John Schettler - Touchstone

“I hope so,” said Dorland. “The physical copies are tangible. The probabilities collapse into certainty with each copy you make because the chance of at least one surviving increases, copy by copy.”

“So, if we go back now and dig up the grave, will the DVD be in it again?”

“I’m not going to go find out,” Dorland said. “As the pious peasant said, ‘There are some things man is not meant to know, Doktor Frankenstein!’”

“Fronkensteen!” retorted Nordhausen, and the men laughed, breaking the mood of heaviness that had beset them while they labored to preserve Kelly in the world of certainty.

Dorland pulled himself out of his seat. “I was right about the contamination,” he said as he eyed a ream of computer printouts.

“What do you mean?”

“The alarm was not for your time breach, Robert. In fact, your party with Wilde and company seems to have made little impression on future Meridians. There’s a few inconsistencies in the RAM bank comparison, but nothing serious. The Meridian is clean on that score.”

“Then what caused the damage?”

“There was another breach of the continuum, concurrent with your mission, but to another target date altogether. No time to talk about it now though. First things first. You’ve got to face Maeve.”

The look Nordhausen gave him was the sum of all fears, but Paul just smiled.

The drive to the apartment from the lab was quite different from the trip they had made earlier in the afternoon. Now they were exhausted, hungry, and still filthy from the graveyard. They had both changed from their soaked shirts into fresh lab coats, but their trousers and shoes were still caked with dried mud. Dorland swung by an all night drive through, and they ordered combo meals to go.

When they got to the apartment, Maeve was already there, waiting in Paul’s car across the street. She seemed very excited, and encouraged by a strong improvement in Kelly’s condition.

“I don’t know what you two did,” she beamed, “but Kelly is awake now and hungry as a horse! He’s lucid, very focused, and the confusion and disorientation is completely gone.”

“Thank Robert,” said Paul, pointing at the professor. He told Maeve their idea of publishing the data to the Internet as a way of preserving it.

“Wasn’t that a security risk?” Maeve suggested.

“Not really,” said Paul. “To any outsider it’s just a few minutes of footage of Kelly at his desk. Sure, he vanishes at the end, but with special effects being what they are these days, and the amount of junk on the Internet—”

“Of course!” Maeve smiled warmly, delighted with the solution. “Well it’s already worked some kind of magic. I insisted Kelly stay at the hospital tonight for observation, just to be sure. In fact, I practically had to sit on him to keep him from running over to the lab.”

“Probably best, but this is great news,” said Robert, clearly relieved.

After they went up, Robert offered Paul the first shower, and set him up a with aclean tee shirt, a UC Berkeley sweat shirt, and a pair of very loose trousers.

While Dorland was showering, Lindford made a pot of coffee and Nordhausen took the opportunity of eating his hamburger, to avoid talking with her. She could see that he was at the end of his strength, and that finally sitting down was making the weariness come on, so she was content to wait for a while before they started getting into the matter seriously.

Dorland came out in a billow of steam, drying his hair with a towel, complaining that the balding Nordhausen should at least have a hairdryer for the benefit of his guests.

Nordhausen said he didn’t have enough visitors to justify the expenditure, and closed the bathroom door behind himself.

Dorland, finally warm and dry, sank into the large easy chair to the side of Nordhausen’s desk. The black and white composition books containing the professors hieroglyphics were scattered on the desk top with computer printouts from the Golem report.

Maeve brought Paul a cup of coffee, and sat in the desk chair. She piled up the notebooks and set them aside without looking at them.

“Okay, Paul, tell me everything.” Tired or not, he was the project team leader, and he would have to answer for anything that went wrong.

“Hah, yes, everything,” Dorland began. “Well, I think we have taken care of Kelly’s problem. Your instincts were right that the DVD in the memorial was not safe, but Robert and I have taken care of that. Oh, by the way,” he handed her a handful of DVD’s in a box. “Take these, and put them somewhere, burn a copy on every computer you have, and keep transferring them when you get new ones.”

She slipped them into her shoulder bag. “So, tell me what you found at the graveyard.”

Paul spoke reluctantly, “The grave had been dug up, and the work looked relatively recent.”

“Dug up? By whom?” Maeve was shocked.

“We have no idea, but the odds are that it was an operative from the future. They dug down, smashed the lid on the box, removed the stuff we put in, and buried it again. It was obvious when we got there, they made no effort to hide it.”

“Who would do this? And why?” Maeve was bewildered.

“As to why, no doubt to eliminate Kelly. As to whom? I suppose we can discuss that.”

“The time travelers who saved Kelly—”

“—wouldn’t have any reason to want to eliminate him. If that were so, then why would they save him in the first place?”

“So that means…”

“Robert believes there are other people moving through time, and if you looked at those reports you would have seen that the alarm keyed on a breach at three past four, this afternoon.”

That set the two of them to silence for a moment. They heard the shower door slam, and listened to Robert moving about in the bathroom. Shortly, he emerged, also in clean, dry clothes, and seemingly re-energized.

“Dare I ask what you two have been talking about?”

Paul and Maeve gazed back at him wearily.

“Paul tells me that you think other people are moving through time.”

Robert looked at Paul. “You told her?”

“Not everything.”

Maeve was instantly alert. “What?”

Robert looked pleadingly at his friend. “You tell her.”

Paul pointed to the professor’s notebooks.

“Open that notebook, Maeve—no, not the Golem files, the older notebook to the left.”

Questioningly, she complied. The rows of precise, intricate hieroglyphics marched across the pages. “What is this?”

“What does it look like to you?” Paul asked.

“It looks like Egyptian writing.” She looked up blankly. “Who wrote this?”

Paul looked at the professor. “Robert did. We didn’t know if it would still manifest in this Meridian, but it seems we learn something new about the theory every time it is tested. Apparently the lifeline of a Prime is held inviolate if he is safe in a Nexus during Transformation. I was worried about Paradox, but Robert is safe and sound—at least for the moment.”

Maeve took in the jargon, understanding, yet clearly still annoyed. “Robert wrote this? Why on earth…” If she had been confused before, she was now totally at a loss.

Nordhausen stood in silence. Maeve continued to turn, page after page after page, uncomprehending.

“Robert says he can read those.”

At that she looked up sharply. “What’s going on here?”

“Robert went through the Arch,” Paul continued quickly.

“What?”

“Robert went through the Arch, and when he came back, he told me something had changed. Oh, he was afraid all this was his fault, and I let him stew for awhile, but the Golems are on to the real culprits, and it has something to do with that writing.” Paul pointed at the professor’s notebooks.