Touchstone

7

The revelation had shocked the professor, but his emotions transitioned quickly as he thought on it.

“You mean to say that I’m trapped in here? If I leave the Lab then I’m going to be… erased, like Kelly?”

“Possibly,” said Paul.

“But you said I was a Free Variable.”

“That too,” Paul equivocated.

“Well, which is it? Am I going to vanish or not?”

“I don’t know—but why take the risk? I can go check on Kelly while you remain on station here. We’ve got an alert on, remember? The whole point of this setup was to get one of us safely under the influence of the Arch Nexus so we could research the Variance and see what could be done about it.”

“But Kelly…”

“I’ll go. You stay here, safe in the Nexus.”

Nordhausen hesitated, torn between Paul’s warning and his overriding sense of guilt, heightened by the fear that he was somehow responsible for Kelly’s collapse. His emotions roiled, and the tension was pulling at his face as he struggled to know what to do. Then he reached an inner conclusion, his jaw set, his eyes hard as he spoke.

“No,” he said flatly.

“But Robert, I’m not fooling around here. The risk is very real. You know about the hieroglyphics, and that creates an impossible contradiction in the world outside this room—outside the influence of the Nexus Point. As long as the Arch is running we can maintain a safe Nexus here until we decide what to do.”

“No!” Robert’s tone was even more adamant. “Until we decide what to do? Listen to yourself, Paul. How long might that take? We can’t keep the Arch running forever—and I damn well won’t be a prisoner here because of a glitch in your time theory.”

“It’s more than a glitch, Robert—it’s Paradox. Christ, we’ve one member of the team down already. Now what if you vanish in a haze the instant we set foot outside this lab?”

“I won’t,” said Nordhausen. “I’m a Free Radical—you said it yourself—and more than that: I’m a Prime Mover. My head is a living process. It’s a mini-Nexus all on its own. Time wouldn’t dare lay her greedy little hands on me. I was the one who deciphered the Palma clues that led us to Minifir. I’m an original Founding Father. You hear me?” He shouted that last bit at the ceiling, not at Paul, as if he were hurling a challenge at Mother Time herself, daring her to interfere.

“No,” he said again. “Kelly’s down, and I’m responsible—responsible for it all—for every living being outside that door: all the misery, the suffering, for everything that’s going amiss now, or ever will go wrong because of my foolish meddling. It all depends on me. I’m the one that caused it, and if time wants me, then by God, let her have me. But I’ve got to see about Kelly, one way or another, no matter what happens.”

His expression was almost pleading now, tormented by everything he had concluded. Paul knew that there would be no stopping him, so he stepped quickly to Nordhausen’s side, putting his arm on his shoulder.

“Then we’ll go together,” he said with finality. “I’ll second your motion. If time wants to pick a fight with you, then I’ve got your back, Robert. She’ll have to take on the two of us. Let’s go.”

They started for the door. In spite of his resolve, Nordhausen could not help the thumping of his heart as they pushed it open and stepped into the foyer. His mouth was dry and a sheen of sweat misted his brow. The cooler air of the outer foyer played upon his forehead, giving him a momentary start when he felt the chill.

He hesitated, a shiver taking him as he stood there. What if Paul was right? Then he felt his friend’s reassuring touch at his elbow, and his strength returned.

“I’m a bloody damn Prime!” he bellowed, his voice echoing in the foyer. “You want me? Here I bloody well am!”

Paul could not help smiling, in spite of his own anxiety. As they pressed ahead, he cast furtive glances this way and that, as if he expected to see a pack of ravenous hounds fall upon them the instant they set foot outside the door. There was a bluster of wind outside, a low growl that preyed upon his emotions.

But nothing happened to them. They pressed on, Nordhausen boldly pushing at the outer door until it gave way and they were out in the twilight of the early evening as it settled on the parking lot.

“Well, that’s done it,” Paul breathed. “We’re outside the Nexus for sure now. How do you feel?”

