Meridian - A Novel In Time (The Meridian Series) Page 19

  The smell of burning tobacco filled the room and the officer took a long drag, breathing the smoke out slowly as he finished. “Very nice,” he said, seeming to warm to the situation. “So this new British General, Allenby, has a little fire in his belly after all. The Arabs took Akaba for him and now he thinks he can just waltz into Jerusalem. No doubt you have been sent here to scout the situation out, yes?” Then a strange look came over the man’ s face, as though another possibility had occurred to him. “Yes,” he said with a tight smile. “The Arabs and the British—like fleas on a dog. Well, we have heard these rumors about a British officer, who has been leading Arab vagrants on raids against our facilities and rail lines. And what do I have before me here?” He smiled again, eyes gleaming with suspicion.

  Good lord, thought Paul. The man thinks I’m Lawrence! But what else would he think? When they decided on their costuming Maeve had come up with the idea for wearing British uniforms beneath Arab robes. It was a wonderful fail-safe if they ran into Arabs in the desert. The Turks were another matter, however, and Paul knew he was in very serious trouble. Here I’ve gone and done the one thing we had to avoid at all costs, he thought. The look on the Turkish Colonel’s face told him it was going to be a very long, painful night.

  14

  Lawrence Berkeley Labs - 3:10 AM

  Kelly stared at the green progress bars on the temporal monitor as the retraction sequence progressed. The power outage had plunged the room into darkness, but emergency lighting kicked in, painting thin red cones of light across the consoles. He bit his lip, counting inwardly as Maeve rushed to his side.

  “I’m sorry, Kelly. I was so wrapped up with what was happening that I just wasn’t thinking. I can’t remember if I closed the inner doors to the corridor or not. Isn’t there an indicator on one of these panels somewhere?” She searched about, a desperate, pleading look on her face.

  Kelly finished counting, and a second or two later the overhead lights flickered on again. Power fed back into the consoles and he breathed a sigh of relief.

  “Secondary systems kicked in,” he said. “We’re drawing auxiliary power from the city. Pacific Gas and Electric isn’t going to like us in the morning, but we have a contract to draw reserve power in the event of a turbine failure.” His mind soon returned to the problem that was uppermost in his thoughts, eyes searching the temporal monitor. The green progress bar moved from left to right across his screen, and digital numbers displayed above it, winking from the last reported variance position to show the latest readings.

  “The math looks good, Maeve. The indicators are holding green and the variance factor is falling off towards zero.”

  “Thank God,” she whispered. “What about the doors?”

  “Don’t worry about it. The system won’t engage with the doors open. The problem was somewhere else.”

  “What? Well why didn’t you say something?”

  “I was too damn busy watching these readouts. If we had any more than a fifteen second gap before the auxiliary power kicked in we stood a chance to loose the spinout on the singularity. That really would have been a disaster. Looks like the power held above 85%, however. Jen, get down there and see what Tom says about this, will you? We can’t draw support from the city grid for very long. I need those turbines back up to speed, and fast.”

  His attention was fixated on the temporal monitor now, as it continued the playback of the data on the shift. The event had already transpired, but the computer was lagging behind, its main processors just too slow to keep up with the data flow in real time. They had compensated for the lack of sufficient processor speed by installing huge arrays of memory. Now, as the computer read one bank of stored information after another, it ran its analysis and translated the results into graphics and numerical readouts on the screen.

  “We should have had a stronger processor bank for this unit,” Kelly muttered. “I can’t react to anything that happens this way. If something went wrong this time, there’s not a thing I can do about it. Look how far behind the data flow is. I think we probably lost a processor bank in here when the power fluctuated. Damn things are so sensitive, and these battery backups just aren’t up to snuff.”

  “How does it look?” Maeve pointed at the screen.

  “Not bad…” Kelly kept watching. “The line is nice and green; numbers are falling off to zero…” He lapsed into silence as he watched.

  Maeve was suddenly uncomfortable again. She looked at the screen and saw that the single green line began to change. Now it appeared that there were two bars that were making up the thickness of the progress line, and one was falling behind the other. She realized that there were two parallel lines moving in tandem, making a steady progress across the screen. Kelly noticed it as well.

  “What’s going on here,” he murmured.

  “A problem?” Maeve’s voice inflected the question in both of their minds. “The line is still solid green, Kelly. Look, your variance is just about nil.”

  Kelly watched, his own mental processes racing in time with the data on the screen. The shift looked good, but there was definitely something amiss. He rolled some dials on the console, enhancing the brightness and contrast of the readouts. There was no mistaking it now. The adjustment clearly indicated that he had two parallel lines, not one unified line as he expected; as he hoped.

  “What is it?” Maeve was beside herself, still not quite over the notion that she had caused the problem.

  “The shift looks good,” said Kelly, “But…”

  “But what?”

  Kelly looked at her, scratching his head before he spoke. “Well it doesn’t look as though they were both—”

  “Tom says not to worry!” Jen was shouting as she ran up the stairs from the lower level. She hastened up, winded with the exertion, but clearly elated to bring up the good news. “He says one of the breakers tripped due to some outside interference, but he got the circuits back on line again.”

