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

  “You don’t understand,” said the visitor. “The Lever was here—it was now. It was instrumental that I prevent the death of Mr. Ramer. That was all. There was nothing I could do to prevent the rise of Ra’id Husan al Din and his Holy Fighters in this time. They were part of a fire that started long ago, and we could not get far enough back to do anything about it.”

  “But you had information—vital information that could have worked to change history in any number of ways. All you had to do was call the FBI and tell them about the bomb.”

  “Who would have believed me?” Graves looked at them. “An anonymous tip called in among the thousands of anonymous tips in the deluge of misinformation and false alarms that became the heart of the terrorist strategy after the World Trade Center fell. Would you have even believed me, say, four years ago; before you dreamt up this project?

  “But where have you been all this time?”

  “In a monastery! I had to avoid contact and let things germinate on their own to prevent the possibility of Paradox. It’s very real, you know. It’s not just a clever twist of the mind. It kills. Time is a harsh mistress, Mr. Dorland. We have lifted her skirts once too often, you see, and many have died. We know better. That little stunt you were planning with the Bermuda Pamphlets, for example, could have gotten you all killed! The only way to be certain, to be safe, was to limit my influence on the time line as much as possible until the actual moment where I could do some good. All our research pointed to the death of Mr. Ramer as a Primary Lever on the three of you. We decided to gamble everything on that one throw of the dice. Outcomes and Consequences had very good numbers for us. They predicted that, if Kelly had lived, you would most certainly have tried something with your experiment. You wanted to visit the Globe in 1612 to take in the Tempest—it’s all on the tape we recovered. We had to decide what to do. Should we simply act on Mr. Ramer’s behalf and hope for the best, or take more drastic action?”

  “Well you have certainly let the cat out of the bag with this little visit.” Dorland was pacing again, his mind a whirl. “The possibility of Paradox is very real now. You’ve revealed things here—”

  “I know…” There was fear in the visitor’s eyes. “But we had to take the risk. It was our last chance at survival. I was resolved not to say anything to you here until we were safely in the void. I was very patient, Mr. Dorland. Very patient.” He clutched at his chest as he spoke, his fist tightly balled, eyes wide with the intensity of his argument. “It was your theory…” His breathing seemed to come faster as he spoke. “A moment exists, somewhere in time, and it can undo the catastrophe that is about to change the entire world. We must find it, and that quickly. We are in the eye of the tempest now. We have less than six hours before the wave-front is scheduled to make first landfall. You have a fully operational Arch ready here, and you must use it tonight.”

  Nordhausen put down his shortwave and leaned heavily on the table. “Use it tonight? To go where?”

  “You must find the Meridian and stick the needle in…” The visitor seemed pale and drawn as he labored to persuade them. “Oh my… I was hoping the void would keep me a while…” He gave them all a wild-eyed look. “Stick the needle in…” he said again, and then collapsed, fainting dead away and sliding off the chair onto the floor.

  MERIDIAN

  Part II

  The Dreamers

  “All men dream: but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act out their dream with open eyes, to make it possible.”

  T.E. Lawrence - The Seven Pillars of Wisdom

  4

  The Nordhausen Study: Berkeley, California - 11:30 PM

  Maeve was the first to render assistance, Kelly at her side. Together they reached to cradle the visitor’s head from the hard wood floor of the study. A moment later, Paul helped Kelly lift the man and they carried him gently to the reading room where Nordhausen kept a small love seat. Maeve rushed in with another wet towel and began swabbing the old man’s forehead. She could see no signs of serious injury, but was concerned nonetheless.

  “He’s light as a feather,” said Kelly. “Has a pallid look to him, doesn’t he? Do you think he’s had a heart attack?”

  Maeve was taking his pulse and looking for other obvious signs of cardiac distress. “I think he just fainted,” she said. “Do you have anything to eat, Robert? The man looks half starved.”

