by Simon Hawke
He then took a cab to the public library and spent the rest of the day reading historical survey texts. It was not as efficient as computer learning, but it would do for a beginning.
He returned to the hotel that evening, had dinner, went to bed, and left a wake-up call for seven A.M., early enough to ensure that he could leave the room before he was due to clock in from the previous day. He had breakfast in a coffee shop, then went back and checked out of the hotel. By now, Charles Forman would probably have reported the theft of his credit cards and cash, and if he had the time, he might possibly have gotten around to getting a new driver's license, but it would never have occurred to him that someone might use his name and social security number to open an account. He'd be more concerned with fraudulent charges on his credit cards, which Hunter had avoided doing, merely using the cards to reinforce his position, by allowing the broker to catch a glimpse of the gold American Express card while he was filling out his account application.
By the end of the week, Hunter was living in a suite at the Plaza" Hotel. He had purchased a conservative wardrobe at Brooks Brothers (for visits to the brokerage firm and lunch at '21') and somewhat sleeker, more fashionable suit'! at Bamey's (for the track and dinners in little Italy). He made daily trips to Belmont Park by rented limousine, increasing his cash flow dramatically each time and attracting attention with his unerring instinct and ostentatious style. Some people started to approach him and he made his choices carefully after some initial probing conversation on both sides. He traded tips for information. And for certain services and introductions.
His disbelieving stockbroker had about a million questions, but wouldn't dare to ask-a single one so long as he could make the same investments as his apparently clairvoyant client. The broker didn't want to scare him off. And in order to be helpful, the broker fell all over himself when Hunter requested a few favours, such as certain introductions to certain types of people.
By the end of the month, Hunter had become a multimillionaire with bank accounts in Switzerland and the Bahamas. He had also established a number of different identities for himself, each fully documented and backed up by impeccably forged credentials, enabling him to drop the identity of his mugging victim, leaving the unfortunate Mr. Forman with an interesting tax problem. Hunter was soon on a first name basis with some of the most influential citizens of New York City. Miami and Geneva. as well as some of the most powerful figures in organised crime. He was moving fast. establishing connections, putting out feelers, making inroads.
Surviving. Doing business. And, as the old saying went, sooner or later, everyone does business with everyone. Though Hunter didn't know it, through one of his connections, he had started doing business with the Network.
"What do you mean, you lost him? How the devil could you lose him? Explain yourself!"
The officer in the black beret and combat fatigues stood stiffly at attention atop the mahogany writing table, all six and a half inches of him. His fatigues were crisply pressed and his combat boots were spit shined to a glass-smooth gloss. He looked like a toy soldier, except that this toy soldier was alive.
"It wasn't anything we could have foreseen, sir," he said, his voice as formally correct as his stiff, military bearing. "The mission plan was followed to the letter.
Gulliver was released in a manner that allowed him to think he had escaped. We tracked him until he returned to England and then the assault team was clocked out to make the strike. It turned out that Gulliver was not alone at the time of the engagement, a contingency we had prepared for, but there was no way we could have prepared for the target employing a warp disc to escape, sir."
"He did what?"
The officer winced from the volume of the full-sized voice.
"Used a warp disc to escape, sir."
"Gulliver? Impossible! Where the hell would he obtain a warp disc? And how would he know how to use one?"
"As I've already stated, sir," the Lilliputian officer continued, Gulliver was not alone. The advance scouts clocked in first, according to the mission plan, and they established that there was another man with Gulliver. The mission plan called for them to wail until the target was alone before calling in the strike. However, the scouts were able to establish that the man Gulliver was with was a Temporal
Observer and they decided to go ahead and call in the strike. "
"An Observer? Are you sure? How did they know?"
"Gulliver was apparently suffering from a hangover. The man gave him some aspirin. The scouts also observed that he was writing a report.
In shorthand, with a ballpoint pen. "
"Go on,"
"Based on what they saw, the scouts called in the strike and the field commander made the decision to go in. Because the Observer was deemed the greater threat, he was designated the priority target. The intention was to take him out quickly and then take care of Gulliver, but the man was a good soldier. He kept his cool under fire and used his own body to shield Gulliver while he put the warp disc on him and clocked him out. The transition co-ordinates must have been pre-set; he didn't have time to reprogram the disc. The Observer could have escaped himself, but Gulliver had all the information. It was an unexpected move, although a tactically sound one, assuming you don't mind committing suicide."
"What did they do with the body?"
"The field' commander determined that with the target clocked out, presumably back to the Observer's base, a Search and Retrieve team could be coming through at any time, so they left the body, clocked out the dead and wounded and got the hell out of there. With Gulliver clocked ahead to tell them what happened, destroying the body would have been pointless in any case.
And too time consuming. The risk was deemed unjustifiable. "
"Unjustifiable, indeed! All they did was leave behind incontrovertible evidence to confirm what happened. "
"Even using lasers to dismember the corpse, disposing of a fun-sized human body would have taken hours," said the colonel. "And with Gulliver in their hands, they'd already know what happened."
