The Sword of Cyrus: A Thriller (A Rossler Foundation Mystery Book 4)

by JC Ryan

  Questions about the nature of time crowded his brain. Fragments of long-forgotten conversations with roommates and drinking buddies while he was in college, full of his own cleverness as he tied those of lesser mental agility in knots. Deep philosophical questions, like what would happen if you visited your own past and accidentally killed one of your forebears. Would you wink out of existence in your own time? Or would it create an alternate reality? Now it seemed that those weren’t idle questions after all. Wait ‘til Nicholas hears this! Wonder if the old timer’s heart is strong enough for it?

  ~~~

  Sinclair took a chance that Nicholas was still at his desk and walked down the hall to pay him a visit. If he’d seen his own face, he would have tried to compose himself before barging in on his mentor, but he didn’t get that chance. As a result, Nicholas got quite a shock when he looked up to see his friend in the doorway. The man looked like he’d seen a ghost!

  “Nicholas, I’ve had a shock,” Sinclair said, rather unnecessarily. Anyone could see that he’d had a shock. Nicholas did what any man would do when a friend had had a shock.

  “Care for a drink?” Nicholas asked, pulling out his own bottle, identical to Sinclair’s, and two glasses, without waiting for an answer.

  “Sure and another would be good,” Sinclair answered, too distracted to realize he’d just revealed he’d already had a drink, and a stiff one, too, unless Nicholas missed his guess. When they’d both intoned Slainte! and downed their drinks, Nicholas waited for Sinclair to gather his thoughts. What he heard next was completely out of left field.

  “Nicholas, have you ever thought about time travel?” Sinclair said. That he said it with a straight face gave Nicholas to understand that he was serious.

  “Not since my college days. Why? Is there a time-travel device in the library?” he said, in jest.

  “You might call it that,” Sinclair said, holding out his glass for another shot. He waited in vain as Nicholas’ mouth dropped and he stared at Sinclair.

  “I think you’d better explain,” he said, wondering if Sinclair had lost his mind, or had rather more of the juice than he should have.

  “I’m not sure I can,” said Sinclair, holding out his glass hopefully again. This time, Nicholas filled it, and poured another stiff shot for himself as well.

  “I think I’ve just experienced the future and the past at the same time, without one second of the present elapsing.” Sinclair’s eyes were glazed, and his hand shook as he raised the glass to his lips.

  Nicholas was beginning to worry about his friend. He’d never seen him in such a state, not even when his first wife died. Would it be a good idea to call Martha? Or could he get Sinclair calmed down himself? He looked at his bottle, decided there were at least two more good shots of calming effect in it, and settled down to wait for Sinclair to say something that made sense.

  To his surprise, he didn’t have all that long to wait. After Sinclair had drained his glass again and Nicholas emptied his bottle for one more shot each, Sinclair was ready to talk, and this time, he was more composed. And surprisingly sober. He wondered how the Irish do it – the more they drink the more sense they make especially if you have been drinking with them.

  “One of the translators brought me something she couldn’t translate today,” he began. “She had it right, she just didn’t believe it. Nicholas, there are references in the library about viewing the future, and coordinates for pictures! They left us pictures of the future, can you believe it?”

  Now it was Nicholas’s turn to be surprised, but he wasn’t as shocked as Sinclair expected.

  “I’ve always thought there had to be alternate realities,” he said, echoing the memories that Sinclair had dredged up right after making his discovery. “And I’ve often wondered if time is real. The physicists are beginning to dispute that, you know. They view what we experience as time more as us traveling along a continuum that exists all at once, like we’re on a conveyor belt, being carried past all these events that are static. They’ve always existed, it’s only us happening upon them that make us experience time.”

  “I had no idea you were such a philosopher, old timer,” Sinclair said, his brogue lilting as never before. It was always more pronounced when he’d had a dram.

  “Who are you calling old-timer, you Irish mug,” said Nicholas, beginning to feel the whiskey a bit himself.

