“Yes. Why not?”
“Christ, Finn, I can give you several obvious reasons why not,” said Lucas. “For one thing, you’re in the First Division. Adjustment specialists are just too valuable to waste on temporal relocation. You ought to know that. Besides-”
“They can’t turn me down if I request a transfer,” Finn said. “With my mission record, I’ve got that option.”
“Technically, yes, you do,” said Lucas, “but you’re not thinking, Finn. You must really have it bad, because I can’t believe you’d be so stupid. To begin with, if Fitzroy found out about this, he’d probably put you in for reeducation when this was over, after which you wouldn’t even remember Marguerite, much less the fact that you wanted a transfer, which they wouldn’t give you anyway, at least not to the relocation units. In fact, that might not be a bad idea. It would certainly solve your problem.”
“It wouldn’t help Marguerite very much,” said Finn.
“Oh, I’m glad to see you’ve finally thought of how this would affect her,” Lucas said. “Have you thought of what would happen when you clock back to Plus Time and someone from the relocation units gets sent back to substitute for Percy Blakeney, someone she’d have to live with for the rest of her life? If the two of you got together, would somebody else be the same? Even if you were allowed to remain here with her, there’s one basic difference between you and someone from the relocation units. You’ve had antiagathic treatments and you’re far too old to have them reversed. She’d age at the normal rate and you wouldn’t. Leaving aside the fact that it would be a little difficult to explain to all your friends, how do you think she’d feel, watching herself grow old while you remained the same? How would you feel?”
Finn nodded. He looked crestfallen. “You’re absolutely right. I’m being a complete idiot. I don’t know what the hell’s wrong with me.”
Lucas looked at him and smiled, sympathetically. “You’re in love,” he said. “It’s made idiots of better men than you before. I’m sorry, old buddy, I shouldn’t have been so hard on you, but you can’t say I didn’t warn you. I told you it would be really rough on you if you started caring about her, though this wasn’t exactly what I had in mind. You know, it’s funny, but in basic training they run down just about every possible hazard you can encounter on the Minus Side, yet I don’t recall anyone ever mentioning the hazard of falling in love with someone who belongs to another time. You’d think they would include that.”
“Maybe they don’t because there’s not much you can do about it,” Finn said.
“Well, there’s certainly nothing we can do about it now,” said Lucas. “Besides, we still have another problem on our hands. What are you going to tell Cobra?”
The corners of Finn’s mouth turned down in a grim frown. “I don’t know. I was going to ask you for suggestions. I know what I wont to tell him, but it’s not for me to decide alone. Besides, you’re the senior officer on this team.”
Lucas raised his eyebrows. “No kidding? God damn, someone record this for posterity, this is a first. Finn Delaney defers to the chain of command!”
“Go to hell.”
“After you, old friend, you’re not sticking me with this one. I’m not going to make any command decisions. I left my oak leaves back in Plus Time.”
“All right, then, at least give me some feedback. What do you think our choices are?”
“The way Cobra laid it out for you,” said Lucas, “it doesn’t sound like we’ve got much in the way of choices. We either play it his way or we don’t. If we do what he wants us to do, it’s hard to say whether we’d be disobeying orders or not. Technically, there’s nothing in our orders that says we have to go after Mongoose. In fact, Fitzroy was pretty specific on that point. Mongoose is Cobra’s responsibility. However, there’s nothing in our orders that says we have to back off and let Mongoose get away if we get a chance to stop him. If we do that, depending on who writes the report and how it’s interpreted, we might be brought up on charges. Fitzroy’s going to be submitting the report and he doesn’t like us, anyway. Now we could go to Fitzroy and report what Cobra told you. If we do, we’ll be forcing someone’s hand and Mongoose, Cobra, or Fitzroy might get killed. Or all three of them might get killed. Or we might get killed. Or someone blows the adjustment. God knows, it could go wrong sixteen different ways.”
