Touchstone (Meridian Series) Read online

  “But you said we were all Prime Movers—that they couldn’t touch us without risking the entire future progression of the Time technology. Look at me. I walked right out of the Nexus and I’m still fit as a fiddle.”

  “That might be true—at least I hoped as much. I think we may have a Time Conundrum on our hands. Time isn’t certain what to do with this situation, and so she left you in one piece while she’s sorting things through. But look at Kelly. Prime mover or not, he’s in jeopardy right now. Your integrity may be compromised as well. But who really knows?”

  Nordhausen took a deep breath. “OK… suppose someone is trying to tamper with that DVD. That means they’ve come here—to our time?

  “Not necessarily. They may have arrived yesterday, a week ago, last month. Who knows? They may have found the thing in the year 2050, or three years before Graves and his people were slated to find it.”

  “What? So how does this explain Kelly’s present condition?”

  Dorland was becoming less and less sure. “Well,” he said, feeling his way as he went, “Paradox is retroactive. At least that’s what I’m starting to think now. If they get their hands on the DVD in the year 2050, like I suggested, then Time has to do some quick editing. None of the events lived by Kelly in this Meridian would have been possible.”

  “Editing? That’s appalling! How could time rewind itself and undo all those events. Kelly’s been safe and sound for months now. Think of all the little pushpins he’s been responsible for in all that time.”

  “True,” said Dorland, overlooking his friend’s persistent error with the terminology. “I admit I’m reaching. But Maeve is convinced this is a Temporal Variation, and we’ve got to check on that DVD. In fact, we should do this now, before we go to the lab. Kelly’s life is in danger here.”

  Nordhausen looked sharply at Dorland. “You think it’s gone, don’t you.”

  Dorland kept his eyes on the road. “No, I don’t, I just agree with Maeve, that we should keep it in a safer place.”

  Nordhausen was silent for a moment. “Kelly is in a Schroedinger’s Box,” he said with a sudden finality. Dorland’s gave him an odd look, waiting for him to explain himself.

  Nordhausen went on. “Kelly is like the cat in the Schroedinger’s Box. Except, he’s outside the box, but we don’t know if he is alive or dead!”

  “Go on.” Paul was listening very closely now, his attention divided between his driving and Nordhausen.

  “Well,” said Nordhausen, slowing down as his theory ramified in his mind, “as you know, Schroedinger set up a thought experiment, in which he put a cat in a box, with a bottle of prussic acid and a trigger on the bottle hooked up to a Geiger Counter.”

  “Yes, yes, and the Geiger counter was monitoring a source of ionizing radiation, with even odds that it would or would not emit a detectible particle in any hour.” Dorland hurried him along.

  “Slow down, let me work this out,” Nordhausen protested. “Okay, let me see… In the thought experiment, after the passage of an hour, the source either has or has not radiated, and the cat is or is not dead, but occupies a condition that is both, until you open the box and look.”

  “Yes, yes, Schroedinger tossed that out as an offhand comment, and said that it was solved by observation, and a half dead and half alive cat in a box was a logical nonsense. Many liberal artists like you take it to mean more than it does.”

  “Well, whatever nonsense it is, we have a black box, and we don’t know what is in it, and we are relying on what is in it to maintain Kelly’s existence against Paradox. Sounds like a Schroedinger’s box to me!”

  Dorland went into a brown funk as he drove, his mind wrestling with time theory even as he twisted the wheel to navigate the narrow road. They were in the Berkeley Hills, working their way along a wooded road behind the university and the Lab complex.

  The night had come early with the appearance of a low, wet front. The sky was darkening, although the rims of the clouds in the western horizon were made brilliant by the low sun. It was suddenly cold and blustery, with a light rain speckling the windshield. Dorland gripped the wheel harder, his head poking forward to see through the rain. Thankfully, a full moon was riding high through the moving clouds, illuminating the way ahead with a silvery sheen.

