“Let’s go back to our river,” Steiger said. “Remember that I said the current of the river is the timestream and that the river itself represents history, the timeline? If a person travels back in time and does something relatively insignificant—my picking up the pillow, for example—then that would be like tossing a very small pebble into a swiftly flowing stream. It wouldn’t even make a ripple. A more significant form of interference—the killing of our hypothetically childless thief, for example—might be compared to tossing a rather large rock into the river. It would make a splash, but unless the interference was significant enough to alter the flow of events, the ripples would be dissipated by the force of the current. Still with me?”
“Yes, I think so,” Gulliver said, paying very close attention.
“Now,” said Steiger, “an act of interference that was significant enough to actually alter the flow of events and cause a severe temporal disruption—something like my killing my great grandfather, in other words could be compared to our throwing a gigantic boulder into the river, something huge, big enough to make the river overflow its banks on both sides and flow around it. And that is what we call a timestream split. For a short period of time, you would have two rivers, one flowing around each side of the giant boulder. One fork of the river would represent the past as it had happened before the act of disruption. The other would represent the creation of a second past, a parallel timeline, in which the act of disruption had been taken into account. A live grandfather in one, a dead grandfather in the other. And the person causing the disruption which created the split would wind up in that second timeline, because there would have to be an original timeline in which his past, up to the moment he disrupted it, was preserved intact. And at some point, unless the disruption was of sufficient magnitude to keep both timelines apart indefinitely, those two separate timelines must rejoin and the results could be disastrous.”
Gulliver gaped at him, slack jawed.
“And that’s only the simplified explanation,” Steiger said. “It can get a great deal more complicated than that. Even if it wasn’t against all regulations for me to attempt to save my brother’s life—and I’ve never been all that religious about following regulations to begin with—there would still be no guarantee that I could do it. And even if I could, there would still have to be a past in which my brother died, because it’s already happened, do you see? If I tried to change it, I’d risk creating a timestream split. Or at the very least, I would bring about what’s known as a ‘ripple’ in the timestream, sort of a miniature timestream split of short duration, one that would also have completely unforeseeable results. “
“The place is clean,” Delaney said, coming back into the bedroom. “Well, did he explain it to you, Doctor?”
Gulliver looked up at him and the bewildered expression on his face said it all.
“Yep, I guess he did,” Delaney said.
Then Andre screamed.
Delaney and Steiger both drew their weapons and ran into the sitting room.
“Don’t shoot, it’s only me,” said Lucas Priest.
Chapter 5
“It can’t be,” said Andre, after a moment of stunned silence.
Delaney had his plasma pistol aimed directly at Priest’s chest. “I don’t know who you are, mister,” he said, “but don’t you move a muscle. “
Lucas stood motionless with his hands raised. “Come on, Finn, it’s me, for chrissake. Lucas. Your old partner, remember?”
“Try again. I buried my old partner.”
“Yeah, I know,” said Lucas, with a grimace. He kept his hands raised and carefully avoided making any sudden moves. “I figured this wasn’t going to be easy. Look, I can explain. I realize this is going to be bit hard to believe, but—”
“It’s gotta be his twin,” said Steiger, interrupting him. “From the congruent universe…
Delaney shook his head. “No. he’s dead, too. I ought to know, I killed him.”
“Maybe in the congruent universe, Lucas Priest had a twin brother,” Steiger said, keeping his gun trained on Lucas.
“Yeah, and maybe I was triplets,” said Lucas, wryly, “but I’m not. Finn, remember that time we took some R & R and went down to that Mexican border town and got in—”
“That was all in the arrest report the Federales filed,” said Delaney. “You could have seen that when the S.O.G. swiped data from the Archives Section. “
“Oh, Right. I forgot about that. Okay, wait a minute, what about that time we got drunk and you told me that when you were fourteen, that sexy young high school English teacher
you had made you stay after school one day and—”
“I’ve been drunk lots of time,” Delaney said, hastily, with a quick glance at the others. He swallowed nervously and moistened his lips. “It’s entirely possible I might’ve told that story to somebody else.”
“Priest had a bionic eye,” said Steiger.
“If they knew about our arrest in Mexico and… that other thing, they could’ve duplicated that, as well,” Delaney said. “Hell, Creed, he can’t possibly be Lucas! Lucas is dead! It’s some kind of trick.”
Andre hadn’t taken her eyes off him for an instant. She stared at him as if he were a ghost. “Who was the Red Knight’s Squire?” she said, softly.
“His name was Marcel,” said Lucas. “He was murdered by the Templar, Brian de Bois-Guilbert, and you avenged his death. He was your brother, Andre. You were the Red Knight. Remember our first meeting, in the lists at Ashby? You damned near killed me.”
“My God,” she said, turning to Delaney with a wide-eyed look. “Finn, besides you, no other living person could have known that.”