John Schettler - Meridian

“Join the Green Party, Robert.”

“You know I’m not political. I just do my bit in the classroom when I can. I figure if we can raise a few heads at a time something might be done about it. We treat this planet like it was our own private amusement park. We’ll just amuse ourselves to death, I suppose.”

“Roger Waters,” said Paul.

“What?”

“Never mind. It was a great concert. You should have been there.” Paul’s eyes brightened with a thought. “Think there’s any dinosaurs left around here? We found that Ammonite thing. What if we come across a big dino carcass!”

“Forget it, Paul. This isn’t a romp through Jurassic Park. Enough of this nonsense. What are we talking about? Kelly botched up the numbers, just like I said he would. How the hell are we going to get back? Would you explain that to me?” Nordhausen returned to the more immediate problem. He would leave the fate of the dinosaurs, and the planet, to another time.

“We obviously can’t wait around sixty-five million years for the target trigger to pull us out,” said Paul. “But the fail-safe trigger is keyed to the half-life sequence and it should take effect in due time.”

“You mean we’re stuck here for a while? Why can’t he just pull us out now?”

“Kelly’s probably working on it,” Paul chided him. “If we went back too far, as we obviously have, the fail-safe would be timed to pull us out in due course. It’s really only a matter of hours in laboratory time. That would give us another shot at things. Kelly may be trying to hasten the process and work another solution right now.”

“Is that what happened to the visitor?”

“I think he was pulled out by the target trigger. Remember, he said he landed seven years before the target event, which was the night of our meeting. They knew they only had one shot at getting through the shadow of the Palma Event, so they didn’t program a fail-safe retraction. It was all or nothing. Our visitor just had to live out the seven years until the night of the meeting. It was his only chance of getting home—or of accomplishing his mission.”

“Must have been hell for the man, sitting there in a monastery all that time.”

“That was damn clever of him, I thought,” said Paul. “He needed to minimize contact with the outside world to prevent contamination. Find a good Trappist monastery and you can live a nice contemplative life, keeping your mouth shut most of the time so you don’t let anything slip out that could cause mischief. The danger of contamination is very real. I suppose the farther back you go, the more severe the outcome if you tamper with anything important.” He looked at his feet as he finished, almost as if he were afraid he might be squashing some insect out of existence, and all the successive generations of its offspring as well. “We’d better watch what we’re doing here.”

Nordhausen was inspecting his robes, but soon became frustrated with the situation again. “So you’re telling me you have no idea how long we’ll be here? What are we supposed to do?”

“Did you bring anything for breakfast?” Paul was very hungry, and amazingly light hearted considering the dilemma they were in. The excitement over the success of his theory was beginning to push away the disastrous implications of their failure on the time coordinates. Nordhausen gave him an infuriated look.

“Breakfast? We were supposed to be on a quick sabotage mission in the Arabian Desert. Sorry, I forgot to bring a menu.” He stuck his hands inside his robe to warm them up when he remembered the small bundle Maeve had slipped into a pocket there. He fumbled for it, and pulled it out, sniffing at the rich aroma of the coffee beans inside. “I suppose we could brew this up, if you can find a Mr. Coffee machine around here.”

Paul fished inside his own garments. “Maeve stuck something in my pockets too.” He produced a small mess kit of WWI vintage, along with a flask of water.

Nordhausen was encouraged and he searched out all his other pockets. “I’ve got a knife,” he exulted, and an old fluid lighter!” He held out the lighter and flipped the cap open to thumb the flint roller. The lighter sparked and a tiny flame leapt up from the wick.

“Good for Maeve!” Paul smiled. “Let’s look around. You gather up some of those dried out ferns and I’ll look for some rocks. Be sure you only take things that are clearly dead—nothing living, got that?”

“You honestly think I can change the Time Meridian by simply plucking a live fern out of the ground? It’s got to be more resilient than that.”

“You never know,” Paul warned him.

“Well, if you’re going to be a stickler about things, we’ll be depriving the time line of all the fertilizer it might make of the dead leaves if we burn them.” Nordhausen gave him a smug look, pleased to hand him back his own fussiness by way of argument.

“We’ll just hasten the decomposition process, that’s all. A little more cinder won’t throw this environment out of whack. I think we can safely light a small fire here, Robert.”

“Unless we burn up one of your little pushpins in the effort.”

Paul rolled his eyes. “Just look for some kindling, will you? We can crush a few of the beans inside the bag and use some cloth as a strainer. A cup of Peets would be just the thing I need right now. Sound good to you?”

Nordhausen was finally persuaded. With nothing else to be done, they set about to find a dry spot for the fire. It took them some time, and several tries on the dampened fern leaves, but they were soon able to get a very small blaze going, sufficient for boiling Paul’s water in the mess kit tin. As Nordhausen labored over the makeshift fire pit a wry grin came to Paul’s face.

“Do you realize what this is?”

“It’s a real dilemma, that’s what it is.” The professor was in a sour mood. “It’s a disaster, a catastrophe, and a big joke.”

“Right,” said Paul. “And we’ve just lit the first campfire made by human hands in the whole history of the earth!”

Nordhausen gave him an odd look. “Why, I suppose you’re right. Now we’re going to sit here drinking coffee while we watch the dinosaurs die off. If anything else goes wrong on this mission we’ll probably end up getting stuck here.”

“Maybe we should have waited for Maeve,” Paul exclaimed with a wry edge of humor. “I mean, you and I can’t do much about launching the human race from this point.”

“Very funny.” Nordhausen was not amused. “What makes you think we would have to populate the earth from this point—to be certain the human race evolves? That’s a bit selfish, Paul. Under your theory the only moral thing we could do here if we don’t get pulled back would be to kill ourselves. I remember the issue being discussed in Maeve’s committee. They even planned a little painless suicide kit for stranded time travelers.”

Paul sighed heavily, his mood deflating considerably. “I almost forgot about that,” he said looking around.

“About what?”

“This suicide business.” They had missed the mark, by the widest possible margin, and the mission was turning into the same disaster that had initiated it. He wondered if Time had not simply played an immensely cruel joke on them, sending them off to the K-T event to watch how the dinosaurs died while preventing them from tampering with the event that would lead to the demise of their own species. Perhaps nothing could alter the accelerating momentum of the sixth extinction that Nordhausen had talked about. Perhaps the Holy Fighters were only feeding a little more fuel into the fire that would soon extinguish the human race on earth forever.

He thought about it all, as he sipped the coffee when it was ready. The steamy vapors and rich, earthy taste made him long for home. He no longer wanted to hunt dinosaurs or postulate on the theory of their demise. The professor was right. If anything else went amiss they might never see their own time again, and they would have to kill themselves. That thought sent him spiraling down to another level.