Nordhausen gasped inwardly as the man finished. He had picked out two other terms that Paul often used when he talked about time. In fact, the other man’s words only made sense in that very context—time. Yet his anxiety only increased as his confusion abated. How could this man be spouting terms right out of Paul’s lexicon on time theory? His throat was dry and he swallowed to clear his voice. There was one surefire way to synchronize his thinking with this stranger. He looked him straight in the eye and spoke.
“Nexus Point… Variation… Clarity… Temporal Locus…” He plucked out the words and handed them back to his captor, watching him closely as he finished with one final addition of his own: “Pushpoint.” The man’s eyes widened with surprise. He had been staring past Nordhausen, deep in thought as he gazed back along the winding throat of the cave to the gloaming amber of Wadi Rumm. Now he fixed the professor with a hard, stare, his eyes alight with emotion.
“So,” he breathed. “Then you are not what you seem after all! You are a member of the Order! How quaint. I should have guessed as much. This story you concocted was too wild and preposterous to be believed. What was it you buried in the Wadi, eh? Did you bring in equipment?”
“Now, just a moment,” said Nordhausen. “You used those words yourself. Where did you hear them? What exactly did you mean?”
“Don’t be coy with me. It does not become you.”
Nordhausen glanced at the two guards, who were watching the conversation indifferently from the back of the cave hollow.
“Oh, do not concern yourself with them,” said the stranger. “My men do not speak English, and, even if they did, they would not understand what we were talking about. My, my, what a fool I have been to ramble on like this. You are very clever, professor—if that is how you prefer to be thought of. Tell me: how did you discover we were operating here?”
Nordhausen’s mind was racing with every phrase the man uttered. A moment ago it seemed that they had reached some common ground, but now the man was veering off onto another tangent, leaving confusion in his wake. The stranger waited for him to answer, but he could only burst out with a question of his own.
“Who in God’s name are you?”
The stranger smiled, this time with a little warmth, as though he had come to some new assessment of the professor and perceived him as an equal now—not simply someone to be bullied about for his trespass here.
“In God’s name? Yes, in Allah’s name I will tell you. I am Abdul Hakam, Servant of the Arbitrator. That is a given name, but also very telling. Others call me Rasil, the Messenger. And you? What is your given name?”
“Robert,” said the professor. “Robert Nordhausen.”
“Ah!” The man smiled broadly now. “Then you are named after a real warrior—one we call Badi al Zaman: the Marvel of Time. Many tales are told of Boulos and the Badi al Zaman. In fact, he lives this very moment. You even bear a resemblance. Tell me, when did you arrive? The penumbra has kept us all at bay for so long that it is surprising anyone is able to get back past the event now. What a day that was! We call that one the Day Of Retribution, but you found a way to nullify our advantage. Yes, I was in the Deep Nexus when everything changed, and I remember how it all was before things solidified again. It was a good time for us then, but now all is overthrown.” His eyes clouded over with a vacant darkness, resolving to a carefully controlled squint of anger.
“What age are you?” The question was curt and sudden, demanding in the voice of the captor again.
Nordhausen did not quite know what to make of it, or why his age would be relevant. “My age? Well, I was born in the 1960s,” he began.
“Ah, then you are of the seventh age—I am of the ninth—so you would not know of what I speak. I will tell you then, for we are safe in a Nexus now, and no harm can be done. The Moslem world once stretched to a third of the surface of the earth. The muezzin’s call to prayer reverberated from a hundred thousand minarets, all over the world. When the hajj came, the multitudes thronged to Mecca in numbers that would stagger the imagination. Do you have any idea what it was like? The sea of pilgrims became an ocean of believers clothed in the simplicity of the iraam. They would stretch for miles and miles on the roads leading into the city. There were so many that the holy days had to be extended to accommodate them. They smothered the plains about Mount Arafat, flowing in to the sacred Mosque of Haram and circling the Ka’ba in an endless murmuring stream of prayer that had no end. We were nearly three billion strong then! Now…” The darkness returned to his eyes, then flared with the light of determination. “Things are different now, and I suppose you know as much about that as any man, yes? That was truly a masterstroke, my friend! You will have to tell me how you accomplished it! Strange that the Order recruits from this time—but agents are kept in every era now, by both sides. The struggle continues, so do not rest easy. We have a saying: ‘nothing is written,’ and we hope to see the pilgrims clot the roads to Mecca again one day—rest assured.”
Rasil’s eyes glowed as he spoke, a challenge in his words and a smile animating the dark stubble of his beard. “But forgive me.” He gestured to his guards, indicating that they should release the professor’s bonds. “There is no need for this now, and I understand your outrage at the treatment you received. Forgive my poor manners. I did not know! You are very clever, my friend. So, how did you learn of this place?”
Now Nordhausen was truly flustered. The stranger, Rasil as he called himself, was talking like one of the lab techs at the Arch complex in Berkeley! He used yet another of Paul’s favorite terms: Penumbra. Who was this man? He tossed about possibilities in the twinkling of a moment’s thought: was he a government agent trailing the two of them on their trip to Jordan? He discarded that card at once, for it had been mere happenstance that the helicopter landed here—unless the damn pilot was in cahoots all along—but no, he had forced the pilot to land at gunpoint. This meeting was entirely random, yet this man was talking like he had been in on the time project from the very first.
Then the notion that he had been avoiding finally tackled him and he fell flat on his belly with the realization.
This man is a time traveler. He’s another one of Mr. Graves band of meddling miracle workers from the future! It was the only thing that made any sense. How else could the man know these terms and speak them in such a clearly related context? And he thinks… by God, he thinks I’m a time traveler as well, or at least some agent in that enterprise. That’s why he’s changed his manner and gone all civil and polite of a sudden. A moment ago he was threatening to cut my throat, and now he’s grinning at me like a Cheshire cat.
A time traveler! Paul argued it himself: the clearest evidence that time travel was possible would be visitations from the future. Nordhausen knew only too well that anything was possible now that the Arch had torn its first fateful breach in the continuum. The notion that this new technology would survive into future generations, and be used, was not a difficult leap. But what would this man be doing here in the middle of Wadi Rumm? A sudden answer came to him, all in that same fleeting instant. Paul…
“Something’s happened to my friend, hasn’t it? You knew we would be here,” he was groping in his thinking now, “and you were trying to intervene somehow, just like you did with Kelly, yes?” The notion that Paul had suffered some accident in the cave preyed upon him with a vengeance as he finished. “But you were too late.”