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

  Maeve saw that he still had his copy of the Seven Pillars in hand and she stepped over and snatched it away from him. “Give me that.” She shot him a fiery glance and then handed the book to Kelly.

  “What am I supposed to do with this?”

  “Nothing,” said Maeve. “Until four o’clock, that is. Just take the book and put it in a drawer somewhere out of sight while you help Jen with the system monitors.”

  “I wasn’t going to bring the damn thing.” The professor was slightly miffed, still thinking Maeve was riding the warpath on him for his suggestion about the Bermuda Pamphlets. “I wish you’d get over this.”

  “No. This has nothing to do with you, Robert,” Maeve made a real effort to calm herself. “It’s for Kelly.”

  “What are you talking about? I’m coming too, Maeve. Where’s my costume?”

  “Kelly…” The tone in Maeve’s voice pulled at him. “Put the book in a drawer. Monitor the system panels with Jen here.” She glanced at the young technician, noting that she was fully focused on some task behind the console. “If we aren’t back by four AM I want you to open the drawer and read the passage in Lawrence’s narrative where this attack was made at Kilometer 172. Read it very carefully, but be quick about it. Paul, when is the tsunami sequence scheduled to make first landfall on the east coast?”

  “Around dawn; a little after four in the morning, our time.”

  “The visitor gave us the exact time,” Nordhausen said quietly. “He said eleven past the hour.”

  “Then you’ll have eleven minutes to do your reading, Kelly,” Maeve continued.

  Paul finally understood what she was getting at. “Yes!” He pointed at the book. “If we’ve done our job…If we’ve found the Pushpoint and changed things, then you can read the result in the book!” He looked at Maeve, just a hint of uncertainty in his voice.

  “Exactly.” Maeve supported him at once. “There were three trains, Kelly. As the history reads now, number two blows up. Remember that. You’re a Free Variable now.”

  “What?” Kelly was struggling to understand the time theory again. He was a programmer and a networking genius, but the logic of Dorland’s theory had always escaped him.

  “Yes, a Free Variable.” Paul took up the charge. “You said it yourself, Kelly. You aren’t supposed to even be here. We’re supposed to be over at the morgue identifying your body by now. Like I said earlier, this is an alternate time line for you,” he whispered, “for all of us in one sense, but particularly you, Kelly. Right now we’re in a Nexus Point. This is very rare, you see. Even though the tsunami is moving hundreds of kilometers per hour, it is still taking this precious time to make its way across the Atlantic. That interval is creating a Deep Nexus! The Palma Event has occurred already, but its primary effect is in the ripple of this tsunami wave. While we’re in the Nexus, in eye of the storm, if you will, we can all act as Free Variables! This means that even if we do go back and alter the time line you should still remember this conversation. The record of these events will be preserved in your mind, even if physical alterations in the matrix of reality occur here.” He tried to say it another way. “If we change history the passage in the book will change, Kelly. You’ll be able to read about it, possibly even discover what we ended up doing. Look, the visitor vanished, but we all still remember him, right? Then you should remember this conversation as well! If we don’t get back before four AM, you’ll have those eleven minutes to decide what to do with the retraction module. I’ve told Jen to monitor it very closely, but we may need programming. We may need your magic, Kelly. You’re the only one who could re-program the algorithm on this end if something goes wrong.”

  Kelly finally realized what they were saying, but he still had a bewildered look on his face. “Well, what do I look for?” He gave the book a forlorn glance.

  “I’ve marked the place and scribbled all over the pages as well,” said Nordhausen.

  “The way it reads now, Kelly, the second train, the one coming up from Amman, was blown up by Lawrence and his men. At four AM you read the passage through. If the second train gets by unscathed, and the third train blows up, the one from the north, then we’ve done our job and you can pull us out. Otherwise hang tight until the last possible minute. Let the fail-safe retraction scheme bring us home. It may give us just the extra time we need there.”

  “What about the first train?” Nordhausen asked.

