by Simon Hawke
“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 analyze and compute transition co-ordinates from a built-in encyclopedic 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 asleep 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.
“I 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 realized.”
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 realize 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. “Darkness 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 everything 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 yo
u,” 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 maneuvers 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.”
“I wonder if we will,” the colonel said.
“We will. Count on it. We’ll make it.”
“I wish I could be so sure,” said the colonel. “Tell the men there’s a briefing scheduled for 0600. A target’s been selected. We’re going out tomorrow night.”
I could sure get used to this, thought Hunter, toying with the stem of his wineglass as he stared at the beautiful, elegant blonde sitting across the table from him. She was dressed in a simple, low cut black dress, an expensive designer original that clung to her lush figure, accentuating it with every move she made. The table top was glass, allowing him to appreciate her gorgeous legs, which were crossed in a calculated manner so that the dress would ride up high. Throughout the meal, she’d been leaning forward slightly, inconspicuously matching her physical attitude to his, making little, almost unnoticeable movements, speaking a subtle body language that was almost as blatant in its effect as if she had tom off all her clothes and sprawled out naked on the table. She smiled and her sea green eyes whispered promises. She was good. She was very, very good.
Yes, sir, thought Hunter, I could sure get used to this. Fine clothes, expensive cars, beautiful women … becoming stranded in this timeline could be the best thing that ever happened to him. In a matter of months, he bad effortlessly parlayed the few dollars he bad stolen into a multimillion dollar’ fortune. And that money had opened many doors. And the more doors the money opened, the more money came in. And as more money came in, more doors were opened for him. After a while, it seemed as if the entire process had started to become completely self-sustaining. The warp disc and a little common sense was all it took. I should have done this years ago, he thought.
“Penny for your thoughts,” the blonde said. Her voice had the rich, low contralto tones of a cello by Stradivarius.
“Hmm?”
She smiled a dazzling, slightly crooked smile. “It doesn’t exactly do wonders for a girl’s ego when you drift off like that, you know,” she said.
“I’m sorry,” he said, with an apologetic smile.
“You seemed so far away. What were you thinking just now?”
“I was just thinking about something I had started out to do.” He gazed out the bay window of her penthouse apartment with the view of Central Park. “At one point, no so very long ago, it seemed terribly important.” He smiled. “I guess I was just trying to remember why.”
The compact disc player automatically segued from Pat Metheny to some mellow, soulful blues by Carlos Santana. The dinner she had cooked for him had been exquisite, the wine was an excellent vintage white Margaux, and there was something very tantalizing about the subtle scent of her perfume. This woman was trouble, Hunter thought, but it was the kind of trouble a man usually walked into with both eyes wide open.
Her name was Krista and they had met at a party hosted by Domenico Manelli, a man who described himself as an investor and a financier. He did invest quite heavily, hut not all of his investments were in blue chip stocks. He also dealt in some commodities that did not appear on the big board. And as for being a financier, well, he did finance certain politicians, a few judges, several entertainers, and a battery of lawyers.
It hadn’t taken Hunter very long to figure out that Krista was on Domenico Manelli’s payroll.
She undoubtedly did not think of herself as a hooker, Hunter thought, because there was a world of difference between Krista and a common prostitute. She was much more than an exclusive call girl, too. Men did not call Krista and pay her exorbitantly for her favors. Few men would have been able to afford the price, either financially or psychologically. Besides, she couldn’t be bought that way. No, Krista was a much more interesting creature. She was a weapon that Domenico Manelli used with careful judgement and restraint. And a weapon like Krista was worth an entire ream of intelligence agents, Hunter thought.
The fact that Krista had approached him meant that Manelli had become interested in him and Hunter had been trying to decide how to react to that. He didn’t quite know what to make of Domenico Manelli. In some ways, the man was astonishingly obvious, while in others he was as complex and devious as a Medici prince. He had taken the twofold path, as all really smart criminals did, establishing himself as a solid, taxpaying citizen with a wide variety of legitimate business interests and community activities while at the same time cleverly furthering his illegal operations, which had provided the seed capital for him to become a respected pillar of the community to begin with.
Manelli functioned on the principle that it was never very smart to become too visibly successful, but that if one did, the thing to do was to create an economic smokescreen. The moment the money became significant—and at the same time, inconveniently inexplicable—he invested it. He invested it legitimately in a manner that allowed for a reasonable return that could then be used to grease the wheels. He used the dirty money to create clean funds that were then used for paying taxes, contributing to various charities and political campaigns, supporting popular causes, starting businesses, creating jobs. . . in other words, buying his way to indispensability to as many people as possible.
