Nexus Point (Meridian Series) (8 page)

       She remembered how she had confronted her
greatest fear at the end of the mission. Robert and Paul were still flushed and
dizzy with the elation of their return. The Arch was a scintillating montage of
light and the generators were whining as they strained to provide the power
required for the retraction jump. She recalled the excitement she had first
felt with Robert’s return. Then Paul came through and everyone was safe at
last. She had the barest moment of relief before that odd rumble shuddered
through the Arch, like a ghostly train passing in the night. A howling sound
droned in its wake, and she felt the fear gather strength within her.

       Things were different.

       She knew it even before she dared to look at
the pages of
The Seven Pillars.
Something had changed and she could feel
it like a shift in the weather, a faint, yet palpable variation in the
certainty of her life.  Something had changed.

       That was the moment she knew Kelly was gone.
Before they ever took the elevator ride up to the main lab she knew, in her
heart of hearts, that he would not be there. The twisted ripple of Paradox was
at work. Heisenberg was running wild. Everything was different now.

       When Paul found the farewell note Kelly had
scrawled, she could barely bring herself to look at it. The errant strokes of
his pen were strokes upon her heart. She knew this moment was waiting for them
all if the mission was a success. It was simple logic: if the Palma Event never
happened, then there would be no reason for Mr. Graves to come back and seek
their help. It was Graves who made everything possible: first by preventing 
Kelly’s untimely death, and then by tucking that little clue away in his
raincoat. If Graves never came, then…

       Kelly was gone.

       Time railed in a confounding loop of
Paradox, and lashed out at anything that did not belong on the changed
Meridian.
Paul tried to explain it to them
once. He said that the notion of Paradox was so insulting to time that she
would find a way to punish the offenders for their mischief. Paradox was not a
mind-puzzle, but a real effect. It was a cleansing and healing force of time
that promised nothing less than annihilation for all those who would dare to
meddle, and it wanted to charge Kelly with his life.
Kelly did not
belong. His presence could no longer be accounted for, and the quantum foam of
uncertainty wanted to simply engulf his life and suck it away to oblivion. At
least that is what they believed at first. His miraculous reappearance at the
memorial service had shaken them all—Maeve more than any other.

       Nothing was written—not even death, it
seemed.
Kelly was saved and snatched away to
some distant Nexus Point in the future. She did not yet understand how they did
it, but apparently they knew something more about the continuum than she could
divine at this point, and so she lived with the mystery, as she lived again
with Kelly.

       The months that passed
brought them much closer. The love she felt taken away from her before its time
finally began to bloom, and she took great joy in her relationship with him.
Oh, he had his quirks and his silliness, as all men did—particularly when he
was around Paul
. But there was something in the
intensity of his moods, the expression of his poetry, and his simple
intelligent reflection on almost any subject that she dearly loved
. She
did not appreciate the notion that all of this was the artifact of some
careless incident from the past—that it was all as temporal as the phases of
the moon. Somehow, she wanted to find that same permanence and sureness in her
love that she so labored for in the world she built around her. She did not
want her love to become a fool of time, but rather, as Shakespeare had so
artfully expressed it, ‘an ever fixed mark that looks on tempests and is never
shaken.’

       The life she had now
with Kelly was always at risk in her mind, as much as her heart wanted that
permanence. She knew that it had been stolen from time like a chip slipped
under the table when the dealer was looking the other way. As much as she tried
to put the fear aside, it persisted in her now, and each day was an effort to
master that feeling in the safe little rituals of her everyday life.

       She sighed, feeling
Gizelle stir beneath her, as if aware of the unsettled mood that had fallen
upon her. She was reaching the head of the bridle trail now, and she needed to
stop and look for that sage, and perhaps a sprig or two of wild thyme while she
was at it. She put the strange notions in her head aside for a while, and
thought about dinner with Kelly. He was probably finishing up the data run at
the lab now, and they would meet at her apartment in two hours. Or at least she
thought they would. She could never be certain of anything again.

       Heisenberg be damned!

5

The dinner was
long over
and they were settling in with a cup of coffee
before Kelly got up the courage to broach the subject with Maeve. He had been
working through the data runs from the mission, documenting everything for
permanent archival records as they contemplated the termination of the project.
Maeve had been the strongest proponent for shutting everything down, with
Nordhausen arguing most of the other side, as one might expect. The historians
had a taste of the sublime power of the Arch, and they wanted more. Outcomes
and Consequences, with the burden of making sure everything turned out all
right, knew just how dangerous the technology could be. It was Nordhausen’s
curiosity and the excitement of discovery against Maeve’s prudence and reasoned
caution—with just the right dash of fear thrown in for good measure. In the
end, the uncertainties about the future of the technology had proved a strong
argument.

       Maeve
gathered momentum when she forced them to consider the real implications of the
project. How long could they keep something like the Arch a secret? The
government was certain to find out what they were doing, if they didn’t already
have their suspicions. Once that happened they would certainly move in and take
the whole project over as a matter of ‘national security.’ Nothing could be
more inimical to the project team leaders than that thought. Once the Feds got
their hands on the technology there would be no end to it. The knowledge would
certainly leak out, and the resulting proliferation issue would give rise to
conflicts that would be stupefying. “Suppose they use the Arch as a weapon,”
Maeve had argued. “You know it’s inevitable if we don’t shut this down. One
side will try to use the Arch to undo the other, and the result will make
Hiroshima and Nagasaki look like child’s play.”

