Nexus Point (Meridian Series) (17 page)

       The man’s eyes narrowed, and then a glimmer
of a smile lit them, his lips sneering out, with little warmth. “In the middle
of nowhere,” he repeated the phrase, but he did not mock. His expression
transitioned, setting deeper with the same resignation the professor had heard
in his voice earlier. “Well it seems you are not the only one marooned here
now. I was supposed to go through, at moonrise, but the well is dissipated.”

       “The well?” Nordhausen tried to ground
himself in the exchange. “You mean to say this was a water cache  you were
worried about?  Surely you would not have missed a liter or two. Besides, we
haven’t even had a moment to drink. You were upon us before I could even fetch
my canteen.”

       The man looked at him, hand on his bearded
chin now, considering. The guards returned, somewhat breathless, and shaking
their heads in the negative. Words were exchanged in Arabic, and Nordhausen got
the gist that Paul had not been found. The leader was decided. He glanced at
the professor with a  vacant look in his eyes. “It is done,”  he said. “Your
friend is not here, and if you are certain he was in that chamber then he has
jumped through—or perhaps he merely fell through—but in either case the result
is the same.”

       “What in blazes are you talking about? Are
you saying he fell into some chasm there? Have your men found…found his body?”
There was real pain on Nordhausen’s face now, and he lashed himself inwardly
for dragging Paul into all of this.

       “My men found nothing,” said the leader.
“Nothing at all. And the water you saw glowing in the dark no longer glows. The
well is dissipated. If your friend went through then we are all in a Nexus
Point now. Who knows how long it will last, or how deep it will reach.”

       Nordhausen just gaped at him, not
understanding what the man was saying at first, until he spoke those last few
words and they jarred him with unexpected recognition.

       “Nexus Point?”

       The man shrugged, and smiled, his anger finally
resolved. “You don’t have any idea what I am talking about, do you? Well, how
do you Americans say it: we are all in the same boat now, yes? May Allah guide
us safely home.”

       It took Nordhausen a moment to absorb the
full implication of what he was hearing.
Nexus Point.
It was part of
Paul’s time theory. Could the man‘s use of the term have been mere coincidence?
Now it was Nordhausen’s turn sink a line and tug out the answer to a question
he dreaded to ask.

       “What do you mean by that,” he ventured. “Nexus
Point.”

       The man gave him a derisive look. “You would
not understand,” he said, and he seemed to speak more to himself than to
Nordhausen. “What’s done is done. It will be at least another month now before
the well can be used again. By that time the situation may have come to some
resolution. As for your friend, that remains to be seen. At the very least it
will introduce a variation, here… somewhere…  Who can say? The well has been
very stable, but the timing was off by at least four hours. The  temporal locus
may shift.” The man nodded his head, considering, almost oblivious of
Nordhausen now. “There is no way to achieve any clarity here. I will just have
to wait.”  He looked up at Nordhausen as he finished. “ You have no idea what I
am talking about, do you?”

       Nordhausen gasped inwardly as the man
finished. He had picked out two other terms that Paul often used when he talked
about time. In fact, the other man’s words only made sense in that very
context—
time
. Yet his anxiety only increased as his confusion abated.
How could this man be spouting terms right out of Paul’s lexicon on time
theory? His throat was dry and he swallowed to clear his voice. There was one
surefire way to synchronize his thinking with this stranger. He looked him
straight in the eye and spoke.

       “Nexus Point… Variation… Clarity… Temporal
Locus…” He plucked out the words and handed them back to his captor, watching
him closely as he finished with one final addition of his own: “Pushpoint.” The
man’s eyes widened with surprise. He had been staring past Nordhausen, deep in
thought as he gazed back along the winding throat of the cave to the gloaming
amber of Wadi Rumm. Now he fixed the professor with a hard, stare, his eyes
alight with emotion.

       “So,” he breathed. “Then you are not what
you seem after all! You are a member of the Order! How quaint. I should have
guessed as much. This story you concocted was too wild and preposterous to be
believed. What was it you buried in the Wadi, eh? Did you bring in equipment?”

       “Now, just a moment,” said Nordhausen. “You
used those words yourself. Where did you hear them? What exactly did you mean?”

       “Don’t be coy with me. It does not become
you.”

       Nordhausen glanced at the two guards, who
were watching the conversation indifferently from the back of the cave hollow.

       “Oh, do not concern yourself with them,”
said the
stranger. “My men
do not speak
English, and, even if they did, they would not understand what we were talking
about. My, my, what a fool I have been to ramble on like this. You are very
clever, professor—if that is how you prefer to be thought of. Tell me: how did
you discover we were operating here?”

       Nordhausen’s mind was racing with every
phrase the man uttered. A moment ago it seemed that they had reached some
common ground, but now the man was veering off onto another tangent, leaving
confusion in his wake. The stranger waited for him to answer, but he could only
burst out with a question of his own. 

       “Who in God’s name
are
you?”

       The stranger smiled, this time with a little
warmth, as though he had come to some new assessment of the professor and
perceived him as an equal now—not simply someone to be bullied about for his
trespass here.

       “In God’s name?  Yes, in Allah’s name I will
tell you. I am Abdul Hakam, Servant of the Arbitrator. That is a given name,
but also very telling. Others call me Rasil, the Messenger. And you? What is
your given name?”

       “Robert,” said the professor. “Robert
Nordhausen.”

       “Ah!” The man smiled broadly now. “Then you
are named after a real warrior—one we call Badi al Zaman: the Marvel of Time.
Many tales are told of Boulos and the Badi al Zaman. In fact, he lives this
very moment. You even bear a resemblance.
Tell me, when did you arrive?
The penumbra has kept us all at bay for so long that it is surprising anyone is
able to get back past the event now. What a day that was! We call that one the
Day Of Retribution, but you found a way to nullify our advantage. Yes, I was in
the Deep Nexus when everything changed, and I remember how it all was before things
solidified again. It was a good time for us then, but now all is overthrown.”
His eyes clouded over with a vacant darkness, resolving to a carefully
controlled squint of anger.

