Touchstone (Meridian Series)

by John Schettler

  “Stay put, Robert…”

  “Don’t worry, I’ll just have a look out the window. What is this place?”

  Maeve’s mind began to piece things together, with one thought stumbling after another. It was daylight. The warm light was streaming through the single open window where Nordhausen was now standing, and gleaming off the polished buttons of his blue waistcoat. The spilled teacup pulled at her, suggesting that someone had been in this very room only a moment before. It was a single person, for there was only one cup. Perhaps he was sitting down for morning tea when the two of them began to manifest. Lord, what a fright that man would have had! Spook Job was a good handle for a mission like this, but something was clearly wrong. She looked about, noticing a half open door behind them, but there was no sign of anyone else. The poor fellow must have been frightened out of his mind.

  She took in more details of the room… The rug was a simple prayer rug, undoubtedly oriented toward Mecca, wherever that was. There was a wash bowl, half filled with water to one side of the table, and a book lay upside down on the floor. She stooped to see that it was a copy of the Holy Koran.

  “Lord,” she whispered… “Where are we? What have we done?”

  Nordhausen turned from the window. “You can blame this on Kelly,” he accused. “He’s mucked up the breaching numbers again. It’s daylight, so the temporal shift is off as well. Looks like a city of some kind out there.” He gestured to the open window. “Damn quiet. Must be early morning.” His eye fell on a weapon set by the window, and he reached for it out of curiosity.

  Maeve’s eyes widened. “Put that down,” she hissed in a strained whisper.

  “What? No harm, Maeve. I’ll just have a quick look. Maybe it will give us a clue as to the time. At least we’re not in the Cretaceous. Whatever that rogue has done, it may only be a minor error. Look here, a nice strait barreled matchlock musket—fully primed and ready to fire…”

  “Robert! Put that down. We mustn’t tamper with anything in this Milieu. It’s plain that something has gone wrong. Kelly will be trying to pull us out as quickly as he can. Besides…” She looked over her shoulder at the half open door. “I think someone was here when we came through.”

  “What?”

  “Look at the tea setting. The pot is still hot and the cup has been spilled.”

  “Right you are,” said Nordhausen as he took note of the scene. “Well let’s hope we at least made it to Egypt.” His mind jumped ahead to a new assessment. “These pressed mud walls would be very typical of construction at the target date, and if this musket is any indication of the time I’d say this was a 19th Century weapon. Maybe we’re not too far off the mark after all.”

  The quiet of the early morning was broken by a thrumming sound in the distance. It quickly resolved to a rhythmic beat, and Nordhausen edged to the window again, his head cocked to one side as he listened. The sound grew ever louder, accented with a steady tum, tum, tum of a drum beat. He leaned out, taking in a narrow cobbled street, and saw that a column of uniformed men were marching up the alley. They were led by an officer with a brightly colored plume on his cap and a drawn sword. Behind him came a group of twenty men at arms, all in blue, their long muskets shouldered in smart order, their faces stern and grim, as though set in stone.

  A group of riders followed, and the professor squinted at the man in the lead, sitting bolt upright on a white stallion. He was clearly the officer in charge. Every aspect of his being shouted authority, with one gloved hand resting on the pommel of his saddle and the other grasping the rein with a sure and steady grip. The gold tasseled shoulder pauldrons marked him with high rank, though he wore no headgear. A curled tress of dark hair fell on his wide forehead, and his eyes surveyed the narrow alley as the column came on. Nordhausen squinted, rubbing his eyes as he looked, as though trying to clear his vision. The man seemed suddenly obscured in a violet haze. He blinked, and looked again with an expression of recognition and surprise stretching his features.

  “Look here, Maeve!” He waved at her. “Come to the window!”

  “Get away from there, Robert! What’s got into you? Put that thing down and get over here. We mustn’t move. We mustn’t touch anything. Don’t you understand?”

  “It’s him, Maeve! Oh, if only Paul could see this. Look, he’s just there.” He gestured with the musket, jabbing it at the open window as the sound of marching feet beat heavily on the cobblestone alleyway.

