by Simon Hawke
“Don’t shout!” said the Lilliputian. “You want to burst my eardrums?”
Lucas found it impossible to keep a straight face.
“Clock out, damn you!” shouted the Lilliputian.
“I don’t think so,” Finn said.
“You don’t think what?” said Lucas.
“I wasn’t talking to you. I was talking to the little pipsqueak sitting on my shoulder—Ow!”
The Lilliputian had slugged him in the ear with his tiny pistol.
“Now!” he said. “Clock out now or you’re dead!”
“You kill me now and none of you will ever make it out of this clearing,” said Delaney. “The situation’s changed, my little friend. Right now, I’m the only thing keeping you and your men alive. Kill me and you’ve all had it. My buddy there will burn you the minute my body hits the ground. You’d better give it up.”
“Surrender?” said the Lilliputian commander. “And wind up being dissected in one of your research labs? Not on your life. So long as we’ve got you, your friend won’t dare to make a move.”
“Looks like it’s a stand-off then,” Finn said.
“I don’t think so,” said the Lilliputian, He stuck two fingers in his mouth and gave a long, piercing, high-pitched whistle.
Finn felt movement inside his trouser legs. Several of the Lilliputians hiding there had let go of the ropes and dropped down onto his boots. Lucas stared wide eyed as several Lilliputians came bounding out from the bottoms of Finn’s trousers, tiny laser rifles aimed straight at him.
“That was not a good move,” said Finn. Lucas disappeared.
The Lilliput commandos on the ground glanced around, confused, then suddenly, one by one, they were snatched up into the air, crying out briefly before they vanished from sight, their tiny rifles falling to the ground.
“What the—where did they go?’ their commander said. “What—ahhh!”
Lucas suddenly materialized at Finn’s side, and with a deft motion, he plucked the Lilliputian leader out from under Finn’s shirt collar. His other arm was held tightly across his body, holding squirming Lilliputians trapped between his forearm and his chest.
“Now then,” said Lucas, holding the struggling Lilliputian leader up between his thumb and forefinger, “I suggest you drop your weapon and order the rest of your people to evacuate Captain Delaney’s clothes and fall in right down there, or I’ll drop these men to the ground and stomp on them. And that goes for you, too. “
“Never mind us!” shouted the commander to his other men. “We’ve had it! Shoot! Shoot! Save yourselves!”
Finn had a bad moment, but the scorching fire never came. Instead, the men inside his breast pockets threw out some rope and rappelled down the length of his body to the ground. The others came out of his trouser pockets and the inside of his shirt, sliding down tiny ropes to the ground as Finn stood there, feeling like the north face of the Eiger.
“Nobody’s ever going to believe this,” he said, shaking his head as the Lilliputians dropped their weapons in a pile and fell into platoon formation at his feet.
“What I can’t figure out is how the hell they got into your clothes in the first place,”
Lucas said, gazing down with wonder at the three ranks of Lilliputians down below him, standing in formation with their hands clasped atop their heads.
Delaney sighed and grimaced ruefully. “Don’t ask., okay?”
“Dear Lord, now where are we?” Gulliver asked, with exasperation.
“I don’t know, Lem,” said Andre, turning around slowly and examining their surroundings.
Both of them were handcuffed. The man in the tailored mauve suit had made Gulliver cuff Andre’s hands behind her back, then he’d cuffed Gulliver himself and fastened his own warp discs around their wrists, slightly above the steel bracelets. Then he clocked them through one at a time to… where?
They had materialized in the centre of a large room, beneath a skylight. They seemed to be standing in some sort of empty warehouse or abandoned loft. Above them, the hangar like ceiling was a crisscrossing webwork of supporting girders and steel beams on which small kleig lights were mounted. Andre turned and saw a row of large rectangular casement windows in the wall behind her at about eye level. They were the kind that opened outwards from the bottom. A warm, humid breeze wafting in carried the sounds of traffic and the stifling smell of air pollution. Through the windows, she could see the West Side Highway and the Hudson River, with New Jersey on the other side. It was starting to get dark.
