by Simon Hawke
"'Yes, I think so," Gulliver said, paying very close attention.
“Now," said Steiger, "an act of interference that was significant enough to actually alter the flow of events and cause a severe temporal disruption-something like my killing my great grandfather, in other words could be compared to our throwing a gigantic boulder into the river, something huge, big enough to make the river overflow its banks on both sides and flow around it. And that is what we call a timestream split. For a short period of time, you would have two rivers, one flowing around each side of the giant boulder. One fork of the river would represent the past as it had happened before the act of disruption. The other would represent the creation of a second past, a parallel timeline, in which the act of disruption had been taken into account. A live grandfather in one, a dead grandfather in the other. And the person causing the disruption which created the split would wind up in that second timeline, because there would have to be an original timeline in which his past, up to the moment he disrupted it, was preserved intact. And at some point, unless the disruption was of sufficient magnitude to keep both timelines apart indefinitely, those two separate timelines must rejoin and the results could be disastrous."
Gulliver gaped at him, slack jawed.
"And that's only the simplified explanation," Steiger said.
"It can get a great deal more complicated than that. Even if it wasn't against all regulations for me to attempt to save my brother's life-and I've never been all that religious about following regulations to begin with-there would still be no guarantee that I could do it. And even if I could, there would still have to be a past in which my brother died, because it's already happened, do you see? If I tried to change it, I'd risk creating a timestream split. Or at the very least, I would bring about what's known as a 'ripple' in the timestream, sort of a miniature timestream split of short duration, one that would also have completely unforeseeable results. "
"The place is clean," Delaney said, coming back into the bedroom. "Well, did he explain it to you, Doctor?"
Gulliver looked up at him and the bewildered expression on his face said it an.
"Yep, I guess he did," Delaney said.
Then Andre screamed.
Delaney and Steiger both drew their weapons and ran into the sitting room.
"Don't shoot, it's only me," said Lucas Priest.
Chapter 5
"'It can't be," said Andre, after a moment of stunned silence.
Delaney had his plasma pistol aimed directly at Priest's chest. "I don't know who you are, mister," he said, "but don't you move a muscle. "
Lucas stood motionless with his hands raised. "Come on, Finn, it's me, for chrissake. Lucas. Your old partner, remember?"
"Try again. I buried my old partner."
"Yeah, I know," said Lucas, with a grimace. He kept his hands raised and carefully avoided making any sudden moves. "I figured this wasn't going to be easy. Look, I can explain. I realise this is going to be bit hard to believe, but-"
"It's gotta be his twin,'" said Steiger, interrupting him.
"From the congruent universe…
Delaney shook his head. "No. he's dead, too. I ought to know, I killed him."
"Maybe in the congruent universe, Lucas Priest had a twin brother," Steiger said, keeping his gun trained on Lucas.
"Yeah, and maybe I was triplets," said Lucas, wryly, "but I'm not. Finn, remember that time we took some R amp; R and went down to that Mexican border town and got in-"
"That was all in the arrest report the Federales filed," said Delaney. "You could have seen that when the S.O.G. swiped data from the
Archives Section. "
"Oh, Right. I forgot about that. Okay, wait a minute, what about that time we got drunk and you told me that when you were fourteen, that sexy young high school
English teacher you had made you stay after school one day and-"
"I've been drunk lots of time, " Delaney said, hastily, with a quick glance at the others. He swallowed nervously and moistened his lips. "It's entirely possible I might've told that story to somebody else."
"Priest had a bionic eye," said Steiger.
"If they knew about our arrest in Mexico and… that other thing, they could've duplicated that, as well," Delaney said. "Hell, Creed, he can't possibly be Lucas! Lucas is dead! It's some kind of trick."
Andre hadn't taken her eyes off him for an instant. She stared at him as if he were a ghost. "Who was the Red Knight's Squire?" she said, softly.
"His name was Marcel," said Lucas. "He was murdered by the Templar, Brian de Bois-Guilbert, and you avenged his death. He was your brother, Andre. You were the Red Knight. Remember our first meeting, in the lists at Ashby? You damned near killed me."
