But no one had ever asked about them before.
How odd,
she thought, as Ross tapped a code into the elevator pads. A subtle jerk, a whine of hydraulics, and the elevator did not go up—though the people in the lobby of the Northside Research Institute would think it had. Upstairs a legitimate marketing research company did a thriving business. Down below ground level existed a complex that those busy researchers would have been astonished to discover.
They dropped fast and smooth; then the elevator doors slid open onto spacious hallways with full spread-spectrum lighting and rows of healthy ferns and other plants. Off both sides offices full of computer banks and desk cubicles opened up, people moving to and fro. The designers had made it as pleasant as they could, but to Eveleen it still felt like vintage government-agency ambience, and modest as their apartment was, she was glad to call it home.
"Ah, there you are." Major Kelgarries emerged from an adjacent hallway, three or four disks in one hand and a sheaf of files in the other.
He's been riding a desk for a long time, but he still looks and moves like a man used to being in the field,
Eveleen thought as Ross returned the brief greeting and they followed Kelgarries's broad shoulders the last few paces to one of the conference rooms.
It was one of the big rooms, with a big projection screen on one wall. No one spoke as they entered and set up their laptops. Ross moved straight to the coffee dispenser next to the door and brought them both a cup. Eveleen was still feeling off balance. She smiled at Gordon Ashe, and decided the light touch was the way to handle his odd request. She tapped her earrings and blinked her eyes, as if to say,
See? I remembered!
He smiled back, but his smile was tight, and perfunctory at best.
Eveleen looked away, troubled, and began seeing the clues she'd overlooked: tension. Tension in Kelgarries, tension in Ashe, tension in Milliard, the big boss, muttering over there into a cell-phone. Tension in the older woman sitting in the corner, laptop open. She talked quietly with the tall redhead whom Eveleen recognized as one of the top computer simulation experts in Project Star.
The redhead gave Eveleen a brief wave.
"Hi, Marilyn," Eveleen murmured. Then wished she hadn't spoken, for her voice seemed oddly loud.
"We're all here," Ashe said then. "Eveleen, if I may trouble you for those earrings, please?"
She no longer felt like laughing as she unfastened and handed them over. In silence she and Ross watched Ashe examine the simple gold loops, then place them on the light-plate of a projecting microscope arranged next to his chair. Eveleen felt Ross tensing up beside her, his gray eyes narrowed.
Everyone watched as Ashe took out a small manila envelope from a file and shook its contents out into his hand: another hoop earring. Then he produced from a pocket a jeweler's eyepiece and bent over the earring, glancing occasionally at the projection screen, where Eveleen's pair loomed as large as basketball hoops, every dimple strike of the jeweler's hammer plain. He reached and turned over the two earrings on the microscope's projection stage.
Eveleen felt tension grip her own neck when she realized she'd heard his breathing stop. In silence he placed the earring from the envelope on the microscope, pushing aside one of the ones already there. There was his hand, big enough for them to see the whorls of his fingerprints as he nudged the earring into the center, next to the other, and then Eveleen realized what she was seeing.
The earring was identical to one of the pair she'd brought, a little more worn, but it had the same little jeweler's squiggle on it and in exactly the same place. It was the same earring.
Cold certainty settled into the pit of her stomach, and Eveleen felt a familiar dizziness; the paradoxical nature of time travel wasn't something anyone ever got used to. She was too experienced a Time Agent to mistake what she and everyone else in the room were seeing: bilocation, the selfsame object existing simultaneously in two places at once.
"Where?" Ross demanded, gazing at Gordon Ashe, his face like granite. "And when? And how long have you known about it?"
Eveleen took her lower lip between her teeth. The truth was, a weird little voice in the back of her mind gibbered and giggled, Mrs. Withan was
scared
of Ross. He had no idea he looked as out of place in her clean, low-key apartment building as a pirate in a swimming pool. Tall, lean, scarred hand, his walk the silent, action-ready walk of someone who was raised on the streets, Ross didn't look even remotely like any sort of software salesman.
The street kid was very obvious in his attitude now. But Ashe had been handling that oblique threat for years.
'To answer your questions in reverse order: I did not know about it until last night. 'When' is somewhere in the middle of the 1600s
b.c.
We think it might be 1628. And where . . ." He smiled wryly. "Have you ever heard of the legend of Atlantis?"
Eveleen said, startled, "But that's New Age woo-woo!"
Ross then surprised her—surprised everyone—by saying, "Plato, fourth century B.C. Retelling Solon's story."
Kelgarries snorted a mirthless laugh. "Glad I didn't put any bets on that one."
Gordon nodded, giving Ross a brief smile. "Dialogues between Timaeus and Critias. So you did a little reading while you were up at my cottage in Maine?"
Ross grinned back. "Books were on the shelf, and you did say to feel free."
Gordon looked around at them all. "Our so-called Atlantis, as far as we can tell, did in fact exist. But it was not a great continent, and it did not sink. It was a volcanic island—actually an arc of small islands, the very top of a massive undersea volcano—just north of Crete, now called Thera. Which means 'fear,'" Gordon added with a sardonic lift of his brows. "The people of the time seem to have called it Kalliste. And as near as we can tell, approximately in the 1620s B.C. from thirty to fifty cubic miles of it blew into the sky, sending out a tsunami that took out all the ports along the Aegean and sent a black cloud into the atmosphere that ruined crops in China and showed up in tree rings as far away as northern California."
Eveleen rubbed her temples, stunned at what had to have been the magnitude of that volcanic eruption.
Kelgarries turned to the red-haired expert. "Marilyn?"
"For purposes of comparison," she said in a strong French accent, "the explosion at Mount St. Helens in Washington was an explosion of a mere half-cubic-mile, as you Americans would say. Krakatoa was about eight cubic miles."
