by Simon Hawke
Forrester's black fatigue shirts and Steiger accepted it gratefully, wincing as he removed his own torn and bloodied one.
"They homed in on him with this," said Forrester, handing Steiger the plastic envelope containing the implant transmitter.
Steiger examined it, frowning. "It doesn't make sense. If they had him long enough to surgically install a cybernetic implant, they had him long enough to kill him.
Why fit him with an implant, let him go, and then track him down and kill him?"
"Manoeuvres?" said Delaney. They all turned to look at him. "What?" said Steiger.
"I was just thinking out loud," Delaney said. "Maybe they installed the implant and let him go so they could practice long range assault tactics. Track the target, home in on the target's co-ordinates, clock in, hit hard, take out the target and clock out again. Suppose you had a target area that was hard to get to, maybe you could only get one man in or you had the co-ordinates, but a full-scale assault would be impractical for whatever reason. Too well defended, not enough room to manoeuvre.. but if you could clock in a miniaturised assault force…"
"Jesus," Steiger said. "That could be a bloody nightmare!"
"It is a bloody nightmare," Forrester said, grimly. "What's more, we're not even sure who's responsible for it. Is this some new wrinkle from the Special
Operations Group in the parallel universe or has the Network somehow managed to come up with this?"
"Either way, we've only got one lead," Delaney said. He looked at
Gulliver.
"You're not going to ask me to go back there, are you?"
Gulliver said, in a hollow voice.
"Our Archives Section has been unable to find any record of such an island, Dr.
Gulliver," said Forrester. "I realise you've already been through a great deal, but perhaps if you could help us to locate this island, or at least show us its location on a chart, then we'd require nothing further from you."
"And what shall become of me then?" Gulliver stared at them all anxiously.
"Have no fear. You'll be returned to your own time," said Forrester. "And we shall arrange it so that you have no memory of this experience."
"You could do that? You could actually take away my memory?"
“Yes," said Forrester. "But there's no need to be concerned.
The procedure is quite safe and painless, I assure you."
Gulliver shook his head vehemently. "No! No, absolutely not! I cannot allow that."
"'I'm afraid you have no choice in the matter, Dr. Gulliver," said Forrester. "You have seen entirely too much."
"And who in their right mind would believe me?" Gulliver responded. "They ridiculed me for my story of the Lilliputians, as Mr. Swift called them, can you imagine how they would react if I told them about this? They would undoubtedly put me in a madhouse. I suppose that I could not prevent your using force against me, but in that case, I would refuse to help you. I would tell you nothing."
"'Dr. Gulliver," said Forrester, "please try to understand-"
"No, General, you try to understand. A man's life is but the sum of his experience. How can I forget what's happened to me? How can I forget that gallant young man who gave his life to save my own? I said that I would help you, but it must be in my own way. If I were to tell you all I know and show you the island's location on a chart, then there would be nothing to prevent you from doing as you will with me. No, sir. If you are going back there, then much as I dread it, I fear that I must go as well."
Forrester glanced at Gulliver, his mouth set in a tight grimace.
"Dr. Gulliver, you're putting me in a very difficult position. We could easily get the information that we need from you, even without your consent. And yes, it would involve using a form of force, though not what you might think. You would feel no pain whatsoever. In fact, you would feel mildly euphoric and be happy to tell us whatever we wanted to know. However, I would prefer to have your voluntary cooperation. And I'm not unsympathetic to your feelings in this matter. I'll have to give it some thought."
Suddenly Andre gasped and dropped her glass.
"What is it?" Steiger said.
She was staring at the window behind them. For a moment, only the briefest instant, she had seen Lucas standing in front of it, but there was nothing there now. She blinked and shook her head.
"Nothing," she said, swallowing hard. "It was nothing. I just thought… for a moment, I thought…"
Delaney was watching her with concern… Andre, you all right?"
"You didn't see anything?" she said. "Over there, by the window? You didn't see?"