  “A Schroedinger’s box!” Dorland came out with that very suddenly, as though his thinking had just reached a sure conclusion. “How can you plan for something like that?”

  8

  Nordhausen was gripping the handle over the door in a struggle against the momentum of the car as it rounded a tight bend in the road. His face was lit by the green glow from the instrument dash, the only light in the darkness of the cabin.

  “Perhaps Maeve is right,” he said. “Maybe we should just dismantle the whole shop, shred the documents, and part out the hardware.”

  “No! Taking care of Kelly is one thing; the project is another matter entirely. Once we recover the DVD, and figure out how to protect it, Kelly will be fine, and we will be able to continue the project—and find out about your Rosetta Stone for starters.”

  “What is the project now Paul? What are we supposed to do with it all?”

  “We’re standing a watch,” Paul said. “We’re out on the walls of eternity with our eyes puckered against the dark.”

  “Very poetic, you always overuse that puckered eyes thing, but what does it mean?”

  “The alarm just went off and we’ve got to get a line on what’s happening. Tell me: when was your mission departure time?”

  The professor adopted that sheepish look again, regret plain on his face. “Oh four hundred.”

  “And your retraction?”

  “Thirty minutes later.”

  “How long were you there?”

  “Forty-eight hours, though it seemed like forever.”

  “And when did you meet the Primes?”

  “What? You mean Wilde and company? Well…” Nordhausen rolled his eyes, thinking. “I was about an hour just taking things in until I got to my hotel room. Then another three hours until I made it to the Opera house. The performance was two hours or so, and I suppose I met Wilde an hour later in the club.”

  “That’s seven hours—in that milieu, correct?”

  “Yes, I suppose so. But what is this all about?”

  Paul squinted, slowing to round another tight curve. “Well that’s odd,” he said. “The alarm went off at three minutes after four—exactly—just a few minutes after you opened the continuum, in our time line.

  “Yes, I know,” Nordhausen admitted with a shrug. “I forgot about Kelly’s Golems. I mean, there hasn’t been an alert since your inadvertent fall into that nest of Assassins at Massiaf. I completely forgot that my mission would set off the alarm. Stupid of me.”

  “Wait a second,” Paul stopped him. “Hear me out. The timing on these things is critical. The Golems call home the instant they detect a variation. The first call came in at four-oh-three. That’s three minutes after you breached the continuum—our time—but that’s almost five hours at your target milieu.”

  “Five hours? How can you know something like that?”

  Paul thought for a second. “Four point eight hours, to be a little more precise. If you were running a 48 hour breach over 30 minutes lab processing time, then each minute here was 96 minutes there. See what I mean?”

  “I suppose so, but—”

  “Well, what were you doing five hours into your mission?” He went over the professor’s story again in his head, vocalizing events and looking to Nordhausen for confirmation. “An hour futzing about, three hours in your room…Why, that would put you at the opera when the alarm came in.”

  “Yes, right in the middle of the performance, I suppose.”

  Paul brought the car to a halt at a stop sign, taking advantage of the brief break from driving to hone in on something. “Think now, Robert. Did you have any significant contact with locals during the opera?”

  “Not that I can
recall. I was so thrilled with the performance that I was totally wrapped up in it. Why, I didn’t say a word to anyone.”

  “You’re certain?”

  “Absolutely. I just sat there.”

  “You didn’t try to pull anything like you had planned for the Shakespeare play, right? You didn’t go back stage…”

  “Not at all. What are you getting at?”

  “The alarm went off before you encountered the Primes at the club.” Paul started off again, adjusting his windshield wipers against a blowing squall of rain.

  Nordhausen stared at him, the implications of Paul’s statement finally hitting home. “Very clever,” he said, feeling a bit relieved, but still somewhat confused.

  “Assuming your estimate of the time is accurate.”

  “The show started at 8:00pm, promptly. I looked at my watch when the curtain rose.”

  “Too bad you didn’t do that when you arrived. Then we’d have a real good time reference.”

  Nordhausen’s eyes widened with a sudden recollection. “The bells!”

