“It certainly has far less haze in the equation than trying to find Masaui,” Maeve agreed. “Yes, I like this. It has switch-like clarity. If the train blows up at Kilometer 172 on November 10, 1917, then we have history as we seem to know it now; as it reads there in Lawrence’s book. If the train fails to blow up, then something changes in the time line for Masaui. It’s not for us to know what that is. You’re right. This is the key moment. Kilometer 172 is both a time and a place—a precise moment on the Meridian. Our visitor knew that, and the clue is vital.”
“Then what should we do?” Nordhausen closed his book.
“Get us Arab garb at the Drama Department,” Paul said to Maeve. “Your idea about the German nurse was good, but it brings us into contact with too many people on the train. We’d have to open the continuum at Amman, and board there. It’s too complicated. If we go as Arabs, we can cloak ourselves easily, and just drop into the desert somewhere near Kilometer 172. It’s perfect! Then we wait for Lawrence to lay his charge and we find some way of preventing the explosion. We do it with as little contact with the locals as possible.”
Nordhausen was still the devil’s advocate. “But suppose we run afoul of the Arabs, or even Lawrence himself? None of us speaks Arabic.”
Dorland’s mind worked quickly, brushing the argument aside. “Time will not want us anywhere near Lawrence,” he said quickly. “He’s a Prime Mover—or perhaps even another Free Radical, depending on your point of view. In any case, Time will not easily allow us to tamper with his history. That’s why Masaui is our target, and this incident becomes the Pushpoint that decides his fate.” He tacked on one last thought. “If we happen on the Arabs, we speak English.”
“English? What good will that do us?”
“We use Maeve’s first ruse. Say we’re a medical team that was captured by the Turks. Say we were on a train, but managed to slip away. Say we were taken in by an Arab family and—”
Nordhausen interrupted him. “Say all of this in English?”
“No!” Maeve held up a finger, her eyes brightening with an idea. “We just say one thing,” she concluded. “Aurens! That’s what the Arabs called him. We just invoke his name and point. Let his name be our shield and hope for the best.” They were all quiet for a moment before Maeve put in one last remark. “And a good retraction algorithm wouldn’t hurt either.”
Kelly came running up, breathless, a notepad in hand. “I’ve got all the preliminaries in for the temporal locus,” he huffed. “Where’s that spatial coordinate?”
“Just a second.” Nordhausen looked at Paul. “Arabs in the desert?”
“I think it’s our best bet, Robert.”
Nordhausen fidgeted a moment, consulting his book again. “The attempt on the Yarmuk Gorge Bridge was made in the pre-dawn hours on November 8th. After it failed they fled to Abu Sawana, arriving tired and hungry as the sun came up. As you might imagine, morale was low and they were all quite discouraged. They had to do something to make the raid worthwhile, particularly if Lawrence hoped to gain the support of other local tribesmen in the area. A botched operation was not good for recruiting purposes, you see. That’s when they hit on the idea of blowing up a train. The rail was close at hand, and they still had explosive charges left. So they decided to set up an ambush at one of their old lookout posts well north of Amman.”
Nordhausen’s finger marked a place in his book. “They approached the rail line again near Minifir on the 9th to lay their last explosive charge at the culvert near Kilometer 172. They fled east after the attack, across the line into the desert to reach Abu Sawana again. We should be on the west side of the line then, probably here.” He fingered a location near the rail line close to Minifir, then keyed a new query for the cartography data base. In a few moments he had coordinates for Minifir, and extrapolated from that location to choose a drop point. “I hate rushing like this,” he muttered to himself as he worked. Kelly leaned over his shoulder and began scribbling the coordinates down.
“Take off another second in each direction,” said Nordhausen. “Lord, it looks like open desert on the map, but we’ve no way of knowing what was really there. We could appear right in the middle of some wandering band of Bedouin vagrants, for all I know.”
“It’ll have to do,” said Kelly as he started off. “If anything changes, let me know at once.”
“I’ve got to get over to the Drama Department.” Maeve realized she had a lot of rummaging to do in the wardrobe.
Kelly came up short, fishing in his pocket and tossing her the keys to the Subaru. “Here,” he said. “You’ll have to drive yourself. I need another twenty minutes on the Arion system.”
“We’ll come with you, Maeve,” said Paul. “Now that we have our coordinates, we might as well carry on the preliminary briefing. Listen everyone. We’ve got to get up to Lawrence Labs as soon as possible. We’ll come back for you, Kelly, but if you finish ahead of us, take University Drive and head for the East Gate. Then we can take Gayley up to Hearst Avenue and head up past the Cyclotron to the lab.”
The Lawrence Berkeley Laboratories were just beyond the campus, up a winding way called Cyclotron Road. Born on the Berkeley campus, the facilities had grown considerably over the years, and eventually moved to the rolling green hills that overlooked the university. A host of scientific disciplines were rooted in the lab, which was a major center of research and a place where some of the most profound questions imaginable were asked, and sometimes answered, with the secret arts of Quantum Science. They took the universe apart, bit by bit, discovering atoms, protons, electrons, neutrons; and then breaking each one down into smaller and smaller particles, and watching how each one behaved. Once the physical structures of the universe were ferreted out and understood, science thought it would finally have the answer to how everything related to everything else. Soon, however, they began to encounter strange things in the corners of their vacuum chambers and cyclotrons. The deeper they looked, the more they found that the universe was playing with another set of rules altogether in the realm of the very small. Things that were once thought to be impossible, even unimaginable, suddenly became odd realities. Travel in time, long debated by physicists, was one of those unimaginable things.
One theory of time held that any given moment was simply a specific arrangement of every quantum particle that made up the universe. The particles, always in motion, created the perception of a forward progression in the flow of time, which was really nothing more than the constant variation of those particles, morphing from one state and position to another. To be in any place, or any time, all one had to do was find a way to tell all the particles of the universe to assume a given state or position in relationship to one another. Any reality that was ever possible could become this moment; this reality. The realization of the theory seemed impossible, however, for one could never know how to arrange each particle of the universe just as they were at the Globe Theatre in 1612. It was challenge enough to understand even one particle of the universe—but science held that the whole of the universe had sprung from one single point. If that were true, then any possible universe might arise in the same way.