"My God," she said, turning to Delaney with a wide-eyed look. "Finn, besides you, no other living person could have known that."
"Can I put my hands down now?" said Lucas.
"Not just yet," said Steiger. "I'm still not convinced. I gave you something once and you can't give it back. If you're really Lucas Priest, then you'll know what I'm talking about."
"Boy, do I ever," Lucas said. "Your favourite mad scientist and mine, Dr.
Darkness, had you give me a particle-level symbiotracer. It was a top secret prototype, not even the army knows about it. Each of you have one, as well. Only there's something about them you don't know, something Darkness didn't tell you.
They weren't just symbiotracers, as it turns out. They also contained something he cans telempathic chronocircuitry, a cute little experimental device he whipped up in his lab back on that red planet with the three moons. "
Steiger's jaw dropped. The only way he could have known that Darkness had his lab on a red planet with three moons would be if he had been there. Darkness kept the location of his base a closely guarded secret. So far as he knew, Steiger had been the only one who'd ever been there besides Darkness himself.
"'It seems this telempathic chronocircuitry is extremely delicate," Lucas continued.
"Yours didn't survive the molecular-bonding process, but mine did, which is why I can do this. "
He disappeared. A second later, he reappeared, standing on the opposite side of the room.
"Look, ma, no hands!" he said, his hands still raised to show he wasn't operating a warp disc.
As they spun around to face him, he disappeared again, to reappear an instant later on the same spot where he'd stood initially.
"'It's a fugue sequence," Steiger said. "He had it pre-programmed in his warp disc."
"Look again, Creed," Lucas said, trying to ignore the headache and the dizziness.
"I'm not wearing one. You see, this is the process that Darkness had been trying to perfect. Time travel by thought. And since these little molecular-bonding gizmos of his are apparently extremely hard to make and I had the only one that worked right, rather than lose his, only working prototype, he decided to effect a little temporal adjustment of his own. He went back and translocated me out of that bullet's path while at the same time taking the corpse of my dead twin moments after you killed him, Finn, and interposing his body between Churchill and that bullet. Essentially, he had me switch places with a dead man. My twin from the parallel universe. The result was that I side stepped my death and wound up as a living time machine, which makes things a little troublesome. See, if my mind happens to wander, so do I."
"Then I wasn't seeing things!" said Andre. "That really was you in my room?"
Lucas nodded. "That was sort of a brief glitch. An unintentional translocation. The telempathic chronocircuitry was designed to analyse and compute transition co-ordinates from a built-in encyclopaedic database as well as my own memory.
Unfortunately, I'm not too great at controlling it and it seems that Darkness didn't quite get all the bugs out. All I had to do was think about you, Andre, and I wound up in your room. And it happened again when I started thinking about the old man and suddenly found myself in his quarters. There were times when I'd fall as
leep and dream about a place and the next thing I knew, I'd wake up there. The first few times that happened, Darkness had to home in one me through the symbiotracer so that he could come and get me, because I absolutely froze. The truly frightening part of it all is that there's no way to turn the damn thing off. Once Darkness activated it with a special coded tachyon signal to the symbiotracer, the telempathic chronocircuitry kicked in and now I can't turn it off anymore than I can turn myself off. It’s part of me, permanently bonded to my atomic structure. You'd think the great genius would have thought to build in some kind of 'off' switch, but noooo…"
Steiger and Delaney slowly lowered their weapons. Lucas sighed with relief and put his hands down. "'You know, for a minute there, I thought you were never going to believe me." He looked past them and frowned. "Who's your friend?"
Gulliver had entered the room and now he came forward hesitantly and held out his hand. "Dr. Lemuel Gulliver, at your service, sir."
Lucas shook hands with him. "Col. Lucas Priest," he said.
"You were at General Forrester's quarters, weren't you?"
