Touchstone (Meridian Series) (11 page)

“Well, we have to know,” said
Paul. “That’s the whole point of a Schroedinger’s box. You make your reality
when you look inside. Let’s dig.”

He waded in with a strong foot
on his shovel, and heaved away the first clod. They wedged the memorial plaque
aside and for the next ten minutes the two men delved into the shallow grave.
At first the work was muddy, but soon they hit dry earth.  The expected thud
came suddenly when the professor’s shovel hit something hard.

“There’s our Schroedinger’s
box,” said Paul. Without speaking, they cleared off the last of the dirt.

Whoever opened the gravesite
before them hadn’t bothered to pry the lid off. They had just hacked into the
top with an axe, leaving an ugly breach in the box.

“It’s kind of odd,” said Robert.
“It feels like a desecration, even though Kelly was never here.”

Dorland stooped to get a better
look, thrusting his arm into the hole in the box and rooting about. He pulled
his hand out and sat back on his haunches.

“Well, Mr. Schroedinger?” asked
Nordhausen.

“The cat is dead,” said Paul.
“It’s gone. Someone’s got the DVD.”

“Who could have done this?”

“God only knows, but we have our
suspicions, right? If it wasn’t Rasil or his men it was someone else. Someone
from the future. They’re the only ones who could possibly know about this.”

“But we were going to keep it
all secret,” Nordhausen protested. “Keep it to ourselves.”

“Someone had to learn about it
or they could not have pulled Kelly to safety in the first place. We have to
look at this clearly, Robert. One side used us to help them reverse
Palma
. The other side is fighting
back. Maybe it’s Rasil, or his masters. Maybe it’s Sinan and his Assassins.
This sure is a devious way to try and do in Kelly—just like something the
Assassins might dream up.”

“So now what?” The professor
flapped his arms against the cold. “Whoever took it, can destroy it, if they
haven’t already. My god, what if Kelly’s gone?”

“I don’t think so,” said Paul.
He was suddenly excited. “Because this wasn’t the only copy. There still must
be a data somewhere on the archives at the lab. We’ve got to get over there! We
have to go and burn a hundred DVDs of Kelly, and stash them everywhere. Put it
on a Yahoo server somewhere as hidden code on a web page. Make it part of
Kelly’s Golem program—anything to insure that the copy will survive. We have to
publish this information so much that it can be always available…not hide it!
Publish it! We had it all wrong. The only way to maintain his probability is to
assert it vigorously.”

9

On the road back
they began to sort out the problem of who took the DVD. The night
had calmed, although thin tails of clouds were still rushing aloft. The moon
loomed in a cobalt blue sphere, with bright white stars dotting the sky
overhead as the storm front passed.

Nordhausen said suddenly:  “It’s
clear now that there are other people moving through time.”

“I was afraid you were going to
bring that up,” said Paul. “It’s a lot to start thinking about just now.”

“Well, we can’t avoid it.
Someone physically dug up Kelly’s DVD and stole it. No one knew about that
except the four of us.”

“No one in this milieu. But they
were the ones who rescued Kelly in the first place, so at some future time the
existence and location of the DVD becomes a known fact.”

“Exactly,” Nordhausen said
excitedly. “We assumed they excavated it decades from now, and found the DVD,
and had the idea to save Kelly. But now, look, we are going to try to make it
so they don’t have to dig up the grave.  So we don’t know how they found it… Maybe
someone stole it, and they got it from them? Maybe they came back in time, and
picked it up now, instead of in their own time. Suppose
this
is how they
found it, perhaps only just hours ago because of what we’re about to do.”

Dorland interrupted him. “That’s
the same Schroedinger’s Cat argument. But it’s a gross analogy trying to
describe a quantum puzzle. Don’t worry. It doesn’t mean anything, it just makes
you think. Niels Bohr said the cat existed in both states, alive and dead,
until you opened the box, and then the probability collapsed into certainty,
and the cat was either alive or dead. But the Many-Worlds theory says that at
the moment a particle can or cannot emit, it does both, and each one sets off
another fork in the universe, one with a dead cat and one with a live cat.”

“Well, you tell me,” Nordhausen
shot back, “is Kelly alive or dead?”

“He seems to be in both states,
before our very eyes. Schroedinger said there is a difference between an out of
focus photograph and a snapshot of fog and clouds.” Dorland was pensive, “He
proposed the original thought experiment to show that it was not possible to
separate a superposition, it had to collapse… But in 1996, the National
Institute of Standards and Technology managed to separate a single ion of
beryllium into two states at a measurable distance of 80 nanometers.”

“More physics? What is that
supposed to mean?”

Dorland rolled his eyes
miserably. “I have no idea. Still, it seems to me that as long as we have Kelly
physically here, and we make certain that there is a data set easily available
for
Graves
’ colleagues to rescue him, then
Kelly ought to maintain his integrity in this
Meridian
.”

Nordhausen was eager to agree.
Then his thinking transitioned to the other problem that had been vexing him
all night. “What about the hieroglyphics?”

“The hieroglyphics?”

“The hieroglyphics! The Rosetta
Stone. And the other time travelers. If I didn’t cause the damage then they
must have been running a mission themselves. That’s what triggered the
alert—not my time jaunt.”

“Possibly.” Dorland was content
to swim in uncertainty for a moment. “We’ll get over to the lab and see what
the Golems have for us.”

Nordhausen pulled out his phone.
“I’m calling Maeve to see how Kelly is. Maybe even our resolve to do this is
enough to help him—even before it happens.”

“Good point,” Paul agreed,
realizing that they were about to look into another box with the call. His
heart was heavy when he thought of Kelly again.

Robert got through on the first
ring, and gave a brief account of what they were planning. Kelly appeared to be
no better, although he seemed to be resting comfortably.

