Yes, the differences would just be beginning now, but there, in that far-flung future she could only imagine, things would be drastically different—entirely new. Even as she had been scouring the corners of her world to root out the slightest hint of alteration, they would be overwhelmed to look out on the world they had brought about when the Nexus finally dissipated on their end of the operation. I’ll bet they’ve been spending the last few months just taking it all in, she thought.
How would it be? They could go to the nearest library and find hundreds of thousands of books—all entirely new—resting quietly on the dusty shelves! How could they possibly take that all in and own it as a world they could live in again? She realized that the elite few who found themselves in a Nexus Point of change would become lost, gypsy souls in a world of their own making, but one where they could never truly be at peace.
That thought replayed her reverie on Shakespeare, and all the arguments she made to Nordhausen when they had considered what to do with the project. “Don’t you realize how fragile this all is,” she remembered telling him. “Do you want to reach for Othello and find it gone, different, changed?”
“Ah,” he had countered, “But what if I find something new! Wouldn’t that be just as significant! What if I were to find another play!”
Maeve remembered how she had left the meeting that night and hastened over to the UC Berkeley library. She ran up to the literature section and went storming down the aisles with the anger of her argument still fresh in her eyes. The poor grad student who happened to be in the English Lit section saw her coming and seemed to skirt aside as if a freight train had been bearing down on him. Maeve tramped up to the stacks and snatched every last volume of Shakespeare’s work while the lad just gaped at her with a slack jawed expression on his face. She was going to check—every play, every line, every word.
Six hours later she had satisfied herself that everything was in order. Nordhausen wasn’t going to find another play. They were all there, all thirty-seven of them, and though she didn’t have quite the time required to read each one, she had gone to the heart and soul of them all, and found Shakespeare living happily in the verse. Nothing was missing; nothing seemed out of place; nothing jarred or lacked the luster, artistry and passion of his expression. Shakespeare was safe. His words had been written long before T.E. Lawrence ever had the chance to read them. The change made in the Meridian had occurred in 1917. Everything before that time was unaltered.
The argument with Nordhausen flared up from time to time. They went round and round, but Maeve persisted. The time project was too dangerous a thing to leave intact. The Arch should be shut down—dismantled—and the research locked away or destroyed. Even as she pressed her arguments home, however, she knew how futile they would be in the end. Mr. Graves’ knock on Nordhausen’s study door that stormy night in May had already made a mockery of them all—and Robert let her know that fact had not escaped him one evening over coffee.
“You know we can’t keep this covered up for long, Maeve,” he said. “Otherwise how could Graves drop by that night, eh?” Just like atomic power before it, they could not purge the knowledge of time travel now that it had been found to be a practical reality. The cat was out of the bag.
Nordhausen relented, however, and they put everything on hold for a time. Until now. Here she was in the lab again, at this ungodly hour, and Kelly, bless him, was busily working out some data runs in the next room. Here she was, hot on the trail of her favorite nemesis—with every good suspicion and a growing body of evidence suggesting that Nordhausen had opened the continuum a second time! This time she would do a good deal more than argue with him when she finally brought him to heel for this little transgression. She looked around, noting what she might use in the environment to crack over the man’s thick skull. Not my teacup, she muttered to herself, and then concluded that a nice firm knuckle rap on the noggin would have to do—for a start.
Kelly was back, his face still buried in a sheaf of data files as he came shuffling into the room. Maeve brightened to see him, the one good thing that had come of this whole business for her. “Well maestro,” she greeted him, “what have you found?”
Kelly looked up briefly and angled into a chair next to her workstation. His medium brown hair was pulled back and tied off in a short tail beneath the baseball cap he often wore when he was working like this. She had smiled to see how he had donned the cap the moment he stepped into the lab, his mind shifting into a new realm, a world of algorithms and formulae that she still found befuddling.
“Well,” he said, “our friend Robert was definitely up to something. I think I’ve recovered the temporal locus now. A lot of the data blocks were pretty corrupted, but I ran a street sweeper over the disk and found quite a bit left in the magnetic resonance signatures—quite a bit.”
15
Maeve smiled, deciding that she was going to let Kelly use all the jargon he wanted this time. Her affection for him stilled the reflexive urge to lecture him about the necessity of speaking layman’s English once in a while, but that license still did not prevent her from nudging him with her next question. “Where?” She made it nice and simple, and hoped he would not launch into a long explanation about how he came to his answer. She was pleasantly surprised.
“1919,” he said bluntly. “November. I couldn’t resolve the day, but the spatial data should give us plenty to work with. It seems he was in London.”
“London?”
“Yes, right smack in the heart of the city, in fact. I’ve got the breaching point narrowed down to within a quarter mile or so. Odd thing is this: the retraction data shows that he wandered pretty far a field while he was there. The system pulled him out just a few hours after the breach, and he was nearly sixty kilometers west of the breaching point when the retraction scheme kicked in.”
“Where?” The question seemed to work wonders the first time.
“My guess was that he was somewhere near Reading. I’ll know for certain in about a half an hour.”
Maeve thought for the briefest moment and came to a quick conclusion. “Then he took the train out of London,” she said. “That’s the only way he could have traveled that distance if you have the retraction time nailed down.”
“Hammered it myself,” said Kelly with a smile. “So what do you figure he was up to?”
“God only knows,” Maeve sighed letting her exasperation vent a bit.
“Well, we’d have to run date queries in the history database for hours to isolate something significant.”
“For all the good it might do us,” Maeve quipped. “Who knows what he did while he was there, Kelly. Sure we could run up the history files, but who’s to say they would mean anything. I mean, if he changed things… Lord, that man tempts fate with utter impunity!” She fixed him with that look she would use to drive home a point, and he took her meaning at once.
“Right. If he caused a variation then the history would seem completely innocuous—unless one of us recognized something wrong, something out of place. But that couldn’t happen because we weren’t part of the operation. We weren’t in the Nexus—safe in the null zone of the void.”