“And Saul did all of this with just three temporal shifts?” I asked.
“We think that there were three major shifts,” Katherine said. “The three that you’ve experienced. The first was when the temple was formed. The second—well, we haven’t quite pinpointed the cause of the shift on January 15th. The third, of course, was yesterday. We originally thought it was a minor shift for the timeline as a whole, with a major impact on anyone whose life has been intertwined with mine since 1969, because it means I never switched places with Richard, never landed at Woodstock, and never gave birth to my daughters. Therefore, Deborah never existed to meet Harry, and you were never born.”
Katherine paused, taking a sip of tea before she continued. “But we’re seeing a lot of other changes, so I’m guessing that they timed this strategically. After all, these shifts must be as unpleasant a sensation for them as they are for you and for me. It would make sense to minimize the discomfort and do several things at once, assuming you have enough people with the ability to time travel.”
The scariest thing to me was that some of this was beginning to sound logical. “Did you know what Saul was planning before you… ended up in 1969? Did you know that he was going to create this new religion?”
Katherine didn’t answer, but took the stack of diaries that I had been holding from me and ran her finger along the spines, reading the dates that were embossed in gold. She shook her head and returned to the bookshelf, locating another small book, which she opened, tapping the first blank page three times. I saw her fingers move briefly on the page, as though she were entering a PIN at the ATM.
“The short answer is no,” she said as she walked back to where I was sitting. “I didn’t know what he was doing. But I did suspect he was up to something—something against CHRONOS regulations.”
Katherine handed me the stack of diaries. “You still need to read my official journal,” she said, “in order to become familiar with the missions. But perhaps this would be the best place to start. We were all asked to keep personal logs in addition to the official trip reports. This one on top is my personal journal.”
Connor gave Katherine a look of surprise. I thought I caught a hint of annoyance as well, and guessed that this was one book in the library to which Connor hadn’t been given access.
Katherine rummaged in a desk drawer and located a case, from which she pulled a small translucent disk, about the size and shape of a contact lens. She placed the circle in my palm. “Stick this just behind your ear, in the little hollow at the bottom. If you press inward, it will adhere to your skin.”
I tried it and the device attached without a problem, but I didn’t notice any change. “Is it supposed to do something?”
Katherine opened the journal and tapped the page three times. I watched as several tiny icons appeared, hovering above the page like a hologram. A volume icon was grayed out until I pressed it with my finger, and then I heard a faint hum. “You can pause, skip entries, and so forth using these controls. They are a bit different from the buttons on your iPod, but they should be self-explanatory.”
As she handed me the journal, she held on to it for just a moment, as though she was reluctant to give the book over. “You can start from the beginning, but you’re unlikely to find much of interest until the entries for late April.” She paused, an odd expression on her face. “Try not to think too badly of me as you read it. I was young and in love, and that rarely leads to wise decisions.”
10
It seemed too intrusive to listen to Katherine’s personal journal while she was right there in the room, so I headed downstairs, grabbed a diet soda out of the fridge, and plopped down on the cushions in the big bay window. This wasn’t exactly the type of reading I had been thinking of when I saw the spot on my first visit to the house with my dad, but it was, as I had suspected, a very nice place to curl up with a book.
Figuring out how to use the controls took a few minutes. Once I had worked out the navigation, I visually scanned several of the early entries for the year. Most of them were fairly basic. The book seemed to be a cross between a journal and a reminder calendar—a note about a New Year’s Eve party Katherine had attended with Saul; a lover’s spat with Saul, who wanted to request larger quarters now that they were living together; a brief but embarrassingly vivid description of their Valentine’s Day celebration—the type of notes that someone might jot in a diary if she were too busy and too happy for a lot of introspection. Other than a rant about a coworker who had too little respect for personal boundaries, the entries made almost no mention of CHRONOS or Katherine’s day-to-day work with the organization.