Nothing was written; nothing forbidden, and everything was permitted. That was the chaos that now sat hunched in the center of her mind like an old, unwelcome hobgoblin to plague her thinking. She wanted it out, wanted it gone, wanted things wrapped in nice neat boxes again, and stacked up just so. But the world would never be that way for her again. All of her careful habits, all the meticulous checks and balances that governed her life, were futile efforts at imposing order on chaos. It was very unsettling, to say the least.
Perhaps there was something in the human heart that reached for a truth that was unalterable. A man’s reach should exceed his grasp, wrote Keats, or what’s a heaven for? Knowing, or believing that there was something out there that was fixed and permanent, had long been a comfort to the human soul. Now the Arch had proved that anything was possible, and any semblance of truth, as she once knew it, was gone from her life. She had firm ground under her feet when she walked into the Lab that night, but now all was quicksand. Nothing was certain, not even the comfort of finished, printed text in the books that she so loved all her life.
She remembered how they had started that first night with an argument about Shakespeare. They were going to test their theory by simply going to see the original showing of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, and she was worried that Nordhausen’s wayward curiosity might contaminate the time line. The man wanted to go nosing about Shakespeare’s office, and she resolved, then and there, that he would not set one foot out of her sight if the Arch actually worked. It wasn’t merely Nordhausen’s eccentric temperament that she was determined to set a watch on—it was Shakespeare! The thought that the professor might do something to alter a single word of that man’s verse was the most compelling argument anyone could make against the time project that night. If Paul’s theory was correct, then a carelessly spoken word to a stranger in the past, a heedless stumble in the dark, a mislaid object, could wreak havoc on future time. It would be as if Shakespeare ‘never writ.’ The most maddening thing was that they might not even know what they had done to alter the record of time. Things would simply change—just like Lawrence’s narrative in The Seven Pillars. She would reach for The Tempest on her library shelf one night and find it missing, gone, annihilated. Worse yet, she might never know the damage was done.
The thought that every book in her library was now subject to sudden revision had become a seed of a deep discomfort, and it was growing in her with each day that passed. She could lose any one of them: Bronte, Whitman, Keats, all blown away with the slightest breath of time. That volume of poetry she had been reading last night—would it be the same tonight? It was more than unnerving to her now, it was frightening. It wasn’t merely words and books that could change on a whim, it was everything. Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle had finally come home to roost.
She remembered how she had confronted her greatest fear at the end of their first mission. Robert and Paul were still flushed and dizzy with the elation of their return. The Arch was a scintillating montage of light, and the generators were whining as they strained to provide the power required for the retraction jump. She recalled the excitement she had first felt with Robert’s return. Then Paul came through and everyone was safe at last. She had the barest moment of relief before that odd rumble shuddered through the Arch, like a ghostly train passing in the night. A howling sound droned in its wake, and she felt the fear gather strength within her.
Things were different.
Something had changed, and she could feel it like a shift in the weather, a faint, yet palpable variation in the certainty of her life. Something had changed. Heisenberg was running wild, and everything was different now.
Time travel was dangerous. Meddling could easily twist the continuum into a confounding loop of Paradox, and when that happened, something lashed out at anything that did not belong on the changed Meridian. Paul tried to explain it to them once. He said that the notion of Paradox was so insulting to time that she would find a way to punish the