The interference of the Time Penumbra cast by the Palma Event had stopped every attempt the future researchers made to prevent it. They could not get through to the target year in the past but, somehow, they managed to send one man into the eye of the storm—into that calm interval between the eruption of Palma, and the arrival of the first towering wave sets on the East Coast of the United States. It was not the eruption, but the tsunami that caused the real damage. The eight hour interval was a Nexus Point, a place where time was holding it’s breath before it exhaled to some new certainty.
If someone could get back to that null point in time, they could try and help the team of researchers meeting in Nordhausen’s study find a way to use their own technology and complete the mission. Even that effort had been a chancy affair. Many died trying to penetrate the penumbra but, finally, one got through. It was a rough ride, however, and the visitor missed his mark by a full seven years. Nordhausen empathized, for he had found himself lost in the Cretaceous because of a single keystroke error that Kelly made with his calculations.
Poor Mr. Graves. He had arrived before the Arch project had even been initiated by Paul and the other team members. All he could think of doing was to find a safe place, sheltered from the mainstream of life, and wait out the days and years until the Nexus Point formed where he could do some good. The professor thought his decision to hide away in a monastery had been quite novel. He could fit himself into a routine, say virtually nothing, and minimize any chance of contamination. Nordhausen wondered how he occupied his mind for those seven long years until he could reach the hour when it would become possible to make his intervention count.
In the year 2010, Nordhausen’s time, there would be a fully functional Arch available at Lawrence Berkeley Labs. The darkening shadow of the Palma Event could not impede a traveler who left before the great tsunami had wreaked havoc on the Eastern Seaboard. That was the plan.
It seemed simple enough but, like all things that have simple beginnings, it quickly developed a momentum of its own. The first thing to be accomplished was to prevent the untimely death of one of the four central committee members, Kelly Ramer. He had been destined to die in a simple accident as he hurried to the meeting on the rain slick streets of the Bay area that night. A moment’s delay, a few seconds when a man in a gray coat stepped in front of his car, had been enough to prevent the unfortunate rendezvous and accomplish the task. Kelly was that same few seconds late to his intersection with death, and his life was spared when the traffic accident that was to kill him never happened.
That first intervention was the lever that would move all the other research team members: Paul Dorland, Chief Physicist and Theoretician; Maeve Lindford, the head of Outcomes and Consequences; Kelly Ramer, the Senior Computer Technician, and Professor Nordhausen himself, Chief Historian. They would be galvanized into action, flush with the knowledge that their experiment would work after all. Their original plan, a modest proposal to visit a performance of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, in the year 1612 was soon shunted aside. The future of the whole Western World was calling now, with an urgent appeal. They had to go back and finish the mission, back to find a way to prevent the birth of the terrorist Husan al Din—but how? Kelly’s life was spared, and the clues that had been left on a note in a raincoat from the future, had been enough to set their course.
Nordhausen took some small satisfaction in the fact that he was the one who first deciphered the meaning of the visitor’s note. It was just a series of numbers that he took to be a date. 11101917-K172 became November 10, 1917, and the alphanumeric after the hyphen turned out to be an exact location on the Hejaz rail line: Kilometer 172. They had a time and a place, but the real problem was to find just what they had to accomplish if they could reach that crucial moment in time. As it turned out, that location was the scene of an ambush staged by one Lawrence of Arabia on that very day. He was planning to blow up a train to raise the fallen spirits of his men after their primary mission, a plan to destroy a bridge, had been foiled by a loose strap that sent a rifle clattering into the stony gorge to alert the Turks.
That was a perfect example of the theory. Tighten that gun strap and Lawrence goes for the bridge. He never comes to Kilometer 172 on November 10th, and a man named Masaui, fated to die in the raid, lives on instead. Somehow, that single life could change history and prevent Palma. That loose gun strap was going to change everything, and Lawrence’s ambush would end up destroying the entire Eastern Seaboard of North America.
Lawrence of Arabia! Nordhausen smiled to himself as he recalled the eerie glow he had seen about the man that last morning of the mission. He had come within a few yards of a Prime Mover, one of history’s most colorful and yet enigmatic figures. There he was, silhouetted against the slate gray dawn on a miserable wet morning, and all Nordhausen could do was gape helplessly at the man in shivering silence.
It was forbidden, of course, to have any interaction with a Prime Mover. Maeve Lindford had beat that tenet into his head a hundred times before the mission. She had been verbally fencing with Nordhausen the night before they left, dead set on preventing him from doing any real research if the project worked… well it did work. They went back alright, but Nordhausen would be damned if he could think of a single thing he had accomplished to change the history. Paul swore the same. Neither man could put their finger on anything they did to unhinge the ambush the Arabs had planned at Kilometer 172. Yet they clearly did something, stumbling about in the cold and rain, confused, tired and bewildered by the experience of traveling in time. Some tiny, insignificant event was set in motion, or prevented, by one of them. Yet they could not discern what the "Pushpoint," as Paul called it, was.
Time moved on the whisper of nothingness, on the careless whim of a humdrum second or two that no one would give the scarcest notice. He always thought it would be great men, Prime Movers all, who would forge the shape of future days. Instead it was poppycock, happenstance, odd coincidence, chance moments in the stream of time. These were the things that carried the seeds of tomorrow.
They knew they had to alter Lawrence’s mission, but how? Where was the Pushpoint? Was it the wire leading to his igniter? Faulty charges in the gelatine? Did the Turkish colonel happen upon something when he searched the railroad tracks? Could he have crushed the Pushpoint under foot as casually as he might step upon a fallen cigarette butt, grinding it into the gravel of the rail bed? Whatever it was, they had been successful. The moment they returned Maeve read them the passage in Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom, and it had changed. Nordhausen had used the book to help them discover the crucial meeting point on the Hejaz rail line where all of future time was waiting to be born. If it were not for that wonderful book…
Thoughts of the Seven Pillars, and the three separate drafts Lawrence had penned, shook Nordhausen from his reverie. Lawrence’s detailed written account of his exploits in the desert had proved a saving grace. It had served as a road map for them on the first trip, and now it was the firm object of Nordhausen’s desire on this second trip.
Here he was, riding in coach number seven as it rolled into Reading Station west of London on a crisp November day in 1919. He would bide his time, watching carefully from his window seat until his quarry left the train and made his way over to the refreshment room for a mid-day tea and crumpet. The man would be carrying a messenger’s bag, of the sort they used to transport important papers, currency, or gold. Why his mark selected such a bag was beyond him. Surely it would be hard to overlook where he was going to leave it haphazardly under the table in the refreshment room. Surely it would be a severe temptation to anyone who found it.