“I’m fine,” said Nordhausen. “I told you, Paul. You said it yourself. We’re all Prime Movers now—possibly more. We’re imperative to the whole notion of time travel. You don’t fuck with an imperative, my friend. I’m fine—you’re fine— “

“Then what’s happened to Kelly?” said Paul, and a bit of the bravado eclipsed in Nordhausen’s eyes. “I wouldn’t be so smug until we figure that out, Robert. But the fact that I was proven wrong just now leads me to believe that the Nexus is deeper than we thought. It’s not just the physical Nexus about the Arch now… it’s something more. Time is waiting. She isn’t certain what to do. I’m not exactly certain either, but whatever the answer is, you and I have something to do with the outcome.”

The two men had much on their minds as they drove to University Hospital. When they got there, they rushed to Kelly’s room, and met a worried Maeve Lindford, pacing the hallway in front of his door. She was wearing a casual khaki colored suit over a loose white silk blouse. She had evidently been called away from her classroom, since she was carrying her pigskin book bag slung over her shoulder and had a brace of dry-erase markers in her breast pocket.

As soon as she noticed the two men, she hurried down the hall toward them, and said, “The doctors don’t know what’s wrong with him, none of the medicine seems to have any effect on him… he’s disoriented… in and out of consciousness, and…” She gave them both a searching look. “I think it might be temporal… some kind of after effect from the first project drop. God only knows. I thought you said you two had this figured out!” She wheeled in anger. “So what are you going to do now?”

Dorland held up his hands in front of him warding off the emotional onslaught. “Maeve, we don’t know what’s going on just yet. Let’s not jump to conclusions. Calm down—”

She cut in. “Don’t give me that. You know exactly what is going on here. One of your time shenanigans is expressing itself! Some consequence from whatever you two have been up to since you started that machine up again.”

“Maeve…” Nordhausen tried to intercede.

“And you! You are in this hand and glove! Are you satisfied? Kelly’s life signs are so faint they can barely read him at times. Damn it! Fix this—now!”

“Please, Maeve, we can’t talk about the project here,” said Paul. “There are too many variables.” He looked around him, noting the passing of nurses and orderlies in the halls, and the open doorways leading to other rooms.

Lindford pulled herself together, and brushed back a loose strand of red hair that had gotten in her face. “Yes, I understand but…” She broke down, her voice choked with emotion.

Paul and Robert instinctively went to comfort her. “Come,” said Robert. “Let’s get out of the hall.”

It was a semi-private room, and Kelly’s bed was screened off by an opaque blue curtain. Paul peeked behind it, thankful that there was no other patient occupying the other bed. His eyes were immediately drawn to his good friend Kelly, who lay on an adjustable bed, as though paralyzed. He was hooked up to heart monitor, a glucose drip, and an EKG record brain wave response. The lines were moving, tracing a thin milky phosphoresce on the monitor screens, but there was little life to them.

Kelly’s eyes fluttered open, unfocused. His head lolled in their direction, as if he was aware of their presence. Paul leaned in, talking to Kelly as he knelt by the bed.

“Hello, mister. It’s me. Can you hear me, Kelly? How did this happen to you?”

“Just came on…” Kelly’s voice was barely a whisper.

“Has this ever happened to you before?”

Kelly seemed to gain a bit of strength. “I’ve had random fits where I felt… precarious. You know… Like that night on the project. I felt like I was slipping… Like I might just vanish into nothing.” His breathing was labored as he spoke.

“Stop it, Paul!” Maeve hissed. “See how he is? It’s temporal variance—I’m certain of it. If we had a lab machine hooked up to him you’d probably say his pattern signature was fading or something. Can’t you see it? I thought putting that DVD in the memorial was supposed to fix all this! Why is this happening?”

Paul gave her a serious look, deep in thought. “Kelly,” he said again, with more urgency. “Please, I have to know if this came on suddenly, or if this is an effect that has been accumulating over time.”

“What?” Kelly closed his eyes.

“Kelly. Kelly Ramer! Listen to me! When did this happen? Can you remember that?”

“When?”

“Oh, leave him alone, Paul,” Maeve protested again. “I can tell you exactly when it happened. Come outside. Robert, you stay here with Kelly.”

