John Schettler - Meridian

Maeve was taking his pulse and looking for other obvious signs of cardiac distress. “I think he just fainted,” she said. “Do you have anything to eat, Robert? The man looks half starved.”

As if to confirm her suspicions, the visitor’s eyes fluttered open and he looked about the room, clearly disoriented. “I seem to have fallen…”

“There now,” said Maeve. “You just fainted. Your pulse is a bit weak, but otherwise normal. You’ve been sweating with a bit of a temperature, I’m afraid. Let’s get something into your stomach and then you rest a bit. Perhaps a hot tea?”

“There’s very little time,” the man tried to return her smile. Then he seemed to remember the urgency of the moment and spoke again. “You must not worry about me,” he whispered. “The Arch… That is the only thing that matters now.” His eyes seemed to look right past her, watching the ceiling and the walls about him with growing anxiety. “No time…” he breathed.

“Yes, yes,” Maeve comforted him. She turned and waved at the others to shoo them out of the room. “You just lie here quietly and I’ll get you something to drink.”

She herded the others back out into the study area and made for the coffee station while Dorland and Nordhausen huddled near the shortwave. They tuned in a few other stations, moving from one emergency bulletin to another until Paul pursed his lips with resignation.

“Six hours,” he said. “Well folks, if we are going to do anything about this business, we had better get started. I’d like to have a word with Mr. Graves, and—”

“Don’t you dare,” Maeve wagged a finger at him. “Give the man a moment to recover, Paul. I’ll get some shortbread and tea into him while you work out a strategy.” She was pouring a cup of the Earl Grey Nordhausen had brewed earlier. “I don’t suppose coffee is the right thing just now, but a little tea will do anyone good.”

Kelly retrieved his laptop and came over to the study table to join the others. “We don’t have much time,” he said. “I’ve got all the algorithms here for the planned mission, but I’m going to need cycles on another Arion system to reconfigure.” He looked at his friend Paul with a puzzled expression. “Where to, boss?”

Dorland ran a hand through his thick, dark hair and cleared his throat. “Good question,” he began. “Any thoughts, Robert? You’re the historian.”

“Lovely,” said Nordhausen. “A madman we haven’t even heard of yet has blown up the island of Palma and we’ve got to find a way to undo the thing. This is a fairly tall order, Paul. The research could take months, years even!”

“We have six hours.” Paul fixed him with a determined look.

“Lord, a few hours ago Maeve was yammering to keep me from sneaking a peek at Shakespeare’s writing desk; now I’m supposed to save the world! Why don’t you go in and ask our visitor from the future? He must have some idea of what we were supposed to do.” He shivered with a sudden cold. “Did someone open the door?”

“Put on the heat, Robert,” said Maeve. She noticed the chill at once. The others felt it as well. “Here, let me get this tea in to Mr. Graves and then we can plan this thing out.”

“We’ll need time on an Arion system,” Kelly repeated. “I can’t log in from here because the phone line is dead. It’s two hours to the City with the traffic and this weather.”

“We’ll just have to try finding something closer,” said Dorland. “What about the system at U.C. Berkeley?”

“You have any time booked?”

“Well, who would be using it on a night like this?”

“Good point,” said Nordhausen. “I’ll bet they closed down and joined the panic out there. I’ve got a U.C. library pass. I just may be able to get us in with my credentials, even if I have to pull seniority to bump someone off the machine.”

“How much time will you need, Kelly?” Dorland was thinking hard.

“Well… That depends on what we need to do. I need at least a half hour to program the preliminaries, but the real work is in fine-tuning the temporal locus. Where are we going?”

Dorland looked over his shoulder. “Maeve? We really must talk with—”

Maeve was standing in the open doorway leading to the reading room, a cup of tea in one hand and a box of shortbread wafers in the other.

“Mr. Graves?” Maeve seemed as if she were calling a lost kitten. She started into the room. “Well that’s odd, he’s gone…” The howling of the wind continued outside, and the rain drummed harder on the roof.

Nordhausen hurried over with Dorland in his wake. “What do you mean he’s—” He came up short, staring into the empty reading room. The love seat was unoccupied, and there was no one by the piano on the far end of the room. Maeve walked to the window and saw it was still locked. There was no other way in, or out, of the room.

“Do you suppose he slipped out the front door?” Nordhausen craned his neck to look at the front entrance, but the door was shut tight, and the emergency chain was still in place.

Dorland said nothing as he entered the room, feeling the remnant of a palpable chill as he approached the love seat. He extended his arm, palm open as if he were feeling the air about him. The cold seemed to emanate from the surface of the love seat. When he touched the fabric he sensed a frosty tinge that was almost wet, and it prompted him to draw his hand back at once.

They just stood there, blank expressions on their faces, but Paul had an eerie sensation in his gut that something was wrong. He stepped back from the love seat, his mind slowly coming to a conclusion about what had happened. The others, Nordhausen in particular, seemed more flustered than anything else. The professor strode boldly across the reading room and leaned over to have a look behind the piano.

“Odd,” he mused aloud. “Very odd. One minute the man keels over and has to be physically carried, then, not five minutes later, he vanishes. Something is very wrong here, Paul. What’s happened?”

Dorland looked at him, and then back at the love seat again, still deep in thought. “I’m not entirely sure,” he began.

“I recall him muttering something about a void.” Nordhausen was still looking about the room, as if he thought he would spy some hint of where the man had gone: behind the music stand, the end table, the white lace curtains by the window. He finally satisfied himself that the stranger was not in the room. “What did he mean by that?”

“I think he knew he was taking a very great risk coming here tonight, just as Maeve argued that you would be taking a great risk by trying to steal away to the back offices at the Globe Theatre during the play. We haven’t even tried our experiment yet, but they have. They know what can happen. What was it he said a moment ago? Time is a harsh mistress. She may be a jealous one as well. Something tells me the whole notion of a Paradox is time’s way of protecting the continuum from contamination, and it’s not just a thorny puzzle. We may have just seen its handiwork. Paradox is real, he said. It kills. Didn’t he try to warn us? If we take the man at his word; if he was from a future time, then his actions here could have triggered some sort of temporal complication that impacted his own personal time line—he may have even created a Paradox.”

“He seemed positively terrified of the thought,” said Nordhausen. “Did you see how the man was perspiring? Why, the moment he sat down at the table it was as if he was afraid to open his mouth.”

Maeve came back from the window, sitting the tea and shortbread on the end table. “He was certainly frightened of something. Did you notice how he looked at you, Paul?”