Settle your nerves.'
He handed Lucas another glass of Scotch. Lucas never saw him go back to the bar and pour it. It didn't even look as if he'd moved. He felt dizzy and there was an aching pressure in his chest.
— I think you'd better sit down,' said Dr. Darkness. Lucas half sat, half collapsed into a large, leather upholstered reading chair.
'Jesus, Doc… what have you done?'
'Well, I saved your life, for one thing. You might at least say thank you. '
'No,' said Lucas, softly. He swallowed hard and shook his head. 'No, I won't thank you. I can't.' He closed his eyes. 'Oh, Jesus, I'm dead. Or I should be dead.
That Ghazi fired his rifle a split second after I leaped and… and that bullet should have hit me. It did hit me! My God, Doe, don't you realise what you've done?
You've caused a timestream split!'
'I've done no such thing,' said Darkness. 'I have been monitoring the situation assiduously and my instruments have detected absolutely no evidence of a timestream split. I rather thought there wouldn't be, but I couldn't be absolutely certain.' He shrugged. 'Occasionally, one must take some risks in order to gain knowledge. Actually, it was quite an interesting experiment. You see, I could easily have deflected that bullet. It wouldn't have taken much, merely matching its speed and giving it a slight nudge would have accomplished the desired result. However, in that event, conditions of the past in a manner that might have affected the entire scenario, not only yourself.
'For one thing, a number of people had already seen you die,' Darkness continued
— as Lucas listened with stunned disbelief. 'That in itself might not have been all that significant from a temporal standpoint, but unfortunately, by the time I learned about your untimely demise, you had already been buried and certain significant events had already proceeded from that point, taking the factor of your death into account.'
Lucas listened to it with a sort of shocked detachment. He simply couldn't take it in. Darkness was calmly talking about his death, about his having been buried, and yet, incredibly, despite having died, he was alive. His mind reeled as he tried to assimilate it all. The more Darkness told him, the crazier it sounded.
'I recall standing over your grave and feeling absolutely furious,' said Darkness.
'You were to have been the vehicle for my greatest achievement, the living prototype of my ultimate invention, and you were dead! Well, granted, I always knew there was some risk of that, considering the highly dangerous nature of your occupation, but that was precisely what made you such an ideal candidate.- You routinely travelled throughout different time periods and were exposed to a wide variety of environments, all of which made for excellent field testing conditions.
Being a temporal agent, you were equipped with a warp disc, which provided a perfect failsafe system. And finally, I don't think that anyone but a temporal agent would have possessed the necessary abilities to deal with the stresses the field testing would have generated. You were perfect., However, to be on the- safe side, I also terminaled Andre Cross and Finn Delaney, in case anything should have happened to you. Just my luck, Cross and Delaney's terminals malfunctioned. The symbiotracer functions continue to work just fine, but the telempathic chronocircuitry embedded in the particle chips burned out during the process of molecular bonding. I still haven’t entirely licked that problem. In any case, that left me with only you. Your telempathic chronocircuitry survived the bonding process.
And then, like an idiot, you had to go and get yourself killed. Which meant that my project, the end result of my life's work, was also dead. And that, my friend, was simply unacceptable!
'I didn't see how I could possibly do anything about it, though,' Darkness continued, 'until I discovered that among the enemy soldiers who had crossed over from the parallel universe was your alternate self, your mirror image from the other timeline. He was an officer in the Special Operations Group-their counterpart to the Time Commandos. His name was also Lucas Priest and he was indistinguishable from you in virtually all respects, right down to his DNA. And that's when inspiration struck! The perfect opportunity presented itself when the twin Lucas Priest attempted to kill Andre Cross and Finn Delaney saved her life by bayoneting him.
'All this occurred after you'd already died, you see,' Darkness explained, 'shot down saving Winston Churchill’s life. I theorised that there would be little danger of temporal interference if I merely switched the bodies. Lucas Priest had died in front of witnesses, saving Winston Churchill's life. After the switch was made, a Lucas Priest would still be dead. It would be a different Lucas Priest, but no one would be the wiser. And if the switch did not affect the outcome of events in any way, then the danger of temporal interference seemed minimal, if not non- existent.
It required only that I dress the corpse of the twin Priest in clothing identical to that which you'd been wearing, use the terminal to tach you out of the bullet's path an instant before impact, then position the corpse of the twin Priest in such a manner that the bullet would impact precisely upon the bayonet wound, allowing the corpse to then fall to the ground an infinitesimal fraction of a second later, all of it occurring at a speed faster than the eye could follow or a bullet could travel. True, a close examination would have disclosed that the body had been stabbed first, and then shot in the exact same place, but there would never be such an examination.
There would be no reason for it. They had all seen what had happened, after all.
They would have no reason to suspect that anything else other than what they had seen might have happened at faster than light speeds. The result of it all would not only be a fascinating experiment in temporal physics, but it would also save the invention that I'd worked my whole life to perfect.''
'This thing you keep referring to,' said Lucas, trying to keep up. 'This terminal… you said something about telempathic chronocircuitry?'
'Correct,' said Darkness. 'I haven't really given it an official designation yet. It more or less functions as a sort of terminal, or at least it makes you function as one, so that's how I've been thinking of it. Essentially, it is a particle-level. thought-controlled warp disc employing telempathic chrono-circuitry. It had to be initially triggered by a remote-controlled. tachyon signal, which is to say that I had to turn it on, but after that it became permanently armed. so to speak, controlled exclusively by the thought waves of the recipient. That's you.'
'You mean…' Lucas felt his voice break momentarily and he cleared his throat.
'You mean to tell me that this thing enables the recipient to clock through time merely by thinking about it'!'
'Well, it would entail a great deal of control and mental discipline on the part of the recipient,' said Darkness, 'but essentially, yes, that's quite correct. So it helps to pay close attention 10 what you're thinking about, otherwise you might just 'tach off' somewhere, if you'll excuse the pun.'
Lucas stared at him with horror. 'Are you telling me that you've turned me into a living time machine?'
'Well, that's a rather colourful way of putting it,' said Darkness, 'but it's more or less correct. Now that the telempathic function of your molecular-bonded chronocircuitry has been triggered, you can travel anywhere you want, instantaneously, merely by thinking about it.'
There followed months of carefully controlled experiments in which Darkness used. hypnosis to place Lucas into a trance state and then, through the medium of hypnotic suggestion, programmed him with specific translocation co-ordinates, from one side of the room to the other, for example. This sort of testing procedure, under rigidly controlled conditions, eliminated much of the danger, but the conditions could not remain so rigidly controlled forever. Lucas had to learn how to develop amazing mental discipline in order to control his telempathic chronocircuitry, otherwise a random thought could translocate him across time and space.
He had already accidentally 'tached'. or translocated back to Earth on several separate occasions, when he had found himself thinking about Andre and wishing he could be with her, explain to her what happened. And afterwards, each time, he had felt ill. There was something about the process that produced after effects, a pounding headache, pressure in the chest, profound dizziness and nausea. She must think she's losing it, be thought, seeing ghosts. He quickly pushed the thought away with alarm. Lucas needed to maintain his mental discipline in order to keep from
'taching off,' as Darkness had put it. The man's got to be crazy, he thought. How the hell could he have done this? He had changed Lucas's life-and death merely to safeguard an experiment. And as if that were not enough, there was still the question of what effect his being brought back to life would have upon the timestream.
Darkness seemed to believe that there would be no effect at all, or else it would be a negligible one. Lucas was not so certain. Without question, Darkness was more versed in the mysteries of Zen physics than Lucas was,
