Meridian - A Novel In Time (The Meridian Series) Read online

  MERIDIAN

  A Novel In Time

  By

  John Schettler

  AWARDS & RECOGNITION FOR MERIDIAN

  ForeWord Magazine’s

  S I L V E R M E D A L W I N N E R

  For Science Fiction

  “Book of the Year”

  2002

  &

  “Honorable Mention”

  Writer’s Digest

  Genre Fiction

  “Book of the Year”

  2002

  Rated 9.5 out of 10

  ______

  Copyright Notice

  All material in this file is protected under U.S. Copyright Law.

  Meridian, Copyright©2002, John A. Schettler

  All Rights Reserved

  No part of this file may be duplicated, distributed, stored in any medium, or sold without expressed, written permission by the author.

  ISBN: 0-9713170-1-1

  John Schettler – [email protected]

  A publication of:

  The Writing Shop Press

  www.writingshop.ws

  Rev: 07/03

  WRITER’S DIGEST REVIEW OF MERIDIAN: “The ending is both believable and satisfying, and the writing is top-notch. This is a nine and a half on a scale of ten. It should have been snapped up by a commercial publisher.”

  “A striking cover and excellent production values make this a book one would pick off a rack. That would be a rewarding move, for Meridian is a science fiction novel combining history, quantum theory, and time travel in a highly intriguing manner. The author has a firm grasp of concepts here, and his understanding of the potential danger of travel into the past is finely tuned. The team of scientists involved in developing the Arch, their device for moving through time, is composed of interesting people who seem very real and compelling.

  The plot is more than complex, yet he keeps it very clear to the reader. The return through time of a man from the future comes at a point when a mega tsunami, caused by the collapse of a wall of a volcano in the Canary Islands, is on its way toward the U.S. His enigmatic message, that they alone can avert the disaster through returning to 1917 and changing a small detail in the career of T.E. Lawrence, sets the team on a perilous course.”

  Writer's Digest: “Book of the Year” Contest

  Judge’s official review and commentary

  With gracious thanks to Richard, Mark and Candace

  For being the friends they are to me and

  For inspiring my Kelly, Robert, and Maeve.

  “Heaven from all creatures hides the book of fate.”

  Alexander Pope: An Essay on Man II

  MERIDIAN

  By

  John Schettler

  Part I – Page 1

  The Tempest

  Part II – Page 59

  Dreamers

  Part III – Page 99

  The Arch

  Part IV – Page 141

  K-T Excursion

  Part V – Page 175

  The Desert

  Part VI – Page 199

  Many Questions

  Part VII – Page 225

  The Least Of Things

  Part VIII – Page 249

  Pushpoint

  Part IX – Page 273

  Retraction

  Part X – Page 293

  Outcomes & Consequences

  Epilogue – Page 324

  Afterword Page 330

  Glossary of Time 340

  From Dorland’s Theory

  MERIDIAN

  Part I

  The Tempest

  “We for a certainty are not the first

  Have sat in taverns while the tempest hurled

  Their hopeful plans to emptiness and cursed

  Whatever brute and blackguard made the world.”

  A.E. Housman: Last Poems IX

  “And like the baseless fabric of this vision,

  The cloud capped towers, the gorgeous palaces,

  The Solemn temples, the great globe itself,

  Yea, all which it inherit shall dissolve,

  And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,

  Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff

  as dreams are made on, and our little life

  is rounded with a sleep.”

  Shakespeare: The Tempest, Act VI, Scene I

  1

  The Nordhausen Study: Berkeley, California – 8:15 PM

  “I warn you, if the outcome is anywhere close to the preliminary readings, then we have a problem; and a very serious problem at that.” Dorland allowed himself a sip of coffee, his eyes dark ovals in the haze of steam above the rim of a Styrofoam cup.

  “Oh, Paul,” Maeve Lindford was at the bookcase squinting at the spine of a volume in the literature section of the study. “When will you learn to drink from a proper mug?”

  “When I can find someone to wash the damn thing,” said Dorland with the same dire intensity.

  “Well, don’t worry about the numbers until they get here,” said Maeve. “We worked hard on this solution. Everything will be fine.”

  “Yes,” said Dorland. “Fine as rain. The preliminaries show a .0027 percent discrepancy value for the entry zone. We aren’t sure where the target will be in the time frame the professor has chosen, and that makes me nervous.”

  “It’ll be fine, Paul.” Professor Nordhausen spoke up from his place at the study table. “He’ll be there, I assure you—probably up in the gallery with the important guests.”

  “Well I wish I could be so certain.” Dorland was shifting uneasily in his chair by the table, obviously upset about something, though he seemed more frustrated than angry. “What time is it?” He craned his neck about to have a look at the study clock on the mantle overlooking the fireplace. “Where’s Kelly? Is he going to make us wait until morning again?” There were four chairs around the study table; three showing obvious signs of occupation, with coats and scarves draped on the polished wood uprights and stacks of books and papers heaped on the table. The odd chair was waiting for the fourth member of the group, Chief Technician Kelly Ramer, running numbers in the computer lab, and he was always late.