  “Ignore it,” said Paul. “Maeve and I have worked this out.”

  “Now, put the book away in a drawer like I said,” Maeve cautioned him. “I want it out of sight. Don’t touch it until four AM. Understand?”

  “What if the damn thing vanishes, like the old man, or the note?” Kelly had a desperate look on his face.

  “I think it will remain a stable element in this environment,” said Maeve, and Paul nodded his ascent.

  “Lawrence is going to write the book one way or another. The note was a Radical Variable, the book should hold true, except for the outcome in this particular narrative. The only way it could vanish is if we do something that gets Lawrence killed.”

  Jen had finished her work behind the main console and came running up with the good news. “Everything’s ready! You can toggle the primary power surge from the main console now.”

  “Well people,” Paul took a deep breath. “The three of us are wasting precious time. Let’s head for the Arch!”

  They started away in a rush of motion, leaving Kelly in their wake holding the volume of the Seven Pillars, and looking like a lost child. Paul looked over his shoulder at him.

  “Take care of us, buddy!”

  Kelly forced a smile in spite of the strange feeling that settled over him now. “Count on it, mister,” he said reflexively, but his heart was very heavy. He had the odd feeling that something was going to happen—something unexpected. His friends were all going off without him and he might never see them again. He swallowed hard, forcing himself to focus on the things he might have to accomplish here.

  They reached the heavy sealed doorway that would take them into the Arch complex. Paul was already entering the access code on the security panel, leaning in to let the retinal scanner verify that the numbers were being keyed by him.

  Maeve hesitated a moment, looking from Paul to Kelly, then she turned and rushed back, reaching Kelly in a wave of motion and throwing her arms around him. She smiled warmly, giving him a tight hug.

  “Don’t touch the book until four AM,” she whispered. “And if we’re not here to read it with you, bring us all back, Kelly…Bring me back to you. Hear me?” It was an action that was well out of character for Maeve, as she had guarded her feelings for Kelly very carefully. Here, however, at the edge of a leave taking that could become permanent, Maeve broke out of her shell of propriety. The action had an immediate effect.

  Tears welled in the corner of Kelly’s eyes as Maeve released him. He was wrestling with a flood of emotions. All the sweat and labor of three long years was finally coming to a head. He was still flustered with the notion that he was living a second life, and the time seemed all the more precious to him as each second ticked away. Now the three people he felt closest to in the world were going off and leaving him with a history book! It was all too much to process at once.

  The heavy titanium doorway opened with a hiss as the pressure variance between the two rooms equalized. Maeve turned and hurried over to the doorway where Paul and Robert were already making their way through the dark entrance with a last wave.

  The moment was jarred with the ring of a telephone on the main console. Jen reached for it as Maeve hastened towards the yawning portal. The door was programmed to open for a brief interval and then automatically close again. If she didn’t make it through she would have to enter the access code all over again. Paul heard the phone ring and froze in his tracks, an odd look on his face.

  “What’s wrong?” Nordhausen nudged him. “You don’t think we’re getting a last minute call from our f
riends in another century, do you?”

  “Hang on a second,” he waited breathlessly as Maeve approached the entrance.

  “Oh, Miss Lindford! It’s for you,” Jen called, her hand covering the mouthpiece of the telephone receiver.

  “What? Who would be calling me at this hour?”

  “Long distance,” said Jen. “It’s your mother.”

  Maeve rolled her eyes, as if acknowledging some deep inner fear that had finally come to pass. She had come to terms with the fact that her mother was going to be killed if the tsunami sequence reached the east coast. Her one hope had been that she would not even hear about the event, remaining quietly asleep in her little cottage on the shore of Boston Harbor.

  Events had overtaken her, and Maeve managed to suppress the sorrow that welled within her as the evening unfolded. She would find time to grieve the loss later, she told herself. Then the visitor arrived with his pound of coffee and she threw her emotions into the one hope that they might actually prevent this catastrophe.

