Paradox Hour

by John Schettler

  Wellings was off at once, soon making his way into the bowels of the lumbering battleship Rodney. He knew the way well enough, for he had been there once before, in another time, another evolution of the history of these events. This time, things were different, for he now had foreknowledge of what he would find hidden away in Rodney’s hold, or at least he believed as much.

  Thank God the Captain was as amenable this time as he was before, he thought to himself. Now to get down to that cargo hold and find that key. Will it still be there? Last time the crate it was in took a hard jolt to enable my discovery. Will that have happened again this time? It was only by chance that I went that way, and made my little discovery. I heard the call of that seaman in distress, and my impulse was to answer it. That too was a part of all of this, that one moment of compassion in the heat of all that was happening. Yet something tells me there was more than chance or luck at work in that damn torpedo hit this time around.

  Wellings knew much more about all that was now transpiring than he could ever reveal to Captain Hamilton. He knew more than the names of the ships that had suddenly turned in his direction, with new orders—find the Rodney, sink her, at any cost… Yes, he knew so very much more… He knew the number on the U-Boat he believed responsible for this recent attack, and who was out there commanding it, caught between a moment of both jubilation and fear as he struggled to evade those four British destroyers.

  Wohlfarth! I’m on to you again, you rascal! Something tells me you have much more mischief in mind here, but first things first. Let’s hope that torpedo hit was enough to shake things loose here in this Meridian, but not enough to sink this ship before I get my hands on that key!

  Chapter 18

  There were four of them, and they had been hot on the case for some time now, about much more than the secretive business of the King. One was a Keyholder, or at least he was for a while, until the fitful warning of the machine that had started this whole intervention again, a mindless bank of computer circuits that seemed to have an uncanny ability to ferret out the ripples and aberrant eddies in the quantum fog of time.

  There were four of them, each with a peculiar skill to make them the perfect team, a synthesis of four determined minds, involved in a project that would decide the fate of untold generations yet to be born. They had names, Dorland, Nordhausen, Ramer, Lindford, and one of them was now dressed in the naval uniform of a Lieutenant Commander, a costume that had been dredged up for a mission very much like this one, pressed into service again in a desperate gamble to set a situation right, where it now threatened to careen into utter chaos. This would be the last mission, or so they hoped, though it had not been the first.

  They were children in the beginning, he realized. They thought they would use their amazing new technology to go see a Shakespeare play. They made enormous errors, landing in the late Cretaceous at one point, and bouncing all over the history until they managed to get their methods understood and well honed. Once they had dallied in time for personal fetishes, to find and retrieve things they had always been curious about, until they discovered what was really happening—they were not alone. Others were moving in the unseen meridians of time, agents from a unknown future, locked in a bitter struggle with one another. A Time war was underway, and it was causing more damage than the alterations to the history these agents conspired to bring about. It was causing damage to the fabric of time itself!

  Their chief research consultant, Robert Nordhausen, was finally convinced of the serious nature of any further breach of the continuum. Considering what they had seen in recent events, the many interventions were now becoming very dangerous. Their last operation had tried to be careful, sending information back through time to try and catalyze the actions of Prime Movers instead of directly intervening themselves. In the end, it had taken considerably more effort, and Wellings had intervened like this on Rodney once before, giving this whole affair a strange feeling of Déjà vu for him.

  The effect of information sent back through Time, particularly to Prime Movers, was also very unpredictable, particularly in the deeply fractured Meridians of World War II where their last mission had been run. There were so many Pushpoints there, lurking in the Nexus Points of battles, campaigns, and roiling sagas at sea, that even the slightest nudge could set the whole mountain of events tumbling. A tiny drop of information could cause an immediate and significant change, like a sudden chemical reaction in a lab beaker, and the changes were no longer predictable with any degree of certainty. It might fall like a saving antidote, or fester like a lethal poison, and there was no way to predict all possible outcomes, or to safely restore the time meridian to its former state.

  Realizing all this, the presence of this key hidden in the Elgin Marbles was baffling and surprising to the man who had posed as Lieutenant Commander Wellings. He knew to a certainty what Kamenski had come to suspect, that there were other agents at large in the history, and many had very dark agendas. Why was this key embedded in the base of the Selene Horse? Was it evidence of a failed operation by one of these hidden agents, or was it placed there deliberately? If so, what did that operation entail, and why was it mounted? Or worse, why was it called off in such a way that this object would have been so carelessly left behind? Was it meant to be left behind, and if so, why? And why did they have no inkling of it in the Golem alerts?

  Yes, the Golem system bad been a life saver. That was the name of the intrepid computer module that was ceaselessly scanning the history over the vast web of the Internet, and making lightning fast comparisons to information about that same history stored in a secured RAM Bank. Whenever a major deviation was found, an alert was sounded, analysis run, and the moment of deviation from the norm could be isolated, the very Pushpoint of divergence, where history that had once been codified in the stillness of the past was now spinning off in a wild new direction. One module in particular had been very enterprising, Golem bank number seven. It produced the warning that had led to the discovery of that key, and that changed everything.

