“Just what do you expect to find?” asked Lucas.
“I haven’t got the faintest idea.” she said. “I’m just following orders. Maybe they expect me to tell them that you don’t really exist, that you’re nothing but a ghost.”
“There’s no such thing as ghosts.”
“Tell that to your buddy Dr. Darkness: she said.
“There’s a lot I could tell him.” Lucas said, with a wry grimace. That man’s got a lot to answer for.”
She gave him a questioning look. “Are you saying you’re not grateful that he saved your life?”
Lucas shrugged. “I don’t know. I wish it were that simple. I can’t help having the feeling that maybe I was supposed to die. Sounds kinda crazy. doesn’t it?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “A bit fatalistic perhaps. but crazy? You’re one of the sanest men I know. People who have survived near death experiences have often come away feeling profoundly changed. sometimes even a bit regretful. Of course, this isn’t quite the same thing, is it? You don’t really remember the experience.”
Lucas shook his head. “How can I? Darkness went back into the past and altered the conditions of my death. Or of my life. Hell, even the semantics of the situation are impossible. I can’t remember something that didn’t happen because the past was changed.”
“I’m still not exactly clear on that.” she said. “How could he have changed the past without bringing about a temporal disruption?”
“You’re asking me to answer a question that’s giving out top temporal physicists a lot of headaches.” Lucas said. “One possible answer is that it wasn’t a change significant enough to bring about a temporal disruption, though Lord knows, it was certainly significant enough for me! On the other hand, maybe it did cause a temporal disruption, only we’re not aware of the consequences yet. That’s one of the things that worries me. What if something terrible happens in the future simply because I didn’t die when I was supposed to’?”
“I never did hear all the details. What exactly happened?”
“Well, we were on a mission in 19th-century Afghanistan.” said Lucas. “We were with the British headquarters command of the Malakand Field Force, standing on a rock cliff overlooking a valley where the Bengal Lancers were fighting with the Ghazis. It was a bloody slaughter. The commanding general was there, watching the action, as well as the regimental surgeon and a young war correspondent whose name happened to be Winston Churchill. We were on the lookout for a temporal disruption that we knew was going to occur and we expected it to center around Churchill. who was the most historically significant person there. The rock we were on had just been captured from the Ghazis. They had sniper nests all over it and the infantry had charged and driven them all out. Only they had missed one.
“While everyone was busy watching the fighting down below, this one Ghazi sniper got up from the rocks where he was hiding and drew a bead on the surgeon, whom he Probably mistook for the commanding officer. I just happened to glance over and see him bringing up his rifle. I yelled, ‘Hugo. look out!’ The surgeon was a veteran who’d just spent weeks pinned down by severe enemy sniper fire and he reacted instinctively by immediately dropping flat to the ground.
“In an instant. I saw what I’d done by warning Hugo. The moment he dropped, he left Churchill directly in the line of fire. I made a dive for Churchill and at the same moment, the Ghazi sniper fired. Instead of hitting Churchill, the bullet struck me in the chest.” He took a deep breath. “Now this is where it starts getting very complicated.”
“I don’t remember the bullet hitting me because, as a result of what Dr. Darkness did, that bullet never did actually strike me. The others saw the bullet hit me and they saw me fall to the ground with a big hole in my chest. Only it wasn’t me. See. during that mission, we encountered a commando unit of Special
Operations Group from the parallel universe. They were the ones involved in the attempted temporal disruption. Among that unit was an officer who was my twin from the parallel timeline. my exact duplicate right down to the DNA. No way to tell us apart at all. Finn Delaney killed him, only that didn’t happen until after I was shot. What Dr. Darkness did was go back into the past and snatch my double’s corpse. He then clocked to the moment of my ‘death.’ and moving faster than the speed of light, he took me out of the bullet’s path and teleported me away. Then he put my double’s corpse directly into the path of that bullet, so that it would impact in the exact same spot left by the wound inflicted when Delaney killed him. An autopsy would probably have revealed that there were two wounds in the same place. but the point was that no one had any reason to believe it wasn’t me. Darkness had snatched the corpse seconds after death: the blood hadn’t coagulated yet and the body was still warm. And I was officially reported killed in action.”
