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

  He knew the Colonel would return in time. He probably went forward see about getting a telegraph sent. The train started to move again, and he was stranded somewhere along the line, probably angry at the engineer. Paul knew that he didn’t have much time. If the Colonel boarded another car, he might have a brief interval of peace, but if he was still outside on the rail bed it would be a simple matter to wait until his coach came up from behind so he could jump on board.

  What day was it? That was the one burning question still in Paul’s mind. He had to locate himself on the continuum and determine what he might do. With no other recourse, he searched about, thinking he might find something to indicate the date. A convenient calendar was too much to hope for, but he soon spied a battered leather brief on the floor beside the desk where the Colonel had been sitting. Recollections of Maeve’s admonition to Nordhausen came to him again. She had warned him not to touch anything in Shakespeare’s office at the Globe, worried that he would do something to contaminate the time line. Paul had little choice, he knew. What harm could he do by inspecting the brief?

  He moved cautiously, grateful that the sound of the train would now cover his movements. A moment later he had the brief open and was squinting at a sheaf of papers inside. It appeared to be a long list of names, perhaps a passenger manifest or troop roster, but he could see no information to indicate what day it might be. He shuffled through the papers, noting a series of ink check marks next to a few of the names. The Colonel had been going over the list, and picking out certain individuals—all Arabic. He was just about to give up his quest when his eye fell on a name that shook him with its importance: Masaui! He looked closely and saw that the ink pen had started to scratch a mark there, but had failed. Masaui was on this train. He was here, and the Colonel was just about to mark off his name when the guards interrupted him.

  He considered his situation, struggling to remember the long discussion he had with Maeve about the three trains. The first train was irrelevant, they had concluded. The second train, the one Lawrence blew up in his time line, was the key. That was the doom they were struggling to overturn. If that train passed unhindered they hoped it would be enough to alter the fate of Masaui. The first train took them by surprise, he remembered. It came from the north in the early morning and they did not see it in the rain and mist. The second train came at mid-day—from the south! The Colonel said this train was heading for Damascus. Yes, he had threatened to drop him off for a session with the Bey when they reached Deraa, not far north of Kilometer 172 where Lawrence was planning his raid.

  He knew at once that he was on the second train, and Masaui was here with him, perhaps a passenger or even a Turkish soldier. Lord, thought Paul, he might be one of the guards right outside this door for all I know. He thought the better of that, for if Masaui was here, and his doom was death in Lawrence’s attack, then he must be farther forward on the train. The rear coaches were always the safest because the raiders primary intent was to destroy the valuable engines.

  As he considered the situation a great doubt began to settle on him. The names on the list he had found cast a shadow on his thinking. What if they were to be selected out for some reason, and possibly assigned elsewhere; even put off the train? There were depot stations every twenty kilometers along the rail line. It appeared that Masaui had been intended for inclusion in the group, but his name was not clearly marked. What if this selection ended up saving these men from whatever fate this train was to suffer in the hours ahead? It would be a simple matter to mark the name. Could the simple stroke of an ink pen be a lever strong enough to move distant events in the future? He realized he could never be sure. He was muddling about, uncertain of what to do. Nordhausen was right: they could have researched this mission for months before having any chance at understanding the immensely complex relationships that drove the continuum forward.

  How could he possibly intervene on Masaui’s behalf? What was he to do, burst out and shout the man’s name in the hopes he would turn his head with sudden recognition? Even if he did find him, what could he say that the man would understand? What could he do? Suppose he succeeded, and then found that Masaui needed to die here today instead? This simple black and white was suddenly marred by muddying shades of gray, confusing him even more.

  No, if he was to do anything at all it must be something to spare this train. He had to rely on the single important clue in the note they found—Kilometer 172. He discarded his worry that the selection on the roster might be something that would spare Masaui. The clue from the coat pocket of the future was very pointed. If Masaui was here, then he was fated to arrive at Kilometer 172. But what should he do? Should he warn the Turks that Arabs were lying in wait for them at Minifir? If he did that he risked exposing Lawrence to unacceptable danger. His mind wrestled with the problem. He was on the second train; heading north. This must be the dawn of November 10th, he thought.

  He tried to remember things that Nordhausen had told him about the history. By now Lawrence and his men would be waiting at Minifir, and the last of the gelatine charges would be laid under a low arch over a defile at the base of that hill. It was probably six or seven in the morning now, and this train was somewhere north of Amman, heading for a fateful rendezvous at mid-day. He had about six hours then, another cruel six hour interval where he could act to do something to spare this train. If he could manage it somehow, and survive, the final fail-safe retraction scheme should pull him out.

  Where was Nordhausen? What was he doing? Was he here on this temporal reference point, or still trapped in the late Cretaceous? Something told him that Nordhausen had shifted forward in time as well. He’s probably doing the same thing I am, thought Paul, just trying to figure out where he is and decide what to do about it. One of us, he knew, has to succeed.

