear your thoughts on this.”

There was much more in Rasil’s words than Nordhausen caught at first. It was almost as if… “What do you mean: if he gets through?” he blurted out. “You’re not making sense! You mean to say that you know where he may have fallen? Why, we’ve got to get in there! We can dig up the truss from our cargo and use the tethering line if we need to. You’ve got two strong men here.“

“We cannot go through that way,” said Rasil. “As I said, the well has dissipated. The reaction takes time to build up. It will be another month before the energy is sufficient—but I doubt if we will be using this gate again, now that you have discovered us. Your friend has gone through in my place, and things may be very difficult for him: dementia, nausea, not to mention the physical danger of the fall itself. But, if he is fortunate and Allah wills it, then he will land safely on the other side. What happens to him there is not for us to know. We are in a Nexus Point, my friend. This business has tempted fate, and now we must simply wait.”

14

Maeve sat at the lab console, her elbow leaning heavily on the armrest of her chair, chin in hand. Her deep hazel eyes scanned the long rows of display panels, replete with dials, switches, readout monitors and colorful LEDs. It was hard to believe that they could control destiny from this very room. With the right calculations, and enough research into the loom and weave of past events, they could stroll through the Arch and emerge in any time and place of their choosing. The notion still staggered her with its implications. How they managed to keep the whole thing a secret thus far was beyond her. The moment the government found out about this they would swoop down and seize the entire operation: facilities, people, data, everything.

She realized that moment would make an end of the world as she knew it—as she thought it to be all of her life. They had only just begun to meddle with eternity. The first breach of faith had been the harrowing mission to the Hejaz to reverse the Palma catastrophe. The equipment held together long enough for Paul and Robert to pull it off and make it safely home. She spent weeks debriefing the two travelers to try and ascertain just exactly what they did to alter the Meridian. After months of speculation and additional research, they still did not know. The Outcome was clear and unequivocal: Palma never happened, and Paradox had been averted by the narrowest margin—largely through the efforts of unseen counterparts in the future.

She tried to imagine them, wondering what year they had come back from and what the time travel project must be like there now after their success. Were they reveling in their time, jubilant with the new life they had created by preventing those towering wave sets from smashing the Eastern Seaboard? Every time she tried to join in that celebration the fear emerged in its place. Kelly nearly died, and there were hundreds of thousands of lives that were saved—probably millions. The future travelers had been desperate to reverse Palma and save those lives. What horror played itself out in that alternate thread of time—the thread in which her life first began?

Only a handful of people, those that were safe in the Deep Nexus during the mission, would ever know what that older world was like. She was one of the knowing few, along with Kelly, Robert, Paul and the technicians that had been with them at the Arch complex that night. It seemed that there was a definite sphere of influence around the Arch that had remained stable and protected when the transformation came about. Every thing had changed, even the lab equipment and furniture had been subtly altered. She looked at the desktop at this workstation and saw that the nick in the corner where she always set her teacup down, was no longer there. Things changed in a Nexus, said Paul, but not living beings—not living memories. The temporal consciousness and cell-based memories of those protected in a Nexus Point were the one thing that remained unaltered. And when we die, she thought, then no one will know what happened here.

The fear returned to her with that thought, pulsing up again from the pit of her stomach and setting off that anxiety ridden adrenaline reaction. Every day she had lived out since the mission ended had been a battle with that fear. She kept opening cupboards and peeking into the corners of her home, as if she was afraid she would find something missing, changed, altered, and gone forever. Yet everything seemed the same. The world she was living in now was virtually identical to the one she had been born into. That made sense, she reasoned, because the real changes would be caused by all those hundreds of thousands of lives that were not extinguished last May. They were all alive now, going about jobs, consuming food and energy, procreating, writing stories, discovering the daily business of their lives. With each and every act, even something as simple as the stirring of a spoon in a cup of tea, the Meridian was changing course and veering off in a direction it was never meant to reach. Now that she was being swept along in that gathering torrent of change, she would never recover the timeline of the world she had been born to. Everything would seem quite normal, quite the same here, just a few short months after Palma was prevented.

