Meridian - A Novel In Time (The Meridian Series)

by John Schettler

  “I have heard the thunder in the desert, but it is not the rain.” The sound returned to them in the distance, a dull rolling rumble at the edge of their awareness.

  The Colonel gave him a dark glance. “Yes, that would be your British friends,” he said with a twist of derision in his voice. “Artillery. That is the one thing the British do well, I’m afraid. They do make good artillery. But we, too, have guns; and we know how to use them.”

  His water was ready at the boil and he reached for the tin pot, pouring the steaming liquid into his cup. The aroma of coffee redoubled as the ground beans bloomed and a light brown foam welled at the lip of the cup. The Colonel leaned down to smell the dark, rich coffee, clearly pleased. “This is very fresh,” he said. “Where did you get it? I have not had coffee like this for many months.”

  Paul hesitated, and then decided to simply tell the truth. “I brought it with me from America.”

  “America? They do not grow coffee in America.”

  “From San Francisco—where I live.” He hoped he might convince the man that he was not a British spy, so he rambled on. “It is imported there. I think the blend is Arabica, with beans from Sumatra as well.” He was beginning to think that a good cup of Major Dickason’s blend would work its wonders on the man and soften his mood.

  “That is one thing the Arabs do well,” said the Colonel. “They make good coffee, though they put too much spice in it. I do not take it that way.” He stirred his cup slowly, looking at Paul with a little curiosity now, the hardness in his voice moderated somewhat. “And the Arabs also like to blow up my trains,” he added. “Did you know that, American? Perhaps you have been helping them.”

  Paul was afraid the interrogation was going to begin again, but he thought it dangerous to remain silent at the remark. “I would not know how to go about it,” he said, with all honesty.

  The Colonel smiled at the remark. “I wonder,” he said quietly. “The Bey may wonder as well when I bring you to Deraa. If you live so long.” He tacked that last bit on as he sipped at the coffee, a satisfied look on his face.

  “You are going to Derra?” Paul could not get himself into any more trouble, so he ventured on. He wondered if he could ascertain what day it was. “I was hoping to reach there by week’s end.”

  The Colonel looked as though he would laugh, but his mood shifted suddenly. “You are a bit too curious for one in your situation. You wish to go to Deraa? Why? Is there something there you wish to see?”

  “The city,” said Paul. “The people.”

  “The defensive works, perhaps; the gun emplacements? Notes for your history books, I suppose. You may think yourself a non-combatant, but I do not think the Bey will be so gracious in his assessment. Yes, I think I will save you for him. He fancies your kind: soft men; men of letters and words. We will stop in Deraa along the way and I will introduce you. He will enjoy your conversation. I do not!”

  He sipped at his cup again. “But your coffee is good,” he finished with wry humor. “I think you are an American. But do not forget: the United States has joined the war now, and so you are just as much an enemy as the English. Yes! I have the reports here in my briefcase. The Germans have killed the first American soldiers in Europe only a few days ago. They will kill many more when the Russians go home to their revolution. Perhaps the generals have sent your likes into the area to cause trouble for us here, just as the British do with these Arabs. I’m afraid that is exactly what the Bey will think, my friend. And that is what I think as well. You are a spy.” He took a deep draught from his coffee cup and stood up, very suddenly. “Now,” he said with a dark grin, “you will tell me something of why you have really come to the desert, and why you wish to see our cities and towns.” He took hold of Paul’s chin, his grip hard and cold. “I cannot give you to the Bey without knowing these things. He will discover it all for himself, of course, but you will tell me first—and you will tell me now.”

  The Colonel’s hand moved to Paul’s throat, and he swallowed hard as he felt the fingers tighten on his wind pipe. So much for Major Dickason’s blend, he thought. I should have brought Guatemala.

  17

  Lawrence Berkeley Labs - 3:15 AM

  Kelly was studying the monitors, noting the final diagnostic numbers coming in on the time shift and feeling quite pleased with himself. His theory had worked! If a loop command was sent through the system during the tachyon infusion multiple signatures could be captured for storage in the pattern buffers. Theoretically, there could be as many signatures as the memory capacity allowed, and for each one he knew he could now time the particle density and decay sequences to initiate a jump to a new point on the continuum. It was a novel idea that no one had ever anticipated, a child of his own speculation that had been given a rough birthing in the emergency that had just transpired.

  “I’ll call it a Ramer Loop,” he said to himself, almost forgetting that Maeve was still there, hovering over his shoulder and trying to make sense of the readouts.

  “Are they on target?”

  “Sure,” said Kelly, an air of jubilancy relieving the stress of the last fifteen minutes. “I got them both in tight on the coordinates. At least that’s what the system reads. Looks like one arrived a day ahead of the other, however.”

  “Will they be on the right spatial coordinates?”

  “I hope so.”

  Maeve didn’t like the sound of that. “What do you mean you hope so? Can’t you tell?”

