most powerful government officials in the world and Steiger wasn't about to pass it up. He had a few things he wanted to get off his mind.
The Council had been impressed by his appearance. He had the right look for a high ranking military officer of the Temporal Corps. For a change, it was the way he really looked. Having his own face back was a relief after the numerous cosmetic surgeries necessitated by his undercover activities as a former field agent of the T.I.A. His flaxen blond hair was parted casually on the side and fell over his forehead to a point just above his pale gray eyes. His features were Germanic in their squared regularity, only his nose was rather Semitic, sharp and hooked like the beak of a predatory bird, giving him a hard, cruel appearance. His frame was large and well muscled and his bearing was just short of textbook military, with the casual, relaxed-yet-controlled motions of the seasoned soldier. Yes, he looked like the sort of man they wanted to hear from, but the format Steiger chose for his presentation wasn't quite what the Council members had expected.
It was the first time any of them had ever heard gunfire. The Council Security Force had not appreciated Steiger's demonstration, either. None of them had any familiarity with lead projectile weapons and the gunshots gave them a bad turn.
'What you don't know can kill you,' Steiger had said into the stunned silence occasioned by his blasting away at the ceiling. He held up the nickel-plated gun for all to see. 'This is a Smith and Wesson 25-dash-5. 45 caliber revolver chambered for the 'Long Colt' cartridge. It fires a hollowpoint lead projec tile with a copper jacket, propelled by gases generated by the explosion of the powder in the shell casing. This projectile, called a bullet, expands on impact and tears through everything in its path, shredding organs and pulverizing bone. It's a primitive weapon, centuries out of date. But that doesn't make it any less effective.
'As a covert operative of the Temporal Intelligence Agency, I've had to face weapons such as this one and others even more primitive, though no less deadly. You people were the ones who put me there. Well, now that I've got your attention, I'm going to tell you what the result of that has been and why I don't think you're qualified to make any operational decisions concerning the resolution of this crisis. I know what I'm talking about. I suggest you listen carefully.'
They had heard the explanations and the theories of the scientists, but Steiger went over it again, presenting the situation to them in simple, laymen's terms, without technical asides and theoretical conjectures. Another universe had come into congruence with their own and the convergence of two separate timelines had resulted in a confluence effect which rippled through both timestreams, causing them to intertwine like a double helix strand of DNA. The integrity of each depended on the disruption and possibly even the complete destruction of the other.
No one knew the exact cause of the phenomenon, whether it was a result of temporal contamination brought about by the actions of the Time Wars or chronophysical misalignment caused by clocking massive amounts of energy through warps in timespace known as Einstein-Rosen Bridges. The fabric of time and space had ruptured or shifted in some way and reality now had an alternative-one that was no less real.
The congruence of two separate timelines was causing an instability in the flow of temporal inertia. The timelines were apparently not dissimilar enough to set up crosscurrents in the timeflow which would manifest themselves in temporal discontinuities. Instead, the result was a surge in the inertial flow at points of confluence, where the separate timestreams converged like two powerful rivers. The Laws of Temporal Relativity attempted to compensate for the instability. The greater the number of confluence points, the stronger the inertial flow. Eventually, if unchecked, the increased flow in temporal inertia would overcome the rippling effect caused by the congruence and cause both timestreams to merge into one timeline. The only way to keep that from happening, it seemed, was to maintain the temporal instability caused by the congruence, to keep working against the surge in the inertia flow. Yet, maintaining temporal instability meant almost certain temporal disruptions. To avoid a catastrophe, they had to invite disaster. It was a Hobson's Choice of the lesser of two evils.
The Council could no longer afford the expedience of using time travel to resolve international conflicts. It had been a convenient form of warfare. It had absolved the world powers of facing the harsh realities of war in their own time. It was so convenient and so beneficial to international economy that the least little disagreements were often quickly escalated into fullscale 'arbitration actions' with temporal soldiers being clocked back to fight and die in ancient wars. Now fear had finally done what reason previously failed to accomplish. A ceasefire in the arbitration actions had been called and the Council's member nations were forced into uneasy unity against a common enemy- their doppelgangers in the congruent universe.
Now they want to listen to the soldiers, Steiger thought. Tell us how to fight the war, they said. Tell us how to win. The best answer he had to give them was that he did not know. His best advice was more direct. 'Leave it to the professionals,' he said. 'Stay the hell out of our way. You can't legislate temporal combat. More wars than you can count have been lost by inept politicians telling experienced generals what to do.' Diplomacy had never been his strong suit, but then it was a bit late for diplomatic answers.
As the robot shuttle crossed the plaza of the Pendleton Base Departure Station, Steiger sat silently, lost in thought. The soldiers he had chosen to accompany him had been content to let him do most of the talking. When questioned, they had answered briefly and politely, but they were veterans of the Temporal Corps and felt it was a waste of time trying to educate a bunch of politicians. Steiger hoped it wasn't. Time was a valuable commodity.
As the shuttle crossed the plaza, Steiger saw soldiers in every type of costume imaginable milling about in the Departure Station, waiting to clock out to their assignments. A ceasefire had been called, but at Pendleton Base-as at other military bases-things seemed not to have changed at all.
In fact, there were profound changes, though they were not readily apparent. These soldiers were not clocking out to fight in arbitration actions. They were being sent back to other time periods as scouts. Those about to leave had already been retrained for their new duties by the Observer Corps and there were thousands more in the process of retraining.
Their mission was twofold-to be on the alert for temporal disruptions and to find points of convergence where the time-stream intersected that of the congruent universe and a confluence existed. The confluence effect was unstable. A convergence could occur and a confluence point exist for a timespan as brief as several seconds or as long as-no one knew for certain. The result was massive temporal instability. Both timestreams were rippling, although not in any manner that was immediately noticeable-unless one stumbled into a confluence point and crossed over from one universe into another. If these points of confluence, however ephemeral, could be pinpointed and logged, then it was possible for them to be patrolled. At least, that was the theory they were operating on.
Already, there had been a brief and furious battle between the commandos of the First Division and soldiers of the Special Operations Group from the congruent universe. The greatest threat was that a force from the congruent universe would locate an undiscovered confluence point and cross over undetected to create a temporal disruption, as they had attempted to do in the Khyber Pass in the year 1897. The enemy was operating on the theory that increased temporal instability would serve to diminish the confluence effect or even eliminate it by creating a timestream split. Chaos, thought Steiger, was an understatement for what was going down.
The tension was evident on the faces of the soldiers in the plaza. In the Time Wars, the mortality rate had always been very high. Death could come from a spear thrust or a bullet. Oblivion could arrive with the rupture of a spacesuit or the explosion of a land mine. For a soldier of the Temporal Corps, there were a thousand ways to die. Now there was one more.
None of these soldiers about to clock out on long term assignments in the past, in Minus Time, knew what to expect. They had been briefed as fully as possible, programmed through their cybernetic implants with the languages, customs and histories of the periods to which they were assigned, but if by chance they happened to clock back into the past at the exact location of a confluence, the odds against their ever coming back were astronomical.
No one had yet crossed over into the congruent universe. The theory was that if a confluence point could be discovered and a crossover achieved, then returning would be a 'simple' matter of retracing one's steps exactly. Turn a corner, Steiger thought, and you're in another universe. But if you were to clock directly into a convergence, with no physical reference for the confluence point, how would you find the corner? Once in the congruent universe, clocking backwards or forwards would only result in time travel within that universe. Because of the confluence effect, every temporal transition would now be even more uncertain.
Until now, Steiger had found his duties as a T.I.A. agent challenging enough. Now, General Forrester was
