“Sure,” she said, a bit bewildered, but moving more on reflex than anything else.
“Maeve? Can you keep an eye on the integrity readout?”
“I’m on it.” Maeve turned to find the right monitor, and soon they were all hunched forward over their screens, though Maeve kept casting sidelong glances at Kelly as she watched the readings.
“What’s the integrity?” Kelly was still moving dials, making fine adjustments to the particle chamber density.
“Number two is holding fine, the other is falling toward the yellow.”
“Shit!” Kelly vented some steam and made a last adjustment. “OK, that will have to do. If that integrity falls below eighty percent I want you to yell at me. OK?”
“It’s at eighty-three, but still moving.”
Kelly ran to the logarithmic station and was on a chair at the keyboard in a flash. His fingers moved in a blur as he typed. The focus on his features was intense. Maeve watched the integrity reading fall through eighty-two percent, but said nothing. She wanted him to give his full attention to the task before him.
Kelly finished his entry and gave the send command. Processors moved at the speed of light, but it seemed an eerie stillness had settled over the room. They were all breathless, suspended in the passage of a few brief seconds that stretched out to an eternity. Then Kelly moved. He had his answer and he slid back from the workstation, his chair rolling madly across the tiled floor on its wheels as he scudded over to the main control panel. He checked the power and was relieved to see it was steady at ninety-five percent.
“On my mark… Now Jen! Enable the retraction scheme on pattern one.”
“Pattern one?” Jen was momentarily lost. Her eyes glazed across the controls, looking for a familiar anchor.
“Toggle the number one switch and hit enter!” Kelly shouted at her, and she moved at last.
There was a humming sound as the module came to life. Kelly fed a last second variable into the system and the module picked it up from the logarithmic generator. He was already moving off his chair and running toward the particle chamber controls. “Watch that retraction line, Jen. Are we green?”
“Looks good—Green one hundred.”
“Integrity?”
Maeve shook herself. “Eighty-one point three.”
“OK… the chamber is responding. Density looks good.
“Integrity below eighty!” Maeve gave him a pleading look.
“Damn it!” Kelly ran back to the retraction module. “This is going to be right on the edge.”
Jen could see what he was worried about. The line was moving, scudding forward on the temporal monitor, but fading slightly as it went. The integrity was slipping into the yellow. She suddenly remembered Paul’s last words to her before he left. “What about the focal routines on terminal three?” She gave Kelly a questioning look.
The information took a second to register in Kelly’s thoughts. Terminal three? Yes! That was the code someone had entered into the module. He had to dump one of his retraction schemes to enable the last shift because it was taking up so much room. “What exactly did he say to you, Jen?”
“Well, he said to watch the retraction closely, and if there was a problem I was supposed to—”
“Enable the focal routines on terminal three!” Kelly finished for her and he was already reaching over her for the switch, flipping it on with a terse motion.
“That’s helping!” Maeve called from the other side of the console. “Integrity has jumped three percent… Five percent. It’s over ninety now.” Her voice carried the first note of hope she had felt for some time.
“Good for you, Paul,” Kelly breathed. “Good for you, old buddy.” He eased back, heaving a great sigh of relief. “Well, we may just pull this thing off after all.” He gave them a broad smile.
Jen sighed with relief. “I wonder which one is coming back,” she said. “Will it be Doctor Dorland, or Professor Nordhausen?”
Kelly gave her a smile. “Well,” he said, “we’ll find out soon enough, won’t we.”
21
They were some time, traveling over hard, rocky ground broken by occasional swathes of wet sand. Each footfall was a slow, incremental pain to Nordhausen, and he wished he had his comfortable walking shoes, no matter what Maeve might think about the possibility of contaminating the time line. Their track took them eastward under a low, cloudy sky backlit by the pale light of a fading moon. Along the way his two Arab companions chatted amiably to themselves, casting occasional glances at the professor.
Nordhausen suffered along in silence, distracting himself with the puzzle of what he hoped to accomplish when they reached their destination. Paul said they had figured everything out, but it was a pity he never bothered to share the information. He found himself going over the account of the incident in Lawrence’s Seven Pillars, somewhat amused that he was recalling details of an experience that had not even been lived yet, at least not at this point in the continuum.
He sniffed the cold night air, smelling rain on the wind. If Lawrence’s account was accurate the weather should worsen as they approached dawn. That must still be several hours off, he reasoned, as there was no sign of light on the horizon. There would already be a train heading south from Damascus through Deraa. It would arrive in the early morning, nearly catching Lawrence and his men by complete surprise as they were planning the placement of their gelatine charges.
The details Lawrence had penned in his account of this incident were the only comfort Nordhausen had. He was going to place the charge under the main arch of a low bridge, well hidden, deep beneath a railroad tie. The bridge, little more than a four meter masonry arch, supported the track as it crossed a shallow culvert at the base of the twin hills called Minifir. They had only sixty yards of wire with them, all that they thought they would need for the attack on the Yarmuk bridge but barely enough for blowing up a train. Their change of plans presented a bit of a problem. The approach to the arch lay across the relatively exposed ground of a runoff channel that wound down from the base of the hill. Lawrence would take some time, hiding the wires in the rocky culvert and extending them up the wide mouth of this channel. Nordhausen remembered that he would single out a small isolated bush as the terminal end of the wire, a convenient place for him to attach his exploder. Even there, some fifty yards from the rail line, he would be painfully exposed to the passing train. It was a dangerous situation.
Now, how am I supposed to get at that damnable wire, he thought? After the first train took them by surprise, Lawrence posted lookouts on high ground to both the north and south so they would not miss another opportunity. He buried his wires and they just waited the whole morning out, huddling under their cloaks to conserve heat against the cold gray drizzle of the rain. Six hours, he thought. If we can get to Minifir by dawn I’ll have that much time to do something about this. The second train, the one coming up from Amman, would be spotted by the south lookouts around noon. It would reach the ambush site about an hour later. Whatever I do, it will have to be accomplished in those six hours.
The irony of the interval did not escape him. They had six hours to figure a way to get him to Minifir on November 10, 1917. Now that he was here he would have another six to save the world. He considered that, realizing that his two Arab guides could present some problem. He heard them speaking of Lawrence, and it was clear to him that they probably believed he was a lost member of Lawrence’s party. That was the difficulty now. Nordhausen knew he could not afford to make contact with the men who lay hidden on the craggy slopes of Minifir. The thought that he might catch a glimpse of the legendary Lawrence of Arabia was an exciting lure to him, but he could hear Maeve’s warning whispers with every step he took. There was no way he could allow himself to come face to face with the man. How would he explain himself?