Timeline. Part 45

The torch sputtered in the cool air. By its flickering light, they saw huge casks, six feet in diameter, running along the wall. They were in a wine cellar.

"You know the soldiers will find this place soon enough," Marek said. He led them through several rooms of casks, moving without hesitation.

Following him, Kate said, "Do you know where you're going?"

"Don't you?" he said.

But she didn't; she and Chris stayed close behind Marek, wanting to be in the comforting circle of light from the torch. Now they were pa.s.sing tombs, small indentations in the wall where bodies rested, their shrouds rotting away. Sometimes they saw the tops of skulls, with bits of hair still clinging; sometimes they saw feet, the bones partially exposed. They heard the faint squeak of rats in the darkness.

Kate s.h.i.+vered.

Marek continued on, until at last he stopped abruptly in a chamber that was nearly empty.

"Why are we stopping?" she said.

"Don't you know?" Marek said.

She looked around, then realized that she was in the same underground chamber she had crawled into several days before. There was the same sarcophagus of a knight, now with the lid on the coffin. Along another wall was a crude wooden table, where sheets of oilskin were stacked and ma.n.u.script bundles were tied with hemp. To one side was a low stone wall, on which stood a single ma.n.u.script bundle-and the glint of the lens from the Professor's eyegla.s.ses.

"He must have lost it yesterday," Kate said. "The soldiers must have captured him down here."

"Probably." She watched as Marek started going through the bundled sheets, one after another. He quickly found the Professor's message, then turned back to the preceding sheet. He frowned, peering at it in the torchlight.

"What is it?" she said.

"It's a description," he said. "Of an underground river, and ... here it is." He pointed to the side of the ma.n.u.script, where a notation in Latin had been scrawled.

"It says, 'Marcellus has the key.'" He pointed with his finger. "And then it says something about, uh, a door or opening, and large feet."

"Large feet?"

"Wait a minute," he said. "No, that's not it." What Elsie had said was coming back to him now. "It says, 'Feet of a giant.' A giant's feet."

"A giant's feet," she said, looking doubtfully at him. "Are you sure you have that right?"

"That's what it says."

"And what's this?" she said. Beneath his finger there were two words, one arranged above the other: DESIDE.

VIVIX.

"I remember," Marek said. "Elsie said this was a new word for her, vivix vivix. But she didn't say anything about deside deside. And that doesn't even look like Latin to me. And it's not Occitan, or old French."

With his dagger, he cut a corner from the parchment, then scratched the two words into the material, folded it, and slipped it into his pocket.

"But what does it mean?" Kate said.

Marek shook his head. "No idea at all."

"It was added in the margin," she said. "Maybe it doesn't mean anything. Maybe it's a doodle, or an accounting, or something like that."

"I doubt it."

"They must have doodled back then."

"I know, but this doesn't look like a doodle, Kate. This is a serious notation." He turned back to the ma.n.u.script, running his finger along the text. "Okay. Okay ... It says here that Transitus occultus incipit Transitus occultus incipit... the pa.s.sage starts ... propre adcapellam viridem, sive capellam mortis propre adcapellam viridem, sive capellam mortis-at the green chapel, also known as the chapel of death-and-"

"The green chapel?" she said in an odd voice.

Marek nodded. "That's right. But it doesn't say where the chapel is." He sighed. "If the pa.s.sage really connects to the limestone caves, it could be anywhere."

"No, Andre," she said. "It's not."

"What do you mean?"

"I mean," she said, "that I know where the green chapel is."

Kate said, "It was marked on the survey charts for the Dordogne project-it's a ruin, just outside the project area. I remember wondering why it hadn't been included in the project, because it was so close. On the chart, it was marked 'chapelle verte morte,' 'chapelle verte morte,' and I thought it meant the 'chapel of green death.' I remember, because it sounded like something out of Edgar Allan Poe." and I thought it meant the 'chapel of green death.' I remember, because it sounded like something out of Edgar Allan Poe."

"Do you remember where it is, exactly?"

"Not exactly, except that it's in the forest about a kilometer north of Bezenac."

"Then it's possible," Marek said. "A kilometer-long tunnel is possible."

From behind them, they heard the sound of soldiers coming down into the cellar.

"Time to go."

He led them to the left, into a corridor, where the staircase was located. When Kate had seen it before, it disappeared into a mound of earth. Now it ran straight up to a wooden trapdoor.

Marek climbed the stairs, put his shoulder to the door. It opened easily. They saw gray sky, and smoke.

Marek went through, and they followed after him.

They emerged in an orchard, the fruit trees in neat rows, the spring leaves a bright green. They ran ahead through the trees, eventually arriving at the monastery wall. It was twelve feet tall, too high to climb. But they climbed the trees, then dropped over the wall, landing outside. Directly ahead they saw a section of dense, uncleared forest. They ran toward it, once again entering the dark canopy of the trees.

09:57:02.

In the ITC laboratory, David Stern stepped away from the prototype machine. He looked at the small taped-together electronic bundle that he had been a.s.sembling and testing for the last five hours.

"That's it," he said. "That'll send them a message."

It was now night in the lab; the gla.s.s windows were dark. He said, "What time is it, back there?"

Gordon counted on his fingers. "They arrived about eight in the morning. It's been twenty-seven hours elapsed time. So it's now eleven in the morning, the following day."

"Okay. That should be okay."

Stern had managed to build this electronic communications device, despite Gordon's two strong arguments that such a thing could not be done. Gordon said that you couldn't send a message back there because you didn't know where the machine would land. Statistically, the chances were overwhelming that the machine would land where the team wasn't. So they would never see a message. The second problem was that you had no way of knowing whether they had received the message or not.