Paul nodded and the two of them stepped out into the hall. Nordhausen gave them a glance, a worried expression on his face, but he soon turned his attention to Kelly.

“Robert?” Kelly had opened his eyes again, and he was trying to force a smile.

“I’m here, Kelly. The others stepped out to talk. So… how do you feel?

“Pretty damn mortal.”

The professor was distracted by the beeping of the hospital monitors, which seemed to speed up, then taper off again.

“It’ll be okay, my friend,” Robert consoled. “Paul will know what to do. Just be here now.”

“Where?” said Kelly. “What time is it?”

“What does that matter.” Nordhausen put his hand on Kelly’s brow, feeling an odd coolness there. He certainly wasn’t running a temperature, which ruled out any sudden illness.

“You don’t understand…” Kelly labored to speak again. “This isn’t life for me, Robert. I should be dead now… I’ve thought about that every second I’ve lived since the mission. Every second of every moment. Hell… Maybe I am turning into a wraith…”

“No good with that sort of talk, Kelly. You just hold on now. We’ve got an alert on the Golem line. Your program is running numbers and working up the report right now. We’ll get to the bottom of this. You’ll see. You are going to be fine. Maeve will stay here with you, and Paul and I will go take care of this business. You’ll will be out of here in no time! I promise!”

“Okay… I just feel so strange… wish the damn drugs would help. What are they shooting me up with?” His head lolled up to look at the glucose drip.

“Just fluids and sugars to help stabilize your system.”

“Sugar buzz…” Kelly began to drift. “Got to rest…”

“Sure, sure, just rest. I’ll wait here till Maeve and Paul come in, and we will take good care of you. Just relax, don’t worry about anything. You’ll be fine.”

“Yeah, fine…” He closed his eyes and lapsed into silence.

Nordhausen turned the lights down, and sat in a chair by the bed. He watched his friend’s breathing, his chest hardly moving, his breath the barest whisper on the oxygen feed line near his nose. Tears welled in the corners of his eyes and his face betrayed the deep emotion he was feeling now.

“My fault,” he whispered. “I did this…” The hospital monitors were pulsing calmly as Kelly seemed to be falling into a deeper sleep.

The door opened again and Maeve stepped in first. Paul remained outside, gesturing at Robert to come. Robert gave Kelly one last look and stood up, offering the bedside chair to Maeve.

A moment later the two men were standing in the busy hospital corridor, speaking to one another in low whispers.

“So, what’s the plan?” Robert was eager to do something to change the situation.

“Well this is all very theoretical, and I haven’t done any real time mapping yet, but Maeve and I think we have to go check the DVD in the grave—you know, the memorial site where we buried our mementos for Kelly.”

The professor glanced at the open door to Kelly’s room, as though afraid that Maeve would overhear them. “Does she know?” His voice was a whisper in Paul’s ear.

“Not everything. She thinks the alert is the cause of the incident. I didn’t mention your… well, you know.”

“Right,” the professor agreed, glancing over his shoulder. “Not the time for it. But what do we do now?”

“We’ve got to get back to the Arch. I’m pretty sure the Nexus from your mission has dissipated by now, but we still have the shelter of the Arch Nexus as long as we can keep it running? We’ll check the Golem report and then get on over to the memorial site to see what’s up.”

The implications of that finally came home to the professor. “You think someone may have tampered with the DVD?”

“It’s a possibility.”

“Okay, let’s go. But what would that mean, Paul?”

“I’ll explain in the car. Let’s say goodbye to Kelly and Maeve and get moving.”

They returned to Paul’s car, a white Honda Civic that he had been fond of for many years. As soon as they were underway Nordhausen returned to the subject of their errand.

“Why do you want to go to the gravesite?”

“We think the DVD might not be safe there. As you know, we counted on the time travelers of the future, who saved Kelly from a paradoxical disintegration. We counted on their finding the DVD we buried in the grave so they could know when and where to snatch Kelly, just before he vanished, and it worked. When the Nexus Point dissipated, they sent him back.”

Safe and sound, it had appeared, until this event.

Nordhausen asked, “So what do you want to do?”

