by Simon Hawke
Delaney had few illusions about himself. There was no place for him in the structure of society except as a soldier and even then, it took an unusual commander who would know how best to use a man such as himself. Forrester
was such a man. He didn't bother with pointless military protocol and senior
officers outside his unit never fully understood his methods, although they respected Forester's results. To the average officer in the Temporal Corps. Forester's First Division seemed like a cadre of mavericks and screw-ups. From the strictly military point of view, that which governed the parade ground, the First Division had no discipline. They were a group of roughnecks, most of them completely lacking spit-and-polish, devoid of even the rudiments of military courtesy. They held themselves above the other units in the service, most of them had a disdain for regulations, they were often sloppy and insubordinate and given to using their fists too readily. But out in the field, on the Minus Side of time, they were a model of efficiency. The necessity of forming a unit to deal with temporal disruptions gave rise to a need for a different breed of soldier—one who could improvise and think fast on his feet, one who did not go by the book, because the book did not cover all contingencies, and one who was more than a little crazy. It called for the sort of soldier who was too smart, too aggressive, too independent and too much of a nonconformist to fit in well with any other unit in the service.
One of the first things Forrester had done when he began to form his unit was to check through the dossiers of those soldiers in the Corps who had the worst disciplinary records in their respective units. He had known what he was looking for and he had known that, in certain cases, the difference between a man confined to a military prison and an outstanding combat soldier was an officer who knew how best to utilize the unique abilities of those placed under his command.
The fact that Delaney, who held the record in the entire Temporal Army for the most promotions and consequent reductions in grade, had finally become an officer in the First Division, and a captain, no less, was one of the bizarre ironies of his career. Another irony was that he had now become not only a soldier, but a temporal agent, an operative of the TIA, which had been brought under the same umbrella with the First Division, both combined into one unit under General Forrester's command. Delaney had never liked what he referred to as "the spooks." the quasi-military operatives of the Temporal Intelligence Agency, who seemed to be recruited primarily from among psycopaths and paranoids. And now he was one of them. Part soldier, part spy, part assassin, part counterterrorist. His worst nightmares had come true—the timestrearm had been split and now they were at war with an alternate universe. A war which was, perhaps, impossible for either side to win.
Theoretically, Delaney knew, it was possible for there to be any number of universes existing at the same time, in different dimensions or planes of reality. Neither Time nor Space was a rigid concept. Mensinger's Theories of Temporal Relativity were, like Einstein's revolutionary concepts, only theories, after all. The fact that nothing had come along to disprove them categorically only supported the theories, it did not "prove" them in the conventional sense as "laws."
The Theory of Temporal Inertia held that the "current" (a word Mensinger used loosely. primarily as an analogue) of the timestream tended to resist the disruptive influence of temporal discontinuities. According to the "father of temporal physics," the degree of this resistance was dependent upon the coefficient of the magnitude of the disruption and the Uncertainty Principle.
The element of uncertainty in temporal relativity, expressed as a coefficient of temporal inertia, represented the unknown factor in the continuity of time. Professor Mensinger had stated that in a temporal event-location which had been disrupted, it was impossible to determine the degree of deviation from the original, undisrupted historical scenario due to the lack of total accuracy in historical documentation and due to the presence of historical anomalies as a result either of temporal discontinuities or their adjustments. In other words, if something happened to influence or alter an historical event. Mensinger maintained that it was impossible to tell exactly how the original event had taken place—because there was no way of knowing exactly what all the details of the original historical event were. Historical records were never absolutely accurate and there was no way of knowing the extent to which a disruption could affect an historical scenario. Consequently, if the historical event were adjusted to compensate for a disruption, there was no way of knowing if the adjustment itself had not introduced a disruptive influence, something that might not have a noticeable effect until years later.
The Fate Factor held that in the event of a disruption of a magnitude sufficient to affect temporal inertia and create a discontinuity, the element of uncertainty both already present and brought about by the disruption combined with the "force" that Mensinger identified as the Fate Factor to determine the degree of relative continuity to which the timestream could be restored. In layman's terms, this meant that history did not "want" to change and there were natural forces at work to maintain the smooth and undisrupted flow of time. However, these forces did not necessarily come into play at the exact locus of a disruptive incident. A "ripple" in the timestream could be set in motion which would result in these compensating forces manifesting themselves further down the line in some other temporal event-location—with completely unforseeable results.
The “Timestream Split" had always been the greatest danger. In the event of a disruption of a magnitude great enough not only to affect temporal inertia, but to actually overcome it, the effects of the Fate Factor would be cancelled out by the overwhelming influence of a massive historical discontinuity. The displaced energy of temporal inertia would in that event— according to Mensinger's theories—create a parallel timeline in which the
Uncertainty Principle would be the chief governing factor.