  “Never mind. Should we call Daniel? Or wait until tomorrow?”

  “If we’re right, tomorrow isn’t tomorrow, it’s yesterday, so we might as well call him today - he won’t know the difference right?” answered Nicholas, with perfect logic as far as he was concerned. He’d developed a bit of a brogue, too.

  “Let’s call everyone,” Sinclair decided. The result was that Daniel, Sarah, and Raj, each received two crazy phone calls, and Roy received one. Everyone rushed back to the office, because clearly the two older men were drunk and needed care, or they had both gone off their rockers at the same time! While they waited for the others to arrive, Sinclair and Nicholas went back to Sinclair’s office for his nearly full bottle and another couple of glasses. Security footage would later show them to be weaving down the hall, arms around each other, humming the Star Wars theme song.

  By chance, it was Roy who arrived first, and stopped short at the sight of the two distinguished oldsters dancing in the halls, now singing Drops of Jupiter, an oldie but goodie favorite of his mother’s. He edged away, backing into his own office and trying to decide whether to call 911 or wait for Daniel, whom Nicholas had shouted out was on his way. Just as he reached for the phone, he heard Daniel’s voice.

  “Grandpa, what in hell has gotten into you two? Is everything all right?” Sarah was right behind him, her mouth open in astonishment.

  “More than all right, boyo,” crowed Sinclair. “We’ve discovered the future the past and the present and time travel! You know yesterday is actually tomorrow but tomorrow could be an entirely different day or is it today? Wait let me just check that again I could be wrong … today is not yesterday you know?”

  “No, no, no Sinclair you have got it all wrong. Yesterday, today and tomorrow do not exist. It is all an illusion but today will be tomorrow’s yesterday or maybe…” Nicholas said in a heavy Irish accent.

  “Oh, my God,” muttered Daniel. Someone had to have given them hallucinogenic drugs. LSD, maybe. He dug in his pocket for his phone and dialed Raj’s number, the third on his speed-dial list. “Raj, are you on your way to the office?”

  “Yes. What’s up, Daniel? I got the oddest call from your grandfather.”

  “I don’t know, but it looks like he and Sinclair are drunk on their asses, maybe someone slipped them something worse. Would you stop somewhere and get a gallon of coffee?”

  “Sure thing. Don’t sober them up before I get there, though. I must see this!” Raj’s rare laughter was ringing out as Daniel hung up.

  “Better call him back and have him pick up a fifth of Jameson’s,” Sinclair said. “When gramps and I are done with you, you’re going to need it.”

  Forty-five minutes later, all four of the newly-arrived members of the party were hoisting their own stiff drinks, after seeing the passages Sinclair had queued up on his screen and translated. The coffee was cooling, untasted, on a side table.

  “Do you realize what this means?” asked Daniel.

  “Do you mean, besides revolutionizing everything we’ve always known about time?” Roy asked, forgetting for the moment to be shy in Sarah’s presence. Or maybe it was the Jameson’s that had given him courage.

  “Yes, besides that. I’ll admit, that’s huge. But, what if it showed us where we might go wrong, as a civilization, I mean? And helped us avoid bad decisions and bad outcomes?” Daniel wrinkled his nose as his grandpa swayed too close, bringing the odor of a distillery with him.

  “Yes!” Sarah cried, grasping his meaning immediately. “They didn’t have time to correct their own mistakes, and they saw the end coming. Daniel! This
will help us avoid our cataclysm! Make sure it never happens! Daniel, they’ve saved us, or given us the means to save ourselves! And think what it would mean to archaeology, if it goes backwards, too!”

  She was so excited that it was hard for Daniel to say the words that would temper her happiness. The last thing he wanted to do was that. She’d been depressed, it seemed, for a while. She’d been too busy with the Foundation and the baby to practice her profession, and he thought what she really needed was to get back to work. Unfortunately, the local campus of the University of Colorado didn’t have an Egyptology curriculum, and that made it doubly difficult for her to see a path for professional growth.

