'Assuming the shock of the experience didn't make him take leave of his senses.
According to your report, he was already disoriented and drinking heavily. Either way, the T.I.A. will be investigating for certain now. Allowing Gulliver to escape was a serious mistake. Your team bungled the entire mission and jeopardised our security.'
The Lilliput colonel drew himself up to his full height, but since his full height was only six and a half inches, the effect was negligible.
''I lost fifteen men on that mission,' he said, through gritted teeth. 'And six seriously wounded, four of them critically. Twenty-five men went out on what was supposed to be a routine training exercise and only four returned in one piece!'
'And what does that tell you, Colonel? Your assault team was almost completely wiped out by one man, and a mere Observer, at that! What do you think would have happened if he had been a time Commando?'
'Sir, those men were green,' the colonel said. ''Only their commander and their sergeant had any field experience at all It was supposed to be a routine training exercise. How were they supposed to expect-'
'They're supposed to expect anything! Anything at all! And be ready for it!
Nothing is routine! Those fifteen men were lost because they were not good enough! And that was your responsibility, Colonel! It's your command! Don't come to me with excuses! I am not concerned with excuses, only with results! Is that clear?'
'Yes, sir!”
'The entire operation has been jeopardised as a result of this fiasco. I want you to Execute Plan Delta immediately.'
Sandy Steiger's apartment on Threadneedle Street had been thoroughly cleaned up by the S amp; R team. There was no sign of the battle that had taken place there, nothing to indicate that it had been used as an Observer outpost.
Temporal Observers were trained to become completely assimilated into the time periods to which they were assigned. With the sole exception of the warp discs that they carried on their persons at all times, they were under strict orders to have nothing else that could not be obtained within their assigned time zone. In practice, however, this regulation proved difficult to enforce. Observer postings were long term and often entailed hardship. It was difficult to resist smuggling back some seemingly inconsequential items.
Such things as deodorant, or toothpaste or even toilet paper were easily concealed and served to make the posting a bit more pleasant. A carefully doled out ration of cigarettes served to remind one of home just as much as they satisfied the cravings of a habit. A favourite paperback novel reread over and over by candlelight was a harmless way of maintaining contact with the world one came from, so long as precautions were taken to ensure that no one else would ever see the book, especially if the posting was in a time period when the only writing to be found was in the form of serious or illuminated manuscripts or cuneiform.
In the early days, a number of Observers became a bit too casual about following such regulations and, having gotten away with a few seemingly inconsequential items, they took to accumulating more. Miniature portable stereos with head phones began appearing in the 14th century. Minicomputers and microwave ovens were brought back to Victorian London. In one celebrated case, a tiny, portable holographic projection system smuggled back to 17th century America led to the burning of an Observer as a witch when she was seen (by a peeping tom)
'consorting' with demons in her bedroom, demons who were, in actuality, merely holograms of actors in an entertainment feature. The Army finally clamped down and instituted the practice of surprise inspections with stiff penalties for the slightest infractions. Still, in many cases, Observers continued to smuggle back some small conveniences.
The S amp; R team had gone over Sandy Steiger's apartment with a fine tooth comb and, according to their report, they had found nothing more esoteric than some aspirin tablets, a ballpoint pen, some timed-release decongestant pills, a modern tooth brush and nine cartons of cigarettes concealed beneath a loose floor board.
Their report stated that Sandy had clearly broken regulations, but the few items he had smuggled back had not seemed very significant. They had no way of knowing that the contraband had been enough to cost Sandy his life. The S and R team had been quite thorough. Nevertheless, the commandos conducted their own search.
Gulliver stood by the door and watched them anxiously, He was clearly uncomfortable at being back in the same room where Sandy had been killed and where he had almost met the same fate.
'One thing puzzles me,' he said, as Creed Steiger, Finn Delaney, and Andre Cross carefully searched through the apartment once again. 'Since you have this astonishing ability to travel back and forth through time, is it not possible that you could go back and prevent Sandy from being killed by those horrible Lilliputians?'
'You think I wouldn't save my own brother if I could?' said
Steiger, grimly.
'Why can't you?'
'It's difficult to explain, Doctor, but the fact is it would be too dangerous. What's done is done. There's nothing we can do about it.
'Can you not tell me why?' said Gulliver.
'Go ahead,' Delaney said. 'We'll check out the sitting room.'
Steiger sighed and sat down on the bed. 'Very well, Doctor. I'll see if I can explain it in a way that you can understand. Think of time as a river. A very swiftly flowing river. The current of that river is the timestream, specifically, the inertial flow of the timeline.'
Furrows appeared in Gulliver's forehead as he frowned, trying to follow it. Steiger grunted and shook his head.
'Look, just imagine that the current of our river of time is the force that impels events, all right? And the length of the river itself is all of history, the timeline. Got that?'
Gulliver nodded. 'Yes, I think I understand.'
'Good,' said Steiger. 'Now, when someone from the future, someone like myself, goes back into the past, he risks doing something that would somehow interfere with the flow of events. Actually, everything I do back here constitutes a form of interference. Even my presence in this room is a form of interference, because after all, there was a point in time at which, in this particular moment, I was never in this room at this particular moment, do you understand?'
Gulliver was frowning once again.
Steiger grimaced. 'Hell, I told you it was complicated.
Look, as we sit here right now, this very moment, I won't even be born for about another thousand years. And yet, here I am, sitting here and talking to you, a man who lived almost a thousand years before my time. That's an example of what we call temporal interference.' He picked up a pillow. 'Even an action as insignificant as my picking up this pillow is an example of temporal interference, because there was a point in time, before we came back here, when this moment passed and I was not here to pick up this pillow and the action of this pillow being picked up didn't happen, see?'
'I… I believe I do see, yes,' said guava. 'You were right, it is rather complicated, isn't it? Much like these circular arguments philosophers are always having. '
'Yes, very much like that, in a way,' said Steiger. 'Now, take the fact that I've picked up this pillow.' He dropped it back down onto the bed. 'It's an insignificant action. It doesn't really change anything, does it? In fact, it's so insignificant that it doesn't have any effect upon our river of time at all. The fact that I have picked up a pillow in this room has had no discernible effect upon events in this time period, even though it was an event that did not originally take place. You follow?'
Gulliver nodded once again, though he looked a bit uncertain.
'Good. Now imagine that you and I go out tonight and have a few drinks. On the way back, as we're passing a dark alley, a thief confronts us at knifepoint and demands all of our money. He lunges at me with the knife and in the struggle, I manage to get the knife away from him and kill him. Now, that act is obviously much more significant than merely picking up a pillow, and I don't mean merely for its moral implications. Suppose the man I've killed had a wife or children. Perhaps he never would have had a wife and children. It's possible that he would have lived out the remainder of his life alone, in insignificance, doing nothing of any importance whatsoever. And it's also possible that if I hadn't been there, you would have been the one to struggle with him, get the knife away and kill him. In that case, his death, in and of itself, has not significantly altered events in this time period. My temporal
