“And that’s exactly why this business is so damn dangerous. What if he tries this again? How would we know if things are the way they’re supposed to be? It’s maddening! You know, I spent six hours in a library one night just to satisfy myself that Shakespeare was sleeping peacefully between the covers of all his books. Now what—do I have to go over there and read all thirty-seven plays again?”
Kelly scratched his forehead. “Now Maeve,” he began. “Let’s not jump to conclusions here until we have more information. You’re right,” he placated her, “this is bullshit. He just can’t go off on a train ride through the English countryside and then cover the whole thing up like this. It’s not right.”
“It’s Nordhausen.” The finality in Maeve’s voice carried a wealth of emotion. “It’s the reason why we have to shut this down. Don’t you see, Kelly? We’re adrift now, without any compass or even a sure star to steer by. We have no reference point to tether us to any sense of reality. Things could be changing and we’d never even know it!”
“I agree with you completely,” he assured her. “In fact, I was thinking a lot about that after Paul first brought up this business about the stability factors in a void created by a Nexus Point.”
“Stability factors?”
“You remember the meeting we had about two weeks before the mission? Paul was talking about the Nexus, and how it forms this protective bubble around the Arch. He thinks there’s a physical void associated with the Arch itself, and not merely a temporal void that protects the actual travelers.”
“You’re losing me,” Maeve complained.
“Hang on a second. We didn’t go through the Arch, right?”
“Right.”
“So how is it we still remember Palma and all the rest? We weren’t in the temporal void, but we were inside the physical null zone around the Arch. Paul wasn’t sure just how far its influence would extend, but it looks like we’re getting a good measure on that now—say a hundred yards or so. That’s why we can still remember what happened that night. The lab here is about five floors above the Arch, right? That’s well within that radius. Now, take Tom, for example.”
“Tom? What’s he got to do with all this?”
“Hear me out for a second. Tom was down in the generator room throughout the whole mission, right? Now those steps are on the other side of the complex, and there’s a corridor heading east for about thirty yards before you get to the generator room.”
“And your point is?” Maeve tried to curtail her impatience and Kelly pressed on to finish his thought.
“That puts the generator room well beyond the hundred yard radius. Don’t you see? I spent some time with Tom after the mission. He doesn’t remember anything at all!”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean that I asked him, half jokingly, what he thought of the news over the Memorial Day weekend and he didn’t get the joke.”
“I’m not sure I do.”
“He didn’t know, Maeve. He had no inkling that the entire east coast was about to be inundated with a three hundred foot tsunami. He wasn’t in the Nexus!”
Maeve bit her lower lip, considering. “We knew there was something odd about Tom’s experience. He seemed completely unaffected, but we weren’t sure why. And that cute lab tech Paul was flirting with had a lot of unaccountable blank spots in her memory as well.”
“You mean Jen? Yes, that confirms my theory—or Paul’s theory. The intercom was out that night because of the storm. Must have been a freak lightening strike or something. In any case, Jen was shuttling back and forth between the lab here and the generator room all through the mission. She was physically moving in and out of the null spot surrounding the Arch. Paul told me she was feeling strange all night. She had this sense that something truly significant was happening, and then the heart of it would slip away from her. One minute she was worried sick about the news of the Palma event, and then the next she moment she had completely forgotten about it. She wrote it all off to the stress of the moment, but it’s pretty telling evidence for the notion that the physical null zone has a limited radius. That’s why nobody else on earth knows what really happened that night except the four of us.”
“But Jen remembers Palma. Paul told me he had to do a lot of explaining to settle her down after the retraction.”
“Yes, Jen too, I suppose,” said Kelly. “She has partial memory of the event. She knows what happened because she was right here in the lab when we pulled Nordhausen out, but it all seems like a dream to her. She gets these odd déjà vu experiences now. Have you talked to Paul about it? The poor girl wakes up screaming, drenched in sweat. Paul has to sit with her for hours to help her sort everything through. I think the key moment was when the transformation actually took place at the mission end of the operation. Jen must have been up here in the lab when that happened. That put her in the Nexus with us—right in the eye of the storm. But right after I ran the final retraction scheme on Paul, I sent Jen down to tell Tom to cut the power. She moved outside that hundred yard radius again, very soon after the retraction.”
“What do you think happened?”
“Well, I’m not quite sure, but I think it takes a little while for the Nexus to collapse after the time breach is closed. That’s when Paradox is active, trying to clean up all the little loose ends and broken threads that it can before the new Milieu solidifies and the Meridian takes a definite course.”
“Don’t remind me,” said Maeve, a warning in her eyes. She didn’t want to think about that awful moment when she first realized that Kelly’s life would be forfeit if the mission succeeded.
“Just this once.” Kelly needed to get this out, and he ventured on. “I was fading, Maeve. God, it was an odd feeling—like when you start to pass out but your senses still keep working. I could see, and hear, and feel the cold surround me… I just had to get that note written, because I think I knew that someone was punching my ticket right then.”
“Kelly…” Maeve’s eyes were glassy and he could see that she was struggling to keep her feelings in check.
“Sorry, Maeve.” He put his hand on her knee, a gentle reassurance that he was still there, alive and well. “Don’t worry. We’ve got some good long years ahead of us yet.”
“A hundred years,” she whispered.
“A hundred years,” he repeated with a smile. “If you’ll have me.” He took off his baseball cap and ran his hand through his hair. “Well the point of all this is that I had this idea.”
“Not another one of those ideas,” Maeve teased with a smile. “How much time did you burn on our Arion system account with this one?“
“A lot,” Kelly confessed. “I guess I’ll be making my own little deposit in the project account to cover the debt. But I had this idea and so I worked up a program.”
“A program?”
“Yes, and I’ve had it running round the clock on a machine in the next room. On a lot of machines, in fact.”
“Twenty-four hours a day? What’s it doing, crunching some numbers for you?”
“Kind of… Remember when you said we had lost our reference point? Well I felt the same way for a good long while after I came back. I mean, you should have seen the operation these guys had.”
“You’re talking about our friends in the future—about Graves and all?”
“Right. They had some slick operation there. I wanted to get a look at their consoles but they wouldn’t let me set one foot out of my receiving chamber—that was what they called it. But I could see some of the equipment when they came and went through the door.”