  “You know how hard it is to get time on an Arion mainframe these days, Paul,” Maeve chided again.

  “Damn near impossible.” Professor Nordhausen shifted in his chair and eyed Dorland over the dark rim of his reading glasses, an irritated expression adding definition to the wrinkles etching his forehead. In his late-forties, the professor had settled into a comfortable agreement with his deeply receded hairline. Dorland remembered when he sported a full head of curly hair in his college days, for the two had a long history. Nordhausen had long since given up on the effort to cultivate what little remained of his hair. “We need another Arion unit on site if the project surprises us and actually works.” He wagged a finger at Dorland as he finished.

  “I’d have three if I could,” said Dorland, “but the budget is strained enough as it is. An Arion mainframe will run us another ten million. Care to write me a check? Until then, we’ll have to stand in line and lease time on the university machines, like everybody else.”

  While simple desktops had tremendous computing power, the computational requirements of the Dorland Project would require a network of several thousand PCs. There were, however, a few Arion mainframes deployed in universities and government facilities for runtime sessions requiring intense computation like weather modeling or exotic 3D-Holography. Named for the mythical horse endowed with the gift of speech and prophecy, the Arion series computers were massive parallel processing units with enormous computational power. A typical Arion syste
m could now do the work of three high-end Cray machines. They were usually booked the whole year through, but Dorland had managed to secure five coveted sessions to run the crucial calculations necessary for his project. The computer genius of the group, Kelly Ramer, was finishing the last session tonight and was scheduled to bring in the numbers on a laptop for the meeting. He had to go all the way into the City, however, as there was no time left on the closer machine at U.C. Berkeley.

  “Well, I wouldn’t worry too much about it,” Nordhausen sighed, his tone shifting noticeably. “If you ask me, the whole thing is a waste of valuable comp cycles.”

  “You aren’t going to start in on that again, are you?” Dorland was drumming his fingers on the oak tabletop now, visibly agitated. His long slender hands moved in a graceful motion, index finger tapping out a steady rhythm.

  “Waste of time,” Nordhausen said again, obviously intending to stir the kettle, though Maeve shot him an admonishing glance just the same. “It won’t work,” he pressed on. “Even if the theory is sound, as it may very well be, I still think the whole thing is impossible. So it doesn’t matter if the target is there or not, Paul. We may never know.”

  “So certain again, are you?” Dorland shot him an annoyed glance. “Honestly, Robert, one minute you’re absolutely convinced that everything will be fine, and then the next thing out of your mouth is this damned pessimism! What’s your problem?”

  “I’m just being realistic,” Nordhausen corrected. “It’s not pessimism. I have my doubts, that’s all. Hawking said it best: if it really is possible to travel in time then why aren’t we awash in time travelers? You’ve never answered that one, you know. Don’t you think they’d be just a little bit interested in a meeting like this, for instance?”

  “Oh please,” Dorland rolled his eyes in obvious dismay. He had heard this complaint before; argued it many times in fact, but Nordhausen was still as stubborn now as when he had first broached the subject with him three years ago. “You really don’t expect a team of future researchers to just come barging in and join us for coffee, do you? Hello,” he acted the part, with a clear edge of sarcasm in his voice to let Nordhausen know he wasn’t happy to be launched on this course again. “Please excuse us, but we’re from the future and we understand this to be a particularly important meeting. Mind if we just stand here off to one side while you folks make a bit of history. We promise not to make any noise.” He looked away, obviously frustrated.

  “Well, to be honest I really don’t expect much of anything at all—and that’s exactly my point, Paul. Nothing is going to happen! Therefore this isn’t a particularly important meeting and, assuming your theory is correct, that’s why nobody is crashing the party. It’s simple, really, when you think on it.”

  “Oh, he’s thought on it,” Maeve put in with a smile, secretly pleased to find herself the referee again in another sparring session between the two senior researchers. Dorland was the Master Of Sciences on the project, and Nordhausen was Chief Historian. They had argued Time Theory many times before, but now that the project was at the very edge of their first real attempt at opening the continuum, the debate had begun to heat up again. Nordhausen, ever the devil’s advocate, was constantly jabbing at Dorland’s theory, in spite of his enormous commitment of time and resources to the effort that had brought them all this far. It was, however, the last thing Dorland needed just now. Healthy skepticism was one thing, but lately Nordhausen had begun to show real signs of backing out of the project altogether.

  “Well it’s obvious that he hasn’t given it much thought,” said Dorland over his shoulder at Maeve. “I mean there are any number of ways I could answer his argument.”

  “Indulge me.” Nordhausen folded his arms with a smug look on his face. “And will you please stop drumming your fingers on the table!”