"Assuming the shock of the experience didn't make him take leave of his senses.
According to your report, he was already disoriented and drinking heavily. Either way, the T.I.A. will be investigating for certain now. Allowing Gulliver to escape was a serious mistake. Your team bungled the entire mission and jeopardised our security."
The Lilliput colonel drew himself up to his full height, but since his full height was only six and a half inches, the effect was negligible.
"'I lost fifteen men on that mission," he said, through gritted teeth. "And six seriously wounded, four of them critically. Twenty-five men went out on what was supposed to be a routine training exercise and only four returned in one piece!"
"And what does that tell you, Colonel? Your assault team was almost completely wiped out by one man, and a mere Observer, at that! What do you think would have happened if he had been a time Commando?"
"Sir, those men were green," the colonel said. "'Only their commander and their sergeant had any field experience at all It was supposed to be a routine training exercise. How were they supposed to expect-"
"They're supposed to expect anything! Anything at all! And be ready for it!
Nothing is routine! Those fifteen men were lost because they were not good enough! And that was your responsibility, Colonel! It's your command! Don't come to me with excuses! I am not concerned with excuses, only with results! Is that clear?"
"Yes, sir!”
"The entire operation has been jeopardised as a result of this fiasco. I want you to Execute Plan Delta immediately."
Sandy Steiger's apartment on Threadneedle Street had been thoroughly cleaned up by the S amp; R team. There was no sign of the battle that had taken place there, nothing to indicate that it had been used as an Observer outpost.
Temporal Observers were trained to become completely assimilated into the time periods to which they were assigned. With the sole exception of the warp discs that the
y carried on their persons at all times, they were under strict orders to have nothing else that could not be obtained within their assigned time zone. In practice, however, this regulation proved difficult to enforce. Observer postings were long term and often entailed hardship. It was difficult to resist smuggling back some seemingly inconsequential items.
Such things as deodorant, or toothpaste or even toilet paper were easily concealed and served to make the posting a bit more pleasant. A carefully doled out ration of cigarettes served to remind one of home just as much as they satisfied the cravings of a habit. A favourite paperback novel reread over and over by candlelight was a harmless way of maintaining contact with the world one came from, so long as precautions were taken to ensure that no one else would ever see the book, especially if the posting was in a time period when the only writing to be found was in the form of serious or illuminated manuscripts or cuneiform.
In the early days, a number of Observers became a bit too casual about following such regulations and, having gotten away with a few seemingly inconsequential items, they took to accumulating more. Miniature portable stereos with head phones began appearing in the 14th century. Minicomputers and microwave ovens were brought back to Victorian London. In one celebrated case, a tiny, portable holographic projection system smuggled back to 17th century America led to the burning of an Observer as a witch when she was seen (by a peeping tom)
"consorting" with demons in her bedroom, demons who were, in actuality, merely holograms of actors in an entertainment feature. The Army finally clamped down and instituted the practice of surprise inspections with stiff penalties for the slightest infractions. Still, in many cases, Observers continued to smuggle back some small conveniences.
The S amp; R team had gone over Sandy Steiger's apartment with a fine tooth comb and, according to their report, they had found nothing more esoteric than some aspirin tablets, a ballpoint pen, some timed-release decongestant pills, a modern tooth brush and nine cartons of cigarettes concealed beneath a loose floor board.
Their report stated that Sandy had clearly broken regulations, but the few items he had smuggled back had not seemed very significant. They had no way of knowing that the contraband had been enough to cost Sandy his life. The S and R team had been quite thorough. Nevertheless, the commandos conducted their own search.
Gulliver stood by the door and watched them anxiously, He was clearly uncomfortable at being back in the same room where Sandy had been killed and where he had almost met the same fate.
"One thing puzzles me," he said, as Creed Steiger, Finn Delaney, and Andre Cross carefully searched through the apartment once again. "Since you have this astonishing ability to travel back and forth through time, is it not possible that you could go back and prevent Sandy from being killed by those horrible Lilliputians?"
"You think I wouldn't save my own brother if I could?" said
Steiger, grimly.
"Why can't you?"
"It's difficult to explain, Doctor, but the fact is it would be too dangerous. What's done is done. There's nothing we can do about it.
"Can you not tell me why?" said Gulliver.
"Go ahead," Delaney said. "We'll check out the sitting room."
Steiger sighed and sat down on the bed. "Very well, Doctor. I'll see if I can explain it in a way that you can understand. Think of time as a river. A very swiftly flowing river. The current of that river is the timestream, specifically, the inertial flow of the timeline."
Furrows appeared in Gulliver's forehead as he frowned, trying to follow it. Steiger grunted and shook his head.
"Look, just imagine that the current of our river of time is the force that impels events, all right? And the length of the river itself is all of history, the timeline. Got that?"
Gulliver nodded. "Yes, I think I understand."
