Return to Camelot
Chapter 11 - Research Project

Nate looked down at his list of King Arthur's knights and scratched his head. Something... something wasn't right. He looked at the list in the Tales of Camelot book he'd pulled them from. No, he hadn't written it wrong. It was correct, but it was still wrong.

"What the hell is going on?"

He went to his office and rifled through his old notes from his first PhD. He spent about half an hour sifting through papers, searching for the right notes. Finally, he found his own personal notes on the knights and compared the old list to the new.

History vs. Legend Thesis		Tales of Camelot
Lancelot		Lance
Gawain		Gawain
Percival		Percival
Gareth		Gareth
Bedivere		Galahad
Galahad		Carson
Tristan		Tristan

"What the hell?" he said again. "Who the hell is Sir Carson?"

He looked through the Tales of Camelot book for the stories related to Sir Carson, but didn't find much. The tales of "Sir Lance" and Guinevere's romance, and Galahad's heroism and tragic death filled most of the pages. Sir Carson, like several of the less popular knights, was barely mentioned. He read the brief mention of Carson in the introduction of the knights.

And when the vile sorcerer did sway King Arthur, Gwynivyre did call the knights to battle. She did bestow the knighthood on the brave Carson, in the wake of the tragic slaying of the goode Sir Galahad. Sir Carson did confront the vile sorcerer, but his magic was too great, and the goode and brave Sir Carson was bested. His body was carried from the battle in honor, and he was mourned deeply, though his service had been brief.

Nate sighed. "Real helpful." He reviewed his original hand-written notes about the various knights, but found no mention of a "Sir Carson" at all. Then again, he only had notes on the major knights, and any minor ones who had a direct impact on his thesis.

In any case, this Carson couldn't be the knight from his manuscript. Carson had died in 508 BCE, while the Writer of his manuscript had clearly died in battle nearly twenty years later. Still, Carson's existence confused him, and he wanted to know more.

He headed for the university library at his alma mater, and found a book that had more detailed images than the book he had at home. There, he found a picture of "The Knighting of Sir Carson". The image showed a knight kneeling before Guinevere, looking toward "the viewer". He was dark-haired and clearly quite large, even taking into account the weird medieval artists' concept of perspective.

Sir Carson looked strangely familiar to Nate, but he couldn't figure out why. It wasn't as if he spent loads of time looking at medieval art in particular. But this person didn't remind him of another old image. It was someone more modern. He had the feeling he sometimes got when his dad would watch Westerns, and some actor from "Gun Smoke" would somehow be the spitting image of a modern actor or singer. But try as he might, he couldn't figure it out, even though he nearly gave himself a headache trying.

Frustrated, he took down the name of the book and left the library. He made a call to his favorite used book store and found that they did have a copy of the book he wanted - The Complete Arthurian Legends. The clerk agreed to hold it for him, and Nate made his way there immediately. He knew he would want to dig in deeper, and a two-week library loan would not be enough.

On the way to the bookstore, a billboard on the side of the road caught his eye, and he nearly swerved off the street. It was a huge picture of the tech mogul, Raymond Palmer, beside the words:

Star City Remembers a Legend:
Dr. Raymond Palmer
Visionary
Philathropist
Activist
1981-2015

"What the hell is going on?" This was the face - the large brown-eyed man kneeling before Guinevere in the book. Nate shook his head. Couldn't be. It had to be a weird coincidence - a throw-back genetic thing where Palmer looked exactly like an ancient ancestor.

But, on the other hand, why was the name Carson in two books, but nowhere in his private notes? Where was Raymond Palmer? The word was, of course, that there was no body because the blast had been so forceful, it had burned all trace of it. But what if that wasn't the real explanation?

Nate shook his head. Absurd. It was just too absurd to contemplate. Time travel. How? And how could that kind of technology go unnoticed? It couldn't. Someone would have leaked a thing that huge, the actual discovery of time travel. No. It was a genetic throw-back, that was all.

While he was at the bookstore, Nate looked up Raymond Palmer on his phone. He compared the Medieval art to the images he found online, but it was inconclusive. How could you compare a digital photo of a suited businessman with the flat, brightly colored art of the old world?

On a whim, he looked up "Raymond Palmer, Camelot" and was interested to find that the tech guru had been a complete nerd for Camelot. One article noted that the IT department at his first company had named their internal servers Arthur, Guinevere and Galahad as a little joke/treat for their boss. "The billionaire mogul even shares a name with one of the lesser-known Arthurian knights, Sir Carson. Ray Carson Palmer is said to take quiet pride in this little-known fact, even though his favorite knight is still Sir Galahad."

"Huh." Nate was fascinated by the coincidence. A few people theorized that Palmer was actually related to Sir Carson, but records were too spotty to prove it conclusively. Still, Nate filed the information away and kept a marker in the book at Sir Carson's knighting.

Nate was sure they must be related, but he also couldn't completely shake the idea of time travel. Maybe it was the influence of the other knights' tale he'd read in its modern English on ancient paper. Maybe it was the suggestion of the missing billionaire and the very similar looking knight, or maybe it was the "addition" of Sir Carson to books and media when he and "Sir Lance" (a sweetly handsome, blonde, long-haired knight who seemed to have replaced Lancelot) were not part of Nate's original research.

Whatever the reason, Nate had a new project - a new obsession: find evidence of time travel.