Delaney remembered how one of his professors in RCS had explained it by setting up a hypothetical situation. "Suppose," the professor had said, "you were to clock hack in time to the American Revolutionary War. Suppose your potentially disruptive presence there results in your having to shoot an American soldier during a battle. This, in itself, creates a temporal disruption, but if this particular American soldier was not someone who was historically significant, the combined forces of the Fate Factor and temporal inertia would work to compensate for his death. For example, if this soldier that you killed originally survived the battle and one of his great, great grandchildren eventually did something of historical significance, the metaphysical influence of temporal inertia and the Fate Factor would probably influence event-locations all the way down the timestream in such a way that someone else would wind up doing the historically significant thing that the dead soldier's great, great grandchild would otherwise have done.
"However," the professor had continued, "suppose youaccidentally shot General George Washington. You would have eliminated a historically significant figure at the key event location point in the timestream and temporal inertia would not be able to build up enough 'momentum' to compensate for that death. The Fate Factor would be cancelled out and the massive amount of displaced temporal energy that would result could split the timestream, creating a parallel timeline. The original, undisrupted scenario would then continue in a smooth temporal flow—the original timeline in which Washington had never died. The parallel timeline created by the split, however, would proceed from the point at which the event-location had been disrupted and changed—in this newly created timeline, the death of George Washington would become a fact of history and events would proceed from that point, taking Washington's death into account.
"This brings up a number of interesting problems," the professor had said, smiling grimly in a way that had sent a chill down Finn Delaney's spine. "For one thing, having initiated a disruption in the temporal event-location, you would inevitably wind up in the timeline in which that disruptive event became a fact of history. Inother words, you'd
probably never be able to come home. Chances are you'd be trapped forever in that parallel timeline. If you were to clock ahead at that point, you would wind up in a parallel future, not the one you came from. Now, while that might pose an immense problem for you personally, it would be nothing compared to the problem it would pose for the entire flow of time, because Mensinger believed that if such an event came to pass, the combined force of the temporal inertia in both timelines would eventually result in their coming together again at some point in the future, like a confluence of rivers. And nobody knows what would happen in such a case. It's
pretty scary."
It was much more than scary. It was terrifying on a scale that could not even be fully comprehended. Mensinger came closest to understanding it completely and his realizations had resulted in his suicide. The political stupidity which had brought about the Time Wars had been based on the conventional wisdom of the then-current scientific establishment, which had maintained that history was an immutable absolute. The past had already happened, they maintained, therefore, it could not he changed. By the time they knew better, it was too late to retreat. At least, from the political standpoint.
A student of history, Delaney had once written a thesis based on the folly of politically feasible halfway measures that had proved disastrous in the long run. He had used a number of examples from the past to illustrate his point.
America in the 20th century had been heavily dependent upon the use of automobiles, personal transport vehicles powered by internal combustion engines. It was the almost universally chosen mode of transportation. The trouble was that internal combustion engines emitted gases and hydrocarbon particles that polluted the atmosphere and in the more densely populated regions, air pollution resulting chiefly from the use of too many automobiles in too small a space resulted in serious health and environmental problems. A solution of some sort was needed, but the scientifically feasible solutions did not prove to be politically feasible.
One possible solution was to regulate the amount of automobile traffic allowed in any densely populated area and develop alternate means of transportation and alternate, nonpolluting fuels, but people would not sit still for being told that they couldn't drive their cars whenever they pleased and they did not want their taxes raised so that alternate—and less attractive— means of public transportation could be developed. The oil industry, with its massive political clout, was not very anxious to see a competitive fuel developed unless they could control it and they already controlled oil, so why go to the expense of developing an alternative fuel, testing it, setting up new plants and distribution networks and so forth, all of which would mean extremely long-term payouts and much smaller profits?
Another solution was to regulate the number of people who could live in any one area, controlling population density. This, too, would have been political suicide for any legislator who supported such a measure. The politicians wanted a fix that would not overly offend their constituencies. Politicians frequently wanted to have their cake and eat it, too. The fix they found was a halfway measure that made a certain amount of "common sense," given enough supportive propaganda, but it ignored economic and scientific
realities. "Pollution Control" devices were incorporated into automobile engine
design, additional plumbing in the engine that would help control emissions. It sounded good in theory, but the trouble was that these devices interfered with optimum performance and most were only good for about ten thousand miles before they required complete replacement—something few automobile owners ever did. The emission control testing programs instituted to enforce this were easily circumvented and little more than lip-service programs to begin with. The result was that engines so equipped not only gave performance far inferior to engines lacking these devices, but they polluted measurably more after a brief period than an engine without the extra plumbing that was routinely kept in a proper state of tune.