  As if to confirm her suspicions, the visitor’s eyes fluttered open and he looked about the room, clearly disoriented. “I seem to have fallen…”

  “There now,” said Maeve. “You just fainted. Your pulse is a bit weak, but otherwise normal. You’ve been sweating with a bit of a temperature, I’m afraid. Let’s get something into your stomach and then you rest a bit. Perhaps a hot tea?”

  “There’s very little time,” the man tried to return her smile. Then he seemed to remember the urgency of the moment and spoke again. “You must not worry about me,” he whispered. “The Arch…That is the only thing that matters now.” His eyes seemed to look right past her, watching the ceiling and the walls about him with growing anxiety. “No time…” he breathed.

  “Yes, yes,” Maeve comforted him. She turned and waved at the others to shoo them out of the room. “You just lie here quietly and I’ll get you something to drink.”

  She herded the others back out into the study area and made for the coffee station while Dorland and Nordhausen huddled near the shortwave. They tuned in a few other stations, moving from one emergency bulletin to another until Paul pursed his lips with resignation.

  “Six hours,” he said. “Well folks, if we are going to do anything about this business, we had better get started. I’d like to have a word with Mr. Graves, and—”

  “Don’t you dare,” Maeve wagged a finger at him. “Give the man a moment to recover, Paul. I’ll get some shortbread and tea into him while you work out a strategy.” She was pouring a cup of the Earl Grey Nordhausen had brewed earlier. “I don’t suppose coffee is the right thing just now, but a little tea will do anyone good.”

  Kelly retrieved his laptop and came over to the study table to join the others. “We don’t have much time,” he said. “I’ve got all the algorithms here for the planned mission, but I’m going to need cycles on another Arion system to reconfigure.” He looked at his friend Paul with a puzzled expression. “Where to, boss?”

  Dorland ran a hand through his thick, dark hair and cleared his throat. “Good question,” he began. “Any thoughts, Robert? You’re the historian.”

  “Lovely,” said Nordhausen. “A madman we haven’t even heard of yet has blown up the island of Palma and we’ve got to find a way to undo the thing. This is a fairly tall order, Paul. The research could take months, years even!”

  “We have six hours.” Paul fixed him with a determined look.

  “Lord, a few hours ago Maeve was yammering to keep me from sneaking a peek at Shakespeare’s writing desk; now I’m supposed to save the world! Why don’t you go in and ask our visitor from the future? He must have some idea of what we were supposed to do.” He shivered with a sudden cold. “Did someone open the door?”

  “Put on the heat, Robert,” said Maeve. She noticed the chill at once. The others felt it as well. “Here, let me get this tea in to Mr. Graves and then we can plan this thing out.”

  “We’ll need time on an Arion system,” Kelly repeated. “I can’t log in from here because the phone line is dead. It’s two hours to the City with the traffic and this weather.”

  “We’ll just have to try finding something closer,” said Dorland. “What about the system at U.C. Berkeley?”

  “You have any time booked?”

  “Well, who would be using it on a night like this?”

  “Good point,” said Nordhausen. “I’ll bet they closed down and joined the panic out there. I’ve got a U.C. library pass. I just may be
able to get us in with my credentials, even if I have to pull seniority to bump someone off the machine.”

  “How much time will you need, Kelly?” Dorland was thinking hard.

  “Well… That depends on what we need to do. I need at least a half hour to program the preliminaries, but the real work is in fine-tuning the temporal locus. Where are we going?”

  Dorland looked over his shoulder. “Maeve? We really must talk with—”

  Maeve was standing in the open doorway leading to the reading room, a cup of tea in one hand and a box of shortbread wafers in the other.

  “Mr. Graves?” Maeve seemed as if she were calling a lost kitten. She started into the room. “Well that’s odd, he’s gone…” The howling of the wind continued outside, and the rain drummed harder on the roof.

  Nordhausen hurried over with Dorland in his wake. “What do you mean he’s—” He came up short, staring into the empty reading room. The love seat was unoccupied, and there was no one by the piano on the far end of the room. Maeve walked to the window and saw it was still locked. There was no other way in, or out, of the room.

