Nexus Point (Meridian Series) (2 page)

       Lawrence of Arabia! Nordhausen smiled to
himself as he recalled the eerie glow he had seen about the man that last
morning of the mission. He had come within a few yards of a Prime Mover, one of
history’s most colorful and yet enigmatic figures. There he was, silhouetted
against the slate gray dawn on a miserable wet morning, and all Nordhausen
could do was gape helplessly at the man in shivering silence.

       It was forbidden, of course, to have any
interaction with a Prime Mover. Maeve Lindford had beat that tenet into his
head a hundred times before the mission. She had been verbally fencing with
Nordhausen the night before they left, dead set on preventing him from doing
any real research if the project worked…well it
did
work. They went back
alright, but Nordhausen would be damned if he could think of a single thing he
had accomplished to change the history. Paul swore the same. Neither man could
put their finger on anything they did to unhinge the ambush the Arabs had
planned at Kilometer 172. Yet they clearly did something, stumbling about in
the cold and rain, confused, tired and bewildered by the
experience
of traveling in time. Some tiny,
insignificant event was set in motion, or prevented, by one of them. Yet they
could not discern what the "Pushpoint," as Paul called it, was.

       Time moved on the whisper of nothingness, on
the careless whim of a humdrum second or two that no one would give the
scarcest notice. He always thought it would be great men, Prime Movers all, who
would forge the shape of
future days.
Instead it was poppycock, happenstance, odd coincidence
, chance moments
in the stream of time. These were the things that carried the seeds of
tomorrow.

       They knew they had to alter Lawrence’s
mission, but how? Where was the Pushpoint? Was it the wire leading to his
igniter? Faulty charges in the gelatine? Did the Turkish colonel happen upon
something when he searched  the railroad tracks? Could he have crushed the
Pushpoint under foot as casually as he might
step
upon a fallen cigarette butt, grinding it into the gravel of the rail bed?
Whatever it was, they had been successful. The moment they returned Maeve read
them the passage in Lawrence’s
Seven Pillars of Wisdom,
and it had
changed.
Nordhausen had used the book to help them discover the crucial
meeting point on the Hejaz rail line where all of future time was waiting to be
born. If it were not for that wonderful book…

       Thoughts of the
Seven Pillars
, and
the three separate drafts Lawrence had penned, shook Nordhausen from his
reverie. Lawrence’s detailed written account of his exploits in the desert had
proved a saving grace. It had served as a road map for them on the first trip,
and now it was the firm object of Nordhausen’s desire on this second trip.

      
Here he
was, riding in coach number seven as it rolled into Reading Station west of
London on a crisp November day in 1919. He would bide his time, watching
carefully from his window seat until his quarry left the train and made his way
over to the refreshment room for a mid-day tea and crumpet. The man would be
carrying a messenger’s bag, of the sort they used to transport important
papers, currency, or gold. Why his mark selected such a bag was beyond him.
Surely it would be hard to overlook where he was going to leave it haphazardly
under the table in the refreshment room. Surely it would be a severe temptation
to anyone who found it.

       Nordhausen planned to
head for that very room in just a minute or two. He waited patiently, counting
out the seconds, and then stood up with a clear resolve. He hefted the stout
walking cane he had brought along, as if to test its strength for the odd use
he had in mind. It was a solid piece of lacquered hickory, with a burnished
brass cap. It would serve him quite well, he thought, as long as he kept a bit
of guts behind it.

       He would make his way
into the station and take a seat in the Refreshment Room, very close to
Lawrence himself. Yes, it was Lawrence he had come to see again. His presence
on the train had been well documented, and Nordhausen was sure he would be
here. The professor wondered whether he would still have that eerie glow about
him now that he had fled from the heroics of his desert to the relative anonymity
of the English countryside. Still, he would have his book with him—
the
manuscript,
the very first draft of
The
Seven Pillars of Wisdom
. Lawrence
claimed it was stolen on this train trip, and Nordhausen would soon find out if
that was true.

       The version of the book
the professor relied upon for their first excursion to the desert was actually
the
third
draft Lawrence made of the story. The first he lost, on this
very trip to Oxford. The second he destroyed himself, perhaps out of grief for
what he failed to accomplish, or some hidden shame that would dog him the rest
of his brief life. The third would survive to become the classic that had saved
the Western World, but the first two copies of the manuscript were never found.
There was no point trying to get at the second draft. The research was too hazy
in that direction. But this first draft was right here on the train, in the
bank messenger’s bag, and reputedly left under his table when Lawrence stopped
here for a brief refreshment. Someone was going to try and make off with it,
and that someone was going to feel the sharp crack of Nordhausen’s cane before
the hour was through—unless the professor could get to the bag first.

       Lawrence would reach
Oxford, and realize his bag was gone. He would place a call to the Reading
Station in the hopes that someone there would recover it. The professor thought
about that for a moment. Should he turn the bag over to the Station Master? He
would still be able to read it, as it would undoubtedly be published at some time.
The more he considered the matter, however, the more he began to hear the snarl
and growl of Paradox on the fringes of his surreptitious plan.

       Would Time punish him
for this little transgression? No, he thought, this time the threat of Paradox favored
his plan. If he turned the manuscript in, then Lawrence would not have to
re-write the book as he did later that year. If the story was altered, ever so
slightly, then the clues, which led them all to their rendezvous in the desert,
might never be there. Everything could come unraveled in that event—
everything
.
Maeve was really quite correct in the end. They would change things without
even knowing it, just as they did at Kilometer 172. He couldn’t take the risk,
so he decided to take the bag instead. After all, it was lost and never
recovered. It was probably taken by some ignorant station worker who did not
have the slightest appreciation of what he was stealing, or even who his poor
victim was. All he had to do was make certain Lawrence was well away on his
train before he recovered it, and if someone got to it first he had his cane.

