Meridian

13

Dorland remembered the dizzying spin in his head and the awful sensation of cold. He suddenly felt light as a feather, insubstantial, his life ebbing away on the chilled breath of the wind. The dark morning faded and he seemed to drift for a moment, vapor-like, a phantom hovering over the wrecked barren landscape about him. Then strange lights rushed at him from all directions and he shut his eyes, fighting off a rising sensation of nausea as he slipped away into unconsciousness.

When he regained his awareness again he was lying on the ground, shivering and wet. The air had a strangely sweet smell to it, cleaned by a recent rain and laden with the scent of fresh washed stones. He moved, struggling to his feet on instinct, his body driven by some involuntary compulsion that he seemed to have no control over. The dizziness that had felled him a moment before was still with him, though not as severe. His vision swam, a blur of shadow and wet mist.

He felt his legs moving in a jerky, reflexive rhythm as he struggled for footing on the damp earth. He was walking; stumbling across the undulating ground in the night, a solitary ghost on a dark, lifeless plain. Time passed unheeded, and he heard a faint sound rumbling in the distance, like rolling thunder that never ceased. He moved on, with aimless abandon, entranced by the fading memory of the brilliant lights in his mind. Some inner compass carried him west, though he did not know that at the time. As he walked and stumbled over sharp-edged shale and clumps of gray rock, he heard a strangely familiar sound emerging from the low rumble in the distance.

There was a rhythm to the sound, and a steady urgency as it resolved itself in his mind. A faint, high note sounded above the churning wash and his brain attached a meaning to the sound at last. He struggled to focus his eyes, looking around him to try and locate the sound. A dim light glazed across his field of vision and he turned towards it, his ambling pathway suddenly attached to the wavering light on the black horizon.

A cool wind struck him full in the face when he turned. The ground under his feet was suddenly flat and firm, a bed of smaller rocks reducing to a fine gravel. Each footfall made a distinctive crunch on the scattered stone, and then his feet struck something hard and he fell.

He passed a moment of darkness where his awareness faded with a prickly sensation of light headedness. Then the blood rushed to his temples and he felt the icy touch of hard metal against his cheek. A strange humming rang in his ears, an eerie resonance of the sound he had heard earlier. He moved his arm, hand groping forward in the murky night, until he was able to sense the cold rim of an iron-hard shape on the ground near his head. His mind began to make gradual sense of the clues it was fed and he realized, at last, that he had stumbled upon the bed of a railroad.

The emergence of something familiar in the bleak landscape gave him a reference point to rally on. His sense of self gathered strength and he remembered who he was now, and what he was supposed to be doing. An inner voice, the voice that had narrated his experience for as long as he could remember, began to speak to him again. We were wrong, it said. We must have simply landed on the volcanic debris fields earlier, far from our intended drop point. I was looking for Nordhausen and must have fallen and hit my head. Who knows how long I’ve been wandering around out here?

He struggled up on one elbow, noting the lattice of coarse wood beams spaced at regular intervals between two metal rails. The place had a name in his mind now, and his sensibilities sharpened somewhat. His attention was soon focused on the sky, looking for the telltale drifts of cinder and smoky ash. Instead he saw streaks of gray-black clouds, which thinned in places to open on patches of starry sky.

This can’t be right, he said to himself again. It was morning before—a brooding red dawn with that strange sulfuric smell on the air. Now it was night again. Could he have passed out from the noxious fumes and then wandered all day in a half-daze until he found this place?

The singing of the metal rail line tugged at his attention and he struggled up onto unsteady feet, looking for some source of the sound. Off to his right he immediately saw the strange light again, closer now, and brighter. He knew at once that a train was coming, and some guarded corner of his mind whispered a warning to him. He began to move, stumbling over the rail lines and making his way along the tracks. Dizziness returned in waves, then receded. The sound of the train changed in tempo, and he heard a hissing release of pent up steam. He dimly perceived the sooty, black billow of smoke bloom from the bulk of a massive shape lit by a single eye of yellow light.

