Touchstone (Meridian Series) (9 page)

“Please, Maeve, we can’t talk
about the project here,” said Paul. “There are too many variables.” He looked
around him, noting the passing of nurses and orderlies in the halls, and the
open doorways leading to other rooms.

Lindford pulled herself
together, and brushed back a loose strand of red hair that had gotten in her
face. “Yes, I understand but…“ She broke down, her voice choked with emotion.

Paul and Robert instinctively
went to comfort her. “Come,” said Robert. “Let’s get out of the hall.”

It was a semi-private room, and
Kelly’s bed was screened off by an opaque blue curtain. Paul peeked behind it,
thankful that there was no other patient occupying the other bed. His eyes were
immediately drawn to his good friend Kelly, who lay on an adjustable bed, as
though paralyzed. He was hooked up to heart  monitor, a glucose drip, and an
EKG record brain wave response. The lines were moving, tracing a thin milky
phosphoresce on the monitor screens, but there was little life to them.

Kelly’s eyes fluttered open,
unfocused. His head lolled in their direction, as if he was aware of their presence.
Paul leaned in, talking to Kelly as he knelt by the bed.

       “Hello, mister. It’s me.
Can you hear me, Kelly? How did this happen to you?”

       “Just came on…” Kelly’s
voice was barely a whisper.

       “Has this ever happened to you before?”

       Kelly seemed to gain a bit of strength.
“I’ve had random fits where I felt…precarious. You know… Like that night on the
project. I felt like I was slipping… Like I might just vanish into nothing.”
His breathing was labored as he spoke.

       “Stop it, Paul!” Maeve
hissed. “See how he is? It’s temporal variance—I’m certain of it. If we had a
lab machine hooked up to him you’d probably say his pattern signature was
fading or something. Can’t you see it? I thought putting that DVD in the
memorial was supposed to fix all this! Why is this happening?”

       Paul gave her a serious
look, deep in thought. “Kelly,” he said again, with more urgency. “Please, I
have to know if this came on suddenly, or if this is an effect that has been
accumulating over time.”

       “What?” Kelly closed his eyes.

       “Kelly. Kelly Ramer!
Listen to me!
When
did this happen? Can you remember that?”

       “When?”

       “Oh, leave him alone,
Paul,” Maeve protested again. “I can tell you exactly when it happened. Come
outside. Robert, you stay here with Kelly.”

Paul nodded and the two of them
stepped out into the hall. Nordhausen gave them a glance, a worried expression
on his face, but he soon turned his attention to Kelly.

       “Robert?” Kelly had opened his eyes again, and he was
trying to force a smile.

       “I’m here, Kelly. The
others stepped out to talk. So… how do you feel?

       “Pretty damn mortal.”

       The professor was distracted by the beeping of the hospital
monitors, which seemed to speed up, then taper off again.

       “It’ll be okay, my
friend,” Robert consoled.  “Paul will know what to do. Just be here now.”

       “Where?” said Kelly. 
“What time is it?”

       “What does that matter.”
Nordhausen put his hand on Kelly’s brow, feeling an odd coolness there. He
certainly wasn’t running a temperature, which ruled out any sudden illness.

       “You don’t understand…”
Kelly labored to speak again. “This isn’t life for me, Robert. I should be dead
now… I’ve thought about that every second I’ve lived since the mission. Every
second of every moment. Hell… Maybe I am turning into a wraith…”

       “No good with that sort
of talk, Kelly. You just hold on now. We’ve got an alert on the Golem line.
Your program is running numbers and working up the report right now. We’ll get
to the bottom of this. You’ll see. You are going to be fine. Maeve will stay
here with you, and Paul and I will go take care of this business. You’ll will
be out of here in no time! I promise!”

       “Okay…  I just feel so
strange…wish the damn drugs would help. What are they shooting me up with?” His
head lolled up to look at the glucose drip.

       “Just fluids and sugars
to help stabilize your system.”

