“Well, I’ll be…” he breathed.
“That’s a pyramid—or at least it once was a pyramid,” said Paul. “And this is the position of the Sphinx where we shifted Kelly, right smack in the middle of the Maadi district.” He pointed to a location slightly west of the greenbelt area. Paul zoomed out for a moment, his finger tracing a line due west across the Nile until it reached the site of the Great Pyramid and Sphinx at Giza. The two locations were on the exact same latitude.
“Damn,” said Nordhausen. “At first I thought there couldn’t be a pyramid here on the east bank. They’re all on the west bank, the place of the setting sun, Ra’s journey to the underworld. That was the whole point of the tomb itself—the pharaoh was to follow Ra to the underworld.”
“But there it is,” said Paul, re-focusing on the greenbelt area and superimposing the satellite image of the pyramid ruins. That object in the center of the circle is positioned dead center in the ruins that define this lost pyramid. And together, with our lost sphinx, we have what looks like an exact mirror image of the site at Giza!”
“They come in pairs,” breathed Nordhausen. “That’s what Maeve said when LeGrand first revealed the existence of the second Sphinx.”
“Right,” said Paul. “So I’m calling this the Sun Pyramid, situated at a point to greet the rising sun, the emergence and return of Ra on his journey into the heavens each day. And I’m betting our esteemed Mr. Ra-Mer is a nice dutiful Muslim as he goes out to greet the morning sun each day for prayer—right there, at those exact spatial coordinates, ten thousand five hundred years ago…”
Chapter 5
Four hours after they arrived at the Harney Science Center, the Arion system signaled that it had completed its analysis of the data and sent the resulting algorithms to Kelly’s notebook.
Paul had been sleeping in his chair, leaning forward on the desk, his head resting on his folded arms. Nordhausen was slouched in a more comfortable chair nearby. The computer played a series of gentle tones, and Paul awoke, rubbing his eyes and reaching for his glasses where they lay on the desk.
Suddenly a strange feeling came over him, and he thought he saw light and movement in the dark. A pulse of alarm stirred him awake and he turned, shocked to see someone walking briskly through the glass doors to the computer lab—literally! It was more like the image of a man, a wavering hologram that was edged with a luminescent blue sheen. As the image came through the glass Paul knew the man immediately, yet just as he was about to speak the image wavered and vanished. It was Kelly! He was there, for the briefest moment, and then gone, like a luminescent spirit haunting the darkened halls of the Harney Science Center. What had just happened?
He shook himself awake, rubbing his eyes. Was he dreaming? Was he so intent on recovering his lifelong friend that he had conjured him up from the last fragments of his fitful sleep? No, he thought, that was real, and his logical mind immediately set about to grasp an explanation. Was the ghost like apparition an attempted Time shift? They called their own recon shifts “spook jobs” for a reason, he thought. That was exactly how one would appear to a casual observer. Kelly was there, for the briefest moment, then gone again, but there was something about his movement and gait that led him to dismiss the idea of a spook job. He was walking, intent on something, not merely standing on fixed coordinates as one might do in a spook job.
It suddenly struck him that this was the very place that Kelly had been running the numbers for their first time shift! He had come here to the City because the Arion system at U.C. Berkeley was booked solid. Good Lord, he thought. Could I have seen an echo of that moment? How was it possible? That was a physical phenomena. The light from that image struck the retina of my eye…
There was a long final tone from his system console signaling the data run was complete. The Arion had verified his information as sound and downloaded it all right onto his laptop. He turned to his friend.
“Wake up, Robert!” he called. “Kelly is waiting for us, and we have little time to spare.”
Nordhausen struggled to rouse himself, and Paul was going to tell him what he had just seen, then thought on it and decided to keep the matter to himself for the moment. There was too much work ahead of them and too little time. He wanted to think about it before he shared it with anyone else. So he urged the professor along and they gathered their things and hurried away, stumbling a bit in the dark and quiet. The cold air outside shocked them both awake as the rushed up the street to Paul’s Honda.
“What time is it?”
“Just after one in the morning.”
“Four hours? Why did it take so damn long?”
“Never mind.”
He put the key in the ignition and was dismayed when the engine did not immediately turn over. “Oh no,” he said. “Another Pushpoint! It’s been doing that from time to time. Come on baby, you can’t do this now!”
The thought that his whole operation would be foiled by a faulty starter in his Honda would have been fitting justice given his theory that the really great events are all triggered, or prevented, by small and insignificant moments, happenstance, trivial occurrences all hiding in polarity with the momentous turning points of history.
He turned the key again, and this time the engine fired up and started normally. Nordhausen breathed a heavy sigh of relief but, even as he did so, they perceived a slight jolt. He looked at Paul.
“Is that the car?”
“You felt it too? I thought it was an earth tremor or something. Well, it’s no more than a three pointer. Let’s get moving!”
He put the Civic in gear and was pulling away when they both heard a cell phone ringing, muffled, yet near enough. Paul looked at Nordhausen.
“That yours?”
“I didn’t bring my cell phone with me,” the professor confessed. “Must be yours.”
“Damnit,” said Paul. “It’s in my briefcase in the trunk! Who’d be calling at this hour anyway? In any case, we’ve got to get this data to the lab as quickly as possible. That’s all we have to worry about now.”
The ringing stopped he pulled away making a quick left onto Golden Gate Avenue. A moment later they heard the phone ring again.
“Don’t worry about it,” said Robert. “Just get us to the lab in one piece.”
Nordhausen was worried about considerably more. They both were, though Paul hid his anxiety with constant energy and determination. But the professor had an odd sense of foreboding, and his stomach felt very unsettled as they raced back across the city to the Bay Bridge. An hour later they were safely back at the Arch complex at Lawrence Berkeley Labs. The system was up and running and Paul was riveted on the monitors, trying to watch everything at one time. The Golem module was winking out a red warning light, but he had no time to deal with it for the moment. They were going after Kelly and the retraction scheme was almost ready for full operation.
The main problem had been power. The first thing Paul did when they got back to the lab was fire up the quantum fuel matrix and feed in the energy required to create the singularity and the strange quantum threads that would spin off from it to fuel the Time shifts. That alone took enormous power resources, and it wasn’t long before the power company was on the phone about it.
Paul fended them off, saying he had a vital experiment underway for the next hour, and arguing that he had waited until this late hour to conduct his test, when the burden on the grid was minimal.