Lucas turned to see a tall and slender man, with dark, unruly hair that came down to his collar in the back and a neatly trimmed moustache. He was gaunt, with dark, penetrating eyes and a sharp, prominent nose. He was dressed in a button-down white shirt, a silk tie with a regimental stripe, a dark brown waistcoat with a gold watch chain and a brown, tweed Norfolk jacket with dark wool trousers and expensive, handmade Italian shoes. He carried a hickory walking stick and wore a brown fedora. One moment, he seemed solid and the next, he was semitransparent.
He seemed to flicker like a faulty hologram.
"Darkness!" Lucas said. "What the hell is going on? Where am I? What happened to the others? Where's Churchill? Is he all right?",
Dr. Darkness raised his eyebrows. "Which of that plethora of questions would you like me to answer first?"
"How about where am I?"
"You are a guest in my home," said Darkness.
"Your.. home?" said Lucas, feeling totally bewildered.
Darkness put the walking stick down on a table and then moved across the room toward a sideboard where he kept several bottles of whiskey, a gasogene and a decanter.
Lucas stared at him with astonishment. He had never before seen Dr. Darkness walk. However, what he was doing wasn't exactly walking. Darkness seemed to be moving in a series of extremely rapid, stop-motion frame, as if he were illuminated by a strobe light. As he made his way across the room, he left behind a series of blurred, ghostly afterimages of himself that faded out like contrails.
"I was once able to walk normally while I was here in my unprojected state," he explained when he noticed Lucas staring. "However, it appears that the stability of my atomic structure is gradually degenerating. I'm having some anxiety over it, since there doesn't seem to be anything that I can do about it."
He poured himself a glass of single malt Scotch and then started to pour one for Lucas. He was at least twenty feet across the room when he held the glass out to Luca.‹;, but in the next split second, he was standing right in front of him, close enough for him to take the glass. Lucas blinked. He never could get used to the way the man could project himself through time and space. It was. unsettling, to say the least.
Lucas accepted the whiskey and took a hearty swallow from the glass. It felt good going down. "Why am I here? What happened, Doc?" he said.
"Nothing much," Darkness replied. "I've only saved your life."
Lucas stared at him. He felt confused. "But what about… God, what about Churchill?"
"Rest assured that Winston Churchill is perfectly all right,"
Darkness said.
"But… how? He was right in the line of fire!" Lucas said. "I jumped to shove him out of the way and… and the Ghazi fired and.." His voice trailed off. He had a horrible feeling that something was very, very wrong. "Doe, tell me what happened back there!"
"I simply tached you out of harm's way," said Darkness. "Otherwise that bullet would have struck you and you would have found it decidedly unpleasant. "
"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, Doe, don't you realise 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, 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.