Rolf took off his glasses and rubbed at his eyes with the knuckle of his hand.
No matter how many times he read the reports, and no matter how he tried to find an explanation, he wasn’t going to find anything there other than pure fact. And that fact was that their trajectory was no longer in shared time. He’d actually already resigned himself to that; one random jump out of shared time wasn’t that monumental. It wasn’t planned and shouldn’t happen, true, but one or two of them could easily be attributed to the pure variability of time. No, the real shocker was that their jumps were on an actual arc. A very real and very specific arc. The numbers on this drew a line though the slipstream that was undeniable. He didn’t know why – he certainly didn’t send them on it – but there it was. An arc that he could only qualify as the effect of an unanticipated cause: Them. Unless time had a mind of its own, that was the only explanation available to him. All Rolf could figure was that they sent themselves down this path all on their own with a change they’d made. Of course, that was just speculation. It’s not like he could see what they saw like some closed circuit television. He didn’t know exactly what they were doing, all he knew was when they were. But there was no doubt that they were forging new time, their jumps were on an arc that he had no hand in creating, and the events of that arc were related.
Rolf had to get control of the timeline. It was like lanes on a track; they started out on one lane, but they’d somehow jumped lanes. Only that wasn’t even accurate, it was more like a windy road through a forest no one had ever been to the end of, and now they weren’t on the path anymore, they’d jumped across a stream.
It was risky, but if he didn’t try to open a new window for them so the slipstream could deposit them into the right lane of travel, he might never be able to stop the jumps from occurring.
This was not what he’d had planned. It ruined everything. So, he set to work on putting everything in place to get them back to his original plan.