“No, you don’t understand.” Kelly groped through his reasoning again. “I’m the one person here who is already supposed to be dead. Remember? I was… Well, I was just thinking that perhaps I should be the one to go. The rest of you stay here where it’s safe.”
“Oh no you don’t!” Paul moved to quash the idea at once. “Look Kelly, you may have a point. This whole notion of your death has really gotten to me. As I said earlier, we’re already off on some new Meridian now. Time is branching here in the Nexus Point. This is another life—not only for you, but for all of us. Whatever happens, I can’t let you take any unusual risks for a while. I couldn’t bear to loose you, buddy.”
“Nor I,” Maeve said quietly. She gave Kelly a lingering glance.
“Let’s everyone think this over while we run the numbers,” Paul suggested. “We’ll decide who goes and who stays later. In the meantime, we have to plan as if we were all going, Maeve. Work whatever magic you can at the Drama Department wardrobe. I know you’ll come up with something. Robert and I will work out the details.”
The SUV sped along Hearst Avenue to the North Gate of the University. Kelly squinted through the front windshield, looking for parking. He was fortunate to find something immediately and Nordhausen had the back door open in a moment, heedless of the rain. “Come on,” he shouted in at them. “Time and tide wait for no man!”
How appropriate, thought Dorland. He visualized the great swelling of the ocean as it hurtled west from Palma, fast leaving the shattered remnants of the Azores in its wake. They couldn’t save Bermuda, but the fate of the Eastern Seaboard was still riding in the whirlwind of time.
6
They made their way over the rain swept pavement past the Earth Sciences Building and the Memorial Glade until they reached the main library in the center of the campus. Thankfully, the lights were still on, and Paul started to lead them toward the entrance.
“Not that way,” Nordhausen called after him. “We’ll go in the back way. I have a pass key.”
Paul reversed his course, and the others followed until they reached a nondescript doorway in a sheltered alcove. The Professor fumbled with his wallet for a moment, extracting his pass key card to log in through the security gate. In a few moments they tramped inside, grateful to be out of the driving rain and cold. The moment of respite was a brief one, however, and they were soon animated by the urgency of their mission.
“Storm must have everyone hunkered down in the dorms,” said Nordhausen.
“That or the news,” said Dorland. He suddenly remembered it was also Memorial Day weekend, and the normal library traffic would be thinned out by the holiday. “I think our chances of finding an open computer terminal will be very good.”
“I’ll get right on it,” said Kelly, hastening off to find a terminal where he could interface his laptop with the Arion mainframe humming away in the lower level of the library. “Get me spatial data as soon as you can,” he shouted over his shoulder as he ran.
Nordhausen was already moving toward a catalog terminal to begin with his research queries. Paul and Maeve followed in his wake, still catching their breath from the rush across the campus grounds. Maeve caught the time on a wall clock. It was just after midnight.
“What about that costume run, Maeve?” Paul asked.
“Well, I need something more to go on than the date,” she replied. “Any ideas at this point, Robert?”
“Give me a few moments,” said the professor. “I’ll get Kelly his spatial numbers and then we can decide how we’re going to make our entry. God, I wish we had a week to plan this.”
“We’ll just have to pull it through as best we can,” Paul encouraged him as he settled into a terminal next to Nordhausen and keyed in catalog searches. “Many hands make for light work,” he smiled, but the tension was obvious as the two men hunched over the keyboards. “What should I look for, Professor?”
Nordhausen balled his fist at his chin for a moment. “Why not run genealogy queries on the names we have on the note? Don’t bother with Lawrence, of course. But give that other fellow a try—what was it, Maeve?”
“Masaui. But don’t ask me to spell it.” They were both thankful for her memory of the note, as it lived only in their combined recollection now.
“I doubt if we’ll find much locally,” said Paul. “I better ask for an Internet search as well.” He was soon discouraged to find thousands of useless references, and began scouring his brain to try and narrow down his search. Nordhausen saw what he was doing and tossed in a few ideas.
“Include the word genealogy,” he said. “You should get some common name combinations that way.” He flipped open his copy of the Seven Pillars, glancing at the brief introductory poem Lawrence had written there.
“I loved you, so I drew these tides of men into my hands, and wrote my will across the sky in stars, to earn you Freedom, the seven pillared worthy house, that your eyes might be shining for me when we came…”
“What was that?” Paul was struck by the poignancy of the words.
“Lawrence,” said Nordhausen. “Funny how those same tides of men have now swelled the oceans with our impending doom. And the odd thing is, they’re still reaching for the same thing Lawrence wanted: their freedom. Why is it we can’t seem to understand that and find a way to give it to them?”
“Is it ours to give?” said Paul rhetorically. “If I’m not mistaken the Founding Fathers seemed to believe that all men were created that way—free. We’ve tried to be the guarantor of that over here, but I think this business with the Holy Fighters is more than a struggle for liberation. There’s hard vengeance in this act. You don’t go and do something like this without being dead inside; heartless and cruel. Nothing could condone the death of so many innocents.”
“True, this Ra’id Husan al Din is no saint, but who plunged the knife into his chest? This is a struggle that has been going on for a hundred generations, Paul. The Islamic world has lived in the shadow of the West for over a millennium. That shadow was once the threat of mounted knights on chargers marching to the holy land—now it has become something far more insidious. Face it, we’ve sucked the life out of these people like we’ve pumped the oil from under their desert. I would say they feel as threatened by us today as they ever did during the Crusades. They handled Pope Urban’s vigilantes easily enough, but how do you strike at something as all pervading as a culture? We don’t send soldiers to conquer our enemies any longer. We send television sets. These people have lived in the pristine clarity of their deserts for thousands of years until we came along with our thirst for petroleum. Now they’ve got McDonalds in Mecca, the Fifth Fleet plying the waters of the Persian Gulf, stealth bombers circling on standby over their heads and special forces teams out hunting down their heroes. I know, we see these men as murderers and terrorists, but to the average Moslem on the street, this Palma thing will be seen as holy retribution.”
“Hell, they killed their own people in the Western Sahara.”
“Martyrs,” said Nordhausen. “Yes, it’s a twisted thing in our minds, but that’s the way these guys see it. They won’t be satisfied until we pack up and leave them alone, and as long as they are sitting on the fermented remains of all those dearly departed dinosaurs—the oil—well, we want to be darn sure we get our daily deliveries. Something like this was bound to happen one way or another. Face it, the typical Arab ‘man in the street’ is a person without a credit profile. He wants to rise and take his morning prayer instead of running out to a one day sale event at Sears. They’re different. That’s the only thing we can come down to, and that difference has produced men like Husan al Din.”