John Schettler - Meridian

“We lost Bermuda, Professor,” he said quietly. “The wave was scheduled to hit there a little after two AM, our time.”

“It was a saving grace in 1611 when the Plymouth expedition made landfall there,” said Nordhausen. “They once feared the place, you know. Called it the Devil’s Island.”

“God help them now,” said Paul. The queasy feeling of anticipation seemed to redouble when the elevator shot down, leaving their stomachs behind.

“It’s better this way,” said Nordhausen. “Maeve has a wonderful head on her shoulders, but a woman would have been very much out of place in the milieu we’re opening; perhaps unexplainable. That nurse business was a good try, but really, what would a nurse be doing in the middle of the desert in Bedouin clothing? Did you know that there was not one single speaking female role in the movie?”

“What?”

“Lawrence of Arabia,” Nordhausen explained. “The entire cast was male—what blessed relief! It was, as they say, a man’s world in 1917. It’s better she stays behind.”

“Maybe you’re right,” Paul conceded. “But don’t get any ideas just because you won’t have Maeve watching your every move. We’ve got to be very careful. This is going to be like a delicate surgery. We have to find our Pushpoint and enable it while creating as little disturbance in the flow of events as possible.”

“I hope there’s time,” Nordhausen worried. “Look at the clock! What if we land in a place that takes us hours and hours to find the ambush zone? We’ve only got an hour and a half.”

Paul shook his head. “Plenty of time. Once we step through the Arch we’ll have all the time between the interval when we emerge and the actual attack on the train. It doesn’t matter how much time is left on this end. We could walk through the Arch a minute before four in the morning and return in thirty seconds, having spent a decade in the past! You never will get a handle on temporal mechanics, will you? Our visitor tonight emerged seven years ago, by his account. He lived out all that time on our Meridian but, in the world he came from, he might have been gone a just few brief moments. Maeve will hardly have time to take her phone call before we get back; you’ll see.”

“What if we miss our target?”

“That’s my main worry,” Paul confided. “Kelly said he shaded a variable to drop us on the negative side of the event. We can’t risk arriving too late, you see. But arriving too early could be just as much of a problem. Suppose we suffer the same fate as our visitor from the future, and miss the mark. We would have to scrub the mission and wait for the fail-safe retraction to kick in, unless we disable it. In that case, if we were to land around 1900, would you be prepared to live out seventeen years in the alternate time line? Think about it, Robert. You can still change your mind if you want. Thus isn’t going to be a quiet evening at the Globe. Kelly is good, but he really had to rush these calculations tonight. We haven’t had any time to fine-tune the breaching point.”

Nordhausen shook his head as the elevator came to a halt. “You aren’t getting rid of me that easy,” he said. “Oh, don’t get me wrong. I’m scared shitless right now, but I’m still going.” Then he thought about the prospect for a moment and asked another question. “I’ve never quite understood how the retraction sequence works. How do we get back?” The question underlined the fear they were both feeling now.

“What? Oh, it’s a bit complex. The infusion is going to permeate the Arch with a tachyon surge. We may even feel the whole thing when we get inside. No one knows yet. In any case, we can weave particles into the fiber of our quantum matrix and give them a designated half-life, in a manner of speaking. We set the spin resonance to respond to one of two events: the temporal signature of the target time, plus a given interval, or the final decay of the infusion. One way or another, we’ll be pulled back through the singularity in the Arch and return. That’s what happened to our visitor! I think he had a very brief time with us after he intervened to save Kelly. That was his mission, you see. Whether he was free-lancing with his coffee run is another question. Did you notice how he kept looking at his watch? He was very agitated, almost as if he expected something to happen to him at any moment.”

“But I don’t understand,” said Nordhausen. “We won’t have an Arch on the other side. How will we get pulled back?”

“Simple,” Paul smiled. “The door we’re about to open is going to remain open for us, Robert. Time may be a harsh mistress, to repeat that old cliché, but she’s also a tidy one.” The elevator doors slid open and they stepped out into another long metallic tunnel. Paul reached back and extended an arm to block the closing doors.

“You see?” He smiled at the professor. “Time will extend an arm and keep the portal open for us. She knows we don’t belong on this side of the door, and she won’t rest until we’re safe in our own Meridian again. You’ll see.”

A great oval door was waiting for them at the end of a short tunnel, much like the portal above. Paul keyed the entry code and looked for the intercom to the control console while the heavy door swung inward with the same snapping hiss as before. He thumbed the call signal on the intercom and spoke.

“We’re opening the outer lock, Kelly. You can ramp it up to full power and start the spin sequence.”

“Roger that,” Kelly’s voice was reassuring on the other end of the line. “Maeve says to check your pockets and all.”

“Tell her we’ll be very discreet campers.” Paul suddenly smiled with an inner recollection. “And we’ll spend a lovely couple of hours in the Arabian Desert.” He let a little southern twang into his voice, knowing that only Kelly would know what he was talking about.

Nordhausen gave him an odd look, and Paul explained.

“I took this camping trip once out on the Olympic Peninsula with Kelly. The park ranger was coming by to collect the camping fees, and these two old people were trying to pretend they were just day visitors… Oh, never mind. You had to be there.”

The professor patted his torso, compliant with Maeve’s abiding caution to the last. He was surprised to find something in a small cache pocket within his gown, and he reached inside to fondle it with his fingers. Beads, he thought? Then the a faint familiar odor came to him and he realized that Maeve had secreted a supply of loose coffee beans in a cloth pouch, along with a few other items that he did not have time to explore. He smiled.

They were in a small, spherical chamber, and the heavy door was already swinging shut behind them. The faint whir of spinning turbines came to them now, resonating from the bowels of the earth with a palpable vibration that gathered strength with each passing moment. A pump began to operate somewhere and they felt their ears pop as the outer door sealed behind them and the chamber added pressure. They instinctively turned to face the last barrier between them and the Arch. It was a another massive metal door, split down the middle with a single seam—the final safety lock. The two halves would slide open any moment now.

“Power at 100 percent,” said Kelly over the intercom. “Everything all right down there?”

“We’re all yours,” said Paul.

“Well don’t cause any trouble in the park. Got that?”

Paul smiled. It was another of their favorite catch phrases, the warp and woof of a long friendship. Kelly spoke again: “Spin configuration looks wonderful, Paul. I’m infusing the chamber now… On my mark… And you are good to go!”