“Lord,” she whispered… “Where are we? What have we done?”
Nordhausen turned from the window. “You can blame this on Kelly,” he accused. “He’s mucked up the breaching numbers again. It’s daylight, so the temporal shift is off as well. Looks like a city of some kind out there.” He gestured to the open window. “Damn quiet. Must be early morning.” His eye fell on a weapon set by the window, and he reached for it out of curiosity.
Maeve’s eyes widened. “Put that down,” she hissed in a strained whisper.
“What? No harm, Maeve. I’ll just have a quick look. Maybe it will give us a clue as to the time. At least we’re not in the Cretaceous. Whatever that rogue has done, it may only be a minor error. Look here, a nice strait barreled matchlock musket—fully primed and ready to fire…”
“Robert! Put that down. We mustn’t tamper with anything in this Milieu. It’s plain that something has gone wrong. Kelly will be trying to pull us out as quickly as he can. Besides…” She looked over her shoulder at the half open door. “I think someone was here when we came through.”
“What?”
“Look at the tea setting. The pot is still hot and the cup has been spilled.”
“Right you are,” said Nordhausen as he took note of the scene. “Well let’s hope we at least made it to Egypt.” His mind jumped ahead to a new assessment. “These pressed mud walls would be very typical of construction at the target date, and if this musket is any indication of the time I’d say this was a 19th Century weapon. Maybe we’re not too far off the mark after all.”
The quiet of the early morning was broken by a thrumming sound in the distance. It quickly resolved to a rhythmic beat, and Nordhausen edged to the window again, his head cocked to one side as he listened. The sound grew ever louder, accented with a steady tum, tum, tum of a drum beat. He leaned out, taking in a narrow cobbled street, and saw that a column of uniformed men were marching up the alley. They were led by an officer with a brightly colored plume on his cap and a drawn sword. Behind him came a group of twenty men at arms, all in blue, their long muskets shouldered in smart order, their faces stern and grim, as though set in stone.
A group of riders followed, and the professor squinted at the man in the lead, sitting bolt upright on a white stallion. He was clearly the officer in charge. Every aspect of his being shouted authority, with one gloved hand resting on the pommel of his saddle and the other grasping the rein with a sure and steady grip. The gold tasseled shoulder pauldrons marked him with high rank, though he wore no headgear. A curled tress of dark hair fell on his wide forehead, and his eyes surveyed the narrow alley as the column came on. Nordhausen squinted, rubbing his eyes as he looked, as though trying to clear his vision. The man seemed suddenly obscured in a violet haze. He blinked, and looked again with an expression of recognition and surprise stretching his features.
“Look here, Maeve!” He waved at her. “Come to the window!”
“Get away from there, Robert! What’s got into you? Put that thing down and get over here. We mustn’t move. We mustn’t touch anything. Don’t you understand?”
“It’s him, Maeve! Oh, if only Paul could see this. Look, he’s just there.” He gestured with the musket, jabbing it at the open window as the sound of marching feet beat heavily on the cobblestone alleyway.
Back in the control room Kelly was frantically trying to replace his damaged keyboard. He got the new unit plugged in, and shifted into his chair with a huff.
“What happened?” Paul was gesturing at the chronometer. “The readings are stabilizing, Kelly.” He looked at the particle infusion station, surprised to see the light was still holding at green. It should be yellow by now, he knew, and the retraction sequence should be kicking in to bring Maeve and Robert back.
“I must have hit the keyboard when I lunged to try and stop that spill. It looks like I triggered my shift modulator by accident.”
“Shift modulator? Is that something new?”
“I installed it last week. It was a new module I was using to make minor adjustments to the breaching sequence. I set it so I could nudge things by minutes, hours, days or even whole years if I needed to adjust the temporal locus, and I have spatial flux programmed as well.”
“You moved them?” Paul gave him a wide eyed look.
“Well, not intentionally. It was an accident!”
“Where? Where are they, Kelly. The particle decay is still green. Why didn’t the emergency retraction scheme kick in?”
Kelly bit his lip, his eyes darting from one reading to another as he thought. “It did kick in—or at least it tried to. Look!” He pointed at an indicator on the console. “It went into emergency suspend mode.“
Paul dragged a chair over and slid in next to Kelly, his dark eyes taking in the situation as his friend pointed out the indicators. “You bumped them in space-time when you spilled the coffee,” he concluded. “Where are they?”
“Not far, I hope,” said Kelly. “Looks like they moved ahead of the target date… here, I’ve got a good reading now. They’re early.”
“How early?” Memories of that wild shift into the chasm of time flooded back to him now, and he was visualizing Robert and Maeve, all dressed up in their 19th Century garb, as they strolled through the late Cretaceous.
“Just a few days or so,” Kelly reassured him, almost as if he could read Paul’s apprehension. “Damn, I was supposed to turn the number lock off on my keypad before I initiated the run, but I just forgot.”
“Have you got a new breaching date?”
“Just a second… Here it comes now: July 2nd, just a few days off… but wait, It looks like the year is off as well. I’m reading 1798.”
“Backup chronometer agrees,” said Paul. His mind was reaching back in the history, and he knew the date was familiar. He reached for one of the volumes in Nordhausen’s research pile and began flipping through the pages. He did not have to look far, for all the relevant data was bookmarked. “Just as I thought,” he said with a deflated expression on his face. “It’s the date of the initial landing. Napoleon has just arrived off Alexandria. Lord, they’ll be right in the middle of things If the spatial coordinates hold.”
“They didn’t,” said Kelly sheepishly. “I really screwed this one up. Sorry Paul. Looks like I bumped them a few kilometers as well. All that from a damn coffee mug!”
“Pushpoint,” said Paul. “Little things have great effects. Let’s get them back, Kelly. The infusion chamber can’t hold for long. It must be feeding in the particle reserve to keep the singularity spinning. We have to yank their butts back to Berkeley, and fast!”
“I’m on it. You get over to the infusion module and hold that mix steady while I reset the retraction to these new coordinates. If they have their wits about them, and stay put, we should be able to pick up their pattern signatures from the flux.”
“Let’s hope Maeve has the good sense to keep a tight rein on Nordhausen.” Paul was hurrying, his movements betraying both the urgency and danger inherent in the situation. The error was not bad, but the hold they had on Robert and Maeve was keyed to the original target dates. The system tried to run a retraction scheme, but they were not there. Now Kelly was feeding in the new coordinates, a worried look on his face.
“There’s no way I can key this decimal in time. I’m patching the retraction vectors right into the space-time chronometer data. It’s the only way I can be sure.” He toggled three switches, and held his breath.