John Schettler - Meridian

The sense of anxiety that she felt was almost paralyzing. The second hands were ticking away, but the time seemed to slip by with agonizing slowness. She knew that Paul and Robert could be living out hours or days in the past, perhaps struggling for their very lives. All she had to do was wait another fifteen or twenty minutes, but it seemed an impossible burden. She started to reach for the drawer handle, then stopped herself, exerting all her willpower to suspend the motion of her hand. I can’t, she urged herself inwardly. I’ve just got to wait it out.

She looked at Kelly, almost longingly now, tears starting at the corners of her eyes. By great effort, she composed herself, brushing the tears away as she watched him. Then she noticed that tense, silent alertness that always indicated he was calculating something in his head. He was leaning in, peering at one of the monitors, and the look on his face began to change.

“Hello…” He muttered to himself, but she was immediately aware that something was amiss. She forced herself to her feet, glancing at the desk drawer one last time as she made her way softly to his side.

“Something up?” Her voice carried the question with as little insistence as possible, almost afraid to learn that anything else could be wrong with this mission.

“Integrity…” Kelly was slowly adjusting a dial, somewhat disgruntled, as though he was trying to tune in bad TV reception. “The integrity is a bit loose on one of the patterns.”

Maeve forced herself to watch for a moment before she asked him to explain that. Under normal circumstances she would have pulled it out of him immediately, but not now, not with the clock ticking away in her mind and heart; not with the fear she hid inside like an infant swaddled in uncertainty.

“This isn’t good…” Kelly was speaking more to himself now than Maeve, but she let it pass, in spite of the sense of alarm that continued to well within her. He was toggling switches, and shifting sideways to look at the information on another flat-panel monitor, his elbow leaning heavily on the desk, chin in hand.

“Shit,” he said. “This thing is getting strange on me now.”

She bit her lip, waiting. He looked around and saw the obvious emotion on her face and apologized. “Sorry, Maeve. I didn’t mean to leave you hanging like that. Look, could you yell down and see if you can get Jen up here? Ask her if the turbines are OK. I’m going to need some volts here in a second.”

She wanted to stay and find out what was wrong, but she knew it would only distract him. Her fears would inspire one question after another, and the answers would never be enough to dispel that awful sense of doubt she felt now. She nodded to him and started off, knowing that he would need all his attention and powers of concentration now.

Kelly returned to his monitors with his own doubts as well. The integrity on one of the patterns had begun to loosen up. It was starting to look like a pre-retraction scatter, yet the chamber wasn’t timed to pull them out until eleven after four. He had re-adjusted the time himself before he moved them forward on the original target coordinates. That maneuver had used the primary pattern signatures, but it worked. Now this second, and final, pattern signature was showing signs of definite integrity loss. Was it a real phenomenon, or simply a hardware failure? He was flipping one diagnostic switch after another, and everything was still in the green on systems and memory. Yet something was clearly wrong. As the seconds passed he realized that they were going to lose their integrity on the alternate time line if he didn’t do something about it. A retraction sequence was building up on its own!

He squinted at the readings… No… It was only affecting one of the two patterns. The other was holding its integrity well. His mind struggled with the problem. When they shifted forward in time, there had been a slight variance on the synchronization. They moved, but as the centuries fled in their wake, one of the two patterns began to fall ever so slightly behind. The actual error was very small when the shift concluded, only hours off the target. Now he realized that the synchronization module was having difficulty with the variance as they approached retraction time. It wanted them together, and they had become separated, both temporally and most likely spatially as well. The sync processors were probably working at full bore right now, he thought. In fact, he wagered the sync module might actually be responsible for the integrity loss.

He flipped a switch, checking his hunch, and immediately saw that he was correct. The sync module was keyed to the fail-safe routines in the programming. If something went askew on the sync it was programmed to compensate. Now Kelly knew what was happening. The module lost its handle on them as a pair, he thought. It wants to bring them home one at a time.

Maeve was back, with Jen running at her heels. They were both breathless from coming up the stairs, and Maeve looked really pale, as though the extra effort without food or sleep was wearing her down.

“You can have ninety-five percent,” Jen called. “Tom says that he’ll have another five percent in ten minutes. The turbines are looking good.”

“Thank God for that,” said Kelly, but his attention was immediately pulled to the particle chamber. “This is going to be close.”

Maeve watched him run to the chamber infusion control station, sure that something was very wrong again. She wanted to go to him and drag out the problem so she could help carry the burden, but instead she reached for the back of a chair, bracing herself. Jen saw her hand slip, and gave her a concerned look.

“You OK, Miss Lindford?

“I’ll be fine,” Maeve started to wave her off; then thought again. “Jen, is there anything to eat? I’m just famished.” She settled onto the chair, eyes following Kelly’s every movement.

“Hey, I brought a sandwich with me and only ate half. Wait a second. I’ll get you something to drink as well.”

“Thanks,” Maeve smiled, but her attention was on Kelly again at once. It was as if she was afraid to take her eyes off him. She wanted to shout at him to tell her what was going on, but she restrained herself. He said the integrity was off. Now he’s at the infusion chamber and he’s been worrying about the power. That can only mean a retraction scheme is in the works. But it’s too early! She looked at the clock and saw that it was only 3:50 AM. They had another ten minutes until the retraction processors were supposed to kick in. She dimly remembered something Kelly had done with the pattern buffers. He had been looking for memory in the retraction module, and something was taking up space. He had to delete one of the two retraction schemes in order to make room for his shift data. Now there was only one retraction scheme left.

She couldn’t bear it any longer, forcing herself to get up go to him. “This doesn’t look good,” she said softly.

Kelly looked over his shoulder. “Can’t explain everything now, but stay close. I’m going to need some help here in a second.”

“They’re moving,” she said, a dullness in her voice, as though it had already happened and there was nothing they could do about it now.

“Yes, one of them is starting to slip. The sync had trouble and the fail-safe routines kicked in. The module decided it couldn’t bring them both home at once, so it’s pulling someone out now. I’ve got to reset the infusion density readings fast! Otherwise there won’t be enough gas in the tank to get the other one home. It’s complicated…” He gave her a quick glance, hoping he had said enough to deflect another question. Thankfully, she said nothing.

Jen came up with half a sandwich and a can of soda. “Are we doing the retraction now?” She handed the food to Maeve and Kelly waved her into a chair to his left.