“This is most confusing,” Gulliver said, scratching his head. “How can someone die and yet still be alive? It sounds like one of these paradoxes you were telling me about. “
“That’s exactly what it is,” said Steiger, “a temporal paradox. And that’s impossible.”
“Then how can I be here?” said Lucas. “Darkness says there hasn’t been a timestream split. He claims his instruments have not detected one.”
“Only if there was a timestream split, then maybe his instruments couldn’t detect it,” said Delaney, “because it’s possible that they could then be a function of that split, part of the newly created matter that would comprise the parallel timeline. For that matter, we all might be part of a newly created parallel timeline and not know it.”
“No, that can’t be,” said Lucas, shaking his head. “Darkness said that no significant events were changed. What’s the only thing that’s different as a result of what Darkness has done? The fact that I’m alive. And that’s it. Otherwise, there was no disruption of events at all.”
“There had to have been some kind of disruption,” Steiger insisted. “The past was changed!”
“But only my past,” Lucas said. “Or, to be technically correct, my past from your point of view, and my potential future from mine, since I obviously never died. My death occurred in some sort of alternate timeframe for me.”
“Is that what Darkness told you?” said Delaney.
Lucas glanced him with a frown. “Yes. Why?”
Delaney shook his head. “Because I don’t think it works that way, old friend. Granted, I haven’t had as much training in temporal physics as Darkness must’ve had, but unless everything that we were taught in R.C.S. was wrong, there had to have been some kind of a disruption. Creed is right. The past was changed. “
“Only it’s not my past,” insisted Lucas. “It didn’t happen to me! I’m obviously still very much alive!”
“Then either there’s been a timestream split,” Delaney said, “or you’re the split yourself, a parallel Lucas Priest. Something had to give. Either a another timeline was created or another Lucas Priest was.” He glanced uneasily at the others. “Only how do we tell which one?”
Gulliver sighed and rubbed his temples. “Colonel,” he said to Steiger, “I don’t suppose you would have any ass-prin, would you?”
“There are times I’d like to kill that man,” the lilliput colonel said, clenching his fists. “You know, maybe one of these days I will.”
“Maybe one of these days, I’ll help yo
u,” his lieutenant said, as he absently sharpened a commando knife the size of a pin on a tiny whetstone. “I wouldn’t mind seeing that son of a bitch bleed a little.”
The two men were very different in appearance. The colonel was slim, solidly built, with a square jaw, steely blue eyes and close-cropped sandy hair. His manner and his speech were as crisp as his freshly pressed fatigues, which he kept sharply creased by carefully folding them every night and placing them beneath a brick. The lieutenant was, by contrast, something of a slob. His fatigues were wrinkled and stained and his shirt was usually worn unbuttoned, revealing an extremely muscular upper torso. He had a bodybuilder’s physique, strong and sharply defined. His black, wavy hair hung down to his shoulders, and he habitually kept it held down with a cloth headband. Once in a while, he remembered to shave, which he did with his razor-sharp commando knife and water. Unlike the fair-skinned colonel, he was dark complected and his large brown eyes had a sleepy cast to them. He looked less like a soldier than a circus roustabout, but appearances could be deceiving, especially in the case of these two men. The colonel was six and half inches tall; the lieutenant stood all of five and three-quarters.
They were in the lieutenant’s tent, which was made from a man’s white cotton handkerchief. It was supported by tent poles made out of quarter-inch wooden doweling rod and staked to the floor by thumbtacks. All around them were dozens of similar tents housing the remainder of the regiment, all of which was billeted within a small loft in a warehouse building near the docks off Washington Street on New York City’s Lower West Side.
“I liked the island better,” the lieutenant said, putting down the knife and unwrapping a chunk of jerky that was lying on the plastic table. The table was toy furniture out of a doll’s house, as were the chairs. “I don’t like the city. I miss the fresh air.” He cut up the piece of jerky with his knife and started chewing on a slice.
“How the hell can you eat that stuff?” the colonel said, with a look of disgust. “Rat meat, for God’s sake!”
The lieutenant shrugged. “Meat is meat,” he said, masticating furiously. “The hunting is a little limited around here, y’know? Like I said, I liked the island better.”
“He does bring us food, you know,” said the colonel.
“That shit he brings us isn’t food,” responded the lieutenant, irately. “Why’nt you tell him to go to a market and get a couple decent cuts of steak and some fresh vegetables’! He thinks he can feed us all on a bag of quarter pounders and some fries. He’s just fuckin’ cheap, that’s all. Half the regiment has got gas and the other half has got the runs. We can’t eat that garbage. “
“I’ll talk to him,” said the colonel.
“He expects us to fight for him, tell him to bring us some decent food, for cryin’ out loud.”
“I said I’ll talk to him!”
“Yo, I’m on your side, remember?”
The colonel sighed. “I’m sorry. I guess the whole thing is just getting to me. He was furious about the practice strike. He said we failed.”
“Yeah, well, fuck him,” said the lieutenant, bitterly. “I lost sixteen men on that damn ‘practice’ mission!”
The colonel glanced at him sharply. “Sixteen?”