end. All the others never happen. Once the Heisenberg Wave completes its migration, the entire universe settles back into one meridian—the prime meridian. We all think it’s the one we were born to, and we are correct, because you never leave the prime meridian of time, Maeve, but it changes… it changes… The one we are standing in now stretches all the way back through time. But in 1908, it started to fray, and that loosened thread is migrating forward like a run in good hosiery.”
“And when it gets here?” Maeve’s eyes held as much fear as anything else as she waited.
“Then God help anyone who is not in a protected Nexus Point.”
There was a long silence between them after that. Maeve’s eyes reflected the seriousness of what Paul was telling her now. It could all come unraveled. It might be so badly frayed that time cannot hold the rope of causality together, and that rope was now grinding and stretching against the sharpened rock of a major Paradox event.
“How long before the wave reaches us?”
“I don’t know,” said Paul frankly, “but we’ll certainly see it coming. The Golem modules will see the variations, and we’ll be able to monitor the progression of the damage on the chronology line. Right now we have solid green before 1908, except for that one little yellow blip in 1815 that seemed to have no consequence. Yet in June of 1908, things go from yellow, to amber, to red, and the damage to the meridian as it passes through WWII is quite profound. Now we see black on the chronology line for the first time, right at 28 July, 1941—Paradox.”
“The ship,” she said in a low voice.
Paul nodded.
“That damn Russian ship… What was the code name Nordhausen said the British once use for it?”
Paul looked down, thinking, then remembered the word.
“Geronimo,” he said, and the silence returned.
Maeve finally met his eyes again, understanding. “So this is why the voices from the future went silent…. Yet you’ve said the Heisenberg Wave is still in the 1940s. Only minor variations have been detected here.”
“Yes, the Golems are having difficulty finding variation data from beyond July of 1941. Paradox has a very strong penumbra, a shadow that can be quite impenetrable. So we aren’t sure if the main Heisenberg Wave has passed through that point in time yet.”
“Then what causes the minor variations we have detected here?”
“The P waves,” said Paul. “Predictive waves, precursors. When an earthquake happens, the seismic waves migrate through the earth’s crust. There are those that migrate through the deeper crust called body waves or P waves, and these are very fast, often reaching seismic monitors before the real damaging waves that follow. The P waves often produce low frequency acoustic energy as well.”
“You mean you can hear them?”
“Not unless you have very good ears. They manifest as ultrasound, very low amplitude sound, and other ambient vibrations. Then the main surface shock waves come, which create the real shear and roll in the crust that causes most of the damage in an earthquake. My theory posits that a Heisenberg Wave acts the same way. First it sends out rapid waves that are precursors to what is going to happen. So I call them P waves, as they can be predictive of what is to come—yet they don’t cause the real damage. Ever get a sensation of imminent doom? That’s a P wave passing through, you sense it, feel it on some level, though you can’t really hear it. They just begin introducing minor variations and other odd effects. Think of them as outliers, harbingers, little foreshocks of the damage yet to come. As to the future, they are at the greatest angle of divergence, so they get the worst of these P wave effects.”
“Angle of divergence?”
Paul thrust out both arms in front of him in a V. “Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,” he said. “As they do so, they are very close to one another in the beginning, yet the farther they go, the farther apart they become. Think of those roads as two possible time meridians. There are actually hundreds, thousands, perhaps even an infinite number of possible meridians, but let’s just stay with these two for this example. When they are close together, they are very similar, with only minor variations. Yet as they diverge, that gulf between them sees them become very different. The farther they go, the wider the divergence, and the greater the variation. So… these