of you grasp what we might be getting ourselves into.”
The others, though, had ceased paying attention.
“We’ve been over that – time and again. I’m going, and that’s final,” said Markowitz.
“Me, too,” said Bergfeld. “Don’t try to stop us.”
***
Lavon did, however, make one last attempt.
“What about the time paradox?” he asked, “the notion that we could accidentally kill one of our ancestors, and thus never be born.”
“We debated that for a while,” Juliet replied, “but we never came up with a good answer. Given that both of our families originated in northern Europe, we decided that the possibility of Henry encountering one of our ancestors in ancient Judea was so remote that we shouldn’t worry about it.”
Lavon gestured towards Markowitz.
“What about him?” he said. “His ancestors –”
Markowitz cut him off.
“By the first century, Jews lived all across the Mediterranean world,” he snapped. “The odds are extremely remote that I could do myself any harm in that regard.”
Whatever the outcome, the paradox struck me as something easy to test.
“Couldn’t we take a handful of newly hatched chicks back a few days with their mother, kill the hen, and watch whether the chicks disappear?” I asked.
The others, though, greeted my contribution to scientific progress with stony silence. Either they considered the idea cruel, or most likely, they realized that such an experiment would only delay our departure.
Finally, Juliet shrugged.
“I can’t tell you what to do,” she said. “But I’d think about it – at least one more night.”
Chapter 11
Of course, no one reconsidered, so at five o’clock the next morning, we followed Juliet – coffee in hand – down narrow corridors whose eerie green-glow reminded me of a movie set’s haunted house.
We had gone about a hundred meters when she finally stopped and opened an electrical box that looked old enough to have been installed by Thomas Edison himself.
A gleaming metallic panel popped up. Juliet punched a code and placed her right eye on the scanner. A second later, the panel light turned green, and we heard a whoosh as a section of the floor in front of us dropped, exposing a ladder leading to a chamber below.
“We need to keep the prep room away from prying eyes,” she said by way of explanation. “Our staffers are very bright; curiosity is part of their job description.”
Fluorescent lights came on automatically as we descended into a room about twenty-five feet square. The ubiquitous industrial tiles made up the ceiling, while several wooden benches had been bolted to the floor. Apart from a few spots of exposed cinder block, a variety of lockers and storage cabinets covered the walls.
I helped Lavon lower the boxes he had brought from Georgia. Once we had climbed down and closed the entrance above, Lavon opened the nearest box and removed three thigh-length brown tunics. He kept the darkest one for himself, then handed the others to Markowitz.
“Take your pick.”
“Does it matter?”
“No.”
Markowitz selected the tan one, and after he had put it on, Lavon opened a second box and extracted a long brown-striped robe. Markowitz donned it, shook a couple of times to adjust the fit, and then stood in front of the mirror, quite pleased with himself.
“We’ll fit right in,” he said.
Lavon warned us that he couldn’t entirely be sure. Even with years of training and field experience, he had to admit that much of what he “knew” about the ancient world was more informed conjecture than a true comprehension of the facts.
So few articles of clothing from the first century had survived that he couldn’t help but wonder whether we could suffer the fate of the occasional tourist in Miami or Los Angeles who got murdered because he unwittingly wandered into the wrong part of town wearing the colors
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