Touchstone (Meridian Series) (17 page)

       “What?”
The professor’s voice quavered out, and she looked to see the excitement in his
eyes giving way to puzzlement. “Where are we?” He was looking around in
amazement. “Now what has Kelly done this time?”

       Presence
of mind had finally returned to her, and she remembered who she was, and what
she was about. Maeve struggled up, aided by Nordhausen, and the two of them
stood gaping at their surroundings. This was not the road to
Alexandria
. They were not in the quiet of the early dawn near
Abukir
Bay
, and worse yet, as the seconds passed,
interminably long, she realized that they were not being pulled back to their
own time. A Spook Job was just a quiet manifestation in the target zone and
then return—or at least it was supposed to be. This was only the second time
they had tried such an operation. If it worked as Kelly planned, they should be
standing in the Arch corridor by now, safe in the year 2010. But instead they
were gawking at the simple furnishings of a small room. The dull brown walls
were shaped of dried earth with embedded stone, and hung with brightly colored
tapestries. A thick rug covered the floor, with an ornate pattern in a stylized
geometric design. Arabic, she thought, her mind filling in the blanks as they
struggled to understand what had happened to them.

       “He’s
done it again,” Nordhausen was saying, but Maeve was still taking in her
surroundings. Her eyes fixed on a low wood table, a few feet in front of them.
There was a small tea pot of polished brass sitting on the table. Tiny curls of
steam emerged from the curved spout, spiraling up into the dissipating fog
about them. A simple porcelain cup was tilted on its side, the brown stain of
freshly spilled tea still wetting the lacquered table top. She noted the simple
decoration painted on the cup, a star embraced by a sickle moon and surrounded
by Arabic writing.

       “Damn
the man,” said Nordhausen, “he’s botched the numbers again, I tell you! Now
where in blazes are we?”

       Maeve
was still speechless as she watched the professor move cautiously toward a
single open window on the far wall. It was clear that the shift had failed.
They were not on their intended coordinates, at least not spatially. God only
knew where they were, or when, but Nordhausen was already getting far too
curious. She forced herself to speak, her voice dry in her throat.

       “Stay
put, Robert…”

       “Don’t
worry, I’ll just have a look out the window. What is this place?”

       Maeve’s
mind began to piece things together, with one thought stumbling after another.
It was daylight. The warm light was streaming through the single open window
where Nordhausen was now standing, and gleaming off the polished buttons of his
blue waistcoat. The spilled teacup pulled at her, suggesting that someone had
been in this very room only a moment before. It was a single person, for there
was only one cup. Perhaps he was sitting down for morning tea when the two of
them began to manifest. Lord, what a fright that man would have had! Spook Job
was a good handle for a mission like this, but something was clearly wrong. She
looked about, noticing a half open door behind them, but there was no sign of
anyone else. The poor fellow must have been frightened out of his mind.

       She
took in more details of the room… The rug was a simple prayer rug, undoubtedly
oriented toward
Mecca
, wherever that was. There was a wash bowl,
half filled with water to one side of the table, and a book lay upside down on
the floor. She stooped to see that it was a copy of the Holy Koran.

       “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 19
^th
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 2
^nd
, 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.

~

“Robert!”
Maeve raised her voice as
much as she dared, but it was clear that the professor was in a daze of
excitement. He was completely beside himself, eyes alight with the fire of
discovery and a ruddy glow on his cheeks. She had to do something. Kelly would
be working, he’d be trying to pull them out. Robert had moved from his initial
point of manifestation, and her instincts told her that this would complicate
things, perhaps fatally, if Kelly was trying to retrieve them. In spite of her
caution she found herself rushing across the room and grabbing Nordhausen by
the lobe of his right ear in a hard pinch.  “Damn it, Robert! Put that down and
come away from the window!”

       There
was a loud crack, deafening as the musket went of in a flash. The professor was
so startled by the ignition that the musket tumbled wildly from his grasp and
fell with a hard thump to the pressed clay floor.

       Maeve
released him, covering her ears with the shock of the sound, but she quickly
recovered and seized hold of Robert’s arm. There was shouting and wild
commotion outside the narrow window. She heard the neigh of a horse and the
scuffle of many booted feet. Deep voices barked out commands and she
immediately recognized the language as French.

       “What
are you doing!” Nordhausen was aghast. “I could have killed someone! Do you
know who’s out there?”