  20

  Lawrence Labs, Berkeley - 3:30 AM

  “What’s wrong, Maeve?” Kelly was up from his chair, moving quickly to Maeve’s side where she stood near the desk. Her hand was shaking and she seemed distraught, as though struck by some traumatic realization. As Kelly reached her, she settled into a chair by the desk, pale and drawn. When she looked at him her eyes concealed something, yet he saw fear there, and concern.

  “I’ll… I’ll be alright,” she said softly. “I guess this has all been a bit much for me. I’ve been up since eight AM yesterday, and trying to run on coffee. I get a bit shaky when I haven’t eaten, that’s all.”

  “You sure?” He was not quite convinced.

  “Really, I’ll be fine. I just needed to get off my feet for a few moments.”

  Kelly waved his hands about slowly, as if to test the air around her. “You aren’t planning to go and vanish on me now, are you?”

  “I wouldn’t worry about it,” she said.

  “Well, there’s bound to be something to eat around here. Where’s Jen?”

  “You sent her down stairs to see about the power.”

  “Yes…” Kelly’s attention drifted and his gaze was pulled to the main console again. He looked at the clock. “Shouldn’t be long now. I hope that power is stable. The city is going to hate us tomorrow, but I’m going to leave the outside taps in place until we complete the retraction sequence. Can you hang on for a few minutes? Then we can all celebrate and go out and get a big breakfast somewhere.”

  “Right…” She gave him a halfhearted smile as he slipped away with a backward glance in return. When she was certain he was safely preoccupied with his work on the operations boards her gaze wandered to the desk drawer where they had hidden Nordhausen’s copy of the Seven Pillars away. She was possessed with an almost irresistible urge to open the drawer. The answer to a question she had been silently asking herself all evening was right there, unless it was still too early. They should wait until four AM. That would be eleven minutes before the first waves were scheduled to hit on the coast near Cape Hatteras. The tsunami sequence would ripple down the Eastern Seaboard after that, and the time line would be so irrevocably
damaged that it would become unchangeable.

  The sense of anxiety that she felt was almost paralyzing. The second hands were ticking away, but the time seemed to slip by with agonizing slowness. She knew that Paul and Robert could be living out hours or days in the past, perhaps struggling for their very lives. All she had to do was wait another fifteen or twenty minutes, but it seemed an impossible burden. She started to reach for the drawer handle, then stopped herself, exerting all her willpower to suspend the motion of her hand. I can’t, she urged herself inwardly. I’ve just got to wait it out.

  She looked at Kelly, almost longingly now, tears starting at the corners of her eyes. By great effort, she composed herself, brushing the tears away as she watched him. Then she noticed that tense, silent alertness that always indicated he was calculating something in his head. He was leaning in, peering at one of the monitors, and the look on his face began to change.

  “Hello…” He muttered to himself, but she was immediately aware that something was amiss. She forced herself to her feet, glancing at the desk drawer one last time as she made her way softly to his side.

  “Something up?” Her voice carried the question with as little insistence as possible, almost afraid to learn that anything else could be wrong with this mission.

  “Integrity…” Kelly was slowly adjusting a dial, somewhat disgruntled, as though he was trying to tune in bad TV reception. “The integrity is a bit loose on one of the patterns.”

  Maeve forced herself to watch for a moment before she asked him to explain that. Under normal circumstances she would have pulled it out of him immediately, but not now, not with the clock ticking away in her mind and heart; not with the fear she hid inside like an infant swaddled in uncertainty.

  “This isn’t good…” Kelly was speaking more to himself now than Maeve, but she let it pass, in spite of the sense of alarm that continued to well within her. He was toggling switches, and shifting sideways to look at the information on another flat-panel monitor, his elbow leaning heavily on the desk, chin in hand.

  “Shit,” he said. “This thing is getting strange on me now.”

  She bit her lip, waiting. He looked around and saw the obvious emotion on her face and apologized. “Sorry, Maeve. I didn’t mean to leave you hanging like that. Look, could you yell down and see if you can get Jen up here? Ask her if the turbines are OK. I’m going to need some volts here in a second.”

  She wanted to stay and find out what was wrong, but she knew it would only distract him. Her fears would inspire one question after another, and the answers would never be enough to dispel that awful sense of doubt she felt now. She nodded to him and started off, knowing that he would need all his attention and powers of concentration now.

  Kelly returned to his monitors with his own doubts as well. The integrity on one of the patterns had begun to loosen up. It was starting to look like a pre-retraction scatter, yet the chamber wasn’t timed to pull them out until eleven after four. He had re-adjusted the time himself before he moved them forward on the original target coordinates. That maneuver had used the primary pattern signatures, but it worked. Now this second, and final, pattern signature was showing signs of definite integrity loss. Was it a real phenomenon, or simply a hardware failure? He was flipping one diagnostic switch after another, and everything was still in the green on systems and memory. Yet something was clearly wrong. As the seconds passed he realized that they were going to lose their integrity on the alternate time line if he didn’t do something about it. A retraction sequence was building up on its own!