The churning sound slowed and the intervals that spaced its chugging rhythm grew ever longer. He heard the squeal of metal on metal and a last hiss of steam. The train was stopping. The voice in his mind began to clamor at him now, urging him to move, to get off the rail bed and hide. He tried to obey, nearly tripping over a large rock at the side of the rail line. As he struggled to keep his footing, the ground seemed to vanish beneath him and he fell, rolling down the side of a short, sandy embankment. His vision danced again, the dizziness returning as he groped the damp earth for some sense of perspective in the inky darkness. He was soon able to pull himself up onto his feet again, and began stumbling away in into the desert.

Voices came to him, faint and far away. He remembered Nordhausen, wondering what had become of his friend. The voices grew louder, more insistent, though he did not know what they were saying. Formless shapes seemed to materialize before him as his head lightened again and he swayed, faint and cold.

The next thing he remembered was the sound of another voice braying at him in an unfamiliar tongue. Hands were on him now, hard and cruel as they gripped his arms and shoulders, dragging him along. His feet struggled to move in a half-hearted, instinctive effort but, more often than not, his leather boots scuffed on the sand and gravel beneath him as he was pulled along. The hissing sound grew near and he was thrust hard against the flat, regular surface of something like a wall. His sensibilities were stirred by the jolt and he realized he had been pushed against the side of a train car, propped up by two rough looking men with dark beards and foul breath. Another man was peering at him, his fat lips moving as he spoke in an unintelligible voice.

The man reached out and took hold of his chin, squeezing his cheeks as he shook his head slightly. Then he seemed to come to some conclusion and strode away into the dark. A few moments later, Paul was dragged off again in the iron grip of his bearded captors. For the first time Paul realized these men must be soldiers. His mind was sluggish and late in sorting out the clues: they were dressed in uniform, and carried rifles slung over their backs above bandoliers of ammunition.

He knew what was happening to him now. This was the rail line in the Hejaz. Kelly had found a way to move them back on the target. This must be one of the trains manned by Turkish soldiers. But which train? What day was it? The warning voice in his mind began to nag at him again, and a flutter of anxiety stirred in his chest.

He felt himself being lifted, dragged up a short flight of steps, and pushed through a narrow door. It was a train coach that had been cleared of its normal seating and furnished with a few simple desks and chairs, probably an officer’s coach, he thought. The relative warmth of the room was a scant comfort to him, and his eyes adjusted to the light of a single oil lamp guttering on a flat wooden desk to one side of the coach. There was a man seated there, dark and stiff in bearing. The light gleamed on his sleek black hair and he stared at Paul with a contemptuous look. His lips seemed to smirk below the dark stain of a thin mustache. Paul could see that the man wore insignia of rank, possibly a Captain, or most likely a Colonel in charge of this troop train.

The man looked away for a moment turning his attention to a sheaf of paperwork on the desk. He dipped his ink pen into a shallow well and traced a few tentative strokes on a register with a dispassionate look on his face. As one hand pressed a stiff finger down the long list of names on his register, the other casually flicked off a checkmark here and there. The ink pen hovered over the paper briefly, and then he started to write. When no mark appeared on the paper he looked and saw that his pen was out of ink. He reached to dip it again in the ever diminishing pool of black ink, but then thought the better of it. With a sigh he put the pen down and turned his attention to the guards.

He spoke to the men in a hard edged voice. Though Paul could not understand anything that was said, it was clear that the Colonel was not pleased with this interruption. The man’s eyes shifted to Paul again, narrowing with curiosity. He pursed his lips, deciding something, and gestured at the overhead rail that ran along the edge of the roof to provide a hand hold while the train was moving.

There was no doubt in Paul’s mind now. He had stumbled onto the railway, and now he was taken by the Turks. Lord, help me, he thought. What day is it? Where exactly am I? Is this one of the trains Nordhausen had talked about? A thousand questions began to prey upon him now, and each one added to the queasy sense of alarm and fear in his chest.

Paul felt the guards tighten their grip on him, stretching his arms up overhead and binding his wrists to a cold metal rail near the roof. The leather ties were pulled tight and bit at his hands when the guards released him. Paul struggled to gain his footing, letting his legs take the weight of his body to ease the strain. He was able to stand, though his legs felt tired and weak.

The man at the desk waved at the guards again and they snapped off a crisp salute before tramping out through the narrow doorway, which closed in a creaking thump behind them. Paul’s eyes began to focus on the other man, noting his clean, well kept uniform and the polished leather of his belt and boots. But his vision was still a bit blurry; his thinking hazy in the unfamiliar setting.

