“I think,” Rebecca continued, “that there are probably far more than one or two extra frequencies in this harmonic.”
“So, you’re saying the original team sent more than one transmission?” Mabry asked.
“No,” Adrianna said. “We sent only one transmission.”
“So where did these extra frequencies come from? If you didn’t send them via the original transmission, then who did?” Mabry directed his question to Professor Lorentz who had remained silent after the revelation, his fingers steepled in front of his lips, head slightly bowed as he listened to his protégés talk. Now all heads turned to regard him.
“Perhaps it’s an echo,” Lorentz offered, “a bounce from some event in the past—”
“Or future?” interjected Mabry.
“—that has caused the signal to amplify and distort? My honest answer is that I do not know.” Lorentz seemed suddenly to shrug off the melancholia and exhaustion that had dogged him for the past few weeks as a wave of enthusiasm overtook him. “There’s only one way to find out. Adrianna, can you refocus your attention to Rebecca’s discovery?”
“Yes. I can put what I’m doing on the back burner.”
“I’ve run some preliminary calculations,” added Rebecca, as she pushed a paper printout across the desk to Adrianna. “They are all uploaded onto the central server for anybody who wants to take a look at them.”
“You’ve managed to isolate five streams already?” Adrianna asked.
“Yes. But that’s really just a cursory initial run—through of the data.”
Adrianna began scribbling notes and figures on the printout before finally looking up. “This first figure, how sure are you of its accuracy?”
A cloud passed over Rebecca’s face. “As sure as I can be under the circumstances. Why?”
“Because, if your calculations are correct, then we have a bigger problem than we first thought.”
“Please, Adrianna, do elucidate,” said Lorentz.
“Here,” she handed the printout to Lorentz, her own calculations written in her childish scrawl alongside Rebecca’s.
Lorentz flipped the sheets open as if he was reading a newspaper. All signs of his earlier hopeful mood evaporated into thin-air as his face drained of color. “My God,” he said, the words falling from suddenly dry lips.
“What is it?” Jim asked.
“It seems,” said Lorentz his voice barely controlled, “that our initial estimation as to the amount of time we have left before the second slip occurs has been severely underestimated. Professor Drake’s figures appear to indicate we no longer have years to stop this problem.”
“How long?” said Mabry.
“Two months,” said Adrianna, and then added, “If we are lucky.”
A silence fell across the room as Jim’s gaze moved to the face of each of his colleagues gathered around the table. They looked as though they had been handed a death sentence.
“You’re telling me that we can expect another occurrence of the Slip in just two months?” he asked. The question was directed to the room of people but it was Lorentz who answered.
“If Adrianna’s figures are correct—and I have no reason to believe otherwise—then, yes. We have just weeks before we will find ourselves back where we were on that fateful day again.”
Jim’s mind began to comprehend the impending disaster: the destruction of all their work to date, everything reset to where they were when the slip first occurred. All progress lost. The thought made him want to throw up. Plans would need to be made for when the second Slip occurred. They would have to arrange a meeting place for the group so they could ensure that they began work immediately. There would have to be— A terrible realization became suddenly and horrifyingly apparent to Jim.
“Lorentz, if this new event is going to occur twenty odd years earlier than we estimated how is that going to affect where we get deposited back down the time stream?” Jim asked.
Adrianna pulled the printout back from Lorentz and quickly jotted down more figures. A minute later, she stopped writing and stared impassively at the paper. A single tear appeared in the girl’s eye, flowed over her reddened cheek and across her quivering lip before falling silently to the table. “Oh no,” she whispered. “Someone tell me this isn’t right.”
Rebecca stood and walked around to the back of Adrianna’s chair. She placed an encouraging hand on the girl’s shoulder and stared at the calculations on the printout. Among the jumble of calculations, she saw a single figure in the Professor’s childlike hand, underlined with three thick slashing strokes from her pen.
The figure read, 1989.
Rebecca felt the room begin to spin. She threw her hand out and grabbed the back of Adrianna’s chair for support until her vision stopped swimming.
“Christ Rebbeca, you look like someone just walked over your grave,” Horatio Mabry was halfway out of his chair, a look of concern carved across his face, quickly followed by embarrassment as he caught his poor choice of words to the resurrected woman.
“I’m… okay,” Rebecca responded, making her way back to her chair on leaden feet.
“So, are you going to give the rest of us the good news?” Mabry asked solemnly.
Rebecca took a deep breath before answering. “According to Adrianna’s preliminary calculations, the second slip is going push us back the same amount of time as the first one.”
“Back to 2017,” said Mabry. “Right?”
Rebecca’s eyes met Jim’s as she regarded him deeply for a moment before answering in a barely audible voice. “No. Because the second slip is going to occur so much earlier than we expected it’s going to drop us somewhere in 1989 and that means most of us will either be infants or… un—born. Either way there won’t be anyone left to figure out how to stop this thing.”
Twenty-Eight
…you see, the Catholic Church is faulty. It is so entrenched in the doctrine of ‘faith above all else’ that should God himself come to us, and tell us that a certain belief or practice the Church had mandated was incorrect, he would be unable to persuade those who govern the faithful of his veracity. If he sat across from you in this very chair and said ‘I am the one and only true God’, the average Catholic would reply ‘Get thee behind me Satan’. Everyone seems so very sure God has no desire to talk directly to them. The very tenet binding us to the Church, denies us true contact and understanding of God. People had forgotten, myself included, that God speaks through the Church, and that the Church is not God—that is a distinction which must be remembered at all cost.
There is a modern parable I am particularly fond of that illustrates my point: A man is caught in a flood and as the water begins to rise, he climbs up onto the roof of his house and awaits rescue. As the hours pass and the water rises, no help comes, so he begins to pray: Dear Lord, in your divine mercy please save me from the rising floodwater.
Suddenly a helicopter appears and lowers a rope down to the stranded man—‘take the rope’ says the pilot. ‘No thanks’ replies the stranded man, ‘I’m waiting for God to rescue me.’ Three more times the pilot of the helicopter tries to convince the stranded man to climb up the rope and three more times he is refused: ‘I’m waiting for God.’
All the while, the water is rising and rising, until finally, the house is swept away, the man with it. His last words being ‘God, why have you forsaken me?’