by Simon Hawke
“Yes, I do believe you are,” Manelli said, with a smile. “That would explain your rather interesting and somewhat reckless behavior. Actually, you’ve proven to be quite resourceful, Capt. Hunter. Your one mistake was that you moved too quickly. You got greedy.”
“Am I under arrest?” said Hunter.
Manelli raised his eyebrows. “Why, Capt. Hunter, do I look like a policeman?”
Hunter frowned. “I don’t understand. You’re not…” And then it came to him. “You’re the Underground?”
Manelli smiled. “No. Not exactly.” He reached out and removed the cigarette butt from between Hunter’s lips before he burned himself. “We’ll be back soon, Capt. Hunter,” he said, “Regrettably, we’re going to have to leave you tied up for the moment. I’ll instruct Krista and Vincent to see to your comfort as much as possible under the circumstances. If you’ve been completely honest with us, you have nothing to be concerned about. In fact, we might even have a proposition for you. But if you have not been completely honest with us, then it won’t be your comfort that Vincent will be seeing to.”
“He was a gentleman. A very large man, built like a bull,” said Gulliver, “with black hair and the most disquieting eyes I’d ever seen. A bright, emerald green, they were. At times, they almost seemed to glow. He was quite a handsome figure of a man, except for the disfiguring scar upon his face, from here to here.” Gulliver ran his forefinger along his cheek, from beneath his left eye to the corner of his mouth. “A wound made with a sabre, I should think, or perhaps a knife.”
“That’s a perfect description of Drakov, all right,” said Lucas.
They sat at the table in the house on Threadneedle Street, sharing a light meal of bread, smoked sausage and cheese along with a bottle of red wine. Finn poured himself another glass and shook his head.
“I can’t understand it,” he said. “Forrester shot Drakov. I was there. I saw it.”
“I saw Lucas get shot, too,” said Andre.
“What are you saying?” said Steiger, sarcastically. “That Drakov had a twin in the parallel universe too, and that Dr. Darkness switched the two of them, as well?”
“I wouldn’t put it past him,” Lucas said, “but maybe what we’re facing here is a result of what Darkness did with me. If there was some sort of temporal disruption that came about from his changing my past, maybe it resulted in Drakov’s past being changed, as well.”
“I can’t see how,” said Finn. “As you said, Lucas, nothing was changed by Darkness altering your past. Nothing, that is, except that you survived. I don’t mean to downplay that, obviously, but the circumstances were unique. Your being alive instead of dead hasn’t altered any of the events that took place since your death.”
“Excuse me…” said Gulliver. “Uh, Finn, would you mind—”
“Don’t ask me to repeat it, Lem,” said Delaney, wryly. “I’m not even sure I understand what I just said. The point is, either Darkness was right and the uniqueness of this situation hasn’t resulted in any disruption at all or you’re the disruption yourself, Lucas. Or all of us are.”
“I’m very confused,” said Gulliver.
“Brother, you’re not alone,” said Lucas.
“Either way, we’re not going to solve anything by sitting around here,” Steiger said.
“Lucas, you sure you don’t want to—”
“No, I don’t think so,” Lucas said. “It would only cause one hell of a commotion if I went back with you now and I’d never get away from them. They’d want to debrief me, put me in for observation. .” He shook his head. “No, I could do more good here. “
“Right,” said Delaney. They got up from the table. “We’ll clock back and pick up a couple of floater paks. And while we’re at it, “ he said to Luc as, “we’ll report your miraculous survival. Or rather, your non death. Or rebirth or whatever. Hell, we’ll just report you as being alive and let them work it out.”
“Uh … on second thought, Finn, maybe you shouldn’t mention me just yet, “said Lucas.
Delaney frowned. “Why not?”
“Partly because it would cause one hell of a commotion,” Lucas said, “and I still don’t fully understand what’s happened to me. Nor can I predict how Dr. Darkness will react when he finds out that the one working prototype of his greatest invention has walked out on him. And I can think of one more reason. With this Network situation that you’ve described to me, it couldn’t hurt to have an ace up your sleeve that no One knows about. “
“Good point, “said Steiger, nodding. “All right, then, we’ll leave you officially dead for the time being. But we should let the old man know.”