The changes were remarkably minor in these first days—and she looked with increasing diligence as the time ticked by. There were a few books that had been moved to different shelves in her library. The arrangement of items in a desk drawer was subtly altered. Yes, she had an uncanny visual memory for things in her own private world. Any odd little ripple from the stone they had dropped in the still waters of time would be noticed by her careful eye. One of her vases had a crack in the rim, and then there was this missing nick in the desktop here at her workstation. A little extra wear and tear in one place, a little mending in another—almost as if time was making sure to balance her books. This would be easy labor for her, she thought. Years from now, however, when one of the lives salvaged from the catastrophe of Palma did something truly significant, then Mother Time would have her real work cut out for her.

Yes, the differences would just be beginning now, but there, in that far-flung future she could only imagine, things would be drastically different—entirely new. Even as she had been scouring the corners of her world to root out the slightest hint of alteration, they would be overwhelmed to look out on the world they had brought about when the Nexus finally dissipated on their end of the operation. I’ll bet they’ve been spending the last few months just taking it all in, she thought.

How would it be? They could go to the nearest library and find hundreds of thousands of books—all entirely new—resting quietly on the dusty shelves! How could they possibly take that all in and own it as a world they could live in again? She realized that the elite few who found themselves in a Nexus Point of change would become lost, gypsy souls in a world of their own making, but one where they could never truly be at peace.

That thought replayed her reverie on Shakespeare, and all the arguments she made to Nordhausen when they had considered what to do with the project. “Don’t you realize how fragile this all is,” she remembered telling him. “Do you want to reach for Othello and find it gone, different, changed?”

“Ah,” he had countered, “But what if I find something new! Wouldn’t that be just as significant! What if I were to find another play!”

Maeve remembered how she had left the meeting that night and hastened over to the UC Berkeley library. She ran up to the literature section and went storming down the aisles with the anger of her argument still fresh in her eyes. The poor grad student who happened to be in the English Lit section saw her coming and seemed to skirt aside as if a freight train had been bearing down on him. Maeve tramped up to the stacks and snatched every last volume of Shakespeare’s work while the lad just gaped at her with a slack jawed expression on his face. She was going to check—every play, every line, every word.

Six hours later she had satisfied herself that everything was in order. Nordhausen wasn’t going to find another play. They were all there, all thirty-seven of them, and though she didn’t have quite the time required to read each one, she had gone to the heart and soul of them all, and found Shakespeare living happily in the verse. Nothing was missing; nothing seemed out of place; nothing jarred or lacked the luster, artistry and passion of his expression. Shakespeare was safe. His words had been written long before T.E. Lawrence ever had the chance to read them. The change made in the Meridian had occurred in 1917. Everything before that time was unaltered.

The argument with Nordhausen flared up from time to time. They went round and round, but Maeve persisted. The time project was too dangerous a thing to leave intact. The Arch should be shut down—dismantled—and the research locked away or destroyed. Even as she pressed her arguments home, however, she knew how futile they would be in the end. Mr. Graves’ knock on Nordhausen’s study door that stormy night in May had already made a mockery of them all—and Robert let her know that fact had not escaped him one evening over coffee.

“You know we can’t keep this covered up for long, Maeve,” he said. “Otherwise how could Graves drop by that night, eh?” Just like atomic power before it, they could not purge the knowledge of time travel now that it had been found to be a practical reality. The cat was out of the bag.

Nordhausen relented, however, and they put everything on hold for a time. Until now. Here she was in the lab again, at this ungodly hour, and Kelly, bless him, was busily working out some data runs in the next room. Here she was, hot on the trail of her favorite nemesis—with every good suspicion and a growing body of evidence suggesting that Nordhausen had opened the continuum a second time! This time she would do a good deal more than argue with him when she finally brought him to heel for this little transgression. She looked around, noting what she might use in the environment to crack over the man’s thick skull. Not my teacup, she muttered to herself, and then concluded that a nice firm knuckle rap on the noggin would have to do—for a start.

Kelly was back, his face still buried in a sheaf of data files as he came shuffling into the room. Maeve brightened to see him, the one good thing that had come of this whole business for her. “Well maestro,” she greeted him, “what have you found?”

Kelly looked up briefly and angled into a chair next to her workstation. His medium brown hair was pulled back and tied off in a short tail beneath the baseball cap he often wore when he was working like this. She had smiled to see how he had donned the cap the moment he stepped into the lab, his mind shifting into a new realm, a world of algorithms and formulae that she still found befuddling.