       “Sugar buzz…” Kelly began
to drift. “Got to rest…”

       “Sure, sure, just rest. I’ll wait
here till Maeve and Paul come in, and we will take good care of you. Just
relax, don’t worry about anything. You’ll be fine.”

       “Yeah, fine…” He closed
his eyes and lapsed into silence.

Nordhausen turned the lights down, and sat in a
chair by the bed. He watched his friend’s breathing, his chest hardly moving,
his breath the barest whisper on the oxygen feed line near his nose. Tears
welled in the corners of his eyes and his face betrayed the deep emotion he was
feeling now.

“My fault,” he whispered. “I did this…” The
hospital monitors were pulsing calmly as Kelly seemed to be falling into a
deeper sleep.

The door opened again and Maeve
stepped in first. Paul remained outside, gesturing at Robert to come. Robert
gave Kelly one last look and stood up, offering the bedside chair to Maeve.

A moment later the two men were standing in
the busy hospital corridor, speaking to one another in low whispers.

“So, what’s the plan?” Robert was eager to
do something to change the situation.

       “Well this is all very
theoretical, and I haven’t done any real time mapping yet, but Maeve and I
think we have to go check the DVD in the grave—you know, the memorial site
where we buried our mementos for Kelly.”

       The professor glanced at
the open door to Kelly’s room, as though afraid that Maeve would overhear them.
“Does she know?” His voice was a whisper in Paul’s ear.

       “Not everything. She
thinks the alert is the cause of the incident. I didn’t mention your … well,
you know.”

       “Right,” the professor
agreed, glancing over his shoulder. “Not the time for it. But what do we do
now?”

       “We’ve got to get back to
the Arch. I’m pretty sure the Nexus from your mission has dissipated by now,
but we still have the shelter of the Arch Nexus as long as we can keep it
running? We’ll check the Golem report and then get on over to the memorial site
to see what’s up.”

       The implications of that
finally came home to the professor. “You think someone may have tampered with
the DVD?”

       “It’s a possibility.”

       “Okay, let’s go. But what
would that mean, Paul?”

       “I’ll explain in the car. Let’s say
goodbye to Kelly and Maeve and get moving.”

~

      
They
returned to Paul’s car, a white Honda Civic that he had been fond of for many
years. As soon as they were underway Nordhausen returned to the subject of
their errand.

“Why do you want to go to the
gravesite?”

“We think the DVD might not be
safe there. As you know, we counted on the time travelers of the future, who
saved Kelly from a paradoxical disintegration. We counted on their finding the
DVD we buried in the grave so they could know when and where to snatch Kelly,
just before he vanished, and it worked. When the Nexus Point dissipated, they
sent him back.”

Safe and sound, it had appeared,
until this event.

Nordhausen asked, “So what do
you want to do?”

Dorland thought a moment. “Maeve
thinks that’s not a safe place. She wants me to get the DVD, and put it in a
safe deposit box or something, where we can be more assured of its security.
We’ll set up a foundation to maintain it or something. And I don’t think that’s
such a bad idea.”

“Security? But who would want to
dig up a grave site? Are you thinking some gardener got his work order wrong
and went trowling through Kelly’s memorial ground?”

“Maybe,” he stretched out the
word, to emphasize how remote he thought the possibility, “someone might get
there before Mr. Graves’ friends find it in the future. That would immediately
expose Kelly to paradox again.”

“Someone? Who are you talking
about?”

“Remember that satellite phone
call you made from Wadi Rumm?”

“Yes. What’s that got to do with
this?”

“Whose phone was it?” Paul gave
him a knowing wink.

“You mean to say that you think
Rasil… that the Assassins…”

“We don’t know, but as I said
before, that call would have been easy enough to trace. No matter how much we
try to cover up our activities here, it could have been an obvious pointer to
this point in the continuum. They know we have an Arch complex operational
here, and they damn well know we must have had something to do with the
Palma
thing.”

