Boats took it all in. When Dwayne was done, Boats poked through his pockets for a crumpled pack of Marlboros. He lit one with a gold lighter engraved with the SEALs eagle. He took a drag and let out smoke that trailed away astern in the wind their forward progress was creating.
“Bring me back something,” he said at last.
“Like a t-shirt?” Jimbo said.
“No, you dumb pogue.” Boats grinned. “A sword, or something cool like that.”
“Not a problem,” Dwayne said.
24
Left Behind
Morris needed sleep, only he knew it would not come. Instead, he was sitting in front of his computer array down in the Tube chamber. He wore two sweaters and had a blanket over his shoulders. The rings encircling the walkway were coated in inches of ice that had condensed on the steel like a skin. The temperature was just above freezing and the air painfully dry. He scrolled from screen to screen with red-rimmed eyes.
It was always like this when he had an unsolved problem. Sleep was pointless and restless and ultimately futile. His mind could not rest while any detail was left inconclusive. The first trial of the Tube was aimed at a random day in the past. The return trips used that first foray as a base point—a benchmark. For this new expedition to work, he would need to reach a certain date in a certain year. The insertion team had to manifest to a designated day in the past with perhaps a forty-eight-hour window of error.
Technically, theoretically, the problem had been solved for him by the Vestergaard Equation. It was an obscure algorithm worked out a decade before by an even more obscure Danish mathematician named Bode Vestergaard. It sought to create a workable equation that could be applied to the concept of, then strictly theoretical, time travel. The Dane theorized a device much like the Tauber Tube and created a series of equations that was broken into twelve sub-formulas and included thousands of symbols. It made the quantum field theory called second quantization look like high school algebra.
Morris applied the equation when he created his Chronus program for tuning the Tube’s field intensity to reach desired targets in the past. It certainly worked out in rough results. He aimed for exactly one hundred thousand years in the past and was only off by a year and four months. That would not do here. He would have to punch the hole for a manifestation in May, 240 BC. He could shoot for earlier and use that as a kind of milestone. Then adjust back closer to the optimal date. That first shot would have to land before the first day of May. If he miscalculated and the team manifested later than May there would be no second shot. The test shot they made was set for 1000 BC to reduce any possibility of an error that would make their hunt for Praxus’ treasure impossible.
For reasons he and Caroline had yet to work out, each trip back created a barrier that could not be crossed. Once they had manifested at one date, that date became a boundary that prevented any further sojourns to periods deeper into the past. That was the reason Caroline chose the earliest date for which she could find chronological references this exact. There would be no travel past that point. It was the fatal flaw in their miraculous device—each usage limited their scope. They were shrinking their options toward the present with each implementation.
To Morris’ mind, it was all worked out. But that was only numbers and models. It was all headwork and keyboard time with no fieldwork. He could be off only a few days, and all of this would be for nothing. Caroline’s theories weren’t theories any more. They worked. God, did they work. Now it came down to Morris’ skills to conjure the desired results.
The screens before him weren’t telling him anything. The longer he stared at them, the less sense they made. Would he even notice an anomaly or missed symbol if there were one to be seen?
The hatch in the wall behind him swung inward with a muted squeal. Caroline entered wearing a parka.
“Chilly,” she said.
“I made hot chocolate, but it goes cold before I can drink it,” Morris said. He turned in his chair to look at her. He welcomed the interruption. His little sister would break him out of this intellectual loop that was chasing its own tail in his mind. But she looked more troubled than he was.
“I heard from Jane in London,” she said. Jane was a friend Caroline made at college. She took a teaching position and was now a professor in—was it archeology? Anthropology? Morris could only remember that she was a chubby girl who came from money of some kind.
“Oh, the bones,” Morris recalled.
“Jane emailed me a full report on her findings. She’s a dear and didn’t ask any questions, though I know she’s dying to.”
“She found a cause of death, then.”
“Yes,” Caroline said quietly. “How old a man would you say Renzi was?”
“I’m not very good at that.” Morris shrugged. “I’d say about my age. Thirty or thereabouts. He was a heavy drinker, so maybe younger.”
“Jane studied the ossification of his skull sutures; where the plates come together. She also examined his cortical bone structure and degenerative changes in his joint sections.”
“Sounds thorough.”
“Rick Renzi was sixty years old when he died,” Caroline said.
“We can’t go back,” Morris said. He stood behind Caroline, who had taken a seat