  ~

  Back in the control room Kelly was frantically trying to replace his damaged keyboard. He got the new unit plugged in, and shifted into his chair with a huff.

  “What happened?” Paul was gesturing at the chronometer. “The readings are stabilizing, Kelly.” He looked at the particle infusion station, surprised to see the light was still holding at green. It should be yellow by now, he knew, and the retraction sequence should be kicking in to bring Maeve and Robert back.

  “I must have hit the keyboard when I lunged to try and stop that spill. It looks like I triggered my shift modulator by accident.”

  “Shift modulator? Is that something new?”

  “I installed it last week. It was a new module I was using to make minor adjustments to the breaching sequence. I set it so I could nudge things by minutes, hours, days or even whole years if I needed to adjust the temporal locus, and I have spatial flux programmed as well.”

  “You moved them?” Paul gave him a wide eyed look.

  “Well, not intentionally. It was an accident!”

  “Where? Where are they, Kelly. The particle decay is still green. Why didn’t the emergency retraction scheme kick in?”

  Kelly bit his lip, his eyes darting from one reading to another as he thought. “It did kick in—or at least it tried to. Look!” He pointed at an indicator on the console. “It went into emergency suspend mode.“

  Paul dragged a chair over and slid in next to Kelly, his dark eyes taking in the situation as his friend pointed out the indicators. “You bumped them in space-time when you spilled the coffee,” he concluded. “Where are they?”

  “Not far, I hope,” said Kelly. “Looks like they moved ahead of the target date… here, I’ve got a good reading now. They’re early.”

  “How early?” Memories of that wild shift into the chasm of time flooded back to him now, and he was visualizing Robert and Maeve, all dressed up in their 19th Century garb, as they strolled through the late Cretaceous.

  “Just a few days or so,” Kelly reassured him, almost as if he could read Paul’s apprehension. “Damn, I was supposed to turn the number lock off on my keypad before I initiated the run, but I just forgot.”

  “Have you got a new breaching date?”

  “Just a second… Here it comes now: July 2nd, just a few days off…but wait, It looks like the year is off as well. I’m reading 1798.”

  “Backup chronometer agrees,” said Paul. His mind was reaching back in the history, and he knew the date was familiar. He reached for one of the volumes in Nordhausen’s research pile and began flipping through the pages. He did not have to look far, for all the relevant data was bookmarked. “Just as I thought,” he said with a deflated expression on his face. “It’s the date of the initial landing. Napoleon has just arrived off Alexandria. Lord, they’ll be right in the middle of things If the spatial coordinates hold.”

  “They didn’t,” said Kelly sheepishly. “I really screwed this one up. Sorry Paul. Looks like I bumped them a few kilometers as well. All that from a damn coffee mug!”

  “Pushpoint,” said Paul. “Little things have great effects. Let’s get them back, Kelly. The infusion chamber can’t hold for long. It must be feeding in the particle reserve to keep the singularity spinning. We have to yank their butts back to Berkeley, and fast!”

  “I’m on it. You get over to the infusion module and hold that mix steady while I reset the retraction to these new coordinates. If they have their wits about them, and stay put, we should be able to pick up their pattern signatures
from the flux.”

  “Let’s hope Maeve has the good sense to keep a tight rein on Nordhausen.” Paul was hurrying, his movements betraying both the urgency and danger inherent in the situation. The error was not bad, but the hold they had on Robert and Maeve was keyed to the original target dates. The system tried to run a retraction scheme, but they were not there. Now Kelly was feeding in the new coordinates, a worried look on his face.

  “There’s no way I can key this decimal in time. I’m patching the retraction vectors right into the space-time chronometer data. It’s the only way I can be sure.” He toggled three switches, and held his breath.

