'Lilliput Island' into his warp disc. He made a final pre-flight check of his floater pak. It wouldn't be amusing to have it fail for some reason while he was over the Indian Ocean.
'Right,' he said to himself, 'let's see if there really is a Lilliput Island.'
He clocked out.
He materialised in free fall about a mile above the surface of the Indian Ocean in the year 1702. He immediately fired his jets. Seconds later, he was in controlled flight, soaring above a bank of clouds. He had purposely clocked in at a high altitude, in order to avoid being seen by any passing ships. In some time periods, high altitude transitions could be hazardous due to air traffic, but there was no chance of that here. Still, Delaney knew of one case where a man clocking in at high altitude with a floater pak had rammed a hot air balloon, so it paid to orient yourself at once and pay attention. As he new past the bank of clouds, he glanced down toward the ocean.
Nothing. Nothing but open sea.
He checked his transition co-ordinates once more. There was no mistake.
So much for Gulliver's insistence, he thought. If Gulliver had been right, there should've been an island down there. Instead, there was only a long, narrow bank of clouds or fog slightly below him and absolutely nothing else in sight for miles, as far as the eye could see. Delaney started to descend a little ways below the cloud bank and fly a quick, wide search pattern, but he didn't think he'd find anything.
Gulliver must have been wrong about those co-ordinates.
And then he saw it, directly below him as he flew down beneath the cloud bank. A small island, approximately the shape of a kidney bean, exactly where Gulliver had said it would be. He blinked. He didn't see how he could possibly have missed it.
The cloud bank didn't seem big enough to hide the island from his sight. He looked up. The cloud bank was easily three times as large from below as from above.
Impossible.
He ascended rapidly and went right through the cloud bank once again. And sure enough, from overhead, it was smaller. And even though the wind was blowing briskly in a westerly direction, the cloud bank wasn't moving.
Actually, it was moving, but instead of being driven west, it was slowly going around in circles, slowly revolving like a whirlpool.
He had found a confluence.
Directly below him, two timelines intersected. Gulliver's
Lilliput Island was in the parallel universe. Somehow, Gulliver’s ship must have been blown through the confluence point during a storm. He had been the sole survivor, never realising that he was in another universe. How could he possibly have suspected such a thing? Or… perhaps Gulliver was from the parallel universe to begin with and he had passed through the confluence point when he had escaped from the Lilliputians. Either situation was possible. Only. how to tell which one had happened? Where did Lemuel Gulliver belong?
Delaney double-checked the transition co-ordinates once more. It was now absolutely vital to log the time/space co-ordinates exactly, or he might never get back home.
'My apologies, Dr. Gulliver,' Delaney said to. himself. 'The island is down there.
Only 'down there' is a universe away.'
He descended through the cloud bank once again and came in at an angle over the island, following the shoreline. It wouldn't take long to do an aerial reconnaissance.
The island was fairly small, probably volcanic, though dormant for years. It was heavily forested and Delaney saw nothing that indicated any sort of settlement, no signs that the island was inhabited.
He flew lower. And then he spotted it.
Camouflage netting.
From higher up, he never would have seen it. He circled around, powering down his jets and slowing his air speed. There was something down there, hidden beneath a wide expanse of camouflage netting covering an area about the size of half a basketball court. There were numerous gaps in the netting that let the sunlight through, but from higher up, it simply blended in with the rest of the forest. Delaney thought he could see a clearing down there, but he needed to get even lower for a closer look. He flew to the far edge of the netting and slowly started to descend through the trees.
Something stung him.
He slapped his hand to his neck, thinking that it was some insect, but he felt something sticking there, a tiny metal dart, no larger than a splinter. He felt another sharp, stinging sensation in his check and another in his temple, followed by several more in rapid succession. The drug was fast acting and took hold almost immediately. He started to lose control of the floater pat as he circled crazily through the trees, some ten to fifteen feet above the ground, smashing through branches as everything started to blur. Like a pilot with a crippled plane gliding in, out of control, Delaney tried to set down before he lost consciousness. Just before everything went black, he managed to shut the jets off and dropped the remaining few feet into a thicket, his forward momentum carrying him headlong into the bushes.
“They should have been back by now,' said Andre, nervously drumming her fingers on the tabletop.
'But they have been gone only a few minutes,' Gulliver said.
'They should have been back.'
'Perhaps it's taking them longer than they expected.' 'You don't understand,' said Andre. 'We're talking about time travel, Lem. They said they'd be back in about two minutes. Our time. It could have taken them two days to meet with Forrester and pick up the floater paks, and they could still have set their warp discs to clock back in here two minutes after they left.' She checked her disc. 'And that was fifteen minutes ago.'
She smashed her fist down on the table, almost upsetting the wine bottle.
'Damn it! First Lucas disappears, God only knows where to, then Darkness takes off after him and now Finn and Creed are overdue. Something's gone wrong. I just know it.'
'What can we do?' said Gulliver.
'For this moment, nothing,' Andre said, with a tight grimace. 'They're supposed to be coming back here. And Dr. Darkness will be coming back as soon as he finds
Lucas. We've simply got to wait, but I hate not knowing what's going on.'
'How do you think I feel?' said Gulliver, with a sigh. 'At least what you are doing makes sense to you. You understand it, whereas I.. I can only marvel at these things because I can’t even begin to comprehend them. Time travel; a dead man coming back to life because somehow he didn't die and yet he did; a transparent, ghostlike man who lives upon some other planet, farther away than I can even imagine… it all defies belief, and yet I cannot dispute the reality of any of it. I tell you that if this table were to suddenly come alive and start to stroll around the room, I would not be surprised.'
'You asked for it,' said Andre. 'You could have told us what we wanted to know and that would've been the end of it. You can still get out of it, you know.'
'Yes, but I would miss the adventure of a lifetime,' Gulliver said, with a grin.
'Poor Mr. Swift. He so liked my story about the little people. I wonder what he would have made of this!'
'For your own good, you'd damn well better make sure he never hears of this, ' said Andre. 'You've 'told him more than enough already!' She shook her head.
'Frankly, I still don't understand why Forrester let you come along on this mission.
It's simply too damn dangerous. How did you ever talk him into it?'
'Ah, well, he's a soldier,' said Gulliver, picking up a small clay pipe and packing it with some shag tobacco. 'And a general, at that. As a ship's surgeon, I have had some experience with serving under military men and I have seen my share of strong-willed commanders. Emotional appeals are wasted on such men. One must appeal to their pragmatism, to their sense of efficiency.'
Andre looked at him with interest. 'What did you tell him?'
'Simply that removing my memory of what had happened and sending me back home after all that I had seen and experienced would be a waste of a potentially valuable resource,' he said, lighting up the pipe and filling the room with- the pleasant, rich smell of red Virginia tobacco blended with some Turkish leaf. 'Sandy Steiger, may he rest in peace, obviously fulfilled some sort of function here. That it was a military posting was not difficult to surmise from all that I subsequently heard. And after I discussed the matter with General Forrester, I came to a