  “Do you suppose he slipped out the front door?” Nordhausen craned his neck to look at the front entrance, but the door was shut tight, and the emergency chain was still in place.

  Dorland said nothing as he entered the room, feeling the remnant of a palpable chill as he approached the love seat. He extended his arm, palm open as if he were feeling the air about him. The cold seemed to emanate from the surface of the love seat. When he touched the fabric he sensed a frosty tinge that was almost wet, and it prompted him to draw his hand back at once. They just stood there, blank expressions on their faces, but Paul had an eerie sensation in his gut that something was wrong. He stepped back from the love seat, his mind slowly coming to a conclusion about what had happened. The others, Nordhausen in particular, seemed more flustered than anything else. The professor strode boldly across the reading room and leaned over to have a look behind the piano.

  “Odd,” he mused aloud. “Very odd. One minute the man keels over and has to be physically carried, then, not five minutes later, he vanishes. Something is very wrong here, Paul. What’s happened?”

  Dorland looked at him, and then back at the love seat again, still deep in thought. “I’m not entirely sure,” he began.

  “I recall him muttering something about a void.” Nordhausen was still looking about the room, as if he thought he would spy some hint of where the man had gone: behind the music stand, the end table, the white lace curtains by the window. He finally satisfied himself that the stranger was not in the room. “What did he mean by that?”

  “I think he knew he was taking a very great risk coming here tonight, just as Maeve argued that you would be taking a great risk by trying to steal away to the back offices at the Globe Theatre during the play. We haven’t even tried our experiment yet, but they have. They know what can happen. What was it he said a moment ago? Time is a harsh mistress. She may be a jealous one as well. Something tells me the whole notion of a Paradox is time’s way of protecting the continuum from contamination, and it’s not just a thorny puzzle. We may have just seen its handiwork. Paradox is real, he said. It kills. Didn’t he try to warn us? If we take the man at his word; if he was from a future time, then his actions here could have triggered some sort of temporal complication that impacted his own personal time line—he may have even created a Paradox.”

  “He seemed positively terrified of the thought,” said Nordhausen. “Did you see how the man was perspiring? Why, the moment he sat down at the table it was as if he was afraid to open his mouth.”

  Maeve came back from the window, sitting the tea and shortbread on the end table. “He was certainly frightened of something. Did you notice how he looked at you, Paul?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, one moment it seemed as if he was about to burst out with something, and then the next—”

  “He was afraid,” Nordhausen concluded.

  “Yes, and I’m afraid that without him our task has become immeasurably more difficult.” Paul took one last look at the love seat, and then led them back out into the study. The radio droned on, and the rain fell heavily on the rooftop lending to the atmosphere of somber strangeness in the room. Paul saw Kelly sitting at the study table, deep in thought. He had taken a small notebook out of his pocket, and his pen was poised above the page, as if he was trying to decide just what to write. It was his word trap, Paul knew. Kelly was secretly a poet, and a darn good one at that. He always carried a little notebook with him so he could jot down a word or phrase when it bloomed in his mind. Paul walked over to him, immediately interpreting the look on his face and sensing his distress. “What’s the matter, mister?”

  Kelly looked up at him, his eyes alight with the inner fire of his reverie. “This is weird,” he said. “I was supposed to die tonight. I mean…We’ve been working on this thing for over three years, Paul. I put my sweat and tears on the line with each of you—not to mention my bank account. Now we find out the damn thing pays off, and pays off big. I’m alive right now because the project works. But don’t you see? I’m not supposed to know that! I’m supposed to be lying on a slab in the morgue right now with a hang-tag on my big toe and a couple of late night med-techs futzing about my corpse until they get around to my autopsy. This isn’t my life any more. It’s… something else now, and it’s just weird, that’s all. This whole thing seems like a dream. It just can’t be real.”

