pile and fell into platoon formation at his feet.
'What I can't figure out is how the hell they got into your clothes in the first place,'
Lucas said, gazing down with wonder at the three ranks of Lilliputians down below him, standing in formation with their hands clasped atop their heads.
Delaney sighed and grimaced ruefully. 'Don't ask., okay?'
'Dear Lord, now where are we?' Gulliver asked, with exasperation.
'I don't know, Lem,' said Andre, turning around slowly and examining their surroundings.
Both. of them were handcuffed. The man in the tailored mauve suit had made
Gulliver cuff Andre's hands behind her back, then he'd cuffed Gulliver himself and fastened his own warp discs around their wrists, slightly above the steel bracelets.
Then he clocked them through one at a time to… where?
They had materialised in the centre of a large room, beneath a skylight. They seemed to be standing in some sort of empty warehouse or abandoned loft. Above them, the hangar like ceiling was a 'criss-crossing webwork of supporting girders and steel beams on which small kleig lights were mounted. Andre turned and saw a row of large rectangular casement windows in the wall behind her at about eye level. They were the kind that opened outwards from the bottom. A warm, humid breeze wafting in carried the sounds of traffic and the stifling smell of air pollution.
Through the windows, she could see the West Side Highway and the Hudson
River, with New Jersey on the other side. It was starting to get dark.
'We're in New York City,' she said. 'The 20th century, I think, but I'm not sure about the exact time-'
'Never mind the time,' said a voice from behind them. 'Get back away from the windows.'
The man in the mauve suit had materialised behind them and as they turned around, he beckoned them away from the windows with his gun. It was a big, black semiautomatic pistol, Andre noticed, and it was cocked. It was a 10 mm
Springfield. That, along with the style of the man's suit and her brief glimpse of the city outside, confirmed her guess about the time period. Late 20th century, early to mid 90's. The dark-haired man watched them from behind tinted, aviator-132
Simon Hawke style glasses. His manner was calm, self-assured, and thoroughly professional.
'You're with the Network, aren't you?' Andre said. 'That's right,' the man said.
'Who are you? Are you with the agency or did they bring you in from the outside?'
'What's the difference?' he said, flatly.
'One of degree, I suppose,' said Andre. 'One merely makes you a criminal. The other makes you an. agent who's gone bad. In my book, that's about ten times worse.'
'really?' he said, still in that same flat, world-weary voice.
'And how long have you been with the agency?'
'A couple of years,' she said.
'A couple of years,' he said, amused. 'A whole couple, huh?'
'Before that! served with the First Division.'
'Ah. One of Moses Forrester's legendary Time Commandos, eh? Saved the world a few times, did you?'
'I did my part.'
'How commendable. Excuse me if I don't share your zealous sense of duty. You see, unlike you privileged elite, I was never sent out on glamorous short-term missions to return to luxurious quarters at Pendleton Base, where I could 'live in a style normally reserved for command staff officers. See, we 'spooks' spend years on the minus side, living in primitive squalor, gathering the intelligence that enables you glory hounds to function and only getting brought in from the cold when our chemically increased lifespans threaten to become an inconvenience. And then we’re only brought back long enough to be briefed for a new assignment in the field. More years; on the minus side that inexorably grind on into decades. And always there's the struggle for funding to maintain field operations-'
'Oh, bull,' said Andre. 'The T. IA. has the largest budget of any government agency-service branches included!'
'We do a bigger job than any government agency, service branches included,' the Network man said. 'You have any idea what it takes to maintain a field office? No, of course not. What the hell do you care? They expect a section head to set up a field office and maintain it with just a small staff of agents, as if all we had to do was read newspapers and monitor the
electronic media, never mind that many of the places we're sent to haven't even heard of electricity, much less mass media. We're expected to feed intelligence to the Observers, investigate and report all anomalies to Temporal Army Command, monitor all activity within a temporal zone that a regiment couldn't adequately cover. And with the parallel universe involved now, we're supposed to handle all those added complications, as well.' He snorted derisively. 'You tell me,' he continued. 'how are we supposed to do that without recruiting additional personnel from the temporal zones we're assigned to? And those people have to be paid somehow out of a budget that doesn't allow for them. Elaborate, costly procedures must be followed to keep them from suspecting what we're really doing. Special, painstaking precautions, also very costly, must be taken to avoid causing any temporal disruptions of our own, because supposedly that's what we're here to prevent. And somehow we're supposed to keep our sanity while trying to do a job that simply can't be done.'
'It sounds to me as if you're trying very hard to justify yourself,' said Andre. 'It also sounds like you should have been relieved a long time ago. You should've been brought in. You need rest and you need help. You're a burnout case.'
'Yeah? Well, maybe I am. Maybe there was a time when doing my duty was as important to me as it is to you. But as you've surmised, I've been at it for a long, long time now. And let me tell you, it's like pissing in the wind.'
He leaned back in the chair, took a deep drag off his cigarette and exhaled the smoke in a sigh.
'You see, it's kinda hard to convince the folks back home that what goes down in some temporal backwater makes any difference to them. I mean, why should they care about a field office in 11th century Jerusalem? Why should they give a damn about some war in 19th century Africa or political instability in 20th century Latin America? That was all ancient history, right? Now the rising interest rates, the falling value of the dollar, the collapse of the service economy, bank failures, those things make a difference to them. They're relevant, you see. Why should they pay taxes to support operations hundreds or thousands of years removed from their own reality? All they can see is their own-world winding down. They simply can't see that it's all connected. They're fools. They're like a bunch of mindless lemmings, running full tilt toward the edge of a cliff. So if they don't give a damn, why the hell should we?'
He backed away from them, keeping them covered with his gun, until he came up against a wooden table and some chairs. He pulled a chair out, sat down and casually crossed his legs, never once taking his eyes off them. He took out a pack of English cigarettes, shook one out and lit it with a lighter held in his free hand.
He offered the pack to Andre, but she shook her head. He shrugged and put it away.
'It's all falling apart, you know. I figure it probably started coming to pieces back around Julius Caesar's time and it's been growing progressively worse ever since.
The miracle is that it's all stayed together this long. Somewhere back in Roman times, some idiot decided that man's role on this earth was to conquer nature instead of being a part of it, so we've been bludgeoning nature to death ever since.
And several thousand years later, we've just about finished the job.'
'Time travel was the final straw,' he continued, in his sleepy sounding voice. 'The Greeks used to say, 'Those whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad.'
Well, we've become the gods and we've driven nature mad. It's fragmenting into split personalities. Parallel timelines. And now that it's started, there's just no way to stop it. It's going to be like a chain reaction, building and building and building.
No stop-ping it. No stopping it at all.'
'What in heaven's name is he talking about?' Gulliver said, under his breath. 'Do you understand any of this?”
Andre nodded. 'I'm afraid I do,' she said. 'And I'm afraid he has a point, too, despite his twisted logic.'