“Well,” he said, “our friend Robert was definitely up to something. I think I’ve recovered the temporal locus now. A lot of the data blocks were pretty corrupted, but I ran a street sweeper over the disk and found quite a bit left in the magnetic resonance signatures—quite a bit.”

15

Maeve smiled, deciding that she was going to let Kelly use all the jargon he wanted this time. Her affection for him stilled the reflexive urge to lecture him about the necessity of speaking layman’s English once in a while, but that license still did not prevent her from nudging him with her next question. “Where?” She made it nice and simple, and hoped he would not launch into a long explanation about how he came to his answer. She was pleasantly surprised.

“1919,” he said bluntly. “November. I couldn’t resolve the day, but the spatial data should give us plenty to work with. It seems he was in London.”

“London?”

“Yes, right smack in the heart of the city, in fact. I’ve got the breaching point narrowed down to within a quarter mile or so. Odd thing is this: the retraction data shows that he wandered pretty far a field while he was there. The system pulled him out just a few hours after the breach, and he was nearly sixty kilometers west of the breaching point when the retraction scheme kicked in.”

“Where?” The question seemed to work wonders the first time.

“My guess was that he was somewhere near Reading. I’ll know for certain in about a half an hour.”

Maeve thought for the briefest moment and came to a quick conclusion. “Then he took the train out of London,” she said. “That’s the only way he could have traveled that distance if you have the retraction time nailed down.”

“Hammered it myself,” said Kelly with a smile. “So what do you figure he was up to?”

“God only knows,” Maeve sighed letting her exasperation vent a bit.

“Well, we’d have to run date queries in the history database for hours to isolate something significant.”

“For all the good it might do us,” Maeve quipped. “Who knows what he did while he was there, Kelly. Sure we could run up the history files, but who’s to say they would mean anything. I mean, if he changed things… Lord, that man tempts fate with utter impunity!” She fixed him with that look she would use to drive home a point, and he took her meaning at once.

“Right. If he caused a variation then the history would seem completely innocuous—unless one of us recognized something wrong, something out of place. But that couldn’t happen because we weren’t part of the operation. We weren’t in the Nexus—safe in the null zone of the void.”

“And that’s exactly why this business is so damn dangerous. What if he tries this again? How would we know if things are the way they’re supposed to be? It’s maddening! You know, I spent six hours in a library one night just to satisfy myself that Shakespeare was sleeping peacefully between the covers of all his books. Now what—do I have to go over there and read all thirty-seven plays again?”

Kelly scratched his forehead. “Now Maeve,” he began. “Let’s not jump to conclusions here until we have more information. You’re right,” he placated her, “this is bullshit. He just can’t go off on a train ride through the English countryside and then cover the whole thing up like this. It’s not right.”

“It’s Nordhausen.” The finality in Maeve’s voice carried a wealth of emotion. “It’s the reason why we have to shut this down. Don’t you see, Kelly? We’re adrift now, without any compass or even a sure star to steer by. We have no reference point to tether us to any sense of reality. Things could be changing and we’d never even know it!”

“I agree with you completely,” he assured her. “In fact, I was thinking a lot about that after Paul first brought up this business about the stability factors in a void created by a Nexus Point.”

“Stability factors?”

“You remember the meeting we had about two weeks before the mission? Paul was talking about the Nexus, and how it forms this protective bubble around the Arch. He thinks there’s a physical void associated with the Arch itself, and not merely a temporal void that protects the actual travelers.”

“You’re losing me,” Maeve complained.

“Hang on a second. We didn’t go through the Arch, right?”

“Right.”

“So how is it we still remember Palma and all the rest? We weren’t in the temporal void, but we were inside the physical null zone around the Arch. Paul wasn’t sure just how far its influence would extend, but it looks like we’re getting a good measure on that now—say a hundred yards or so. That’s why we can still remember what happened that night. The lab here is about five floors above the Arch, right? That’s well within that radius. Now, take Tom, for example.”

“Tom? What’s he got to do with all this?”

“Hear me out for a second. Tom was down in the generator room throughout the whole mission, right? Now those steps are on the other side of the complex, and there’s a corridor heading east for about thirty yards before you get to the generator room.”

“And your point is?” Maeve tried to curtail her impatience and Kelly pressed on to finish his thought.

