The Chronoliths

The presence of groundwater causes a similar phenomenon in soil and bedrock, cracking stone and radiating a ground-borne shockwave.

All this cooled and moving air creates convection cells, thus severe wind at ground zero and unpredictable and pervasive fogs for miles around.

Which was why no one objected to the dry heat, the sealed room.

The white-garbed technicians, most of them graduate students out on loan, ma

She paused before us, crisp in fresh blue jeans and a white blouse. “Background counts are way up,” she said, “on extremely steep curves. That’s like a two-minute warning, guys.”

Morris said, “Should we have goggles or something?”

“It’s not an H-bomb, Morris. It won’t blind you.”

And then she turned away.

One of the monitoring technicians, a young blond woman who looked not much older than Kaitlin, had risen from her chair and approached Sue with a supplicating smile. The IDF security contingent looked sharply at her. So did Morris.

The girl seemed dazed, maybe a little out of control. She hesitated. Then, in a gesture almost touchingly childlike, she reached for Sue’s hand and took it in her own.

Sue said, “Cassie? What is it?”

“I wanted to say… thank you.” Cassie’s voice was timid but fervent.

Sue frowned. “You’re welcome, but — for what?”

But Cassie just ducked her head and backed away as if the thought had gone out of her head as quickly as it had entered. She covered her mouth with her hand. “Oh! I’m sorry. I just — I guess I just felt like I should say it. I don’t know what I was thinking…” She blushed.

“Best stay in your chair,” Sue said gently.

We were deep in the tau turbulence now. The room smelled hot and electric. Beyond the window, the city core quivered under a sudden auroral glow.

It all happened in a matter of seconds, but time was elastic; we inhabited seconds as if they were minutes. I will admit that I was afraid.

The incidental light created by the arrival was a curtain of quickly shifting color, blue-green deepening to red and violet, hovering over the city and filling the room in which we sat with eerie shadow.

“Nineteen hundred and seven minutes,” Sue said, checking her watch. “Mark.”

“It’s already cold,” Morris said to me. “You notice?”

It felt as if the temperature in the room had dropped by several degrees. I nodded.

One of the IDF men stood up nervously, fingering his weapon. As quickly as it had come, the light began to fade; and then—

Then the Chronolith was simply and suddenly present.

It flashed into existence beyond the Dome of the Rock, taller than the hills, grotesquely large, white with ice under a brittle moon.

“Touchdown!” someone at the consoles a

“Hold on,” Sue said.

The shockwave flexed the window glass and roared like thunder. Almost immediately the Chronolith vanished in a white whirlwind, moisture gigged out of the atmosphere by thermal shock. A few miles away, temperature differentials cracked concrete, split timbers, and surely destroyed the living tissue of any creature unfortunate enough to have strayed into the exclusion zone. (There were a few: cats, dogs, pilgrims, skeptics.)

A wave of whiteness rayed out from the central storm, frost climbing the Judean hills like fire, and a host of urban lights dimmed as power-grid transformers shorted in fountains of sparks. Cloud engulfed the hotel; a hard, fast wind rattled the windows. Suddenly the room was dark, console lights quivering like stars reflected in a pond.

“Cold as a son of a bitch,” Morris muttered.

I wrapped my arms around myself and saw Sue Chopra do likewise as she turned away from the window.

The IDF man who had stood up moments ago raised his automatic rifle. He shouted something that was incomprehensible in the noise of the storm. Then he began to fire into the darkened room.

The name of the shooter was Aaron Weiszack.

What I know about him is what I read in the next day’s newspapers, and wouldn’t it save a world of grief if we could read tomorrow’s headlines before they happened?

Or maybe not.

Aaron Weiszack had been born in Cleveland, Ohio, and immigrated to Israel with his family in 2011. He spent his teenage years in suburban Tel Aviv and had already flirted with a number of radical political organizations before he was drafted in 2020; Weiszack had been briefly detained, but not charged, during the Temple Mount riots of 2025. His IDF record, however, was impeccable, and he had been careful to conceal from his superiors his ongoing association with a fringe “Kuinist” cell called Embrace the Future.

He was, if not deranged, at least unbalanced. His motives remain unclear. He had not fired more than a couple of rounds before another of the IDF soldiers, a woman named Leah Agnon, cut him down with a brief burst from her own weapon.

Weiszack died almost instantly of his wounds. But he wasn’t the only casualty in the room.

I have often thought Aaron Weiszack’s act was at least as portentous as the arrival of the Kuin of Jerusalem — in its way, a far more precise imaging of the shape of things to come.

Weiszack’s last rifle burst cracked one of the allegedly blast-proof (but apparently not bulletproof) windows, which collapsed in a shower of silvery nuggets. Cold wind and dense fog swept into the room. I stood up, deafened by the gunshots, blinking stupidly. Morris leaped out of his chair toward Sue Chopra, who had fallen to the floor, and covered her with his body. None of us knew whether the attack had finished or had just begun. I couldn’t see Sue under Morris’s bulk, didn’t know whether she was seriously injured, but there was blood everywhere — Weiszack’s blood all over the wallpaper, and the blood of the young technicians speckled across their consoles. I took a breath and began to hear sounds again, the scream of human voices, the scream of the wind. Fine grains of ice flew through the room like shrapnel, propelled by the impossibly steep thermoclines sweeping the city.

The IDF force surrounded the fallen Weiszack, rifles aimed at his inert body. The FBI contingent spread out to secure the scene, and some of Sue’s post-docs hovered over their fallen companions attempting first aid. Voices, and I thought I heard Morris’s among them, shouted for help. We had a paramedic in the room, but he was surely overwhelmed if he hadn’t been injured.

I ducked and crawled across the floor to Morris. He had rolled off Sue and was cradling her head in his arms. She was hurt. There was blood on the carpet here, a smattering of red droplets steaming in the brutal cold. Morris glanced at me. “It’s not serious,” he said, mouthing the words broadly over the roar of the wind. “Help me drag her into the hallway.”

“No!” Sue surged up against him, and I saw the bloody gash where her jeans had been torn by a bullet or shrapnel, a freely-bleeding divot along the fleshy part of her right thigh. But if this was her only wound then Morris was right, she was in no immediate danger.

“Let us take care of it,” Morris told her firmly.

“People are hurt!” Her eyes darted toward the row of terminals where her students and technicians were variously paralyzed with terror or slumped in their chairs. “Oh, God — Cassie!”

Cassie, the winsome postgraduate student, had lost part of her skull to the gunfire.