He thought he might ask the professor to have a quiet look inside and confirm that. With all the recent interventions and the odd occurrences reported by LeGrand and Aziz, would he be that surprised to find it had vanished, one of those things that simply shifted or slipped in Time?
With that thought in mind, Paul put the key on a chain and wore it around his neck, under his shirt at all times from that moment on. He also made an entry in Kelly’s protected RAM Bank, describing the key, how and where he found it, and including a set of images. It was well encrypted, so he had no fear of it ever being discovered. If something did slip, he wanted to know it immediately—at least insofar as this key was concerned. He had the RAM Bank programmed to notify him once a week about the hidden file and ask him a question only he would ever know the answer to so he could view the contents. If the key ever vanished, he wanted to know it immediately--know that it had existed, where he had found it, and what he had discovered about it since.
Yet how would any of them ever know again what was real, or what was the contorted product of another Time intervention? They would have to keep the Arch spinning on low standby mode at all times, an enormously expensive proposition, and one that also presented challenges involving maintenance and engineering. As to finances, he had a quiet talk with LeGrand about this before the man departed. Just before the timed shutdown for the truce, he received a curious message from the distant future, tucked into a slice in an apple! It displayed two prominent words: “Thank You!” The advice penned below this allowed him to make certain investments that proved to be very timely and he had little concern for money ever thereafter.
Even so, he worried that, one day, by some means, his machine would falter and fail when it was most needed. It was only the confounding Shadow of Palma that prevented the Assassins from effectively counter-operating in the missions they had run thus far. Yet the enemy still managed several interventions aimed at preserving their advantage, and making the devastating operation they mounted against Charles Martel stand. Thankfully they had failed.
Now he wondered if the Golem alert system would be efficient enough to pick up any potential violation of the truce they had just negotiated. What if the warring parties used some unknown technology, or even a principle of physics unknown to his time, to spoof their system and conduct another stealthy operation? Was this key evidence of exactly that?
He remember something the Sheik had let slip as they argued in the conclave. He had revealed that the Assassins never intended to spare Bismarck as a means of restoring Palma, and that their success in doing so had been an unexpected consequence of that campaign. He said nothing at the time, but kept that thought in the back of his mind for some time. What were they up to, he wondered? Could they have known that the team would intervene… that he himself would be aboard the battleship Rodney as she engaged Bismarck in that final battle, within a hair’s breadth of dying in the cold Atlantic? Was it Rodney they had been gunning for all along? Old lumbering Rodney, with a secret cargo, in more than one way—the gold bullion, the Elgin Marbles, the hidden key… and me!
What if the Assassins took Maeve’s threats to heart and decided that their next and only mission must be to eliminate the meddling Founders from the continuum in a way that still permitted Time travel to occur in the future? After all, they had reasoned it out themselves one evening—if Columbus doesn’t discover the Americas, someone else was more than willing to do so. Thomas Edison, the Wright brothers, Henry Ford—they all had competing inventors working the same technology in their day. Paul had never published his findings in the greater scientific community, but he took note of any discovery or experiment that seemed to wander toward the Elysian Fields he had found himself in one day, and some people were already beginning to walk along some of the pathways of thought that eventually led him to the Arch.
Physicists were still taking pokes at Einstein. The CERN research institute near Geneva recently announced they had measured particles that had to be exceeding the speed of light. It was only a matter of getting somewhere 60 nanoseconds sooner than expected, but it was enough to raise a lot of eyebrows in the physics community. It meant, in one possible application, that it would be possible to send information back through Time, something Paul could clearly confirm now if ever asked around the water cooler conversations at the Berkeley Lab facilities, though he could never speak a word of this to anyone outside the four core members of the project. Even the interns and lower level staff had been banned from the main facilities after that first mission. The team could take no chance that the true purpose and utility of the Arch would ever become generally known. If the government ever discovered what they were doing here it would be confiscated and shut down in a heartbeat. In that event he had little doubt that a new Time War would soon begin.
It was a very slippery slope, he knew. Others would reason that if information could be sent back in Time, matter and people would come into the discussion shortly thereafter. He smiled inwardly when he learned that Steven Hawking had remarked: “It is premature to comment on this. Further experiments and clarifications are needed.”
Paul could write them all a book, but the more he considered things, the more questions piled up, one on top of another. Perhaps LeGrand and Aziz may have answered a few for him, but he knew they were also constrained to limit the amount of information they revealed—particularly to a Prime Mover. If ever there was a Prime Mover, Paul and the other Founders certainly filled the bill. He shuddered to think that the simple act of reaching a majority opinion in their discussion over what to do about the Bismarck campaign had an immediate effect—even extending to the operation of the technology and equipment they used!
Be careful what you wish for, went the old maxim… You may get it. And what did he have hanging round his neck now, a strange relic that should never have been found, or left, where it was discovered.
A curious man, he immediately applied a little forensic investigation to the key, regretting that he had twiddled with it in his pocket and largely extinguished any finger prints he might have found on it. Yet a little non invasive scan revealed something very interesting, for this key was not what it seemed at all. It was hollow! There was something inside it, and he would spend a good bit of time thinking about that before he went any further, or even whispered the fact to his closest associates.
There was something inside it! The metal end, machined to engage lock tumblers, had clearly been designed for some other purpose as well, and this turned the cylinders of his mind, opening a universe of possibilities. What was it, he wondered? Surely the contents would tell him where it had come from, and what its purpose was, he thought.
Now all he had to do was find out how to open the damn thing. Yet, being inventive and resourceful, he soon answered that challenge. He found that the head of the key could be turned with sufficient torque, and slowly unscrewed. He still remembered that moment of breathless opening, when everything he ever knew and believed turned at the head of that key, and its slow untwisting became the great unraveling of all that ever was. When he finally had it open, and tilted the shaft ever so gently to urge the hidden contents out onto a lab dish, he stared with amazement and perplexity at what he had found.