“But how is that possible?” Paul scratched his head. “You can’t move someone in time without getting a pattern signature on them from the tachyon infusion. There was no signature on you, Kelly. You were never even in the Arch.”
Kelly smiled. “That may be true now,” he said with a wry smile, “but there’s one other way you can pick someone up. It’s very difficult, damn near impossible, in fact. They don’t like to do it—in fact they have a rule against ever doing it, except in special emergencies like this. You have to know exactly where the person is—and I mean exactly. If you can get that as close to a certainty as possible, you can move someone. Let’s just say our friends from tomorrow have had a little more time to refine things.”
“But how would they know where you would be,” asked Robert? “Lord, they would have to target a specific place with the spatial coordinates, at precisely the right time.”
“That they did.” Kelly looked at Paul. “They had a little help in working that out.”
They all looked at him, not understanding what he meant with that. There was a great deal more he wanted to tell them, but he tried to sum up the situation quickly.
“It’s like this,” he concluded. “They were able to pull me to the safety of the Nexus on their end before it dissipated. It gave them enough time to neutralize the Paradox Reaction—Just their way of saying thanks for what we had accomplished, I suppose. They were able to stabilize me—it took several hours in their time; it was years in this Meridian.”
“You mean there was still a chance they could lose you?”
“It was a very close call,” said Kelly. “I was gone for some time. You all finished out your ceremony here and lived many…” He caught himself, suddenly afraid to say more, then nodded his head to one side, coming to a new conclusion. “What’s the harm. I was going to say you lived many long years without me in this Meridian, but that’s all changed now. They asked me if I wanted to stay with them, or go back. That was an easy choice for me, but they had to spend a long time with the issue in Outcomes and Consequences before I finally got approval for the move. If they sent me back it would revise this Meridian again, you see. So this is all new!” He raised his arms expansively, as if to take in the whole of the world about them. “And it’s all ours.”
Paul burst out laughing. “You changed the continuum?”
“Ran the numbers myself.”
“Hope you got the exponents right!” Robert could not help himself.
Maeve had been so quiet, just looking at the three of them with a broad smile on her face the whole time. She reached out and quietly took Kelly by the hand, as if to test for herself if he was real, substantial; if he was truly there.
Kelly looked at her warmly. “Something tells me I’m going to spend a long time with this hand in mine.” He gave her a reassuring squeeze.
“Well come on, people!” Nordhausen waved his hands in front of Kelly’s eyes to break the spell. “What are we standing here for? Let’s get over to Peets and we can talk the hours away over coffee. I want to hear all about this.” He stooped to recover his box. From the shallow grave, and Paul moved to get his parcel as well.
“Wait!” Kelly held up a warning hand. They looked at him, afraid that it had all been a mirage and that he would melt away into a cold fog at a moment’s notice. “Leave everything there,” Kelly whispered. The sound of a dog barked at the far end of the park, and he cocked his head to heed it, a strange look on his face. “Leave everything where it is. Let’s bury it in place and set the stone Maeve brought for the grave.”
Paul looked at him, slowly understanding. They had to know exactly where he was to pull him forward, he thought. Exactly! They saw the DVD file from the security camera. They must have excavated this grave site as part of their research on the incident. That’s why we have to leave it all here, safe and undisturbed.
“But this is all precious,” said Nordhausen. “It will be ruined.”
“Do exactly what he says,” said Paul, and he gave Kelly a knowing wink. There was only one last thing that was bothering him. As he understood things now, Kelly’s return was a round trip ticket. Once they took his pattern signature in the Tachyon infusion, the fail-safe systems would eventually reach the half-life trigger and pull him back to the future. Did they have some way of slowing down the decay sequence? “Kelly,” he whispered while Robert and Maeve began to bury the memorial tokens, “what about the final retraction sequence?”
“No pattern signature,” Kelly whispered back. “I insisted on it. This is a one way trip, Paul. They don’t have a signature on me any longer, so you’re stuck with me.”
“And Paradox?”
“Once this stone is in place I will be just fine. It’s the one thing I had to do—It’s our Pushpoint, Paul.”
They were setting the grave stone in place, smiling with the irony of it all. This planned memorial to his death would stand a guard on his life now, through all the days that remained to him. Kelly winked at Paul, excusing himself for a moment and walking to the cool green grass of the burial knoll.
“I’ve always wanted to do this,” he said with a grin, dancing a little jig on his own grave. Then they all joined arms and started back along the flagstone pathway of a new life together. They were going to begin it with good strong cup of Peets coffee—Major Dickason’s Blend.
Epilogue
The Nordhausen Caper – England – November, 1919
T
he train reached the station at precisely 12:00 noon, and Nordhausen smiled at the legendary British sense of punctuality. It was the daily run out of London to Oxford, making its way there in a roundabout way by following the meandering line of the Thames as it curled north of Windsor. It was stopping at Reading now, near the confluence of the Kennet River and the Thames. They would hold over here for half an hour, and then turn north to cross the Berkshire Downs and come up upon Oxford from the south.
