Nexus Point (Meridian Series) (7 page)

       “Bacteria!” Paul sprung the answer on him.
“Some sort of algal microorganism in the water was finding a way to concentrate
the uranium that did leech out of the rocks and, by God, they did their job so
well that a reaction started.”

       “What are you talking about? Don’t you need
a reactor chamber and fuel rods and all kinds of power for that?”

      
“The f
uel
was there in the U-235, and the reactor chamber, or cham
bers
to be more
precise, were the bacteria! They concentrated the stuff and, when you get to a
certain critical mass in any one place, a reaction starts—on a very low level,
mind you, but very well controlled. In fact, they theorize that it might have
been sustained for over a million years! Imagine that—a natural nuclear reactor
providing sustained power. They measured the estimated electrical output at
many kilowatts, sighed with relief that no terrorism was involved, and called
the whole thing an Oklo reaction.”

       “And you think
this
is a pool of
radioactive algae?”

       “Possibly.”

       “Shit, there goes the drinking water—let
alone the nice cool bath I was hoping for.”

       Paul caught the green reflection of the pool
in Nordhausen’s eyes as he spoke. “Come on,” he said, flicking the flashlight
back on. “There has to be some stream feeding this pool. We’ll find other water
around here if we look for it.”

       It was not long before he spied a suspicious
crevice deep in the throat of a side cave. It gleamed with a sheen of water
that seemed to be oozing down from the ceiling of the cave.

       “Probably a sink or punch bowl up there
somewhere that has been collecting rainwater. I’ll bet our stream is on the
other side of this gash. Here—hold the flashlight while I squeeze through.”

       “Well, be careful,” Nordhausen warned him.
“Suppose that leads into some deep underground aquifer of irradiated water! Now
that I think of it, that might be just the thing to straighten  you out.”

       “Very funny,” said Paul. He was already up
onto a low ledge and working his way into the glistening wet fissure.”

       “Hold on,” said Nordhausen. “You’ll need a
canteen if you find anything. Give me a second to fetch one. Do you think you
can stand a moment here in the dark? I’ll need the flashlight to find my way
back to our campsite.”

       Paul was already through the crack, but he
stuck his face out with a wry smile. “Well, get moving! I think your canteen
will do quite nicely. You’ve practically emptied the thing on the walk in.”

       “Right,” said Nordhausen. “I’ll just be a
moment,” and he started off, the glowing beam of the flashlight wiggling away
with him in the dark.

       The professor had only been gone a few
minutes when Paul noticed a faint green sheen emanating from the darkness ahead
of him. As his eyes adjusted he could see that the same eerie phosphorescence
was present here, and the fissure had simply opened to another deep hollow of
the cave they were in. He thought he heard the faint sound of running water
ahead, though the noise had an odd, distended timbre, as though coming from a
great distance away. His curiosity led him forward a few steps. The sound
increased with each halting footfall, and he suddenly caught the cool, moist
flow of an updraft.

       He leaned into it, relieved to feel the
chill of the air on his body yet a bit surprised that a hot artesian spring
would generate such a cool updraft. Wait until Robert feels this, he thought. 
It was obvious why the Arabs used this as a hiding place throughout their
history. I wonder why no one ever documented this. Look how it
glows. Natural underground air conditioning and
lighting. What a find!

       He was so elated with his discovery that he
failed to see the chasm that was just underfoot. His next step dangled for a
heart throbbing moment, looking for firm ground. Then he suddenly found himself
plunging over the edge of a shadowy precipice in a convulsion of fear and
anxiety.

       He was falling. In a flash his mind leapt ahead to
the image of an agonizing death on jagged rocks. The adrenaline animated his
lanky frame and limbs in a fitful  clawing motion as he plummeted into the
depths, amazed at the prickly feeling that raised goose bumps on his flesh.
There was a strange sensation—icy cold, and the milky green glow on the chasm
walls rushed by in a dizzying wash of light. So this is what it’s like to die,
he thought. A wave of nausea overcame him and he closed his eyes in terror,
dreading the moment when his body would smash into the rocky bottom. And then
he was amazed to feel the hard slap and splash of cold water when he plunged
into a deep underground pool, terrified, yet alive and unharmed.

Part II

Nothing Is Written

“Nothing Is
Written, and Everything is Permitted.”

- Ismaili
Saying

4

Maeve was riding
back along t
he
bridle path on her favorite horse, Giselle
.
T
he late afternoon
sun was dappling through the oak trees in the valley, and the air had a warm
sweetness to it that spoke of fresh sage. She reminded herself to stop and
collect some at the trailhead. It would be just the thing to season that pot
roast she had planned for the evening meal. But now there was more simmering in
her mind than the roast. She had been thinking her way through the events of
these last few months, trying to place everything into context and impose some
semblance of order. While the challenges of the time travel project delighted
her, the consequences that could result from it all were overwhelming.

       Outcomes and Consequences—that was her
mission in life these days. The dangers inherent in the enterprise, once only
speculation about contamination and fateful effects, had suddenly been made
painfully obvious to her. Kelly nearly vanished in the cold frost of Paradox.
She had been thinking a lot about that in recent days, and running whole
segments of the mission over in her mind.

       From the moment when the unseen future first
knocked on Nordhausen’s door in the person of Robert Graves, she had an odd
feeling that there was something amiss in the whole equation—something she
could not quite work out in her probability algorithms. And that something
irked her like a shirt that needed ironing. It sat like unwashed dishes on her
kitchen countertops, and waited like an unpaid bill on her desk—things that
Maeve would never allow in the carefully managed space of her own personal
life.