“We’re in New York City,” she said. “The 20th century, I think, but I’m not sure about the exact time—”
“Never mind the time,” said a voice from behind them. “Get back away from the windows.”
The man in the mauve suit had materialized behind them and as they turned around, he beckoned them away from the windows with his gun. It was a big, black semiautomatic pistol, Andre noticed, and it was cocked. It was a 10 mm Springfield. That, along with the style of the man’s suit and her brief glimpse of the city outside, confirmed her guess about the time period. Late 20th century, early to mid 90’s. The dark-haired man watched them from behind tinted, aviator-style glasses. His manner was calm, self-assured, and thoroughly professional.
“You’re with the Network, aren’t you?” Andre said.
“That’s right,” the man said.
“Who are you? Are you with the agency or did they bring you in from the outside?”
“What’s the difference?” he said, flatly.
“One of degree, I suppose,” said Andre. “One merely makes you a criminal. The other makes you an agent who’s gone bad. In my book, that’s about ten times worse.”
“Really?” he said, still in that same flat, world-weary voice. “And how long have you been with the agency?”
“A couple of years,” she said.
“A couple of years,” he said, amused. “A whole couple, huh?”
“Before that I served with the First Division.”
“Ah. One of Moses Forrester’s legendary Time Commandos, eh? Saved the world a few times, did you?”
“I did my part.”
“How commendable. Excuse me if I don’t share your zealous sense of duty. You see, unlike you privileged elite, I was never sent out on glamorous short-term missions to return to luxurious quarters at Pendleton Base, where I could live in a style normally reserved for command staff officers. See, we ‘spooks’ spend years on the minus side, living in primitive squalor, gathering the intelligence that enables you glory hounds to function and only getting brought in from the cold when our chemically increased lifespans threaten to become an inconvenience. And then we’re only brought back long enough to be briefed for a new assignment in the field. More years on the minus side that inexorably grind on into decades. And always there’s the struggle for funding to maintain field operations—”
“Oh, bull,” said Andre. “The T.I.A. has the largest budget of any government agency—service branches included!”
“We do a bigger job than any government agency, service branches included,” the Network man said. “You have any idea what it takes to maintain a field office? No, of course not. What the hell do you care? They expect a section head to set up a field office and maintain it with just a small staff of agents, as if all we had to do was read newspapers and monitor the electronic media, never mind that many of the places we’re sent to haven’t even heard of electricity, much less mass media. We’re expected to feed intelligence to the Observers, investigate and report all anomalies to Temporal Army Command, monitor all activity within a temporal zone that a regiment couldn’t adequately cover. And with the parallel universe involved now, we’re supposed to handle all those added complications, as well.”
He snorted derisively. “You tell me,” he continued. “how are we supposed to do that without recruiting additional personnel from the temporal zones we’re assigned to? And those people have to be paid somehow out of a budget that do
esn’t allow for them. Elaborate, costly procedures must be followed to keep them from suspecting what we’re really doing. Special, painstaking precautions, also very costly, must be taken to avoid causing any temporal disruptions of our own, because supposedly that’s what we’re here to prevent. And somehow we’re supposed to keep our sanity while trying to do a job that simply can’t be done.”
“It sounds to me as if you’re trying very hard to justify yourself,” said Andre. “It also sounds like you should have been relieved a long time ago. You should’ve been brought in. You need rest and you need help. You’re a burnout case.”
“Yeah? Well, maybe I am. Maybe there was a time when doing my duty was as important to me as it is to you. But as you’ve surmised, I’ve been at it for a long, long time now. And let me tell you, it’s like pissing in the wind.”
He leaned back in the chair, took a deep drag off his cigarette and exhaled the smoke in a sigh.