  Yet as Wellings descended into the lower levels of the ship, every question in his mind led him on to another, a long corridor of unopened doors that perhaps would be breached with this very key if he chose the correct one. First off, how was it that the object itself could have moved forward with him in time when he returned from his last wild ride aboard HMS Rodney in the Atlantic ocean? Never mind that, he thought. It did come forward, and he once had it well in hand.

  He remembered how he had placed the key on a chain and wore it around his neck, under his shirt at all times, from that moment on. He also made an entry in Kelly’s protected RAM Bank, describing the key, how and where he found it, and including a set of images. It was well encrypted, so he had no fear of that data ever being discovered. If something did slip, he wanted to know it immediately—at least insofar as this key was concerned. He had the RAM Bank programmed to notify him once a week about the hidden file, and ask him a question only he would ever know the answer to before allowing him to view the contents. If the key ever vanished, he wanted to know it immediately—know that it had existed, where he had found it, and what he had discovered about it since.

  Yet how would any of them ever know again what was real, or what was the contorted product of another Time intervention? They were the first, or so they thought, to ever open Time. They had created the device, the Arch, their gateway to a thousand yesterdays, or a thousand tomorrows. Yet now they would have to keep the Arch spinning on low standby mode at all times, an enormously expensive proposition, and one that also presented challenges involving maintenance and engineering.

  Even so, he worried that one day, by some means, his machine would falter and fail when it was most needed. Yes, there were others operating on the Meridians of Time now. They were not alone. They had discovered that two sides in a distant future were at war with one another, one known as the Order, the other labeled Assassins, each side attempting to bend the lines of fate and time to their li
king—Time War.

  They had met some of these nefarious agents in time, and eventually forced the two sides to agree to a truce and end their Time War. Now he wondered if the Golem alert system would be efficient enough to pick up any potential violation of the truce they had negotiated. What if the warring parties used some unknown technology, or even a principle of physics unknown to his day, to spoof their system and conduct another stealthy operation? Was this key evidence of exactly that?

  He said nothing of his discovery during those negotiations, but kept that thought in the back of his mind. What were these future agents really up to, he wondered? Was it Rodney they had been gunning for all along? Old lumbering Rodney, with a secret cargo, in more than one way—the King’s business, the gold bullion, the Elgin Marbles, the hidden key… and me!

  We had to threaten them, both sides at war in the future, before they would listen, for they knew we had power. We were the first, the Founders, and from our unique position on the continuum, we had the ability to frustrate any move they made. What if the Assassins took our threats to heart, and decided that their next and only mission must be to eliminate the meddling Founders from the continuum in a way that still permitted Time travel to occur in the future?

  Physicists were still taking pokes at Einstein. The CERN research institute near Geneva recently announced they had measured particles that had to be exceeding the speed of light. It was only a matter of getting somewhere 60 nanoseconds sooner than expected, but it was enough to raise a lot of eyebrows in the physics community. It meant, in one possible application, that it would be possible to send information back through Time, something Wellings could clearly confirm now if ever asked around the water cooler conversations at the Berkeley Lab facilities, though he could never speak a word of this to anyone outside the four core members of the project. Even the interns and lower level staff had been banned from the main facilities after that first mission. The team could take no chance that the true purpose and utility of the Arch would ever become generally known. If the government ever discovered what they were doing here, it would be confiscated and shut down in a heartbeat. In that event he had little doubt that a new Time War would soon begin.

  It was a very slippery slope, he knew. Others would reason that if information could be sent back in Time, matter and people would come into the discussion shortly thereafter. He smiled inwardly when he learned that Steven Hawking had remarked: “It is premature to comment on this. Further experiments and clarifications are needed.”

  He could write them all a book, but the more he considered things, the more questions piled up, one on top of another. Be careful what you wish for, went the old maxim… You may get it. And what did he have hanging round his neck that day when he first revealed the existence of the key to his good friend Kelly Ramer. The key… a strange relic that should never have been found, or left, where it was discovered—the very same key he was laboring to find again now as he reached the lower decks of Rodney, and began to make his way forward towards the main cargo hold.

  A curious man, he had immediately applied a little forensic investigation to the key, regretting that he had twiddled with it in his pocket and largely extinguished any finger prints he might have found on it. Yet a little non-invasive scan revealed something very interesting, for this key was not what it seemed at all. There was something machined on the side, a series of numbers that could only be read under intense magnification. Beyond that, it was hollow! There was something inside it, and he would spend a good bit of time thinking about that before he went any further, or even whispered the fact to his closest associates.

