John Schettler - Golem 7

“Then where is he, man?” Nordhausen raised his eyebrows, clearly upset.

“He should be in the damn Arch Bay,” said Kelly, deathly afraid that he had made another error in the numbers. The look on Robert’s face said exactly that, though the professor didn’t say anything more. The tormented look in Kelly’s eyes dissuaded him.

“Think,” said Maeve. “What could have happened?”

“I’ll check the shift program, but the Golems assisted with the processing, and I had really strong integrity, well over 99.875% That’s better than we had on any shift we’ve made.”

“Well, hell,” Nordhausen could not hold it in any longer. “The first time we shifted into the God damn pre-Cambrian!”

“I got you back on target,” said Kelly.

“Then we ended up arriving at different times in the desert.”

”That was just a sequencing problem. I had to bring you in one after another due to the power situation.”

“Then Maeve and I missed our target time for Rosetta by a full year , and damn near fell afoul of Napoleon’s guardsmen.”

“I got you back to the correct target date in five minutes,” said Kelly.

“Then where in blazes is Paul?”

The question lashed at all of them. Kelly sat with it, deflated and deeply troubled. He gave the screen a wan look, unwilling to believe he had made yet another error.

“I don’t know…” he said quietly. “Damnation, he should be here!”

He was there.

The instant he felt solidity return to his frame again and perceived the hard concrete flooring of the Arch Bay cold on his cheek, Paul opened his eyes. He was lying in a wet puddle just over the event horizon line, and the dizzying lights and roaring sound of the Arch had abated. He thought he caught something out of the corner of his eye, and looked to see the roiling mists stirring near his legs. It was very cold, and he still had a strangely odd feeling all through his body.

Then, to his amazement, he saw a dim shape looming before him, slowly receding into the shadows of the Arch Bay. An odd echoing sound resounded, more in his mind than the chamber around him.

He watched as the apparition seemed to vanish into the elevator, shaking his head and rubbing his eyes to be certain he was OK. Everything had a strange hue. There were tinges of blue and vermillion running along the hard, straight edges of the walls. His head ached, and his ears were still ringing with the concussion from Rodney ’s guns. He thought he might be having a migraine, complete with the characteristic visual aberrations.

Some welcome, he thought, still shaken by what he had seen and experience after he had been thrown over the gunwale into the wild sea. He looked around, expecting to see Kelly and the others, but apparently they were all still up in the lab, so he composed himself, sat up, and eventually rose on unsteady legs, walking slowly to the elevator. The button was icy cold, and he rubbed his fingers together to ease the discomfort.

The elevator seemed to take forever, but the doors finally slid open and he entered. This time he shielded his hand with the sleeve of his uniform before he pressed the floor button that would take him to the lab. Emerging a few moments later, he was in the long ascending tunnel that would lead up to the heavy pressure sealed door. What were they so pre-occupied with that no one could come down to meet him, he wondered?

As the heavy door eased open he thought he could hear people talking, but their voices were completely unintelligible. He had an odd feeling of déjà vu, thinking he had already come up this tunnel and gone through the door, a thousand times.

He stepped into the lab, dismayed to see three dark shadows hovering near the retraction module. The sounds around him reverberated again and again, and he felt a sudden stab of pain all through his body. He could not help but flatten his palms against his ears to muffle the sound, and his eyes puckered, closing with the pain. Then, to his great amazement the tortured sound resolved in timbre and tone, and he could hear definite voices, hard on the dead air of the room.

“…He should be here!” It was Kelly, nearly shouting at the others as he gestured at the screen.

Paul opened his eyes. The shadows suddenly sharpening to clear shapes, and he could see Kelly staring at him, his jaw slack with disbelief.

“He… he is here!” Kelly pointed, and Robert and Maeve looked over their shoulders to see the bedraggled figure of Paul standing there in his Navy whites, drenched from head to toe. He forced a wan smile, swaying a bit.

“Dissonance…” he breathed, and the others rushed to his side.

They took hold of each arm and eased him down onto a swivel chair. The color came back into his face and his smile seemed warmer, his eyes brightening as he looked at them.

“That was very uncomfortable,” he said, telling him where he had been just before the retraction kicked in. “One more wave and I think I would have gone under for good,” he breathed, shivering.

Maeve had a thick wool blanket and she wrapped it around him. “But what in the world just happened?” she asked.

“I was surprised no one came down to the Arch to meet me,” Paul began.

“I did!” said Maeve. “The retraction finished and you weren’t there. Nothing but fog in the Bay. There wasn’t a sign of you anywhere, so I came up to check on things with Kelly.”

“Very strange,” said Paul. “I thought I saw someone in the bay, a shadow, a formless shape really, and it moved directly to the elevator.”

Kelly had a serious look on his face. “I had solid green on the numbers here. The system was telling me you were home safe and sound,” he said.

“Apparently I was,” Paul seconded him, but told them what he had experienced coming up through the tunnel and through the final door into the lab. “I could see the three of you, indistinct figures, with a strange aura outlining each one of you. Your voices were oddly distorted, then it hurt like hell and when I opened my eyes you were all here!”

“Swear to God, Paul?“ said Nordhausen. “Tell me you aren’t just pulling our legs here.”

“I swear!” Paul protested, placing the palm of his hand on his chest.

“Then could you have manifested late, just after we left the Arch Bay?”

“No, I had power down to 50% by that time,” said Kelly. “That’s not enough to hold a shift pattern together.”

Paul thought for a moment. “I think I came back OK,” he said. “But I may have been slightly out of phase with your exact time locus.” It began to make sense to him now as he thought of the shapes and sounds he had seen. “I was slightly ahead of you—in Time—perhaps no more than a few milliseconds.”

“Ahead of us?”

“Ever so slightly,” Paul explained. “I think you were obviously the formless shadows I saw, and I could hear your voices, such as they were. I must have been slowing down to sync with your time. God, it’s painful . It’s like I was being pulled into this moment by Time gravity. The place I was, just an instant ahead of you on the continuum, could not hold me. It didn’t seem solid enough. The color of things was all wrong. Nothing sounded right.”

“But you could see us?” Robert was stunned. “Why couldn’t we see you then? I didn’t see any shadowy shape in the Arch, did you Maeve?”

“Well, the lighting was fairly dim, but I ran my arms all through the area where you should have manifested, and there wasn’t a hint of solid mass there.”

“There’s no way you could have seen or felt me,” said Paul. “Even a millisecond ahead of you in time, I would be completely invisible; simply not there. I was in a place, or rather at a location in space-time, that you had not yet reached—but I was moving too. By the time you did reach it, a millisecond later, I would have moved forward, again just beyond your time. God,” he thought, “If I hadn’t slipped back into sync I might have remained there forever, here, but just beyond the edge of your awareness.”