       “What age are you?” The question was curt
and sudden, demanding in the voice of the captor again.

       Nordhausen did not quite know what to make
of it, or why his age would be relevant. “My age? Well, I was born in the
1960s,” he began.

       “Ah, then you are of the seventh age—I am of
the ninth—so you would not know of what I speak. I will tell you then, for we
are safe in a Nexus now, and no harm can be done. The Moslem world once
stretched to a third of the surface of the earth. The muezzin’s call to prayer
reverberated from a hundred thousand minarets, all over the world. When the
hajj
came, the multitudes thronged to Mecca in numbers that would stagger the
imagination. Do you have any idea what it was like? The sea of pilgrims became
an ocean of believers clothed in the simplicity of the
iraam.
They would
stretch for miles and miles on the roads leading into the city. There were so
many that the holy days had to be extended to accommodate them. They smothered
the plains about Mount Arafat, flowing in to the sacred Mosque of Haram and
circling the
Ka’ba
in an endless murmuring stream of prayer that had no
end. We were nearly three billion strong then! Now…” The darkness returned to
his eyes, then flared with the light of determination. “Things are different
now, and I suppose you know as much about that as any man, yes? That was truly
a masterstroke, my friend! You will have to tell me how you accomplished it!
Strange that the Order recruits from this time—but agents are kept in every era
now, by both sides. The struggle continues, so do not rest easy. We have a
saying:  ‘nothing is written,’ and we hope to see the pilgrims clot the roads
to Mecca again one day—rest assured.”

       Rasil’s eyes glowed as he spoke, a challenge
in his words and a smile animating the dark stubble of his beard. “But forgive
me.” He gestured to his guards, indicating that they should release the
professor’s bonds. “There is no need for this now, and I understand your
outrage at the treatment you received. Forgive my poor manners. I did not know!
You are very clever, my friend. So, how did you learn of this place?”

       Now Nordhausen was truly flustered. The
stranger, Rasil as he called himself, was talking like one of the lab techs at
the Arch complex in Berkeley! He used yet another of Paul’s favorite terms:
Penumbra. Who
was
this man? He tossed about possibilities in the
twinkling of a moment’s thought: was he a government agent trailing the two of
them on their trip to Jordan? He discarded that card at once, for it had been
mere happenstance that the helicopter landed here—unless the damn pilot was in
cahoots all along—but no, he had forced the pilot to land at gunpoint. This
meeting was entirely random, yet this man was talking like he had been in on
the time project from the very first.

       Then the notion that he had been avoiding
finally tackled him and he fell flat on his belly with the realization.

       This man is a
time traveler.
  He’s
another one of Mr. Graves band of meddling miracle workers from the future! It
was the only thing that made any sense. How else could the man know these terms
and speak them in such a clearly related context? And he thinks…by God, he thinks
I’m a time traveler as well, or at least some agent in that enterprise. That’s
why he’s changed his manner and gone all civil and polite of a sudden. A moment
ago he was threatening to cut my throat, and now he’s grinning at me like a
Cheshire cat.

       A time traveler! Paul argued it himself: the
clearest evidence that time travel was possible would be visitations from the
future. Nordhausen knew only too well that anything was possible now that the
Arch had torn its first fateful breach in the continuum. The notion that this
new technology would survive into future generations, and be used, was not a
difficult leap. But what would this man be doing here in the middle of Wadi
Rumm? A sudden answer came to him, all in that same fleeting instant.
Paul…

      
“Something’s happened to my friend, hasn’t it? You
knew we would be here,” he was groping in his thinking now, “and you were
trying to intervene somehow, just like you did with Kelly, yes?” The notion
that Paul had suffered some accident in the cave preyed upon him with a
vengeance as he finished. “But you were too late.”

       “Too late? You mean too late to stop you?
No, my friend, I was right on target. I came through from…  Let us just say
that I was timely enough with my arrival. But you have not answered my
question. How did you discover this place? When did you arrive, and, since we
are both safe here in a Nexus, what were you about?”

       Nordhausen was still struggling with the
idea that some dire accident had befallen Paul, when an inner sense put the
subtle clues in the man’s words together and handed him the solution.

       This man thinks I was sent here; on some
kind of mission. He’s asking me about arrival times, and I damn well know he
doesn’t mean my flight to Amman.    Nordhausen covered his mouth with his hand
for a moment, as though  unwilling to let his mind blurt out any of his
confusion and bewilderment. One thought still clawed at him: Paul.

       “Damn, I wish I had never dragged him into
this now. What’s happened to him? Do you know?”

       “Ah, you are worried about your friend. I
understand. Then he did not intend to jump here? Do you mean to say that he was
merely sent to observe? I see!” Rasil nodded his head with inner confirmation.
“That is why you arrived early. You meant to establish yourselves here as
observers—perhaps you set up a monitor in the Wadi to try and analyze the
vectors. But you did not expect us at this hour and our meeting was mere
coincidence. Am I correct? Then your friend became restless and wandered into
the cave for a closer look. Too close, perhaps. If you are telling me the
truth, and he did not intend to jump, then it is almost certain that he has
fallen.”

       Nordhausen clasped his forehead, straining
to get his mind around all of this. The man’s words would lead him through a
thorny path, and then land him right smack in the middle of his greatest fear.
Paul must have slipped over some unseen ledge in the heart of the stony cavern.

       “Fallen?” He repeated the word, his worry
and self-recrimination wrapped about it like a wet blanket.