"Good," said Steiger. "Now, when someone from the future, someone like myself, goes back into the past, he risks doing something that would somehow interfere with the flow of events. Actually, everything I do back here constitutes a form of interference. Even my presence in this room is a form of interference, because after all, there was a point in time at which, in this particular moment, I was never in this room at this particular moment, do you understand?"
Gulliver was frowning once again.
Steiger grimaced. "Hell, I told you it was complicated.
Look, as we sit here right now, this very moment, I won't even be born for about another thousand years. And yet, here I am, sitting here and talking to you, a man who lived almost a thousand years before my time. That's an example of what we call temporal interference." He picked up a pillow. "Even an action as insignificant as my picking up this pillow is an example of temporal interference, because there was a point in time, before we came back here, when this moment passed and I was not here to pick up this pillow and the action of this pillow being picked up didn't happen, see?"
"I… I believe I do see, yes," said guava. "You were right, it is rather complicated, isn't it? Much like these circular arguments philosophers are always having. "
"Yes, very much like that, in a way," said Steiger. "Now, take the fact that I've picked up this pillow." He dropped it back down onto the bed. "It's an insignificant action. It doesn't really change anything, does it? In fact, it's so insignificant that it doesn't have any effect upon our river of time at all. The fact that I have picked up a pillow in this room has had no discernible effect upon events in this time period, even though it was an event that did not originally take place. You follow?"
Gulliver nodded once again, though he looked a bit uncertain.
"Good. Now imagine that you and I go out tonight and have a few drinks. On the way back, as we're passing a dark alley, a thief confronts us at knifepoint and demands all of our money. He lunges at me with the knife and in the struggle, I manage to get the knife away from him and kill him. Now, that act is obviously much more significant than merely picking up a pillow, and I don't mean merely for its moral implications. Suppose the man I've killed had a wife or children. Perhaps he never would have had a wife and children. It's possible that he would have lived out the remainder of his life alone, in insignificance, doing nothing of any importance whatsoever. And it's also possible that if I hadn't been there, you would have been the one to struggle with him, get the knife away and kill him. In that case, his death, in and of itself, has not significantly altered events in this time period. My temporal interference in causing his death is negligible in terms of the grand scheme of things. You with me so far?"
"Yes, I think so," said Gulliver, listening intently.
"All right," said Steiger, "now let's examine another possibility in that same hypothetical situation. Suppose that if it wasn't for my interference, that thief would have attacked somebody else. After all, it was my idea that we go out for a drink; if I hadn't come back here and interfered, you would have stayed home and the thief would have attacked another victim. And in that event, he would not have died. He would have' killed his — victim, prospered from his ill-gotten gains, married and had children. Except, now that I have gone back into the past and killed him, obviously those children will never be born. And that victim will not die, at least not at that particular time. So by my interference, I have altered history.
I have changed the past. I have disrupted the flow of events. Now let's take it a bit further. What if that thief had been my ancestor, my great, great grandfather about a dozen times removed?"
"Good lord!" said Gulliver. "Then by killing him, you've prevented the birth of his children, which means that… that you could never have been born!"
"Precisely," Steiger said.
"But… but if you could never have been born," said
Gulliver, frowning, "then.. then how… how is it possible that you could have.. " his voice trailed off and he stared at Steiger with an expression of utter confusion.
"That, my friend, is what's known as a temporal paradox," said Steiger. "If you went back into
the past and killed your grandfather before your father had been born, then you wouldn't have been born, so how could you have gone back and killed your grandfather in the first place?"
"It makes no sense," said Gulliver. "How is it possible?"
"Well, for years, scientists believed it wasn't possible,"
Steiger replied. "They believed that the past was an immutable absolute. It had already happened, therefore it could not be changed. According to their thinking, if I went back into the past and tried to kill my grandfather, something would have prevented me from doing it, otherwise I couldn't have gone back to try it in the first place because the very fact that I was
alive to do it meant that my grandfather had survived my attempt on his life. You see.?"
Gulliver knitted his brows as be ran through it once more in his mind and nodded slowly. "Yes, I think I understand. It all seems very logical now that you've explained it."
"Except it doesn't work that way," said Steiger.
“Oh, dear," said Gulliver. "And I thought I was beginning to understand it."
"Don't worry," Steiger said. "All the scientists were wrong as well and they had the advantage of having a lot more knowledge than you do. Or perhaps I should say they will have that advantage… in about another 950 years or so."
"What is the answer, then?" Gulliver said, anxiously.
“Let's go back to our river," Steiger said. "Remember that
I said the current of the river is the timestream and that the river itself represents history, the timeline? If a person travels back in time and does something relatively insignificant my picking up the pillow, for example-then that would be like tossing a very small pebble into a swiftly flowing stream. It wouldn't even make a ripple. A more significant form of interference-the killing of our hypothetically childless thief, for example-might be compared to tossing a rather large rock into the river.
It would make a splash, but unless the interference was significant enough to alter the flow of events, the ripples would be dissipated by the force of the current. Still with me?"