The man spoke to him in a foreign tongue that he knew must be Turkish. He had no comprehension of what the officer was saying, but if his tone was any indication, the man was making some derisive remark, his eyes replete with accusation as he spoke. The officer stood up suddenly and stepped closer, staring at him with curious regard. He looked him up and down, then his hand began feeling at Paul’s robes, groping the loose folds of his soiled clothing. His disgust seemed to redouble, and he reached out, rudely snatching Paul’s headdress away and throwing it to the ground.

The officer shouted something at him, and when Paul did not answer he was struck a sharp blow on the side of his face. The slap from the officer’s open palm was just enough to shake Paul’s senses from the doldrums that had fogged them. His eyes rolled, then grew more focused. The officer slapped him again.

“Damn!” the invective slipped from Paul’s lips before he realized what he was saying. He wanted to remain mute, to endure the interrogation as though deaf and dumb, but he did not yet have the presence of mind to control himself. The officer’s eyes widened at the remark, and he seemed to immediately come to a new assessment of his captive.

“Ah, English,” he said with a satisfied grin, though his lips hardened to a half smile that bore no good will. “English!” The officer’s hands were on him now, tugging at his Arabian garb until he had torn the robes open and exposed the khaki tunic and trousers that Paul wore beneath them. As he did so, the mess kit and a small cloth bag with the remnant of the coffee Maeve had given to Nordhausen, spilled to the floor. The officer knelt briefly to retrieve them. He set the miss kit on the wooden desk and slowly raised the cloth bag to his nose, snuffing the contents with a pleased look on his face.

“You are far from home, English.” The man’s speech had a thick middle-eastern accent, but Paul understood him. “Now what are you doing here wandering about in the desert a hundred miles from British lines?”

The officer was still holding the coffee bag at his lips, savoring the rich aroma of the beans. “This is very good, English. How could you know I was needing coffee tonight?”

The man set the coffee bag aside, his face hardening as he studied Paul more carefully. Light gleamed from a medallion pinned on his chest, and Paul’s eye was drawn to a silver star, the center finished in a thin, red enamel with a crescent moon superimposed upon it. The pointed arcs reached up around an emblem in the center. His long study of military history recognized it as the badge of honor that some came to call the Iron Crescent. He looked for other insignia, noting the braided shoulder pauldrons that designated this man’s rank. Yes, he was a Colonel, just as Paul had guessed. But Paul’s gaze was soon drawn to the man’s hand where he was drawing a long, sharp field knife from a leather scabbard at his side. His heart pulsed with a beat of fear.

“You will curse at me, but yet not speak?” The Colonel hefted the knife in his hand, approaching Paul with bad intent. The blade was at his cheek, cold and sharp, and all vestiges of the fog that had bedeviled him soon fled. Paul’s heart thumped in his chest as the Turkish officer moved the knife slowly along the side of his face, resting the blade on his slender neck.

“You shave well, English.” The colonel smirked as he spoke, “but you miss a spot or two under your chin.” His features hardened as he used the knife to slowly force Paul’s chin up, looking him full in the face. “Now you will answer me, or I will finish the job for you, but I assure you, I am no barber.”

Paul felt the edge of the knife at his throat, and his breath came faster with the anxiety of the moment. His mind was beset with the arguments he had made to Nordhausen over their camp fire earlier. The risk of contamination was very real. If he said anything to this man he might alter the time line, change things in some unperceived way that no one would ever realize until the damage was done. The only moral thing to do would be to remain silent. Wasn’t he the one who had argued about committing suicide to avoid contamination? He remembered the conversation well, but here, with the cold edge of a knife at his throat, he was not so brave or righteous as he once thought. He felt his body tense up, instinctively squirming away from the edge of the blade, his neck tense, wrists straining at the leather cords that bound his arms overhead.

“Why do I find you here in the desert, English? I ask you one last time.” The knife twisted and he felt a sharp prick under his chin.

Paul knew that to be caught in British kit, behind enemy lines, was a quick ticket to torture and possibly death. What should he say? “Not English…” The words slipped out again, tumbling into the tense stillness of the room. The Colonel’s dark eyes were alight with the flickering flame of the oil lamp on the desk. He removed the knife, a pleased smile on his face.