“But you said we were all Prime
Movers—that they couldn’t touch us without risking the entire future
progression of the Time technology. Look at me. I walked right out of the Nexus
and I’m still fit as a fiddle.”

“That might be true—at least I
hoped as much. I think we may have a Time Conundrum on our hands. Time isn’t
certain what to do with this situation, and so she left you in one piece while
she’s sorting things through. But look at Kelly. Prime mover or not, he’s in
jeopardy right now. Your integrity may be compromised as well. But who really
knows?”

Nordhausen took a deep breath.
“OK… suppose someone is trying to tamper with that DVD. That means they’ve come
here—to our time?

“Not necessarily. They may have
arrived yesterday, a week ago, last month. Who knows? They may have found the
thing in the year 2050, or three years before
Graves
and his people were slated to find it.”

“What? So how does this explain
Kelly’s present condition?”

Dorland was becoming less and
less sure.  “Well,” he said, feeling his way as he went, “Paradox is
retroactive. At least that’s what I’m starting to think now. If they get their
hands on the DVD in the year 2050, like I suggested, then Time has to do some
quick editing. None of the events lived by Kelly in this
Meridian
would have been possible.”

“Editing? That’s appalling! How
could time rewind itself and undo all those events. Kelly’s been safe and sound
for months now. Think of all the little pushpins he’s been responsible for in
all that time.”

“True,” said Dorland,
overlooking his friend’s persistent error with the terminology. “I admit I’m
reaching. But Maeve is convinced this is a Temporal Variation, and we’ve got to
check on that DVD. In fact, we should do this now,
before
we go to the
lab. Kelly’s life is in danger here.”

Nordhausen looked sharply at
Dorland. “You think it’s gone, don’t you.”

Dorland kept his eyes on the
road. “No, I don’t, I just agree with Maeve, that we should keep it in a safer
place.”

Nordhausen was silent for a
moment. “Kelly is in a Schroedinger’s Box,” he said with a sudden finality.
Dorland’s gave him an odd look, waiting for him to explain himself.

Nordhausen went on. “Kelly is
like the cat in the Schroedinger’s Box. Except, he’s outside the box, but we
don’t know if he is alive or dead!”

“Go on.” Paul was listening very
closely now, his attention divided between his driving and Nordhausen.

“Well,” said Nordhausen, slowing
down as his theory ramified in his mind, “as you know, Schroedinger set up a
thought experiment, in which he put a cat in a box, with a bottle of prussic
acid and a trigger on the bottle hooked up to a Geiger Counter.”

“Yes, yes, and the Geiger
counter was monitoring a source of ionizing radiation, with even odds that it
would or would not emit a detectible particle in any hour.” Dorland hurried him
along.

“Slow down, let me work this
out,” Nordhausen protested. “Okay, let me see… In the thought experiment, after
the passage of an hour, the source either has or has not radiated, and the cat
is or is not dead, but occupies a condition that is both, until you open the
box and look.”

       “Yes, yes, Schroedinger tossed that out as an offhand
comment, and said that it was solved by observation, and a half dead and half
alive cat in a box was a logical nonsense. Many liberal artists like you take
it to mean more than it does.”

       “Well, whatever nonsense it is, we have a black box, and we
don’t know what is in it, and we are relying on what
is
in it to
maintain Kelly’s existence against Paradox. Sounds like a Schroedinger’s box to
me!”

       Dorland went into a brown funk as he drove, his mind
wrestling with time theory even as he twisted the wheel to navigate the narrow
road. They were in the Berkeley Hills, working their way along a wooded road
behind the university and the Lab complex.

       The night had come early with the appearance of a low, wet
front. The sky was darkening, although the rims of the clouds in the western
horizon were made brilliant by the low sun. It was suddenly cold and blustery,
with a light rain speckling the windshield. Dorland gripped the wheel harder,
his head poking forward to see through the rain. Thankfully,  a full moon was
riding high through the moving clouds, illuminating the way ahead with a
silvery sheen.