Andre Cross, Lemuel Gulliver and Lucas Priest stood among the crowd being kept baek behind the barricades as the firemen gathered up their equipment and the police officers took statements. With the weapons hidden underneath the coats they'd stolen from the cloakroom, they were careful to stay back out of the way.
Reporters from the print and electronic media were milling about. There was some kind of story here. But no-one quite knew what to make of it. There was a good deal of confusion. The police detectives were not surprised to hear that there had been some sort of shootout inside the club before the fIre broke out. They knew about Manelli and his Family business. What they were having a hard time reconciling were the statements of some of the eyewitnesses.
'I'm tellin' you, Lieutenant-“ 'Sergeant. Sergeant Lubinski.'
'Whatever. Look, I'm tellin' you, man, I know it sounds crazy, but there were these little people… tiny little people-'
'You mean like dwarves?' said the detective, frowning.
'Midgets?'
'No, man, no, smaller, about like this…' The white. haired lead singer of Flesh held his hands about six inches apart, one over the other.
'Like what?' said Lubinski.
'Yeah, like this, man, they were about six inches tall, and they were flyin' around in these tiny, little rocket belts and shootin' lasers, it was fuckin' incredible-'
'Lasers?' said Sgt. Lubinski. ' Tiny, little rocket belts?'
'Yeah, it was outrageous, man, there were, like, dozens of 'em, no, more, and they were, like, having a war in there, like dogfights, you know? Swoopin' around and blasting away at each other and-'
'Now wait a minute..
'Look, I know it sounds crazy, but-'
'Just hold on a second,' said Lubinski. 'You're with that group, Flesh, huh? Aren't you guys the ones who went ape and burned down that club in Jersey a few months ago?'
'Hey, look, that wasn't our fault, man!'
'Yeah, right. And what did you take before?'
'What did I take?'.
'Yeah, what are you on?' Lubmski saId. 'Dust?' PCP?'
'Oh, man! Come on, don't give me this! Look, I'm straight, so help me, I swear to God! Look, ask anybody, there were these little people-'
'Seems like you guys in the band were the only ones who saw any little people, chum,' Lubinski said, wryly. 'Everybody else saw some kinda laser light show that went out of
control, and one of your own roadies told us that the club electrician said your wiring wasn't up to code.'
'Look, you gotta believe me, man, it wasn't us, I swear! I'm tellin' you, there were these little people flyin' around-“
'I know, I know, with rocket belts and lasers,' said Lubinski, rolling his eyes. 'I think you'd better come along with me, ace. You got the right to remain silent…'
Delaney glanced at Lucas and smiled. 'Somehow I don't think they're going to believe that fella, do you?”
Lucas shook his head. 'No. Too bad. They were a good band, too. Sure brought down the house. '
EPILOGUE
'I simply can't get over it,' said Forrester, staring at Lucas Priest and slowly shaking his head. 'I Just can't believe you're alive.'
'How do you think I feel? sitting here with people who saw me die and helped to bury me'?' said Lucas.
They were gathered in Forrester's newly refurbished quarters, sitting in the living room for an informal, postmission debriefing over drinks and coffee. There was still some construction going on outside as workmen repaired the damage from the lilliput assault and installed new, state-of-the-art security systems, the necessity of which Forrester had fmally reluctantly admitted. In the morning, Forrester was due to go in for surgery to repair the damage done to his face and kneecap. The other wounds, fortunately, had not been very serious, but the hospital was less than enthusiastic about having him back as a patient.
' It, seems crazy,''Lucas said. 'I’ve been going over it and over It and I still haven't been able to accept it, somehow. I know that Andre saw that jezail bullet make hash out of my chest, and I know that Finn helped bury me, but I didn't die! That was never part of my experience. It was part of theirs. So what does that mean?
Does it mean that another Lucas Priest died in my place? Some. some alternate version of myself that was only a potential future for me relative to where I was before
Darkness snatched me, a potential future which was realised for everybody here but me, because I was sidetracked? I can't figure out what happened. Did I sidestep my own fate and get away with it somehow? Or am I the temporal anomaly here? Is my existence the metaphysical result of some sort of compensation by the Fate
Factor'! Am I some kind of parallel Lucas Priest who came into existence the moment my 'original self' died? Just thinking about it gives me the shakes.'
'There's still another possibility, you know,' Delaney said. 'One that suggests the laws of temporal relativity are a lot more flexible than we might think.'
'What do you mean?' said Andre.
'In effect,' Delaney said, 'what Dr. Darkness did was essentially the same thing that we've been doing all along. He effected a temporal adjustment. '
'No, wait, that can't be right,' said Lucas, 'because there was never a temporal disruption in the first place. '
'How do we know?' Delaney said.
'What do you mean, how do we know?' said Lucas. 'It's obvious, isn't it? Our presence there in 19th century Afganistan was never part of the original temporal scenario. We went back there to effect a temporal adjustment, so anything that happened to us couldn't possibly have been disruptive because we were never part of the original scenario to begin with.'
'How do you know?' Delaney said. 'How do you know that by going back into the past, we didn't become part of the original scenario?'
He paused, trying to formulate the concept.
'The fact that we're capable of going back in time and becoming involved in so-called 'past' events would seem to indicate that, in a sense, it's all happening now, only that 'now' is not an absolute, concrete concept. It's completely relative, depending on where you are and what you're doing. I mean, how do you define
'now? How do you capture it? Even as you perceive that something is happening now, it's already happened, hasn't it? Something has to be in order for you to perceive it, but once you've perceived it, it is no longer something that is in a state of being it's something that has been. The act of your perceiving it has, in a sense, relegated it to the past.'
'Come on, Finn, that's just semantics,' Steiger said.
'Is it?' said Delaney. 'Look, one thing I learned in R.C.S. when we got into advanced Zen physics is that all perception of time is, in a sense, nothing but semantics. I know that's a complicated concept, but bear with me.
Mensinger compared the timestream to a river. And no matter where you are in relation to that river, it's in the act of flowing. Mensinger also made the analogy that a temporal disruption is like something that acts against the current and the result of such a disruption depends on its degree.
'We've always assumed that presence in the past by people from the future was relatively safe, so long as it remained nondisruptive,' he continued. 'That fits in with what Mensinger believed and it's what allows us to effect temporal adjustments. But we've also always worked from the assumption that our presence in the past had a negligible effect, or essentially-no effect at all, so long as it remained non-disruptive. That we were somehow separate from the original scenario, like someone standing on the outside and looking in. But what if that was