“Not English? You wear English trousers, an English soldier’s shirt, though you hide them badly.” The Colonel’s hands groped along his sides, making their way down to his waist with hard searching fingers squeezing at his body as they went. “You are an English spy,” he breathed as he continued his search, forcing his hands into every pocket. He found Nordhausen’s lighter where Paul had tucked it away in his trouser pocket after they lit the fire.

“Another gift,” he grinned as he fished it out. Then, satisfied that Paul harbored no weapons, he stepped back, slipping the knife into its leather scabbard. His attention was momentarily drawn to the lighter, and he flicked it open, turning to retrieve a rolled cigarette from the desk behind him. The lighter sparked and flamed to life. Paul was grateful to have the man away from him, and the Colonel seemed somewhat mollified as he lit his cigarette.

The smell of burning tobacco filled the room and the officer took a long drag, breathing the smoke out slowly as he finished. “Very nice,” he said, seeming to warm to the situation. “So this new British General, Allenby, has a little fire in his belly after all. The Arabs took Akaba for him and now he thinks he can just waltz into Jerusalem. No doubt you have been sent here to scout the situation out, yes?” Then a strange look came over the man’ s face, as though another possibility had occurred to him. “Yes,” he said with a tight smile. “The Arabs and the British—like fleas on a dog. Well, we have heard these rumors about a British officer, who has been leading Arab vagrants on raids against our facilities and rail lines. And what do I have before me here?” He smiled again, eyes gleaming with suspicion.

Good lord, thought Paul. The man thinks I’m Lawrence! But what else would he think? When they decided on their costuming Maeve had come up with the idea for wearing British uniforms beneath Arab robes. It was a wonderful fail-safe if they ran into Arabs in the desert. The Turks were another matter, however, and Paul knew he was in very serious trouble. Here I’ve gone and done the one thing we had to avoid at all costs, he thought. The look on the Turkish Colonel’s face told him it was going to be a very long, painful night.

14

Kelly stared at the green progress bars on the temporal monitor as the retraction sequence progressed. The power outage had plunged the room into darkness, but emergency lighting kicked in, painting thin red cones of light across the consoles. He bit his lip, counting inwardly as Maeve rushed to his side.

“I’m sorry, Kelly. I was so wrapped up with what was happening that I just wasn’t thinking. I can’t remember if I closed the inner doors to the corridor or not. Isn’t there an indicator on one of these panels somewhere?” She searched about, a desperate, pleading look on her face.

Kelly finished counting, and a second or two later the overhead lights flickered on again. Power fed back into the consoles and he breathed a sigh of relief.

“Secondary systems kicked in,” he said. “We’re drawing auxiliary power from the city. Pacific Gas and Electric isn’t going to like us in the morning, but we have a contract to draw reserve power in the event of a turbine failure.” His mind soon returned to the problem that was uppermost in his thoughts, eyes searching the temporal monitor. The green progress bar moved from left to right across his screen, and digital numbers displayed above it, winking from the last reported variance position to show the latest readings.

“The math looks good, Maeve. The indicators are holding green and the variance factor is falling off towards zero.”

“Thank God,” she whispered. “What about the doors?”

“Don’t worry about it. The system won’t engage with the doors open. The problem was somewhere else.”

“What? Well why didn’t you say something?”

“I was too damn busy watching these readouts. If we had any more than a fifteen second gap before the auxiliary power kicked in we stood a chance to loose the spinout on the singularity. That really would have been a disaster. Looks like the power held above 85%, however. Jen, get down there and see what Tom says about this, will you? We can’t draw support from the city grid for very long. I need those turbines back up to speed, and fast.”

His attention was fixated on the temporal monitor now, as it continued the playback of the data on the shift. The event had already transpired, but the computer was lagging behind, its main processors just too slow to keep up with the data flow in real time. They had compensated for the lack of sufficient processor speed by installing huge arrays of memory. Now, as the computer read one bank of stored information after another, it ran its analysis and translated the results into graphics and numerical readouts on the screen.

“We should have had a stronger processor bank for this unit,” Kelly muttered. “I can’t react to anything that happens this way. If something went wrong this time, there’s not a thing I can do about it. Look how far behind the data flow is. I think we probably lost a processor bank in here when the power fluctuated. Damn things are so sensitive, and these battery backups just aren’t up to snuff.”