  On top of all that, only Daniel knew how much the warning in the 10th Cycle greeting had affected her, how seriously she had taken it to heart. War anywhere grieved her to the point of despair. He hadn’t been able to talk to her much about what loomed ahead for them, given the technology that the Iranian spies had stolen. It took too great a toll on her already-battered soul to even talk about it. Reluctantly, he brought up the difficulty with his next question.

  “Raj, have you ever seen anything that looked remotely like a picture in the raw data? How could the 10th Cyclers have left us pictures that neither we nor anyone else has ever seen?”

  Raj paused in his own daydreaming. At last, he may have the means to prove that the government was conspiring to keep the knowledge of aliens from another planet from us! He already had a listening device the size of a fly! Now he may have the means to travel in time, and observe the landing for himself. He barely heard Daniel’s question, but enough sunk in to know he was being addressed.

  “Sorry, Daniel, what did you say?”

  “I said, have you ever seen anything that looked like a picture? If they left anything, wouldn’t it be in the nature of an art gallery?”

  “No,” Raj answered. “I haven’t. But you’ve just made me think of something. Remember how no one knows what the Great Gallery is for? We’ve found lots of data there that doesn’t make any sense. No words, just random data, no matter what skip sequence we use. Could that be it?”

  “I don’t know. It’s worth a try. Or maybe some of what Sinclair has found will give you the key. I’d like you and him to get started on it first thing tomorrow. Assuming he’s in any shape to come in tomorrow.” Both Raj and Daniel turned to watch Sinclair, who was trying to get Sarah to do an Irish jig with him. Daniel smiled. “If not, I guess day after tomorrow will be good enough. He deserves the celebration.”

  Daniel got taxis to take them all home – no one was in a state to drive a car. He also called Bess and Martha to warn them to expect their very happy and relaxed husbands’ arrival.

  Pictures from the future

  June 17, 2020; Boulder

  On the morning after the rather unorthodox celebration begun by Sinclair and Nicholas, the two were understandably a little late to work. When they did arrive, neither looked fit for duty, but both were determined to learn more about the astonishing discovery. They found Raj already at work, searching for the phrase that Sinclair had pointed out the night before. He’d celebrated a little more decorously, and had been at work for hours. A list of references awaited Sinclair, and he got busy immediately. For the time being, everyone who had been at the party last night had agreed to keep this discovery quiet until they knew more about it.

  Sometime around noon, Raj hit pay dirt with a passage that contained directions for building the viewing device. This validation of the reality of the discovery was cause for another celebration. They kept it sedate this time, though. While Raj continued to work and Sinclair went right to work on translating that passage, abandoning what he’d been doing before, Nicholas went to notify Daniel. The two returned to Sinclair’s office, where he was finished translating the description of the purpose of the device, and had begun translating the plans for making it.

  As soon as Daniel walked in his door, Sinclair spoke without looking up.

  “I think we’re going to need Roy for this.” Daniel and Nicholas exchanged glances, and then Daniel went to Roy’s lab.

  “Can I interrupt you for a minute?” he asked, leaning against the doorway with his arms crossed.

  Roy put down the new gadget he was working on, an insect-sized flying device that could detect minute quantities of any substance for which it was programmed, and mark the location with an intense red flare, tiny, but visible for yards. He thought it would come in handy for automatic detection and marking of toxic waste spills.

  “What can I do for you?” he asked Daniel, who was eying the new toy with interest.

  “Raj found the directions for building that future viewing device. Sinclair wants you to take a look at his translation and see if you think you can build it.” Daniel deliberately kept his request low-key. He didn’t want to touch off a celebration like they’d had last night, as much as he enjoyed having the chance to blow off steam.

