John Schettler - Meridian

Paul burst out laughing. “You changed the continuum?”

“Ran the numbers myself.”

“Hope you got the exponents right!” Robert could not help himself.

Maeve had been so quiet, just looking at the three of them with a broad smile on her face the whole time. She reached out and quietly took Kelly by the hand, as if to test for herself if he was real, substantial; if he was truly there.

Kelly looked at her warmly. “Something tells me I’m going to spend a long time with this hand in mine.” He gave her a reassuring squeeze.

“Well come on , people!” Nordhausen waved his hands in front of Kelly’s eyes to break the spell. “What are we standing here for? Let’s get over to Peets and we can talk the hours away over coffee. I want to hear all about this.” He stooped to recover his box. From the shallow grave, and Paul moved to get his parcel as well.

“Wait!” Kelly held up a warning hand. They looked at him, afraid that it had all been a mirage and that he would melt away into a cold fog at a moment’s notice. “Leave everything there,” Kelly whispered. The sound of a dog barked at the far end of the park, and he cocked his head to heed it, a strange look on his face. “Leave everything where it is. Let’s bury it in place and set the stone Maeve brought for the grave.”

Paul looked at him, slowly understanding. They had to know exactly where he was to pull him forward, he thought. Exactly! They saw the DVD file from the security camera. They must have excavated this grave site as part of their research on the incident. That’s why we have to leave it all here, safe and undisturbed.

“But this is all precious,” said Nordhausen. “It will be ruined.”

“Do exactly what he says,” said Paul, and he gave Kelly a knowing wink. There was only one last thing that was bothering him. As he understood things now, Kelly’s return was a round trip ticket. Once they took his pattern signature in the Tachyon infusion, the fail-safe systems would eventually reach the half-life trigger and pull him back to the future. Did they have some way of slowing down the decay sequence? “Kelly,” he whispered while Robert and Maeve began to bury the memorial tokens, “what about the final retraction sequence?”

“No pattern signature,” Kelly whispered back. “I insisted on it. This is a one way trip, Paul. They don’t have a signature on me any longer, so you’re stuck with me.”

“And Paradox?”

“Once this stone is in place I will be just fine. It’s the one thing I had to do—It’s our Pushpoint, Paul.”

They were setting the grave stone in place, smiling with the irony of it all. This planned memorial to his death would stand a guard on his life now, through all the days that remained to him. Kelly winked at Paul, excusing himself for a moment and walking to the cool green grass of the burial knoll.

“I’ve always wanted to do this,” he said with a grin, dancing a little jig on his own grave. Then they all joined arms and started back along the flagstone pathway of a new life together. They were going to begin it with good strong cup of Peets coffee—Major Dickason’s Blend.

The train reached the station at precisely 12:00 noon, and Nordhausen smiled at the legendary British sense of punctuality. It was the daily run out of London to Oxford, making its way there in a roundabout way by following the meandering line of the Thames as it curled north of Windsor. It was stopping at Reading now, near the confluence of the Kennet River and the Thames. They would hold over here for half an hour, and then turn north to cross the Berkshire Downs and come up upon Oxford from the south.

The professor had been very careful in his research this time, following every clue he could dig up on the matter that was now afoot. He was very pleased that he had been able to dress himself so well for the part he hoped to play here, a stolid English gentlemen in dark wool and pinstripes topped off with a typical derby of the period. His shoes were immaculately polished, and this time they were very well fitted. The memory of his trek across the desert in those tight leather boots still sent a twinge to his toes when he thought of it. A gold chain adorned his vest, linking smartly to the pocket watch his grandfather had given him years ago. Even though Maeve had not had the chance to subject him to her careful scrutiny before he left, he was well satisfied that there was nothing about his appearance that would arouse the slightest suspicion or undue interest. He seemed the perfect English banker, out on business, which is exactly the image he intended to project.

No, Maeve never had the chance to get her claws into me this time, he smirked to himself. In fact, no one knew he was here at all, not even the hapless graduate assistant he had press-ganged into a late shift on the mission. The lad had been given one simple task. He was to throw a switch at precisely 3:00 AM, and bother with nothing else.

It’s a pity this all has to end, he thought. There’s so much more we could learn with the technology. Why, we’ve hardly gone anywhere! That business with Lawrence and Kelly was enough to put the proverbial ‘Fear of the Lord’ into Paul’s poor heart. I don’t suppose I blame him for taking Maeve’s side in this. That was a near run thing with Kelly. I still don’t quite understand it all myself.

The project was being shut down, of course. Maeve had argued it from the very first moment when things began to settle back into normalcy after Kelly’s return. She strung out a hundred reasons why the Arch should never be used again, all well and good, but terribly disheartening to Nordhausen. He had been the Doubting Thomas up until the moment when he first plunged through the portal of the Arch. Seeing was believing, and he saw enough on that first mission to whet his appetite for more and more and more. He had opposed himself to Maeve in the long discussions over the future of the project. In time, Kelly had come round to Maeve’s side to tip the balance toward discontinuing things. Paul floated for a while, undecided, reluctant to abandon his long held theories that had been vindicated with such an amazing effect.

Eventually he came to fear the dangers involved in the technology more than he could appreciate the prospects it offered. It wasn’t that difficult to keep a lid on what they had accomplished that night. There had only been two other people at the facility when they took their stroll though the Trans-Jordan in 1917. Tom was oblivious of virtually everything that happened, for he had been down with the generators the whole time. As for Jen, she had been quietly persuaded that they should all stick to the cover story and say the project failed. Paul had a key hand in that. He finally managed to get that girl into bed!

Nordhausen smiled to think of the two of them now. Paul always did have a romantic streak in him. Thankfully, she was as impressionable as she was willing, and the secret was kept quiet. They would write some papers about it all and the investors would benefit by a few patents that would be developed from the technology. Most just shook their heads and bowed to the inward suspicion they held all along—that time travel was impossible. No one else, of course, knew anything more about it.

Still, the dire consequences and horrendous outcomes Maeve painted for them had eventually prevailed over Nordhausen’s arguments. He had tried his best to tantalize them with the prospects and potentials the Arch offered. They could have learned so much. Imagine watching Caesar crossing his Rubicon, or wandering through the great Pyramid of Giza. Imagine listening to one of Plato’s soliloquies, visiting the Parthenon in all its glory, or watching the intrepid defense of the 300 Spartans at Thermopylae. Imagine stealing up Mount Calvary and catching a glimpse of the crucifixion, or better yet, the resurrection! It seemed that every argument he made rebounded on him. The thought that they would muddy the waters of history and contaminate any of these crucial events was too much in the end. They had already stood witness to one resurrection, Maeve said, closing the matter.