“How does it look?” Maeve pointed at the screen.

“Not bad…” Kelly kept watching. “The line is nice and green; numbers are falling off to zero…” He lapsed into silence as he watched.

Maeve was suddenly uncomfortable again. She looked at the screen and saw that the single green line began to change. Now it appeared that there were two bars that were making up the thickness of the progress line, and one was falling behind the other. She realized that there were two parallel lines moving in tandem, making a steady progress across the screen. Kelly noticed it as well.

“What’s going on here,” he murmured.

“A problem?” Maeve’s voice inflected the question in both of their minds. “The line is still solid green, Kelly. Look, your variance is just about nil.”

Kelly watched, his own mental processes racing in time with the data on the screen. The shift looked good, but there was definitely something amiss. He rolled some dials on the console, enhancing the brightness and contrast of the readouts. There was no mistaking it now. The adjustment clearly indicated that he had two parallel lines, not one unified line as he expected; as he hoped.

“What is it?” Maeve was beside herself, still not quite over the notion that she had caused the problem.

“The shift looks good,” said Kelly, “But…”

“But what?”

Kelly looked at her, scratching his head before he spoke. “Well it doesn’t look as though they were both—”

“Tom says not to worry!” Jen was shouting as she ran up the stairs from the lower level. She hastened up, winded with the exertion, but clearly elated to bring up the good news. “He says one of the breakers tripped due to some outside interference, but he got the circuits back on line again.”

“Outside interference?”

“Yeah,” Jen nodded. “He thinks maybe we caught some lightning and the rods couldn’t handle the juice. Must have been a direct hit.”

Maeve had a frustrated look on her face. “Kelly, what were you going to say?”

“Great, Jen,” Kelly was still distracted, and a sudden thought threw him further off the track. “Can we roll it back up to full power in twenty minutes?”

“I’ll go ask.” Jen fished her hands out of the pockets of her khaki shorts, turned on her heels, and ran off, her long brown legs carrying her quickly toward the stairwell again.

“Kelly!” Maeve gave him a wide-eyed stare.

“Right…” Kelly leaned in to study the lines on the screen again. He watched the numbers keep falling, pleased to see they were rolling ever more slowly toward zero. He knew they would settle there in the end. His math was good. “Well,” he said with a sigh. “We moved them, but not at the same time.”

Maeve stared at him, waiting for more information.

“See the lines?” Kelly pointed at the screen with a pen. “See how the bottom line is just a tick behind the other? They’re both moving, but not at the same time. That damn power dip was just enough to throw the sync off. Looks like the system compensated by grabbing one a few seconds before the other. Let me run a verification routine.”

He slid his chair over to a terminal to his left and began keying some system commands. “There,” he said as he finished. “We should know the final variance in a moment.”

“They shifted at different times?” Maeve’s own processing was finally catching up.

“There it is,” Kelly pointed at the screen. “Hell, it’s only a little off. Just 0.00168 discrepancy. Hardly a nudge!”

“And that means what?” Maeve wanted it in English, and she wanted it now.

“Well, they both hit the bull’s eye, numerically speaking. They’re going to be right on the target time; perhaps only a few days or even hours off. The only thing is that one is going to arrive before the other.” He shifted back to the temporal monitor. “Yup,” he concluded as he spun his chair around to look at her. “I wonder who’s going to arrive first?”

15

Nordhausen was lying face down on a low dune of wet sand. He did not know how long he had been there. All he could remember were surreal dreams of swirling auroras that danced in hues of red and milky green. He awoke, groggy; with a sickly queasiness in the pit of his stomach and a strange lightness of head. The night air surrounded him with a frosty cold, and the layers of clothing provided little comfort. He rolled over, staring up at the clouds. A wet mist shrouded the landscape but, here and there, the dark vapors parted and he could see the stars in a sable sky, cold and remote.

He immediately looked for the moon, finding a spot low on the horizon where the darkness seemed smudged with a hoary glow of diffused gray light. He watched the area for some time, wondering what had happened to him and where he was. One moment he had been sitting quietly by the campfire, sulking over his fate, and then that strange sense of weightlessness had come over him, a feathery lightness accompanied by a sudden chill. It occurred to him that he had been sleeping here, lost in the kaleidoscope of water colored dreams, for many hours.

