"'That's exactly what we were discussing," Steiger said, slowly, "and it’s simply not possible! Not unless…" He swallowed hard, a cold fist squeezing his insides. "Not unless Darkness brought about a timestream split!"
"No," said Delaney, shaking his head. "That can't be. If a timestream split had occurred, then we wouldn't have remembered Lucas's death."
"But you would have," Lucas said, "because you saw it. You were there. Or at least Andre was. Only what you saw, Andre, was my twin's corpse, not me."
"Except that I did see you," said Andre. "'If what you’re saying is true, then I saw you die and it was only afterward that Dr. Darkness went back and changed the past, after you'd already died the first time!"
"This is most confusing," Gulliver said, scratching his head. "How can someone die and yet still be alive? It sounds like one of these paradoxes you were telling me about. "
"That's exactly what it is," said Steiger, "a temporal paradox. And that's impossible."
"Then how can I be here?" said Lucas. "Darkness says there hasn't been a timestream split. He claims his instruments have not detected one."..
"Only if there was a timestream split, then maybe his instruments couldn't detect it," said Delaney, "because it's possible that they could then be a function of that split, part of the newly created matter that would comprise the parallel timeline.
For that matter, we all might be part of a newly created parallel timeline and not know it."
"No, that can't be," said Lucas, shaking his head. "Dark The Lilliput Legion 79 ness said that no significant events were changed. What's the only thing that's different as a result of what Darkness has done? The fact that I'm alive. And that's it. Otherwise, there was no disruption of events at all."
"There had to have been some kind of disruption," Steiger insisted. "The past was changed!"
"But only my past," Lucas said. "Or, to be technically correct, my past from your point of view, and my potential future from mine, since I obviously never died. My death occurred in some sort of alternate timeframe for me."
"Is. that what Darkness told you?" said Delaney. Lucas glanced him with a frown.
"Yes. Why?"
Delaney shook his head. "Because I don't think it works that way, old friend. Granted, I haven't had as much training in temporal physics as
Darkness must've had, but unless every-thing that we were taught in R.C.S. was wrong, there had to have been some kind of a disruption. Creed is right. The past was changed. "
"Only it's not my past," insisted Lucas. "It didn't happen to me! I'm obviously still very much alive!"
"Then either there's been a timestream split," Delaney said, "or you're the split yourself, a parallel Lucas Priest. Something had to give. Either a another timeline was created or another Lucas Priest was." He glanced uneasily at the others. "Only how do we tell which one?"
Gulliver sighed and rubbed his temples. "Colonel," he said to Steiger, "I don't suppose you would have any ass-prin, would you?"
"There are times I'd like to kill that man," the Lilliput colonel said, clenching his fists. "You know, maybe one of these days I will."
"Maybe one of these days, I'll help you," his lieutenant said, as he absently sharpened a commando knife the size of a pin on a tiny whetstone. "I wouldn't mind seeing that son of a bitch bleed a little."
The two men were very different in appearance. The colonel was slim, solidly built, with a square jaw, steely blue eyes and close-cropped sandy hair. His manner and his speech were as crisp as his freshly pressed fatigues, which he kept sharply creased by carefully folding them every night and placing them beneath a brick. The lieutenant was, by contrast, something of a slob. His fatigues were wrinkled and stained and his shirt was usually worn unbuttoned, revealing an extremely muscular upper torso. He had a bodybuilder's physique, strong and sharply defined. His black, wavy hair hung down to his shoulders, and he habitually kept it held down with a cloth headband. Once in a while, he remembered to shave, which he did with his razor-sharp commando knife and water. Unlike the fair-skinned colonel, he was dark complected and his large brown eyes had a sleepy cast to them. He looked less like a soldier than a circus roustabout, but appearances could be deceiving, especially in the case of these two men. The colonel was six and half inches tall; the lieutenant stood all of five and three-quarters.
They were in the lieutenant's tent, which was made from a man's white cotton handkerchief. It was supported by tent poles made out of quarter-inch wooden doweling rod and staked to the floor by thumbtacks. All around them were dozens of similar tents housing the remainder of the regiment, all of which was billeted within a small loft in a warehouse building near the docks off Washington Street on New York City's Lower West Side.
"I liked the island better," the lieutenant said, putting down the knife and unwrapping a chunk of jerky that was lying on the plastic table. The table was toy furniture out of a doll's house, as were the chairs. "I don't like the city. I miss the fresh air." He cut up the piece of jerky with his knife and started chewing on a slice.
"How the hell can you eat that stuff?" the colonel said, with a look of disgust. "Rat meat, for God's sake!"
The lieutenant shrugged. "Meat is meat," he said, masticating furiously. "The hunting is a little limited around here, y'know? Like I said, I liked the island better.
"He does bring us food, you know," said the colonel.
"That shit he brings us isn't food," responded the lieutenant, irately. "Why'nt you tell him to go to a market and get a couple decent cuts of steak and some fresh vegetables'! He thinks he can feed us all on a bag of quarter pounders and some fries. He's just fuckin' cheap, that's all. Half the regiment has got gas and the other half has got the runs. We can't eat that garbage. "
"I'll talk to him," said the colonel.
"He expects us to fight for him, tell him to bring us some decent food, for cryin' out loud."
"I said I'll talk to him!"
"Yo, I'm on your side, remember?"
The colonel sighed. "I'm sorry. I guess the whole thing is just getting to me. He was furious about the practice strike. He said we failed."
"Yeah, well, fuck him," said the lieutenant, bitterly. "I lost sixteen men on that damn 'practice' mission!"
The colonel glanced at him sharply. "Sixteen?"
"Yeah. My sergeant didn't make it. He died this morning." "Oh, damn."
"What the hell is going to happen to us, sir?" said the lieutenant. "What the hell kind of life have we got to look forward to?"
The tiny colonel stared out at a shaft of sunlight coming down from the skylight of the loft. "I don't know, Lieutenant," he said. "I honestly don't know. How are the men doing?"
"About as well as could be expected. They're getting a little wired. I try to keep the tension down by running the hell out of 'em all day, setting up. obstacle courses and practice manoeuvres Lord know we've got enough damn room here, but there's a limit, y'know? They don't like it here anymore than I do. And losin' sixteen of the boys on what was supposed to be a training exercise didn't exactly boost moral."
The lieutenant threw the knife down angrily and it stuck, quivering, in the wooden floor of the loft.
"I never should've called the strike in," he said, bitterly. "I should've waited."
"The presence of the Observer changed everything," said the colonel. "You did what you had to do. You might have lost him if you held off."
"Hell, we lost him anyway. And you know something? I'm not sorry. It eats my guts out that my boys had to die, but I'm not sorry that Gulliver got away. After all we put him through, that poor bastard deserved a decent break. At least somebody got out of this damn nightmare in one piece."
"I wonder if we will," the colonel said.
"We will. Count on it. We'll make it."