And then, like an idiot, you had to go and get yourself killed. Which meant that my project, the end result of my life's work, was also dead. And that, my friend, was simply unacceptable!
"I didn't see how I could possibly do anything about it, though," Darkness continued, "until I discovered that among the enemy soldiers who had crossed over from the parallel universe was your alternate self, your mirror image from the other timeline. He was an officer in the Special Operations Group-their counterpart to the Time Commandos. His name was also Lucas Priest and he was indistinguishable from you in virtually all respects, right down to his DNA. And that's when inspiration struck! The perfect opportunity presented itself when the twin Lucas Priest attempted to kill Andre Cross and Finn Delaney saved her life by bayoneting him.
"All this occurred after you'd already died, you see," Darkness explained, "shot down saving Winston Churchill’s life. I theorised that there would be little danger of temporal interference if I merely switched the bodies. Lucas Priest had died in front of witnesses, saving Winston Churchill's life. After the switch was made, a Lucas Priest would still be dead. It would be a different Lucas Priest, but no one would be the wiser. And if the switch did not affect the outcome of events in any way, then the danger of temporal interference seemed minimal, if not non-existent.
It required only that I dress the corpse of the twin Priest in clothing identical to that which you'd been wearing, use the terminal to tach you out of the bullet's path an instant before impact, then position the corpse of the twin Priest in such a manner that the bullet would impact precisely upon the bayonet wound, allowing the corpse to then fall to the ground an infinitesimal fraction of a second later, all of it occurring at a speed faster than the eye could follow or a bullet could travel. True, a close examination would have disclosed that the body had been stabbed first, and then shot in the exact same place, but there would never be such an examination.
There would be no reason for it. They had all seen what had happened, after all.
They would have no reason to suspect that anything else other than what they had seen might have happened at faster than light speeds. The result of it all would not only be a fascinating experiment in temporal physics, but it would also save the invention that I'd worked my whole life to perfect.'"
"This thing you keep referring to," said Lucas, trying to keep up. "This terminal… you said something about telempathic chronocircuitry?"
"Correct," said Darkness. "I haven't really given it an official designation yet. It more or less functions as a sort of terminal, or at least it makes you function as one, so that's how I've been thinking of it. Essentially, it is a particle-level. thought-controlled warp disc employing telempathic chrono-circuitry. It had to be initially triggered by a remote-controlled. tachyon signal, which is to say that I had to turn it on, but after that it became permanently armed. so to speak, controlled exclusively by the thought waves of the recipient. That's you."
"You mean…" Lucas felt his voice break momentarily and he cleared his throat.
"You mean to tell me that this thing enables the recipient to clock through time merely by thinking about it'!"
"Well, it would entail a great deal of control and mental discipline on the part of the recipient," said Darkness, "but essentially, yes, that's quite correct. So it helps to pay close attention 10 what you're thinking about, otherwise you might just 'tach off' somewhere, if you'll excuse the pun."
Lucas stared at him with horror. "Are you telling me that you've turned me into a living time machine?"
"Well, that's a rather colourful way of putting it," said Darkness, "but it's more or less correct. Now that the telempathic function of your molecular-bonded chronocircuitry has been triggered, you can travel anywhere you want, instantaneously, merely by thinking about it."
There followed months of carefully controlled experiments in which Darkness used. hypnosis to place Lucas into a trance state and then, through the medium of hypnotic suggestion, programmed him with specific translocation co-ordinates, from one side of the room to the other, for example. This sort of testing procedure, under rigidly controlled conditions, eliminated much of the danger, but the conditions could not remain so rigidly controlled forever. Lucas had to learn how to develop amazing mental discipline in order to control his telempathic chronocircuitry, otherwise a random thought could translocate him across time and space.
He had already accidentally "tached". or translocated back to Earth on several separate occasions, when he had found himself thinking about Andre and wishing he could be with her, explain to her what happened. And afterwards, each time, he had felt ill. There was something about the process that produced after effects, a pounding headache, pressure in the chest, profound dizziness and nausea. She must think she's losing it, be thought, seeing ghosts. He quickly pushed the thought away with alarm. Lucas needed to maintain his mental discipline in order to keep from
'taching off,' as Darkness had put it. The man's got to be crazy, he thought. How the hell could he have done this? He had changed Lucas's life-and death merely to safeguard an experiment. And as if that were not enough, there was still the question of what effect his being brought back to life would have upon the timestream.
Darkness seemed to believe that there would be no effect at all, or else it would be a negligible one. Lucas was not so certain. Without question, Darkness was more versed in the mysteries of Zen physics than Lucas was, but then Darkness wasn't exactly normal anymore and hadn't been for quite some time. In his own bizarre way, Darkness was reordering his own reality and now he'd pulled Lucas into it, as well. He hadn't done it out of any altruistic motive; he had merely wanted to have his prototype telempathic translocator back. But regard-less of what Darkness had said, there was no denying the fact that something had occurred to "bump" the timeflow when he had snatched Lucas out of that bullet's path..
If, in fact, there had been no temporal interference as a result, then did that mean that nothing had changed at all? If Lucas went back to 19th century Afghanistan and dug up his own grave, would he find his own body mouldering inside it? Or if the Search amp; Retrieve teams had already brought it back, would they have cremated it according to the instructions in his will and scattered the ashes throughout time? Would he be able to walk into the headquarters building of the
Temporal Army Command and see his own name engraved upon the Wall of
Honour?
But then the fact of his survival meant that there had been a change. Perhaps, since Darkness claimed his sophisticated instruments had not detected any significant temporal fluctuations, the event hadn't been temporally significant, but there was a "ripple" in the timestream now-a timeframe in which Lucas had died and a timeframe in which he hadn't-and those two timeframes had to somehow become reconciled with each other if there was to be timestream split. Lucas knew there was no guarantee at all that the temporal ripple which Darkness had set in motion by altering his fate would not somehow build momentum in the current of the timestream, setting off a series of seemingly insignificant events that could eventually result in a massive temporal disruption-perhaps even the timestream split that everybody feared. There was only one way that he would ever know for sure. And it didn't matter if he wasn't ready. There was too much at stake and there wasn't any choice. He simply had to risk it.
He had to go back.
Chapter 4
Capt. Reese Hunter had become separated from his unit. In fact, he was about as far separated from his unit as it was possible to get. They were an entire universe apart and Reese Hunter was in the wrong one. The planet he was on was known as