by Mayer, Bob
The explosion centered on the pyramid, on a scale not seen since meteors battered the planet. A tidal wave more than a mile high spread outward from the center of the Atlantic, so powerful it circled the entire globe before slowly subsiding. Atlantis’s thirteen islands were gone so completely, with no indication there had even been land in the center of the mighty ocean, no ruins for later civilizations to find.
And so it begins.
When: Can’t Tell You. Where: Can’t Tell You.
“Forget everything you were told,” Dane said to the Nightstalkers. A mousy woman in a gray suit handed him a manila file folder and waited. Dane was an average-sized man with thick hair that was prematurely gray. His beard was a few days removed from the last touch of a razor and there were deep bags under his eyes.
“Just great,” Scout muttered.
“Roland already did,” Mac said. “Never need worry about that.”
“Told by who?” Moms asked. “You? Amelia Earhart? Her?” she added, with a nod toward Edith Frobish.
Dane was looking inside the folder. He frowned, pulled a pen out of his pocket and scrawled something inside, and then handed it back to the woman. “Okay. Maybe not everything.”
“Too late for that,” Mac said. “Roland just dumped what little he had.”
Roland glared at Mac, not quite accepting the ribbing. It was somewhat astute of the big man to be defensive because underneath Mac’s comments, there was a pain. Unfortunately, Roland wasn’t astute enough to recognize that pain had nothing to do with him. Neeley could have reassured Roland, but she wasn’t here, so he was on his own, ill-equipped to handle a verbal assault but disciplined enough not to respond.
The woman in gray left, a door shutting behind her, cutting off the low roar of noise from the Palace. They were in a small room found through one of the many doors on the balcony. There was a wooden table in the center and lockers along the far wall. The wall behind Dane was covered with a large blackboard, imperfectly cleared of whatever had been written on it before with large smears of chalk going this way and that.
“Take a seat,” Dane suggested.
The Nightstalkers, along with Edith Frobish, settled down in wooden chairs around the table.
“This will be your team room,” Dane said. He pointed past them to another door. “There are sleeping quarters back there, but you won’t be sleeping for a bit.”
“Of course not,” Scout muttered.
“We don’t know how many parallel Earths there are,” Dane began. “Amelia Earhart, from her position in the Space Between, has encountered people from what she believes are thirty-two different timelines, including her own, which is not ours. But it’s a rather unscientific survey as it consists of her checking a particular history and seeing if it’s radically different from other timelines. We believe the differences between timelines are often much more subtle. Some could seem exactly the same, but have differences that aren’t immediately obvious.”
“Infinite,” Doc said. “There can be infinite timelines.”
Dane nodded. “Theoretically, there can be. But how many are there really? If I make choice A instead of choice B, have I created a new timeline on my own? Are my choices that important? Are any of our choices that important to an overall timeline?”
“Probably not,” Doc said. “You’d still have the one timeline, although your life might turn out a bit differently.”
Dane nodded. “Correct. It is very, very difficult for a new timeline to split off; it requires a time tsunami. But it has happened. At least thirty-two times.”
“How did the first split occur?” Ivar asked.
“You’re asking how did the multiverse begin?” Dane said. It was obvious it wasn’t a question he expected answered.
But Doc gave it a shot. “Perhaps at the bottom of the Possibility Palace. The start point of the spiral ramp. Isn’t that the start point of our timeline?”
Dane sighed. “It’s the start point of the Time Patrol. We’re not even certain when our universe began. Maybe the multiverse started at the same time?
“Let’s deal with the problem, not the theory. The problem is our timeline has been attacked and continues to be attacked, in various ways. What you just experienced with the Ratnik in our timeline was a test based on a real problem, an introduction to a concept many can’t grasp. But it was also real. The Ratnik, the Russian Time Patrol, were a problem, one from our own timeline.”
Moms spoke up. “Are there any other Time Patrols from our timeline, like the Ratnik?”
“Not that we’re aware of,” Dane said.
“Great,” Scout muttered.
“One of the problems,” Dane said, with a glance at Scout, “is that our timeline, and others, are not unified entities. We have wars and competing superpowers. We do not present a united front against the assaults from the Shadow even inside our own timeline, never mind across timelines.”
“Like the United Nations,” Doc observed.
“Indeed.” Dane sighed. “Listen. We don’t understand a lot of this. We do the best we can.”
“And what’s the best you expect of us?” Moms asked. “You’ve got all those people out there. You have other time travelers working for you. What do you want from us? You didn’t randomly pick us and test us.”
“No,” Dane agreed. “We didn’t. There’s a new threat that we have to counter in a new way. Which is why we recruited you specifically.” He nodded to his left, where Edith Frobish sat. “Some of what she told you is indeed true. The concept of time ripples, shifts, and a possible tsunami which could alter our timeline, or even wipe it out. However, we’ve learned of a new threat in terms of that. A more focused one. A potentially more dangerous one.”
“Cutting to the headline,” Scout said.
