“Too late? You mean too late to stop you? No, my friend, I was right on target. I came through from… Let us just say that I was timely enough with my arrival. But you have not answered my question. How did you discover this place? When did you arrive, and, since we are both safe here in a Nexus, what were you about?”
Nordhausen was still struggling with the idea that some dire accident had befallen Paul, when an inner sense put the subtle clues in the man’s words together and handed him the solution.
This man thinks I was sent here; on some kind of mission. He’s asking me about arrival times, and I damn well know he doesn’t mean my flight to Amman. Nordhausen covered his mouth with his hand for a moment, as though unwilling to let his mind blurt out any of his confusion and bewilderment. One thought still clawed at him: Paul.
“Damn, I wish I had never dragged him into this now. What’s happened to him? Do you know?”
“Ah, you are worried about your friend. I understand. Then he did not intend to jump here? Do you mean to say that he was merely sent to observe? I see!” Rasil nodded his head with inner confirmation. “That is why you arrived early. You meant to establish yourselves here as observers—perhaps you set up a monitor in the Wadi to try and analyze the vectors. But you did not expect us at this hour and our meeting was mere coincidence. Am I correct? Then your friend became restless and wandered into the cave for a closer look. Too close, perhaps. If you are telling me the truth, and he did not intend to jump, then it is almost certain that he has fallen.”
Nordhausen clasped his forehead, straining to get his mind around all of this. The man’s words would lead him through a thorny path, and then land him right smack in the middle of his greatest fear. Paul must have slipped over some unseen ledge in the heart of the stony cavern.
“Fallen?” He repeated the word, his worry and self-recrimination wrapped about it like a wet blanket.
“That is not good,” said Rasil. “He was not prepared, and this will certainly be hard on him, if he gets through safely at all. And it will introduce a variation, at the very least; possibly even a more significant transformation if he is not very careful at the other end. We will just have to wait and see. I will be interested to hear your thoughts on this.”
There was much more in Rasil’s words than Nordhausen caught at first. It was almost as if… “What do you mean: if he gets through?” he blurted out. “You’re not making sense! You mean to say that you know where he may have fallen? Why, we’ve got to get in there! We can dig up the truss from our cargo and use the tethering line if we need to. You’ve got two strong men here.“
“We cannot go through that way,” said Rasil. “As I said, the well has dissipated. The reaction takes time to build up. It will be another month before the energy is sufficient—but I doubt if we will be using this gate again, now that you have discovered us. Your friend has gone through in my place, and things may be very difficult for him: dementia, nausea, not to mention the physical danger of the fall itself. But, if he is fortunate and Allah wills it, then he will land safely on the other side. What happens to him there is not for us to know. We are in a Nexus Point, my friend. This business has tempted fate, and now we must simply wait.”
14
Maeve sat at the lab console, her elbow leaning heavily on the armrest of her chair, chin in hand. Her deep hazel eyes scanned the long rows of display panels, replete with dials, switches, readout monitors and colorful LEDs. It was hard to believe that they could control destiny from this very room. With the right calculations, and enough research into the loom and weave of past events, they could stroll through the Arch and emerge in any time and place of their choosing. The notion still staggered her with its implications. How they managed to keep the whole thing a secret thus far was beyond her. The moment the government found out about this they would swoop down and seize the entire operation: facilities, people, data, everything.
She realized that moment would make an end of the world as she knew it—as she thought it to be all of her life. They had only just begun to meddle with eternity. The first breach of faith had been the harrowing mission to the Hejaz to reverse the Palma catastrophe. The equipment held together long enough for Paul and Robert to pull it off and make it safely home. She spent weeks debriefing the two travelers to try and ascertain just exactly what they did to alter the Meridian. After months of speculation and additional research, they still did not know. The Outcome was clear and unequivocaclass="underline" Palma never happened, and Paradox had been averted by the narrowest margin—largely through the efforts of unseen counterparts in the future.
She tried to imagine them, wondering what year they had come back from and what the time travel project must be like there now after their success. Were they reveling in their time, jubilant with the new life they had created by preventing those towering wave sets from smashing the Eastern Seaboard? Every time she tried to join in that celebration the fear emerged in its place. Kelly nearly died, and there were hundreds of thousands of lives that were saved—probably millions. The future travelers had been desperate to reverse Palma and save those lives. What horror played itself out in that alternate thread of time—the thread in which her life first began?
Only a handful of people, those that were safe in the Deep Nexus during the mission, would ever know what that older world was like. She was one of the knowing few, along with Kelly, Robert, Paul and the technicians that had been with them at the Arch complex that night. It seemed that there was a definite sphere of influence around the Arch that had remained stable and protected when the transformation came about. Every thing had changed, even the lab equipment and furniture had been subtly altered. She looked at the desktop at this workstation and saw that the nick in the corner where she always set her teacup down, was no longer there. Things changed in a Nexus, said Paul, but not living beings—not living memories. The temporal consciousness and cell-based memories of those protected in a Nexus Point were the one thing that remained unaltered. And when we die, she thought, then no one will know what happened here.
The fear returned to her with that thought, pulsing up again from the pit of her stomach and setting off that anxiety ridden adrenaline reaction. Every day she had lived out since the mission ended had been a battle with that fear. She kept opening cupboards and peeking into the corners of her home, as if she was afraid she would find something missing, changed, altered, and gone forever. Yet everything seemed the same. The world she was living in now was virtually identical to the one she had been born into. That made sense, she reasoned, because the real changes would be caused by all those hundreds of thousands of lives that were not extinguished last May. They were all alive now, going about jobs, consuming food and energy, procreating, writing stories, discovering the daily business of their lives. With each and every act, even something as simple as the stirring of a spoon in a cup of tea, the Meridian was changing course and veering off in a direction it was never meant to reach. Now that she was being swept along in that gathering torrent of change, she would never recover the timeline of the world she had been born to. Everything would seem quite normal, quite the same here, just a few short months after Palma was prevented.
The changes were remarkably minor in these first days—and she looked with increasing diligence as the time ticked by. There were a few books that had been moved to different shelves in her library. The arrangement of items in a desk drawer was subtly altered. Yes, she had an uncanny visual memory for things in her own private world. Any odd little ripple from the stone they had dropped in the still waters of time would be noticed by her careful eye. One of her vases had a crack in the rim, and then there was this missing nick in the desktop here at her workstation. A little extra wear and tear in one place, a little mending in another—almost as if time was making sure to balance her books. This would be easy labor for her, she thought. Years from now, however, when one of the lives salvaged from the catastrophe of Palma did something truly significant, then Mother Time would have her real work cut out for her.