Paul and Maeve had come up, padding quietly into the lab to find Robert and Kelly still squabbling about the missing Golems and the slow data rate and whether or not the green line on the variance monitor was going to eventually migrate to the right, through the end of the year 732.
“Can we rely on this data now with that virus is at large in the system?”
“How the hell do I know?” Kelly said with obvious annoyance.
“I mean the Internet is full of crap. Remember the big scare about Nibiru that had all the doomers up in a fit in 2011 when Comet Elenin paid us a visit? Well how do we know this is reliable information? I mean the file says it’s from the Chronicles of Fredegar, but how can we be sure it isn’t something someone just threw up in a blog somewhere?”
The professor turned, seeing Paul and Maeve, and waved them over, intent on enlisting some support for his argument. He didn’t even notice what Paul was holding.
“Welcome home, Paul. You got rid of Grimwald, alright. Good Man, but you can tell us the tale later. The job is still not done. We need to be certain we have good information here,” he went on. “There’s been entirely too much speculation pushing this mission, and look at the results!” He had pointed at the screen. “It’s still not green…”
Paul gave him a sharp wave of his hand. “Time Out, gentlemen!” he yelled. “Look what I found—well Maeve found it I suppose, but what do you make of this?” He thrust his arm out, boldly, showing them the object with a wry smile. “It apparently manifested just after I shifted back successfully.” He looked at Kelly. “And brother, I was never more grateful to feel that retraction shift kick in. Let’s hope my integrity is good and I don’t suffer Rantgar’s fate.”
“No problem there,” said Kelly. “Your numbers were rock solid. “Remember, I took a double sweep on your pattern.”
Robert gave Paul a puzzled look. “That came in through the Arch with you?”
“It appears so,” said Paul, holding up the apple. It was a plump, round Pippin, nicely ripened, and there was a thin slice on one side with a piece of paper tucked into the crevasse, an obvious note. Paul could make out handwriting on the paper as he peered at it, smiling.
“Well open the damn thing!” said Kelly. “Someone obviously has a wry sense of humor, but it’s clear they want to get our attention.”
Paul slipped out the note and they all drew closer. It felt vaguely like that moment, so long ago now it seemed, when Maeve had come upon a paper in Mr. Graves overcoat. It had contained numbers that led them to decipher the exact physical coordinates of their initial shift in time, to Minifir, where Lawrence of Arabia would lie in wait for an oncoming Turkish train. The note in the apple was an obvious message from Rantgar’s unseen. associates. Perhaps he didn’t simply vanish after all, though he was clearly not at the scene of Grimwald’s death. Yet, he must have told them the story of how Paul shifted in on a brief Spook Job and tossed the apple to Maeve, hoping against hope that she would decipher its meaning and find a way to take some decisive action. As he slipped the note paper out, Paul was struck by the thought that this was an equally urgent appeal.
He opened the page and read the few words that had been written there: “Congratulations! And now the pleasure of your company is requested. Send R.N.”
“Send RN?” said Robert. A Registered Nurse? It must be shorthand for help.” They were all looking at him, eyebrows raised with some astonishment.
“You’re thinking that means me?” he said.
“R period, N period, and it’s underlined,” said Paul. “Aren’t those your initials, Robert?”
“Me? What would they want me to join them for? Join who? Where?”
“Good questions,” said Paul. “Perhaps they’ve found a way to shift you forward in Time to a safe Nexus Point. This could be exciting, Robert! It’s just what you’ve been wanting, a nice close look at a future no man of our era would ever have the opportunity to see.”
Kelly cleared his throat, noticeably.
“Except Mr. Ramer here,” Paul corrected himself quickly.
“Well it could mean Ramer and Nordhausen,” said the professor. “The both of us.” The look on his face was somewhat squeamish, and he seemed to be looking for allies in an ever closing circle of foes.
“I doubt that,” said Paul. “It looks like an invitation to take a trip through the Arch. But where indeed? Noticing Robert’s discomfiture, he chided him a bit. “Are you telling me you don’t want to go with that sad face?”
Maeve jumped right in. “The man who’s become famous for unauthorized use of the Arch for personal business!”
“Now, now… We have no idea what that note means,” said Robert, increasingly leery. “Why, we have no idea who even sent it! Suppose it’s from the Assassins, and they’re inviting me to a lynching party or some other mischief?”
“Not possible,” said Paul. “You heard Rantgar explain it. They can’t shift anything into our Arch. The two systems are incompatible.”
“Well suppose they’ve gotten hold of one of the Order’s Arch complexes in the future. That’s entirely possible, yes?” He looked from one to the other, but was seeing no second to his proposal.
“And how would they know about the apple?” said Paul. “The Order didn’t even know about it until we told Rantgar, and he seemed to get a kick out of it. No, my guess is that this was back fed on the shift stream using a narrow emission bandwidth before the continuum closed.”
Deflated, Nordhausen shrugged and steeled himself to the possibility that he would have to make another Time jump. “Very well then,” he said grudgingly. “But you haven’t the slightest inkling of where I’m to go?”
“I think we may have an answer soon,” said Kelly. “I just discovered that my missing Golems, aren’t really gone. They seem to be very, very busy right now. I did a little hacking and was able to scan the hard drive of an unsecured computer running my Golem software. The program is there, and its running, but in a kind of null state where it will not respond to outside commands. And it’s using quite a bit of the local CPU capacity as well. Whatever it’s doing, it’s working very hard on something.”
“It must be related to the Battle of Tours somehow,” said Paul. “It’s clear on our monitors that the line of variation has been cured all through the years 705 to 732. But it still hung up at Tours. You say Abdul Rahman remains victorious, so there was something we missed, or were just unable to know at all at our point in the Meridian—something they may be privy to given their vantage point in the future.”
“Well then they should have the decency to just send us a FAX or something,” Robert complained. “An email would do just as well. Rantgar said they could get information through the Palma Shadow. Why all the drama?”
“I think this shifted in from the past, Robert. What do you make of this parchment?”
Paul handed Robert the note, and the professor studied it closely. “Freshly inked, and much too clean, he said. This would be thought of as a fraud if I tried to pass it off as an 8th century artifact today. But then again, this is probably what it looked like freshly written on clean parchment back then. But it still doesn’t answer my question. If they can get information through, why don’t they just ring us up on the telephone?” He folded his arms, frowning.
“They’re playing it safe,” said Paul. “Any electronic transmission could be intercepted in the resonance. This is a low tech approach that is more secure. It got our attention, didn’t it?”
“Hello…” Kelly was looking at his console monitors again. “And this is certainly getting my attention. Look here, Pablo. The missing Golems have suddenly reappeared on the network and they are sending a large block of data—”