Nexus Point (Meridian Series) (18 page)

       “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.”