"Yes, that's quite true," said Gulliver, "however, I-"
He never got to finish his sentence, as Andre, unable to restrain herself any longer, suddenly slammed into Lucas and threw her arms around him, hugging him hard enough to take his breath away.
"You're alive!" she said, her voice breaking. "God, I can't believe it! You're alive!"
She kissed him long and hard.
Steiger and Delaney were still staring at him with dazed expressions.
Gulliver looked uncomfortable and confused.
“ thought I'd lost you," Andre said, fighting back tears. And I never… and I never got around to telling you I-"
Lucas put his finger to her lips. "I know," he said, softly.
"Then you never really died!" said Delaney. "Dr. Darkness saved your life and what we thought was you was the body of your twin!"
"Well, no, not exactly," said Lucas. "In a sense, I did die, but then Darkness went back and altered that scenario. I guess you might say he brought me back to life by altering my past. Or, from where I stand right now, a potential future that I never realised."
For a moment, nobody said anything as they stared at him with astonishment, then Gulliver was the first to break the stunned silence.
"Col. Steiger," he said, "I realise that I don't really comprehend your science of the future, but isn't that-what we were just discussing moments ago in regards to your brother? Altering the past so that someone who died might live?"
"'That's exactly what we were discussing," Steiger said, slowly, "and it’s simply not possible! Not unless…" He swallowed hard, a cold fist squeezing his insides. "Not unless Darkness brought about a timestream split!"
"No," said Delaney, shaking his head. "That can't be. If a timestream split had occurred, then we wouldn't have remembered Lucas's death."
"But you would have," Lucas said, "because you saw it. You were there. Or at least Andre was. Only what you saw, Andre, was my twin's corpse, not me."
"Except that I did see you," said Andre. "'If what you’re saying is true, then I saw you die and it was only afterward that Dr. Darkness went back and changed the past, after you'd already died the first time!"
"This is most confusing," Gulliver said, scratching his head. "How can someone die and yet still be alive? It sounds like one of these paradoxes you were telling me about. "
"That's exactly what it is," said Steiger, "a temporal paradox. And that's impossible."
"Then how can I be here?" said Lucas. "Darkness says there hasn't been a timestream split. He claims his instruments have not detected one."..
"Only if there was a timestream split, then maybe his instruments couldn't detect it," said Delaney, "because it's possible that they could then be a function of that split, part of the newly created matter that would comprise the parallel timeline.
For that matter, we all might be part of a newly created parallel timeline and not know it."
"No, that can't be," said Lucas, shaking his head. "Dark The Lilliput Legion 79 ness said that no significant events were changed. What's the only thing that's different as a result of what Darkness has done? The fact that I'm alive. And that's it. Otherwise, there was no disruption of events at all."
"There had to have been some kind of disruption," Steiger insisted. "The past was changed!"
"But only my past," Lucas said. "Or, to be technically correct, my past from your point of view, and my potential future from mine, since I obviously never died. My death occurred in some sort of alternate timeframe for me."
"Is. that what Darkness told you?" said Delaney. Lucas glanced him with a frown.
"Yes. Why?"
Delaney shook his head. "Because I don't think it works that way, old friend. Granted, I haven't had as much training in temporal physics as
Darkness must've had, but unless every-thing that we were taught in R.C.S. was wrong, there had to have been some kind of a disruption. Creed is right. The past was changed. "
"Only it's not my past," insisted Lucas. "It didn't happen to me! I'm obviously still very much alive!"
"Then either there's been a timestream split," Delaney said, "or you're the split yourself, a parallel Lucas Priest. Something had to give. Either a another timeline was created or another Lucas Priest was." He glanced uneasily at the others. "Only how do we tell which one?"
Gulliver sighed and rubbed his temples. "Colonel," he said to Steiger, "I don't suppose you would have any ass-prin, would you?"
"There are times I'd like to kill that man," the Lilliput colonel said, clenching his fists. "You know, maybe one of these days I will."
"Maybe one of these days, I'll help you," his lieutenant said, as he absently sharpened a commando knife the size of a pin on a tiny whetstone. "I wouldn't mind seeing that son of a bitch bleed a little."
