Nordhausen hurried over with Dorland in his wake. “What do you mean he’s—” He came up short, staring into the empty reading room. The love seat was unoccupied, and there was no one by the piano on the far end of the room. Maeve walked to the window and saw it was still locked. There was no other way in, or out, of the room.
“Do you suppose he slipped out the front door?” Nordhausen craned his neck to look at the front entrance, but the door was shut tight, and the emergency chain was still in place.
Dorland said nothing as he entered the room, feeling the remnant of a palpable chill as he approached the love seat. He extended his arm, palm open as if he were feeling the air about him. The cold seemed to emanate from the surface of the love seat. When he touched the fabric he sensed a frosty tinge that was almost wet, and it prompted him to draw his hand back at once.
They just stood there, blank expressions on their faces, but Paul had an eerie sensation in his gut that something was wrong. He stepped back from the love seat, his mind slowly coming to a conclusion about what had happened. The others, Nordhausen in particular, seemed more flustered than anything else. The professor strode boldly across the reading room and leaned over to have a look behind the piano.
“Odd,” he mused aloud. “Very odd. One minute the man keels over and has to be physically carried, then, not five minutes later, he vanishes. Something is very wrong here, Paul. What’s happened?”
Dorland looked at him, and then back at the love seat again, still deep in thought. “I’m not entirely sure,” he began.
“I recall him muttering something about a void.” Nordhausen was still looking about the room, as if he thought he would spy some hint of where the man had gone: behind the music stand, the end table, the white lace curtains by the window. He finally satisfied himself that the stranger was not in the room. “What did he mean by that?”
“I think he knew he was taking a very great risk coming here tonight, just as Maeve argued that you would be taking a great risk by trying to steal away to the back offices at the Globe Theatre during the play. We haven’t even tried our experiment yet, but they have. They know what can happen. What was it he said a moment ago? Time is a harsh mistress. She may be a jealous one as well. Something tells me the whole notion of a Paradox is time’s way of protecting the continuum from contamination, and it’s not just a thorny puzzle. We may have just seen its handiwork. Paradox is real, he said. It kills. Didn’t he try to warn us? If we take the man at his word; if he was from a future time, then his actions here could have triggered some sort of temporal complication that impacted his own personal time line—he may have even created a Paradox.”
“He seemed positively terrified of the thought,” said Nordhausen. “Did you see how the man was perspiring? Why, the moment he sat down at the table it was as if he was afraid to open his mouth.”
Maeve came back from the window, sitting the tea and shortbread on the end table. “He was certainly frightened of something. Did you notice how he looked at you, Paul?”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, one moment it seemed as if he was about to burst out with something, and then the next—”
“He was afraid,” Nordhausen concluded.
“Yes, and I’m afraid that without him our task has become immeasurably more difficult.” Paul took one last look at the love seat, and then led them back out into the study. The radio droned on, and the rain fell heavily on the rooftop lending to the atmosphere of somber strangeness in the room. Paul saw Kelly sitting at the study table, deep in thought. He had taken a small notebook out of his pocket, and his pen was poised above the page, as if he was trying to decide just what to write. It was his word trap, Paul knew. Kelly was secretly a poet, and a darn good one at that. He always carried a little notebook with him so he could jot down a word or phrase when it bloomed in his mind. Paul walked over to him, immediately interpreting the look on his face and sensing his distress. “What’s the matter, mister?”
Kelly looked up at him, his eyes alight with the inner fire of his reverie. “This is weird,” he said. “I was supposed to die tonight. I mean… We’ve been working on this thing for over three years, Paul. I put my sweat and tears on the line with each of you—not to mention my bank account. Now we find out the damn thing pays off, and pays off big. I’m alive right now because the project works. But don’t you see? I’m not supposed to know that! I’m supposed to be lying on a slab in the morgue right now with a hang-tag on my big toe and a couple of late night med-techs futzing about my corpse until they get around to my autopsy. This isn’t my life any more. It’s… something else now, and it’s just weird, that’s all. This whole thing seems like a dream. It just can’t be real.”
“You’re right, my friend.” Paul put his hand on Kelly’s shoulder to reassure him. “It’s weird for all of us. We’re in a Deep Nexus Point—very real to us, but very strange. Time is dreaming now, and in a dream anything can happen. From this point, all possible futures extend out to infinity. I think I understand what the visitor was trying to tell us now. This is a null spot; a void. The volcano has been blown apart and a massive surge of ocean is about to radically alter the continuum. But, for the next few hours, we will occupy a brief interval of time where it remains possible to exercise some influence on what actually happens.”
“Something already has happened,” said Nordhausen.
“Yes,” said Dorland “but don’t you see? We’re right in the middle of the dream! In fact, I would go so far as to say that we are the dreamers; waking dreamers with a chance to determine how this whole thing plays itself out. What we do in the next six hours will be absolutely crucial to the fate of countless individual time lines. If we can take the obvious fear and distress of our guest as any indication, it may be crucial to the survival of the human race.”
“I don’t follow you,” said Nordhausen.
“They were desperate, Robert. They had the benefit of the most powerful technology ever devised at their disposal and they were desperate. It was all they could do to get one man through the shadow cast by the Palma Event. There was only one interval in time now where they could do anything to change their fate, the fate that will befall all of us if that tsunami strikes the east coast in the morning. Think of it. How many died on Palma? Hell, the population of the Cape Verde Islands is probably half a million by itself. Add in all the other islands: the Azores, Madeira, and then what about Western Sahara, Casablanca, Lisbon and the coast of Portugal? The web of time is already ripping asunder, people. The hundreds of thousands of life-strands are snapping and twisting in the void under the assault of that wall of water. The fabric of the continuum is tearing, and we’ve got to dream up something here tonight to mend it again—and fast. It’s going to be dangerous—the most dangerous thing we’ve ever done in our lives. I can see that now. Do you realize the power we have in our hands? Yet, the greatest peril we face is ourselves. Right now, at this moment, we’re the most dangerous people on earth. We can be saviors on the one hand if we manage to sort this thing out, but if we fail, for whatever reason…”
Nordhausen stared at him, a grim determination settling itself onto his features. “But what will we do? We’re wasting time!” He looked at Kelly, and then Maeve. They all stared at each other, each waiting for one of the others to speak. Kelly was looking at Paul, and Paul’s eyes caught the professor’s with a question in them that was needing his help. It was clear to them all that they had to act; had to do something, but what? Where should they go? Where would they even begin to look for that one single moment of insignificance that could make the difference in the endless weave of time?