John Schettler - Meridian

“You did? You know you aren’t supposed to touch these modules!”

“I didn’t,” Jen blurted out. “But Doctor Dorland said I was supposed to watch it very closely, that’s all.”

“Paul? When did he say that?”

“Just before he left.”

“Well did you do anything here? There’s data written all through the banks and I need space to get these algorithms initiated.”

“I didn’t do a thing,” Jen defended herself. “Doctor Dorland just said to watch it closely and if the readings were to fall into the yellow, I was supposed to run some routines…” She fidgeted, searching her memory, but obviously disturbed in thinking she was being blamed.

“What routines?” Kelly’s voice had an added edge to it. The clock was spinning towards the three minute mark and he was running out of time. He was connecting his laptop even as he spoke, his attention shifting from Jen to the interface cable.

Jen closed her eyes, her smooth tan brow suddenly furrowed with concentration. “The focal routines on terminal three!” She remembered what Paul had said.

“Terminal three?” Kelly looked to his right. He moved the mouse cursor on the screen and took a look at the registers there. “Hello…”

“What is it?” Maeve leaned in to inspect the screen more closely.

“There’s code here—a lot of it.” Kelly was scrolling through the data. “What did Paul tell you?” He looked at Jen again, one eye on the time.

“He just said to run this routine if the retraction module went into the yellow.” Jen pointed at the code on the screen.

“Well, he must have worked this out with a programmer and set it all up on his own. Did you hear anything about this, Maeve?”

“Not a whisper.” There was just over two minutes left on the clock.

Kelly’s mind rushed through the possibilities. What was Paul up to? If the retraction module signal went into the yellow it would mean that there was a loss of integrity on the pattern. The focal routine was probably intended to tighten things up, but it now occupied a huge chunk of memory in the retraction module and there was no room for Kelly’s operational algorithms. Something had to go. He looked at the screen, fighting off a feeling of quiet panic. If he wanted to retain Paul’s focal routine he had to delete something else. There were only two other data banks in the unit: one was occupied by the target date retraction scheme, and the other with the fail-safe half-life trigger. One of these had to go.

“Jen!” He yelled. “Take the power up to 100% again, now!”

She ran to obey, the urgency in his voice a sure prod to action.

What should he do? He had to move them or everything was lost. He decided quickly and flushed the memory for the target date retraction scheme. They were in the wrong time, and it was useless now. An error trap message dialogue flashed onto the screen: You are about to clear system critical data. Proceed?

“Yes, damnit! That’s why I pressed the clear key!” Kelly yelled at the computer screen as he gave the enter key another hard jab. The memory cleared and he swiveled quickly to engage his laptop and press the send command. Data began pouring into the retraction unit, the speed of light racing time as the seconds ticked away. He had a green board with thirty seconds to spare.

“How’s that power reading?” He shouted as he lunged toward the main console.

“Ninety-five percent,” Jen called back. They could hear the turbines shuddering somewhere in the bowels of the facility beneath them.

“It will just have to do,” said Kelly. “On my mark…” He opened three covered switches and enabled the first two, finger hovering over the third. The digital timer sounded a single tone and he pressed the last button, his face and forehead glistening with perspiration.

The particle half-life decay sequence in the chamber had reached the mid-point, the density was just right, and the retraction module lit up with an array of fluttering LEDs. Kelly was back at the screen, watching as the data was graphically displayed in a chart.

“Get over to the temporal monitor, Jen. Tell me what’s going on there.”

Jen turned to heed him and there was a noticeable dimming in the overhead lighting. Buzzers started going off all around the console as surge suppressing units warned of a major variation in the power flow.

“Not now!” Kelly shouted at the ceiling, his attention pulled there by the flickering lights, but he knew the problem was really under foot, down with the massive generators that were spinning up to provide the enormous power required for the operation. Something was wrong. There didn’t seem to be enough power available.

“Are we still at ninety-five percent on the power?” Kelly gave Jen a wide eyed look.

“Eighty-seven.”

The lights flickered again and went out. As the room plunged into darkness the battery backup units fed their long coveted energy into the consoles to keep the system LEDs glowing. They could provide power for about fifteen minutes in an emergency—just long enough to shut everything down and back up the data.

“Oh God!” Maeve said in a low voice. “I was down in the corridor… and I think I forgot to close the inner doors.” She could see the red glow of the system warning lights reflected from Kelly’s eyes in the darkened room.

“Where are we, Robert?” The question was ludicrous, Paul knew, but asking it with the expectation that Nordhausen would hand him a convenient answer seemed to comfort. “Nothing seems to fit with contemporary times here. Is that what you’re saying?”

The professor looked at the lump of stone in his hand, fingering it in his mind as well. “Shocked quartz,” he muttered. “You might get this sort from a particularly violent volcanic eruption.”

“Or perhaps as ejecta from a large impact,” Paul put in.

“I was afraid you were going to say that.” The professor knew all too well of Paul’s life-long fascination with great disasters.

“Well look at the sky,” said Paul. “It’s well after sunrise and the atmosphere is laden with smoke and dust.”

“Consistent with an eruption.”

“Possibly…” Paul looked at the strange fossil they had discovered. “What about this Ammonite thing. How long ago did they live?”

Nordhausen thought for a moment. “They were prevalent through the later Cretaceous, and perished with the dinosaurs. This one seems quite young, but who knows when it died. Still… the other clues seem to point to the late Cretaceous as well. Ferns were flourishing; there was active continental drift going on in the plate tectonics and that would produce a lot of volcanic activity.”

“God, how long ago was that?”

“Some sixty-five million years.” Nordhausen looked around at the bleak landscape. “I suppose that would account for the lack of weathering on these ridges. Kelly sure shaded his damn variable, alright. I told you we didn’t have enough time to plan this operation. It’s nice to be early, Paul, but sixty-five million years? Good God!” The professor was finally realizing what had happened. He sat down, as though felled by the impact of the emotion. The first thing that came to him was finding a way home. “How the hell are we going to get back?” he looked at Paul, a dumbfounded look on his face.

Paul was pulled with a strange conflict of emotions. On the one hand he was still in the throes of the elation he felt in making the time shift alive. The danger inherent in the operation was obvious. Even the visitor from the future had hinted that they had suffered many deaths in the Arch. His gratitude at being alive was fed by a surge of pride and satisfaction in the accomplishment. They were through; they had shifted in time! But to where? If Nordhausen was correct then the temporal coordinates were well off the mark. It was not merely an error of hours, minutes or even days. Nordhausen seem to believe they were many centuries off—even millennia.