  “What?”

  “Oranges and lemons, sing the bells of St. Clements…The bells, Paul! I heard them ring the very moment I arrived. Why, I counted four—yes, exactly four PM—just a few seconds after I got there.”

  “Good for you! That nails down the time, so it looks like the contamination happened while you were at the opera.”

  “But I wasn’t doing anything. I was just delighted to watch the play. What harm could I have caused by just sitting there?”

  “Who knows. Pushpoints are very fragile things.”

  “But how could that have destroyed the Rosetta Stone? I just don’t see the connection.”

  Paul was silent for a time. “Neither do I,” he said at last, his voice laden with an air of finality.

  Nordhausen picked up on the tonal change at once. “You mean to say… you don’t think I’m responsible?”

  “Nope.”

  The professor sighed with great relief. “Thank God—but how can you be sure? You’re the one who says these little pushpins could be anywhere. Suppose I took someone’s seat at the opera, like you said, and they moved elsewhere.” He spun out a scenario, inwardly hoping he would not end up shifting the blame back on his own shoulders again. “So this guy moves and has a conversation with someone at his new seat—someone he was never supposed to meet, and the dislocation caused some sort of cascading event in the continuum. You follow me? Could that have caused the damage?”

  “Yes, I follow you, and no, it could not.”

  “How can you be certain?” The professor wanted to know if he was really off the hook.

  “I’m certain. I thought this from the very first moment you came out with this.”

  “What? And you kept it to yourself!”

  “It’s elementary, my dear professor.” Paul smiled, pleased to be Holmes to Nordhausen’s Watson. “You say this artifact was discovered in 1799 by Napoleon’s troops?”

  “Yes, at Rosetta. That’s how it got the name.”

  “Fine. And what year was your breaching point set for?”

  “1880. The year Pirates of Penzance opened at the Opera Comique in London.”

  “So how does a contamination in 1880 cause damage to a stone carving that was discovered nearly a hundred years earlier?”

  “Right…” Nordhausen groped about the argument, feeling he way forward. “The curator! When I saw the damage to the stone he claimed he had taken very good care of it—that it was always that way!”

  “So the damage had to occur earlier on the Meridian.” Paul slowed the Honda to look for the entrance to the memorial grounds. Nordhausen leaned back, exhaling deeply.

  “Thank God,” he breathed. “It wasn’t me. Why didn’t you tell me if you suspected this all along?”

  “You needed to sit with it for a while,” Paul chided. “You ran off to Reading Station to retrieve Lawrence’s manuscript, then dragged me off to Wadi Rumm for a tour of the Crusades. Now this. I wanted you to stew in your own pot for a while, my friend.”

  Nordhausen was going to say something, but he caught himself, nodding his head.

  “I suppose I had it coming,” he agreed at last. “Yet I can’t tell you how relieved I am! I thought it was all my fault—the stone, the hieroglyphics, Kelly. All of it.”

  “Well you can finally be done with that,” said Paul, “because I don’t think you had anything to do with Kelly’s situation either. We may find out your meddling caused changes in this Meridian, but we won’t know that until we get the Golem report. It’s a pretty fair bet that you didn’t damage this Rosetta Stone you keep talking about. Didn’t you hear me when I first came in? The initial reports showed a spatial locus in the Middle East—and you were in London.”

  Robert gave him a wide eyed look. “Yes… Then I couldn’t be the one responsible for the contamination. But who then? How did it happen?”

  “You should be.” There was an ominous tone to that, and Paul gave the professor a hard look.

  “What now?” he asked.

  “I think we both know who might be behind this business, Robert.”

  “You mean Rasil and his confederates?”

  “Possibly—in fact, very likely. There’s no doubt he learned of your phone call from the digital log on his gizmo. A simple number trace would give him Kelly’s cell phone number, and it would ID our good buddy clear enough. So, in one way, you still may be responsible for what’s happening to Kelly. Someone is on to us, and they’re trying to counter what we’ve been doing with the project.”

