TW09 The Lilliput Legion NEW (11 page)

"I . . . I believe I do see, yes," said Gulliver. "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 discernable 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 no 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 neglible 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.

"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 arc, 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 Federates 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 calls telempathic chronocircuitry, a cute little experimental device he whipped up in his lab hack 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.

"It seems this telempathic chronocircuitry is extremely delicate," Lucas continued. "Yours didn't survive the molecular- bonding process, but mine did, which is why I can do this."

He disappeared. A second later, he reappeared, standing on the opposite side of the room.

"Look, ma, no hands!" he said, his hands still raised to show he wasn't operating a warp disc.

As they spun around to face him, he disappeared again, to reappear an instant later on the same spot where he'd stood initially.

"It's a fugue sequence," Steiger said. "He had it preprogrammed in his warp disc."

"Look again, Creed," Lucas said, trying to ignore the headache and the dizziness. "I'm not wearing one. You see, this is the process that Darkness had been trying to perfect. Time travel by
thought.
And since these little molecular-bonding gizmos of his are apparently extremely hard to make and I had the only one that worked right, rather than lose his only working prototype, he decided to effect a little temporal adjustment of his own. He went back and translocated me out of that bullet's path while at the same time taking the corpse of my dead twin moments after you killed him, Finn, and interposing his body between Churchill and that bullet. Essentially, he had me switch places with a dead man. My twin from the parallel universe. The result was that I sidestepped my death and wound up as a living time machine, which makes things a little troublesome. See, if my mind happens to wander, so do I."

"Then I wasn't seeing things!" said Andre. "That really
was
you in my room?"

Lucas nodded. "That was sort of a brief glitch. An unintentional translocation. The telempathic chronocircuitry was designed to analyze and compute transition coordinates from a built-in encyclopedic
database
as well as my own memory. Unfortunately, I'm not too great at controlling it and it seems that Darkness didn't quite get all the bugs out. All I had to do was think about you, Andre, and I wound up in your room. And it happened again when I started thinking about the old man and suddenly found myself in his quarters. There were times when I'd fall asleep and dream about a place and the next thing I knew, I'd wake up there. The first few times that happened, Darkness had to home in one me through the. symbiotracer so that he could come and get me, because I absolutely froze. The truly frightening part of it all is that there's no way to turn the damn thing off. Once Darkness activated it with a special coded tachyon signal to the symbiotracer, the telempathic chronocircuitry kicked in and now I can't turn it off anymore than I can turn
myself
off. It's part of me, permanently bonded to my atomic structure. You'd think the great genius would have thought to build in some kind of 'off' switch, but noooo. . . ."