Dane graced her with a patient smile. “Sometimes a buildup is necessary. There is a paradigm called the Rule of Seven. This applies to a time shift occurring; in fact it applies to a lot of things. For time, it takes six ripples or changes, with the seventh one being the shift. We call these ripples ‘cascade events.’ Six cascade events lead to the seventh: the shift.”
“And how many shifts to a tsunami?” Doc asked.
“We don’t know,” Dane said. “And we don’t want to find out. We’ve been studying the Rule of Seven and we’ve found it applies to almost every manmade catastrophe or disaster. Six things go wrong, minor things, things most people never even notice, but the seventh is catastrophic. Plane crashes, for example. You can have five things go wrong and the plane is still flying. You don’t even know how close you came to disaster. But when the sixth happens, that causes the seventh, cataclysmic event, the crash.”
That caught Eagle’s attention. “True. As a maintenance test pilot, I’ve had to study almost every major crash. None just happened without precursors. And pretty much every one could have been prevented if someone had paid attention to the events leading up to it.”
Dane agreed. “And human error is always a factor. Thus these disasters can be prevented.”
“And we’re here for?” Moms prompted, getting back to her original question. “To pay attention?”
“Let me diagram this for you,” Dane said. He turned to the board, shook his head at the mess, and then found a relatively clean area. He picked up a piece of chalk and drew three horizontal lines. He put an arrow at the right end of the center line. “Right here,” he pointed at the arrow, “is the front of our timeline. The leading edge. When you came from. We can travel to anything before that. But not ahead of it; i.e., not into the future. That’s the unknown.”
He began making small x’s above and below the central line but inside the top and bottom line. “These are ripples, cascade events. Changes in our history. Initiated by the Shadow. If we get six”—he began connecting the x’s—“that are uncorrected, we get the seventh.” He put a large X above the top line. “A shift outside the parameters of our timeline. History will change, which means our present will change in some way. We fear that a
couple of shifts could send a time tsunami and wipe us out.”
“You said this was a new development,” Moms said. “How do you know about this Rule of Seven?”
“The Rule of Seven is old,” Dane said. “But this mode of attack, using it in a specific way, is new.” Dane turned to Edith. She pulled a scroll out of her leather briefcase.
“This is ancient,” Edith said, laying the scroll on the table. “We believe around twelve thousand years old.”
“Whoa, hold on,” Doc said. “First. No paper would survive that long.”
“It’s not paper,” Edith said. “Feel.”
Doc reached across the table and slid his finger along the edge. It had a plastic texture, but it was thin and flexible. “What is it?”
“We don’t know what the material is,” Edith said. “And that’s not really important. What’s important is what’s written on it.”
Doc got to his feet and leaned over, looking at the scroll. “That’s hieroglyphics.”
“Yes,” Edith said. She nodded toward the door that led to the Possibility Palace. “That’s what we use as our common written language. We cover all eras and all times out there. Thus we need a common way to record what we know and communicate. These hieroglyphics are the oldest known language and surprisingly easy to learn.”
Doc shook his head. “There wasn’t even civilization, never mind writing in ten thousand BC.”
“There was civilization,” Dane said.
“Atlantis,” Eagle said. “Earhart mentioned it in the Space Between.”
“Indeed,” Dane said. “The myth is based on reality.” He pointed at the document Edith had unfurled. “That’s from Atlantis and the original writing of mankind.”
“What happened to Atlantis?” Moms asked.
Edith tapped the scroll, bringing attention back to it and her. “This partially explains things. It’s the oldest document we have. The foundation of the Time Patrol. It was brought here by survivors just prior to the destruction of Atlantis by the Shadow. It tells how their empire was assaulted by the Shadow for six years; six cascade events. And then in the seventh year, the final assault came. The people who brought this document escaped via time travel, back to an earlier time, and then relocated here.”
“The bottom of the Possibility Palace,” Ivar said.
“Correct,” Edith said.
“So we must be in prehistory,” Doc said. “Prior to the destruction of Atlantis?”
Dane and Edith ignored that.
“And you’re not going to tell us where here is,” Moms said.
“I’m not,” Dane confirmed. “Nor when,” he said, with a glance at Doc.
“Why didn’t the time travelers go back and save Atlantis?” Ivar asked.
“It was too late,” Dane said. “The six cascade events had already occurred and they were in the midst of the seventh before they were able to move through time.”
“And how did they discover that little feat?” Moms asked.
“They didn’t,” Dane said. “They were given it.”
Everyone waited for an explanation. Edith shifted uncomfortably in her seat.
Moms finally spoke up. “One of the tenets of the Nightstalkers is that everyone knows everything possible about a mission. What we don’t know can get us killed.”
“I understand,” Dane said. “I served in MACV-SOG during the Vietnam War.”
That got the attention of those Nightstalkers who’d come out of Special Operations. MACV-SOG stood for Military Assistance Command Vietnam—Studies and Observations Group. It was a rather innocuous title for a unit that conducted numerous covert, and often illegal, operations during the Vietnam War, including a number of cross-border missions.
Dane continued. “We’ve got a short fuse on this mission, folks. I know you’re frustrated with a lack of information, but the reality is, there’s a lot we don’t know. We inherited time travel from the Atlanteans; we didn’t invent it. How the Atlanteans got it: we don’t know exactly.”