Delaney shook his head, frowning. "No, I was looking at Dr. Gulliver."
"What did you see?' said Steiger, frowning.
Andre shook her head. "Nothing," she said, nervously. "It must have been my imagination, a trick of the light… I don't know.".
"What do you think you saw?" Delaney said.
"Nothing! It was nothing, just drop it, all right?" "lieutenant?" said Forrester.
"I'm sorry, sir," she said, sheepishly. "It wasn't anything. I.. I guess I'm a little jumpy, what with everything that's happened tonight."
"Well, we've all been under a strain," said Forrester. "And I'm afraid it's going to get a lot worse before it gets much better." He glanced at his watch. "It's almost dawn. Why don't you all go freshen up and grab some chow and coffee? Dr.
Gulliver will stay here with me. Be back here for a briefing at oh six-hundred hours."
As they left, Finn Delaney grabbed Andre by the arm. "You're not the type to jump at shadows," he said. "You want to tell me about it?"
"I've already told you-".
He interrupted her. "Something’s bothering you, Andre. I know you too damn well.
You saw something back there or you thought you saw something. What was it?"
"Okay, you're right, I thought I saw something. I guess I'm seeing things. That makes me a liability, right? Maybe I should go to the division shrink and get myself checked out. "
"Hell, you're saner than anyone I know," Delaney said.
"And we've known each other too long to keep things from each other. Now tell me what you saw."
Andre licked her lips nervously. "A ghost, all right'! I just saw a ghost…
Chapter 3
"You should've let me stay dead," said Lucas Priest, sighing and wearily running his hand through his dark brown hair. "I simply can't seem to control it."
Dr. Robert Darkness turned a steely gaze on Priest. "You will control it. You will Learn. You have become the living embodiment of my life's work, Priest. I brought you back from death for this and I'll be damned if I'm going to allow you to give up!"
"It doesn't look as if I have much choice, does it'!" Lucas said, rubbing his aching head.
He lit up a cigarette and inhaled deeply. The simple act of smoking helped to keep his mind occupied. It was excruciatingly difficult trying to control his thoughts. It had never before occurred to him just how exhausting it could be. Random thoughts were taken for granted by most people, but unlike most people-in fact, unlike anyone else in the entire universe-Lucas Priest could no longer afford to take random thoughts for granted. A random thought could mean disaster for him now. And his thoughts were becoming increasingly harder to control. A person could concentrate only for so long and then something had to give. Lucas was tired.
And he was afraid.
He had always thought of Dr. Darkness as a brilliant, scientist, eccentric, highly idiosyncratic and unpredictable, but it went beyond that.
Dr. Darkness was a madman. Not a raving lunatic, but a madman just the same. It was often said that there was an exceedingly fine line between genius and insanity.
When had Darkness slipped over the edge? Was it after his invention of the warp grenade, the most devastating weapon known to man? Perhaps his sanity had been derailed by the knowledge-that his invention had been responsible for the loss of billions of lives, when — the surplus nuclear en
ergy of exploding warp grenades was mistakenly clocked into a parallel universe, setting off the war between the timelines. Or maybe he lost it after the disastrous experiment in which his atomic structure became permanently tachyonized, turning him into the man who was faster than light. There were so many cataclysmic upheavals in the life of Dr.
Darkness, so much pressure brought to bear upon his fragile genius that it was a wonder he had not snapped completely.
Dr. Darkness never spoke about his past. Lucas knew nothing about it whatsoever prior to the event that gave him both his fame and infamy. After years of labouring as an obscure research scientist in the Temporal Army Ordnance Division,
Darkness had invented the terrifying warp grenade purely as an accidental by product of his own independent work in temporal translocation.