“I agree,” Delaney said.
“All right,” said Lucas. “You can tell Forrester, but no one else. Oh, and one more thing. Don’t mention anything to him about Nikolai Drakov. At least not until we know for sure.”
“I’ll go along with that,” said Steiger. “We’ll leave directly from base to check out Gulliver’s co-ordinates. If there’s an island out there, we’ll come right back here and pick up the rest of you. Meanwhile, sit tight.” He checked his disc. “We’ll be clocking back here in about two minutes, your time.” He glanced at Gulliver. “That means don’t move around the room much till we get back, Lem. I’d hate to materialize in the same spot where you were standing.”
“Goodness. What would happen if you did?” asked Gulliver.
“Believe me, you wouldn’t want to know,” said Steiger.
The two men went over to the far side of the room, locked in the transition co-ordinates on their warp discs and clocked out. Gulliver stared at the spot where they had stood a second ago and shook his head with amazement.
“It truly is astonishing what one can become accustomed to,” he said. “I’ve just seen two people vanish into thin air and here I sit, calm as you please, eating bread and cheese and drinking wine.”
“You’ve certainly had your share of interesting experiences,” Andre said. “All things considered, you’re bearing up extremely well.”
“What else is one to do?” Gulliver replied… A man can’t go jumping out of his skin every time something—Great merciful Heavens!”
He leaped out of his chair, sending it crashing to the floor and spilling wine all over the table as Dr. Darkness suddenly appeared sitting in the chair next to him, one leg casually crossed over the other.
“The Japanese have an old saying,” Darkness said, playing with his walking stick.
“When one saves another’s life, that person becomes responsible for the life he saved.” He grunted. “The Japanese can be a very irritating people.” He glanced at Gulliver, standing back away from the table and staring at him open mouthed.
“What are you goggling at?”
“I … that is, I … I … ai-yi-yi,” said Gulliver, holding his head with both hands.
“Articulate chap, isn’t he?” said Darkness.
“Now listen, Doc,” Lucas began, but Darkness interrupted him.
“No, you listen,” he said. “Did you think that I went to all that trouble simply so that you could comeback here and continue playing soldier, perhaps get yourself killed again? Is that what comes of all my efforts on your behalf?”
“Doc, I didn’t ask you to make any efforts on my behalf! I never asked you to do anything!”
“Indeed? And where would you be right now if I hadn’t done anything?”
“Well, dead, presumably, but—”
“Presumably?” said Darkness, arching his eyebrows. “Nothing presumable about it. You would have been stiff as a carp.” He grunted. “I saved your blasted life for you and what do I get in return? You simply walk out on me, without so much as a by your leave. Would it have been too much trouble to leave a note, at least? ‘Dear Dr. Darkness, thank you for saving my life. I am off to make an asshole of myself and perhaps get killed again. Yours in perpetual confusion, Lucas Priest.’ It would have taken less than a minute to dash that off. You couldn’t be b
othered?”
“Doc, you’re starting to sound like my mother,” Lucas said.
“I am your mother, for God’s sake! I am both your mother and your father. I gave you life! Life and an opportunity such as no man has ever had before—”
“Doc, I didn’t want it!”
“Well, who asked you?”
“Nobody did, that’s just the point!”
“Wait a minute,” Andre said. She turned to Lucas. “What do you mean, you didn’t want it? You’d rather be dead?”
“You stay out of this!”
“I’d listen to her if I were you,” said Darkness.
“Well, you’re not me!” Lucas shouted. “What am I supposed to do, spend the rest of my life like some kind of laboratory animal on that cockamamie desert planet of yours, waiting around for you to perfect your telempathic terminal or whatever the hell it is before you discorporate?”
“I should think that most people would have found it a small enough price to pay for being brought back from the dead,” said Darkness.
“And what happens if you don’t perfect it?”
