“Well you have certainly let the cat out of the bag with this little visit.” Dorland was pacing again, his mind a whirl. “The possibility of Paradox is very real now. You’ve revealed things here—”
“I know…” There was fear in the visitor’s eyes. “But we had to take the risk. It was our last chance at survival. I was resolved not to say anything to you here until we were safely in the void. I was very patient, Mr. Dorland. Very patient.” He clutched at his chest as he spoke, his fist tightly balled, eyes wide with the intensity of his argument. “It was your theory…” His breathing seemed to come faster as he spoke. “A moment exists, somewhere in time, and it can undo the catastrophe that is about to change the entire world. We must find it, and that quickly. We are in the eye of the tempest now. We have less than six hours before the wave-front is scheduled to make first landfall. You have a fully operational Arch ready here, and you must use it tonight.”
Nordhausen put down his shortwave and leaned heavily on the table. “Use it tonight? To go where?”
“You must find the Meridian and stick the needle in…” The visitor seemed pale and drawn as he labored to persuade them. “Oh my… I was hoping the void would keep me a while…” He gave them all a wild-eyed look. “Stick the needle in…” he said again, and then collapsed, fainting dead away and sliding off the chair onto the floor.
Part II
The Dreamers
“All men dream: but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act out their dream with open eyes, to make it possible.”
4
Maeve was the first to render assistance, Kelly at her side. Together they reached to cradle the visitor’s head from the hard wood floor of the study. A moment later, Paul helped Kelly lift the man and they carried him gently to the reading room where Nordhausen kept a small love seat. Maeve rushed in with another wet towel and began swabbing the old man’s forehead. She could see no signs of serious injury, but was concerned nonetheless.
“He’s light as a feather,” said Kelly. “Has a pallid look to him, doesn’t he? Do you think he’s had a heart attack?”
Maeve was taking his pulse and looking for other obvious signs of cardiac distress. “I think he just fainted,” she said. “Do you have anything to eat, Robert? The man looks half starved.”
As if to confirm her suspicions, the visitor’s eyes fluttered open and he looked about the room, clearly disoriented. “I seem to have fallen…”
“There now,” said Maeve. “You just fainted. Your pulse is a bit weak, but otherwise normal. You’ve been sweating with a bit of a temperature, I’m afraid. Let’s get something into your stomach and then you rest a bit. Perhaps a hot tea?”
“There’s very little time,” the man tried to return her smile. Then he seemed to remember the urgency of the moment and spoke again. “You must not worry about me,” he whispered. “The Arch… That is the only thing that matters now.” His eyes seemed to look right past her, watching the ceiling and the walls about him with growing anxiety. “No time…” he breathed.
“Yes, yes,” Maeve comforted him. She turned and waved at the others to shoo them out of the room. “You just lie here quietly and I’ll get you something to drink.”
She herded the others back out into the study area and made for the coffee station while Dorland and Nordhausen huddled near the shortwave. They tuned in a few other stations, moving from one emergency bulletin to another until Paul pursed his lips with resignation.
“Six hours,” he said. “Well folks, if we are going to do anything about this business, we had better get started. I’d like to have a word with Mr. Graves, and—”
“Don’t you dare,” Maeve wagged a finger at him. “Give the man a moment to recover, Paul. I’ll get some shortbread and tea into him while you work out a strategy.” She was pouring a cup of the Earl Grey Nordhausen had brewed earlier. “I don’t suppose coffee is the right thing just now, but a little tea will do anyone good.”
Kelly retrieved his laptop and came over to the study table to join the others. “We don’t have much time,” he said. “I’ve got all the algorithms here for the planned mission, but I’m going to need cycles on another Arion system to reconfigure.” He looked at his friend Paul with a puzzled expression. “Where to, boss?”
Dorland ran a hand through his thick, dark hair and cleared his throat. “Good question,” he began. “Any thoughts, Robert? You’re the historian.”
“Lovely,” said Nordhausen. “A madman we haven’t even heard of yet has blown up the island of Palma and we’ve got to find a way to undo the thing. This is a fairly tall order, Paul. The research could take months, years even!”
“We have six hours.” Paul fixed him with a determined look.
“Lord, a few hours ago Maeve was yammering to keep me from sneaking a peek at Shakespeare’s writing desk; now I’m supposed to save the world! Why don’t you go in and ask our visitor from the future? He must have some idea of what we were supposed to do.” He shivered with a sudden cold. “Did someone open the door?”
“Put on the heat, Robert,” said Maeve. She noticed the chill at once. The others felt it as well. “Here, let me get this tea in to Mr. Graves and then we can plan this thing out.”
“We’ll need time on an Arion system,” Kelly repeated. “I can’t log in from here because the phone line is dead. It’s two hours to the City with the traffic and this weather.”
“We’ll just have to try finding something closer,” said Dorland. “What about the system at U.C. Berkeley?”
“You have any time booked?”
“Well, who would be using it on a night like this?”
“Good point,” said Nordhausen. “I’ll bet they closed down and joined the panic out there. I’ve got a U.C. library pass. I just may be able to get us in with my credentials, even if I have to pull seniority to bump someone off the machine.”
“How much time will you need, Kelly?” Dorland was thinking hard.
“Well… That depends on what we need to do. I need at least a half hour to program the preliminaries, but the real work is in fine-tuning the temporal locus. Where are we going?”
Dorland looked over his shoulder. “Maeve? We really must talk with—”
Maeve was standing in the open doorway leading to the reading room, a cup of tea in one hand and a box of shortbread wafers in the other.
“Mr. Graves?” Maeve seemed as if she were calling a lost kitten. She started into the room. “Well that’s odd, he’s gone…” The howling of the wind continued outside, and the rain drummed harder on the roof.