He looked at them, eyes flashing under his cinder brows. “The Palma Event was not a Grand Imperative, as you first concluded, Mr. Dorland. It was, however, a Radical Transformation: a catastrophic alteration of the time continuum due to the influence of a profound Free Radical. You said it yourself on the tape I’ve listened to so many times: hundreds of thousands of people are going to die when the sun comes up on the east coast tomorrow. All those time lines are going to be changed forever—unless we do something about it in the next six hours.”
A stunned silence fell on them all. Nordhausen was fiddling with the shortwave and a glint of satisfaction sparked in his eye. “He’s right!” He nearly shouted at them. “BBC is announcing evidence of unusually high radiation levels. The Brits sent a Canberra out of Gibraltar to over-fly the island.”
“It will be confirmed shortly by American Satellite Intelligence,” said Graves. “They picked up the initial explosion on their early detection system. By now the President is in an airplane heading west with a fighter escort, Section ‘R’ of the emergency government has been activated, and there’s quite a panic underway on your Eastern Seaboard. It’s just after two in the morning back there, and it’s going to be a long, terrible night.”
“No shit…” Kelly’s eloquence seemed to sum things up.
“There’s still something troubling me,” said Dorland. “We would have heard this news in time. The professor there is already piecing it together. Are you saying we found out about the terrorist attack and failed to act in time?”
“You failed to act at all.” The visitor looked at Kelly. “It was Mr. Kelly’s fate that preoccupied you this night, not the fate of the Eastern Seaboard. In the midst of the greatest tragedy in modern times, the simplicity of one man’s death had a profound effect on all three of you. Your telephone was supposed to ring about the same time I arrived at your doorstep. It was supposed to be the hospital, of course, with news of Mr. Ramer’s accident. I made sure nothing like that could happen by cutting the line an hour ago. It was just a backup plan in case my intervention failed to prevent the accident. In the history I know, however, the call came in and the three of you rushed across town in the midst of all this rain and growing alarm. We don’t really know why you never tried to use the Arch. There’s been a great deal of speculation, of course. Some think that Kelly’s computer savvy was the key to getting the right calculations in order; others attribute the failure to the deep depression that seemed to settle over Mr. Dorland there after the death of his friend. And you, my dear Maeve, were quite shaken by the events of this night. Still others felt that it was your input on Outcomes and Consequences that was most needed, and with the death of both your mother and your emerging…” He seemed to catch himself, pausing for a moment. “…The suffering of your new-found friends here,” he corrected himself. “It was all very traumatic.”
Maeve heard his comment about her mother, and her eyes hazed over with pain. The visitor continued, very intent on what he was trying to say.
“I could go on and on about this forever, and we haven’t the time. I didn’t come here to point history’s finger at any of you. We came to our own conclusions about why you never tried. The research was shunted aside, and not discovered again until… much later. The point is, we now think everything turned on the death of Mr. Ramer. The accident at the Seven-Eleven was a Primary Lever on all of you. I argued the point most eloquently, and the council finally acceded. There were many who saw the Palma Event as a Finality—so rooted in the stream of the continuum that it could not be altered. I had to quote them chapter and verse from your papers on the theory, Mr. Dorland. Eventually I convinced them that if they were correct in that assumption, there was one chance of altering the Radical Transformation. One slim chance.”
“Pushpoint…” Dorland spoke the words with an almost reverent whisper. “Every Finality creates one moment in time where the possibility of reversal blooms in a brief interval at one given point on the continuum. The two opposites arise mutually. Then, the event solidifies and the shadow it casts on the continuum becomes impenetrable.”
“I could not have said it better, Mr. Dorland.” The visitor took a deep breath, the lines of his face long and drawn, his eyes almost pleading. He was sweating profusely now as he spoke. “Dear me… I may have already said too much here…” The wind was still howling at the night outside, and the visitor eyed the windows with a glimmer of fear, harried a bit by the sound. He seemed to pause at the edge of a precipice in his thinking, and then leapt over.
“It’s too late for us—In the time of my natural life. We can’t see through the Penumbra, through the shadow cast on the time line by the Palma Event and all it gives rise to. We’ve tried to reason it out—we’ve thrown enormous computing resources at the problem, such as we had available in our time. It was leading us nowhere. Every attempt we made at opening up the continuum failed. Every time we tried to go back to the crucial moment we were stopped by the Penumbra of Palma. It acted as a great barrier. Then I came up with this little idea. We were trying to get back too far, I told them.” His thin hands waved about to add emphasis. “If we could focus all our resources on sending one man through; and if we could just reach any time at all close to the onset of the event, then there would be a chance to prompt action from here, from this side of the shadow—before the wave-front strikes the coast. We made six attempts. They all died in the Arch. The shadow was just too formidable for us. We made… adjustments. We tried something new, and I volunteered for the seventh attempt. Thank God, I made it through.”
“When did you arrive?” Dorland was spellbound.
“Seven years ago. We missed our mark, you see. Bit of a bumpy ride getting through the Penumbra. It’s a miracle I got through at all.”
“Seven years? Why, you had all that time to plan alternative action and you waited until the night of the event to do anything?”
“You don’t understand,” said the visitor. “The Lever was here—it was now. It was instrumental that I prevent the death of Mr. Ramer. That was all. There was nothing I could do to prevent the rise of Ra’id Husan al Din and his Holy Fighters in this time. They were part of a fire that started long ago, and we could not get far enough back to do anything about it.”
“But you had information—vital information that could have worked to change history in any number of ways. All you had to do was call the FBI and tell them about the bomb.”
“Who would have believed me?” Graves looked at them. “An anonymous tip called in among the thousands of anonymous tips in the deluge of misinformation and false alarms that became the heart of the terrorist strategy after the World Trade Center fell. Would you have even believed me, say, four years ago; before you dreamt up this project?
“But where have you been all this time?”
“In a monastery! I had to avoid contact and let things germinate on their own to prevent the possibility of Paradox. It’s very real, you know. It’s not just a clever twist of the mind. It kills. Time is a harsh mistress, Mr. Dorland. We have lifted her skirts once too often, you see, and many have died. We know better. That little stunt you were planning with the Bermuda Pamphlets, for example, could have gotten you all killed! The only way to be certain, to be safe, was to limit my influence on the time line as much as possible until the actual moment where I could do some good. All our research pointed to the death of Mr. Ramer as a Primary Lever on the three of you. We decided to gamble everything on that one throw of the dice. Outcomes and Consequences had very good numbers for us. They predicted that, if Kelly had lived, you would most certainly have tried something with your experiment. You wanted to visit the Globe in 1612 to take in the Tempest—it’s all on the tape we recovered. We had to decide what to do. Should we simply act on Mr. Ramer’s behalf and hope for the best, or take more drastic action?”