Dorland thought a moment. “Maeve thinks that’s not a safe place. She wants me to get the DVD, and put it in a safe deposit box or something, where we can be more assured of its security. We’ll set up a foundation to maintain it or something. And I don’t think that’s such a bad idea.”

“Security? But who would want to dig up a grave site? Are you thinking some gardener got his work order wrong and went trowling through Kelly’s memorial ground?”

“Maybe,” he stretched out the word, to emphasize how remote he thought the possibility, “someone might get there before Mr. Graves’ friends find it in the future. That would immediately expose Kelly to paradox again.”

“Someone? Who are you talking about?”

“Remember that satellite phone call you made from Wadi Rumm?”

“Yes. What’s that got to do with this?”

“Whose phone was it?” Paul gave him a knowing wink.

“You mean to say that you think Rasil… that the Assassins…”

“We don’t know, but as I said before, that call would have been easy enough to trace. No matter how much we try to cover up our activities here, it could have been an obvious pointer to this point in the continuum. They know we have an Arch complex operational here, and they damn well know we must have had something to do with the Palma thing.”

“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.”

“But we were going to keep it all secret,” Nordhausen protested. “Keep it to ourselves.”

“Someone had to learn about it or they could not have pulled Kelly to safety in the first place. We have to look at this clearly, Robert. One side used us to help them reverse Palma. The other side is fighting back. Maybe it’s Rasil, or his masters. Maybe it’s Sinan and his Assassins. This sure is a devious way to try and do in Kelly—just like something the Assassins might dream up.”

“So now what?” The professor flapped his arms against the cold. “Whoever took it, can destroy it, if they haven’t already. My god, what if Kelly’s gone?”

“I don’t think so,” said Paul. He was suddenly excited. “Because this wasn’t the only copy. There still must be a data somewhere on the archives at the lab. We’ve got to get over there! We have to go and burn a hundred DVDs of Kelly, and stash them everywhere. Put it on a Yahoo server somewhere as hidden code on a web page. Make it part of Kelly’s Golem program—anything to insure that the copy will survive. We have to publish this information so much that it can be always available… not hide it! Publish it! We had it all wrong. The only way to maintain his probability is to assert it vigorously.”

9

On the road back they began to sort out the problem of who took the DVD. The night had calmed, although thin tails of clouds were still rushing aloft. The moon loomed in a cobalt blue sphere, with bright white stars dotting the sky overhead as the storm front passed.

Nordhausen said suddenly: “It’s clear now that there are other people moving through time.”

“I was afraid you were going to bring that up,” said Paul. “It’s a lot to start thinking about just now.”

“Well, we can’t avoid it. Someone physically dug up Kelly’s DVD and stole it. No one knew about that except the four of us.”

“No one in this milieu. But they were the ones who rescued Kelly in the first place, so at some future time the existence and location of the DVD becomes a known fact.”

“Exactly,” Nordhausen said excitedly. “We assumed they excavated it decades from now, and found the DVD, and had the idea to save Kelly. But now, look, we are going to try to make it so they don’t have to dig up the grave. So we don’t know how they found it… Maybe someone stole it, and they got it from them? Maybe they came back in time, and picked it up now, instead of in their own time. Suppose this is how they found it, perhaps only just hours ago because of what we’re about to do.”

Dorland interrupted him. “That’s the same Schroedinger’s Cat argument. But it’s a gross analogy trying to describe a quantum puzzle. Don’t worry. It doesn’t mean anything, it just makes you think. Niels Bohr said the cat existed in both states, alive and dead, until you opened the box, and then the probability collapsed into certainty, and the cat was either alive or dead. But the Many-Worlds theory says that at the moment a particle can or cannot emit, it does both, and each one sets off another fork in the universe, one with a dead cat and one with a live cat.”

“Well, you tell me,” Nordhausen shot back, “is Kelly alive or dead?”

“He seems to be in both states, before our very eyes. Schroedinger said there is a difference between an out of focus photograph and a snapshot of fog and clouds.” Dorland was pensive, “He proposed the original thought experiment to show that it was not possible to separate a superposition, it had to collapse… But in 1996, the National Institute of Standards and Technology managed to separate a single ion of beryllium into two states at a measurable distance of 80 nanometers.”

