John Schettler - Nexus Point

Nordhausen relented, however, and they put everything on hold for a time. Until now. Here she was in the lab again, at this ungodly hour, and Kelly, bless him, was busily working out some data runs in the next room. Here she was, hot on the trail of her favorite nemesis—with every good suspicion and a growing body of evidence suggesting that Nordhausen had opened the continuum a second time! This time she would do a good deal more than argue with him when she finally brought him to heel for this little transgression. She looked around, noting what she might use in the environment to crack over the man’s thick skull. Not my teacup, she muttered to herself, and then concluded that a nice firm knuckle rap on the noggin would have to do—for a start.

Kelly was back, his face still buried in a sheaf of data files as he came shuffling into the room. Maeve brightened to see him, the one good thing that had come of this whole business for her. “Well maestro,” she greeted him, “what have you found?”

Kelly looked up briefly and angled into a chair next to her workstation. His medium brown hair was pulled back and tied off in a short tail beneath the baseball cap he often wore when he was working like this. She had smiled to see how he had donned the cap the moment he stepped into the lab, his mind shifting into a new realm, a world of algorithms and formulae that she still found befuddling.

“Well,” he said, “our friend Robert was definitely up to something. I think I’ve recovered the temporal locus now. A lot of the data blocks were pretty corrupted, but I ran a street sweeper over the disk and found quite a bit left in the magnetic resonance signatures—quite a bit.”

Maeve smiled, deciding that she was going to let Kelly use all the jargon he wanted this time. Her affection for him stilled the reflexive urge to lecture him about the necessity of speaking layman’s English once in a while, but that license still did not prevent her from nudging him with her next question. “Where?” She made it nice and simple, and hoped he would not launch into a long explanation about how he came to his answer. She was pleasantly surprised.

“1919,” he said bluntly. “November. I couldn’t resolve the day, but the spatial data should give us plenty to work with. It seems he was in London.”

“London?”

“Yes, right smack in the heart of the city, in fact. I’ve got the breaching point narrowed down to within a quarter mile or so. Odd thing is this: the retraction data shows that he wandered pretty far a field while he was there. The system pulled him out just a few hours after the breach, and he was nearly sixty kilometers west of the breaching point when the retraction scheme kicked in.”

“Where?” The question seemed to work wonders the first time.

“My guess was that he was somewhere near Reading. I’ll know for certain in about a half an hour.”

Maeve thought for the briefest moment and came to a quick conclusion. “Then he took the train out of London,” she said. “That’s the only way he could have traveled that distance if you have the retraction time nailed down.”

“Hammered it myself,” said Kelly with a smile. “So what do you figure he was up to?”

“God only knows,” Maeve sighed letting her exasperation vent a bit.

“Well, we’d have to run date queries in the history database for hours to isolate something significant.”

“For all the good it might do us,” Maeve quipped. “Who knows what he did while he was there, Kelly. Sure we could run up the history files, but who’s to say they would mean anything. I mean, if he changed things… Lord, that man tempts fate with utter impunity!” She fixed him with that look she would use to drive home a point, and he took her meaning at once.

“Right. If he caused a variation then the history would seem completely innocuous—unless one of us recognized something wrong, something out of place. But that couldn’t happen because we weren’t part of the operation. We weren’t in the Nexus—safe in the null zone of the void.”

“And that’s exactly why this business is so damn dangerous. What if he tries this again? How would we know if things are the way they’re supposed to be? It’s maddening! You know, I spent six hours in a library one night just to satisfy myself that Shakespeare was sleeping peacefully between the covers of all his books. Now what—do I have to go over there and read all thirty-seven plays again?”

Kelly scratched his forehead. “Now Maeve,” he began. “Let’s not jump to conclusions here until we have more information. You’re right,” he placated her, “this is bullshit. He just can’t go off on a train ride through the English countryside and then cover the whole thing up like this. It’s not right.”

“It’s Nordhausen.” The finality in Maeve’s voice carried a wealth of emotion. “It’s the reason why we have to shut this down. Don’t you see, Kelly? We’re adrift now, without any compass or even a sure star to steer by. We have no reference point to tether us to any sense of reality. Things could be changing and we’d never even know it!”

“I agree with you completely,” he assured her. “In fact, I was thinking a lot about that after Paul first brought up this business about the stability factors in a void created by a Nexus Point.”

“Stability factors?”

“You remember the meeting we had about two weeks before the mission? Paul was talking about the Nexus, and how it forms this protective bubble around the Arch. He thinks there’s a physical void associated with the Arch itself, and not merely a temporal void that protects the actual travelers.”

“You’re losing me,” Maeve complained.

“Hang on a second. We didn’t go through the Arch, right?”

“Right.”

“So how is it we still remember Palma and all the rest? We weren’t in the temporal void, but we were inside the physical null zone around the Arch. Paul wasn’t sure just how far its influence would extend, but it looks like we’re getting a good measure on that now—say a hundred yards or so. That’s why we can still remember what happened that night. The lab here is about five floors above the Arch, right? That’s well within that radius. Now, take Tom, for example.”

“Tom? What’s he got to do with all this?”

“Hear me out for a second. Tom was down in the generator room throughout the whole mission, right? Now those steps are on the other side of the complex, and there’s a corridor heading east for about thirty yards before you get to the generator room.”

“And your point is?” Maeve tried to curtail her impatience and Kelly pressed on to finish his thought.

“That puts the generator room well beyond the hundred yard radius. Don’t you see? I spent some time with Tom after the mission. He doesn’t remember anything at all!”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean that I asked him, half jokingly, what he thought of the news over the Memorial Day weekend and he didn’t get the joke.”

“I’m not sure I do.”

“He didn’t know , Maeve. He had no inkling that the entire east coast was about to be inundated with a three hundred foot tsunami. He wasn’t in the Nexus!”

Maeve bit her lower lip, considering. “We knew there was something odd about Tom’s experience. He seemed completely unaffected, but we weren’t sure why. And that cute lab tech Paul was flirting with had a lot of unaccountable blank spots in her memory as well.”

“You mean Jen? Yes, that confirms my theory—or Paul’s theory. The intercom was out that night because of the storm. Must have been a freak lightening strike or something. In any case, Jen was shuttling back and forth between the lab here and the generator room all through the mission. She was physically moving in and out of the null spot surrounding the Arch. Paul told me she was feeling strange all night. She had this sense that something truly significant was happening, and then the heart of it would slip away from her. One minute she was worried sick about the news of the Palma event, and then the next she moment she had completely forgotten about it. She wrote it all off to the stress of the moment, but it’s pretty telling evidence for the notion that the physical null zone has a limited radius. That’s why nobody else on earth knows what really happened that night except the four of us.”