“Sinan is from the future, Paul.” The professor’s voice was hushed with the implication of his statement. “He’s like a permanent CIA agent assigned to a given Milieu—and look what he does in the history: he sets himself up in these secret mountain strongholds to recruit and train Assassins to carry out operations aimed at influencing events.”
“It sure looks that way. The Assassin cults survived for over 200 years, until the Mongols finally stomped them out for good.”
“Who knows if they really succeeded?” Robert had the bit between his teeth now. “Good lord! I’ve almost forgotten it, but Rasil said something—more to himself than to me. He blew up the entrance to the Well of Souls, as he called it, and said something like: ‘It will never again deliver the souls of the faithful to our agents in Massiaf.’ Yes! Then he said: ‘I wonder how Sinan will fare without the scrolls to guide him now?”
They looked at each other, and the conclusion was plain on both their faces.
“Sinan is an agent,” Paul agreed. “From the future.”
“And Rasil was sending instructions from Egypt. That threw me at first, but the more I thought about that scroll the more I was convinced that it was a rubbing.”
“A rubbing?”
“Yes, you hold the papyrus up to carved stone characters and the pressure of your rubbing imprints the images, like modern printing, only without the ink. It was a rubbing, Paul, and that meant the original message was carved somewhere, carved in stone. That’s why I wanted to look through the collection in the British Museum. I couldn’t find any reference to these characters in the existing data. If Rasil’s scroll was a rubbing then—”
“The touchstone had to be somewhere…” Paul reached the obvious conclusion. “Good for you, Robert. You’ve convinced me. Rasil opened his big mouth and now someone has run a mission—at least according to this Golem report—to the year 1799; to Egypt, to Rosetta.”
“They broke it,” Nordhausen nodded. “They’re trying to preserve the integrity of their code.”
“Interesting,” said Paul, his tone hinting that he had some clear conclusion in mind. “Why would they be using stone carvings to keep a record of the history? Because that’s the real touchstone. It has to be. It’s not the Rosetta Stone, but this hidden record of the history.”
“Are you suggesting they have some kind of archive or something?”
“Well, Kelly came to the conclusion that we needed a reference point on the history that was stable if we were to have any success guarding the Meridian. Otherwise how would we know if something changed? That’s what this Golem report is all about. But it seems to me that our Arab adversaries, if indeed they are Islamic radicals like the Assassins, are using a low tech approach to this whole process. They’ve got these Oklo reaction chambers rigged up to provide enough power to open the continuum at selected points. They’ve established these one way gates, a natural Arch opening a breach to a selected time. They’ve got little reception committees set up for the Walkers, as they call them, and they’ve got agents and supervisors and God only knows what else! I only saw a few rooms of that castle.”
Nordhausen gave him a grave nod of assent. “And while I was watching H.M.S Pinafore at the opera house someone from their side ran a mission—to wipe out the primary key to their record of the history. They’re using the Egyptian writing as a code, damn it. And if we go back tomorrow we can see about stopping them!”
“To Rosetta?”
“Where else? We have to see if the stone was broken upon discovery. If it’s whole, we have half a chance at fixing this thing. But what if it’s broken when they dig it up? That would mean the damage could have been done at any prior point in the history. We’d never find that needle in the haystack.”
“That would be hard to pull off,” said Paul. “No one knows when the stone was placed there. If they weren’t careful they might do something that would affect the discovery in 1799.”
“Ah,” Nordhausen countered. “But they know where it is—where it was discovered. They could go back a year earlier, dig it up, damage it, and then bury it again. And they know exactly what that stone said—in fact, I know what it said. I still remember it.”
“Tell me.” Paul was suddenly curious.
“Well nothing really mysterious or important. It was really just a sign, a proclamation by Ptolemy V Epiphanes laying out all his good deeds in regards to the temples and priests to buy their reciprocal good will and cement his legacy. The last line even states a possible point of origin for the stone. It read: ‘This decree shall be inscribed on a stela of hard stone in sacred, native and Greek characters and set up in each of the first, second and third rank temples beside the image of the ever-living king.” He gave Paul a satisfied look, pleased with his recollection of the history and taken with the notion that he was the only one alive now that knew this.
“So they had clues enough to look for it deeper in the past as well,” he concluded.
“Possibly, but that’s a much more difficult operation,” said Paul. “You just said that they were going to carve this message in each of three temple sites. They would have to get just the right one—the exact stone that eventually wound up in Rosetta, wouldn’t they? Otherwise they’d have to damage all three to be sure none of them was ever found intact. There’s just too much variation and haze in that direction. I like the idea of damaging it after it was dug up in 1799, or perhaps just a year before as you suggested—something very close to the discovery date. That has much more clarity—much more likelihood of success.”
“Well, there’s one way to find out,” said the professor with a gleam in his eye. “Now all we have to do is convince Kelly and Maeve.”
11
The next morning the four team members met at the Lab as planned. This time Paul was the last to arrive, still yawning when he came through the door and found the others milling about the main control consoles, already deep in a discussion over temporal coordinates. Nordhausen was standing with an armful of books, volumes dragged from his well stocked library. He was pushing one on Maeve, trying to gesture with a free hand while she flipped through the pages. Kelly was seated at the console, and Paul gave him a hearty ‘welcome back.’
“We didn’t think we’d have you here,” he said. “This is great! Now I don’t have to run the numbers.“
“There you are, Paul.” Nordhausen was on him at once. “I realize these volumes have been altered slightly by that last time mission, but they’ll give us a good starting point on the history, and we can look up details in Kelly’s RAM bank to verify things.”
Paul glanced at Maeve, obviously checking her reaction to all this.
“Oh, don’t worry,” she said. “He’s been arguing his point for an hour now and—”
“—She’s agreed to approve the mission,” the professor put in excitedly.
“She’s agreed that 1799 is the key target date,” Maeve corrected him quickly.
“Right—well we aren’t throwing darts, Maeve.” The professor pressed on. “It’s the date we need for the mission. Kelly’s already working up the preliminary numbers.”
“Right,” said Kelly, bent over his laptop. “But I’ll need time on an Arion to solidify all this.”
Paul gave Kelly a curious look. “You sure you’re OK, buddy?”