“Pants on fire,” Scout muttered.
“So,” Mac said, focusing on the tactics, “six attacks and then the last one destroyed Atlantis.”
“Exactly,” Dane said. “A major shift in our timeline. But not a fatal one. Mankind survived and eventually flourished. The curious thing is, every timeline we’ve encountered records the destruction of Atlantis, even if only as a myth. It is the one commonality.”
“Wait a second,” Doc said. “That could be where the first timelines split off. The beginning of it.”
“It could be,” Dane admitted. “It’s a theory our scientists argue. But no one knows for certain.”
“And now?” Moms asked.
“And now,” Dane said, “we think the Shadow is trying to shift our timeline again. Not in the way we’re used to: trying for a major ripple or two, trying to cause a shift with a single bold move, but a more coordinated attack, similar to what happened to Atlantis, but still different.”
“Different how?” Moms asked.
“More subtle,” Dane said. “And following the Rule of Seven. The Shadow is going to infiltrate six points in history and try to change events, leading to the shift.”
“And you want us to stop these changes.” Moms didn’t phrase it as a question.
Dane turned to Edith. “Tell them the key.”
Edith tapped the scroll. “When Atlantis was first attacked, no special focus was paid to the day. But the second attack occurred exactly a year later. Then the third, a year to the day later. And the fourth. Fifth and sixth. And the final assault. All on the same day.”
“What date?” Doc asked.
“We don’t think the exact date matters,” Edith said. “We believe what matters, according to what’s written here, is that it’s the exact same day of the year.”
“Why?” Doc asked.
Edith shook her head. “If we knew the answer to that, we’d understand this all a lot more than we do.”
“Could be celestial,” Ivar said. “Same location in the orbit of Earth?”
Doc shook his head. “A year isn’t perfectly exact. That’s the reason we have leap years. It’s not celestial. Besides the orbit isn’t exact. The physics don’t work out.”
Dane sounded weary. “Again. We don’t know why. And while Atlantis was attacked in roughly the same location, in successive years, the intelligence our operatives have picked up indicates that though the attacks will occur on the same day, they are years apart and spread out around the planet.” Before being assaulted by more questions, Dane held up his hands in defense. “We don’t know how the HUBs work. We don’t know how other equipment we have works, such as the memory block-slash-download device that was used on Edith during your test.”
“And on my team sergeant,” Moms said, a tint of anger in her voice.
Dane pursed his lips at the chill that blanketed the room at the mention of their former team sergeant. “Nada made his choice. We all did.”
“His freedom of choice was taken away from him for a long time,” Moms said.
“For his own good,” Dane replied. “And that wasn’t my decision. That was a decision inside the present by your own people.” He waved a hand, forestalling Moms’s next words. “This is not the time or place to discuss this matter. We’re on the clock here.”
“How so?” Scout asked, with a glance at Moms.
“We’re getting indications,” Dane said, “that some of these ripples are in the process of occurring. We believe some are pending. The key is that there’s been no shift yet, so we still have time to stop it from happening. But it has to be coordinated. All the missions inside the same twenty-four-hour window on that particular day, whatever year it happens to be.”
“I’m confused,” Doc said, speaking for the rest of the team.
“My head hurts,” Roland said. Doc and Roland both being confused was like cats and dogs living together, a sign of the Nightstalkers’ universe being out of balance.
�
�I’m not far behind you,” Moms commiserated. “Let me see if we can get past the theory, or more appropriately leave it behind. You want us to run six concurrent ops to the same day in the past?”
“Same day, different years,” Dane said.
“What day?” Moms asked.
“The twenty-ninth of October. Most famously known as Black Tuesday in 1929, but we also have five other years.”
“What years?”
Dane glanced over at Edith. She opened up a file folder next to the scroll. “All AD. 999. 1618. 1929, of course. 1969. 1972. And 1980.”
Moms stood. “When do we deploy?”
“In three hours,” Dane said. “There’s much to be done between now and then. Edith will take each of you to a team that will outfit you in the appropriate clothing and with the gear you’ll need. Then we will have a mission briefing here in an hour.”
The White House
“So the world wasn’t at stake?” The President made her words both a statement and a question, a skill any good politician needs to have.
“Apparently not, Madam President.” The Keep had the leather-bound Book of Truths open. A quill pen, once wielded by Thomas Jefferson, was in her hand and a small bottle of ink awaited its dip. She looked at the President, who was seated across from the Keep’s tiny desk.
They were in the Keep’s office in the attic of the White House, a tiny cubicle most who worked in the building weren’t even aware existed, tucked away among the offices for housekeeping and other maintenance staff. The only person in the entire building who knew what the Keep did was the President. Everyone else thought she worked for someone else.
The Keep’s job was maintaining the Book of Truths.
And briefing the President when there were incidents from the world of secrets that were beyond the province of the CIA, NSA, and the rest of the alphabet-soup agencies. There were a few more of those than any head of state ever liked, and they inspired additions to the gray hair one can track spreading on the president’s head as they made their way through terms in office, wrestling with the secrets the public is never privy to.