John Schettler - Nexus Point

It was not long before he spied a suspicious crevice deep in the throat of a side cave. It gleamed with a sheen of water that seemed to be oozing down from the ceiling of the cave.

“Probably a sink or punch bowl up there somewhere that has been collecting rainwater. I’ll bet our stream is on the other side of this gash. Here—hold the flashlight while I squeeze through.”

“Well, be careful,” Nordhausen warned him. “Suppose that leads into some deep underground aquifer of irradiated water! Now that I think of it, that might be just the thing to straighten you out.”

“Very funny,” said Paul. He was already up onto a low ledge and working his way into the glistening wet fissure.”

“Hold on,” said Nordhausen. “You’ll need a canteen if you find anything. Give me a second to fetch one. Do you think you can stand a moment here in the dark? I’ll need the flashlight to find my way back to our campsite.”

Paul was already through the crack, but he stuck his face out with a wry smile. “Well, get moving! I think your canteen will do quite nicely. You’ve practically emptied the thing on the walk in.”

“Right,” said Nordhausen. “I’ll just be a moment,” and he started off, the glowing beam of the flashlight wiggling away with him in the dark.

The professor had only been gone a few minutes when Paul noticed a faint green sheen emanating from the darkness ahead of him. As his eyes adjusted he could see that the same eerie phosphorescence was present here, and the fissure had simply opened to another deep hollow of the cave they were in. He thought he heard the faint sound of running water ahead, though the noise had an odd, distended timbre, as though coming from a great distance away. His curiosity led him forward a few steps. The sound increased with each halting footfall, and he suddenly caught the cool, moist flow of an updraft.

He leaned into it, relieved to feel the chill of the air on his body yet a bit surprised that a hot artesian spring would generate such a cool updraft. Wait until Robert feels this, he thought. It was obvious why the Arabs used this as a hiding place throughout their history. I wonder why no one ever documented this. Look how it glows. Natural underground air conditioning and lighting. What a find!

He was so elated with his discovery that he failed to see the chasm that was just underfoot. His next step dangled for a heart throbbing moment, looking for firm ground. Then he suddenly found himself plunging over the edge of a shadowy precipice in a convulsion of fear and anxiety.

He was falling. In a flash his mind leapt ahead to the image of an agonizing death on jagged rocks. The adrenaline animated his lanky frame and limbs in a fitful clawing motion as he plummeted into the depths, amazed at the prickly feeling that raised goose bumps on his flesh. There was a strange sensation—icy cold, and the milky green glow on the chasm walls rushed by in a dizzying wash of light. So this is what it’s like to die, he thought. A wave of nausea overcame him and he closed his eyes in terror, dreading the moment when his body would smash into the rocky bottom. And then he was amazed to feel the hard slap and splash of cold water when he plunged into a deep underground pool, terrified, yet alive and unharmed.

Maeve was ridingback along the bridle path on her favorite horse, Giselle . The late afternoon sun was dappling through the oak trees in the valley, and the air had a warm sweetness to it that spoke of fresh sage. She reminded herself to stop and collect some at the trailhead. It would be just the thing to season that pot roast she had planned for the evening meal. But now there was more simmering in her mind than the roast. She had been thinking her way through the events of these last few months, trying to place everything into context and impose some semblance of order. While the challenges of the time travel project delighted her, the consequences that could result from it all were overwhelming.

Outcomes and Consequences—that was her mission in life these days. The dangers inherent in the enterprise, once only speculation about contamination and fateful effects, had suddenly been made painfully obvious to her. Kelly nearly vanished in the cold frost of Paradox. She had been thinking a lot about that in recent days, and running whole segments of the mission over in her mind.

From the moment when the unseen future first knocked on Nordhausen’s door in the person of Robert Graves, she had an odd feeling that there was something amiss in the whole equation—something she could not quite work out in her probability algorithms. And that something irked her like a shirt that needed ironing. It sat like unwashed dishes on her kitchen countertops, and waited like an unpaid bill on her desk—things that Maeve would never allow in the carefully managed space of her own personal life.

She kept everything in quiet order, and the structure of her world was wholly predictable at any given moment. She would ride Gizelle back up the bridle path, and give her a good rub down in the stables. She would take the Subaru into town on the way home and stop by Noah’s for bagels and a shmear. And she wouldn’t forget that fresh sage for the pot roast either. The steady certainty of her life had been something in which she took great solace—something of her own making. It was an extension of her considerable will power, and the determined competence she thrust against any problem the world would dare to concoct for her. Up until now she had been quite content in her world, with outcomes that were wholly satisfactory—until Kelly vanished.

Time travel, it seemed, could be quite untidy.

She thought back over the mission again, for the hundredth time. Everything had been so rushed that it was hard to get at the details of her recollection now. There were two moments that still bothered her. The first was the odd telephone call from her mother that pulled her away from the forward end of the mission. She remembered the strange echo of her mother’s voice reverberating in the receiver, as if some infernal loop had already begun; as if time was suspended in the repetition of her mother’s last words, undecided, uncertain, and afraid.

That uncertainty had become a real feeling for her at that moment—not just a nagging, misplaced cipher in her probability algorithms. It settled into her with a pulsing beat of anxiety, and it never quite went away. Even now, months after Robert and Paul had returned to the present, she still felt its presence, like the thrumming of adrenaline in her chest. The world was not the way she always fancied it to be. Now, nothing was certain; nothing fixed and determined—not even the past.

For someone who had always labored to define clear and well established borders, this defiant ‘quantum uncertainty’ in time travel was a daunting and frightening prospect. Heisenberg, damn him, was right. He predicted that physical quantities and properties fluctuate randomly and therefore can never be accurately known. While the effect of this uncertainty was most evident on the sub-atomic level, where things like the speed and charge of particles could be highly unpredictable, the fact remained that this basic uncertainty was at the core of all reality—if that term could be applied in any meaningful way. Put simply: nothing was written. That is how Paul would say it, imitating Lawrence with the remark. She realized now that she hated the whole notion inherent in that statement.

Nothing was written; nothing forbidden, and everything was permitted. That was the chaos that now sat hunched in the center of her mind like an old, unwelcome hobgoblin to plague her thinking. She wanted it out, wanted it gone, wanted things wrapped in nice neat boxes again, and stacked up just so. But the world would never be that way for her again. All of her careful habits, all the meticulous checks and balances that governed her life, were futile efforts at imposing order on chaos. It was very unsettling, to say the least.