The professor had been very careful in his research this time, following every clue he could dig up on the matter that was now afoot. He was very pleased that he had been able to dress himself so well for the part he hoped to play here, a stolid English gentlemen in dark wool and pinstripes topped off with a typical derby of the period. His shoes were immaculately polished, and this time they were very well fitted. The memory of his trek across the desert in those tight leather boots still sent a twinge to his toes when he thought of it. A gold chain adorned his vest, linking smartly to the pocket watch his grandfather had given him years ago. Even though Maeve had not had the chance to subject him to her careful scrutiny before he left, he was well satisfied that there was nothing about his appearance that would arouse the slightest suspicion or undue interest. He seemed the perfect English banker, out on business, which is exactly the image he intended to project.
No, Maeve never had the chance to get her claws into me this time, he smirked to himself. In fact, no one knew he was here at all, not even the hapless graduate assistant he had press-ganged into a late shift on the mission. The lad had been given one simple task. He was to throw a switch at precisely 3:00 AM, and bother with nothing else.
It’s a pity this all has to end, he thought. There’s so much more we could learn with the technology. Why, we’ve hardly gone anywhere! That business with Lawrence and Kelly was enough to put the proverbial ‘Fear of the Lord’ into Paul’s poor heart. I don’t suppose I blame him for taking Maeve’s side in this. That was a near run thing with Kelly. I still don’t quite understand it all myself.
The project was being shut down, of course. Maeve had argued it from the very first moment when things began to settle back into normalcy after Kelly’s return. She strung out a hundred reasons why the Arch should never be used again, all well and good, but terribly disheartening to Nordhausen. He had been the Doubting Thomas up until the moment when he first plunged through the portal of the Arch. Seeing was believing, and he saw enough on that first mission to whet his appetite for more and more and more. He
had opposed himself to Maeve in the long discussions over the future of the project. In time, Kelly had come round to Maeve’s side to tip the balance toward discontinuing things. Paul floated for a while, undecided, reluctant to abandon his long held theories that had been vindicated with such an amazing effect.
Eventually he came to fear the dangers involved in the technology more than he could appreciate the prospects it offered. It wasn’t that difficult to keep a lid on what they had accomplished that night. There had only been two other people at the facility when they took their stroll though the Trans-Jordan in 1917. Tom was oblivious of virtually everything that happened, for he had been down with the generators the whole time. As for Jen, she had been quietly persuaded that they should all stick to the cover story and say the project failed. Paul had a key hand in that. He finally managed to get that girl into bed!
Nordhausen smiled to think of the two of them now. Paul always did have a romantic streak in him. Thankfully, she was as impressionable as she was willing, and the secret was kept quiet. They would write some papers about it all and the investors would benefit by a few patents that would be developed from the technology. Most just shook their heads and bowed to the inward suspicion they held all along—that time travel was impossible. No one else, of course, knew anything more about it.
Still, the dire consequences and horrendous outcomes Maeve painted for them had eventually prevailed over Nordhausen’s arguments. He had tried his best to tantalize them with the prospects and potentials the Arch offered. They could have learned so much. Imagine watching Caesar crossing his Rubicon, or wandering through the great Pyramid of Giza. Imagine listening to one of Plato’s soliloquies, visiting the Parthenon in all its glory, or watching the intrepid defense of the 300 Spartans at Thermopylae. Imagine stealing up Mount Calvary and catching a glimpse of the crucifixion, or better yet, the resurrection! It seemed that every argument he made rebounded on him. The thought that they would muddy the waters of history and contaminate any of these crucial events was too much in the end. They had already stood witness to one resurrection, Maeve said, closing the matter.
Oddly, they still had not discovered what it was they did to reverse the Palma Event. Paul’s Pushpoint was hiding there somewhere, he thought, but no one could discern what it was.
He sighed with resignation. So much history would remain comfortably unknown, safe in the shrouding mists of time. The day he gave in on the matter was the day he hatched his little plan for one last mission—on the sly, of course. He simply had to try it one more time, no matter what the danger. He would plan things very carefully, research it all right down to his derby and shoes. He would parse out the mathematics through his graduate intern contacts. He could spread the calculations through the heads of ten to twelve different people, and no one would ever see the whole, or know what they were for. He would hire an expert to simply verify his final solution on an Arion mainframe, telling him it was all some arcane physics program. He would slip in late at night, and set it up so that he would only be gone for an hour or so. That was all the time it would take him. No one would know about it until after the fact. Then he would apologize, offer to pay for the electrical bill for a month out of his own pocket, and swear that he would never so much as think about doing something like this again.
Just for good measure, and to lessen the scourge he knew he would have to endure from Maeve as his penance, he chose something simple; something that would not upset anything. He would just go back and solve one of history’s little enigmas, that’s all. It would be a wonderful postscript to the mission he had taken with Paul, and it wouldn’t harm a flea on Mother Time’s back.