He had begun by working on voice and image communication by tachyon radio transmission. He eventually achieved a method of communication at six hundred times the speed of light, but that still wasn't good enough. He wanted it to be instantaneous, even over distances measured in hundreds of light years. Working from the obscure Zen mathematics based upon Georg Cantor's theory of transfinite numbers, Darkness found a way to make his tachyon beam move more quickly by sending it through an Einstein-Rosen Bridge, more commonly known as a "space warp." The…result was instantaneous transmission, going from point A to point B without having to cover the distance in between. The warp-grenade was merely an incidental by-product of this discovery.
It occurred to Darkness one day that his method of translocation through an
Einstein-Rosen Bridge could be applied to nuclear devices, allowing unprecedented control of nuclear explosions and drastically limiting fallout, in some cases almost eliminating it entirely. Having explored this idea merely as an intellectual exercise in abstract theory, Darkness lost all interest in it. However, since the Temporal Army Ordnance Division took control of all the paperwork and computer data generated by its scientists, from complex equations down to incidental doodles done on temporal Army time and in temporal Army facilities, the end result of this "intellectual exercise in abstract theory" was the warp grenade, a combination nuclear device and time machine, small enough to be held. in one hand and capable of adjustable, transtemporal detonation.
The principles behind the function of the warp grenade led Darkness to the development of the warp disc, which had rendered Prof. Mensinger's chronoplate obsolete. It had also led him to the development of the disruptor, or the "warp gun" as it was sometimes called by those few who knew of its existence. It was the first true disintegrator ray. Yet as frightening a weapon as the disruptor was, the warp grenade made it seem tame by comparison. It could be set to destroy a city, or a city block, or one house within that block, or a room within that house, or a space within that room no larger than a breadbox. The surplus energy of the explosion, whatever was not required to accomplish the designated task, was then clocked instantaneously through an Einstein-Rosen Bridge, to explode harmlessly in the
Orion Nebula-or so it was believed.
The problem was that so much devastating energy clocked through Einstein-Rosen
Bridges eventually shifted the chronophysical alignment of the universe. The result was that every time a warp grenade was detonated, instead of the surplus energy being teleported to the Orion Nebula, a parallel universe was nuked. Millions of lives were lost and though Darkness had never detonated a single warp grenade, he had to live with the knowledge of what his work had led to. That alone, thought
Lucas, could easily destroy a man.
Shortly after the temporal Army had conducted its first test detonation of a warp grenade, Dr. Darkness disappeared. No one knew where he had gone. He had wanted to get as far away from people as it was possible to get, so he took off for some remote pan of the galaxy, to carry on his work in an environment where he could keep complete control of it. From time to time, he would release some new discovery through one of several Earth-based conglomerates he controlled, thereby financing his further experiments in tachyon translation, a process no one else alive could even begin to under-stand. And, as it turned out, even Dr. Darkness hadn't fully understood it.
He had been obsessed with the idea of perfecting a process whereby the human body could be translated into tachyons, which would then depart at six hundred times the speed of light along the direction of a tachyon beam through an Einstein-Rosen Bridge.
On paper, he believed that he had solved the problems, but what was mathematically real and what was really real were often two very different things.
His main concerns had to do with the reassembly process, ensuring that the organs and the tissues were reassembled in the appropriate — order at the appropriate time and place. Because there would be no "'receiver," Darkness had incorporated a timing mechanism into the tachyon conversion, so that the tachyonized body could be reassembled at the instant of arrival based on the time/space co-ordinates of the transition. And when he was certain that he had the process finally perfected, he became his own first human test subject. His ego would never have allowed anyone else to be the first to experience direct translation into tachyons.
Unfortunately, Dr. Darkness had neglected one small element of the equation. His
"taching" process was ultimately restrained by a little known principle of physics called the law of baryon conservation. Lucas was never quite able to follow the scientific explanation, but it had something to do with the idea that objects with mass could not be translated into particles with "'zero rest mass." Or, as Darkness had sarcastically put it, "'you can't roller skate in a buffalo herd." When Lucas questioned that enigmatic analogy, Darkness lost his patience and told him to look up the works of 20th century philosopher named Roger Miller.
