Touchstone (Meridian Series) by John Schettler, Mark Prost Page A

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