  “You’re right, my friend.” Paul put his hand on Kelly’s shoulder to reassure him. “It’s weird for all of us. We’re in a Deep Nexus Point—very real to us, but very strange. Time is dreaming now, and in a dream anything can happen. From this point, all possible futures extend out to infinity. I think I understand what the visitor was trying to tell us now. This is a null spot; a void. The volcano has been blown apart and a massive surge of ocean is about to radically alter the continuum. But, for the next few hours, we will occupy a brief interval of time where it remains possible to exercise some influence on what actually happens.”

  “Something already has happened,” said Nordhausen.

  “Yes,” said Dorland “but don’t you see? We’re right in the middle of the dream! In fact, I would go so far as to say that we are the dreamers; waking dreamers with a chance to determine how this whole thing plays itself out. What we do in the next six hours will be absolutely crucial to the fate of countless individual time lines. If we can take the obvious fear and distress of our guest as any indication, it may be crucial to the survival of the human race.”

  “I don’t follow you,” said Nordhausen.

  “They were desperate, Robert. They had the benefit of the most powerful technology ever devised at their disposal and they were desperate. It was all they could do to get one man through the shadow cast by the Palma Event. There was only one interval in time now where they could do anything to change their fate, the fate that will befall all of us if that tsunami strikes the east coast in the morning. Think of it. How many died on Palma? Hell, the population of the Cape Verde Islands is probably half a million by itself. Add in all the other islands: the Azores, Madeira, and then what about Western Sahara, Casablanca, Lisbon and the coast of Portugal? The web of time is already ripping asunder, people. The hundreds of thousands of life-strands are snapping and twisting in the void under the assault of that wall of water. The fabric of the continuum is tearing, and we’ve got to dream up something here tonight to mend it again—and fast. It’s going to be dangerous—the most dangerous thing we’ve ever done in our lives. I can see that now. Do you realize the power we have in our hands? Yet, the greatest peril we face is ourselves. Right now, at this moment, we’re the most dangerous people on earth. We can be saviors on the one hand if we manage to sort this thing out, but if we fail, for whatever reason…”

  Nordhausen stared at him, a grim determination settling itself onto his features. “But what will we do? We’re wasting time!
” He looked at Kelly, and then Maeve. They all stared at each other, each waiting for one of the others to speak. Kelly was looking at Paul, and Paul’s eyes caught the professor’s with a question in them that was needing his help. It was clear to them all that they had to act; had to do something, but what? Where should they go? Where would they even begin to look for that one single moment of insignificance that could make the difference in the endless weave of time?

  “This is cruel,” said Dorland. “Here we had the answer to that very question sitting at our study table and resting on the love seat, and then he was snatched away from us.”

  Nordhausen began to think. “It must be something to do with the rise of Islamic radicalism in modern times. Lord, the roots of the conflict between the Moslem world and the West go back centuries! Where do we start?”

  “What about the Crusades?” Kelly offered an obvious guess.

  “Which one? They started in 1096 and extended all the way to 1254.” Nordhausen wasn’t making things any easier, but he needed to impress the enormity of the problem on them. “Should we start at the beginning and try to prevent Pope Urban II’s speech in 1095 where he exhorted the faithful to come to the aid of the Byzantine Empire? Supposing that was the right place in time, how would we find Dorland’s pushpin in all the moments leading up to that incident?”

  “Pushpoint,” Dorland corrected him.

  “Whatever!” Nordhausen was clearly flustered now. “The point is that it will be absolutely impossible for us to find this thing—the one insignificant moment in time that acts as a catalyst to energize that event. It could be anything. Do we try to delay the Pope on the road to Clermont where he gave the speech? Do we go back further to try and intercept the messenger that reached him from the Byzantine Emperor with an appeal for aid? Where is the decisive moment? Is it a rickety wheel on an oxcart that we must keep from repair; or do we just try and assassinate the man, God forbid? Don’t you see how useless this is? It will take months or even years of research to isolate a potential root cause for the Crusades. It may take us ten, twenty or even a hundred attempts: each one a mission to enact our latest best guess on the issue, and who knows what harm we’ll work upon the time line with our mistakes?”