by Simon Hawke
“But… then what kept it from hitting Churchill?”
“I merely interposed another mass between Churchill and the bullet.”
“What are you talking about? What mass?”
“Your twin.”
“My what?”
“Your twin from the parallel universe,” said Darkness. “He was already dead, you see. Your friend Delaney killed him, which was quite convenient. All I did was move at multiples of light speed, take your twin’s body and switch it with yours, taching you back here while I positioned your double’s corpse in such a way that the ball from the Ghazi’s rifle would enter at the exact same spot as Delaney’s bayonet had when he killed your twin. It was actually rather complicated and it took some careful timing, but— “
“Wait a minute, wait a minute!” Lucas said, staring wide-eyed at the scientist. “What the hell are you talking about? What twin from the parallel universe? And what’s this about Delaney killing him? When did all this happen? I don’t remember any of this!”
“Well, naturally. That’s because it all happened in a slightly different timeframe,” Darkness explained. He hesitated. “After you … uh … died.”
“After I what?” Lucas suddenly felt as if his stomach were trying to turn itself inside out.
“Died,” said Darkness. He cleared his throat. “After you died. Here, perhaps you’d better have another drink. Settle your nerves.”
He handed Lucas another glass of Scotch. Lucas never saw him go back to the bar and pour it. It didn’t even look as if he’d moved. He felt dizzy and there was an aching pressure in his chest.
“I think you’d better sit down,” said Dr. Darkness. Lucas half sat, half collapsed into a large, leather upholstered reading chair.
“Jesus, Doc … what have you done?”
“Well, I saved your life, for one thing. You might at least say thank you. “
“No,” said Lucas, softly. He swallowed hard and shook his head. “No, I won’t thank you. I can’t.” He closed his eyes. “Oh, Jesus, I’m dead. Or I should be dead. That Ghazi fired his rifle a split second after I leaped and … and that bullet should have hit me. It did hit me! My God, Doc, don’t you realize what you’ve done? You’ve caused a timestream split!”
“I’ve done no such thing,” said Darkness. “I have been monitoring the situation assiduously and my instruments have detected absolutely no evidence of a timestream split. I rather thought there wouldn’t be, but I couldn’t be absolutely certain.” He shrugged. “Occasionally, one must take some risks in order to gain knowledge. Actually, it was quite an interesting experiment. You see, I could easily have deflected that bullet. It wouldn’t have taken much, merely matching its speed and giving it a slight nudge would have accomplished the desired result. However, in that event, I conditions of the past in a manner that might have affected the entire scenario, not only yourself.”
“For one thing, a number of people had already seen you die,” Darkness continued as Lucas listened with stunned disbelief. “That in itself might not have been all that significant from a temporal standpoint, but unfortunately, by the time I learned about your untimely demise, you had already been buried and certain significant events had already proceeded from that point, taking the factor of your death into account.”
Lucas listened to it with a sort of shocked detachment. He simply couldn’t take it in. Darkness was calmly talking about his death, about his having been buried, and yet, incredibly, despite having died, he was alive. His mind reeled as he tried to assimilate it all. The more Darkness told him, the crazier it sounded.
“I recall standing over your grave and feeling absolutely furious,” said Darkness. “You were to have been the vehicle for my greatest achievement, the living prototype of my ultimate invention, and you were dead! Well, granted, I always knew there was some risk of that, considering the highly dangerous nature of your occupation, but that was precisely what made you such an ideal candidate. You routinely travelled throughout different time periods and were exposed to a wide variety of environments, all of which made for excellent field testing conditions. Being a temporal agent, you were equipped with a warp disc, which provided a perfect failsafe system. And finally, I don’t think that anyone but a temporal agent would have possessed the necessary abilities to deal with the stresses the field testing would have generated. You were perfect. However, to be on the safe side, I also terminaled Andre Cross and Finn Delaney, in case anything should have happened to you. Just my luck, Cross and Delaney’s terminals malfunctioned. The symbiotracer functions continue to work just fine, but the telempathic chronocircuitry embedded in the particle chips burned out during the process of molecular bonding. I still haven’t entirely licked that problem. In any case, that left me with only you. Your telempathic chronocircuitry survived the bonding process. And then, like an idiot, you had to go and get yourself killed. Which meant that my project, the end result of my life’s work, was also dead. And that, my friend, was simply unacceptable!
“I didn’t see how I could possibly do anything about it, though,” Darkness continued, “until I discovered that among the enemy soldiers who had crossed over from the parallel universe was your alternate self, your mirror image from the other timeline. He was an officer in the Special Operations Group–their counterpart to the Time Commandos. His name was also Lucas Priest and he was indistinguishable from you in virtually all respects, right down to his DNA. And that’s when inspiration struck! The perfect opportunity presented itself when the twin Lucas Priest attempted to kill Andre Cross and Finn Delaney saved her life by bayoneting him.
