Tears welled in the corner of Kelly’s eyes as Maeve released him. He was wrestling with a flood of emotions. All the sweat and labor of three long years was finally coming to a head. He was still flustered with the notion that he was living a second life, and the time seemed all the more precious to him as each second ticked away. Now the three people he felt closest to in the world were going off and leaving him with a history book! It was all too much to process at once.
The heavy titanium doorway opened with a hiss as the pressure variance between the two rooms equalized. Maeve turned and hurried over to the doorway where Paul and Robert were already making their way through the dark entrance with a last wave.
The moment was jarred with the ring of a telephone on the main console. Jen reached for it as Maeve hastened towards the yawning portal. The door was programmed to open for a brief interval and then automatically close again. If she didn’t make it through she would have to enter the access code all over again. Paul heard the phone ring and froze in his tracks, an odd look on his face.
“What’s wrong?” Nordhausen nudged him. “You don’t think we’re getting a last minute call from our friends in another century, do you?”
“Hang on a second,” he waited breathlessly as Maeve approached the entrance.
“Oh, Miss Lindford! It’s for you,” Jen called, her hand covering the mouthpiece of the telephone receiver.
“What? Who would be calling me at this hour?”
“Long distance,” said Jen. “It’s your mother.”
Maeve rolled her eyes, as if acknowledging some deep inner fear that had finally come to pass. She had come to terms with the fact that her mother was going to be killed if the tsunami sequence reached the east coast. Her one hope had been that she would not even hear about the event, remaining quietly asleep in her little cottage on the shore of Boston Harbor.
Events had overtaken her, and Maeve managed to suppress the sorrow that welled within her as the evening unfolded. She would find time to grieve the loss later, she told herself. Then the visitor arrived with his pound of coffee and she threw her emotions into the one hope that they might actually prevent this catastrophe.
Time passed in a dizzy rush after that. Now it was running out. The Deep Nexus that had formed around them would soon begin to dissipate as the tsunami sequence surged west. She could feel it. Surely the alarm was up all along the Eastern Seaboard by now. All the media channels were broadcasting full tilt, and she had no doubt that every fog horn and lighthouse along the coast was signaling danger to any who could see or hear. Something must have awakened her mother and, by some miracle, she managed to get a line to the one place she knew Maeve would probably be if she was not at home.
Maeve stopped, nearly at the door, looking over her shoulder at Jen, her eyes wide with the urgency of a decision that clamored for an answer. The heavy metal door was swinging shut, gliding silently on well-oiled hinges; moving as inevitably as the great swell in the Atlantic. She looked at Paul and Robert, then at Kelly, and Jen where she waited, holding the telephone in two hands like something hot that she had just taken out of the oven. It would be the last time, Maeve thought, that she would ever hear her mother’s voice. If she slipped through the narrowing portal she might never see this world again.
All these thoughts passed in a fluttering instant within her mind, and her heart leapt with the only choice she could possibly make. She looked at Paul and Robert.
“Go!” she yelled at them. “Don’t wait. There’s no time!”
The great polished door swung closed, the seals taking hold at once with a sharp metallic clank followed by a sibilant hiss as the pressure reasserted itself. She stared at the impenetrable mass of titanium alloy, her eyes wet with tears. Then she heaved a quiet sigh and turned toward Jen at the main console. Kelly was frozen with a heart-rending look on his face. He started toward her, but Maeve held up a warding hand, intent on reaching the phone.
“This first,” she said with quiet dignity, and Kelly gave her an assuring smile.
When the door clamped shut the pale blue overhead lighting winked on to illuminate a long cylindrical tunnel. Paul stared at Robert, but was soon galvanized by the urgency of the moment.
“We’d better hurry,” he said, leading the way down the long tunnel as it angled ever more sharply into the depths of the hillside. The complex was buried deep underground, a precaution to help shield the environment against the strange effects that might be released should anything go wrong with the spin-out of the singularity. The tunnel led them to an elevator, and they rushed in, catching their own reflection on the polished metal doors: two ghosts in long white Arab robes. There were only two buttons on the elevator panel. One was clearly labeled ARCH and Paul pressed it without a moment’s hesitation. He glanced at the clock on the elevator wall, noting the time at 2:20 AM.
“We lost Bermuda, Professor,” he said quietly. “The wave was scheduled to hit there a little after two AM, our time.”
“It was a saving grace in 1611 when the Plymouth expedition made landfall there,” said Nordhausen. “They once feared the place, you know. Called it the Devil’s Island.”
“God help them now,” said Paul. The queasy feeling of anticipation seemed to redouble when the elevator shot down, leaving their stomachs behind.
“It’s better this way,” said Nordhausen. “Maeve has a wonderful head on her shoulders, but a woman would have been very much out of place in the milieu we’re opening; perhaps unexplainable. That nurse business was a good try, but really, what would a nurse be doing in the middle of the desert in Bedouin clothing? Did you know that there was not one single speaking female role in the movie?”
“What?”
“Lawrence of Arabia,” Nordhausen explained. “The entire cast was male—what blessed relief! It was, as they say, a man’s world in 1917. It’s better she stays behind.”
“Maybe you’re right,” Paul conceded. “But don’t get any ideas just because you won’t have Maeve watching your every move. We’ve got to be very careful. This is going to be like a delicate surgery. We have to find our Pushpoint and enable it while creating as little disturbance in the flow of events as possible.”
“I hope there’s time,” Nordhausen worried. “Look at the clock! What if we land in a place that takes us hours and hours to find the ambush zone? We’ve only got an hour and a half.”
Paul shook his head. “Plenty of time. Once we step through the Arch we’ll have all the time between the interval when we emerge and the actual attack on the train. It doesn’t matter how much time is left on this end. We could walk through the Arch a minute before four in the morning and return in thirty seconds, having spent a decade in the past! You never will get a handle on temporal mechanics, will you? Our visitor tonight emerged seven years ago, by his account. He lived out all that time on our Meridian but, in the world he came from, he might have been gone a just few brief moments. Maeve will hardly have time to take her phone call before we get back; you’ll see.”
“What if we miss our target?”
“That’s my main worry,” Paul confided. “Kelly said he shaded a variable to drop us on the negative side of the event. We can’t risk arriving too late, you see. But arriving too early could be just as much of a problem. Suppose we suffer the same fate as our visitor from the future, and miss the mark. We would have to scrub the mission and wait for the fail-safe retraction to kick in, unless we disable it. In that case, if we were to land around 1900, would you be prepared to live out seventeen years in the alternate time line? Think about it, Robert. You can still change your mind if you want. Thus isn’t going to be a quiet evening at the Globe. Kelly is good, but he really had to rush these calculations tonight. We haven’t had any time to fine-tune the breaching point.”