In non-abstract terms, what the principle meant to Darkness in the real world was a glitch in the translation process that resulted in his body being permanently tachyonized. He became "the man who was faster than light." He could travel from his secret laboratory headquarters somewhere in the far reaches of the universe to Earth or anywhere else in the blink
of an eye- much quicker, actually-but once he had arrived, he was incapable of normal movement, appearing much like a holographic projection or a ghost seen underwater, frozen in time, trapped by the immutable laws of the universe.
Unlike a holographic projection, he was not insubstantial, although being faster than light, he could be if he wanted to. However, like a holographic projection, he could not move so much as one step. At least, not normally. He needed to project himself from one place to another. "Taching," as he called it. His atomic structure had become unstable. His tachyonization had rendered him immune to ageing or disease. No bacteria could latch onto him because they simply were not fast enough. In a sense, Darkness had become immortal, yet due to the increasingly unstable nature of his atomic structure, he knew a time would one day come when his body would literally discorporate, departing at multiples of light speed in all directions of the universe.
It seemed incredible to Lucas that anyone could maintain even a semblance of sanity under such conditions; yet on the surface, Darkness was completely lucid, brilliant, and controlled.. albeit in a thoroughly skewed manner. He was a driven man, obsessed, not knowing how much time he had before he flew apart in all directions. It could be centuries or it could be only seconds and he did not want to leave his work undone. And that was where Lucas had come in.
During their mission to destroy Nikolai Drakov's pirate submarine, The Nautilus, Darkness had "'terminaled" Lucas with a tachyon symbiotracer that bonded to certain protein molecules in the cells of his nervous system. The device, which operated on the particle level, represented a technology which Darkness had pioneered and which only he fully understood. The purpose of the symbiotracer was to allow Darkness to "'home in" on Lucas no matter where he was in space and time. However, unknown to Lucas, the symbiotracer had built into it a prototype of the particle-level chronocircuitry that Darkness was e
xperimenting with-essentially, a particle-level warp disc, organic and completely thought controlled.
The device had become a permanent part of Lucas Priest's atomic structure. He could no more get rid of it than he could get a body transplant. When the symbiotracer had first been given to him in the medium of a graft patch from a medikit. He had believed that minor surgery would be able to remove it. He had never suspected that the device would fuse with his very atoms. He was even more dismayed when he realised that the symbiotracer function was only part of what
Darkness had designed the chronocircuitry to do. But by the time he knew that, he had already died.
At least, he had been meant to die. And in some parallel timeframe that wound its way about him like a double helix strand of DNA, Lucas thought he must have realised that fate and had, in fact, died. He did not remember dying, of course, because — that event had been in his future, relative to the moment in which
Darkness had snatched him away, and that future had been changed. His death was now an irrevocable fact of Finn and Andre's past, yet it was only an alternate future for himself, a potential future he had bypassed., It happened… and it didn't happen.
It was the sort of Zen koan puzzle that was taught in advanced temporal physics classes, a hypothetical set of temporal conditions that Zen physics professors referred to as "problem modules," situations that were mind-boggling, defying any application of conventional science or logic, capable of inducing nervous breakdowns in even the most gifted students who attempted to relate them to conventional reality or solve them with conventional reasoning. Only this was not a classroom problem module. This was real.
Ever since he had learned what happened, Lucas had been trying desperately to figure it all out, to assess the implications, both for himself and for the timeline. It was driving him to the brink of a nervous collapse. And he knew that now, of all times, he had to keep his cool, his mental discipline focused, and yet it was impossible. Thanks to Dr. Darkness filling in the blanks for him, he knew what the original scenario had been, before Dr. Darkness had effected his unique temporal adjustment. It was, of course, a scenario that Lucas had never personally experienced-not from where he stood right now. He remembered only part of it.