  “Sure. Let me put things away here, and I’ll be right down.” Roy began to gather his tools and spare parts, swiftly putting them into their places with sure hands. A moment later, he followed Daniel back to Sinclair’s office. Daniel regretted that the crowd was beginning to draw some attention; however, if they could build this thing, it would revolutionize just about everything. If it could be made to look backwards far enough, it might even speed up the monumental task of translating the library. And looking forward - there was no end to the utility of that! When Daniel put his musings into words for the others to hear, they were silent and awe-struck by the possibilities. Until Sinclair’s flip remark set them laughing again.

  “Well, if this gets out, there’ll be no more betting on the horses and no more lotto to play!”

  Roy had finished studying the description of the device and the principle on which it worked.

  “Yes, I think I can build this, if Sinclair’s translation can give me plans for a few key components.” His quiet delivery of the good news almost made them miss the significance of what he’d said.

  “You understand the principle, then?” Daniel asked, his question suddenly urgent. It had just occurred to him that the device may make it possible to find out why the Iranians were designing nanonukes, and when they intended to use them. Time was of the essence.

  “Oh, yes. It’s rather simple, really. Just as we were talking about last night, time isn’t something that starts and rolls along for us when we’re born. It’s more like, like plasma,” he said, struggling to explain to the laypeople around him. “It flows, all right, but not linearly. Certain events create the potential for alternate timelines, and even those can rejoin themselves at some later date. We travel along, and our decisions dictate which timeline we follow. People who are closely linked by physical or emotional ties are swept in the same direction as each other, and if someone follows a different timeline, his memory disappears, usually, from the collective knowledge of the others. I’ll have to study it more to understand that part.”

  The others were held in thrall by his explanation, so inadequate for such a profound subject. Every one of them was searching his memory for a long-forgotten friend, with no luck. The alternative would have been very painful, Nicholas realized. To remember someone who had disappeared from your life, and never be able to find out what had happened to them. Come to think of it, that did happen to most people. And when the memory resurfaced, it was more painful or less painful, depending on how close to the other you’d been. More often than not, it was just a brief episode of melancholy. People you were close to didn’t vanish like that, most often. They were still traveling your same timeline. It would bear some thought to discover who pulled whom with them.

  Daniel was the first to recover his wits in the pause that followed. “But, what about the viewer?”

  “Oh,” said Roy. “Yes. You can view events in your own timeline, for as far back as it’s been in existence, and as far forward as it stays stable. You can also view other timelines, but only very recent or close fut
ure events. It relies on nanotechnology, by the way. How fortunate that I’m right here.” Roy said the last without the least bit of self-consciousness for the statement of the obvious. He was possibly the only person in the world with the hands-on expertise with nanotechnology to actually build the device. Some of the best quantum physicists in the world may understand how it worked, but there wasn’t another man alive with the experience he had in actually building the devices that had previously proved theoretical only.

  “How long will it take you to build it?” Daniel asked, his expression carefully neutral to avoid letting Roy know that it was critical. Roy wouldn’t need any incentive to work faster on it, it was the most important discovery ever to have come out of the library, and the fact of it alone would urge rapid development.

  “I can’t say for sure. Depends on how long it takes for Sinclair to get me the critical components’ plans. Maybe a week, maybe two,” Roy answered. Daniel had a feeling that wouldn’t be soon enough, but for now he’d let it go. There were still pictures to be seen, if the other references meant what they thought they did.

  “Okay, everyone, let’s keep chipping away at this one. Sinclair, a word please?” As everyone else filed out of Sinclair’s office, Daniel asked Sinclair if he thought that any of the translators could be trusted to remain calm and not have their heads turned by the secret. After careful consideration, Sinclair reluctantly said that he’d rather not take the risk. He’d pull some long hours to get all the passages referring to the viewer or pictures at least skimmed. And, if possible, coordinates within the physical blueprint of the pyramid, so they could try to take a look at those.

  ~~~

  June 19, 2020, Boulder

  For two days, Raj had searched and re-searched the library for any phrase he could think of to indicate a remote-viewing device, as they’d been calling it. Remote, in the sense that the time was removed from the present. It made it simpler than to say future/past/alternate timeline viewing device, though that would have been the most accurate.