by Simon Hawke
Nothing. Nothing but open sea.
He checked his transition co-ordinates once more. There was no mistake. So much for Gulliver’s insistence, he thought. If Gulliver had been right, there should’ve been an island down there. Instead, there was only a long, narrow bank of clouds or fog slightly below him and absolutely nothing else in sight for miles, as far as the eye could see. Delaney started to descend a little ways below the cloud bank and fly a quick, wide search pattern, but he didn’t think he’d find anything. Gulliver must have been wrong about those co-ordinates.
And then he saw it, directly below him as he flew down beneath the cloud bank. A small island, approximately the shape of a kidney bean, exactly where Gulliver had said it would be. He blinked. He didn’t see how he could possibly have missed it. The cloud bank didn’t seem big enough to hide the island from his sight. He looked up. The cloud bank was easily three times as large from below as from above.
Impossible.
He ascended rapidly and went right through the cloud bank once again. And sure enough, from overhead, it was smaller. And even though the wind was blowing briskly in a westerly direction, the cloud bank wasn’t moving. Actually, it was moving, but instead of being driven west, it was slowly going around in circles, slowly revolving like a whirlpool.
He had found a confluence.
Directly below him, two timelines intersected. Gulliver’s Lilliput Island was in the parallel universe. Somehow, Gulliver’s ship must have been blown through the confluence point during a storm. He had been the sole survivor, never realizing that he was in another universe. How could he possibly have suspected such a thing? Or … perhaps Gulliver was from the parallel universe to begin with and he had passed through the confluence point when he had escaped from the Lilliputians. Either situation was possible. Only. how to tell which one had happened? Where did Lemuel Gulliver belong?
Delaney double-checked the transition co-ordinates once more. It was now absolutely vital to log the time/space co-ordinates exactly, or he might never get back home.
“My apologies, Dr. Gulliver,” Delaney said to. himself. “The island is down there. Only ‘down there’ is a universe away.”
He descended through the cloud bank once again and came in at an angle over the island, following the shoreline. It wouldn’t take long to do an aerial reconnaissance. The island was fairly small, probably volcanic, though dormant for years. It was heavily forested and Delaney saw nothing that indicated any sort of settlement, no signs that the island was inhabited. He flew lower. And then he spotted it.
Camouflage netting.
From higher up, he never would have seen it. He circled around, powering down his jets and slowing his air speed. There was something down there, hidden beneath a wide expanse of camouflage netting covering an area about the size of half a basketball court. There were numerous gaps in the netting that let the sunlight through, but from higher up, it simply blended in with the rest of the forest. Delaney thought he could see a clearing down there, but he needed to get even lower for a closer look. He flew to the far edge of the netting and slowly started to descend through the trees.
Something stung him.
He slapped his hand to his neck, thinking that it was some insect, but he felt something sticking there, a tiny metal dart, no larger than a splinter. He felt another sharp, stinging sensation in his check and another in his temple, followed by several more in rapid succession. The drug was fast acting and took hold almost immediately. He started to lose control of the floater pat as he circled crazily through the trees, some ten to fifteen feet above the ground, smashing through branches as everything started to blur. Like a pilot with a crippled plane gliding in, out of control, Delaney tried to set down before he lost consciousness. Just before everything went black, he managed to shut the jets off and dropped the remaining few feet into a thicket, his forward momentum carrying him headlong into the bushes.
“They should have been back by now,” said Andre, nervously drumming her fingers on the tabletop.
“But they have been gone only a few minutes,” Gulliver said.
“They should have been back.”
“Perhaps it’s taking them longer than they expected.”
“You don’t understand,” said Andre. “We’re talking about time travel, Lem. They said they’d be back in about two minutes. Our time. It could have taken them two days to meet with Forrester and pick up the floater paks, and they could still have set their warp discs to clock back in here two minutes after they left.” She checked her disc. “And that was fifteen minutes ago.”
She smashed her fist down on the table, almost upsetting the wine bottle.
“Damn it! First Lucas disappears, God only knows where to, then Darkness takes off after him and now Finn and Creed are overdue. Something’s gone wrong. I just know it.”
“What can we do?” said Gulliver.
“For this moment, nothing,” Andre said, with a tight grimace. “They’re supposed to be coming back here. And Dr. Darkness will be coming back as soon as he finds Lucas. We’ve simply got to wait, but I hate not knowing what’s going on.”
“How do you think I feel?” said Gulliver, with a sigh. “At least what you are doing makes sense to you. You understand it, whereas I … I can only marvel at these things because I can’t even begin to comprehend them. Time travel; a dead man coming back to life because somehow he didn’t die and yet he did; a transparent, ghostlike man who lives upon some other planet, farther away than I can even imagine … it all defies belief, and yet I cannot dispute the reality of any of it. I tell you that if this table were to suddenly come alive and start to stroll around the room, I would not be surprised.”
“You asked for it,” said Andre. “You could have told us what we wanted to know and that would’ve been the end of it. You can still get out of it, you know.”