  He squinted at the readings…No…It was only affecting one of the two patterns. The other was holding its integrity well. His mind struggled with the problem. When they shifted forward in time, there had been a slight variance on the synchronization. They moved, but as the centuries fled in their wake, one of the two patterns began to fall ever so slightly behind. The actual error was very small when the shift concluded, only hours off the target. Now he realized that the synchronization module was having difficulty with the variance as they approached retraction time. It wanted them together, and they had become separated, both temporally and most likely spatially as well. The sync processors were probably working at full bore right now, he thought. In fact, he wagered the sync module might actually be responsible for the integrity loss.

  He flipped a switch, checking his hunch, and immediately saw that he was correct. The sync module was keyed to the fail-safe routines in the programming. If something went askew on the sync it was programmed to compensate. Now Kelly knew what was happening. The module lost its handle on them as a pair, he thought. It wants to bring them home one at a time.

  Maeve was back, with Jen running at her heels. They were both breathless from coming up the stairs, and Maeve looked really pale, as though the extra effort without food or sleep was wearing her down.

  “You can have ninety-five percent,” Jen called. “Tom says that he’ll have another five percent in ten minutes. The turbines are looking good.”

  “Thank God for that,” said Kelly, but his attention was immediately pulled to the particle chamber. “This is going to be close.”

  Maeve watched him run to the chamber infusion control station, sure that something was very wrong again. She wanted to go to him and drag out the problem so she could help carry the burden, but instead she reached for the back of a chair, bracing herself. Jen saw her hand slip, and gave her a concerned look.

  “You OK, Miss Lindford?

  “I’ll be fine,” Maeve started to wave her off; then thought again. “Jen, is there anything to eat? I’m just famished.” She settled onto the chair, eyes following Kelly’s every movement.

  “Hey, I brought a sandwich with me and only ate half. Wait a second. I’ll get you something to drink as well.”

  “Thanks,” Maeve smiled, but her attention was on Kelly again at once. It was as if she was afraid to take her eyes off him. She wanted to shout at him to tell her what was going on, but she restrained herself. He said the integrity was off. Now he’s at the infusion chamber and he’s been worrying about the power. That can only mean a retraction scheme is in the works. But it’s too early! She looked at the clock and saw that it was only 3:50 AM. They had another ten minutes until the retraction processors were supposed to kick in. She dimly remembered something Kelly had done with the pattern buffers. He had been looking for memory in the retraction module, and something was taking up space. He had to delete one of the two retraction schemes in order to make room for his shift data. Now there was only one retraction scheme left.

  She couldn’t bear it any longer, forcing herself to get up go to him. “This doesn’t look good,” she said softly.

  Kelly looked over his shoulder. “Can’t explain everything now, but stay close. I’m going to need some help here in a second.”

  “They’re moving,” she said, a dullness in her voice, as though it had already happened and there was nothing they could do about it now.

  “Yes, one of them is starting to slip. The sync had trouble and the fail-safe routines kicked in. The module decided it couldn’t bring them both home at once, so it’s pulling someone out now. I’ve got to reset the infusion density readings fast! Otherwise there won’t be enough gas in the tank to get the other one home. It’s complicated…” He gave her a quick glance, hoping he had said enough to deflect another question. Thankfully, she said nothing.

  Jen came up with half a sandwich and a can of soda. “Are we doing the retraction now?” She handed the food to Maeve and Kelly waved her into a chair to his left.

  “Get on the retraction module, Jen. I want you to enable on my command. Understand?”

  “Sure,” she said, a bit bewildered, but moving more on reflex than anything else.

  “Maeve? Can you keep an eye on the integrity readout?”

  “I’m on it.” Maeve turned to find the right monitor, and soon they were all hunched forward over their screens, though Maeve kept casting sidelong glances at
Kelly as she watched the readings.

  “What’s the integrity?” Kelly was still moving dials, making fine adjustments to the particle chamber density.

  “Number two is holding fine, the other is falling toward the yellow.”

  “Shit!” Kelly vented some steam and made a last adjustment. “OK, that will have to do. If that integrity falls below eighty percent I want you to yell at me. OK?”

  “It’s at eighty-three, but still moving.”

  Kelly ran to the logarithmic station and was on a chair at the keyboard in a flash. His fingers moved in a blur as he typed. The focus on his features was intense. Maeve watched the integrity reading fall through eighty-two percent, but said nothing. She wanted him to give his full attention to the task before him.

  Kelly finished his entry and gave the send command. Processors moved at the speed of light, but it seemed an eerie stillness had settled over the room. They were all breathless, suspended in the passage of a few brief seconds that stretched out to an eternity. Then Kelly moved. He had his answer and he slid back from the workstation, his chair rolling madly across the tiled floor on its wheels as he scudded over to the main control panel. He checked the power and was relieved to see it was steady at ninety-five percent.

  “On my mark… Now Jen! Enable the retraction scheme on pattern one.”

  “Pattern one?” Jen was momentarily lost. Her eyes glazed across the controls, looking for a familiar anchor.

  “Toggle the number one switch and hit enter!” Kelly shouted at her, and she moved at last.