settlement could be reached, and so the grievance was submitted for arbitration to the Referee Corps. A ref was assigned to arbitrate the temporal action that would settle the whole thing. He asked the Nippon government to provide five hundred grunts and he asked our government to provide five hundred grunts. He selected an historical scenario for the arbitration conflict or the time war, as it’s more popularly called. He decided to use World War II. The troops were cybernetically indoctrinated and clocked back into the past, to fight among the troops of World War II. One of our guys got a bit carried away and used a warp grenade instead of a regular 20th century hand grenade. He didn't exactly set off a multimegaton nuclear explosion, he only used a small portion of the energy released by the grenade, no more than would have been released by a conventional 20th century hand grenade. The only problem is, he killed General Dwight D. Eisenhower, who went on to become the President of the United States.'
'
Did this actually happen?' said the reporter.
'No, of course not, it's only a hypothetical situation,' said Delaney. 'Well, now we've got a problem. We've got a fairly large temporal disruption and it has to be adjusted. So an adjustment team is clocked hack into the past, in the hope that something can be done about it before the damage becomes irreversible and a timestream split occurs. Let's say we get lucky. We're able to replace the late General Eisenhower just in time with one of our own people, someone from a special unit formed to deal with just such a situation. It's not an easy job. This person has been surgically and cybernetically altered to become General Eisenhower. He has to live out the rest of Eisenhower's life, exactly as Eisenhower would have lived it, based on what we know of history.
A chancy proposition, at best, but it's the most we can do. There are certain to be at least minor discontinuities as a result, but we can bring all of our resources to bear on this and hope that the discontinuities will be relatively minor.
'Meanwhile, things like this have been happening all throughout the timestream, every time we've had a temporal conflict. Sometimes we've adjusted the disruptions. Sometimes we've had to replace historically significant individuals with people of our own. Sometimes we haven't caught the disruption, because it was really very minor. It all started to add up. Maybe it put a strain on temporal inertia and something happened to disturb chronophysical alignment in time and space and another universe somehow came into congruence with our own. Isuppose it really doesn't matter how it happened, the point is that it happened. Somehow the timestream became unstable and our timestream intersected another timestream and now the two parallel universes are crisscrossing in time and space, intertwining like a double helix strand of DNA. Every now and then, there occurs an event- location at which both timestreams exist in the same time and space. Crossover becomes possible. And the people in this other timestream are not very happy with us.
'To anticipate your next question, the reason they don't like us very much has to do with that warp grenade our temporal soldier blew up General Eisenhower with. The way a warp grenade works, you set it for the amount of energy you want to use. Let's say you only need about one-tenth of one percent of the energy of the grenade's nuclear explosion. The rest of it is warped into outer space where it goes off, theoretically, without doing any harm. Only as it turns out, the surplus energy of that grenade didn't just go off with a big bang in outer space, as we had thought. Because of the congruence, most of that energy was teleported directly into the alternate universe, where there was one hell of an explosion. And we've been setting off more than just one warp grenade. In other words, we were bombing the hell out of the alternate universe without even realizing it and, understandably, they're somewhat annoyed with us. So now we're at war with them. The Temporal Crisis, as you people in the media call it. Only neither side really wants an all-out war. Nobody could survive that. So instead they concentrate on screwing up our history, in the hope that they can split our timeline and somehow force our universe away from theirs, and we do much the same to them.'
'Where does it all end?' the reporter said.
'The hell of it is, it probably doesn't end.' Delaney told her. 'You see, you could wind up with timestream splits all over the damn place and nobody knows what effect that would have. We could wind up with all of them intersecting. A real mega-Tine War. Their universe is almost a mirror image of ours, but it's not exactly the same. The trouble is, the forces of temporal inertia in both universes are working to bring our two timelines together, so the only thing we can do to keep that from happening is to continue creating disruptions in their timeline while they continue creating disruptions in ours. In order to keep our two timelines from becoming one timeline, we have to maintain the instability. But if we maintain the instability, we're threatening our own temporal continuity. It's a Catch-22 situation. The whole thing is liable to collapse at any minute like a house of cards.'
'So what's the answer?' the reporter said, growing impatient.
'What makes you think I've got an answer?' said Delaney.
'Yes, but surely you must have some ideas about how to resolve the Temporal Crisis. There has to be an answer.'
Delaney shrugged. 'Not really. In a complex world, I'm afraid there are no simple answers.'
'So where does that leave us?' the reporter said, still pressing for an answer.
'I guess it leaves us with a lot of questions to which there are no simple answers,' said Delaney wryly. 'And that's the 'simple truth' as a 'frontline soldier' sees it.'
He watched the report later that night. They had, indeed, edited his answer. It ran like this: 'We just want to hear the simple truth about the Temporal Crisis as a frontline soldier sees it.'
'Well, the simple truth is the Time Wars were a terrific risk right from the start.
They just didn't give a damn until something went wrong. And something was bound to go wrong. It’s a Catch-22 situation. The whole thing is liable to collapse at any minute like a house of cards. And that's the simple truth as a frontline soldier sees it.'
Delaney had to explain to Forrester about the editing. He received an official reprimand, which Forrester promptly 'filed,' and specific orders were issued to all military personnel not to speak to members of the media without special authorization. Paranoia settled in to stay.
Delaney wondered what would have happened if he had told them about the Special Operations Group, the First Division's counterpart in the alternate universe, and Project Infiltrator, a genetic engineering project headed by Dr. Phillipe Moreau, aimed at creating genetically engineered soldiers to be infiltrated into their timeline? What if he had told them that Drakov had kidnapped Moreau from the Project Infiltrator labs and set him to work creating hominoids, creatures bioengineered from human clones and modified with advanced surgical and cyber- netic techniques, turned into monstrosities that were no longer human, but something else entirely? And what if he had told them that aside from the Temporal Crisis, they were all fated with the threat of Nikolai Drakov, an insane criminal genius who wanted nothing less than temporal anarchy, or failing that, an apocalyptic entropy, an end to all of time?
He imagined the reporter saying, 'Yes, but what's the answer?'
He imagined himself replying with a variation on an old zen koan. 'If the shit hits the fan and there's no one left to smell it, is there a stink?'
He checked his watch. Ransome was late. He should have reported in by now and gone off to relieve Rizzo at Hesketh's apartment. And it would soon be time for him to wake up Steiger, catch a couple of hours sleep himself and then relieve Andre at Conan Doyle's house, so that she could get some rest. It was monotonous. Watching and waiting. Something had to break soon. The bathroom door opened and Christine Brant came in. having been relieved at
H. Wells' house by Linda Craven.
They wereusing the bathroom as a clocking in point, with each member of the team assigned a 'window' during which they could make temporal transition. Using the bathroom as a temporal staging zone meant that they could all freely move about the rest of the apartment without having to worry about when someone might be clocking in at a certain point-it wouldn't do to be standing on the same place where someone was trying to clock in. The results would be very messy and very fatal. It also meant that in the unlikely event that someone else was present in the apartment, with the bathroom door closed, they would not see anybody suddenly materializing out of thin air. Someone clocking in could simply wait inside the bathroom until whoever it was had gone. As far as using the bathroom for its intended purpose was concerned, they resorted to the one in the adjoining suite.
'Anything?' said Christine Brant.
Delaney shrugged. 'Ransome's late reporting in. Otherwise, no changes.'
