“Jen!” He yelled. “Take the power up to 100% again, now!”
She ran to obey, the urgency in his voice a sure prod to action.
What should he do? He had to move them or everything was lost. He decided quickly and flushed the memory for the target date retraction scheme. They were in the wrong time, and it was useless now. An error trap message dialogue flashed onto the screen: You are about to clear system critical data. Proceed?
“Yes, damnit! That’s why I pressed the clear key!” Kelly yelled at the computer screen as he gave the enter key another hard jab. The memory cleared and he swiveled quickly to engage his laptop and press the send command. Data began pouring into the retraction unit, the speed of light racing time as the seconds ticked away. He had a green board with thirty seconds to spare.
“How’s that power reading?” He shouted as he lunged toward the main console.
“Ninety-five percent,” Jen called back. They could hear the turbines shuddering somewhere in the bowels of the facility beneath them.
“It will just have to do,” said Kelly. “On my mark…” He opened three covered switches and enabled the first two, finger hovering over the third. The digital timer sounded a single tone and he pressed the last button, his face and forehead glistening with perspiration.
The particle half-life decay sequence in the chamber had reached the mid-point, the density was just right, and the retraction module lit up with an array of fluttering LEDs. Kelly was back at the screen, watching as the data was graphically displayed in a chart.
“Get over to the temporal monitor, Jen. Tell me what’s going on there.”
Jen turned to heed him and there was a noticeable dimming in the overhead lighting. Buzzers started going off all around the console as surge suppressing units warned of a major variation in the power flow.
“Not now!” Kelly shouted at the ceiling, his attention pulled there by the flickering lights, but he knew the problem was really under foot, down with the massive generators that were spinning up to provide the enormous power required for the operation. Something was wrong. There didn’t seem to be enough power available.
“Are we still at ninety-five percent on the power?” Kelly gave Jen a wide eyed look.
“Eighty-seven.”
The lights flickered again and went out. As the room plunged into darkness the battery backup units fed their long coveted energy into the consoles to keep the system LEDs glowing. They could provide power for about fifteen minutes in an emergency—just long enough to shut everything down and back up the data.
“Oh God!” Maeve said in a low voice. “I was down in the corridor… and I think I forgot to close the inner doors.” She could see the red glow of the system warning lights reflected from Kelly’s eyes in the darkened room.
12
“Where are we, Robert?” The question was ludicrous, Paul knew, but asking it with the expectation that Nordhausen would hand him a convenient answer seemed to comfort. “Nothing seems to fit with contemporary times here. Is that what you’re saying?”
The professor looked at the lump of stone in his hand, fingering it in his mind as well. “Shocked quartz,” he muttered. “You might get this sort from a particularly violent volcanic eruption.”
“Or perhaps as ejecta from a large impact,” Paul put in.
“I was afraid you were going to say that.” The professor knew all too well of Paul’s life-long fascination with great disasters.
“Well look at the sky,” said Paul. “It’s well after sunrise and the atmosphere is laden with smoke and dust.”
“Consistent with an eruption.”
“Possibly…” Paul looked at the strange fossil they had discovered. “What about this Ammonite thing. How long ago did they live?”
Nordhausen thought for a moment. “They were prevalent through the later Cretaceous, and perished with the dinosaurs. This one seems quite young, but who knows when it died. Still… the other clues seem to point to the late Cretaceous as well. Ferns were flourishing; there was active continental drift going on in the plate tectonics and that would produce a lot of volcanic activity.”
“God, how long ago was that?”
“Some sixty-five million years.” Nordhausen looked around at the bleak landscape. “I suppose that would account for the lack of weathering on these ridges. Kelly sure shaded his damn variable, alright. I told you we didn’t have enough time to plan this operation. It’s nice to be early, Paul, but sixty-five million years? Good God!” The professor was finally realizing what had happened. He sat down, as though felled by the impact of the emotion. The first thing that came to him was finding a way home. “How the hell are we going to get back?” he looked at Paul, a dumbfounded look on his face.
Paul was pulled with a strange conflict of emotions. On the one hand he was still in the throes of the elation he felt in making the time shift alive. The danger inherent in the operation was obvious. Even the visitor from the future had hinted that they had suffered many deaths in the Arch. His gratitude at being alive was fed by a surge of pride and satisfaction in the accomplishment. They were through; they had shifted in time! But to where? If Nordhausen was correct then the temporal coordinates were well off the mark. It was not merely an error of hours, minutes or even days. Nordhausen seem to believe they were many centuries off—even millennia.
“You sure about this, Robert?” He didn’t want to believe that they could miss their target date so badly.
“Look around, Paul. Kelly screwed the whole thing up, can’t you see that?”
The more he stared at the ominous sky, the more Paul came to realize the truth. They were lost—buried in time. They had gone so far back that humans had not even evolved. The thought staggered him for a moment, and his face betrayed a curious mixture of awe and fear.
“Now, how the hell will we get back, would you please tell me that?” Nordhausen had already transitioned from denial to anger, and he voiced the one obvious concern that he hoped Paul could quickly amend.
“Don’t worry,” Paul was wide eyed as he looked at the terrain with new apprehension. “We won’t be here long.”
“What do you mean?” Nordhausen latched on to the statement.
“The machine is set to pull us out,” Paul explained. “Besides, Kelly is standing the watch on the shift. He’ll see what’s happened.”
“Kelly? He’s the one that got us into this fix!” Nordhausen took no solace from Paul’s argument. “It’s a miracle he didn’t have us materialize inside solid rock, or somewhere up in that, so we could just plunge to our doom.” He gestured at the smoldering sky.
“That can’t happen, “ Paul explained. “The pattern buffers prevent that sort of thing. The shift accounts for differences in the landforms over time, and moves us appropriately based on the reference point of the mass and gravity—” He stopped his explanation, seeing how Nordhausen’s face dropped as he started in on the physics. “Humans are never found alive while embedded in solid rock, or hovering a thousand feet above the atmosphere. The machine accounts for these things. Just take my word for it, OK?”
“Well this wasn’t supposed to happen either, was it?” Nordhausen would not be put off so easily.”
“Look, we missed our breaching point, that’s all.”
“Missed it? You make it sound as if we just missed a damn BART train! We landed in the middle of the fucking Cretaceous, Paul—Do you realize that?”
“Well what do you expect me to do about it?” Paul warmed to the argument a bit.
“Get us out of here, that’s what!”