The two men were very different in appearance. The colonel was slim, solidly built, with a square jaw, steely blue eyes and close-cropped sandy hair. His manner and his speech were as crisp as his freshly pressed fatigues, which he kept sharply creased by carefully folding them every night and placing them beneath a brick. The lieutenant was, by contrast, something of a slob. His fatigues were wrinkled and stained and his shirt was usually worn unbuttoned, revealing an extremely muscular upper torso. He had a bodybuilder's physique, strong and sharply defined. His black, wavy hair hung down to his shoulders, and he habitually kept it held down with a cloth headband. Once in a while, he remembered to shave, which he did with his razor-sharp commando knife and water. Unlike the fair-skinned colonel, he was dark complected and his large brown eyes had a sleepy cast to them. He looked less like a soldier than a circus roustabout, but appearances could be deceiving, especially in the case of these two men. The colonel was six and half inches tall; the lieutenant stood all of five and three-quarters.
They were in the lieutenant's tent, which was made from a man's white cotton handkerchief. It was supported by tent poles made out of quarter-inch wooden doweling rod and staked to the floor by thumbtacks. All around them were dozens of similar tents housing the remainder of the regiment, all of which was billeted within a small loft in a warehouse building near the docks off Washington Street on New York City's Lower West Side.
"I liked the island better," the lieutenant said, putting down the knife and unwrapping a chunk of jerky that was lying on the plastic table. The table was toy furniture out of a doll's house, as were the chairs. "I don't like the city. I miss the fresh air." He cut up the piece of jerky with his knife and started chewing on a slice.
"How the hell can you eat that stuff?" the colonel said, with a look of disgust. "Rat meat, for God's sake!"
The lieutenant shrugged. "Meat is meat," he said, masticating furiously. "The hunting is a little limited around here, y'know? Like I said, I liked the island better.
"He does bring us food, you know," said the colonel.
"That shit he brings us isn't
food," responded the lieutenant, irately. "Why'nt you tell him to go to a market and get a couple decent cuts of steak and some fresh vegetables'! He thinks he can feed us all on a bag of quarter pounders and some fries. He's just fuckin' cheap, that's all. Half the regiment has got gas and the other half has got the runs. We can't eat that garbage. "
"I'll talk to him," said the colonel.
"He expects us to fight for him, tell him to bring us some decent food, for cryin' out loud."
"I said I'll talk to him!"
"Yo, I'm on your side, remember?"
The colonel sighed. "I'm sorry. I guess the whole thing is just getting to me. He was furious about the practice strike. He said we failed."
"Yeah, well, fuck him," said the lieutenant, bitterly. "I lost sixteen men on that damn 'practice' mission!"
The colonel glanced at him sharply. "Sixteen?"
"Yeah. My sergeant didn't make it. He died this morning." "Oh, damn."
"What the hell is going to happen to us, sir?" said the lieutenant. "What the hell kind of life have we got to look forward to?"
The tiny colonel stared out at a shaft of sunlight coming down from the skylight of the loft. "I don't know, Lieutenant," he said. "I honestly don't know. How are the men doing?"
"About as well as could be expected. They're getting a little wired. I try to keep the tension down by running the hell out of 'em all day, setting up. obstacle courses and practice manoeuvres Lord know we've got enough damn room here, but there's a limit, y'know? They don't like it here anymore than I do. And losin' sixteen of the boys on what was supposed to be a training exercise didn't exactly boost moral."
The lieutenant threw the knife down angrily and it stuck, quivering, in the wooden floor of the loft.
"I never should've called the strike in," he said, bitterly. "I should've waited."
"The presence of the Observer changed everything," said the colonel. "You did what you had to do. You might have lost him if you held off."
"Hell, we lost him anyway. And you know something? I'm not sorry. It eats my guts out that my boys had to die, but I'm not sorry that Gulliver got away. After all we put him through, that poor bastard deserved a decent break. At least somebody got out of this damn nightmare in one piece."