“So then you never really died at all.” she said. “The past wasn’t changed.”
“Yeah, well, unfortunately that’s the part no one can figure out.” said Lucas. with a sigh. “Looking at it logically. I did die, because you’d think there had to be a moment when my death actually occurred, before Darkness went back and altered the scenario, but when it comes to temporal physics, all logic breaks down. By doing what he did. Darkness changed the past so that the bullet struck my double’s corpse, not me. and that became the past. Or maybe it didn’t become the past, maybe it was the past, because what Darkness did was part of the temporal scenario. Or maybe what he did was create a sort of temporal loop, in which there was a kind of… a kind of skip or something in my own personal history, but not the history of the timeline. Maybe, somewhere in time, there exists an instant in which I actually died… only nobody knows for sure and chances are no one will ever know, no matter how many damn tests they run on me. How the hell is something like that supposed to show up on some test?”
“Good question.” she said. “But as the saying goes, why look a gift horse in the mouth? You’re alive. That’s all that matters, isn’t it?”
“Maybe.” Lucas said, That how’d you like to go through life knowing that somewhere in time, there could exist a moment when you’d died, only you can’t remember it because in a certain sense it never really happened? How’d you like to be the only person in the world who ever experienced a temporal paradox. but has no memory of the experience? And what if ifs some sort of temporal ripple that could, at some point in the future. somehow catch up with me?”
“Do you really think that’s possible?”
“I don’t know,” said Lucas. “That’s the exasperating thing about it! I don’t think even that Darkness knows and he understands temporal physics better than anyone alive. The thing that really gets me is that he didn’t give a damn about me one way or another. He only did it because he’d implanted me with the only existing prototype of his new telepathic temporal transponder and he didn’t want to lose the only working model. I’ve got what amounts to an ultra-miniaturized. thought-controlled warp disc implanted in my body, bonded to some molecule somewhere, and any stray thought is liable to send me on a trip through time. Its already happened several. times. You have any idea what it’s like to go to sleep and dream you’re back in ancient Rome, then suddenly wake up to discover that you’re actually there?”
Dr. Hazen shook her head. “Wow. I hadn’t known about that. I can’t say I envy you. Lucas. Frankly. I’m amazed they’re letting you go back on active duty. I hate to say it, but after what you just told me, I honestly feel that it’s my responsibility to pronounce you medically unfit.
“You can’t.”
“I’m sorry. Lucas.” she said. “Under the circumstances. I really have no other alternative.”
“You don’t understand,” said Lucas. “I’m not asking you not to do it, I’m saying that you can’t Under ordinary circumstances, you would certainly have that authority, hut then these aren’t ordinary circumstances. By all means, do what you feel you have to do, but I’m telling you right now, if you order me removed from active duty. the brass will override you. I’ve got the only thought-controlled warp disc in existence. In effect. Darkness has turned me into a living time machine and the brass wants to see it tested in the field. They want to find out if it’ll work over the long haul or if it will induce the same atomic instability that Darkness suffers from. He tried an earlier version of the same process on himself and it altered his atomic structure irreversibly. And his condition’s getting progressively worse. Eventually. he’s going to discorporate and depart at multiples of light speed in all directions of the universe. The brass would sort of like to find out if that’s going to happen to me before they start to issue telempathic temporal transponders to the troops.”
“I thought you said you had the only working prototype,” she said.
“I do,” said Lucas, sourly. “Darkness said it would take a bloody fortune to produce another one, and before anyone’s ready to commit to that, they want to see if there are any bugs in mine. And since his own atomic structure is unstable, Darkness is on borrowed time, so the brass is anxious to get on with the field testing, which