The populace was propagandized into believing that this "bolt-on solution" was the answer and someone else came up with the brilliant idea that if people drove more slowly, they would save fuel and thereby pollute less. Unfortunately, this had very little to do with the principles of automotive engineering. It was a "sounds good solution– that made sense only to the technologically ignorant, who knew nothing about horsepower curves, gearing and torque and therefore were incapable of understanding how a high performance sports car driven at 85 miles per hour could be made more fuel efficient than a family sedan driven at 55. They wanted simple answers, not engineering complexity. Slower speed meant less fuel used—it was wrong, but it made sense to most people, so they wrote a law limiting the speed to 55 miles per hour. Delaney had once driven an antique internal combustion engined car from Denver to Houston and he had concluded that only idiots on the densely populated east coast could have passed such a law. Had they been made to drive the same distance over the same roads at a speed of 55 miles per hour, he had no doubt the law would have been quickly repealed. But it wasn't, because ithad great propaganda value and because rampant noncompliance with the law provided local authorities with easy revenue. Yet another way to fool the public and then skin them.
Nuclear energy was an even more graphic example. Before fusion was developed, nuclear power plants were potentially hazardous. If the proper safeguards were not observed, if personnel manning the plants were inadequately trained and if the plants were not constructed and maintained properly, then nuclear power plants could pose serious threats to the environment. In 1986, in the USSR, an accident occurred that was referred to in the media as a "fire"—a curious but more palatable term for a chain reaction. Dangerous levels of radiation were released into the atmosphere; an event which could have been prevented had the proper safety procedures, such as the use of concrete containment buildings, been observed. But the human factor was always the weak link. Engineering principles were only as efficient as the people who applied them. After the accident
occurred, the danger was de-emphasized, the scientific ignorance of the populace
facilitated political circumlocution, and the resulting "fallout of popular opinion blamed nuclear power itself as being too dangerous, when the real answer was that nothing could be rendered absolutely safe—it was all a question of relativity and trade-offs, of acceptable versus unacceptable risks, and of scientific illiteracy prevailing over educated and informed opinion. A scenario made to order for political stupidity.
The Time Wars were the ultimate example of people making decisions who were not even qualified to hold an opinion on the matter. When the Time Wars could have been stopped, the politicians prevailed, thinking about their own livelihoods, concerned about all the support industries created by the Time Wars which were providing jobs to their constituents, thinking about the propaganda value of being able to assure the folks back home that thanks to the Time Wars, they were immune to conflicts taking place in their own time—the only ones at risk were soldiers, all of whom were volunteers, and warfare in the past meant essential disarmament in the present. Propaganda, Halfway measures. Scientific illiteracy. Lies. Now they reaped the harvest.
The accident that everyone had dreaded had finally occurred. It was impossible to pinpoint exactly what had caused it. It was even impossible to determine if one particular event had caused it or if it was a result of cumulative temporal interference. Without an event-location which could be pinpointed, there was no "fix." And yet, the politicians were screaming for a fix. The scientists of the Temporal Corps had explained it to them over and over again, they had explained it to the media, but the question still persisted, always starting with the all-too- familiar "yes, but" phrase. "Yes, but how can it be fixed?" They screamed for an investigation. Who was at fault? Who can the finger be pointed at? If enough money could be spent, surely a solution could be found. Wrong, said the scientists. There is no solution, because the problem can't be solved. We can't cure the disease, we can only treat the symptoms. As for whose fault it w
as, finding a scapegoat would accomplish nothing, because it was everybody's fault, the fault of all those people who thought that lunch was free, that something could be gained for nothing, that there was a way to live secure, without the threat of risk. But such an answer was politically unfeasible, and so they didn't want to listen. And they blamed the scientists.
It was similar to what happened to the space program in the latter part of the 20th century. An enviable safety record had lulled the public into complacency. Budgetary cuts voted by scientifically illiterate legislators steadily reduced the safety factors and created additional pressure to make space exploration more glamorous and relevant, to keep it in the public eye. And then, when an accident occurred, resulting in tragic loss of life, once again, the media and the legislators
screamed. How could it have happened? Who was to blame?
The magnitude of the problem was too great for them to comprehend. And explaining complicated scientific principles to the public in uncomplicated terms took up too much time—it could not be reduced to a simplistic statement or two in a live-minute interview on a news program. And a five-minute attention span was the most that the media could hope for. They wanted it short, informative and simple and if they were told that it could not be short, informative and simple, they became impatient and suspected obfuscation.
