John Schettler - Meridian

“What do you mean?”

“Well, one moment it seemed as if he was about to burst out with something, and then the next—”

“He was afraid,” Nordhausen concluded.

“Yes, and I’m afraid that without him our task has become immeasurably more difficult.” Paul took one last look at the love seat, and then led them back out into the study. The radio droned on, and the rain fell heavily on the rooftop lending to the atmosphere of somber strangeness in the room. Paul saw Kelly sitting at the study table, deep in thought. He had taken a small notebook out of his pocket, and his pen was poised above the page, as if he was trying to decide just what to write. It was his word trap, Paul knew. Kelly was secretly a poet, and a darn good one at that. He always carried a little notebook with him so he could jot down a word or phrase when it bloomed in his mind. Paul walked over to him, immediately interpreting the look on his face and sensing his distress. “What’s the matter, mister?”

Kelly looked up at him, his eyes alight with the inner fire of his reverie. “This is weird,” he said. “I was supposed to die tonight. I mean… We’ve been working on this thing for over three years, Paul. I put my sweat and tears on the line with each of you—not to mention my bank account. Now we find out the damn thing pays off, and pays off big. I’m alive right now because the project works. But don’t you see? I’m not supposed to know that! I’m supposed to be lying on a slab in the morgue right now with a hang-tag on my big toe and a couple of late night med-techs futzing about my corpse until they get around to my autopsy. This isn’t my life any more. It’s… something else now, and it’s just weird, that’s all. This whole thing seems like a dream. It just can’t be real.”

“You’re right, my friend.” Paul put his hand on Kelly’s shoulder to reassure him. “It’s weird for all of us. We’re in a Deep Nexus Point—very real to us, but very strange. Time is dreaming now, and in a dream anything can happen. From this point, all possible futures extend out to infinity. I think I understand what the visitor was trying to tell us now. This is a null spot; a void. The volcano has been blown apart and a massive surge of ocean is about to radically alter the continuum. But, for the next few hours, we will occupy a brief interval of time where it remains possible to exercise some influence on what actually happens.”

“Something already has happened,” said Nordhausen.

“Yes,” said Dorland “but don’t you see? We’re right in the middle of the dream! In fact, I would go so far as to say that we are the dreamers; waking dreamers with a chance to determine how this whole thing plays itself out. What we do in the next six hours will be absolutely crucial to the fate of countless individual time lines. If we can take the obvious fear and distress of our guest as any indication, it may be crucial to the survival of the human race.”

“I don’t follow you,” said Nordhausen.

“They were desperate, Robert. They had the benefit of the most powerful technology ever devised at their disposal and they were desperate. It was all they could do to get one man through the shadow cast by the Palma Event. There was only one interval in time now where they could do anything to change their fate, the fate that will befall all of us if that tsunami strikes the east coast in the morning. Think of it. How many died on Palma? Hell, the population of the Cape Verde Islands is probably half a million by itself. Add in all the other islands: the Azores, Madeira, and then what about Western Sahara, Casablanca, Lisbon and the coast of Portugal? The web of time is already ripping asunder, people. The hundreds of thousands of life-strands are snapping and twisting in the void under the assault of that wall of water. The fabric of the continuum is tearing, and we’ve got to dream up something here tonight to mend it again—and fast. It’s going to be dangerous—the most dangerous thing we’ve ever done in our lives. I can see that now. Do you realize the power we have in our hands? Yet, the greatest peril we face is ourselves. Right now, at this moment, we’re the most dangerous people on earth. We can be saviors on the one hand if we manage to sort this thing out, but if we fail, for whatever reason…”

Nordhausen stared at him, a grim determination settling itself onto his features. “But what will we do? We’re wasting time!” He looked at Kelly, and then Maeve. They all stared at each other, each waiting for one of the others to speak. Kelly was looking at Paul, and Paul’s eyes caught the professor’s with a question in them that was needing his help. It was clear to them all that they had to act; had to do something, but what? Where should they go? Where would they even begin to look for that one single moment of insignificance that could make the difference in the endless weave of time?

“This is cruel,” said Dorland. “Here we had the answer to that very question sitting at our study table and resting on the love seat, and then he was snatched away from us.”

Nordhausen began to think. “It must be something to do with the rise of Islamic radicalism in modern times. Lord, the roots of the conflict between the Moslem world and the West go back centuries! Where do we start?”

“What about the Crusades?” Kelly offered an obvious guess.

“Which one? They started in 1096 and extended all the way to 1254.” Nordhausen wasn’t making things any easier, but he needed to impress the enormity of the problem on them. “Should we start at the beginning and try to prevent Pope Urban II’s speech in 1095 where he exhorted the faithful to come to the aid of the Byzantine Empire? Supposing that was the right place in time, how would we find Dorland’s pushpin in all the moments leading up to that incident?”

“Pushpoint,” Dorland corrected him.

“Whatever!” Nordhausen was clearly flustered now. “The point is that it will be absolutely impossible for us to find this thing—the one insignificant moment in time that acts as a catalyst to energize that event. It could be anything. Do we try to delay the Pope on the road to Clermont where he gave the speech? Do we go back further to try and intercept the messenger that reached him from the Byzantine Emperor with an appeal for aid? Where is the decisive moment? Is it a rickety wheel on an oxcart that we must keep from repair; or do we just try and assassinate the man, God forbid? Don’t you see how useless this is? It will take months or even years of research to isolate a potential root cause for the Crusades. It may take us ten, twenty or even a hundred attempts: each one a mission to enact our latest best guess on the issue, and who knows what harm we’ll work upon the time line with our mistakes?”

“Well, it didn’t seem so difficult when we were discussing the Bermuda Pamphlets earlier,” Dorland argued.

“That was happenstance,” said Nordhausen. “The key to solving that event was in the timing of the storm. If the ships could be delayed in setting out from Plymouth, then it was very likely that there would have been no Bermuda Pamphlets. But this is different, Paul. The Crusades were a huge cultural, religious and political event—a wave of events that set Europe on a collision with the Moslem world for well over a century. Now the wave train is heading our way, and it would be like trying to stop the ocean with our bare hands. History has its imperatives, as you will be the first to admit. I’m afraid the Crusades are one of them. We’ve no hope in that area. They must occur.”

“Then it has to be something else, perhaps closer to modern times.” He looked at the clock over the mantle. “We can’t just stand here gaping at one another. We have to move. We can talk about this on the way to U.C. Berkeley. Kelly—get your laptop. We’ve got to secure that comp cycle you need for the numbers.”