Nexus Point (Meridian Series) (19 page)

       “Hammered it myself,” said Kelly with a smile.
“So what do you figure he was up to?”

       “God only knows,” Maeve sighed letting her
exasperation vent a bit.

       “Well, we’d have to run date queries in the
history database for hours to isolate something significant.”

       “For all the good it might do us,” Maeve
quipped. “Who knows what he did while he was there, Kelly. Sure we could run up
the history files, but who’s to say they would mean anything. I mean, if he
changed
things…Lord, that man tempts fate with utter impunity!” She fixed him with that
look she would use to drive home a point, and he took her meaning at once.

       “Right. If he caused a variation then the
history would seem completely innocuous—unless one of us recognized something
wrong, something out of place. But that couldn’t happen because we weren’t part
of the operation. We weren’t in the Nexus—safe in the null zone of the void.”

       “And that’s exactly why this business is so
damn dangerous. What if he tries this again? How would we know if things are
the way they’re supposed to be? It’s maddening!  You know, I spent six hours in
a library one night just to satisfy myself that Shakespeare was sleeping
peacefully between the covers of all his books. Now what—do I have to go over
there and read all thirty-seven plays again?”

       Kelly scratched his forehead. “Now Maeve,”
he began. “Let’s not jump to conclusions here until we have more information.
You’re right,” he placated her, “this is bullshit. He just can’t go off on a
train ride through the English countryside and then cover the whole thing up like
this. It’s not right.”

       “It’s Nordhausen.” The finality in Maeve’s
voice carried a wealth of emotion. “It’s the reason why we have to shut this
down. Don’t you see, Kelly? We’re adrift now, without any compass or even a
sure star to steer by. We have no reference point to tether us to any sense of
reality. Things could be changing and we’d never even know it!”

       “I agree with you completely,” he assured
her. “In fact, I was thinking a lot about that after Paul first brought up this
business about the stability factors in a void created by a Nexus Point.”

       “Stability factors?”

       “You remember the meeting we had about two
weeks before the mission? Paul was talking about the Nexus, and how it forms
this protective bubble around the Arch. He thinks there’s a physical void
associated with the Arch itself, and not merely a temporal void that protects
the actual travelers.”

       “You’re losing me,” Maeve complained.

       “Hang on a second. We didn’t go through the
Arch, right?”

       “Right.”

       “So how is it we still remember Palma and
all the rest? We weren’t in the temporal void, but we were inside the
physical
null zone around the Arch. Paul wasn’t sure just how far its influence would
extend, but it looks like we’re getting a good measure on that now—say a
hundred yards or so. That’s why we can still remember what happened that night.
The lab here is about five floors above the Arch, right? That’s well within
that radius. Now, take Tom, for example.”

       “Tom? What’s he got to do with all this?”

       “Hear me out for a second. Tom was down in
the generator room throughout the whole mission, right?  Now those steps are on
the other side of the complex, and there’s a corridor heading east for about
thirty yards before you get to the generator room.”

       “And your point is?” Maeve tried to curtail
her impatience and Kelly pressed on to finish his thought.

       “That puts the generator room well beyond
the hundred yard radius. Don’t you see? I spent some time with Tom after the
mission. He doesn’t remember anything at all!”

       “What do you mean?”

       “I mean that I asked him, half jokingly,
what he thought of the news over the Memorial Day weekend and he didn’t get the
joke.”

       “I’m not sure I do.”

       “He didn’t
know
,
 
Maeve. He
had no inkling that the entire east coast was about to be inundated with a
three hundred foot tsunami. He wasn’t in the Nexus!”

       Maeve bit her lower lip, considering. “We
knew there was something odd about Tom’s experience. He seemed completely
unaffected, but we weren’t sure why. And that cute lab tech Paul was flirting
with had a lot of unaccountable blank spots in her memory as well.”

       “You mean Jen? Yes, that confirms my
theory—or Paul’s theory. The intercom was out that night because of the storm.
Must have been a freak lightening strike  or something. In any case, Jen was shuttling
back and forth between the lab here and the generator room all through the
mission. She was physically moving in and out of the null spot surrounding the
Arch. Paul told me she was feeling strange all night. She had this sense that
something truly significant was happening, and then the heart of it would slip
away from her. One minute she was worried sick about the news of the Palma
event, and then the next she moment she had completely forgotten about it.  She
wrote it all off to the stress of the moment, but it’s pretty telling evidence
for the notion that the physical null zone has a limited radius. That’s why
nobody else on earth knows what really happened that night except the four of
us.”

       “But Jen remembers Palma. Paul told me he
had to do a lot of explaining to settle her down after the retraction.”

       “Yes, Jen too, I suppose,” said Kelly. “She
has partial memory of the event. She knows what happened because she was right
here in the lab when we pulled Nordhausen out, but it all seems like a dream to
her. She gets these odd
déjà vu
experiences now. Have you talked to Paul
about it? The poor girl wakes up screaming, drenched in sweat. Paul has to sit
with her for hours to help her sort everything through. I think the key moment
was when the transformation actually took place at the mission end of the
operation. Jen must have been up here in the lab when that happened. That put
her in the Nexus with us—right in the eye of the storm. But right after I ran
the final retraction scheme on Paul, I sent Jen down to tell Tom to cut the
power. She moved outside that hundred yard radius again, very soon after the
retraction.”

       “What do you think happened?”

       “Well, I’m not quite sure, but I think it
takes a little while for the Nexus to collapse after the time breach is closed.
That’s when Paradox is active, trying to clean up all the little loose ends and
broken threads that it can before the new Milieu solidifies and the Meridian
takes a definite course.”