  “Outside interference?”

  “Yeah,” Jen nodded. “He thinks maybe we caught some lightning and the rods couldn’t handle the juice. Must have been a direct hit.”

  Maeve had a frustrated look on her face. “Kelly, what were you going to say?”

  “Great, Jen,” Kelly was still distracted, and a sudden thought threw him further off the track. “Can we roll it back up to full power in twenty minutes?”

  “I’ll go ask.” Jen fished her hands out of the pockets of her khaki shorts, turned on her heels, and ran off, her long brown legs carrying her quickly toward the stairwell again.

  “Kelly!” Maeve gave him a wide-eyed stare.

  “Right…” Kelly leaned in to study the lines on the screen again. He watched the numbers keep falling, pleased to see they were rolling ever more slowly toward zero. He knew they would settle there in the end. His math was good. “Well,” he said with a sigh. “We moved them, but not at the same time.”

  Maeve stared at him, waiting for more information.

  “See the lines?” Kelly pointed at the screen with a pen. “See how the bottom line is just a tick behind the other? They’re both moving, but not at the same time. That damn power dip was just enough to throw the sync off. Looks like the system compensated by grabbing one a few seconds before the other. Let me run a verification routine.”

  He slid his chair over to a terminal to his left and began keying some system commands. “There,” he said as he finished. “We should know the final variance in a moment.”

  “They shifted at different times?” Maeve’s own processing was finally catching up.

  “There it is,” Kelly pointed at the screen. “Hell, it’s only a little off. Just 0.00168 discrepancy. Hardly a nudge!”

  “And that means what?” Maeve wanted it in English, and she wanted it now.

  “Well, they both hit the bull’s eye, numerically speaking. They’re going to be right on the target time; perhaps only a few days or even hours off. The only thing is that one is going to ar
rive before the other.” He shifted back to the temporal monitor. “Yup,” he concluded as he spun his chair around to look at her. “I wonder who’s going to arrive first?”

  15

  The Desert - November, 1917

  Nordhausen was lying face down on a low dune of wet sand. He did not know how long he had been there. All he could remember were surreal dreams of swirling auroras that danced in hues of red and milky green. He awoke, groggy; with a sickly queasiness in the pit of his stomach and a strange lightness of head. The night air surrounded him with a frosty cold, and the layers of clothing provided little comfort. He rolled over, staring up at the clouds. A wet mist shrouded the landscape but, here and there, the dark vapors parted and he could see the stars in a sable sky, cold and remote.

  He immediately looked for the moon, finding a spot low on the horizon where the darkness seemed smudged with a hoary glow of diffused gray light. He watched the area for some time, wondering what had happened to him and where he was. One moment he had been sitting quietly by the campfire, sulking over his fate, and then that strange sense of weightlessness had come over him, a feathery lightness accompanied by a sudden chill. It occurred to him that he had been sleeping here, lost in the kaleidoscope of water colored dreams, for many hours.

  He looked around him. Where was the circle of stones they had built for the fire; where was the exquisite bare white fossil of the Ammonite they had discovered; where was Paul? As he took his situation in he suddenly realized that the entire landscape about him was different than he remembered. Before they had been on the smooth brow of a low hill, part of a winding ridge. Now he lay upon flat, sandy ground, and the only rise in elevation he could see anywhere about him was some distance off. The sky had a different quality to it as well, clean and fresh where once it had been choked with smoky ash. What was going on here?

  Perhaps I’m back, he thought. He never really did understand how the machine was supposed to work. Paul tried to explain it to him many times, but he could never get his mind around the physics. The one metaphor that seemed to stick in his head was the image of Paul’s long arm extending back to hold open the elevator door when they stepped off into the outer corridor. He remembered what his friend had said then: ‘The door we’re about to open is going to remain open for us, Robert… Time will extend an arm and keep the portal open …’

  It was the only sensible thing he could think of to account for the change. The mission had failed. Kelly botched the numbers, just as he knew he would, and they went so far back in time that it was a miracle they survived it. At least Paul was correct with his time theory, he mused. How did he explain it? Something in the infusion expired and they got pulled back into their own time. That was the only way he could understand it, like a sand clock running out of grains. Thankfully, it happened after only a few hours, and they were saved from the agony of the dying Cretaceous.

  “Well, I suppose it would be too much to ask to be delivered safe and sound to the comfort of my study again,” he said aloud. “And what has happened to Paul?”

  He squinted into the darkness, looking for any sign of his friend, but the cold, empty desert surrounded him on every side, stretching away to bleak horizons. He stood up, on unsteady legs, and felt the blood pound at his temples with the effort. It seems that time travel had a very severe physical effect, so he gave himself a moment to compose himself.

  They had failed. Now he was lost in the Jordanian desert; perhaps miles from the nearest road. He decided the best thing to do would be to head for the high ground in the distance. That way he could take in the lay of the land and sort out what to do. Perhaps he might even start a fire to attract attention. He determined to go over all of this with the Operations Group when he got back to California. They should have told him the spatial location was going to remain fixed at the target coordinates! Had he known this was going to happen he would have insisted that they take some kind of emergency transponder beacon with them, no matter what Maeve and her silly Outcomes committee said about it.

