You saw something back there or you thought you saw something. What was it?"
"Okay, you're right, I thought I saw something. I guess I'm seeing things. That makes me a liability, right? Maybe I should go to the division shrink and get myself checked out. "
"Hell, you're saner than anyone I know," Delaney said.
"And we've known each other too long to keep things from each other. Now tell me what you saw."
Andre licked her lips nervously. "A ghost, all right'! I just saw a ghost…
Chapter 3
"You should've let me stay dead," said Lucas Priest, sighing and wearily running his hand through his dark brown hair. "I simply can't seem to control it."
Dr. Robert Darkness turned a steely gaze on Priest. "You will control it. You will Learn. You have become the living embodiment of my life's work, Priest. I brought you back from death for this and I'll be damned if I'm going to allow you to give up!"
"It doesn't look as if I have much choice, does it'!" Lucas said, rubbing his aching head.
He lit up a cigarette and inhaled deeply. The simple act of smoking helped to keep his mind occupied. It was excruciatingly difficult trying to control his thoughts. It had never before occurred to him just how exhausting it could be. Random thoughts were taken for granted by most people, but unlike most people-in fact, unlike anyone else in the entire universe-Lucas Priest could no longer afford to take random thoughts for granted. A random thought could mean disaster for him now. And his thoughts were becoming increasingly harder to control. A person could concentrate only for so long and then something had to give. Lucas was tired.
And he was afraid.
He had always thought of Dr. Darkness as a brilliant, scientist, eccentric, highly idiosyncratic and unpredictable, but it went beyond that.
Dr. Darkness was a madman. Not a raving lunatic, but a madman just the same. It was often said that there was an exceedingly fine line between genius and insanity.
When had Darkness slipped over the edge? Was it after his invention of the warp grenade, the most devastating weapon known to man? Perhaps his sanity had been derailed by the knowledge-that his invention had been responsible for the loss of billions of lives, when — the surplus nuclear energy of exploding warp grenades was mistakenly clocked into a parallel universe, setting off the war between the timelines. Or maybe he lost it after the disastrous experiment in which his atomic structure became permanently tachyonized, turning him into the man who was faster than light. There were so many cataclysmic upheavals in the life of Dr.
Darkness, so much pressure brought to bear upon his fragile genius that it was a wonder he had not snapped completely.
Dr. Darkness never spoke about his past. Lucas knew nothing about it whatsoever prior to the event that gave him both his fame and infamy. After years of labouring as an obscure research scientist in the Temporal Army Ordnance Division,
Darkness had invented the terrifying warp grenade purely as an accidental by product of his own independent work in temporal translocation.
He had begun by working on voice and image communication by tachyon radio transmission. He eventually achieved a method of communication at six hundred times the speed of light, but that still wasn't good enough. He wanted it to be instantaneous, even over distances measured in hundreds of light years. Working from the obscure Zen mathematics based upon Georg Cantor's theory of transfinite numbers, Darkness found a way to make his tachyon beam move more quickly by sending it through an Einstein-Rosen Bridge, more commonly known as a "space warp." The…result was instantaneous transmission, going from point A to point B without having to cover the distance in between. The warp-grenade was merely an incidental by-product of this discovery.
It occurred to Darkness one day that his method of translocation through an
Einstein-Rosen Bridge could be applied to nuclear devices, allowing unprecedented control of nuclear explosions and drastically limiting fallout, in some cases almost eliminating it entirely. Having explored this idea merely as an intellectual exercise in abstract theory, Darkness lost all interest in it. However, since the Temporal Army Ordnance Division took control of all the paperwork and computer data generated by its scientists, from complex equations down to incidental doodles done on temporal Army time and in temporal Army facilities, the end result of this "intellectual exercise in abstract theory" was the warp grenade, a combination nuclear device and time machine, small enough to be held. in one hand and capable of adjustable, transtemporal detonation.
The principles behind the function of the warp grenade led Darkness to the development of the warp disc, which had rendered Prof. Mensinger's chronoplate obsolete. It had also led him to the development of the disruptor, or the "warp gun" as it was sometimes called by those few who knew of its existence. It was the first true disintegrator ray. Yet as frightening a weapon as the disruptor was, the warp grenade made it seem tame by comparison. It could be set to destroy a city, or a city block, or one house within that block, or a room within that house, or a space within that room no larger than a breadbox. The surplus energy of the explosion, whatever was not required to accomplish the designated task, was then clocked instantaneously through an Einstein-Rosen Bridge, to explode harmlessly in the
Orion Nebula-or so it was believed.
The problem was that so much devastating energy clocked through Einstein-Rosen
Bridges eventually shifted the chronophysical alignment of the universe. The result was that every time a warp grenade was detonated, instead of the surplus energy being teleported to the Orion Nebula, a parallel universe was nuked. Millions of lives were lost and though Darkness had never detonated a single warp grenade, he had to live with the knowledge of what his work had led to. That alone, thought
Lucas, could easily destroy a man.
Shortly after the temporal Army had conducted its first test detonation of a warp grenade, Dr. Darkness disappeared. No one knew where he had gone. He had wanted to get as far away from people as it was possible to get, so he took off for some remote pan of the galaxy, to carry on his work in an environment where he could keep complete control of it. From time to time, he would release some new discovery through one of several Earth-based conglomerates he controlled, thereby financing his further experiments in tachyon translation, a process no one else alive could even begin to under-stand. And, as it turned out, even Dr. Darkness hadn't fully understood it.
He had been obsessed with the idea of perfecting a process whereby the human body could be translated into tachyons, which would then depart at six hundred times the speed of light along the direction of a tachyon beam through an Einstein-Rosen Bridge.
On paper, he believed that he had solved the problems, but what was mathematically real and what was really real were often two very different things.
His main concerns had to do with the reassembly process, ensuring that the organs and the tissues were reassembled in the appropriate — order at the appropriate time and place. Because there would be no "'receiver," Darkness had incorporated a timing mechanism into the tachyon conversion, so that the tachyonized body could be reassembled at the instant of arrival based on the time/space co-ordinates of the transition. And when he was certain that he had the process finally perfected, he became his own first human test subject. His ego would never have allowed anyone else to be the first to experience direct translation into tachyons.
Unfortunately, Dr. Darkness had neglected one small element of the equation. His
"taching" process was ultimately restrained by a little known principle of physics called the law of baryon conservation. Lucas was never quite able to follow the scientific explanation, but it had something to do with the idea that objects with mass could not be translated into particles with "'zero rest mass." Or, as Darkness had sarcastically put it, "'you can't roller skate in a buffalo herd." When Lucas questioned that enigmatic analogy, Darkness lost his patience and told him to look up the works of 20th century philosopher named Roger Miller.