He looked around him. Where was the circle of stones they had built for the fire; where was the exquisite bare white fossil of the Ammonite they had discovered; where was Paul? As he took his situation in he suddenly realized that the entire landscape about him was different than he remembered. Before they had been on the smooth brow of a low hill, part of a winding ridge. Now he lay upon flat, sandy ground, and the only rise in elevation he could see anywhere about him was some distance off. The sky had a different quality to it as well, clean and fresh where once it had been choked with smoky ash. What was going on here?

Perhaps I’m back, he thought. He never really did understand how the machine was supposed to work. Paul tried to explain it to him many times, but he could never get his mind around the physics. The one metaphor that seemed to stick in his head was the image of Paul’s long arm extending back to hold open the elevator door when they stepped off into the outer corridor. He remembered what his friend had said then: ‘The door we’re about to open is going to remain open for us, Robert… Time will extend an arm and keep the portal open…’

It was the only sensible thing he could think of to account for the change. The mission had failed. Kelly botched the numbers, just as he knew he would, and they went so far back in time that it was a miracle they survived it. At least Paul was correct with his time theory, he mused. How did he explain it? Something in the infusion expired and they got pulled back into their own time. That was the only way he could understand it, like a sand clock running out of grains. Thankfully, it happened after only a few hours, and they were saved from the agony of the dying Cretaceous.

“Well, I suppose it would be too much to ask to be delivered safe and sound to the comfort of my study again,” he said aloud. “And what has happened to Paul?”

He squinted into the darkness, looking for any sign of his friend, but the cold, empty desert surrounded him on every side, stretching away to bleak horizons. He stood up, on unsteady legs, and felt the blood pound at his temples with the effort. It seems that time travel had a very severe physical effect, so he gave himself a moment to compose himself.

They had failed. Now he was lost in the Jordanian desert; perhaps miles from the nearest road. He decided the best thing to do would be to head for the high ground in the distance. That way he could take in the lay of the land and sort out what to do. Perhaps he might even start a fire to attract attention. He determined to go over all of this with the Operations Group when he got back to California. They should have told him the spatial location was going to remain fixed at the target coordinates! Had he known this was going to happen he would have insisted that they take some kind of emergency transponder beacon with them, no matter what Maeve and her silly Outcomes committee said about it.

The more he thought about his situation the more sullen and despondent he became. The fate of the world has been sealed, he concluded. This penumbra business with the Palma Event was going to cause some kind of interference and they wouldn’t be able to go through it again, at least not without a great deal of trouble. A pity, he thought, imagining the chaos that must be reigning on the Eastern Seaboard. There was nothing more he could do about it, God rest their souls. Perhaps they could try a second time, but something told him that it was all too late. Maybe the machine would never work again.

He sighed, chagrined by the thought that he might not have the chance to visit the Globe Theatre. For that matter, his hopes at catching a glimpse of Lawrence had been foiled as well. All he saw of this mission was a sour sky full of smoke and volcanic debris, and the fossil, of course. They had certainly ended up somewhere, and the discovery of the Ammonite fossil had been the high point of it all for him. Perhaps he could fish the spatial coordinates from Kelly and fly back out here in a month or so with a few students for a dig. If the remains were still anywhere near the surface it would be a splendid recovery, and might even stand as evidence that they had actually gone somewhere. He resolved to discuss the matter with Paul and Maeve the instant he got back.

But where was Paul? He pulled up short with that thought again, and searched about him, calling out Paul’s name at the top of his voice. There was no answer.

Just like him to get himself lost. Where did he wander off to? He said he was only going to look for a few more dead fern leaves for the fire and then… He was suddenly struck by the thought that Paul may still be stranded in time. What if the damn retraction scheme was limited to a certain radius around their entry point? Paul may have wandered just outside its influence. He passed a moment of deep misgiving, thinking that his long time friend may be doomed to a lonesome existence in the deeps of time, the only human being alive on the planet, and fifty million years to wait for company. Then he remembered how Paul had been worrying over the possibility of contamination and brooding about the necessity of killing himself to prevent complications to the future time lines. Where was he? He wished he was here, nagging at him again with some silly temporal concept or physics problem.

Poor Paul. The memory of his friend’s voice returned to him once more, offering a note of solace as he spoke about Time. ‘She knows we don’t belong on this side of the door, Robert, and she won’t rest until we’re safe in our own Meridian again. You’ll see.’

