life of crime? His ethics would not have permitted that. What then? He would have wound up as a derelict, a drunk, no doubt, or worse, a drug addict or a cybernetic dreamer, fleeing from an unacceptable reality until his body gave up on a life of desperate fantasy and surrendered to the reality of death.
Delaney had few illusions about himself. There was no place for him in the structure of society except as a soldier and even then, it took an unusual commander who would know how best to use a man such as himself. Forrester was such a man. He didn't bother with pointless military protocol and senior officers outside his unit never fully understood his methods, although they respected Forester's results. To the average officer in the Temporal Corps. Forester's First Division seemed like a cadre of mavericks and screw-ups. From the strictly military point of view, that which governed the parade ground, the First Division had no discipline. They were a group of roughnecks, most of them completely lacking spit-and-polish, devoid of even the rudiments of military courtesy. They held themselves above the other units in the service, most of them had a disdain for regulations, they were often sloppy and insubordinate and given to using their fists too readily. But out in the field, on the Minus Side of time, they were a model of efficiency. The necessity of forming a unit to deal with temporal disruptions gave rise to a need for a different breed of soldier-one who could improvise and think fast on his feet, one who did not go by the book, because the book did not cover all contingencies, and one who was more than a little crazy. It called for the sort of soldier who was too smart, too aggressive, too independent and too much of a nonconformist to fit in well with any other unit in the service.
One of the first things Forrester had done when he began to form his unit was to check through the dossiers of those soldiers in the Corps who had the worst disciplinary records in their respective units. He had known what he was looking for and he had known that, in certain cases, the difference between a man confined to a military prison and an outstanding combat soldier was an officer who knew how best to utilize the unique abilities of those placed under his command.
The fact that Delaney, who held the record in the entire Temporal Army for the most promotions and consequent reductions in grade, had finally become an officer in the First Division, and a captain, no less, was one of the bizarre ironies of his career. Another irony was that he had now become not only a soldier, but a temporal agent, an operative of the TIA, which had been brought under the same umbrella with the First Division, both combined into one unit under General Forrester's command. Delaney had never liked what he referred to as 'the spooks.' the quasi-military operatives of the Temporal Intelligence Agency, who seemed to be recruited primarily from among psycopaths and paranoids. And now he was one of them. Part soldier, part spy, part assassin, part counterterrorist. His worst nightmares had come true-the timestrearm had been split and now they were at war with an alternate universe. A war which was, perhaps, impossible for either side to win.
Theoretically, Delaney knew, it was possible for there to be any number of universes existing at the same time, in different dimensions or planes of reality. Neither Time nor Space was a rigid concept. Mensinger's Theories of Temporal Relativity were, like Einstein's revolutionary concepts, only theories, after all. The fact that nothing had come along to disprove them categorically only supported the theories, it did not 'prove' them in the conventional sense as 'laws.'
The Theory of Temporal Inertia held that the 'current' (a word Mensinger used loosely. primarily as an analogue) of the timestream tended to resist the disruptive influence of temporal discontinuities. According to the 'father of temporal physics,' the degree of this resistance was dependent upon the coefficient of the magnitude of the disruption and the Uncertainty Principle.
The element of uncertainty in temporal relativity, expressed as a coefficient of temporal inertia, represented the unknown factor in the continuity of time. Professor Mensinger had stated that in a temporal event-location which had been disrupted, it was impossible to determine the degree of deviation from the original, undisrupted historical scenario due to the lack of total accuracy in historical documentation and due to the presence of historical anomalies as a result either of temporal discontinuities or their adjustments. In other words, if something happened to influence or alter an historical event. Mensinger maintained that it was impossible to tell exactly how the original event had taken place-because there was no way of knowing exactly what all the details of the original historical event were. Historical records were never absolutely accurate and there was no way of knowing the extent to which a disruption could affect an historical scenario. Consequently, if the historical event were adjusted to compensate for a disruption, there was no way of knowing if the adjustment itself had not introduced a disruptive influence, something that might not have a noticeable effect until years later.
The Fate Factor held that in the event of a disruption of a magnitude sufficient to affect temporal inertia and create a discontinuity, the element of uncertainty both already present and brought about by the disruption combined with the 'force' that Mensinger identified as the Fate Factor to determine the degree of relative continuity to which the timestream could be restored. In layman's terms, this meant that history did not 'want' to change and there were natural forces at work to maintain the smooth and undisrupted flow of time. However, these forces did not necessarily come into play at the exact locus of a disruptive incident. A 'ripple' in the timestream could be set in motion which would result in these compensating forces manifesting themselves further down the line in some other temporal event-location-with completely unforseeable results.
The “Timestream Split' had always been the greatest danger. In the event of a disruption of a magnitude great enough not only to affect temporal inertia, but to actually overcome it, the effects of the Fate Factor would be cancelled out by the overwhelming influence of a massive historical discontinuity. The displaced energy of temporal inertia would in that event- according to Mensinger's theories-create a parallel timeline in which the
Uncertainty Principle would be the chief governing factor.
Delaney remembered how one of his professors in RCS had explained it by setting up a hypothetical situation. 'Suppose,' the professor had said, 'you were to clock hack in time to the American Revolutionary War. Suppose your potentially disruptive presence there results in your having to shoot an American soldier during a battle. This, in itself, creates a temporal disruption, but if this particular American soldier was not someone who was historically significant, the combined forces of the Fate Factor and temporal inertia would work to compensate for his death. For example, if this soldier that you killed originally survived the battle and one of his great, great grandchildren eventually did something of historical significance, the metaphysical influence of temporal inertia and the Fate Factor would probably influence event-locations all the way down the timestream in such a way that someone else would wind up doing the historically significant thing that the dead soldier's great, great grandchild would otherwise have done.
'However,' the professor had continued, 'suppose youaccidentally shot General George Washington. You would have eliminated a historically significant figure at the key event location point in the timestream and temporal inertia would not be able to build up enough 'momentum' to compensate for that death. The Fate Factor would be cancelled out and the massive amount of displaced temporal energy that would result could split the timestream, creating a parallel timeline. The original, undisrupted scenario would then continue in a smooth temporal flow-the original timeline in which Washington had never died. The parallel timeline created by the split, however, would proceed from the point at which the event-location had been disrupted and changed-in this newly created timeline, the death of George Washington would become a fact of history and events would proceed from that point, taking Washington's death into account.
'This brings up a number of interesting problems,' the professor had said, smiling grimly in a way that had sent a chill down Finn Delaney's spine. 'For one thing, having initiated a disruption in the temporal event-location, you would inevitably wind up in the timeline in which that disruptive event became a fact of history. Inother words, you'd probably never be able to come home. Chances are you'd be trapped forever in t hat parallel timeline. If you were to clock ahead at that point, you would wind up in a parallel future, not the one you came from. Now, while that might pose an immense problem for you personally, it would be nothing compared to the problem it would pose for the entire flow of time, because Mensinger believed that if such an event came to pass, the combined force of the temporal inertia in both timelines would eventually result in their coming together again at some point in the future, like a confluence of rivers. And nobody knows what would happen in such a case. It's pretty scary.'
It was much more than scary. It was terrifying on a scale that could not even be fully comprehended. Mensinger came closest to understanding it completely and his realizations had resulted in his suicide. The political stupidity which had brought about the Time Wars had been based on the conventional wisdom of the then-current scientific establishment, which had maintained that history was an immutable absolute. The past had already happened, they maintained, therefore, it could not he changed. By the time they knew better, it was too late to retreat. At least, from the political standpoint.