“You see, it’s kinda hard to convince the folks back home that what goes down in some temporal backwater makes any difference to them. I mean, why should they care about a field office in 11th century Jerusalem? Why should they give a damn about some war in 19th century Africa or political instability in 20th century Latin America? That was all ancient history, right? Now the rising interest rates, the falling value of the dollar, the collapse of the service economy, bank failures, those things make a difference to them. They’re relevant, you see. Why should they pay taxes to support operations hundreds or thousands of years removed from their own reality? All they can see is their own-world winding down. They simply can’t see that it’s all connected. They’re fools. They’re like a bunch of mindless lemmings, running full tilt toward the edge of a cliff. So if they don’t give a damn, why the hell should we?”
He backed away from them, keeping them covered with his gun, until he came up against a wooden table and some chairs. He pulled a chair out, sat down and casually crossed his legs, never once taking his eyes off them. He took out a pack of English cigarettes, shook one out and lit it with a lighter held in his free hand. He offered the pack to Andre, but she shook her head. He shrugged and put it away.
“It’s all falling apart, you know. I figure it probably started coming to pieces back around Julius Caesar’s time and it’s been growing progressively worse ever since. The miracle is that it’s all stayed together this long. Somewhere back in Roman times, some idiot decided that man’s role on this earth was to conquer nature instead of being a part of it, so we’ve been bludgeoning nature to death ever since. And several thousand years later, we’ve just about finished the job.”
“Time travel was the final straw,” he continued, in his sleepy sounding voice. “The Greeks used to say, ‘Those whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad.’ Well, we’ve become the gods and we’ve driven nature mad. It’s fragmenting into split personalities. Parallel timelines. And now that it’s started, there’s just no way to stop it. It’s going to be like a chain reaction, building and building and building. No stopping it. No stopping it at all.”
“What in heaven’s name is he talking about?” Gulliver said, under his breath. “Do you understand any of this?”
Andre nodded. “I’m afraid I do,” she said. “And I’m afraid he has a point, too, despite his twisted logic.”
“Twisted logic?” the Network man said.
“I’d call it twisted,” said Andre. “Things may be falling apart, but that’s no reason to stop trying to do anything about it. You talk as if there’s some kind of virtue in not caring, in simply giving up. Nothing can be done, so why bother? Live for today, forget about tomorrow, right?”
“That’s only human nature,” he said, with a shrug. “When the bombs were falling on London during World War II, people made love in the bomb shelters. Knowing that death could come at any second, they tried to wring as much out of the passion of the moment as they could.”
“That wasn’t why,” said Andre, shaking her head. “That’s what I mean about your twisted logic. They did it because the procreative urge is often activated during times of great stress and extreme danger. Because their innermost instincts, knowing, as you said, that death could come at any moment, were driven to reaffirm life. Faced with imminent extinction, the human animal fights to procreate, to create new life to carry on the struggle. That’s why things have stayed together this long. Not because it was some sort of miracle or blind luck or entropy or whatever the hell you want to call it, but because we’re a race of fighters and dreamers. We know things aren’t going well, but we have a dream that they’ll get better and we fight to make that dream come true. Because when you get right down to it, that’s all there is. If you stop fighting for your dream, then it really is all over. If you give up your dreams, you die.”
The sound of slow hand clapping echoed through the loft. “Bravo, Miss Cross! Spoken like a true dreamer! Bravo, indeed!”
Andre spun around toward the door at the far end of the loft. The freight elevator doors stood open and Nikolai Drakov had stepped out, dressed in an elegant, dark, wool, velour topcoat and a conservative worsted suit with a very fine pinstripe. His tie was impeccably knotted, his shirt was raw white silk and he wore a dark blue scarf draped around his neck. He looked more like a corporate attorney than the last surviving member of the terrorist Timekeepers, former leader of the notorious Time Pirates and master of the monstrous hominoids. Andre stared at him with disbelief.
“Yes, Miss Cross, I really am alive, as you can see,” he said, with an amused smile, giving her a slight bow from the waist. “Only the good die young, as they say.”