“More physics? What is that supposed to mean?”

Dorland rolled his eyes miserably. “I have no idea. Still, it seems to me that as long as we have Kelly physically here, and we make certain that there is a data set easily available for Graves’ colleagues to rescue him, then Kelly ought to maintain his integrity in this Meridian.”

Nordhausen was eager to agree. Then his thinking transitioned to the other problem that had been vexing him all night. “What about the hieroglyphics?”

“The hieroglyphics?”

“The hieroglyphics! The Rosetta Stone. And the other time travelers. If I didn’t cause the damage then they must have been running a mission themselves. That’s what triggered the alert—not my time jaunt.”

“Possibly.” Dorland was content to swim in uncertainty for a moment. “We’ll get over to the lab and see what the Golems have for us.”

Nordhausen pulled out his phone. “I’m calling Maeve to see how Kelly is. Maybe even our resolve to do this is enough to help him—even before it happens.”

“Good point,” Paul agreed, realizing that they were about to look into another box with the call. His heart was heavy when he thought of Kelly again.

Robert got through on the first ring, and gave a brief account of what they were planning. Kelly appeared to be no better, although he seemed to be resting comfortably.

Dorland whispered, “Tell her to meet us at your apartment in Berkeley. We can confer there. And use the code.”

The professor tried to remember. “Oh, yes,” he said. “And say hello to Alexandria.” It was a reference to a novel he had been writing on the destruction of the famous library in that city—and a fitting metaphor for his holding in Berkeley, as they had all agreed.

He switched off the phone with a visible sigh. “I don’t think she took that code business too well.”

This arrangement made, the men drove to the facility at Lawrence Berkeley Labs with as much speed as Paul could safely manage. They pulled into the rain swept parking lot a half hour later and rushed through the security station to the Lab. By the time they pushed through the door, they were breathless with the energy and excitement of their mission.

“You work the DVD thing,” Paul yelled. “I’ll check on the Golems.”

“Where do I start?” Nordhausen gave him a blank look.

“The blue system at the far left of the main control room. You know the one?”

“Yes, but what do I do?”

“Just do a search for any .MPEG file. You’ll find it. Make copies and publish. Use your imagination!” He rushed away, heading for the RAM bank center where he hoped the Golems would have news for him.

Robert located the data file on the archival storage system, and spent the next couple hours copying it on every available type of media he could locate. He set up a web and domain called KellyRamer.com, and posted the file in every possible format. It was linked into every University page he could access, and he added in meta-tags for easy searching.

When he was done, Nordhausen gave a sigh of exhaustion, and went to look for Paul.

“I made fifty copies,” he said. “Have we changed the future?”

“I hope so,” said Dorland. “The physical copies are tangible. The probabilities collapse into certainty with each copy you make because the chance of at least one surviving increases, copy by copy.”

“So, if we go back now and dig up the grave, will the DVD be in it again?”

“I’m not going to go find out,” Dorland said. “As the pious peasant said, ‘There are some things man is not meant to know, Doktor Frankenstein!’”

“Fronkensteen!” retorted Nordhausen, and the men laughed, breaking the mood of heaviness that had beset them while they labored to preserve Kelly in the world of certainty.

Dorland pulled himself out of his seat. “I was right about the contamination,” he said as he eyed a ream of computer printouts.

“What do you mean?”

“The alarm was not for your time breach, Robert. In fact, your party with Wilde and company seems to have made little impression on future Meridians. There’s a few inconsistencies in the RAM bank comparison, but nothing serious. The Meridian is clean on that score.”

“Then what caused the damage?”

“There was another breach of the continuum, concurrent with your mission, but to another target date altogether. No time to talk about it now though. First things first. You’ve got to face Maeve.”

The look Nordhausen gave him was the sum of all fears, but Paul just smiled.

The drive to the apartment from the lab was quite different from the trip they had made earlier in the afternoon. Now they were exhausted, hungry, and still filthy from the graveyard. They had both changed from their soaked shirts into fresh lab coats, but their trousers and shoes were still caked with dried mud. Dorland swung by an all night drive through, and they ordered combo meals to go.