“All this occurred after you’d already died, you see,” Darkness explained, “shot down saving Winston Churchill’s life. I theorized that there would be little danger of temporal interference if I merely switched the bodies. Lucas Priest had died in front of witnesses, saving Winston Churchill’s life. After the switch was made, a Lucas Priest would still be dead. It would be a different Lucas Priest, but no one would be the wiser. And if the switch did not affect the outcome of events in any way, then the danger of temporal interference seemed minimal, if not non-existent. It required only that I dress the corpse of the twin Priest in clothing identical to that which you’d been wearing, use the terminal to tach you out of the bullet’s path an instant before impact, then position the corpse of the twin Priest in such a manner that the bullet would impact precisely upon the bayonet wound, allowing the corpse to then fall to the ground an infinitesimal fraction of a second later, all of it occurring at a speed faster than the eye could follow or a bullet could travel. True, a close examination would have disclosed that the body had been stabbed first, and then shot in the exact same place, but there would never be such an examination. There would be no reason for it. They had all seen what had happened, after all. They would have no reason to suspect that anything else other than what they had seen might have happened at faster than light speeds. The result of it all would not only be a fascinating experiment in temporal physics, but it would also save the invention that I’d worked my whole life to perfect.”
“This thing you keep referring to,” said Lucas, trying to keep up. “This terminal … you said something about telempathic chronocircuitry?”
“Correct,” said Darkness. “I haven’t really given it an official designation yet. It more or less functions as a sort of terminal, or at least it makes you function as one, so that’s how I’ve been thinking of it. Essentially, it is a particle-level, thought-controlled warp disc employing telempathic chronocircuitry. It had to be initially triggered by a remote-controlled tachyon signal, which is to say that I had to turn it on, but after that it became permanently armed, so to speak, controlled exclusively by the thought waves of the recipient. That’s you.”
“You mean …” Lucas felt his voice break momentarily and he cleared his throat. “You mean to tell me that this thing enables the recipient to clock through time merely by thinking about it?”
“Well, it would ent
ail a great deal of control and mental discipline on the part of the recipient,” said Darkness, “but essentially, yes, that’s quite correct. So it helps to pay close attention to what you’re thinking about, otherwise you might just ‘tach off’ somewhere, if you’ll excuse the pun.”
Lucas stared at him with horror. “Are you telling me that you’ve turned me into a living time machine?”
“Well, that’s a rather colorful way of putting it,” said Darkness, “but it’s more or less correct. Now that the telempathic function of your molecular-bonded chronocircuitry has been triggered, you can travel anywhere you want, instantaneously, merely by thinking about it.”
There followed months of carefully controlled experiments in which Darkness used hypnosis to place Lucas into a trance state and then, through the medium of hypnotic suggestion, programmed him with specific translocation co-ordinates, from one side of the room to the other, for example. This sort of testing procedure, under rigidly controlled conditions, eliminated much of the danger, but the conditions could not remain so rigidly controlled forever. Lucas had to learn how to develop amazing mental discipline in order to control his telempathic chronocircuitry, otherwise a random thought could translocate him across time and space.
He had already accidentally “tached” or translocated back to Earth on several separate occasions, when he had found himself thinking about Andre and wishing he could be with her, explain to her what happened. And afterwards, each time, he had felt ill. There was something about the process that produced after effects, a pounding headache, pressure in the chest, profound dizziness and nausea. She must think she’s losing it, be thought, seeing ghosts. He quickly pushed the thought away with alarm. Lucas needed to maintain his mental discipline in order to keep from ‘taching off,’ as Darkness had put it. The man’s got to be crazy, he thought. How the hell could he have done this? He had changed Lucas’s life-and death merely to safeguard an experiment. And as if that were not enough, there was still the question of what effect his being brought back to life would have upon the timestream.
Darkness seemed to believe that there would be no effect at all, or else it would be a negligible one. Lucas was not so certain. Without question, Darkness was more versed in the mysteries of Zen physics than Lucas was, but then Darkness wasn’t exactly normal anymore and hadn’t been for quite some time. In his own bizarre way, Darkness was reordering his own reality and now he’d pulled Lucas into it, as well. He hadn’t done it out of any altruistic motive; he had merely wanted to have his prototype telempathic translocator back. But regardless of what Darkness had said, there was no denying the fact that something had occurred to “bump” the timeflow when he had snatched Lucas out of that bullet’s path. .
If, in fact, there had been no temporal interference as a result, then did that mean that nothing had changed at all? If Lucas went back to 19th century Afghanistan and dug up his own grave, would he find his own body moldering inside it? Or if the Search & Retrieve teams had already brought it back, would they have cremated it according to the instructions in his will and scattered the ashes throughout time? Would he be able to walk into the headquarters building of the Temporal Army Command and see his own name engraved upon the Wall of Honor?
But then the fact of his survival meant that there had been a change. Perhaps, . since Darkness claimed his sophisticated instruments had not detected any significant temporal fluctuations, the event hadn’t been temporally significant, but there was a “ripple” in the timestream now—a timeframe in which Lucas had died and a timeframe in which he hadn’t—and those two timeframes had to somehow become reconciled with each other if there was to be no timestream split. Lucas knew there was no guarantee at all that the temporal ripple which Darkness had set in motion by altering his fate would not somehow build momentum in the current of the timestream, setting off a series of seemingly insignificant events that could eventually result in a massive temporal disruption—perhaps even the timestream split that everybody feared. There was only one way that he would ever know for sure. And it didn’t matter if he wasn’t ready. There was too much at stake and there wasn’t any choice. He simply had to risk it.