  Dorland looked at his hand, and then ran it through his full brown hair. Unlike Nordhausen the ravages of time lay gently on him. They were the same age, but Paul still looked ten years younger, and some even thought he was still in his thirties. “Alright,” he began, “let’s put your pessimism aside for a moment and suppose we’re successful tomorrow. If that’s the case then we will have accomplished something that will have the most profound effect I can imagine on the future course of history.”

  “Yes, yes,” said Nordhausen, conceding the point. “All future time lines would be vulnerable to alteration if we’re successful.”

  “All time lines,” said Dorland, “both future and past. That makes the experiment tomorrow a Deep Nexus, which would make this whole milieu a Point of Origin—closed to any temporal contamination according to my theory—unless it’s done by one of us here on the inside. So that’s why we don’t have visitors in the back of the room slurping coffee, Professor. It’s really simple, if you think on it.” He mocked his adversary to make his point, but the grin on his face betrayed the long friendship between the two men, in spite of their obvious intellectual differences. It was this bond, forged over some thirty years, that had kept Nordhausen involved in the project, though at times he was a reluctant warrior.

  “Well there wouldn’t be enough to go around anyway,” Maeve chimed in as she slid another volume from the bookcase, frowning at the dust on the binding. “Make another pot, Paul. It looks like we’re going to be here for a while. Did you bring Peets?”

  “Guatemala,” said Dorland absent mindedly as he flipped through the pages of a notebook, still hot on the trail of his argument with Nordhausen.

  “I thought you were going to bring Major Dickason’s blend tonight. Guatemala is a good breakfast coffee but we’ll need something a little stronger if Robert starts digging his heels in again.”

  “Oh come now, Maeve,” Nordhausen protested mildly. “I’m just trying to make him think about his own theory here. He dreamt up all this stuff, remember? The idea of a time ‘penumbra’ is convenient, but nothing more than pure speculation. I think my argument still holds up quite well. If they could visit a pivotal event like this, they would visit it. And since we can’t even seem to get Kelly to join us in a timely manner, I’m not expecting anyone else to show up either.”

  Maeve was frowning at the spine of a volume of The Norton Anthology of Literature. “Don’t you ever clean in here, Robert? I could spend a whole day getting the dust off these books.”

  “Be my guest.” Nordhausen warmed to the offer immediately, but Maeve shook a warning finger at him. He tacked back to the argument with Paul, as if suddenly remembering something. “I thought you said a Prime Mover was the primary causative factor for an Imperative, and that only an Imperative event can cast a time penumbra.”

  “Precisely,” said Dorland as he scribbled a brief note in his journal.

  “Getting a bit overconfident, aren’t we?” Nordhausen needled his friend again. “I mean if the experiment does become a Deep Nexus then the first moment when we open the continuum would be an Imperative event, an event that must happen—is that what you’re starting to think now, Paul?”

  “Why shouldn’t I? If I had your attitude I would have torn out my hair long ago over this business, and given up.” He gave Nordhausen an accusing glance but the other man brushed it aside. “If you’re so convinced this is all poppycock, then why are you here? Could it be that there’s just a thimbleful of faith in your heart as well?”

  “Believe me,” said Nordhausen, “If there’s any possibility that you might actually gain access to the continuum tomorrow, then someone has to be certain you don’t start mucking things up.”

  “Oh, I see,” said Dorland. “You want to supervise again, is that it?”

  “He ought to hire a maid,” said Maeve again from the bookcase.

  “What are you doing over there, Maeve?” Nordhausen took advantage of the interruption to veer away from the conversation with Dorland for a moment. The two had quarreled in recent weeks over who should have final authority over the experiment. Up to this point it had been Dorland’s team of science expe
rts and physicists that had been the key players in the project. The time and investment required to build the project launch site, with its massive computing and power requirements, had been the mainstream of their effort thus far. Nordhausen worked on the sidelines with his team of historical researchers to isolate an appropriate target for their first experiment. Now that the project plant was fully operational, he argued that the historians should exercise primary operational control. Dorland was too close to the effort expended thus far to relinquish control, and the friction between them had been building as the launch date neared.

  Nordhausen slipped away from his place at the table and headed for the coffee station. He tugged on a gold chain attached to his sweater and drew out a pocket watch. “Eight-forty,” he muttered. “Wasn’t the meeting scheduled for eight? What’s Kelly up to? I know,” a mischievous glint brightened his eyes as he turned to Dorland. “He’s botched up the numbers again, and the whole thing is off. That’s why we don’t have visitors tonight. Kelly never shows and the meeting gets cancelled.” A satisfied grin dressed his features as he bent over the coffee station.

  “He’ll be here,” said Maeve, defending their missing compatriot. “He’s probably just stuck in traffic with all this weather. My lord—” She was squinting through the rain drizzled pane of the study window now, still clutching the volume of the Norton Anthology under her arm. “What’s going on out there? You’d think it was rush hour.”