  “Damn…” Nordhausen nodded his head gravely. “We have to find out what is going on… is that the place?” He pointed to a wrought iron gate up ahead, marking the entrance to the memorial site.

  They passed a painted white sign blowing wildly in the rain: Eternal Grove Cemetery. They selected the spot when they thought Kelly was lost, burying a few mementoes in a shallow grave, on a isolated hillside still far from development, a peaceful oak grove surrounded by green pastureland and harboring a small cemetery. Now the oak trees were heaving furiously in the wind, bulging black shapes in the dark. A heavy chain bound the white painted gate, rattling with the wind. Nordhausen hopped out to open it, while Dorland drove on through.

  Old oak leaves were blowing, stirred up by the storm. Nordhausen waved the car by, and secured the chain. They were very much alone, in fact they hadn’t seen another car for miles on the road, but Paul’s intimations had unnerved him. Thankfully, the rain was abating somewhat, and the professor ran down the drive after the white Honda, which finally came to a stop where the driveway opened on a pathway into the memorial grounds.

  After the sharp crunching of tires on the gravel, the silence was acute. Spread before them in the moonlight was a rolling hillside graveyard of several acres, descending to a stream that wound away to the valley in the distance. The shadows of clouds raced across the headstones, making them flash when the moonlight suddenly bathed them again. Occasional optimistic frogs started to croak fitfully in the unseen distance.

  Dorland got out, opened the trunk of the Honda and the two men pulled out a pair of shovels, a pick and a pry-bar wrapped in a blanket tied with bungee cords.

  “Can you find it in this murk?” asked Nordhausen.

  “It’s over here.”

  He started down the left arm of the loop with a shovel in his hand, his lanky frame bent forward against a gust of wind. Nordhausen followed with the other shovel and the tools.

  They heard a car approach on the main road and stopped walking, their hackles raised with alarm. It was just a passing vehicle, but it was clear that they both were quite on edge.

  “Good thing the moon’s out.” said Nordhausen.

  “If only it weren’t raining,” Paul complained. Dorland was looking around for landmarks. He located a familiar stone, a fine marble urn with cherubs, 1807 - 1879, Matilda Hibbard, Beloved Wife and Mother. The rain was short and brisk, the tail end of a squall
. It had darkened the granite headstones, and made the polished marble gleam. He walked around a few tilted headstones, and found Kelly’s, a modest plaque set flat against the ground.

  Behind the plaque, the sod was humped up, and had fresh cuts around the edges. The ground bore the unmistakable mark of tampering.

  “This has been opened.” said Nordhausen.

  “It sure looks like it. Probably within the last couple days, possibly even hours.”

  The two men looked at each other, wondering if they should go ahead and do what they had come to do in the first place.

  “Well, we have to know,” said Paul. “That’s the whole point of a Schroedinger’s box. You make your reality when you look inside. Let’s dig.”

  He waded in with a strong foot on his shovel, and heaved away the first clod. They wedged the memorial plaque aside and for the next ten minutes the two men delved into the shallow grave. At first the work was muddy, but soon they hit dry earth. The expected thud came suddenly when the professor’s shovel hit something hard.

  “There’s our Schroedinger’s box,” said Paul. Without speaking, they cleared off the last of the dirt.

  Whoever opened the gravesite before them hadn’t bothered to pry the lid off. They had just hacked into the top with an axe, leaving an ugly breach in the box.

  “It’s kind of odd,” said Robert. “It feels like a desecration, even though Kelly was never here.”

  Dorland stooped to get a better look, thrusting his arm into the hole in the box and rooting about. He pulled his hand out and sat back on his haunches.

  “Well, Mr. Schroedinger?” asked Nordhausen.

  “The cat is dead,” said Paul. “It’s gone. Someone’s got the DVD.”

  “Who could have done this?”

  “God only knows, but we have our suspicions, right? If it wasn’t Rasil or his men it was someone else. Someone from the future. They’re the only ones who could possibly know about this.”