He had to go back.
Chapter 4
Capt. Reese Hunter had become separated from his unit. In fact, he was about as far separated from his unit as it was possible to get. They were an entire universe apart and Reese Hunter was in the wrong one. The planet he was on was known as Earth, but it was not the Earth he came from. He was as thoroughly alien here as if he’d been a creature from another’ galaxy. Which, in fact, he was. His was a mirror-image galaxy, a parallel universe in a congruent timeline. The same, and yet, profoundly different. Hunter was behind enemy lines ... and there was no way back.
He had been taken prisoner by a team of temporal agents who had crossed over into his universe. He had been unconscious when Andre Cross, Creed Steiger and Finn Delaney had brought him through the confluence point.. When he had escaped from them, using a stolen warp disc, he hadn’t realized that they had brought him back into their own time line. It was only after he had clocked in at Pendleton Base, at the present transition co-ordinates the warp disc had been programmed with, that he suddenly realized, as Dorothy would have said, that he was not in Kansas anymore. Fortunately for him, no one at Pendleton Base had expected an escaped prisoner with a stolen warp disc to be clocking in, least of all an officer of the S. O. G. ‘s Counter Insurgency Section. As a result, he’d been able to bluff his way through, buying himself just enough time to program a new set of transition co-ordinates into the stolen disc. It had been one hell of a big risk. The discs used by his people were not quite the same and he hadn’t really been sure of what he was doing.
He didn’t know if they’d be able to trace him through the disc or not, but he had known that he could not afford to wait around and find out. It would have been only a matter of time, perhaps only moments, before the alarm was given and they’d be looking for him. He had no intention of being anywhere near Pendleton Base when that happened. So he had clocked out once again. Unfortunately, now he had no idea where he was. Which was rather ironic, since he knew exactly where he was.
He knew he was in New York City, but that really wasn’t much help at all because this New York City did not correspond exactly to the one in the universe from which he came. He had learned, from picking up a copy of the Daily News, that it was the 20th century, but he could take no comfort in that knowledge, either. Events in this timeline did not correspond exactly with the events in his. The president of the United States in 1989 was not a woman, as in his timeline. The mayor of New York City wasn’t black. And the citizens were apparently not allowed to carry weapons.
Hunter had, at best, only a sketchy knowledge of the history of this timeline, supplied by S.O.G. agents who had crossed over and infiltrated the Temporal Army Archives Section. Their mission had been sabotage and intelligence gathering and they had managed to get a great deal of information through before they had been caught, among which was a detailed explanation of the failsafe systems the Temporal Corps used on their warp discs. Hunter had benefited from all that, but still, it was nowhere near enough, not when even one slight misstep could get him into trouble. Paranoia had welled up within him. He felt like a bleeding swimmer treading water in the middle of a school of sharks.
There was only one way for Hunter to get home. Somewhere, he had to find a confluence point. The trouble was, he didn’t even know how to begin to look for one. A confluence point wasn’t something you could see. When they were found, they were usually discovered by accident. You simply turned a corner and you were in another universe. If you could keep your head about you and retrace your steps exactly, you could get back home. But Hunter didn’t even know where the corner was in this case. Because he had been unconscious when he was brought through, he had no idea where they had crossed over, not even in what country or what time period. Instinctively, the first thing he had done when he had regained hi
s senses was to attempt escape. The attempt had been successful. The only trouble was, now he was trapped in the wrong universe and he had no idea how to get back home.
Part of the problem was that confluence points were completely unpredictable. There were no scientific principles governing their behavior that anybody knew of, much less understood. With sophisticated instruments, it was possible to detect the energy field of a confluence, but you had to be practically on top of it. And there was no way of knowing where a confluence point would lead to. They did not correspond in space and time. Hunter knew that a confluence point located in his own universe in the 27th century could intersect with this timeline in such a manner that crossing over would result in entering a completely different century in a completely different geographical location. Conceivably, a confluence point located in Paris, France in one universe could open onto’ the middle of the Atlantic Ocean in the other. Theoretically, it was entirely possible for a confluence point occurring on Earth in one timeline to open onto deep space in the other, although the vacuum on one side would probably act as a miniature black hole, sucking through everything from the other side where there was an atmosphere, resulting in a devastating temporal whirlpool that would last until the confluence point shifted. And there was no way of telling when that could occur.
Hunter didn’t even want to think about what would happen if he were to cross over at the moment a confluence point shifted. He still remembered the disaster that occurred when S.O.G. troops had launched an invasion of this timeline through a confluence point located in the Khyber Pass. At the crucial moment, the confluence point had shifted without warning in a rippling effect that had continued down the timelines as temporal stability had been restored to that location. An entire battalion of soldiers had been caught in the middle of the shift. None of them were ever seen again. They had been trapped forever in the limbo of non-specific time known as the dead zone. Or at least that was the theory. No one really knew for sure what happened to them.