'There had to have been some kind of disruption,' Steiger insisted. 'The past was changed!'
'But only my past,' Lucas said. 'Or, to be technically correct, my past from your point of view, and my potential future from mine, since I obviously never died. My death occurred in some sort of alternate timeframe for me.'
'Is. that what Darkness told you?' said Delaney. Lucas glanced him with a frown.
'Yes. Why?'
Delaney shook his head. 'Because I don't think it works that way, old friend. Granted, I haven't had as much training in temporal physics as
Darkness must've had, but unless every-thing that we were taught in R.C.S. was wrong, there had to have been some kind of a disruption. Creed is right. The past was changed. '
'Only it's not my past,' insisted Lucas. 'It didn't happen to me! I'm obviously still very much alive!'
'Then either there's been a timestream split,' Delaney said, 'or you're the split yourself, a parallel Lucas Priest. Something had to give. Either a another timeline was created or another Lucas Priest was.' He glanced uneasily at the others. 'Only how do we tell which one?'
Gulliver sighed and rubbed his temples. 'Colonel,' he said to Steiger, 'I don't suppose you would have any ass-prin, would you?'
'There are times I'd like to kill that man,' the Lilliput colonel said, clenching his fists. 'You know, maybe one of these days I will.'
'Maybe one of these days, I'll help you,' his lieutenant said, as he absently sharpened a commando knife the size of a pin on a tiny whetstone. 'I wouldn't mind seeing that son of a bitch bleed a little.'
The two men were very different in appearance. The colonel was slim, solidly built, with a square jaw, steely blue eyes and close-cropped sandy hair. His manner and his speech were as crisp as his freshly pressed fatigues, which he kept sharply creased by carefully folding them every night and placing them beneath a brick. The lieutenant was, by contrast, something of a slob. His fatigues were wrinkled and stained and his shirt was usually worn unbuttoned, revealing an extremely muscular upper torso. He had a bodybuilder's physique, strong and sharply defined. His black, wavy hair hung down to his shoulders, and he habitually kept it held down with a cloth headband. Once in a while, he remembered to shave, which he did with his razor-sharp commando knife and water. Unlike the fair-skinned colonel, he was dark complected and his large brown eyes had a sleepy cast to them. He looked less like a soldier than a circus roustabout, but appearances could be deceiving, especially in the case of these two men. The colonel was six and half inches tall; the lieutenant stood all of five and three-quarters.
They were in the lieutenant's tent, which was made from a man's white cotton handkerchief. It was supported by tent poles made out of quarter-inch wooden doweling rod and staked to the floor by thumbtacks. All around them were dozens of similar tents housing the remainder of the regiment, all of which was billeted within a small loft in a warehouse building near the docks off Washington Street on New York City's Lower West Side.
'I liked the island better,' the lieutenant said, putting down the knife and unwrapping a chunk of jerky that was lying on the plastic table. The table was toy furniture out of a doll's house, as were the chairs. 'I don't like the city. I miss the fresh air.' He cut up the piece of jerky with his knife and started chewing on a slice.
'How the hell can you eat that stuff?' the colonel said, with a look of disgust. 'Rat meat, for God's sake!'
The lieutenant shrugged. 'Meat is meat,' he said, masticating furiously. 'The hunting is a little limited around here, y'know? Like I said, I liked the island better.
'He does bring us food, you know,' said the colonel.
'That shit he brings us isn't food,' responded the lieutenant, irately. 'Why'nt you tell him to go to a market and get a couple decent cuts of steak and some fresh vegetables'! He thinks he can feed us all on a bag of quarter pounders and some fries. He's just fuckin' cheap, that's all. Half the regiment has got gas and the other half has got the runs. We can't eat that garbage. '
'I'll talk to him,' said the colonel.
'He expects us to fight for him, tell him to bring us some decent food, for cryin' out loud.'
'I said I'll talk to him!'
'Yo, I'm on your side, remember?'
The colonel sighed. 'I'm sorry. I guess the whole thing is just getting to me. He was furious about the practice strike. He said we failed.'
'Yeah, well, fuck him,' said the lieutenant, bitterly. 'I lost sixteen men on that damn 'practice' mission!'
The colonel glanced at him sharply. 'Sixteen?'
'Yeah. My sergeant didn't make it. He died this morning.' 'Oh, damn.'
'What the hell is going to happen to us, sir?' said the lieutenant. 'What the hell kind of life have we got to look forward to?'
The tiny colonel stared out at a shaft of sunlight coming down from the skylight of the loft. 'I don't know, Lieutenant,' he said. 'I honestly don't know. How are the men doing?'
'About as well as could be expected. They're getting a little wired. I try to keep the tension down by running the hell out of 'em all day, setting up. obstacle courses and practice manoeuvres Lord know we've got enough damn room here, but there's a limit, y'know? They don't like it here anymore than I do. And losin' sixteen of the boys on what was supposed to be a training exercise didn't exactly boost moral.'
The lieutenant threw the knife down angrily and it stuck, quivering, in the wooden floor of the loft.
'I never should've called the strike in,' he said, bitterly. 'I should've waited.'
'The presence of the Observer changed everything,' said the colonel. 'You did what you had to do. You might have lost him if you held off.'
'Hell, we lost him anyway. And you know something? I'm not sorry. It eats my guts out that my boys had to die, but I'm not sorry that Gulliver got away. After all we put him through, that poor bastard deserved a decent break. At least somebody got out of this damn nightmare in one piece.'
'I wonder if we will,' the colonel said.
'We will. Count on it. We'll make it.'
'I wish I could be so sure, ' said the colonel. 'Tell the men there's a briefing scheduled for 0600. A target's been selected.
We're going out tomorrow night.'
I could sure get used to this, thought Hunter, toying with the stem of his wineglass as he stared at the beautiful, elegant blonde sitting across the table from him. She was dressed in a simple, low cut black dress, an expensive designer original that clung to her lush figure, accentuating it with every move she made. The table top was glass, allowing him to appreciate her gorgeous legs, which were crossed in a calculated manner so that the dress would ride up high. Throughout the meal, she'd been leaning forward slightly, inconspicuously matching her physical attitude to his, making little, almost unnoticeable movements, speaking a subtle body language that was almost as blatant in its effect as if she had tom off all her clothes and sprawled out naked on the table. She smiled and her sea green eyes whispered promises. She was good. She was very, very good.
Yes, sir, thought Hunter, I could sure get used to this. Fine clothes, expensive cars, beautiful women… becoming stranded in this timeline could be the best thing that ever happened to him. In a matter of months, he bad effortlessly parlayed the few dollars he bad stolen into a multimillion dollar' fortune. And that money had opened many doors. And the more doors the money opened, the more money came in. And as more money came in, more doors were opened for him. After a while, it seemed as if the entire process had started to become completely self-sustaining.
The warp disc and a little common sense was all it took. I should have done this years ago, he thought.
'Penny for your thoughts,' the blonde said. Her voice had the rich, low contralto tones of a cello by Stradivarius.
'Hmm?'
She smiled a dazzling, slightly crooked smile. 'It doesn't exactly do wonders for a girl's ego 'hen you drift off like that, you know,' she said.
'I'm sorry,' he said, with an apologetic smile.
'You seemed so far away. What were you thinking just now?'
'I was just thinking about something I had started out to do.' He gazed out the bay window of her penthouse apartment with the view of Central Park. 'At one point, no so very long ago, it seemed terribly important.' He