Dorland whispered, “Tell her to
meet us at your apartment in
Berkeley
. We can confer there. And use the code.”

The professor tried to remember.
“Oh, yes,” he said. “And say hello to
Alexandria
.” It was a reference to a novel he had been writing on the
destruction of the famous library in that city—and a fitting metaphor for his
holding in
Berkeley
, as they had all agreed.

He switched off the phone with a
visible sigh. “I don’t think she took that code business too well.”

~

This arrangement made, the men
drove to the facility at Lawrence Berkeley Labs with as much speed as Paul
could safely manage. They pulled into the rain swept parking lot a half hour
later and rushed through the security station to the Lab. By the time they
pushed through the door, they were breathless with the energy and excitement of
their mission.

“You work the DVD thing,” Paul
yelled. “I’ll check on the Golems.”

“Where do I
start?” Nordhausen gave him a blank look.

“The blue system at the far left
of the main control room. You know the one?”

“Yes, but what do I do?”

“Just do a search for any .MPEG
file. You’ll find it. Make copies and publish. Use your imagination!” He rushed
away, heading for the RAM bank center where he hoped the Golems would have news
for him.

Robert located the data file on the
archival storage system, and spent the next couple hours copying it on every
available type of media he could locate. He set up a web and domain called
KellyRamer.com, and posted the file in every possible format. It was linked
into every University page he could access, and he added in meta-tags for easy
searching.

When he was done, Nordhausen
gave a sigh of exhaustion, and went to look for Paul.

“I made fifty copies,” he said.
“Have we changed the future?”

“I hope so,” said Dorland. “The
physical copies are tangible. The probabilities collapse into certainty with
each copy you make because the chance of at least one surviving increases, copy
by copy.”

“So, if we go back now and dig
up the grave, will the DVD be in it again?”

“I’m not going to go find out,”
Dorland said. “As the pious peasant said, ‘There are some things man is not
meant to know, Doktor Frankenstein!’”

“Fronkensteen!” retorted
Nordhausen, and the men laughed, breaking the mood of heaviness that had beset
them while they labored to preserve Kelly in the world of certainty.

Dorland pulled himself out of
his seat. “I was right about the contamination,” he said as he eyed a ream of
computer printouts.

“What do you mean?”

“The alarm was not for
your
time breach, Robert. In fact, your party with Wilde and company seems to have
made little impression on future Meridians. There’s a few inconsistencies in
the RAM bank comparison, but nothing serious. The
Meridian
is clean on that score.”

“Then what caused the damage?”

“There was
another
breach
of the continuum, concurrent with your mission, but to another target date
altogether. No time to talk about it now though. First things first. You’ve got
to face Maeve.”

The look Nordhausen gave him was
the sum of all fears, but Paul just smiled.

~

The drive to the apartment from
the lab was quite different from the trip they had made earlier in the
afternoon. Now they were exhausted, hungry, and still filthy from the graveyard.
They had both changed from their soaked shirts into fresh lab coats, but their
trousers and shoes were still caked with dried mud. Dorland swung by an all
night drive through, and they ordered combo meals to go.

When they got to the apartment, Maeve
was already there, waiting in Paul’s car across the street. She seemed very
excited, and encouraged by a strong improvement in Kelly’s condition.

“I don’t know what you two did,”
she beamed, “but Kelly is awake now and hungry as a horse! He’s lucid, very
focused, and the confusion and disorientation is completely gone.”

“Thank Robert,” said Paul,
pointing at the professor. He told Maeve their idea of publishing the data to
the Internet as a way of preserving it.

“Wasn’t that a security risk?”
Maeve suggested.

“Not really,” said Paul. “To any
outsider it’s just a few minutes of footage of Kelly at his desk. Sure, he
vanishes at the end, but with special effects being what they are these days,
and the amount of junk on the Internet—”

“Of course!” Maeve smiled
warmly, delighted with the solution. “Well it’s already worked some kind of
magic. I insisted Kelly stay at the hospital tonight for observation, just to
be sure. In fact, I practically had to sit on him to keep him from running over
to the lab.”

“Probably best, but this is
great news,” said Robert, clearly relieved.

 After they went up, Robert
offered Paul the first shower, and set him up a with aclean tee shirt, a UC
Berkeley sweat shirt, and a pair of very loose trousers.

While Dorland was showering, Lindford
made a pot of coffee and Nordhausen took the opportunity of eating his
hamburger, to avoid talking with her. She could see that he was at the end of
his strength, and that finally sitting down was making the weariness come on,
so she was content to wait for a while before they started getting into the
matter seriously.

Dorland came out in a billow of
steam, drying his hair with a towel, complaining that the balding Nordhausen
should at least have a hairdryer for the benefit of his guests.

Nordhausen said he didn’t have
enough visitors to justify the expenditure, and closed the bathroom door behind
himself.

Dorland, finally warm and dry,
sank into the large easy chair to the side of Nordhausen’s desk. The black and
white composition books containing the professors hieroglyphics were scattered
on the desk top with computer printouts from the Golem report.

Maeve brought Paul a cup of
coffee, and sat in the desk chair. She piled up the notebooks and set them
aside without looking at them.

“Okay, Paul, tell me
everything.” Tired or not, he was the project team leader, and he would have to
answer for anything that went wrong.

“Hah, yes, everything,” Dorland
began. “Well, I think we have taken care of Kelly’s problem. Your instincts
were right that the DVD in the memorial was not safe, but Robert and I have
taken care of that. Oh, by the way,” he handed her a handful of DVD’s in a box.
“Take these, and put them somewhere, burn a copy on every computer you have,
and keep transferring them when you get new ones.”