The woman next to her—short, thick graying hair—listened, taking notes steadily, but as yet she had not spoken, and no one had introduced her.
Ashe tapped the projection stage of the microscope, making the huge images on the screen tremble and bringing their attention back to the earrings. "And this was discovered buried under approximately twenty-five meters—say eighty feet of volcanic ash, undisturbed until just this summer."
Ross looked sick. "A volcanic island?" His mouth tightened. "I suppose our bones were next to it?"
Eveleen felt her heart squeeze at that
our.
No one had mentioned him yet, but she knew that he'd be there beside her, somehow, no matter how.
"No," Ashe said. "Understand that the progress at that dig is barely measured in inches, especially in the past few years, and as yet there have been no remains. Just a few scattered artifacts in the street of a city. The people, as far as we can tell, seem to have been evacuated."
"By us?" Eveleen spoke, her throat dry. That voice at the back of her mind was no longer laughing.
If everyone got away, why was my earring there?
"I mean, it's clear that we were there. That we're going to be there."
Ross tapped a pencil on the edge of his laptop, a militant tattoo. "Why all this background chat? Are you building up to some big idea about the Baldies maybe causing that volcano to blow?"
"Well, we don't know," Ashe said. "The truth is, until yesterday somehow this remarkable incident in Earth's history had seemed a random natural event, albeit extraordinarily spectacular. As a possible site for our investigations, it had been previously overlooked. Probably because as yet there has been so little excavation done, and we know so very little about what happened—and of course there had been no mysterious artifacts found, none of the globe ships or other signs of the Baldies that we've discovered and dealt with in other times and places."
Eveleen's mind worked rapidly through what she knew of history. "Thera. . . north of Crete. Those were the Minoans, weren't they? The bull worshippers? Weren't they supposed to be this sophisticated, peaceful trading civilization?"
"They were," Ashe said. "They were probably the most sophisticated culture Earth had produced until the past couple of centuries—and some will argue about that, considering the wars we've managed to wage against ourselves and the environmental damage our industrial developments have caused. The Minoan houses that have been excavated so far had running water, possibly hot and cold. Toilets. Showers, even, in one place. A standard of living, in short, that would not be out of place today. Only they didn't wage war, they traded, all along the Mediterranean, for their distinctive artwork shows up in tombs in Egypt as well as points north and west. Yet right around this time they vanished. Simply disappeared from history."
Ross nodded. "Right. But you said that no bodies were found, and that they might have evacuated. So how did that civilization vanish?"
"No one knows," Milliard said, pointing to a sheaf of printouts. "We've pulled up as much research as we can, and most of it is speculation."
Eveleen looked around. Anomalies—events that could have been caused by outside agency—existed all through the human past, of course. She and the other Time Agents had certainly experienced enough outside interference from the hairless, humanoid aliens they called Baldies to make every incident that did not have clear cause and effect appear suspicious.
Ross frowned. "What we might be looking at here is some kind of dirty work, then? Someone deliberately setting back the development of our civilization a couple thousand years?"
Ashe pressed his thumbs into his eye sockets. "It is one hypothesis, isn't it? Marilyn and her team have been up all night running sims on this, and correlating it with what we know. The most accepted hypothesis in my field posits that if the Minoans had survived, we might have had our industrial revolution at least a thousand years ago—if not more. We might be immortal by now. Colonies on other planets. But, though theories are neat, as is usual when dealing with human psychology, it might not be that simple."
Kelgarries said, "There's apparently even a computer analog in Athens, made some two thousand years ago." And he looked over at the gray-haired woman. "Mrs. Edel? What was that you were telling me about earlier?"
The woman spoke for the first time. "It's called the Antikythera mechanism. It was pulled off a shipwreck. Layers of interlocking gears, with readouts to calculate and display astronomical positions." As she spoke her eyes widened with just that sort of wonder that sometimes characterized Gordon Ashe when he talked about the mysteries of the past.
The eternal curiosity of the scholar,
Eveleen thought.
And Milliard said, "Mrs. Edel is our authority on the time and culture."
The woman gave them a tentative smile. Eveleen met her dark gaze, with its expression of inquiry, and smiled back.
Ross also gave the woman a nod and smile, but it was a distracted smile. He was back tapping his pencil again, his scarred fingers tense. "A computer, eh? So, what, we're going back to see if the Baldies dropped a couple of their equivalent of nuclear bombs down the shaft of that volcano?" He sat back and sighed. "But if they caused the volcano to blow, then it doesn't really matter if it was them or Mother Nature, does it? It already happened. That means if we were there we lost the battle, and it happened. If we'd been successful—if we were to be successful in stopping 'em—then we might destroy ourselves up at this end of time."
"Yes, and no," Ashe said, leaning forward. "As usual, it's not that simple; it's not clear that the Baldies touched off the volcanic explosion by some arcane means." He turned to the computer expert. "Marilyn?"
"There is another hypothesis that projects an unexpected version of what our modern times might have been like if the Minoans had lived," she said, tapping at her computer console.
The light under Ashe's display blinked out, and the power shifted.
Once again the screen came to life, this time with a picture of the Mediterranean world. "This hypothesis, less popular, begins with the obvious statement that our present-day civilization is a direct result of that disaster."
Eveleen frowned, staring at the map.
"The key word, now, is
peaceful,"
Marilyn went on. "The Minoans were peaceful and stable. If they had continued to build their remarkable ships and carry goods and ideas around the world, there is a chance we would have developed along more peaceful lines. Most of our technological development has been a side effect of inventions for warfare. Or defense.
This second model gives us this picture—" The image shifted. "Had the Minoans continued to influence our development, Earth's population would have grown slowly, engaged more in trade than warfare, giving us—today—a largely pastoral civilization of maybe half a billion people."