“That puts the generator room well beyond the hundred yard radius. Don’t you see? I spent some time with Tom after the mission. He doesn’t remember anything at all!”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean that I asked him, half jokingly, what he thought of the news over the Memorial Day weekend and he didn’t get the joke.”

“I’m not sure I do.”

“He didn’t know, Maeve. He had no inkling that the entire east coast was about to be inundated with a three hundred foot tsunami. He wasn’t in the Nexus!”

Maeve bit her lower lip, considering. “We knew there was something odd about Tom’s experience. He seemed completely unaffected, but we weren’t sure why. And that cute lab tech Paul was flirting with had a lot of unaccountable blank spots in her memory as well.”

“You mean Jen? Yes, that confirms my theory—or Paul’s theory. The intercom was out that night because of the storm. Must have been a freak lightening strike or something. In any case, Jen was shuttling back and forth between the lab here and the generator room all through the mission. She was physically moving in and out of the null spot surrounding the Arch. Paul told me she was feeling strange all night. She had this sense that something truly significant was happening, and then the heart of it would slip away from her. One minute she was worried sick about the news of the Palma event, and then the next she moment she had completely forgotten about it. She wrote it all off to the stress of the moment, but it’s pretty telling evidence for the notion that the physical null zone has a limited radius. That’s why nobody else on earth knows what really happened that night except the four of us.”

“But Jen remembers Palma. Paul told me he had to do a lot of explaining to settle her down after the retraction.”

“Yes, Jen too, I suppose,” said Kelly. “She has partial memory of the event. She knows what happened because she was right here in the lab when we pulled Nordhausen out, but it all seems like a dream to her. She gets these odd déjà vu experiences now. Have you talked to Paul about it? The poor girl wakes up screaming, drenched in sweat. Paul has to sit with her for hours to help her sort everything through. I think the key moment was when the transformation actually took place at the mission end of the operation. Jen must have been up here in the lab when that happened. That put her in the Nexus with us—right in the eye of the storm. But right after I ran the final retraction scheme on Paul, I sent Jen down to tell Tom to cut the power. She moved outside that hundred yard radius again, very soon after the retraction.”

“What do you think happened?”

“Well, I’m not quite sure, but I think it takes a little while for the Nexus to collapse after the time breach is closed. That’s when Paradox is active, trying to clean up all the little loose ends and broken threads that it can before the new Milieu solidifies and the Meridian takes a definite course.”

“Don’t remind me,” said Maeve, a warning in her eyes. She didn’t want to think about that awful moment when she first realized that Kelly’s life would be forfeit if the mission succeeded.

“Just this once.” Kelly needed to get this out, and he ventured on. “I was fading, Maeve. God, it was an odd feeling—like when you start to pass out but your senses still keep working. I could see, and hear, and feel the cold surround me… I just had to get that note written, because I think I knew that someone was punching my ticket right then.”

“Kelly…” Maeve’s eyes were glassy and he could see that she was struggling to keep her feelings in check.

“Sorry, Maeve.” He put his hand on her knee, a gentle reassurance that he was still there, alive and well. “Don’t worry. We’ve got some good long years ahead of us yet.”

“A hundred years,” she whispered.

“A hundred years,” he repeated with a smile. “If you’ll have me.” He took off his baseball cap and ran his hand through his hair. “Well the point of all this is that I had this idea.”

“Not another one of those ideas,” Maeve teased with a smile. “How much time did you burn on our Arion system account with this one?“

“A lot,” Kelly confessed. “I guess I’ll be making my own little deposit in the project account to cover the debt. But I had this idea and so I worked up a program.”

“A program?”

“Yes, and I’ve had it running round the clock on a machine in the next room. On a lot of machines, in fact.”

“Twenty-four hours a day? What’s it doing, crunching some numbers for you?”

“Kind of… Remember when you said we had lost our reference point? Well I felt the same way for a good long while after I came back. I mean, you should have seen the operation these guys had.”

“You’re talking about our friends in the future—about Graves and all?”

“Right. They had some slick operation there. I wanted to get a look at their consoles but they wouldn’t let me set one foot out of my receiving chamber—that was what they called it. But I could see some of the equipment when they came and went through the door.”

“We agreed not to talk about that anymore, Kelly.”