So here he was, riding in coach number seven as it rolled into Reading Station west of London on a crisp November day in 1919. He would bide his time, watching carefully from his window seat until his quarry left the train and made his way over to the ‘Refreshment Room’ for a mid-day tea and crumpet. The man would be carrying a messenger’s bag, of the sort they used to transport important papers, currency, or gold. Why his mark selected such a bag was beyond him. Surely it would be hard to overlook where he was going to leave it haphazardly under the table in the Refreshment Room. Surely it would be a severe temptation to anyone who found it.
Nordhausen planned to head for that very room in just a minute or two. He waited patiently, counting out the seconds, and then stood up with a clear resolve. He hefted the stout walking cane he had brought along, as if to test its strength for the odd use he had in mind. It was a solid piece of lacquered hickory, with a burnished brass cap. It would serve him quite well, he thought, as long as he kept a bit of guts behind it.
He would make his way into the station and take a seat in the Refreshment Room, very close to Lawrence himself. Yes, it was Lawrence he had come to see again. His presence on the train had been well documented, and Nordhausen was sure he would be here. The professor wondered whether he would still have that eerie amber glow about him now that he had fled from the heroics of his desert exploits to the relative anonymity of English Society again. Still, he would have his book with him—the manuscript, the very first draft of the Seven Pillars of Wisdom. If his claim that it was lost, or stolen on this very train trip was true, Nordhausen would soon find out.
The version of the book the professor relied upon for their harrowing excursion to Kilometer 172 was actually the third draft Lawrence made of the story. The first he lost, on this very trip to Oxford. The second he destroyed himself, perhaps out of grief for what he failed to accomplish, or some hidden shame that would dog him the rest of his brief life. The third would survive to become the classic that had saved the Western World, but the first two copies of the manuscript were never found. There was no point trying to get at the second draft. The research was too hazy in that direction. But this first draft was right here on the train, in the bank messenger’s bag, and reputedly left under his table when Lawrence stopped here for a brief refreshment. Someone was going to try and make off with it, and that someone was going to feel the sharp crack of Nordhausen’s cane before the hour was through.
Lawrence would reach Oxford, and realize his bag was gone. He would place a call to the Reading Station, in the hopes that someone there would recover it. The professor thought about that for a moment. Should he turn the bag over to the Station Master? He would still be able to read it, as it would undoubtedly be published at some time. The more he considered the matter, however, the more he began to hear the snarl and growl of Paradox on the fringes of his surreptitious plan.
No, this time the threat of Paradox favored his plan. If he turned it in, then Lawrence would not have to re-write the book as he did later that year. If the story was altered, ever so slightly, then the clues which led them all to Kilometer 172 might never be there. Everything could come unraveled in that event… Everything. Maeve was really quite correct in the end. They would change things without even knowing it, just as they did at Minifir. He couldn’t take the risk, so he decided to take the bag instead. After all, it was lost and never recovered. It was probably taken by some ignorant station worker who did not have the slightest appreciation of what he was stealing, or even who his poor victim was! All he had to do was make certain Lawrence was well away on his train before he recovered it, and if someone got to it first, he had his cane.
The professor rubbed his hands in anticipation. He would see to the matter once and for all. If history could find no use for the precious draft, he would be quite happy to take it under his loving wing, and fly away.
And that is exactly what he did.
The End
Afterword
"The hardest strokes of heaven fall in history upon those who imagine that they can control things in a sovereign manner, playing providence not only for themselves but for the far future -- reaching out into the future with the wrong kind of farsightedness, and gambling on a lot of risky calculations in which there must never be a single mistake."
English Historian Sir
Herbert Butterfield
“Certainty about prediction is an illusion. One thing that history keeps teaching us is that the future is full of surprises and outwits all our certitudes.”
Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.
T
ime travel has always been a favorite grazing field for me. Ever since I first saw the H.G. Wells classic as a youth, and read his story, I have been fascinated with the thought that some day humans might learn to travel in time. Perhaps they will, though people like Steven Hawking, who have pondered the physics deeply, don’t seem to think it very likely, or even possible. Hawking’s argument, that we should be awash with time travelers from the future if it ever becomes possible to visit the past, was recounted through Nordhausen’s voice at the outset of the book. The time theory that was vindicated by the appearance of Mr. Graves was my answer to Hawking’s challenge.
One of two possibilities present themselves when considering this question. The first is that we don’t see time travelers from the future because they have no interest in visiting us, a solution our egos might find hard to swallow. The second is even more perplexing: we are seeing time travelers from the future, only they are the reason for the many strange UFO sightings that have occurred in recent years—not beings from another planet. Would this explain why the aliens many abductees claim to remember appear so human in form, like strangely evolved primates? I shudder to think that the entire UFO phenomenon is actually subtle tampering by future time travelers. Perhaps, as Maeve feared, a Time War is going on, and the late 20th Century became a particularly fertile field for battle. Or perhaps we are being visited, but the travelers are very clever about concealing themselves.
Meridian - A Novel In Time (The Meridian Series) Page 31