       She kept everything in quiet order, and the
structure of her world was wholly predictable at any given moment. She would
ride Gizelle back up the bridle path, and give her a good rub down in the
stables. She would take the Subaru into town on the way home and stop by Noah’s
for bagels and a shmear. And she wouldn’t forget that fresh sage for the pot
roast either. The steady certainty of her life had been something in which she
took great solace—something of her own making. It was an extension of her
considerable will power, and the determined competence she thrust against any
problem the world would dare to concoct for her. Up until now she had been
quite content in her world, with outcomes that were wholly satisfactory—until
Kelly vanished.

       Time travel, it seemed, could be quite
untidy.

       She thought back over the mission again, for
the hundredth time. Everything had been so rushed that it was hard to get at
the details of her recollection now. There were two moments that still bothered
her. The first was the odd telephone call from her mother that pulled her away
from the forward end of the mission. She remembered the strange echo of her
mother’s voice reverberating in the receiver, as if some infernal loop had
already begun; as if time was suspended in the repetition of her mother’s last
words, undecided, uncertain, and afraid.

       That uncertainty had become a real feeling
for her at that moment—not just a nagging, misplaced cipher in her probability
algorithms. It settled into her with a pulsing beat of anxiety, and it never
quite went away. Even now, months after Robert and Paul had returned to the
present, she still felt its presence, like the thrumming of adrenaline in her
chest. The world was not the way she always fancied it to be. Now, nothing was
certain; nothing fixed and determined—not even the past.

       For someone who had always labored to define
clear and well established borders, this defiant ‘quantum uncertainty’ in time
travel was a daunting and frightening prospect. Heisenberg, damn him, was
right. He predicted that physical quantities and properties fluctuate randomly
and therefore can never be accurately known.  While the effect of this
uncertainty was most evident on the sub
-atomic level,
where things like the speed and charge of particles could be highly
unpredictable, the fact remained that this basic uncertainty was at the core of
all reality—if that term could be applied in any meaningful way. Put simply:
nothing was written. That is how Paul would say it, imitating Lawrence with the
remark. She realized now that she hated the whole notion inherent in that
statement.

       Nothing was written; nothing
forbidden, and everything was permitted. That was the chaos that now sat
hunched in the center of her mind like an old, unwelcome hobgoblin to plague her
thinking. She wanted it out, wanted it gone, wanted things wrapped in nice neat
boxes again, and stacked up just so. But the world would never be that way for
her again. All of her careful habits, all the meticulous checks and balances
that governed her life, were futile efforts at imposing order on chaos. It was
very unsettling, to say the least.

       She remembered that awful moment
in the lab when she had first realized the full implication of all of this. She
had suddenly hit on the idea that, if the mission was successful, and the history
was actually changed, then the book Lawrence wrote about his exploits in the
desert would also have to change.

       She had been reading through it the last week or
so, wondering what it must have been like for Robert and Paul to actually be
there. With each episode she found herself wondering if this was the real story
of the event, or something that had been altered again and again by the
shifting eddies of time. Lawrence had written three versions of the book before
it settled down. Now, even though he was dead and gone, the text was still
being re-written!

      
The Seven Pillars
, a
metaphor for solidity and truth, suddenly seemed to be built upon very shaky
ground. Perhaps there was something in the human heart that reached for a truth
that
was
unalterable. A man’s reach should exceed his grasp, wrote
Keats, or what’s a heaven for?
Knowing, or believing that there was something out there that
was fixed and permanent, had long been a comfort to the human soul. Now the
Arch had proved that anything was possible, and any semblance of truth, as she
once knew it, was gone from her life. She had firm ground under her feet when
she walked into the Lab that night, but now all was quicksand. Nothing was
certain, not even the comfort of finished, printed text in the books that she
so loved all her life.

       She remembered how they had started that
night with an argument about Shakespeare. They were worried that  Nordhausen’s
wayward curiosity might contaminate the time line. The man wanted to go rifling
through Shakespeare’s office and she resolved, then and there, that he would
not set one foot out of her sight if the Arch actually worked. It wasn’t merely
Nordhausen’s eccentric temperament that she was determined to set a watch on—it
was Shakespeare! The thought that the professor might do something to alter a
single word of that man’s verse was the most compelling argument anyone could
make against the time project that night. If Paul’s theory was correct, then a
carelessly
spoken word to a stranger in the past, a
heedless stumble in the dark, a mislaid object,  could wreak havoc on future
time. It would be as if Shakespeare ‘never writ.’ The most maddening thing was
that they might not even know what they had done to alter the record of time.
Things would simply change—just like Lawrence’s narrative in
The
Seven
Pillars.
She would reach for
The Tempest
on her library shelf one
night and find it missing, gone, annihilated. Worse yet, she might never know
the damage was done.

       The thought that every book in her library
was now subject to sudden revision had become a seed of a deep discomfort, and
it was growing in her with each day that passed. She could lose any one of
them: Bronte, Whitman, Keats, all blown away with the slightest breath of time.
That volume of poetry she had been reading last night—would it be the same
tonight? It was more than unnerving to her now, it was frightening. It wasn’t
merely words and books that could change on a whim, it was everything.
Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle had finally come home to roost.