But Stern had solved both those objections in an extremely simple way. His bundle contained an earpiece transmitter/ receiver, identical to the ones the team was already wearing, and two small tape recorders. The first tape recorder transmitted a message. The second recorded any incoming message to the earpiece transmitter. The whole contraption was, as Gordon admiringly termed it, a multiverse answering machine.

Stern recorded a message that said, "This is David. You have now been out for twenty-seven hours. Don't try to come back until thirty-two hours. Then we'll be ready for you at this end. Meanwhile, tell us if you're all right. Just speak and it'll be recorded. Good-bye for now. See you soon."

Stern listened to the message one final time, then said, "Okay, let's send it back."

Gordon pushed b.u.t.tons on the control panel. The machine began to hum and was bathed in blue light.

Hours earlier, when he had begun working on this message machine, Stern's only concern was that his friends back there might not know they couldn't return. As a result, he could imagine them getting into a jam, perhaps being attacked from all sides, and calling for the machine at the last instant, a.s.suming they could come home at once. So Stern thought they should be told that, for the moment, they couldn't come back.

That had been his original concern. But now there was a second, even greater concern. The air in the cave had been cleared for about sixteen hours now. Teams of workers were back inside, rebuilding the transit pad. The control booth had been continuously monitored for many hours.

And there had been no field bucks.

Which meant there had been no attempt to come back. And Stern had the feeling-of course, n.o.body would say anything outright, least of all Gordon-but he had the feeling that people in ITC thought that to go more than twenty hours without a field buck was a bad sign. He sensed that a large faction inside ITC believed the team was already dead.

So interest in Stern's machine was not so much about whether a message could be sent as whether one would be received. Because that would be evidence that the team was still alive.

Stern had rigged the machine with an antenna, and he had made a little ratchet device that turned the flexible antenna to different angles and repeated the outgoing message three times. So there would be three chances for the team to respond. After that, the entire machine would automatically return to the present, just as it had when they were using the camera.

"Here we go," Gordon said.

With flashes of laser light, the machine began to shrink into the floor.

It was an uncomfortable wait. Ten minutes later, the machine returned. Cold vapor whispered across the floor as Stern removed his electronic bundle, tore the tape away, and started to play back.

The outgoing message was played.

There was no response.

The outgoing message was played again.

Again, there was no response. The crackle of static, but nothing.

Gordon was staring at Stern, his face expressionless. Stern said, "There could be a lot of explanations...."

"Of course there could, David."

The outgoing message was played a third time.

Stern held his breath.

More static crackling, and then, in the quiet of the laboratory, he heard Kate's voice say, "Did you guys just hear something?"

Marek: "What are you talking about?"

Chris: "Jeez, Kate, turn your earpiece off."

Kate: "But-"

Marek: "Turn it off."

More static. No more voices.

But the point was made.

"They're alive," Stern said.

"They certainly are," Gordon said. "Let's go see how they're doing at the transit pad."

Doniger was walking around in his office, mouthing the words to his speech, practicing his hand gestures, his turns. He had a reputation as a compelling, even charismatic speaker, but Kramer knew that it didn't come naturally. Rather, it was the result of long preparation, the moves, the phrasing, the gestures. Doniger left nothing to chance.

At one time, Kramer had been perplexed by this behavior: his endless, obsessive rehearsal for any public appearances seemed odd for a man who, in most situations, didn't give a d.a.m.n how he came across to others. Eventually, she realized that Doniger enjoyed public speaking because it was so overtly manipulative. He was convinced he was smarter than anyone else, and a persuasive speech-"They'll never know what hit 'em"-was another way to prove it.

Now Doniger paced, using Kramer as an audience of one. "We are all ruled by the past, although no one understands it. No one recognizes the power of the past," he said, with a sweep of his hand.

"But if you think about it, the past has always been more important than the present. The present is like a coral island that sticks above the water, but is built upon millions of dead corals under the surface, that no one sees. In the same way, our everyday world is built upon millions and millions of events and decisions that occurred in the past. And what we add in the present is trivial.

"A teenager has breakfast, then goes to the store to buy the latest CD of a new band. The kid thinks he lives in a modern moment. But who has defined what a 'band' is? Who defined a 'store'? Who defined a 'teenager'? Or 'breakfast'? To say nothing of all the rest, the kid's entire social setting-family, school, clothing, transportation and government.

"None of this has been decided in the present. Most of it was decided hundreds of years ago. Five hundred years, a thousand years. This kid is sitting on top of a mountain that is the past. And he never notices it. And he never notices it. He is He is ruled ruled by what he never sees, never thinks about, doesn't know. It is a form of coercion that is accepted without question. This same kid is skeptical of other forms of control-parental restrictions, commercial messages, government laws. But the invisible rule of the past, which decides nearly everything in his life, goes unquestioned. This is real power. Power that can be taken, and used. For just as the present is ruled by the past, so is the future. That is why I say, the future belongs to the past. And the reason-" by what he never sees, never thinks about, doesn't know. It is a form of coercion that is accepted without question. This same kid is skeptical of other forms of control-parental restrictions, commercial messages, government laws. But the invisible rule of the past, which decides nearly everything in his life, goes unquestioned. This is real power. Power that can be taken, and used. For just as the present is ruled by the past, so is the future. That is why I say, the future belongs to the past. And the reason-"

Doniger broke off, annoyed. Kramer's cell phone was ringing, and she answered it. He paced back and forth, waiting. Trying one hand gesture, then another.

Finally, Kramer hung up the phone, looked at him. He said, "Yes? What is it?"

"That was Gordon. They're alive, Bob."

"Are they back yet?"

"No, but we got a recorded message of their voices. Three of them are alive for sure."

"A message? Who figured out how to do that?"

"Stern."