He turned around and motioned to someone behind him in the elevator. Two men came forward, supporting. a third between them, a man with his hands and arms firmly tied behind his back. They dragged him out and shoved him forward, so that he fell sprawling full-length on the floor. He moaned and raised his battered face to look at Andre.
“My God,” she whispered. “Hunter!”
Chapter 9.
They had brought their twenty-six tiny prisoners back to the apartment on Threadneedle Street, all bound with their own little ropes and carefully wrapped up in a section of the camouflage netting that had concealed their camp. Finn slowly unrolled the netting, taking care not to damage any of their little prisoners; then he gently laid them all out one by one. on the table top, as if they were wounded combatants in a field hospital. They all suffered this treatment stoically, saying nothing, apparently resigned to whatever fate awaited them.
“Maybe we can find some sort of a valise or something to transport them,” Lucas said. “Something soft. We can line it with some cloth or toweling, make sure they don’t get tossed around too much.”
Delaney took out another parcel in which he had wrapped up the weapons they’d been carrying along with their floater paks and some of the supplies they’d found at their base camp.
“Check the closets,” he said. “Maybe there’s some bags in there. I just want to get the prisoners off our hands as soon as possible. I’m worried about Andre and Gulliver.”
“I’m worried about them, too, Finn,” said Lucas, “but we’ve got to wait for Darkness. He’s the only one who’d know where they were taken.”
“That’s quite an interesting collection you’ve got there,” said Darkness, suddenly materializing behind them. He projected himself forward through space-time in a rapid series of translocations, leaving behind a trail of ghostly afterimages. He stood over the table and gazed down at the tiny prisoners. “If you’re anxious to be rid of them, I’ll take them off your hands.”
“You?” said Lucas. He narrowed his eyes suspiciously.
“Why? What would you do with them?”
“Oh, I was thinking I could dress them up in little suits of black or white and use them to play chess,” said Darkness, with a perfectly straight face.
“Oh, for cryin’ out loud!” said Delaney. “We haven’t got time for jokes!”
“Wh
o’s joking? They’d make a dandy chess set. Only I’d need thirty-two and you’ve got only twenty-six. Think you could manage to rustle up another half a dozen?”
“Forget about it,” said Delaney. “What’s happened to Andre and Gulliver?”
“They were abducted. “
Delaney rolled his eyes. “Yeah, right. We already know that. Where were they taken?”
“New York City,” Darkness said. “The 20th century. September 13, 1992, to be exact.”
“Are you sure?”
“I am always sure, Delaney,” Darkness said, wryly. “I do not make idle pronouncements. I observed the settings on their warp discs, and to be doubly sure, I followed them. They were clocked to an old warehouse building on Washington Street. They’re in a loft, on the top floor. The man who took them prisoner is some sort of renegade T.I.A. agent, a member of the Network. I didn’t hear him say his name, but he’s a tall, slim, dark-haired, rather bored-looking individual dressed like a giant boysenberry’. He was holding them there alone, apparently waiting for someone.”
“He was waiting for General Drakov,” a small voice said from behind them.
They turned to face the table where the Lilliputian prisoners were all laid out.
“What did you say?” Delaney said.
The Lilliputian commander struggled to sit up. “I said, he was waiting for General Drakov. That warehouse on Washington Street was one of our base camps. And the man your friend described sounds like Victor Savino. I’ve met him. He controls a criminal organization known as the Family through a man named Domenico Manelli.”
“Savino?” said Delaney. “Vic Savino? Tied up with the 20th century Mafia?” He glanced at Lucas with astonishment. “Savino’s the T.I.A. section chief in that temporal zone. Steiger’s mentioned him dozens of times. They started out together. The man is something of a legend in the agency.”
“And he’s with the Network,” Lucas said. “That means Drakov is not only still alive, but he’s hooked up with the Network somehow. The most dangerous enemy we’ve ever faced, and our own people are involved with him. Christ, I don’t believe it!”