  “Well, it depends if they’ve moved or not when they were on their original breaching point. This was just a temporal shift. I left the spatial variables as they were. The shift just moved them forward in time, that’s all. The only spatial variance would be the proximity algorithm—you know, so they won’t materialize inside a boulder or under water. That could separate them a bit. The quantum gravity matrix handles that. But if they wandered off at the original site, they’re likely to be off by that much on this shift. I wouldn’t worry about it. How far could they go?”

  “But what about the time differential,” Maeve was still fishing, driven by her natural instinct to leave no stone unturned. She wanted things right, ever so right, and the untidy nature of this first breach of the continuum was unnerving. “They’ve only been gone a few minutes here, but in the alternate time they could have lived out years.”

  “Theoretically.”

  “Yes, theoretically—it’s all about the theory at this point, but we’re making it practical now. We’ve got to be careful, and we have to get it right. Isn’t there a way you can see about their spatial shift?”

  Kelly thought for a minute. “Well, there should be a signal trace I could run down. Then I could do a comparison study on the spatial coordinates relative to the trace—”

  “Run it down.” Maeve waved a hand at the consoles, gesturing randomly at the intimidating wall of machinery as she prodded Kelly to action.

  “Now? I was going to work on the particle chamber and make sure it’s set right for the final retraction. If I don’t balance the element sampling right it could be critical.”

  “You mean we might not get them back?”

  “Look, we’ll get them back, OK?” Kelly gave her a frustrated look. “I just think I’d better fine tune the chamber to be sure. It will only take about ten minutes. Then I’ll run that comparison study for you, though by that time it won’t matter much. They are where they are, Maeve, and there’s nothing I can do about it. I can only move them one more time, and that’s to bring them back here.”

  Maeve sighed, but she understood what he was saying, nodding agreement. Kelly stood up and put his arm around her. “Hey, I know this has been hard on you—on all of us. Imagine what they must be going through. We’re doing everything we possibly can for them, and we’ll get them both home just fine. You’ll see.”

  Maeve smiled, wanting to be persuaded, but still driven by the need to know, to have a sense of some certainty about it all. “I think I need some of that coffee Jen m
ade,” she said.

  “I’ll get you a cup.”

  She saw him searching about to locate the pot and decided his time would be better spent elsewhere. “Don’t bother. Get started on that tune-up job you were talking about. I’ll get the coffee myself. We haven’t much time.”

  “Right,” said Kelly, and he diverted to the chamber console.

  Maeve spotted the coffee and retrieved a mug from a supply cabinet on the far wall. “I wonder where they ended up after the first shift,” she mused.

  “What? God only knows,” said Kelly. “I suppose we could do a full diagnostic on the shift—we will do that, but there won’t be time tonight.”

  “You said the variance factor was off exponentially.”

  “Nasty little error, that one.” Kelly was already tinkering with the particle chamber settings, pleased that the element readings were holding stable and he seemed to have good control. The particle density was building up nicely after the shift, and he glanced at the clock, relieved to see that he had ample time before his final retraction. It was 3:20 AM.”

  “What was the range of that error. Any way to do a little quick multiplication and see if you can ballpark it?”

  “Oh, I did that earlier.”

  Maeve gave him a long look. “Well?”

  Kelly was focused on the task in front of him, but he paused, eyes rolling a moment as he considered. “They went for quite a ride, I think. Somewhere in the early Tertiary, or late—”

  “How long ago was that?” Maeve did not immediately recognize the term and was waiting for a simple number. “Are you talking in hundreds of years, or thousands?”

  Kelly smiled. “More like millions. Maybe sixty-five million years or so—give or take a few hundred thousand.”

  Maeve practically choked on her coffee. “Sixty-five million years? God, Kelly. I had no idea they were that far off the target!”

  “Like I said, it was either the early Tertiary or late Cretaceous.”

  “Then we’re talking dinosaurs here?” Maeve was amazed.

  “A real Crichton-Spielberg moment,” said Kelly with a laugh. “I’ll bet they were scared shitless. Hopefully, they were only there for a brief time. I’m sure they probably figured out they were off target. I mean, the place was a seabed just a few thousand years before they showed up.”

  “God, what if it still was a seabed.” She assumed the worst.

  “Relax, they’d land at the surface. The references are almost foolproof.”

  “How would you like to be plopped down in the middle of a primordial sea and forced to swim for the nearest shore in Arabic robes. Lord, Kelly, how can you take this so calmly! Why didn’t you tell me about this earlier?”

  “What, so you could worry about it? Look, I’m sorry. I was keying data fast and I made a mistake. I got them out of there as quickly as I could.”

  “Well how do we even know they’re still alive?”

  “We don’t know.” Kelly put it as plainly as he could. “We’ve just got to have a little faith, that’s all.”

  She was going to say something, but took a sip of coffee instead, imposing an interval of calm on herself. She stared at the control consoles, fighting off the rising sense of frustration and helplessness that had been preying upon her since the call from her mother came in. Something had happened there, she thought. Just as Kelly pressed his looping command I had a strange sense of déjà vu. I could hear my mother’s voice resonating, echoing in my head over and over, and then it just vanished. She glanced at the phone, thinking about the moment. What was it the stranger had said? We’re in a deep void. Whatever we’ve done to the time lines will be determined in the next few minutes and, until then, the universe is holding its breath.