“Yes, but I would miss the adventure of a lifetime,” Gulliver said, with a grin. “Poor Mr. Swift. He so liked my story about the little people. I wonder what he would have made of this!”
“For your own good, you’d damn well better make sure he never hears of this,” said Andre. “You’ve told him more than enough already!” She shook her head. “Frankly, I still don’t understand why Forrester let you come along on this mission. It’s simply too damn dangerous. How did you ever talk him into it?”
“Ah, well, he’s a soldier,” said Gulliver, picking up a small clay pipe and packing it with some shag tobacco. “And a general, at that. As a ship’s surgeon, I have had some experience with serving under military men and I have seen my share of strong-willed commanders. Emotional appeals are wasted on such men. One must appeal to their pragmatism, to their sense of efficiency.”
Andre looked at him with interest. “What did you tell him?”
“Simply that removing my memory of what had happened and sending me back home after all that I had seen and experienced would be a waste of a potentially valuable resource,” he said, lighting up the pipe and filling the room with the pleasant, rich smell of red Virginia tobacco blended with some Turkish leaf. “Sandy Steiger, may he rest in peace, obviously fulfilled some sort of function here. That it was a military posting was not difficult to surmise from all that I subsequently heard. And after I discussed the matter with General Forrester, I came to a clearer understanding of what it is that soldiers, Temporal Observers such as Sandy Steiger, do. Perhaps I could not fulfill that function myself, but I could certainly provide assistance as a son of liaison and subordinate. Why waste a man when you can put him to good use?”
“I don’t believe it,” Andre said. “You volunteered to be a field agent?”
“It seems there is some precedent for this,” said Gulliver, with a smile. “Yourself, for instance. The general also explained how certain agents had employed people from the time periods to which they were sent and I submitted that I was eminently qualified. I am better educated than most people in this time and I already have some experience in these matte
rs. I told him that the potential benefits of accepting my services would seem to far outweigh the risks and he agreed. “
“Lem, you’re an amazing man,” said Andre, with a smile.
“Indeed, Miss Cross, I quite agree,” said a voice from behind them.
As Andre started to turn around, there was the cough of a silenced semiautomatic pistol and the empty wine bottle on the table burst apart into fragments of green glass.
“Please make no sudden moves, either one of you. I don’t intend to kill you, but I will if you force my hand.”
“Lord, now what?” said Gulliver. “And who is this?”
Andre stared at the gunman in the custom-tailored, mauve silk suit and slowly shook her head. “Lem, I haven’t the faintest idea. “
The first thing Lucas thought was that he had materialized directly in the path of an oncoming train. The ground was’ shaking and there was a rumbling sound, an incredible din, and a fierce trumpeting and then a Roman legionary knocked into him and sent him sprawling.
“Oh, Jesus ...” Lucas said, and then there was no time for anything, not even thought, as the elephants came charging.
Another Roman soldier shouldered him aside, not even registering his strange garb in his panic to escape the charging monsters and then Lucas found himself born along by the tide as the Roman phalanx broke and ran before the terrifying onslaught.
He had been here once before. In fact, he was probably here right now. It had been one of his first missions and one of his worst ones, as well. He had been clocked out to fight with Scipio’s legions against Hannibal of Carthage in one of the bloodiest struggles in history. Chances were that if he looked around, he might even see himself, dressed as a Roman legionary, running along with the others. However, there wasn’t any time to look. The elephants were upon them and Lucas was plunged right back into one of his worst nightmares. And he knew exactly why.
He had no one to blame but himself. Ever since this awful mission, whenever things had gotten tough, he always referred back to this debacle, the rout of the Roman soldiers before Scipio managed, miraculously, to turn it all around. “You think this is tough?” he used to say at such times. “Try going up against a charging elephant with nothing but a Roman short sword and a spear.” Often, he would refer back to his stint with Scipio Africanus whenever he became exasperated. “Christ, it almost makes me wish I was ‘back facing Hannibal and his fucking elephants!”
Well, his telempathic chronocircuitry had granted him his wish. He had become exasperated with Dr. Darkness and the old thought had occurred to him—I really need this, he had thought. Hell, I’d rather be back with Scipio facing Hannibal and his damn—
Elephants!
He leaped to one side and rolled as the massive, trumpeting creature came charging past him, stomping Romans into jelly, and then he rolled again as another elephant missed him by scant inches. And they came on, one after the other, and Lucas found himself scrambling panic-stricken, choking on the dust and leaping around like a grasshopper on speed, trying to avoid the tremendous feet that came down like gigantic grey pistons, threatening to crush him. The dust was so thick that he could barely see. He kept diving to one side, then the other, rolling, jumping, desperately trying to avoid being trampled and then, miraculously, they were past him and he was crouching on the ground, coughing from the dusty fog that enveloped him, his eyes red, his throat raw, every muscle fiber screaming in protest from the strain…
… and here came the Carthaginian infantry.
A disembodied hand suddenly came out of the dust and grabbed him by the back of his collar, jerking him back hard. The next thing Lucas knew, he was lying on the floor of the apartment on Threadneedle Street, gasping for air and coughing his lungs out.
