Maeve was struggling to follow the theory. “Move them?”
“Right. I can try to push them forward in time to the correct temporal coordinates! They went back too far. We both realize that now. If it was more than a few decades—”
“Hell, it was more than a few centuries, Kelly. Probably millennia!”
“Same difference,” Kelly said quickly. “They would die long before they reached the target time, so we can’t use it for retraction. That only leaves one other chance to move them—the emergency retraction sequence that was keyed to the particle half-life setting.”
“But Kelly,” Maeve still had an exasperated look on her face. “Have you looked at the time? The tsunami sequence is going to slam into the east coast in less than two hours!”
“Yes, but I can alter the half-life timing by removing material. I’ve thought about this for some time, Maeve. If I enrich the particle medium I can get a longer half-life sequence in the chamber, but if I thin it out…”
“That’s dangerous, Kelly.” Maeve had a warning in her eyes. “If you upset the particle generation you could loose the whole array. Then we’d have nothing to time the emergency retraction.”
“We’ll have to risk it.”
“That’s easy for you to say,” she protested. “You’re alive.”
“Yes, I know. I’m supposed to be dead.” Kelly looked away from her.
Maeve softened her tone. “I’m sorry, Kelly. I didn’t mean it like that.”
“But it’s true nonetheless. A lot of other people are going to be dead as well, unless I pull this thing off.” He paused for a moment, meeting her eyes. “Look, Maeve. Tell me you absolutely forbid this as head of Outcomes and Consequences, and I’ll stop right now. Then Paul and Robert languish in the void and, if they manage to survive, the retraction sequence will pull them out… whatever is left of them. In the meantime the whole Eastern Seaboard pays a visit to the bottom of the sea. Now—If I pull this off, and I’ve got ten minutes left, I have a good chance of moving them forward to the correct coordinates. I’ve already corrected the variables. All I have to do is time the particle chamber for the decay. Then, when the sequence reaches the half-way marker, the loop I sent through the system will run the retraction module as if it were bringing them home—only it will target the new coordinates I set instead. I can move them, Maeve. You’ve got to believe me.”
He stared at her, waiting in a long, tense moment. She looked at the floor, uncertain. All of her instincts screamed at her to forbid the whole thing. It was bad enough that they were tampering with the root ends of fate itself. What were they doing here? Paul was right, she thought. This is dangerous. We are dangerous—the most dangerous people in the world.
“They’re my friends.” Kelly put in one last word as he waited her out.
She decided.
“Do it.”
The words slipped out, but she gave Kelly a sympathetic glance, trying to force a smile to her lips. “But get the math right, damnit!”
“Already done,” said Kelly. He was heading for the element chamber controls when Jen came in with a carafe of coffee. “I’ll take the first cup over here.” He pointed at the half-life chamber monitors, and Jen hovered over with a steaming hot cup of Major Dickason’s blend. Kelly took one whiff and his mind was suddenly clear on what he had to do.
“Love this stuff,” he said as he settled into a chair.
He was soon hard at work, running a few calculations on his laptop and keying information into the chamber controls. He was going to thin out the mixture, and the particle density should fall off to a point where his first retraction trigger should kick in. All he had to do was time it to a certain density. He slid over to the retraction module, noticing how Jen seemed to be staring at the controls there with a worried expression on her face.
“Excuse me, young lady.” Kelly slipped into the chair. Maeve came up behind them and was looking over his shoulder as he worked. There were still five minutes until his first retraction opportunity. He flipped a series of switches and gave a command to feed the original pattern signature data into the retraction module. A red warning light flashed on the screen, catching him by surprise.
“Now what is this?” He squinted at the computer dialogue, which read: Out of memory. Please close applications or clear module memory before proceeding.
Jen started to say something. “I was going to say that Doctor Dorland told me—”
“There should be plenty of memory in this module!” Kelly was not happy. He moved the mouse pointer to view the registers and saw something he did not expect. “Who’s been screwing around with this thing?”
“Well I was going—” Jen tried again, but Kelly’s mind was racing ahead to a wrong conclusion.
“You did? You know you aren’t supposed to touch these modules!”
“I didn’t,” Jen blurted out. “But Doctor Dorland said I was supposed to watch it very closely, that’s all.”
“Paul? When did he say that?”
“Just before he left.”
“Well did you do anything here? There’s data written all through the banks and I need space to get these algorithms initiated.”
“I didn’t do a thing,” Jen defended herself. “Doctor Dorland just said to watch it closely and if the readings were to fall into the yellow, I was supposed to run some routines…” She fidgeted, searching her memory, but obviously disturbed in thinking she was being blamed.
“What routines?” Kelly’s voice had an added edge to it. The clock was spinning towards the three minute mark and he was running out of time. He was connecting his laptop even as he spoke, his attention shifting from Jen to the interface cable.
Jen closed her eyes, her smooth tan brow suddenly furrowed with concentration. “The focal routines on terminal three!” She remembered what Paul had said.
“Terminal three?” Kelly looked to his right. He moved the mouse cursor on the screen and took a look at the registers there. “Hello…”
“What is it?” Maeve leaned in to inspect the screen more closely.
“There’s code here—a lot of it.” Kelly was scrolling through the data. “What did Paul tell you?” He looked at Jen again, one eye on the time.
“He just said to run this routine if the retraction module went into the yellow.” Jen pointed at the code on the screen.
“Well, he must have worked this out with a programmer and set it all up on his own. Did you hear anything about this, Maeve?”
“Not a whisper.” There was just over two minutes left on the clock.
Kelly’s mind rushed through the possibilities. What was Paul up to? If the retraction module signal went into the yellow it would mean that there was a loss of integrity on the pattern. The focal routine was probably intended to tighten things up, but it now occupied a huge chunk of memory in the retraction module and there was no room for Kelly’s operational algorithms. Something had to go. He looked at the screen, fighting off a feeling of quiet panic. If he wanted to retain Paul’s focal routine he had to delete something else. There were only two other data banks in the unit: one was occupied by the target date retraction scheme, and the other with the fail-safe half-life trigger. One of these had to go.