  Time passed in a dizzy rush after that. Now it was running out. The Deep Nexus that had formed around them would soon begin to dissipate as the tsunami sequence surged west. She could feel it. Surely the alarm was up all along the Eastern Seaboard by now. All the media channels were broadcasting full tilt, and she had no doubt that every fog horn and lighthouse along the coast was signaling danger to any who could see or hear. Something must have awakened her mother and, by some miracle, she managed to get a line to the one place she knew Maeve would probably be if she was not at home.

  Maeve stopped, nearly at the door, looking over her shoulder at Jen, her eyes wide with the urgency of a decision that clamored for an answer. The heavy metal door was swinging shut, gliding silently on well-oiled hinges; moving as inevitably as the great swell in the Atlantic. She looked at Paul and Robert, then at Kelly, and Jen where she waited, holding the telephone in two hands like something hot that she had just taken out of the oven. It would be the last time, Maeve thought, that she would ever hear her mother’s voice. If she slipped through the narrowing portal she might never see this world again.

  All these thoughts passed in a fluttering instant within her mind, and her heart leapt with the only choice she could possibly make. She looked at Paul and Robert.

  “Go!” she yelled at them. “Don’t wait. There’s no time!”

  The great polished door swung closed, the seals taking hold at once with a sharp metallic clank followed by a sibilant hiss as the pressure reasserted itself. She stared at the impenetrable mass of titanium alloy, her eyes wet with tears. Then she heaved a quiet sigh and turned toward Jen at the main console. Kelly was frozen with a heart-rending look on his face. He started toward her, but Maeve held up a warding hand, intent on reaching the phone.

  “This first,” she said with quiet dignity, and Kelly gave her an assuring smile.

  When the door clamped shut the pale blue overhead lighting winked on to illuminate a long cylindrical tunnel. Paul stared at Robert, but was soon galvanized by the urgency of the moment.

  “We’d better hurry,” he said, leading the way down the long tunnel as it angled ever more sharply into the depths of the hillside. The complex was buried deep underground, a precaution to help shield the environment against the strange effects that might be released should anything go wrong with the spin-out of the singularity. The tunnel led them to an elevator, and they rushed in, catching their own reflection on the polished metal doors: two ghosts in long white Arab robes. There were only two buttons on the elevator panel. One was clearly labeled ARCH and Paul pressed it without a moment’s hesitation. He glanced at the clock on the elevator wall, noting the time at 2:20 AM.

  “We lost Bermuda, Professor,” he said quietly. “The wave was scheduled to hit there a little after two AM, our time.”

  “It was a saving grace in 1611 when the Plymouth expedition made landfall there,” said Nordhausen. “They once feared the place, you know. Called it the Devil’s Island.”

  “God help them now,” said Paul. The queasy feeling of anticipation seemed to redouble when the elevator shot down, leaving their stomachs behind.

  “It’s better this way,” said Nordhausen. “Maeve has a wonderful head on her shoulders, but a woman would have been very much out of place in the milieu we’re opening; perhaps unexplainable. That nurse business was a good try, but really, what would a nurse be doing in the middle of the desert in Bedouin clothing? Did you know that there was not one single speaking female role in the movie?”

  “What?”

  “Lawrence of Arabia,” Nordhausen explained. “The entire cast was male—what blessed relief! It was, as they say, a man’s world in 1917. It’s better she stays behind.”

  “Maybe you’re right,” Paul conceded. “But don’t get any ideas just because you won’t have Maeve watching your every move. We’ve got to be very careful. This is going to be like a delicate surgery. We have to find our Pushpoint and enable it while creating as little disturbance in the flow of events as possible.”

  “I hope there’s time,” Nordhausen worried. “Look at the clock! What if we land in a place that takes us hours and hours to find the ambush zone? We’ve only got an hour and a half.”

