John Schettler - Nexus Point

The trainreached the station at precisely 12:00 noon, and Nordhausen smiled at the legendary British sense of punctuality. It was the daily run out of London to Oxford, making its way there in a roundabout way by following the meandering line of the Thames as it curled north of Windsor. It was stopping at Reading now, near the confluence of the Kennet River and the Thames. They would hold over here for half an hour, and then turn north to cross the Berkshire Downs and come up upon Oxford from the south.

The professor had been very careful in his research this time, following every clue he could dig up on the matter that was now afoot. He was very pleased that he had been able to dress himself so well for the part he hoped to play here, a stolid English gentlemen in dark wool and pinstripes topped off with a typical derby of the period. His shoes were immaculately polished, and this time they were very well fitted. The memory of his trek across the desert in those tight leather boots still sent a twinge to his toes when he thought of it. A gold chain adorned his vest, linking smartly to the pocket watch his grandfather had given him years ago. Even though Maeve had not had the chance to subject him to her careful scrutiny before he left, he was well satisfied that there was nothing about his appearance that would arouse the slightest suspicion or undue interest. He seemed the perfect English banker, out on business, which is exactly the image he intended to project.

In spite of all his research and careful preparations, however, Nordhausen was a bit worried. It occurred to him that, behind all his rationalizations, he still entertained a hint of misgiving about this trip. He had wrestled with the matter internally for some time, and he knew it was risky to go off on a time jaunt without authorization. That last mission to the desert had been enough to convince him that Paul’s theory was correct. Changes in time hinged on the simplest of things: loose knots, a casual stumble, a chance meeting, something inadvertently dropped, or lost, or found. All one had to do was find these things in the research—a task that could take years, depending on the complexity of the situation. The number of potential variables was enormous! How could anyone ever hope to uncover just the right pinprick of time? It was an intimidating proposition.

The research went something like this: once you determine the thing you want to change you must then isolate all the key Meridians flowing into that Nexus Point of time and determine which one offered the best prospects for success. Any solution you devise might cause some alteration in the stream of causality, yet the change may not be the one needed to accomplish your purpose. Time had a way of accounting for small errors and deviations, like a meandering stream that eventually found its way back into the main channel.

It all seemed an impossible game of hit and miss to him, until Paul convinced him that somewhere, lost on a single wayward thread of time, a moment existed that was mated to every great event on the continuum, a whisper of inconsequential absurdity that was forever paired to the great conquerors of history, like the slaves who would ride with Ceasar in his triumph to remind him that all glory was fleeting.

The trick was finding the correct moment to alter, and the surprise was that it would never be something big, something obvious. Try to stop an asteroid from striking the earth on the day of the event and no amount of force applied at that moment might be enough to do the job. But get to it while it is far enough away, and it would only take the slightest nudge to divert its course and save the world. Try swatting aside the rifle of an assassin at the moment before he shoots, and time would find a way to frustrate your every attempt. But let the air out of the tire of his car three weeks before the day of the shooting, and all history will change.

You had to feel your way along the Meridians, groping for those little moments of insignificance that would have the right effect. Who would have thought that a disaster on the scale of Palma in 2010 could have been reversed by a train wreck in the Jordanian desert of 1917? How could one make a connection of cause and effect from such disjointed events? The research could take years. He knew now that they could never have finished that first mission without the timely help of their visitor from the future, and the subtle clues he left behind.

Yet, what a mission it was! They had set out to save the Western World from Ra’id Husan al Din, a man so bent on his war against the “Infidel” that he would sacrifice the lives of tens of millions of innocent people in a single moment of terror. It was not a symbolic stroke, as his forerunner Osama Bin Ladin had made in his September attack against the World Trade Center. No, Husan al’ Din came up with something truly awesome in scope. By comparison, it made the 9/11 attack seem like the barest foreshock to the real catastrophe that lay in store for the West: on the night before Memorial Day of the year 2010.

Husan and his operatives had finally acquired their weapon of mass destruction—a warhead of sufficient power and yield to serve in the incredible plan they had spawned. It was inevitable that someone would eventually get their hands on a nuke, but the genius of the plan led to consequences far beyond the destruction of a single city. The device was buried deep in the unstable western flank of the volcano that made up the bulk of the Island of Palma. When it went off, it super-heated huge pillars of standing water that had percolated down into old lava tubes in the side of the mountain. As the water expanded, driven by the fierce explosive venting of an eruption triggered by the blast, the flank of the volcano gave way and a massive landslide rumbled into the ocean a little after midnight, GMT. The resulting tsunami was unlike anything ever seen in modern history. It surged across the Atlantic, promising to swell up in immense waves topping three hundred feet by the time it struck the Eastern Seaboard. There was no ground on Manhattan island that high, and the loss of life would have been unthinkable in that city alone. The whole of the western shoreline of the US was doomed to share the same fate, but it never happened, and Nordhausen could still not figure out why.

The wave sequence was supposed to take over eight hours to cross the Atlantic and, in that brief interval of time, Paul Dorland’s theory had been proven correct. Someone came back on that storm drenched night and made it to the final briefing at the professor’s study. He carried an urgent message and an appeal for help. It would all work, he told them. Time travel was possible! Researchers from his own time had been trying to forestall the terror of Husan al Din for years, but they could not get back far enough on the Meridian.

From their vantage point, in some far distant future, they had discovered that the only way to save their world was to prevent the birth of the master terrorist himself. It was the key to preventing the Palma Event, a Radical Transformation according to Paul’s lexicon. Yet, try as they might, the team of future researchers who had built upon Paul’s unproven theory were foiled by another of his maxims: that great events cast a penumbra on the continuum, a time shadow that slowly calcified until it became impossible to penetrate