“You and me both,” said Robert.
They reached the Arion terminal and Paul pulled out a chair to settle in for what might become a long evening. The professor gave him a frustrated look, but watched in silence as Paul connected Kelly’s Laptop and established a link to the system. A minute later the main Arion system screen came up and Paul entered his password in the interface.
“One thing I can’t figure out Paul…” The professor stepped gingerly into his thought, not yet certain what he was asking. “You tried explaining it on the way over here, but I was just thinking of that first mission again. If we were the first people to ever travel in Time, how come we received a visit from the future that evening—well before we initiated our first operation?”
“Absolute Certainty,” said Paul, extracting a new term he was adding to his lexicon on Time travel. We were dead set on operating, one way or another. At that moment, we had come to that choice with absolute certainty. It was inevitable that we would do what we decided. So the outcome of that choice was inevitable as well. Time travel was possible the instant we resolved to make it so.”
Nordhausen frowned.
“Think of it this way,” Paul explained. “You’re driving on a road and come to a tunnel. When you enter it you haven’t emerged from the other side, yet there is a strong likelihood that you will. Once in the tunnel you can’t go left or right, or reverse direction or even back out, as the traffic behind will not allow it. You have to go through. There are places on the Meridian like that, but since the course of the continuum is defined by choices and events, when we make a firm choice, a kind of tunnel forms in the stream of causality that restricts variation. The strength of our will and determination actually exerts an effect on causality! Let’s face it. We were going to travel in Time that night, to one place or another. It was the first ever attempt to shift in Time, a grand event and First Cause. We spent years and all our personal wealth on the project, and I was determined to get a result that night. It was therefore subject to the principle of Absolute Certainty.”
“But that’s not what the visitor told us.” Nordhausen reminded him. “He said we were so despondent over Kelly that we never made the shift. We just shut the whole thing down. That’s why they had to come back and prevent Kelly’s death.”
“He was wrong,” said Paul. “And understandably so. In spite of their vantage point in the future, they cannot know everything. You said yourself that we really know only 95% or less of everything that has happened. So they did not know, for example, that I had the Arch rigged to operate automatically that night, and send through a small robotic rover with a camera—just a quick in and out. It was all set up to run at midnight, come hell or high water. Time travel was going to become a proven reality. So the principle of Absolute Certainty took effect, at least as far as Time was concerned.
“We were in the tunnel from the moment we started the final briefing session. The volcano on Palma was exploding at that very moment as well. That was also a grand event because it was going to work a radical transformation on the Meridians. So let’s just say Time was gracious and forgiving that night in allowing our visitor to get through the chaos of Palma and carry out his mission, even though Mr. Graves arrived seven years early. His patience saved Kelly, and we went through the Arch instead of my robot. Time travel became possible that night, and the rest, if I may say, is history.”
“They they must have found a way to reverse our intervention on Palma even before we sent Kelly off to the sphinx!”
“Correct,” said Paul. “If Kelly had managed to succeed he would have eliminated their primary touchstone on the history. Yet Kelly failed. Time was just waiting for the outcome of his mission. After that the Paradox sweep calcified the changes made by the Heisenberg Wave, and we get this—”
He gestured to the city outside the building, where they could hear the distant rumble of cars, people shouting, emergency sirens, and even an occasional gun shot. “Our Nexus dissipated when we shut down the Arch the other night. We stepped outside into this nightmare, and it’s only going to get worse. But speaking of time, we’re wasting it here with all this talk. Let’s get to work!”
Nordhausen watched him keying in a few commands to call up his data set for the Arion analysis.
“Those are Kelly’s numbers?” The professor was curious.
“For the most part,” said Paul. “I’ve entered in a new spatial coordinate and programmed a series of potential breaching points for a retraction scheme, like a series of snapshots from a camera.”
“New spatial coordinates? Where?”
“The Sun Pyramid.”
That threw Nordhausen off kilter for a moment. “What? But there weren’t any pyramids at that point in the history. They didn’t appear for thousands of years!”
“Wrong again,” said Paul. “I’m using some new research a colleague of mine was just getting ready to publish. You remember those satellite infrared scans that discovered seventeen new pyramids? It was the work pioneered by Dr. Sarah Parcak. They found all these new pyramid sites buried under the desert sands, and thousands of new tombs and other ancient settlements. Well, this colleague was able to get time on a satellite and ran another series of deep penetrating scans. He hasn’t had time to review all the images yet, but last night I was able to get him to let me have a look at some of his raw data.”
“That’s what you were doing until two in the morning last night?”
“Right. He did a fairly broad scan series, and one of the satellite sweeps passed directly over the section of Cairo where our hidden sphinx was supposed to be—the very place we sent Kelly.”
“On infrared? The heat and ground clutter of the city would make it impossible to read anything buried there.”
“He was using ground penetrating radar as well. The sequence wasn’t supposed to kick in for another two minutes, when the satellite was scanning west of the Nile, where all the existing pyramids are sited, but for some reason it did. Consider it a Pushpoint, if you will. One of those little loose quirks that end up having dramatic repercussions. Well, it scanned the east bank of the Nile as well, and I took a close look at that data last night. Have a look at this!”
He pointed to the Arion system screen and Nordhausen saw a satellite image of modern day Cairo. Paul zoomed in on a position east of the Nile and, in the midst of the maze like streets and alleyways, there was a prominent clearing that resolved to a greenbelt park area as Paul zoomed in. In the middle of the park was a circular walkway, bisected on the vertical and horizontal by two more paths, which intersected at a concrete structure, a perfect circle with yet another object in its exact center.
“How’s that for a bull’s eye,” said Paul. “Now what does that look like there,” he pointed. “It’s the spitting image of the hieroglyphic symbol for Ra, the sun. That, in itself would not be remarkable, but the deep penetrating radar found this, directly beneath the center point of that circle.” He tapped the keyboard and the next image came up. Nordhausen could clearly see the outline of what appeared to be a ancient ruin there, roughly square, but with an obvious center point. He had seen enough satellite imagery to recognize it as a possible burial site.