  ~

  “Robert!” Maeve raised her voice as much as she dared, but it was clear that the professor was in a daze of excitement. He was completely beside himself, eyes alight with the fire of discovery and a ruddy glow on his cheeks. She had to do something. Kelly would be working, he’d be trying to pull them out. Robert had moved from his initial point of manifestation, and her instincts told her that this would complicate things, perhaps fatally, if Kelly was trying to retrieve them. In spite of her caution she found herself rushing across the room and grabbing Nordhausen by the lobe of his right ear in a hard pinch. “Damn it, Robert! Put that down and come away from the window!”

  There was a loud crack, deafening as the musket went of in a flash. The professor was so startled by the ignition that the musket tumbled wildly from his grasp and fell with a hard thump to the pressed clay floor.

  Maeve released him, covering her ears with the shock of the sound, but she quickly recovered and seized hold of Robert’s arm. There was shouting and wild commotion outside the narrow window. She heard the neigh of a horse and the scuffle of many booted feet. Deep voices barked out commands and she immediately recognized the language as French.

  “What are you doing!” Nordhausen was aghast. “I could have killed someone! Do you know who’s out there?”

  The world was spinning out of control. Maeve felt a dizzy sensation of nausea settle in her stomach. All she could think of was getting back to that first point of entry on this strange new world. It was the only safe island she could see, a retreat to the moment when they had first appeared, as though none of this had even happened. She would stand there, close her eyes, and make it all go away. But even as she pulled the professor along, she could hear the men outside drawing ever nearer.

  “Stand here,” she commanded, her eyes riveting the professor. “And whatever happens next, don’t you dare move a muscle or say one single thing if those men find us here—understand?”

  Nordhausen gave her a breathless look, but nodded his assent. They could hear men below them in the alleyway beating on a wooden door with the butts of their muskets. The door gave way with a loud crash and booted feet tramped into the rooms below them. The sound of their approach drove a rising anxiety through Maeve as she whispered a silent prayer.

  “Kelly… Do something!”

  Nordhausen took her hand again and the two stood stone still, just as they had been in the Arch only moments ago. Maeve felt faint as the voices and heavy footfalls grew louder on the stairs below them. The soldiers were hastening up to the second floor, kicking open one door after another.

  14

  “You’d better hurry, I’m losing the particle density.” Paul saw the reading turn yellow, and he knew the quantum fuel that was keeping the breaching sequence alive was ebbing fast. Kelly gave him an anguished look, hesitated for one brief moment, and then toggled a console switch. There was only one thing he could do now, though it meant he would have to sacrifice one of his emergency pattern signatures. He crossed his fingers, hoping that he would not have to move the travelers a second time.

  The light on the infusion chamber began to blink red, and then went out. Paul looked over his shoulder with a worried expression. “I hope you have them, Kelly. The infusion mix is expended and the Arch is out of gas.”

  “Hold on…” Kelly was watching his chronometer digits settle on a new target date. “Got them!” he exclaimed.

  “Paul sighed with relief. “Good, I’ll go down and smooth things out with Maeve while you re-set things up here.”

  “Umm… Don’t bother,” said Kelly, and the tone of his voice put Paul on edge.

  “Why not?”

  “Well, they’re not in the Arch. I knew we wouldn’t have enough intermix on the infusion chamber, so I just used my emergency pattern signature to nudge them forward to the correct target.”

  “You mean…”

  “Yup. I moved them to July 15, 1799. There was nothing else I could do once the particle infusion went yellow. There just wasn’t enough particle density for a retraction. But I took three pattern signatures while they were in the flux tube before the mission launch, so I just grabbed their pattern and we had just enough gas to get them where they were supposed to be in the first place.”

  “But how will we get them back? This was just supposed to be a Spook Job.”

  “We’ve still got the main mission retraction scheme programmed. When they manifest on the original target coordinates, and don’t get yanked home, they’ll realize something went wrong. They’ll just have to start the mission early.”

  “Assuming the target coordinates were clear,” Paul suggested the one thing that could pose a real complication for them now. “What if they manifest right in the middle of a column of Turkish soldiers? I’m still a bit nervous about that breaching site. These blind jumps could be dangerous. That little coffee spill sent them back to the very day someone took a pot-shot at Napoleon as he entered Alexandria. Lord, who knows where they landed?” Then another question took the forefront of his thinking. “Did they shift OK?”