“Don’t be absurd. It’s already been perfected. It simply requires some fine tuning, a certain amount of training and adaptation on the part of the subject. Granted, it isn’t exactly user friendly, but—”
“User friendly? Are you out of your tree? This damn thing is a time bomb ticking away inside me and I’m stuck with it for rest of my unnatural life, thanks to you! Did it ever occur to you that I might actually resent being your guinea pig?” He threw his hands up and rolled his eyes. “God, why am I even bothering trying to explain anything to you? You act as if I had to ask your permission to come back to Earth!”
“You certainly should have,” Darkness said. “You’re a fool, Priest. An astonishingly lucky fool, but a fool nevertheless. It’s one thing. to lose your concentration and accidentally translocate to Earth during an idle lapse or while you’re dreaming, because in that event, the chronocircuitry computes the co-ordinates from your subconscious and its own inherent database, but to consciously attempt to program a translocation of such magnitude when you’re not even certain of the distance was foolhardy in the extreme! Suppose you had mentally tried to program specific transit co-ordinates and overridden the telempathic database function?”
“Well, actually I thought of that, but you said that the telempathic chronocircuitry had a built-in, automatic trip computer or whatever and—”
“My God!” said Darkness. “And so you blithely flung yourself across two million light years when the furthest you’d ever consciously translocated before was across the room?”
Lucas merely gaped at him.
“Two million light years?” Andre said, in a voice barely above a whisper.
“What… what, pray tell, is a light year?” Gulliver asked, hesitantly.
“A unit of distance, determined by the velocity of the speed of light in a vacuum, which is approximately 186,000 miles per second, measured in miles per hour and multiplied by the number of hours in a year, which yields the distance that light travels in one year, which is approximately six trillion miles,” Darkness said, impatiently. “I thought everyone knew that.”
Gulliver tried—and failed—to comprehend the explanation he’d been given. He gave up and took a small flask from his pocket, unstoppered it and slugged down some whiskey in the hope that it would settle his nerves, so that the stranger who had just appeared would stop fading in and out like some ghostly apparition.
Only instead of Darkness becoming more substantial, Lucas disappeared.
“Lucas!” Andre cried.
“Oh, hell,” said Darkness, irritably. “His bloody concentration slipped again. “
“Where did he go?” said Andre, alarmed.
“I haven’t the foggiest,” said Darkness. “Who knows what he was thinking?” He sighed. “Now I’ll have to track him through the symbiotracer. With any luck, I’ll find him before he panics and thinks himself into a jam. Science would be ever so much more rewarding if one didn’t have to deal with people!”
And he vanished.
Gulliver tossed the flask over his shoulder and put his head down on the table. “I give up,” he said. “Wake me when this dream is over.”
As the uniformed courier stepped out of the lift tube and approached the security station, the two armed guards posted at the lift tube entrance fell in on either side of him. He glanced at them briefly, but didn’t pause. He was carrying a briefcase that was fastened to his wrist by a chain. He set the case down on the desk in front of the sergeant of the guard and reached into his inside jacket pocket for his I.D.
“Lt. Stroud, Council of Nations attaché,” he said. “I have priority classified dispatches for General Forrester.”
The sergeant of the guard carefully examined the credentials. “I have nothing on my log concerning dispatches from the Council of Nations, sir.”
“They’re priority dispatches, Sergeant,” said Lt. Stroud. “This isn’t a regular delivery. It wouldn’t appear on your log.”
The sergeant of the guard maintained direct eye contact with the courier. “I see. Would you open the case, please, sir?’
“I’m afraid I can’t do that, Sergeant. Orders.”
“I’m sorry, sir, but I have my orders, as well. And I do possess an A-6 level clearance.”
“That doesn’t help me, Sergeant. I have specific instructions to open this case only in General Forester’s presence.”
“I’m afraid I’m going to have to insist, sir, “said the sergeant of the guard. “That case isn’t going anywhere until I’ve seen what’s inside it.”
Stroud’s eyes widened. “Are you serious? Do you realize what you’re doing, Sergeant’!”
“I’m following orders, sir,” the sergeant said, resting his hand on the butt of his weapon. “Open the case, please.”
Stroud shook his head with resignation and reached into his pocket. The sergeant of the guard’s gun leaped out if its holster. The men on either side of the courier instantly grabbed his arms.
