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It would be nice if she could get into the system, just to see what she could find.
Doing so would require a hacker’s skills, though, and she wasn’t that good.
Kristian Sieber was.
As soon as the idea registered she discarded it. Not only was it dangerous to let anyone know where she was, but to involve Kris again was dangerous to him.
What could she possibly learn, anyway? A list of contributors, that’s all. That wouldn’t help her. It would be nice if she could learn Parrish’s schedule…
She bit her lip. No. She wasn’t going to call Kris.
Grace sat down and forced herself to return to the documents. After a moment, she was engrossed again.
There had always come a time, while she was studying a language, when suddenly her brain seemed to “get” it. She would struggle with syntax and verbs for months, then the accumulated knowledge and familiarity would reach critical mass, the synapses would connect, and presto! From one moment to the next she would pass from struggling to reading, the language opening up to her as if the letters had rearranged themselves from gibberish into real words.
Three minutes after she sat down, the old language synapses connected.
“The Guardian holds the Knowledge to bring down the Mother Church, and he Shall hold it Close, for the Power of our Lord God is Greater than the thought of Man, and so he Shall serve our Lord God all his days.
“To this End Shall he Journey through Time, his body Prepared by food and drink, and the Years shall be as nothing to him. Be it a Thousand years, yea, still he Shall go forth to Battle the Foundation of Evil, for he alone may wield the Power.”
Journey through time? Grace blinked at the words. What was the Guardian supposed to be, a time traveler? She hadn’t realized that bit of silliness had existed for so long. Medieval scholars hadn’t even been able to grasp the concept of a round earth; they had still pictured dragons lurking around the edges, waiting to devour anyone foolish enough to fall off.
But evidently the Templars had not only believed it, they had devised a special diet to prepare the body for the trip. What else could the Diet of Time be?
Curiously, she pulled out the sheet on which she had translated the diet. At first glance, or second or third, there wasn’t anything magical about it. First one precisely calculated one’s weight by sitting in a barrel of water; ingenious of them, using water displacement as a measure. Then, according to one’s weight, there was a formula for working out how much salt, calf’s liver, and various other foods one must consume, and exactly how much water to drink.
It was a diet rich in sodium, iron, and all the trace minerals, she noted. Not a bad diet, except for the liver; that would be hell on a time traveler’s cholesterol level.
She kept that page in her hand, and returned to the Gaelic documents.
“His body Prepared, he will then by striking Steel to Stone find the Spark of Lightning that will Carry him to the Chosen Time.”
Grace almost choked. “What were you idiots trying to do?” she blurted, staring at the page. “Electrocute yourselves?” They had deliberately flooded their bodies with iron and water, then worked up some source of electricity. Who ha
d been the guinea pigs for this experiment, and had anyone survived?
The rest of the page was mathematical formulas. Evidently, they had thought to control the number of years traveled by the amount of water drunk and the force of electricity applied. Interesting concept, but what had they known about electricity, much less controlling it?
She turned to the next page, and her blood ran cold.
“And the Evil one shall be called Parrish.”
“Oh, my God,” she whispered.
“Kris, this is Grace.”
There was silence on the end of the line, then he said explosively, “Grace!”
“Shh,” she cautioned. Nervously she twisted the steel cord of the pay phone, wondering once again if she had any right to involve Kris in this mess. She had been up most of the night, reading and rereading the documents, trying to apply common sense to the situation, but finally coming to the conclusion that extraordinary events called for extraordinary actions. Nothing about her life in the past eight months had been ordinary. Perhaps she would find something in the Foundation’s computers, perhaps not, but she couldn’t afford to leave any avenue unexplored.
“It’s okay. Mom and Dad are in Florida. Where are you? Are you okay?”
“I’m fine,” she said automatically. Fine was a relative term. She wasn’t dead, she wasn’t injured, she wasn’t hungry. Physically, she supposed she was fine; emotionally was another story. “Did you have any trouble… after talking to me that time? Did Parrish or any of his men question you?”
“Maybe. I don’t know,” he said. “A detective came to the house that day, but he wasn’t the one I’d talked to before. He showed me a badge, y’know, but how would I know if it looked the way it should? He asked me a lot of questions I’d already answered, and I stuck to the story. I’d worked on your modem, showed you a program I was working on, you paid me and left. That was all. You didn’t mention anything about your work.”
She breathed a sigh of relief. The “detective” could have been legitimate, and could also have been one of Parrish’s men rechecking Kris’s story. Kristian had pulled it off, protected by his computer wonk persona. No one meeting him would think him involved in anything beyond bytes and programs.
