The Lilliput Legion Page 9

  “Assuming the shock of the experience didn’t make him take leave of his senses. According to your report, he was already disoriented and drinking heavily. Either way, the T.I.A. will be investigating for certain now. Allowing Gulliver to escape was a serious mistake. Your team bungled the entire mission and jeopardized our security.”

  The lilliput colonel drew himself up to his full height, but since his full height was only six and a half inches, the effect was negligible.

  “I lost fifteen men on that mission,” he said, through gritted teeth. “And six seriously wounded, four of them critically. Twenty-five men went out on what was supposed to be a routine training exercise and only four returned in one piece!”

  “And what does that tell you, Colonel? Your assault team was almost completely wiped out by one man, and a mere Observer, at that! What do you think would have happened if he had been a time Commando?”

  “Sir, those men were green,” the colonel said. “Only their commander and their sergeant had any field experience at all. It was supposed to be a routine training exercise. How were they supposed to expect—”

  “They’re supposed to expect anything! Anything at all! And be ready for it! Nothing is routine! Those fifteen men were lost because they were not good enough! And that was your responsibility, Colonel! It’s your command! Don’t come to me with excuses! I am not concerned with excuses, only with results! Is that clear?”

  “Yes, sir!”

  “The entire operation has been jeopardized as a result of this fiasco. I want you to Execute Plan Delta immediately.”

  Sandy Steiger’s apartment on Threadneedle Street had been thoroughly cleaned up by the S & R team. There was no sign of the battle that had taken place there, nothing to indicate that it had been used as an Observer outpost.

  Temporal Observers were trained to become completely assimilated into the time periods to which they were assigned. With the sole exception of the warp discs that they carried on their persons at all times, they were under strict orders to have nothing else that could not be obtained within their assigned time zone. In practice, however, this regulation proved difficult to enforce. Observer postings were long term and often entailed hardship. It was difficult to resist smuggling back some seemingly inconsequential items.

  Such things as deodorant, or toothpaste or even toilet paper were easily concealed and served to make the posting a bit more pleasant. A carefully doled out ration of cigarettes served to remind one of home just as much as they satisfied the cravings of a habit. A favorite paperback novel reread over and over by candlelight was a harmless way of maintaining contact with the world one came from, so long as precautions were taken to ensure that no one else would ever see the book, especially if the posting was in a time period when the only writing to be found was in the form of serious or illuminated manuscripts or cuneiform.

  In the early days, a number of Observers became a bit too casual about following such regulations and, having gotten away with a few seemingly inconsequential items, they took to accumulating more. Miniature portable stereos with head-phones began appearing in the 14th century. Minicomputers and microwave ovens were brought back to Victorian London. In one celebrated case, a tiny, portable holographic projection system smuggled back to 17th century America led to the burning of an Observer as a witch when she was seen (by a peeping tom) “consorting” with demons in her bedroom, demons who were, in actuality, merely holograms of actors in an entertainment feature. The Army finally clamped down and instituted the practice of surprise inspections with stiff penalties for the slightest infractions. Still, in many cases, Observers continued to smuggle back some small conveniences.

  The S & R team had gone over Sandy Steiger’s apartment with a fine tooth comb and, according to their report, they had found nothing more esoteric than some aspirin tablets, a ballpoint pen, some timed-release decongestant pills, a modern tooth brush and nine cartons of cigarettes concealed beneath a loose floor board. Their report stated that Sandy had clearly broken regulations, but the few items he had smuggled back had not seemed very significant. They had no way of knowing that the contraband had been enough to cost Sandy his life. The S & R team had been quite thorough. Nevertheless, the commandos conducted their own search.

  Gulliver stood by the door and watched them anxiously, He was clearly uncomfortable at being back in the same room where Sandy had been killed and where he had almost met the same fate.

  “One thing puzzles me,” he said, as Creed Steiger, Finn Delaney, and Andre Cross carefully searched through the apartment once again. “Since you have this astonishing ability to travel back and forth through time, is it not possible that you could go back and prevent Sandy from being killed by those horrible Lilliputians?”

  “You think I wouldn’t save my own brother if I could?” said Steiger, grimly.

  “Why can’t you?”

  “It’s difficult to explain, Doctor, but the fact is it would be too dangerous. What’s done is done. There’s nothing we can do about it.”

  “Can you not tell me why?” said Gulliver.

  “Go ahead,” Delaney said. “We’ll check out the sitting room.”

  Steiger sighed and sat down on the bed. “Very well, Doctor. I’ll see if I can explain it in a way that you can understand. Think of time as a river. A very swiftly flowing river. The current of that river is the timestream, specifically, the inertial flow of the timeline.”

  Furrows appeared in Gulliver’s forehead as he frowned, trying to follow it. Steiger grunted and shook his head.

  “Look, just imagine that the current of our river of time is the force that impels events, all right? And the length of the river itself is all of history, the timeline. Got that?”

  Gulliver nodded. “Yes, I think I understand.”

  “Good,” said Steiger. “Now, when someone from the future, someone like myself, goes back into the past, he risks doing something that would somehow interfere with the flow of events. Actually, everything I do back here constitutes a form of interference. Even my presence in this room is a form of interference, because after all, there was a point in time at which, in this particular moment, I was never in this room at this particular moment, do you understand?”