       “Don’t remind me,” said Maeve, a warning in
her eyes. She didn’t want to think about that awful moment when she first
realized that Kelly’s life would be forfeit if the mission succeeded.

       “Just this once.” Kelly needed to get this
out, and he ventured on. “I was fading, Maeve. God, it was an odd feeling—like
when you start to pass out but your senses still keep working. I could see, and
hear, and feel the cold surround me… I just had to get that note written,
because I think I knew that someone was punching my ticket right then.”

       “Kelly…” Maeve’s eyes were glassy and he
could see that she was struggling to keep her feelings in check.

       “Sorry, Maeve.” He put his hand on her knee,
a gentle reassurance that he was still there, alive and well. “Don’t worry.
We’ve got some good long years ahead of us yet.”

       “A hundred years,” she whispered.

       “A hundred years,” he repeated with a smile.
“If you’ll have me.” He took off his baseball cap and ran his hand through his
hair. “Well the point of all this is that I had this idea.”

       “Not another one of those ideas,” Maeve
teased with a smile.
“How much time did you burn on
our Arion system account with this one?“

       “A lot,” Kelly confessed. “I guess I’ll be
making my own little deposit in the project account to cover the debt. But I
had this idea and so I worked up a program.”

       “A program?”

       “Yes, and I’ve had it running round the
clock on a machine in the next room. On a lot of machines, in fact.”

       “Twenty-four hours a
day? What’s it doing, crunching some numbers for you?”

       “Kind of…Remember when you said we had lost
our reference point? Well I felt the same way for a good long while after I
came back. I mean, you should have seen the operation these guys had
.”

       “You’re talking about our friends in the
future—about Graves and all?”  

       “Right. They had some slick operation there.
I wanted to get a look at their consoles but they wouldn’t let me set one foot
out of my receiving chamber—that was what they called it. But I could see some
of the equipment when they came and went through the door.”

       “We agreed not to talk about that anymore,
Kelly.”

       “I’m sorry, but it’s just that I had some
time on my hands there, in a manner of speaking, and I was wondering how they
knew if they were going to be successful on the mission. Sure, the changes
would be obvious, but where would the record of all the previous time be
stored? What was their reference point? How could they navigate without a
compass, as you said a moment ago? So, after I got back I started working the
problem and—“

       “I’m afraid to hear this,” Maeve protested.
“You aren’t going to tell me that you used the Arch now, are you?”

       “The Arch? No. I’m not that reckless. You’re
right about Nordhausen. We’ve got to have some stern words with Robert the
moment he gets back from his little fossil hunt in Jordan. No, I wrote this
program, see, and I keep the damn thing running all the time. In fact, it’s all
over the net: my little Golems.”

       “You mean that screensaver you put out last
month?”

       “Yup. Circulation is up over a hundred
thousand installs now, and growing. It was just a nifty little agent that I
called my Golem. People love the damn thing!”

       “Yeah, I have it running on my box at home
too, but aside from the cute graphics and the pretty kaleidoscopic patterns I
don’t see how it relates to what we’re talking about.”

       “What’s in a name, my dear. A Golem, as you
may know, comes from the Jewish tradition. It was a man made of clay, magically
brought to life to perform menial tasks. It's like a pre-industrial revolution
concept of a robot.. Did you ever read Brin’s
Kiln People?
He had a
world where people could make duplicates of themselves to run errands. Well,
the idea has applications in the computer world as well. In Unix such software
services are called daemons, artfully enough, and on an old Microsoft platform
they were less romantically called ‘services.’ I kind of think the handle fits
the task.”

       “But what does it do?”

       “Don’t you ever use the search feature? You
type in keywords and then just walk away and cook dinner, or turn in for the
night. Then my Golem screensaver comes up when the system idles and performs
all your searches on the Internet. The next time you sit down at your box, the
friendly little Golem is there with a nice little report.”

       “OK, I’ll try the search feature—but what
has this got to do with the time project?”

       Kelly realized that he
was rapidly spending Maeve’s reserve of patience. He came to the point. “That’s
not all my Golem does,”  he said a bit ominously. “I also slipped in a little
routine that runs non-stop and performs a self checking error correction loop.
It  looks at the entire body of the static source code and compares it to the
code in RAM to report any variation—almost like a virus scanner.”

       “Now you’ve completely lost me.”

       “Well, a virus scanner watches all the files
you send, receive or copy, and looks for subtle patterns and variations. If it
spots suspicious activity, it alerts the user and either quarantines the
contaminated file or deletes it. In this case I have the program call home and
complain if it spots any variation. I had this idea, see.”

       “Oh you had an idea alright, but I still
haven’t the slightest notion of what it’s about yet.”

       “Remember Paul’s theory?” Kelly tacked back
to the question of Time again, trying to bring Maeve along. “He said that
living memory would not be affected by the changes in the continuum if a person
was protected in a Nexus—even though physical things were subject to change.
Take that copy of the
Seven Pillars of Wisdom,
for example. It was right
here in the lab desk drawer throughout the whole mission—well inside this null
zone sphere I’ve been talking about. Yet it changed. That was how we were going
to learn if Robert and Paul were successful or not, remember?  I was supposed
to read that passage in the book and compare it to my own living memory—my
unaltered
living memory of the book. Why, you were doing the very same thing with
Shakespeare! You were scouring the plays for any sign or word that did not seem
to fit. Since the program is a constantly running process, it’s like living
memory when active. You see?”