  Kelly had returned to his chamber controls, working away as if nothing was wrong at all. He was supposed to be dead. She knew he must be feeling something about all of this, but he was able to set his emotions aside for the moment and focus on the task at hand. Every thing he did now, every calculation, every twist of a dial or flick of a switch, was subtly altering the shape of the world they had all been living in before. Kelly was a Free Variable. He was alive for some reason, and he was right, they had to have a little faith in the things that reason might bring.

  She chided herself, watching his example, and realized she had been quite hard on him when it seemed like things were spinning out of control. He was doing the best he could, and it was amazing to her that he could manipulate the hardware and software as he did. Calculating new temporal coordinates in his head on the fly had been an incredible feat, but he pulled it off. The bank of machinery seemed so impersonal and unfeeling to her, like a lot of technology did. As if cars and televisions and computers were not enough, now there were going to be time machines to deal with.

  Outcomes and Consequences—that was her charge. Even though she had been as excited as all the other senior team members at the prospect of success, the reality of it all was much more intimidating than she thought it would be. They could travel in time. It all worked! All of Paul’s time theory was a real phenomena now. The glossary of novel terms he dreamt up were all going to form the root of an entire new lexicon of thought and experience for humans. She thought back to the last time a project of this scope had been attempted, the Manhattan project during World War Two. They were going to unleash the power of the atom for the first time. What was it Oppenheimer had said? ‘Now I am become God, the destroyer of all things.’

  The Arch made that discovery pale by comparison. They had gone to great pains to avoid taking government funding for the project. It had all been achieved with private money and corporate donations, leasing out facilities and equipment wherever possible. The government had exercised routine permitting authority but, as far as they were concerned, this was all a theoretical study project. The few inspectors they had entertained seemed politely ignorant of the physics involved, and heedless of the implication should the project succeed. They never thought it was anything more than a bunch of arcane science wizards playing with ideas. Had they known we were actually going to make a practical attempt…

  Visions of men in black suits with earpieces and hand guns flooded into her mind, born of a hundred science fiction movies and X-Files episodes. She shuddered to realize that the cliché images would probably play out just that way now. When the team announced that they had actually made the theory real—actually traveled in time, the government was going to descend on the project like a pack of vultures. Now that their Outcome had been proven to be a practical reality, the resulting Consequences were going to be mind-boggling. She looked ahead, realizing the staggering implications of the technology Kelly was quietly tuning in the corner alcove. They could change things; they could change anything! Now they were not merely made destroyers, but creators as well. It was no metaphor. They had become Gods. They could go back and alter the time line in any way they chose. There was a part of her that never believed it could be possible. Now it was.

  A complete government lock-down on the facility would be inevitable, she knew. They would move in and take control at once. The whole thing would be surrounded with the highest possible security, and the military-industrial establishment that Eisenhower had once warned of was going to shift into high gear. Now there would be time wars, where competing interests would battle for control of the future through clever infections of the past. If they wanted someone killed, they would just go back and prune the family tree a bit. If they wanted funding they could just go back and buy lots of a few well chosen stocks and tuck them away in a holding company.

  These were just the simplest possible examples that came to her mind. The Arch made anything possible—anything at all. And the strangest thing about it was that no one would ever know about it. The time-line would change, and all would seem as though it was quietly the same. Only a select few, those who held forth in the intervals of void during the missions, like this one, would ever know or recall the way things once were. The wh
ole universe outside the void would rewrite itself but, to those inside, at the hub of the wheel, the memory of the old life would live on, a last faint recollection of the universe as it once was.

  This was Paul’s theory—that while everything physical would change in the new time-line, the living recollection of people protected in a Deep Nexus would remain unaltered. The void was both a place and an experience. It had something to do with human consciousness—a living, vibrating energy of the soul that was unfathomable and yet so real. She would remember her mother’s phone call forever, but her mother might never make the call.

  She shook herself, the eerie feeling of Paradox creeping into her thinking now like a wolf in the dark. As she looked at the clock, watching the seconds tick away, she wondered if things had not already changed. Her eyes shifted to the desk drawer where they had hidden Nordhausen’s copy of the Seven Pillars of Wisdom. According to the theory if the book survived it would be subtly altered. Perhaps it was already different, she thought. Perhaps she had an answer to the most immediate question right there in the desk. Were they alive or dead? Did they succeed or fail? All she had to do was go over and open the drawer.

  She drifted over to the desk, setting her coffee mug on the table top with an unsteady hand. A feeling of intense anxiety thrummed in her chest. She was the one who berated Kelly not to open the book until at least four AM. She looked at the clock, watching the minutes slip away. The tension was almost too much for her.

  Kelly finished what he was doing and turned to look for her. He seemed startled by what he saw. “What’s wrong, Maeve?”