  “Solid Green. Readings were 100%,” Kelly assured him. “I just patched in the original target vectors and bumped them forward. A little jump like that has almost no chance of pattern loss on the shift. Let’s just hope the target was clear.” He looked down at his coffee cup with a frown. “New rule,” he said with finality as he pointed a finger at his mug. “No coffee at the workstations during mission time.”

  “Right,” Paul agreed, but his mind was already centuries away, wondering what was happening with Robert and Maeve.

  ~

  And Robert and Maeve were wondering much the same. They heard heavy booted feet clomping down the hallway and, just as the door gave way, Robert felt the chill accompanied by that airy lightness of being that characterized time shift. He vaguely discerned the shape of a uniformed man bursting through the doorway, but then the milky green haze of eternity masked his vision, and his stomach rolled with the shift. This time he closed his eyes, hoping that Maeve had done the same. A moment later he felt the solidity of soft earth under his feet, and the travelers appeared in a haze of icy fog.

  Robert steadied himself, feeling Maeve’s hand tight in his own. When he opened his eyes the room they were in had vanished. It was dark now but, as his eyes adjusted, he realized that it was just before dawn. The sky was lightening and slowly revealing a gray-brown landscape of undulating, sandy ground, with small stands of date and palm trees scattered here and there. There was a tinge of salt in the air, and Robert breathed deeply, taking in the fresh breeze that was coming off the ocean. He could not see the shoreline from the low depression in the ground where they huddled in the cold, but he could feel it, and hear the distant roll of wave sets breaking on the shore.

  “Where are we?” Maeve’s voice was unsteady.

  “I… Well I think this must be the road to Alexandria.” Nordhausen squinted trying to make out the lay of the land. “Kelly must have moved us back on our original target. I wonder where we were before?”

  “Thank God,” said Maeve. “We almost had a nasty encounter there. When will you learn to keep your hands to yourself, Robert?”

  “The damn musket wouldn’t have gone off in the first place if you would mind your own rules!” The professor was still rubbing his right earlobe where Maeve had given him a hard pinch.
He stood upright, composing himself and straightening his white wig. There was a tinge of hesitation to his movements now, as if he expected another time shift at any moment. “At least the target vectors are clear. When the retraction kicks in, keep your eyes closed. In fact, close them now. We’ll need our wits about us for the real shift. I’ll give Kelly the thumbs up and he can drop us back here when the Arch is ready—unless you have an hour’s meeting in mind for debriefing on that little mishap we just went through.”

  “Mishap? What’s got into you, Robert? You knew something was amiss and yet you went wandering off to gawk out the window. That bit with the rifle serves you right.”

  “It was a musket, and I was only looking at it—until you tried to rip my ear off. I hope no one was injured when the damn thing fired. Do you have any idea who was out there? Napoleon! Yes, he was riding behind a column of French Guardsmen, and I have little doubt that those soldiers thought we were shooting at them. If someone was hit, it could have caused a major transformation. Let that be a lesson to you, my dear miss outcomes and consequences.”

  Maeve just folded her arms and gave him a smoldering look. Then it occurred to her that they were still there. They weren’t being pulled back to the Arch complex in Berkeley. Whatever had caused the brief misfire was still plaguing the mission.

  Nordhausen’s next remark seemed to vocalize her own thoughts. “Correct me if I’m wrong, but the Spook Job thing has a limited duration, right?” He fidgeted, looking around as if he was waiting for an overdue train. “Well,” he breathed heavily, “we’re here for good, I think.”

  “Right,” Maeve agreed. “Something went wrong. We’re here for good.” There was very little enthusiasm in her tone, and the thought of what she was saying suddenly struck her. What if something really did go wrong and they could no longer get home? Where were they, exactly? Was Nordhausen correct in assuming they were back on the original target date?