When they got to the apartment, Maeve was already there, waiting in Paul’s car across the street. She seemed very excited, and encouraged by a strong improvement in Kelly’s condition.

“I don’t know what you two did,” she beamed, “but Kelly is awake now and hungry as a horse! He’s lucid, very focused, and the confusion and disorientation is completely gone.”

“Thank Robert,” said Paul, pointing at the professor. He told Maeve their idea of publishing the data to the Internet as a way of preserving it.

“Wasn’t that a security risk?” Maeve suggested.

“Not really,” said Paul. “To any outsider it’s just a few minutes of footage of Kelly at his desk. Sure, he vanishes at the end, but with special effects being what they are these days, and the amount of junk on the Internet—”

“Of course!” Maeve smiled warmly, delighted with the solution. “Well it’s already worked some kind of magic. I insisted Kelly stay at the hospital tonight for observation, just to be sure. In fact, I practically had to sit on him to keep him from running over to the lab.”

“Probably best, but this is great news,” said Robert, clearly relieved.

After they went up, Robert offered Paul the first shower, and set him up a with aclean tee shirt, a UC Berkeley sweat shirt, and a pair of very loose trousers.

While Dorland was showering, Lindford made a pot of coffee and Nordhausen took the opportunity of eating his hamburger, to avoid talking with her. She could see that he was at the end of his strength, and that finally sitting down was making the weariness come on, so she was content to wait for a while before they started getting into the matter seriously.

Dorland came out in a billow of steam, drying his hair with a towel, complaining that the balding Nordhausen should at least have a hairdryer for the benefit of his guests.

Nordhausen said he didn’t have enough visitors to justify the expenditure, and closed the bathroom door behind himself.

Dorland, finally warm and dry, sank into the large easy chair to the side of Nordhausen’s desk. The black and white composition books containing the professors hieroglyphics were scattered on the desk top with computer printouts from the Golem report.

Maeve brought Paul a cup of coffee, and sat in the desk chair. She piled up the notebooks and set them aside without looking at them.

“Okay, Paul, tell me everything.” Tired or not, he was the project team leader, and he would have to answer for anything that went wrong.

“Hah, yes, everything,” Dorland began. “Well, I think we have taken care of Kelly’s problem. Your instincts were right that the DVD in the memorial was not safe, but Robert and I have taken care of that. Oh, by the way,” he handed her a handful of DVD’s in a box. “Take these, and put them somewhere, burn a copy on every computer you have, and keep transferring them when you get new ones.”

She slipped them into her shoulder bag. “So, tell me what you found at the graveyard.”

Paul spoke reluctantly, “The grave had been dug up, and the work looked relatively recent.”

“Dug up? By whom?” Maeve was shocked.

“We have no idea, but the odds are that it was an operative from the future. They dug down, smashed the lid on the box, removed the stuff we put in, and buried it again. It was obvious when we got there, they made no effort to hide it.”

“Who would do this? And why?” Maeve was bewildered.

“As to why, no doubt to eliminate Kelly. As to whom? I suppose we can discuss that.”

“The time travelers who saved Kelly—”

“—wouldn’t have any reason to want to eliminate him. If that were so, then why would they save him in the first place?”

“So that means…”

“Robert believes there are other people moving through time, and if you looked at those reports you would have seen that the alarm keyed on a breach at three past four, this afternoon.”

That set the two of them to silence for a moment. They heard the shower door slam, and listened to Robert moving about in the bathroom. Shortly, he emerged, also in clean, dry clothes, and seemingly re-energized.

“Dare I ask what you two have been talking about?”

Paul and Maeve gazed back at him wearily.

“Paul tells me that you think other people are moving through time.”

Robert looked at Paul. “You told her?”

“Not everything.”

Maeve was instantly alert. “What?”

Robert looked pleadingly at his friend. “You tell her.”

Paul pointed to the professor’s notebooks.

“Open that notebook, Maeve—no, not the Golem files, the older notebook to the left.”