       The long silence
in the room had choked Nordhausen’s argument to death that night. They would
shut it all down. Paul convinced everyone to stick by the cover story that this
was all just an effort to poke around in the theoretical physics. They were
just playing with particles in the micro-scale of an accelerator scheme—just
tickling Heisenberg on the chin. He would write the paper for the physics
department and they would all have to find a way to make it worth something to
the private investors. He was certain they could squeeze two or three patents
out of the whole thing, and these should provide enough reward for the key
contributors.

       Their lease
on the facility had another six months, and that gave them plenty of time to
tie up loose ends and plan how they could best put the whole thing quietly
behind them. Three months later Kelly was just completing his data packing,
scouring the numbers for any red flag that would be difficult to explain to an
auditor or an over zealous investigator. The problem seemed innocuous at first.
There was something amiss in the power usage curve.

Someone had
transposed some numbers, and the more he looked into it the more suspicious he
became. It was not long before he uncovered some log entries that put him on to
the culprit. Nordhausen had copied some data blocks into the machine two weeks
ago, but the information was not in the archives. A check of the logs showed
some very spotty deletions, and the file sizes and system clock dates all
corresponded to a single evening in early July.

       “I checked
the sign-in sheets for the lab,” he told Maeve as he stirred his coffee. “There
was only one shift reported that weekend because of the Independence Day
holiday. Everyone left early on Friday, but a grad student was in for three
hours that night, and it was just logged  as a routine security call.”

       “So, what’s
the problem?” Maeve asked. “Was he fishing around in the data?” Her fears got
the best of her. “Oh, Kelly, what if this guy was working for the Feds? Do you
think he found anything?”

       “I wouldn’t
worry about that,” Kelly assured her. “All the vital system files are
encrypted.” He shifted in his chair, looking for a more comfortable position as
he considered what he was about to say next. “I found one other thing in the
accounting log that set me thinking,” he explained.

       “The
accounting log? I thought that was closed and sent off to the auditors last
month?”

       “It was,
but I was just running checksums on the file blocks on that disk when I noticed
something out of place. There was a deposit listed with a revised file date—a
rather large deposit.”

       “I’m not
following you.” Maeve reached for the Arabian steaming pot that she used to
serve coffee, and slowly tilted the long golden neck to warm her cup. “Are you
saying someone tried to cover up a deposit? A withdrawal is one thing, but a
deposit? Do we have an unknown benefactor who might be trying to get in on a
share of the patent royalties?”

       “I hadn’t
thought of that,” said Kelly. “But it does make sense.” He considered the issue
for a moment, then discarded it. “No, on second thought it would not explain
the other clues.”

       “Clues?
You’re making this sound like a mystery novel. What are you getting at?”

       Kelly
heaved a sigh and decided to let his suspicions tumble out. Still, he was
careful in how he approached the matter. After all, he was talking about a
mutual friend.

       “Did Robert
have any further discussion with you about the project after our meeting in
June?”

       “Nordhausen?
No, I haven’t seen him for several weeks now. The last I heard he was yanking
on Paul’s arm to fly over to Jordan with him. It seems he has some sentimental
attachment to a fossil he claims to have discovered on their first jump.”

       “Yes, the
Ammonite. He told me about that. In fact, he’s over there right now. I’m surprised
he convinced Paul to go. They left last weekend and won’t be back for another
ten days. But this is different.” He scratched the back of his neck and Maeve
was immediately on guard. She had seen Kelly make that gesture before, and it
was always the preamble to something uncomfortable he felt he needed to say.

       “There’s
something going on here, isn’t there?”    “Well, you said it yourself: why
would someone want to try and cover up a deposit to the project bank account?
Only a few people could even get access to that account to do such a thing, and
it wouldn’t be hard to track down the dates with the auditor.”

       “So?”

       “So I gave
him a call.”

       “And?”
Maeve let just a pinch of impatience creep into her voice.”

       Kelly
hesitated for the briefest moment and then let the matter go. “The deposit was
made on Monday the 5
^th
of July, and the system file discrepancies
were all traced to the 3
^rd
.”

       “You mean
right after you discovered a grad student  had come in on a holiday weekend…”
Maeve was starting to piece things together now. “Get to the point, Kelly. Your
coffee is getting cold and I’m not letting you touch that pot until you come
out with this.” She fixed him with that hazel-eyed stare that had won so many
victories for her in the Outcomes Committee.

       “The deposit
was made by Robert,” he said nonchalantly.

       “Nordhausen?”
Maeve seemed genuinely surprised. “What do you figure he was up to—salving a
guilty conscience for all the money he cost us with research? Lord, he spent
nearly ten percent of the budget trying to isolate vectors for the Shakespeare
mission, and then the whole thing was trashed at the last minute. Maybe he was
feeling guilty.”

       “I’d like
to think so but—“

       “But you
know him as well as I do. OK, Kelly. What was he up to this time?”

       Kelly could
feel the heat entering her tone and he wondered if he had made a mistake in
bringing this up. Yet he had come this far, and there was no way to back out
gracefully now that he had dangled out these irregularities. He tried to
explain.

       “Well, the
numbers were pretty significant—in file size, I mean. There were several
hundred terabytes of data with altered checksums, and the whole block had been
shunted off to the recycling bin. That was erased, but I was able to recover
the base code for the data blocks and—“

       “English
please.”

       Kelly
scratched the back of his neck again and Maeve’s eyes narrowed with suspicion.
“Only one thing could account for that much data,” he explained. “Oh, he used
the secondary drive system, and had everything running through the simulator to
make it look like it was just a trial run and all, but the data transfer tags
were pretty clear.” He resisted the urge to explain the technical discrepancies
and acceded to Maeve’s request. “It was coordinate information—temporal and
spatial.”