“What’s the bar doing?” Kelly shouted at Jen, ignoring Maeve for the moment. His voice had a frantic edge to it.
“Blue by one-seven point two.”
The digital clock passed three seconds.
Kelly leaned heavily on the main console, his finger poised on the buffer-loop release button as he counted to two. It seemed the longest two seconds of his life, a life he should not even be living, he realized; a life that had been stolen from the larders of Time.
He pressed the release, his breath expelling as he did so, his other hand groping to one side feeling for some support. His head felt very light, and his hands were shaking.
The digital clock ran out and a loud buzz signaled that the Arch breaching sequence had run its course. Kelly’s arm waved lazily behind him, groping the still air of the room. Maeve saw his distress and took hold of his arm at once, easing him down into a swivel chair.
“What happened?” She was as much concerned for Kelly’s condition as anything else, but her emotions seemed pulled in a hundred directions. The telephone receiver swayed back and forth, and not a sound came from the earpiece now. The console was still fluttering with digital readouts and waveform ray tracings on the thin panel displays. Kelly sat in utter stillness, pale and confused. Jen still sat at her workstation, looking from the color bar to Kelly and Maeve and then back again.
“Did something go wrong?” she ventured.
Kelly said nothing, prompting Maeve to look over her shoulder at Jen’s view panel. Now the various elements of the scene that had just played itself out began to gel in her mind, like odd, unrelated clues suddenly coalescing to a certainty. She squeezed Kelly’s hand, almost as if to assure herself that he was still there; still warm; still substantial.
“You initiated an emergency pattern loop,” she whispered, retracing the moment that had passed by in such a rush. “The countdown was at three seconds and you sent a loop command through the system.” Her voice gathered strength as the realization of what had happened solidified in her thinking. “Kelly, how could you? How could you possibly key the right variable without a computational cycle?”
Kelly gave her a vacant look. “There was no time,” he said quietly. “The temporal vectors were spiking out of the target range and I had to do something.”
“Something?” Maeve’s eyes widened. Her Committee had set down one ironclad regulation to be followed without fail in the event of any irregularity on an attempt to breach the continuum: Abort. Kelly, being a senior project team member, knew the importance of the regulation as well as anyone there, for any irregularity, beyond the obvious possibility of equipment failure, would most likely stem from an error in the calculations.
“The bar spiked into yellow—It must have been an incorrect entry on the shading variable I keyed for Nordhausen. I told him we couldn’t change the time, but I tried to shade the breach on the negative side of the target event, just for safety’s sake. Then the bar started to spike and there were only fifteen seconds on the clock. They were in the infusion and…”
“Oh God,” Maeve whispered. “But a loop, Kelly. Why initiate a vector loop?”
“It was the only thing I could think of,” Kelly began. “Actually… I thought of it last week, as a possible safety procedure for retraction.”
“Retraction?” Maeve gave him a look that immediately demanded more.
“Yes,” Kelly stammered, still physically upset by the experience. “I was thinking that once we had a signature on their temporal matrix from the infusion, we could run a loop vector, and use the timing on the cycle in conjunction with the half-life setting for retraction. Theoretically, it would allow us to run a retraction routine for every complete cycle of the loop, at specific points during the half-life decay sequence.”
“Theoretically?” Maeve’s eyes widened to emphasize her displeasure.
“Well none of this has ever been done before, Maeve,” Kelly protested. “It’s all theoretical at this point. Give me a break! We don’t even know if the breach worked.”
Maeve looked quickly at the console, finding the microphone to the PA panel in the Arch corridor. She flipped the switch and called for Paul and Robert several times, but there was no answer. Her lips tightened as she looked at Kelly, real concern in her eyes.
“So maybe it worked,” Kelly offered, hoping to look at things from the bright side.
“And maybe they’re lying unconscious in the Arch corridor,” Maeve countered. “Or maybe they’re dead! I’m going down there.”
“Wait, Maeve.” Kelly reached for her arm. “You can’t. The door is sealed and it won’t open for another five minutes until the particle flux effects have cleared.”
“Fine then,” she pulled away. “You can open the lock in five minutes. I’m going down there. God only knows what may have happened.” She looked at Jen, clearly angry.
“What?” Jen was looking from one to the other. She had been trained on the panel readouts, and knew all the appropriate status calls for her station, but very little about the actual theory and mechanism behind it all. Paul’s quiet warning to her added a sense of urgency to the situation. Something was clearly wrong, but she did not know exactly what it was.
Maeve gave her a stern look. “What does the color bar read now?”
“Blue at zero point two-five.”
“That’s close,” said Kelly trying to salvage something from the situation. “It’s well under one percent, which means—”
“Which means they’re likely to land in November,” Maeve interrupted him. “What century they end up in, however, is anybody’s guess.”
Part IV
K-T Excursion
“It’s a queer sensation, this secret belief that one stands on the brink of the world’s greatest catastrophe.”
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 21st 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.”