“I’m sorry, but it’s just that I had some time on my hands there, in a manner of speaking, and I was wondering how they knew if they were going to be successful on the mission. Sure, the changes would be obvious, but where would the record of all the previous time be stored? What was their reference point? How could they navigate without a compass, as you said a moment ago? So, after I got back I started working the problem and—“

“I’m afraid to hear this,” Maeve protested. “You aren’t going to tell me that you used the Arch now, are you?”

“The Arch? No. I’m not that reckless. You’re right about Nordhausen. We’ve got to have some stern words with Robert the moment he gets back from his little fossil hunt in Jordan. No, I wrote this program, see, and I keep the damn thing running all the time. In fact, it’s all over the net: my little Golems.”

“You mean that screensaver you put out last month?”

“Yup. Circulation is up over a hundred thousand installs now, and growing. It was just a nifty little agent that I called my Golem. People love the damn thing!”

“Yeah, I have it running on my box at home too, but aside from the cute graphics and the pretty kaleidoscopic patterns I don’t see how it relates to what we’re talking about.”

“What’s in a name, my dear. A Golem, as you may know, comes from the Jewish tradition. It was a man made of clay, magically brought to life to perform menial tasks. It’s like a pre-industrial revolution concept of a robot.. Did you ever read Brin’s Kiln People? He had a world where people could make duplicates of themselves to run errands. Well, the idea has applications in the computer world as well. In Unix such software services are called daemons, artfully enough, and on an old Microsoft platform they were less romantically called ‘services.’ I kind of think the handle fits the task.”

“But what does it do?”

“Don’t you ever use the search feature? You type in keywords and then just walk away and cook dinner, or turn in for the night. Then my Golem screensaver comes up when the system idles and performs all your searches on the Internet. The next time you sit down at your box, the friendly little Golem is there with a nice little report.”

“OK, I’ll try the search feature—but what has this got to do with the time project?”

Kelly realized that he was rapidly spending Maeve’s reserve of patience. He came to the point. “That’s not all my Golem does,” he said a bit ominously. “I also slipped in a little routine that runs non-stop and performs a self checking error correction loop. It looks at the entire body of the static source code and compares it to the code in RAM to report any variation—almost like a virus scanner.”

“Now you’ve completely lost me.”

“Well, a virus scanner watches all the files you send, receive or copy, and looks for subtle patterns and variations. If it spots suspicious activity, it alerts the user and either quarantines the contaminated file or deletes it. In this case I have the program call home and complain if it spots any variation. I had this idea, see.”

“Oh you had an idea alright, but I still haven’t the slightest notion of what it’s about yet.”

“Remember Paul’s theory?” Kelly tacked back to the question of Time again, trying to bring Maeve along. “He said that living memory would not be affected by the changes in the continuum if a person was protected in a Nexus—even though physical things were subject to change. Take that copy of the Seven Pillars of Wisdom, for example. It was right here in the lab desk drawer throughout the whole mission—well inside this null zone sphere I’ve been talking about. Yet it changed. That was how we were going to learn if Robert and Paul were successful or not, remember? I was supposed to read that passage in the book and compare it to my own living memory—my unaltered living memory of the book. Why, you were doing the very same thing with Shakespeare! You were scouring the plays for any sign or word that did not seem to fit. Since the program is a constantly running process, it’s like living memory when active. You see?”

Maeve was starting to get a grasp on what he was saying, though the technical details still escaped her. “You mean your computer program is like our memory as long as it keeps running. You think it will remain unaltered by changes in the continuum?”

“Something like that. As long as it doesn’t shut down and re-boot from the source code. The trick was to make sure it would always be running. That’s when I got the idea to tack it on to the code for my screensaver. Now it’s on over a hundred thousand boxes all over the globe, and the sun never sets on my little Golem program. He’s always active and running somewhere, and if any variation is noticed, he’ll phone home.”

“Phone home?”

“The program will send a data packet here to the main server I set up for it last month.”

“And what does that tell you?”

“It’s not what it tells me, it’s what it does.”

Maeve gave him a look that said she would tolerate no more nonsense. He knew he had to sum things up for her fast. There was nothing to be done now but to blurt it all out.

“I set it up so that if a significant variation is detected anywhere on the globe, the server will contact me on my cell phone and put the Arch generator on cold standby.”