  The more he thought about his situation the more sullen and despondent he became. The fate of the world has been sealed, he concluded. This penumbra business with the Palma Event was going to cause some kind of interference and they wouldn’t be able to go through it again, at least not without a great deal of trouble. A pity, he thought, imagining the chaos that must be reigning on the Eastern Seaboard. There was nothing more he could do about it, God rest their souls. Perhaps they could try a second time, but something told him that it was all too late. Maybe the machine would never work again.

  He sighed, chagrined by the thought that he might not have the chance to visit the Globe Theatre. For that matter, his hopes at catching a glimpse of Lawrence had been foiled as well. All he saw of this mission was a sour sky full of smoke and volcanic debris, and the fossil, of course. They had certainly ended up somewhere, and the discovery of the Ammonite fossil had been the high point of it all for him. Perhaps he could fish the spatial coordinates from Kelly and fly back out here in a month or so with a few students for a dig. If the remains were still anywhere near the surface it would be a splendid recovery, and might even stand as evidence that they had actually gone somewhere. He resolved to discuss the matter with Paul and Maeve the instant he got back.

  But where was Paul? He pulled up short with that thought again, and searched about him, calling out Paul’s name at the top of his voice. There was no answer.

  Just like him to get himself lost. Where did he wander off to? He said he was only going to look for a few more dead fern leaves for the fire and then… He was suddenly struck by the thought that Paul may still be stranded in time. What if the damn retraction scheme was limited to a certain radius around their entry point? Paul may have wandered just outside its influence. He passed a moment of deep misgiving, thinking that his long time friend may be doomed to a lonesome existence in the deeps of time, the only human being alive on the planet, and fifty million years to wait for company. Then he remembered how Paul had been worrying over the possibility of contamination and brooding about the necessity of killing himself to prevent complications to the future time lines. Where was he? He wished he was here, nagging at him again with some silly temporal concept or physics problem.

  Poor Paul. The memory of his friend’s voice returned to him once more, offering a note of solace as he spoke about Time. ‘She knows we don’t belong on this side of the door, Robert, and she won’t rest until we’re safe in our own Meridian again. You’ll see.’

  That thought gave him some hope, and he resolved to plod on and find some higher ground. If Paul were around he would probably do the same thing. It was bound to be light soon, and perhaps he would catch a glimpse of a road. There had to be traffic of some kind in the area. He would find his way out of this mess soon enough.

  He started off, his mind rummaging about with his worry. What if he couldn’t find a road? He had no water, and no food. Lord, he didn’t even have any money with him! How was he supposed to get back to California? It reminded him of a cruel joke the Freshmen would play on the newly elected president of the Sophomore class at the university. They would waylay the poor sap, and put him on a plane to some random destination with nothing more than a single dime in his pocket. That’s exactly the way he felt now, kidnapped by Paul’s time machine and set adrift in the desert without so much as a dime for a telephone call to console him.

  He trudged on, intent on making the rise ahead of him before first light. Almost as if to reassure himself, he stopped from time to time to study the ground, looking for any sign of tektite glass or shocked quartz. He found none.

  The light mist became a rain, and he gathered his Arabic robes about him, trying to hold in as much body heat as possible. His feet ached in the boots that Maeve had forced upon him, and he was tired, hungry and wet. There’s bound to be a village nearby, he thought, and soon had his first prospect of finding help. He stumbled around a low rise and saw the wavering light of a small camp
fire guttering in the distance. His spirits rose immediately, and he smiled inwardly as he made for the light.

  It occurred to him that it might not be wise to just come stampeding up on some sheep herder’s camp in the dark, so he started waving his arms and shouting as he approached the place, intent on eliciting aid.

  “Hello!” he shouted. “Anyone there?”

  There was a scuffling sound in the distance and then he was surprised by the sharp crack of a gun. A bullet whizzed by and he instinctively fell to the ground in a panic. Another shot was fired, passing wide of the mark and vanishing in the darkness. He heard a voice muttering something, and quiet footfalls.

  Now what have I gone and done, he thought? This ‘shoot first and ask questions later’ attitude would have been expected in the desert on a dismal night like this. He saw a shadowy form drifting to his right, barely silhouetted against the horizon. There was no good shouting at the man, he realized. Who would speak English here? The only thing to do, he reasoned, was to play possum and hope the man would not find him. Then he could eventually slip away to find more agreeable assistance.

  He waited, stilling his breath for what seemed an awfully long time and peering into the dark for any sign of his attacker. He had fallen on a sharp stone and, as he tried to roll away from it, he heard a crisp metallic click behind his right ear.

  “Entabeh!” A voice spoke in a sibilant whisper behind him. He did not know what the man was saying, but the note of caution in his tone was obvious enough.

  “Don’t shoot,” he said, raising both hands to demonstrate that he was unarmed. It was foolish to say anything more, but he rambled on just the same. “I’m unarmed. I’m lost and seeking help. I mean you no harm.”