“If we don’t tell Fitzroy and he finds out about it,” Finn said, “we’ll probably be court-martialed.”
“There’s that,” said Lucas. “There’s also the fact that Mongoose’s interference has already resulted in several deaths, courtesy of our overly zealous young friend, Jean. Given that those soldiers were killed by someone in their own time, Cobra might be correct in his assessment that temporal inertia will compensate for it. On the other hand, maybe it won’t and we’ll have another minor disruption on our hands. Plus there’s the possibility that Mongoose might inadvertently cause a more serious disruption. That’s assuming that Cobra’s right again and that Mongoose has no interest in interfering with the adjustment. He could be wrong.”
“God, I hate those damn spooks,” Finn said.
“Well, it took a while, but I think I’ve finally come around to your point of view,” said Lucas. “I’d like to send the whole bunch of them into reeducation and then put them all to work in waste disposal about a million miles from Earth, preferably even farther.”
“It’s a nice thought, but it doesn’t solve our problem,” Finn said.
“I’ve just been thinking that it would have made our job a whole lot easier if you had been a bit more on target with your sword cane that night.”
“I was wondering if you’d get around to that,” said Finn.
Lucas sighed. “I’m actually surprised to hear myself say it, but killing him would wrap things up rather neatly, wouldn’t it?”
“I hate to be the one to bring this up,” Finn said, “but actually, it wouldn’t. The new director of the agency wants him alive so he can pump him dry. If we killed Mongoose, we’d be directly disobeying orders, we’d have both the TIA and the Observer Corps coming down on us and, last but not least, we’d be guilty of murder.”
“I don’t think they could make a case for murder,” Lucas said, thoughtfully.
“They could if they wanted to,” said Finn. “Manslaughter, at the very least. We’d be in it pretty deep.”
“That didn’t stop you when you tried to stick him in the maze,” said Lucas.
“Things weren’t quite so complicated then,” said Finn. “Besides, I had no intention of getting caught.”
“What were you planning to do with the body?”
“I hadn’t thought it through that far,” said Finn, “but there are several nice lakes on the estate. If I weighted him down, he’d sink very nicely and by the time he came up, if he ever did come up, we’d be long gone and no one would ever be able to recognize who it was.”
“He’d have implants,” Lucas said. “There’d be the problem of the termination signal.”
Finn gazed down at his hand, contemplating his hypo ring. He exposed the needle and stared at it a moment. “Fitzroy was kind enough to issue me some sedatives,” he said. “It would mean that we’d have to take him alive, but then we could put him to sleep and do a little sloppy surgery.”
Lucas exhaled heavily. “I can’t believe we’re talking like this,” he said.
Finn shrugged. “It’s only talk. So far.”
Lucas nodded. “Yeah. So far.”
The three of them sat in a corner at a small and rickety table in a dark and unprepossessing inn called the Chat Gris, on the outskirts of Calais near Cap Gris Nez. The innkeeper, a surly, grizzled Frenchman named Brogard, did little to disguise his dislike for the Englishmen or his citizen’s contempt for their aristocratic status. However, they were paying customers and the times in France were such that Brogard could ill afford to turn anyone away much less rich patrons with healthy appetites who had also taken rooms in his establishment. He served them in a prompt, if perfunctory, manner and he kept his contact with them to a minimum, which suited Lucas, Finn, and Andrew Ffoulkes just fine.
“I have found the perfect place,” said Ffoulkes in a low voice, so as not to be overheard, although Brogard had removed himself to the far corner of the room and was obviously totally uninterested in anything that Englishmen had to say. “It’s a tiny cottage belonging to a Pere Blanchard,” Ffoulkes said, “an old man of Royalist sympathies who was more than happy to allow us the use of his small hut with no questions asked, providing he received a very reasonable stipend to ease his final days. I think he suspects that I am a smuggler, though I’m certain he doesn’t have a clue as to the sort of goods I’m dealing in.” He grinned.
“Where is this cottage?” Lucas said.