“The Arch generator? Do you have any idea what it costs us to run that kind of power here?”

“Yes, but don’t worry, nothing has happened in the last 30 days and our electric bill will be well within the norm.”

“But why, Kelly? Why would you want the Arch on standby like that? What good would it do for your program?”

“Maeve…” Kelly tried to fashion one of his own stern glances now, with moderate success. “If the program reports changes then something is afoot, as Nordhausen would say. I’m betting my Golem will alert us to variations in the continuum.”

“Variations? How could there be changes to the continuum. OK, I’ll admit that Nordhausen pulled the wool over our eyes and got away with a little train ride through the English countryside, or so it seems now from your data file there. He won’t get away with anything like that again, by god. Now that I think of it, an alert system like that would be a nice fail safe for us. Just you let me catch that rogue in the act the next time he tries to pull off an unauthorized time breach. Can you set that thing to call my cell phone?”

Kelly laughed. “If you insist,” he said, “And I think you probably will. That’s the general idea, though. If it works, and I’m still not sure that it will, then we could be alerted to changes in the continuum. We could have a chance at maintaining a safe reference point here.”

“Here?”

“Right,” said Kelly with a satisfied smile. He put his baseball cap back on and waved expansively at the lab around them. “Right here—right smack dab in the heart of the Nexus. We spin up the Arch and the field will start to coalesce. A null spot will form, and we can be here in the center, safe and protected from any change in the Meridian. Then we’ll know, Maeve,” he concluded. “We’ll know. We’ll be the reference point, if you follow me.”

She did.

“Clever boy,” she whispered. “I knew I had you around for some good reason.”

Kelly smiled, relieved that he had been able to get through the technical issues to the heart of the matter. “The phone rings,” he summed up. “I get in the Subaru and haul ass over here to the Arch complex. Maybe you have a good idea there, Maeve. I think all four of us should be able to respond to the alert. That way we improve our chances of getting someone into the safety of the Nexus Point before the Meridian solidifies on some new course.”

“Well if we can just get Nordhausen on board and shut this whole thing down we won’t need a wakeup call from your cute little Golem program.”

“Oh, I’m not worried about any of us changing the continuum again, but you forget Mr. Graves and company.”

Now Maeve finally settled on the heart of Kelly’s plan. She gave him a long look, her eyes reflecting the conclusion that was obvious to her now, but one she had resisted in her thinking all along. “You think they’re still using the Arch technology to change things?”

“You know what a temptation that kind of power is, Maeve. Hell, look what Nordhausen pulled here! Now, I don’t know about you, but I’m willing to bet that if something starts to slip; if things start to change on us here, I damn well want to know about it when it’s happening so I have the chance to do something about it—just like that night last May. We were all set to go watch a Shakespeare play, then things changed. We were just lucky we had the Arch on standby that night with Jen and Tom on duty here. The point is this: we had six hours to do something, and I want that chance again if anything goes terribly wrong.”

Maeve gave him a long, forlorn look. Outcomes and Consequences, that was what he was talking about now. He wanted to keep a firm grasp on the life he was living now; wanted solid ground under foot—some sense of certainty in the face of this awful new technology they had spawned. He understood the same yawning doubt that sat in her chest now. He had to.

“Good for you, Kelly. I think it’s a great idea.” She leaned over and embraced him, a long warm hug that conveyed her relief and approval at the same time. It’s not just me, she thought. He feels the same way I do about all of this. “I can imagine your cell phone gives you a bit of a start every time it rings now, doesn’t it? People are calling you on that damn thing all the time.”

“You mean this?” Kelly reached in his pocket and pulled out his slim light green Nokia cell phone. “Oh, I don’t use this account for the alert calls.”

There was a muted sound and he felt Maeve tense up in his arms as she looked about the room to see what it was. Kelly’s eyes widened with surprise. “I use the red phone in my briefcase…”

Maeve had located the noise and the look on her face spoke volumes. Kelly edged away from her and the sound continued. He stood up and started across the room to his briefcase.

It was singing out its third ring now and, one by one, the system monitors began sputtering to life, consoles lighting up and computers beeping as they began to boot their operating software routines. Far below them, deep in the bowels of the Berkeley Hills, the massive titanium wheels of the main power generator began to slowly spin with a low thrum.

The Arch was growling to life.