“Easy, easy!” said Stroud. “Jesus, what is it with you people? I was only getting the key for this bracelet.”
The sergeant of the guard nodded and the men released him. He kept the courier covered with his gun. “Just bring it out slowly, sir, if you don’t mind,” he said, his voice even and polite.
Moving carefully and deliberately, Lt. Stroud removed the key from his pocket and showed it to the sergeant of the guard.
“Take the bracelet off him,” The sergeant of the guard said. One of the men took the key away from him and unlocked the courier’s bracelet, removing it from his wrist.
“I’ve heard of tight security, but you guys are really something,” said Stroud. “What the hell do you think I’ve got in here, a bomb?”
“We’ll find out as soon as we scan it, sir, “ said the sergeant of the guard, reaching down and bringing out a portable scanner gun with a built-in screen. It hummed faintly when he turned it on. “All right, let’s see what’s in here. If these are nothing but dispatches, sir, you’ll have my sincere apologies and—what the hell?”
The lid of the briefcase suddenly sprang open and a filament-thin beam of bright, coherent light lanced up out of the case. The sergeant of the guard screamed and recoiled, clapping his hand to his right eye, which the tiny laser had melted right out of its socket.
Stroud elbowed the guard on his right in the solar plexus, then back fisted the other one in the face. breaking his nose. He brought his right hand down in a sharp, chopping motion and the blow broke the neck of the first guard. then he hit. the second guard again with a strike to the throat. collapsing his trachea. The sergeant of the guard hit the alarm button on the console as more laser fire hit him and he sagged down to the floor. As the alarm klaxon sounded, tiny, black-garbed commandos started rising rapidly up out of the case, carried aloft on miniature floater paks.
“Go! Go!” shouted Stroud, running arou
nd the counter and stabbing at the console, trying to find the switch to cut off the alarm.
In his office suite, across the hall from his private quarters, Forrester heard the alarm and glanced at the security monitor mounted in the comer, just below the ceiling. What he saw was a platoon of armed Lilliput commandos wearing floater paks, hurtling down the corridor. A bright ball of blue-white fire from a miniature autopulser flew at the lens. The image on the monitor broke up and the screen went blank.
“Jesus Christ!” said Forrester. yanking open his desk drawer and pulling out an antique, ivory-stocked; Colt Python .357 Magnum with a six-inch, vent-ribbed barrel. As he bolted toward the door, he heard screams and autopulser fire coming from the front office.
He stuck his head out the door and almost ran right into a wire-thin laser beam. He brought up his gun and the Colt Python roared and bucked, sending a copper-jacketed, hollow-point .357 magnum round slamming into the oncoming Lilliput commando, obliterating his entire upper torso and penetrating the miniature floater pak, which exploded in a tiny fireball.
Another laser beam singed Forester’s earlobe and one autopulser blast narrowly missed his head as he fired twice more, two handed, then hit the floor and rolled as two little exploding fireballs passed over his head. He came up on one knee and fired again, then cried out with pain as he took a direct hit on his kneecap. The Lilliput commandos had disposed of the security detail and were now swooping down on him like angry hornets. He fired his last two rounds, missing with one and taking out another miniature assassin with the last, then he threw the gun as one of the Lilliput commandos came diving down at him, firing his laser. He felt the heat as the beam grazed his check and then the Lilliputian went pinwheeling out of control as the thrown gun struck him a glancing blow. He struck the wall and the tiny floater pak exploded. Forrester dove through the doorway into his private quarters and slammed the door shut, locking it behind him.
Steiger and Delaney were in the lift tube, on their way up, when the alarm klaxon sounded. A second before the tube delivered them to the penthouse floor, the klaxon was silenced. Both men had their guns out. As they came diving out of the lift tube, they heard the unmistakable sound of Forrester touching off one of his antique firearms and it was the sound of the big magnum cutting loose that saved their lives. Stroud involuntarily glanced in the direction of the sound at the moment that the lift tube doors opened and the quick, diving exit of the two temporal agents caught him by surprise. Instinctively, he fired through the open lift tube doors, but Steiger and Delaney weren’t there anymore and Stroud screamed as he was engulfed by two plasma bursts.