       Still, the feeling of uncertainty redoubled.
The manuscript had not been recovered—not yet, but thousands of artifacts and
art treasures of his day had been lost for millennia before they were finally
found. What if someone was slated to find the manuscript in another hundred
years? What if the find was to prove a very significant event in the life of
that unborn person? Nordhausen realized that even this seemingly innocuous trip
may have unforeseen consequences for future generations.

       What might he do this time, and without even
knowing it? He could return and find everything changed; everyone gone; lives
askew and no one even realizing that the present they embraced was not meant to
be; that it was all the heedless doings of a selfish man who refused to listen
to the voice of caution. The misgivings spawned by Maeve’s warnings were riding
him with each mile and dogging every step he took. What if he botched the
mission? What if he bumped into Lawrence again at Reading Station? What if
there was a struggle for the manuscript with the original thief? The prospect
that he might be involved in a scuffle was not so palatable now, in spite of
his sturdy cane. The more he thought, the deeper his misgivings became, but
there was only one thing to do now that he was here. Get on with it! Get the
damn manuscript and head home, with as little fuss and bother as possible. He
would just have to suffer the consequences, whatever they might be.

       Nordhausen steadied himself as the train
approached the station and people began to jostle up from their seats. He was
still a bit bemused by the effects of his time shift. Yes, he knew it was
dangerous to open one’s eyes during transit time in the Arch, but he could not
resist. The spectacle was so completely encompassing that it was worth the
dizzying nausea that resulted. What would one endure, he thought, to but
glimpse the face of God? Maeve did not know. She had stayed behind in the lab
on the first mission. She never
saw
it, and Nordhausen knew that she
would never understand until she stood there in the auroras and opened her
eyes. There was no explaining it. You just had to open your eyes and take it
in.

       Perhaps he would not hear her chiding voice
so sharply if she came along, just one time, and felt the exhilaration of that
terrible moment in the stream of infinity. But Nordhausen was alone in this
now. Nobody knew he was here—not even the simpleton of a graduate student he
had press-ganged into a long night shift in the main lab facility. All the lout
had to do was toggle a switch at precisely three AM; just a few hours of idle
time in the lab, but eight hours for Nordhausen on his trip to England in the
year 1919.

       The train whistle blew its shrill warning as
it slowed to enter Reading Station.
The
professor rubbed his hands in anticipation. He would see to the matter once and
for all. If history could find no use for the precious draft, he would be quite
happy to take it under his loving wing, and fly away.

       And that is exactly
what he did.

       He accomplished his
mission, and was greatly relieved to find that nothing seemed amiss when he
finally returned to the Lab. The dutiful grad student he had secreted into the
facility had done his job. He toggled the switch that set Nordhausen’s
retraction scheme running, and the professor was pulled back through the open
gateway in Time to reappear in the Arch. In spite of the temptation to look, he
made a point of keeping his eyes clenched shut this time through, to minimize
the effects of the shift. As soon as his senses were clear he raced up stairs
to cover his tracks in the data module. A few deletions here and there would do
the job. He sent the grad student on his way with a nice monetary treat so he
could enjoy the rest of the holiday weekend.

       Three hours after his
safe retraction he was back in his study in Berkeley, gleefully paging through
Lawrence’s handwritten notes. He would celebrate Independence Day by recounting
Lawrence’s efforts to bring exactly that to his Arab friends.

       It had all been so
easy, he thought. So painless. All of his misgivings had been for naught—aside
from the hefty deposit he would have to make to cover the added electricity
usage that weekend. No matter. It would be well worth it. He didn’t even have
to bother with the original thief! The bag was just sitting there unattended.

       Nordhausen was very
pleased with himself, but he would have had a lot to think about if he had seen
what actually happened after he left Reading Station. If he had seen the dusky
stranger shuffle into the refreshment room, he might have thought it odd how
the man singled out one isolated table in the corner and stooped to look
beneath it, as though he expected to find something there. He might have been
surprised at the look on the fellow’s face when the bag he expected to find was
not sitting there. He might have wondered at the curse the man uttered beneath
his breath, in a strange and unfamiliar tongue, and the
odd
way in which he surveilled
the room, his eyes laden with hostility and suspicion. There was no one else
there for him to blame. Nordhausen was already ninety-one years away, with a
glass of good Chianti in his right hand and a self-indulgent gleam of
satisfaction in his eye.

Part I

The Ammonite

“Who controls the past
controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”
1984 -
George Orwell

1

The helo swooped low,
its turbine
engines whining with the descent as it made its way along the crest of a jagged
ridge of weathered rock. All about them the desert was broken by fantastic
shelves of striated stone erupting from a barren plain. The sun cast an amber
hue on the red and black stone as they circled, painting the landscape in dark
shades of scarlet and orange.

       “How you got permission for this
is beyond me.” Paul Dorland was seated in the comfortable back seat of the helo
next to Professor Nordhausen, his long time friend and associate.

       “It wasn’t easy,” said the
professor over the noise of the engine. “The Jordanian government isn’t very
fond of Americans these days—not after the mess we created in the region with
that business in Iraq.  It took some doing, Paul, but I pulled on a few favors
I was owed by associates in the Middle Eastern Archeological Society. They have
digs going on out here all the time: the Buller excavations at Aliba, the
resources project out at Kerak, the Madaba Plains outfit near Tel Jalul—just to
name a few. I convinced them to slip one more permit through the system, that’s
all. If you want to get anything done in this world you never make much fuss
about it. Just be as inconspicuous as possible. “