  Paul shook his head. “Plenty of time. Once we step through the Arch we’ll have all the time between the interval when we emerge and the actual attack on the train. It doesn’t matter how much time is left on this end. We could walk through the Arch a minute before four in the morning and return in thirty seconds, having spent a decade in the past! You never will get a handle on temporal mechanics, will you? Our visitor tonight emerged seven years ago, by his account. He lived out all that time on our Meridian but, in the world he came from, he might have been gone a just few brief moments. Maeve will hardly have time to take her phone call before we get back; you’ll see.”

  “What if we miss our target?”

  “That’s my main worry,” Paul confided. “Kelly said he shaded a variable to drop us on the negative side of the event. We can’t risk arriving too late, you see. But arriving too early could be just as much of a problem. Suppose we suffer the same fate as our visitor from the future, and miss the mark. We would have to scrub the mission and wait for the fail-safe retraction to kick in, unless we disable it. In that case, if we were to land around 1900, would you be prepared to live out seventeen years in the alternate time line? Think about it, Robert. You can still change your mind if you want. Thus isn’t going to be a quiet evening at the Globe. Kelly is good, but he really had to rush these calculations tonight. We haven’t had any time to fine-tune the breaching point.”

  Nordhausen shook his head as the elevator came to a halt. “You aren’t getting rid of me that easy,” he said. “Oh, don’t get me wrong. I’m scared shitless right now, but I’m still going.” Then he thought about the prospect for a moment and asked another question. “I’ve never quite understood how the retraction sequence works. How do we get back?” The question underlined the fear they were both feeling now.

  “What? Oh, it’s a bit complex. The infusion is going to permeate the Arch with a tachyon surge. We may even feel the whole thing when we get inside. No one knows yet. In any case, we can weave particles into the fiber of our quantum matrix and give them a designated half-life, in a manner of speaking. We set the spin resonance to respond to one of two events: the temporal signature of the target time, plus a given interval, or the final decay of the infusion. One way or another, we’ll be pulled back through the singularity in the Arch and return. That’s what happened to our visitor! I think he had a very brief time with us after he intervened to save Kelly. That was his mission, you see. Whether he was free-lancing with his coffee run is another question. Did you notice how he kept looking at his watch? He was very agitated, almost as if he expected something to happen to him at any moment.”

  “But I don’t understand,” said Nordhausen. “We won’t have an Arch on the other side. How will we get pulled back?”


  “Simple,” Paul smiled. “The door we’re about to open is going to remain open for us, Robert. Time may be a harsh mistress, to repeat that old cliché, but she’s also a tidy one.” The elevator doors slid open and they stepped out into another long metallic tunnel. Paul reached back and extended an arm to block the closing doors.

  “You see?” He smiled at the professor. “Time will extend an arm and keep the portal open for us. She knows we don’t belong on this side of the door, and she won’t rest until we’re safe in our own Meridian again. You’ll see.”

  A great oval door was waiting for them at the end of a short tunnel, much like the portal above. Paul keyed the entry code and looked for the intercom to the control console while the heavy door swung inward with the same snapping hiss as before. He thumbed the call signal on the intercom and spoke.

  “We’re opening the outer lock, Kelly. You can ramp it up to full power and start the spin sequence.”

  “Roger that,” Kelly’s voice was reassuring on the other end of the line. “Maeve says to check your pockets and all.”

  “Tell her we’ll be very discreet campers.” Paul suddenly smiled with an inner recollection. “And we’ll spend a lovely couple of hours in the Arabian Desert.” He let a little southern twang into his voice, knowing that only Kelly would know what he was talking about.

  Nordhausen gave him an odd look, and Paul explained.

  “I took this camping trip once out on the Olympic Peninsula with Kelly. The park ranger was coming by to collect the camping fees, and these two old people were trying to pretend they were just day visitors…Oh, never mind. You had to be there.”

  The professor patted his torso, compliant with Maeve’s abiding caution to the last. He was surprised to find something in a small cache pocket within his gown, and he reached inside to fondle it with his fingers. Beads, he thought? Then the a faint familiar odor came to him and he realized that Maeve had secreted a supply of loose coffee beans in a cloth pouch, along with a few other items that he did not have time to explore. He smiled.