  There was something inside it! The metal end, machined to engage lock tumblers, had clearly been designed for some other purpose as well, and this turned the cylinders of his mind, opening a universe of possibilities. What was it, he wondered? Surely the contents would tell him where it had come from, and what its purpose was, he thought.

  Now all he had to do was find out how to open the damn thing. Yet, being inventive and resourceful, he soon answered that challenge. He found that the head of the key could be turned with sufficient torque, and slowly unscrewed. He still remembered that moment of breathless opening, when everything he ever knew and believed turned at the head of that key, and its slow untwisting became the great unraveling of all that ever was. When he finally had it open, and tilted the shaft ever so gently to urge the hidden contents out onto a lab dish, he stared with amazement and perplexity at what he had found.

  Days later, he knew the answer to many of his questions, and he also knew why there had been no answer from the distant future when others had called out to their successive generations. From that day forward his life, and his entire understanding of the world he lived in, was never the same. But who to tell?

  He spent a long time thinking about that before he ever spoke a word of this key again. Yet it was something too big for him to carry alone. Like Frodo’s ring, it began to weigh upon him, seeming heavier and heavier with each day that passed. But unlike Frodo, there was no place he could take it and cast it away, and there was no way he could simply forget about it either… not this… not this…

  Then one sunny afternoon at his cottage in Carmel, he was sitting with his good friend Kelly, down on a getaway visit while the other team members stood watch back in their Berkeley Lab facility, the Arch complex as they called it now. They had been walking on the coastline of Asilomar that day, and later dined at a favorite restaurant, the Sardine Factory in Monterey. Afterwards, they were drinking wine in the cottage, looking at some of Kelly’s photo albums, and listening to the music they loved and shared together, talking over things in a way only two very old friends could. The music played on in the background and Kelly came in with a good bottle of Pinot Noir from the wine rack.

  The man who would be Wellings knew that he had to finally unburden himself concerning his discovery of that key. Yet he knew the moment he opened his mouth, he would pass this hidden knowledge on to his friend, germ like, and Kelly’s life, and his awareness of life itself, would change forever. He, too, would never be the same. He hesitated briefly, thinking to leave his friend in the relative innocence and simplicity of his life, to leave him unbothered, unburdened, unaware. But if this would eventually lead them all to renewed Time missions, the whole project team would have to be informed. He could bear it no longer. The sheer loneliness of carrying the key, and all he knew about it now, was like a great weight crushing down on his soul.

  He reached into his shirt and slowly drew out the key on its chain, feeling like Gandalf visiting Frodo in the Shire, there to tell him what the quaint little magic ring was really all about.

  For one last moment he waited. Then he spoke. “It’s about this key,” he said…

  * * *

  Later that night, the Arch was still slowly spinning on low power mode back in the Berkeley Hills, just enough to keep the systems energized and ready for quick startup if needed. The project team was taking no chances. They wanted to be able to monitor the newly enforced cease fire closely. The Golem Module was to be in use 24/7, now strongly reinforced with the addition of many new data banks and much more processing power.

  At around four A.M. that evening, the Golem Module suddenly came to life again. The threat warning filters had been jarred awake by a lone sentry, while the world slept, blissfully unaware of the impending danger. Normally it would take an assessment from at least three Golem Banks to trigger a warning like this, a call to arms as it were. This time, however, the system had been reconfigured to move into alert mode if just one Golem Bank reported sufficient evidence of a variation. They were taking no further chances. So the alarm went out again, the threat module responded and sent start signals to the main turbines, and the low thrum of the Arch immediately revved up from 20% to 40% power, just enough to open and sustain a small Nexus Point around the facility. Signals were sent out to each of the four project team members, and they were all bound to come to the facility a
s soon as possible. Within that Nexus, they would be immune to any changes resulting from a Heisenberg Wave that may have been generated by the variation.

  One of the Golem banks had found something oddly incongruous while it performed its routine scans of data available on the Internet. It was out of alignment with at least fifteen data points in the RAM bank, and so the digital “stand to” had been sounded again by the vigilance of this single search cluster. It was Golem 7, the same dogged module that had first set them on the trail of German warships on the seas of WWII.

  The alarm came in, and that was the night everything again took a most unexpected turn. The man who now called himself Wellings had another name, Paul Dorland, Chief Physicist in the time travel project in Berkeley, one of the four “Founding Fathers” that had first opened the continuum and discovered the Time War. Something had happened. The Golem module was returning red flags concerning an incident in the Norwegian Sea. A Russian battlecruiser had been involved, and then suddenly went missing… as did something else.

  That night, as he reflexively reached for the key that had been hanging around his neck since that last harrowing mission, he found that, like Alan Turing’s watch, it was gone…

  Part VII

  Choices

  “In any moment of decision, the best thing you can do is the right thing. The worst thing you can do is nothing."

  ― Theodore Roosevelt

  Chapter 19