That thought gave him some hope, and he resolved to plod on and find some higher ground. If Paul were around he would probably do the same thing. It was bound to be light soon, and perhaps he would catch a glimpse of a road. There had to be traffic of some kind in the area. He would find his way out of this mess soon enough.

He started off, his mind rummaging about with his worry. What if he couldn’t find a road? He had no water, and no food. Lord, he didn’t even have any money with him! How was he supposed to get back to California? It reminded him of a cruel joke the Freshmen would play on the newly elected president of the Sophomore class at the university. They would waylay the poor sap, and put him on a plane to some random destination with nothing more than a single dime in his pocket. That’s exactly the way he felt now, kidnapped by Paul’s time machine and set adrift in the desert without so much as a dime for a telephone call to console him.

He trudged on, intent on making the rise ahead of him before first light. Almost as if to reassure himself, he stopped from time to time to study the ground, looking for any sign of tektite glass or shocked quartz. He found none.

The light mist became a rain, and he gathered his Arabic robes about him, trying to hold in as much body heat as possible. His feet ached in the boots that Maeve had forced upon him, and he was tired, hungry and wet. There’s bound to be a village nearby, he thought, and soon had his first prospect of finding help. He stumbled around a low rise and saw the wavering light of a small campfire guttering in the distance. His spirits rose immediately, and he smiled inwardly as he made for the light.

It occurred to him that it might not be wise to just come stampeding up on some sheep herder’s camp in the dark, so he started waving his arms and shouting as he approached the place, intent on eliciting aid.

“Hello!” he shouted. “Anyone there?”

There was a scuffling sound in the distance and then he was surprised by the sharp crack of a gun. A bullet whizzed by and he instinctively fell to the ground in a panic. Another shot was fired, passing wide of the mark and vanishing in the darkness. He heard a voice muttering something, and quiet footfalls.

Now what have I gone and done, he thought? This ‘shoot first and ask questions later’ attitude would have been expected in the desert on a dismal night like this. He saw a shadowy form drifting to his right, barely silhouetted against the horizon. There was no good shouting at the man, he realized. Who would speak English here? The only thing to do, he reasoned, was to play possum and hope the man would not find him. Then he could eventually slip away to find more agreeable assistance.

He waited, stilling his breath for what seemed an awfully long time and peering into the dark for any sign of his attacker. He had fallen on a sharp stone and, as he tried to roll away from it, he heard a crisp metallic click behind his right ear.

“Entabeh!” A voice spoke in a sibilant whisper behind him. He did not know what the man was saying, but the note of caution in his tone was obvious enough.

“Don’t shoot,” he said, raising both hands to demonstrate that he was unarmed. It was foolish to say anything more, but he rambled on just the same. “I’m unarmed. I’m lost and seeking help. I mean you no harm.”

“Ayez eh? Rayeh feen?”

Nordhausen turned slowly and saw a scraggly, bearded man behind him, his head swathed in henna cloth with a simple black circlet at the crown. The dim light revealed dull gleam of metal, and Nordhausen saw that a pistol was aimed at his belly. The professor eyed the gun with some trepidation.

“No need for that,” he said. “I mean you no harm. I’m lost, that’s all.”

“Ismack eh? Shoe betiimal?” The man squinted at him in the dark, still guarded as he approached the professor and extended his other arm towards him. He fingered the sash at Nordhausen’s waist and searched cautiously, his dark eyes watching the professor’s every move. Nordhausen stayed very still, understanding that the man wanted to make a cursory search to see if he was armed.

“I mean no harm,” he said again. “I’m lost, you see. Just trying to reach help and get to a telephone. Is there a telephone nearby, or perhaps a radio? Do you have a vehicle with you?”

The man gestured that he should be silent, and Nordhausen waited, frustrated that he could not make himself understood. The local was looking him over very closely, suspicion growing in his eyes as he leaned in to have a closer look at Nordhausen’s face.

“Eh dah?” The man seemed confused by Nordhausen’s appearance, and the professor realized the idea of masquerading as an Arab had some definite liabilities. He decided to try and use sign language, cautiously placing his open palms on his chest as he spoke again.