“That was the silliest display I’ve ever seen,” said Dr. Darkness, standing over him. “Those pachyderms almost pounded you into a pudding. Why the devil didn’t you translocate?”
“I …” Lucas was seized by another fit of coughing. “I couldn’t... no time…”
“No time?” said Darkness, with disbelief. “How much time does it take to think one coherent thought? Well, granted, for you it might take a while, but you could just as easily have thought your way out of that mess instead of wasting all that energy leaping about like a trout thrown up on a riverbank. I’ve never seen such a ridiculous spectacle. “
“I ... I couldn’t think straight,” Lucas said, slowly getting his, wind back. “It was… it all happened so damn fast…
“How the devil did you wind up in the middle of the Punic Wars in the first place? What on earth made you think of that? No, on second thought, don’t answer that,” Darkness added, hastily. “You’re liable to pop back there once again and I have a distinct aversion to large and noisy animals.”
“I’m sorry, Doc. Thanks for—”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake, don’t thank me,” Darkness said, with a grimace of distaste. “Now that I’ve saved your life twice in a row, I feel doubly responsible for it. I never should have taken that survey course in philosophy when I was back in college. It’s been getting in my way ever since.”
“Just the same, I’m grateful,” Lucas said, getting to his feet and brushing off his clothes.
“Don’t be grateful, be careful,” Darkness said. “Be wary of stray thoughts until you learn proper control. You have just had a graphic demonstration of how much trouble they can get you into. I can’t be hovering over you all the time like some sort of deux ex machina. In order for the field trials to have any validity whatsoever, you must rely on your telempathic chronocircuitry to get you out of trouble, not me.”
“I’ll try to keep that in mind,” said Lucas. He looked around. “Where are the others’!”
“How the devil should I know? They were here when I left. At least, Miss Cross and that other fellow were. Everyone seems to be popping off somewhere.”
“Andre? Gulliver?” said Lucas. He looked in the other rooms, but the apartment was empty. “Andre wouldn’t simply leave like that. And Steiger and Delaney were due back. Now there’s no one here but us. That isn’t like them. Something’s happened…
Then he noticed the remains of the shattered wine bottle. He glanced at Dr. Darkness with alarm.
“How much time has elapsed here since you left?”
“Ten, fifteen, twenty minutes perhaps?” said Darkness. “I’m really not quite sure.”
“What do you mean, you’re not quite sure?”
“I can’t be bothered with trifles, Priest,” said Darkness, irritably. “When one routinely deals in light years, one doesn’t sweat the occasional ten minutes .”
“Well, something happened here in those ten minutes,” Lucas said, tensely, “That bottle didn’t break, it burst apart, as if …” his voice trailed off as he started looking around the apartment, trying to estimate trajectories, and finally, he found it—a bullet hole in the wall next to the armoire.
“Look at this!” he said. “Doc, they’re in trouble! You’ve got to help me!”
“Look, Priest, I thought I already explained that—”
“Dammit, Doc, I haven’t got time for this! I don’t care about the validity of your field tests; I’ve got to find out what happened here. I can’t fade out the way you can. If I went back to see what happened. I’d be visible and there’s no telling what I might be clocking into; but you could find out what happened without anybody seeing you.”
“Yes, well, I suppose I could do that,” grumbled Darkness. He grunted. “Perhaps you’re right. Under the circumstances, I can’t expect you to cope with all of this yourself. Do you want me to find out what became of Steiger and Delaney, as well?”
“It could be important, Doc. Please.”
Darkness sighed. “Very well.” He grimaced wryly. “Do you think I could depend on you to remain in one place long enough for me to do that?”
“I’ll try to think good thoughts,” said Lucas, sarcastically.
“Yes, do,” s
aid Darkness. “I’ll be right back.”
He disappeared and almost immediately reappeared, standing directly behind Lucas.
“I’m back.”
Lucas jumped, startled. “God, don’t do that!” He took a deep breath. “You certainly cut it close. You only left about a second ago!”
“So?”
“So what if you’d arrived a second earlier and seen yourself leave?”
“So what? As long as I didn’t tell myself what I’d found out in order to save myself a trip so that I couldn’t have found out what I told myself I’d found out in the first place, it wouldn’t have caused any problems whatsoever.”
“Huh? You want to run .that past me again?”
“Never mind. The important thing is that you were correct in what you had surmised. Something did happen here. Miss Cross and Gulliver were abducted at gunpoint by some character right out of a Frank Sinatra movie.”
“Frank who?”
“Never mind. He looked like a 20th century gangster dressed by a Hollywood designer. His .45 automatic was what made the bullet hole you found. He shot at the bottle, apparently to impress them with the fact that he wouldn’t hesitate to shoot if they resisted. They seemed sufficiently impressed. He made them surrender their warp discs, then he replaced them with some he had brought with him. Evidently, they were pre-programmed with the desired transition co-ordinates.”
“What the hell is going on’?” said Lucas. “Where did they go?”
“I haven’t the faintest idea,” Darkness said.