  Gulliver was frowning once again.

  Steiger grimaced. “Hell, I told you it was complicated. Look, as we sit here right now, this very moment, I won’t even be born for about another thousand years. And yet, here I am, sitting here and talking to you, a man who lived almost a thousand years before my time. That’s an example of what we call temporal interference.” He picked up a pillow. “Even an action as insignificant as my picking up this pillow is an example of temporal interference, because there was a point in time, before we came back here, when this moment passed and I was not here to pick up this pillow and the action of this pillow being picked up didn’t happen, see?”

  “I … I believe I do see, yes,” said guava. “You were right, it is rather complicated, isn’t it? Much like these circular arguments philosophers are always having. “

  “Yes, very much like that, in a way,” said Steiger. “Now, take the fact that I’ve picked up this pillow.” He dropped it back down onto the bed. “It’s an insignificant action. It doesn’t really change anything, does it? In fact, it’s so insignificant that it doesn’t have any effect upon our river of time at all. The fact that I have picked up a pillow in this room has had no discernible effect upon events in this time period, even though it was an event that did not originally take place. You follow?”

  Gulliver nodded once again, though he looked a bit uncertain.

  “Good. Now imagine that you and I go out tonight and have a few drinks. On the way back, as we’re passing a dark alley, a thief confronts us at knifepoint and demands all of our money. He lunges at me with the knife and in the struggle, I manage to get the knife away from him and kill him. Now, that act is obviously much more significant than merely picking up a pillow, and I don’t mean merely for its
moral implications. Suppose the man I’ve killed had a wife or children. Perhaps he never would have had a wife and children. It’s possible that he would have lived out the remainder of his life alone, in insignificance, doing nothing of any importance whatsoever. And it’s also possible that if I hadn’t been there, you would have been the one to struggle with him, get the knife away and kill him. In that case, his death, in and of itself, has not significantly altered events in this time period. My temporal interference in causing his death is negligible in terms of the grand scheme of things. You with me so far?”

  “Yes, I think so,” said Gulliver, listening intently.

  “All right,” said Steiger, “now let’s examine another possibility in that same hypothetical situation. Suppose that if it wasn’t for my interference, that thief would have attacked somebody else. After all, it was my idea that we go out for a drink; if I hadn’t come back here and interfered, you would have stayed home and the thief would have attacked another victim. And in that event, he would not have died. He would have’ killed his victim, prospered from his ill-gotten gains, married and had children. Except, now that I have gone back into the past and killed him, obviously those children will never be born. And that victim will not die, at least not at that particular time. So by my interference, I have altered history. I have changed the past. I have disrupted the flow of events. Now let’s take it a bit further. What if that thief had been my ancestor, my great, great grandfather about a dozen times removed?”

  “Good lord!” said Gulliver. “Then by killing him, you’ve prevented the birth of his children, which means that … that you could never have been born!”

  “Precisely,” Steiger said.

  “But… but if you could never have been born,” said Gulliver, frowning, “then ... then how… how is it possible that you could have . . .” his voice trailed off and he stared at Steiger with an expression of utter confusion.

  “That, my friend, is what’s known as a temporal paradox,” said Steiger. “If you went back into the past and killed your grandfather before your father had been born, then you wouldn’t have been born, so how could you have gone back and killed your grandfather in the first place?”

  “It makes no sense,” said Gulliver. “How is it possible?”

  “Well, for years, scientists believed it wasn’t possible,” Steiger replied. “They believed that the past was an immutable absolute. It had already happened, therefore it could not be changed. According to their thinking, if I went back into the past and tried to kill my grandfather, something would have prevented me from doing it, otherwise I couldn’t have gone back to try it in the first place because the very fact that I was alive to do it meant that my grandfather had survived my attempt on his life. You see?”

  Gulliver knitted his brows as he ran through it once more in his mind and nodded slowly. “Yes, I think I understand. It all seems very logical now that you’ve explained it.”

  “Except it doesn’t work that way,” said Steiger.

  “Oh, dear,” said Gulliver. “And I thought I was beginning to understand it.”

  “Don’t worry,” Steiger said. “All the scientists were wrong as well and they had the advantage of having a lot more knowledge than you do. Or perhaps I should say they will have that advantage … in about another 950 years or so.”

  “What is the answer, then?” Gulliver said, anxiously.

  “Let’s go back to our river,” Steiger said. “Remember that I said the current of the river is the timestream and that the river itself represents history, the timeline? If a person travels back in time and does something relatively insignificant—my picking up the pillow, for example—then that would be like tossing a very small pebble into a swiftly flowing stream. It wouldn’t even make a ripple. A more significant form of interference—the killing of our hypothetically childless thief, for example—might be compared to tossing a rather large rock into the river. It would make a splash, but unless the interference was significant enough to alter the flow of events, the ripples would be dissipated by the force of the current. Still with me?”

  “Yes, I think so,” Gulliver said, paying very close attention.