“I’m an American,” he started, indicating himself. “A scientist from Lawrence Labs in Berkeley; here on a mission.” That wasn’t helpful, he thought, but the man stepped back, his head cocked to one side.

“Aurens?” The tone of his voice carried a note of excitement.

Nordhausen did not catch the implications of the man’s reply at first, and he tried again. “A-mer-i-can,” he sounded out the word, patting his chest. “Lost.”

The stranger eyed him suspiciously again, gesturing at his belt line. “Eftah,” he said, waving the pistol in his hand.

Nordhausen saw that he wanted him to open his robes. Cautious fellow, he thought, but he undid the sash and let the gown fall open, feeling a bit silly to be standing there in wet khaki trousers and a British officer’s uniform from the First World War. How will this help my story if I manage to get to the authorities? It occurred to him that Americans may not be particularly welcome here. The chaos of the Middle East in recent years had built up a tremendous resentment among common Muslims against the West, and America in particular. Most of the population of the region would be Jordanian Palestinians, and they were not very well disposed to foreigners. Old news stories of Western reporters and missionaries taken as hostages and brutally murdered came to mind, and he was suddenly very afraid, and angry again that no one had told him he would remain at the spatial coordinates of the drop site when they shifted home.

The man had a very different reaction to Nordhausen’s uniform, however. He stooped to have a closer look, noting the thick belt at Nordhausen’s waist, and the high, leather army boots.

“English?” The word was badly spoken, but Nordhausen understood it. He was momentarily taken by surprise. How would he come to that assessment, he wondered?

“Sadiq, English.” The man smiled at him and Nordhausen saw that he was missing one tooth. “Sadiq Aurens?”

Nordhausen caught the hint of a name the second time the man spoke the word. His mind whirled for a moment, remembering what Maeve had said about coming across local Arabs in the desert. It couldn’t be so, he thought, his eyes searching the horizon. The rain had stopped and the clouds parted to reveal a crescent moon in the sky, low on the horizon. It suddenly occurred to him that he should be seeing the glow of urban centers on the horizon as well. Even if he was in the desert, the light from major cities like Amman and others would still be visible, but all was pitch black.

“Good God,” he breathed. “What’s happened? Where am I?”

The stranger gave him an odd look. “Sadiq Aurens?”

The moon was wrong. It was full the night they went through the Arch. Something went wrong on the retraction! That thought jarred his thinking for a moment until he remembered what Paul had said about Kelly on the watch. ‘He’ll see what’s happened and make adjustments.’ What has Kelly done?

“Taa’la maei,” the man gestured toward the distant camp fire. He no longer brandished the gun but he was nonetheless insistent that the professor start moving as he indicated. Nordhausen started walking, and the man fell in at his side, just slightly behind, chattering away as they went. The professor didn’t understand anything he was saying, but occasionally the word ‘English’ or ‘Aurens’ would come through again. It dawned on him, with a sinking feeling, that he had not reached his own time after all. Kelly botched the retraction, he thought at first, but upon consideration he realized this was probably not the case. He made his adjustment, Nordhausen concluded. He made one last attempt at getting us to the right temporal coordinates. If he was anywhere close, I’m still nearly a hundred years in the past! The stranger didn’t react to the word American, but he immediately recognized my uniform as English. And he called me Aurens. He can’t possibly think I’m Lawrence of Arabia.

“Oh God,” Nordhausen breathed. Kelly had moved them forward in time to the right coordinates. He wasn’t home, as he first thought. He was back in the middle of the First World War. How did this happen? Paul said there were only two chances for retraction—one triggered to the target date, and the other some kind of fail-safe system they had programmed. Kelly must have used up one of his trump cards to get them back on target. The mission was on, then. He had an Arab in with him mouthing the word Aurens and the whole thing was still on. But would he ever make it home?

A sensation of real anxiety enfolded him as he realized the weight of the operation was descending heavily on his shoulders again. He wasn’t home. Now he had to figure out just exactly where he was. He had to find the rail line, and discover what day it was. He had to pick the right train and decide what to do about it. Paul said he and Maeve had the whole thing figured out, but they never had time to go over it with him. Oh God, he thought. I have to unravel all this mischief and save the world after all. I have to find Paul’s little Pushpin and figure out what to do. It was imperative. He whispered a silent invocation to any deity who would hear him, and hoped he would get it all right.