John Schettler - Meridian

“I was too damn busy watching these readouts. If we had any more than a fifteen second gap before the auxiliary power kicked in we stood a chance to loose the spinout on the singularity. That really would have been a disaster. Looks like the power held above 85%, however. Jen, get down there and see what Tom says about this, will you? We can’t draw support from the city grid for very long. I need those turbines back up to speed, and fast.”

His attention was fixated on the temporal monitor now, as it continued the playback of the data on the shift. The event had already transpired, but the computer was lagging behind, its main processors just too slow to keep up with the data flow in real time. They had compensated for the lack of sufficient processor speed by installing huge arrays of memory. Now, as the computer read one bank of stored information after another, it ran its analysis and translated the results into graphics and numerical readouts on the screen.

“We should have had a stronger processor bank for this unit,” Kelly muttered. “I can’t react to anything that happens this way. If something went wrong this time, there’s not a thing I can do about it. Look how far behind the data flow is. I think we probably lost a processor bank in here when the power fluctuated. Damn things are so sensitive, and these battery backups just aren’t up to snuff.”

“How does it look?” Maeve pointed at the screen.

“Not bad…” Kelly kept watching. “The line is nice and green; numbers are falling off to zero…” He lapsed into silence as he watched.

Maeve was suddenly uncomfortable again. She looked at the screen and saw that the single green line began to change. Now it appeared that there were two bars that were making up the thickness of the progress line, and one was falling behind the other. She realized that there were two parallel lines moving in tandem, making a steady progress across the screen. Kelly noticed it as well.

“What’s going on here,” he murmured.

“A problem?” Maeve’s voice inflected the question in both of their minds. “The line is still solid green, Kelly. Look, your variance is just about nil.”

Kelly watched, his own mental processes racing in time with the data on the screen. The shift looked good, but there was definitely something amiss. He rolled some dials on the console, enhancing the brightness and contrast of the readouts. There was no mistaking it now. The adjustment clearly indicated that he had two parallel lines, not one unified line as he expected; as he hoped.

“What is it?” Maeve was beside herself, still not quite over the notion that she had caused the problem.

“The shift looks good,” said Kelly, “But…”

“But what?”

Kelly looked at her, scratching his head before he spoke. “Well it doesn’t look as though they were both—”

“Tom says not to worry!” Jen was shouting as she ran up the stairs from the lower level. She hastened up, winded with the exertion, but clearly elated to bring up the good news. “He says one of the breakers tripped due to some outside interference, but he got the circuits back on line again.”

“Outside interference?”

“Yeah,” Jen nodded. “He thinks maybe we caught some lightning and the rods couldn’t handle the juice. Must have been a direct hit.”

Maeve had a frustrated look on her face. “Kelly, what were you going to say?”

“Great, Jen,” Kelly was still distracted, and a sudden thought threw him further off the track. “Can we roll it back up to full power in twenty minutes?”

“I’ll go ask.” Jen fished her hands out of the pockets of her khaki shorts, turned on her heels, and ran off, her long brown legs carrying her quickly toward the stairwell again.

“Kelly!” Maeve gave him a wide-eyed stare.

“Right…” Kelly leaned in to study the lines on the screen again. He watched the numbers keep falling, pleased to see they were rolling ever more slowly toward zero. He knew they would settle there in the end. His math was good. “Well,” he said with a sigh. “We moved them, but not at the same time.”

Maeve stared at him, waiting for more information.

“See the lines?” Kelly pointed at the screen with a pen. “See how the bottom line is just a tick behind the other? They’re both moving, but not at the same time. That damn power dip was just enough to throw the sync off. Looks like the system compensated by grabbing one a few seconds before the other. Let me run a verification routine.”

He slid his chair over to a terminal to his left and began keying some system commands. “There,” he said as he finished. “We should know the final variance in a moment.”

“They shifted at different times?” Maeve’s own processing was finally catching up.

“There it is,” Kelly pointed at the screen. “Hell, it’s only a little off. Just 0.00168 discrepancy. Hardly a nudge!”

“And that means what?” Maeve wanted it in English, and she wanted it now.

“Well, they both hit the bull’s eye, numerically speaking. They’re going to be right on the target time; perhaps only a few days or even hours off. The only thing is that one is going to arrive before the other.” He shifted back to the temporal monitor. “Yup,” he concluded as he spun his chair around to look at her. “I wonder who’s going to arrive first?”

Nordhausen was lying face down on a low dune of wet sand. He did not know how long he had been there. All he could remember were surreal dreams of swirling auroras that danced in hues of red and milky green. He awoke, groggy; with a sickly queasiness in the pit of his stomach and a strange lightness of head. The night air surrounded him with a frosty cold, and the layers of clothing provided little comfort. He rolled over, staring up at the clouds. A wet mist shrouded the landscape but, here and there, the dark vapors parted and he could see the stars in a sable sky, cold and remote.

He immediately looked for the moon, finding a spot low on the horizon where the darkness seemed smudged with a hoary glow of diffused gray light. He watched the area for some time, wondering what had happened to him and where he was. One moment he had been sitting quietly by the campfire, sulking over his fate, and then that strange sense of weightlessness had come over him, a feathery lightness accompanied by a sudden chill. It occurred to him that he had been sleeping here, lost in the kaleidoscope of water colored dreams, for many hours.

He looked around him. Where was the circle of stones they had built for the fire; where was the exquisite bare white fossil of the Ammonite they had discovered; where was Paul? As he took his situation in he suddenly realized that the entire landscape about him was different than he remembered. Before they had been on the smooth brow of a low hill, part of a winding ridge. Now he lay upon flat, sandy ground, and the only rise in elevation he could see anywhere about him was some distance off. The sky had a different quality to it as well, clean and fresh where once it had been choked with smoky ash. What was going on here?

Perhaps I’m back, he thought. He never really did understand how the machine was supposed to work. Paul tried to explain it to him many times, but he could never get his mind around the physics. The one metaphor that seemed to stick in his head was the image of Paul’s long arm extending back to hold open the elevator door when they stepped off into the outer corridor. He remembered what his friend had said then: ‘The door we’re about to open is going to remain open for us, Robert… Time will extend an arm and keep the portal open…’