Questioningly, she complied. The rows of precise, intricate hieroglyphics marched across the pages. “What is this?”

“What does it look like to you?” Paul asked.

“It looks like Egyptian writing.” She looked up blankly. “Who wrote this?”

Paul looked at the professor. “Robert did. We didn’t know if it would still manifest in this Meridian, but it seems we learn something new about the theory every time it is tested. Apparently the lifeline of a Prime is held inviolate if he is safe in a Nexus during Transformation. I was worried about Paradox, but Robert is safe and sound—at least for the moment.”

Maeve took in the jargon, understanding, yet clearly still annoyed. “Robert wrote this? Why on earth…” If she had been confused before, she was now totally at a loss.

Nordhausen stood in silence. Maeve continued to turn, page after page after page, uncomprehending.

“Robert says he can read those.”

At that she looked up sharply. “What’s going on here?”

“Robert went through the Arch,” Paul continued quickly.

“What?”

“Robert went through the Arch, and when he came back, he told me something had changed. Oh, he was afraid all this was his fault, and I let him stew for awhile, but the Golems are on to the real culprits, and it has something to do with that writing.” Paul pointed at the professor’s notebooks.

“Okay, stop right there.” Lindford commanded. “This is too much at once.” She paused, closed her eyes, and took a deep breath.

“Okay, one more time. Robert went through the Arch?” She flashed him a dark look, and Nordhausen swallowed hard. “You’re talking about his trip to recover Lawrence’s manuscript at Reading station, yes?”

“No. I’m talking about his trip to see H.M.S Pinafore in London—1880.”

Dorland was through helping. He had let the cat out of Schroedinger’s box and he decided to leave the rest to the professor. Nordhausen said, “Yes… I… Well, I went through the Arch, and when I came back something was different, and if I hadn’t gone we wouldn’t even know about it, so I did a good thing after all, and now we have to figure out what to do about it.” He ran out of steam, giving her a deflated look.

Maeve left him hanging for a few beats.

“Notwithstanding the fact that I only agreed to let you two start up the project again on your express promise that you would never send a person through it again without my approval,” she began, “you nevertheless secretly, and in violation of your promise to me, sent Robert through the Arch? Robert, of all people? And he did something to change history?”

“Now wait a second,” Dorland protested. “I didn’t send Robert through, this was all his own secret little plan.”

“I’m afraid that’s correct, Maeve. It was just me,” Nordhausen seconded. “Paul knew nothing about it until I told him this afternoon. He got to me just as I was returning.”

“Well suppose you just tell me now!” She was reddening with anger, secretly believing that the whole of Kelly’s dilemma was to be laid at Nordhausen’s feet.

Robert related his experience in London once more. This time he minimized his encounter with Wilde and Gilbert, and focused on the British Museum. With some contributions from Dorland, the story was worked out again, and with more details, which Maeve pried out in pointed inquisition.

Finally they were back again with Maeve and Paul paging through Robert’s hieroglyphic diaries. Maeve had vented her anger at them, but the more she came to realize that Robert’s unauthorized time jaunt had been a lucky windfall for them all, the more she composed herself.

Paul summed it up. “So if Robert hadn’t followed up his lead on Rasil’s scroll and the hieroglyphics, then we would have never stumbled on the damaged stone—the Rosetta Stone, as he claims it was called. Here, have a look at the data we pulled from the on-line RAM Bank reference. The Golems confirm Robert’s story. The stone was supposed to look like this.” He pointed to the photo on the readout they had obtained earlier. “That’s the heart of it.”

“The Rosetta Stone!” Robert exulted.

“Their touchstone,” said Paul. He pointed at the Golem files lying scattered all over Nordhausen’s study table. “He’s on to something, Maeve. The alert we got keyed on another breach in the continuum.

The professor’s eyebrows raised, wrinkling his forehead with surprise. “When? Does the report have any good data on the time?”

Paul smiled at him, the light of discovery in his eyes. “You’re going to love this,” he waded in, then jumped. “The temporal date is 1799 and the spatial locus of the breaching point is in the Middle East.”

“The Middle East?”

“In Egypt… At a place called Rosetta…”