“Gimme a moment.” Ian leaned his head against the wall and rested for a few minutes while Lila kept track on her watch.

“Ready?” she asked impatiently.

“Not quite. A minute more.”

Lila set the timer on her watch to go off in one minute and watched it intently. “Time’s up,” she said as the tinny alarm sounded.

She got to her feet and put her hand down to help Ian stand. He put his other hand against the wall to steady himself as he rose shakily.

Lila strode over to the posts and turned her head to watch him come toward her, keeping her hands hovering over the posts until he drew near. He stood directly behind her and placed his hands on top of hers. “Let’s go,” he whispered in her ear. She lowered her hands onto the posts and took a quick intake of breath as the lights once again swirled around her.

She could see what appeared to be a control room occupied by men in military uniforms. The man nearest her had a nametag that she could just make out as Петров or Petrov, and she could see a sign on the wall with the word Око written on it.

Lila started to pull her hands away from the posts, but pressure from Ian’s hands kept her palms in contact with the surface.  A few seconds later the pressure eased, and they both sank to the floor in tandem.

This time travel didn’t seem to have nearly the same negative effect on Lila. Ian still looked a bit peaked from the experience.

“What did you see?” Lila asked breathlessly.

Ian raised his hand indicating for her to pause. “Just a second,” he gasped out before scooting back to place his back against the wall. Lila joined him there and once again handed him the piece of paper and pen. He waved it away. “Cuban Missile Crisis. I could see Kennedy in his office with McNamara poring over what looked like ballistic missile photos.”

Lila perked up. “That means we traveled forward about twenty years.”

“What did you see?” Ian asked curiously.

“I think I was looking at Stanislav Petrov. He worked at the Soviet’s Oko command center and some people say he prevented a nuclear war back in 1983.”

Ian’s eyes brightened. “I remember reading about him. He monitored an early warning system that reported the U.S. had launched a missile at the Soviet Union. He assessed that it was a false alarm, and by waiting to report it may have prevented an all out retaliation by the Soviets. Amazing guy.” Ian shook his head. “Couldn’t have been easy to make that decision.”

Lila looked puzzled. “Okay, so what’s the point of this? Why are we seeing these things?”

Ian screwed up his face in an I-don’t-know expression. “Maybe we’re supposed to be averting a similar fate? Seems like a pretty strong message.” He gestured toward the posts. “Who’s controlling these things? The visions–if that’s what they are–seem pre-recorded, except that we’re seeing different things.”

The blank white wall in front of them began to seethe with colors that eventually coalesced into a pearlescent appearance. A voice spoke in what sounded like 3D audio so that the sound came first from behind them and then switched to above them, before finally reverberating from all four walls.