Maeve remained silent, sullen though resigned to these inevitable facts. Her gaze was ever drawn to Kelly, who sat near the History module running his hand through his thick, brown hair.
“Alright, I’ll go along with that,” she said at last. “But what’s our plan now?”
“There’s something Rantgar told us that stuck in my mind,” said Robert. “When Paul asked him how the Assassins were managing to get through Palma’s Shadow, he suggested they may have a facility, similar to the Well of Souls we found, and that they are using it as a relay station. If we could find and destroy that site it might take the pressure off of us.”
“Good point,” said Paul, “We could try and locate it and take it out somehow… unless they are shifting men in to a date in our immediate past, last Thursday, for example. We could destroy it today, but be unable to touch it last Thursday, so it may be fruitless. In fact, they may even be using the Well of Souls we found in this manner.”
“But Rasil and his men destroyed the Well of Souls,” said Robert.
“Right, but that was two weeks ago. Suppose they shift in three weeks ago, before you and I ever found it?” He thought for a moment. “But you’ve got the right idea,” he said. “They’ve had us on the defensive this whole mission, but the best defense is a good offense. It’s time we hit back, and hard!”
“Well we won’t be able to do anything now,” said Kelly. “I think the quantum matrix is resolving safely. We may as well shut this baby down now and use the remaining power to regenerate the singularity. But after we do, and before we do anything else, I want something to eat.”
They all just looked at him, and Maeve’s eyes began to glaze over with tears. She went to him, with a longing expression on her face, knowing that he could vanish again, swept over the edge of eternity by Paradox.
Paul was at his side now as well, and Robert walked over, putting his hand on Kelly’s shoulder. None of them spoke a whisper of the possibility that Kelly was only minutes away from annihilation. Instead they just gathered round him, like the captains and chieftains had closed ranks about Charles to secure his life during that final climactic charge of the Saracen cavalry. All they could hope for now was that, somewhere, Time had another Odo circling round the flank of this moment, ready to strike home at the enemy camp, and that Paul’s speculation that Palma may no longer require the sacrifice of Kelly’s life was indeed a real possibility. They had a 50-50 chance.
After a long silence, Paul cleared his throat, obviously weary, and struggling with the emotion of what he had to say. “Alright then, let’s test my theory and hope for the best… I suppose I should be the one to shut this thing down,” he fidgeted.
“Oh, no mister!” Kelly waved his hand away from the main power toggle. “This is my call tonight.”
Before anyone could say another word, he pulled hard on the lever and shut off the last fitful labors of the backup generator. The main lab lights immediately went dark, and he felt Maeve’s hand at his neck, softly reassuring.
“It will take a few moments for the singularity to fail and the Nexus to dissipate,” said Paul as the battery operated emergency lighting painted the room a pale blue.
The mission was over.
They waited in a silence that seemed endless, each one holding their thoughts safely within, unspoken, unknown to all but themselves. This was the greatest part of all human experience, Paul knew—to stand here, befuddled, beset with doubt, bewildered, and yet still hold on with love, hope, and the promise of yet another day.
Then Kelly moved and Paul thought he was reaching for something in his pocket, but he was clasping his breast, as if testing to see if he was still there.
He was.
He still had a head on his shoulders, and when the lights flickered on again he smiled with it, and breathed a heavy sigh. “Looks like P. G& E is back on line,” he said, his hand moving to his belly, still testing to see if he was all there.
“Well, I want a damn hamburger!” he said at last. “And a good brew or two… And another thing—I want my Giants baseball cap! Where is the damn thing? I’ve been looking for it all night.”
Robert laughed heartily, “We’ll find your baseball cap,” he said. “The hamburger and beer may take some doing, but you’ve got it, my friend, you’ve got it.”
Paul looked around, up at the lights and the equipment and the computer screens of the Arch complex, quietly humming back to life. The screen indicated the Nexus had closed, and Kelly was still alive!
“Well, we have a lot to get done,” he said, smiling broadly. “Let’s get busy!”
Epilogue
In the year 735 A.D., as the cold autumn winds again blew in from the sea and cast their rain upon the rich land of Aquitaine, Odo, Duke and Prince, lay himself down, weary, tired, and beset with fever. To Hunald, his son, he gave all his realm, and bid him hold it fast, lest Charles the Usurper come once more to steal these lands and sully the honor of his family.
History would not remember Odo, however, for it would not be written by his sons, but by those of Charles Martel. Pippin the Second would follow Charles with equal fervor and eventually subdue Odo’s beloved Aquitaine, and forge it into the loose confederation of clans and tribes that came to be called the land of the Franks. And after him Pippin’s son would be called Charlemagne and bend the lines of fate to his will in a long and glorious reign.
So the world would know little of Odo’s life and deeds. He would die unheralded by the scribes and largely unmentioned in the chronicles that recounted the events of his day. Yet, when the autumn would come each year, and the leaves would fail and fall in the fields of Aquitaine, some few would sing his name, and tell how he first fought, and prevailed, and turned back the Saracen horde, years before Charles was even a whisper at court. And that after his great victory at Toulouse the Franks were given precious years to forge the union that would bring them the strength to face and match the doughty warriors of the Ishmaelites.
The bards would remember how Odo stood bravely on the River Garonne that hot summer in the year 732, while the blood of Aquitaine flowed red before the besieged city of Bordeaux. And they would tell how it was Odo who came, miraculously alive from that carnage, spared by the hand of God and Fate, and how he raised the alarm through all these lands, summoning even his old enemy Charles to stand and fight with him once more. It would be said that Odo bid Charles to stand behind his shieldwall and be the anvil that would endure the heavy blows of the Saracen horsemen all that day. And they would say how the name martelus, ‘the hammer,’ should rightly rest with Odo, for it was he that fell like a hammer at dusk upon the enemy camp astride the old Roman road south of Tours, and it was he that unhinged the weave of their enemies, putting all their greed and pernicious desires to rout.
And here is a tale no man will ever know, for it is written only on the whispering fog of Time—that in the same year proud Odo lay his head down to die, the pale gray horse that had carried him to safety, Kuhaylan, lay down as well in the stall where Odo had kept him, and breathed his last…
The Time Theory:
The Lawrence Berkeley Laboratories were just beyond the campus, up a winding way called Cyclotron Road. Born on the Berkeley campus, the facilities had grown considerably over the years, and eventually moved to the rolling green hills that overlooked the university. A host of scientific disciplines were rooted in the lab, which was a major center of research and a place where some of the most profound questions imaginable were asked, and sometimes answered, with the secret arts of Quantum Science. They took the universe apart, bit by bit, discovering atoms, protons, electrons, neutrons; and then breaking each one down into smaller and smaller particles, and watching how each one behaved. Once the physical structures of the universe were ferreted out and understood, science thought it would finally have the answer to how everything related to everything else. Soon, however, they began to encounter strange things in the corners of their vacuum chambers and cyclotrons. The deeper they looked, the more they found that the universe was playing with another set of rules altogether in the realm of the very small. Things that were once thought to be impossible, even unimaginable, suddenly became odd realities. Travel in time, long debated by physicists, was one of those unimaginable things.