  “Now,” said Steiger, “an act of interference that was significant enough to actually alter the flow of events and cause a severe temporal disruption—something like my killing my great grandfather, in other words could be compared to our throwing a gigantic boulder into the river, something huge, big enough to make the river overflow its banks on both sides and flow around it. And that is what we call a timestream split. For a short period of time, you would have two rivers, one flowing around each side of the giant boulder. One fork of the river would represent the past as it had happened before the act of disruption. The other would represent the creation of a second past, a parallel timeline, in which the act of disruption had been taken into account. A live grandfather in one, a dead grandfather in the other. And the person causing the disruption which created the split would wind up in that second timeline, because there would have to be an original timeline in which his past, up to the moment he disrupted it, was preserved intact. And at some point, unless the disruption was of sufficient magnitude to keep both timelines apart indefinitely, those two separate timelines must rejoin and the results could be disastrous.”

  Gulliver gaped at him, slack jawed.

  “And that’s only the simplified explanation,” Steiger said. “It can get a great deal more complicated than that. Even if it wasn’t against all regulations for me to attempt to save my brother’s life—and I’ve never been all that religious about following regulations to begin with—there would still be no guarantee that I could do it. And even if I could, there would still have to be a past in which my brother died, because it’s already happened, do you see? If I tried to change it, I’d risk creating a timestream split. Or at the very least, I would bring about what’s known as a ‘ripple’ in the timestream, sort of a miniature timestream split of short duration, one that would also have completely unforeseeable results. “

  “The place is clean,” Delaney said, coming back into the bedroom. “Well, did he explain it to you, Doctor?”

  Gulliver looked up at him and the bewildered expression on his face said it all.

  “Yep, I guess he did,” Delaney said.

  Then Andre screamed.

  Delaney and Steiger both drew their weapons and ran into the sitting room.

  “Don’t shoot, it’s only me,” said Lucas Priest.

  Chapter 5

  “It can’t be,” said Andre, after a moment of stunned silence.

  Delaney had his plasma pistol aimed directly at Priest’s chest. “I don’t know who you are, mister,” he said, “but don’t you move a muscle. “

  Lucas stood motionless with his hands raised. “Come on, Finn, it’s me, for chrissake. Lucas. Your old partner, remember?”

  “Try again. I buried my old partner.”

  “Yeah, I know,” said Lucas, with a grimace. He kept his hands raised and carefully avoided making any sudden moves. “I figured this wasn’t going to be easy. Look, I can explain. I realize this is going to be bit hard to believe, but—”

  “It’s gotta be his twin,” said Steiger, interrupting him. “From the congruent universe…

  Delaney shook his head. “No. he’s dead, too. I ought to know, I killed him.”

  “Maybe in the congruent universe, Lucas Priest had a twin brother,” Steiger said, keeping his gun trained on Lucas.

  “Yeah, and maybe I was triplets,” said Lucas, wryly, “but I’m not. Finn, remember that time we took some R & R and went down to that Mexican border town and got in—”

  “That was all in the arrest report the Federales filed,” said Delaney. “You could have seen that when the S.O.G. swiped data from the Archives Section. “

  “Oh, Right. I forgot about that. Okay, wait a minute, what about that time we got drunk and you told me that when you were fourteen, that sexy young high school English teacher
you had made you stay after school one day and—”

  “I’ve been drunk lots of time,” Delaney said, hastily, with a quick glance at the others. He swallowed nervously and moistened his lips. “It’s entirely possible I might’ve told that story to somebody else.”

  “Priest had a bionic eye,” said Steiger.

  “If they knew about our arrest in Mexico and… that other thing, they could’ve duplicated that, as well,” Delaney said. “Hell, Creed, he can’t possibly be Lucas! Lucas is dead! It’s some kind of trick.”

  Andre hadn’t taken her eyes off him for an instant. She stared at him as if he were a ghost. “Who was the Red Knight’s Squire?” she said, softly.

  “His name was Marcel,” said Lucas. “He was murdered by the Templar, Brian de Bois-Guilbert, and you avenged his death. He was your brother, Andre. You were the Red Knight. Remember our first meeting, in the lists at Ashby? You damned near killed me.”

  “My God,” she said, turning to Delaney with a wide-eyed look. “Finn, besides you, no other living person could have known that.”

  “Can I put my hands down now?” said Lucas.

  “Not just yet,” said Steiger. “I’m still not convinced. I gave you something once and you can’t give it back. If you’re really Lucas Priest, then you’ll know what I’m talking about.”

  “Boy, do I ever,” Lucas said. “Your favorite mad scientist and mine, Dr. Darkness, had you give me a particle-level symbiotracer. It was a top secret prototype, not even the army knows about it. Each of you have one, as well. Only there’s something about them you don’t know, something Darkness didn’t tell you. They weren’t just symbiotracers, as it turns out. They also contained something he cans telempathic chronocircuitry, a cute little experimental device he whipped up in his lab back on that red planet with the three moons. “

  Steiger’s jaw dropped. The only way he could have known that Darkness had his lab on a red planet with three moons would be if he had been there. Darkness kept the location of his base a closely guarded secret. So far as he knew, Steiger had been the only one who’d ever been there besides Darkness himself.