"They can't hear us now, can they?" Lucas said, softly.
Finn turned around and shook his head.
"You know what I'm about to say, don't you?" Lucas said.
"You mean about the paradox?" said Finn.
"What paradox?"
Finn nodded, glumly.
"That corpse doesn't represent a paradox," said Lucas. "At least, not yet. You smoked the kid, Finn."
"I had to. I had no choice. Surely you can see that."
Lucas took a deep breath and let it out slowly. "Jesus. What a mess. You know, something sounded wrong while you were talking to him, but I couldn't quite put my finger on it. I'm still not sure I can follow it through completely, but then I'm just a simple dog soldier. So are you, for that matter. Or are you? You seem pretty well versed in temporal mechanics, even for a veteran with your experience."
"I'm not a mission plant, if that's what you're getting at," said Finn. "What you see is what you get. I'm a lifer, son. I've served a lot of time. I've gone up and down in rank like a yo-yo, mainly because I don't always play it by the rules, but..."
"But?"
"Yes, well, there is a 'but,' Sergeant Major. I volunteered for the Corps. I didn't really have to. I finished in the top three percent of the Service Aptitude batteries. I chose the army anyway and I put in my time."
"Which qualified you for Referee Corps School," said Lucas.
Finn nodded. "I got halfway through before I washed out," he said. "I couldn't handle Econo-political Management and Arbitration. Way over my head. Well, maybe not over my head, but beyond my inclination. I did get through Temporal Physics and Trans-historical Adjustment and Maintenance, though."
"Which should have qualified you for the observers."
"It did," said Finn, nodding. "Only I didn't want it. You may think I'm crazy, but I missed this. Observing's not the same as participating, even though it pays better."
Lucas nodded. "I understand. I can't say I would have done the same thing in your position, but that's beside the point. The point is, you bluffed him. You made him think that we can still do something to get through this thing alive. Only we can't, can we?"
"Not necessarily," said Finn. "We still have a chance. We do. Hooker, I'm afraid, has no chance at all."
"I don't quite follow."
"Okay, I'll make it quick, they might come back at any minute. Time is fluid. The only thing that isn't is our subjective relationship to time. Time is like a river in that respect. Now you can take a boulder, let's say, and drop it in that river. It will create some eddies, but those eddies will have dissipated say, two hundred yards downstream. In order to significantly change the course of the river, or split the timeline, you're going to have to introduce a much more significant factor. Say, divert the river at one point and split it.
Now think of yourself as a molecule of water. Your relationship to that river is totally subjective, depending upon where you are in relation to its flow. If you move with the water to a point beyond which the river has been diverted, before it has been diverted, then that won't affect you. However, if I was to draw a cupful of water from that river, containing your little molecule, and pour you back in at a point upstream of the diversion, then that diversion could affect you."
"So we can't be attacked in our absolute past," said Lucas. "Irving can't kill me yesterday and expect that action to destroy me here today."
"That's right," said Finn. "You can't shoot five feet behind a clay pigeon and expect it to burst. What's happened to us has already happened. That's an absolute. Regardless of what Irving does in the past, it won't affect us right here right now. It will affect the past at a point at which the timeline will be split. From that point on, the future will be an entirely different scenario, depending upon when the timelines eventually rejoin. Irving can only kill us in a parallel timeline if he tries to attack us in our past. The point is, our job is to keep him from creating that parallel timeline. If he does succeed in causing the split, the future will be affected. And there's the danger. That game of Russian roulette the ref was talking about. His fate is sealed in that respect. If we succeed in stopping Irving, assuming that the real Richard Plantagenet is still alive and we can find him, then we have the possibility of our being able to clock back in to Plus Time with Irving, leaving the real Richard to sit on the throne. In that case, he'll have to be conditioned to forget all about Irving's intervention in his life. Not a problem. But then we'll have to clock back in at a point just beyond Irving's having gone back, so as not to create a paradox regarding our own experience. We will have restored the status quo of our own history. However, the possibility of that is almost nonexistent. I'll bet my life on the fact that Irving has killed the real Richard, in order to improve the odds of his success. In that case, we've got to kill Irving and let our ref become Richard, acting in a manner that will preserve our timeline. He will have to die, as Richard, in order to avoid a paradox."
"So where does that leave Hooker?" Lucas said.
"Hooker's finished," Delaney said. "We've still got a chance, because at this point, Irving has not confronted us with our own fates. Yet. He knows about Hooker. He knows about you. He may or may not know about me and Johnson. But the fact that we have been confronted with Hooker's corpse means that Hooker must die, because if he survives beyond the point at which Irving has killed him, assuming that it is Irving who's done it, then that will mean that he never died to be clocked back to right now. He will never have seen his own dead body. And that will change his experience. That will constitute a paradox and we, then, will have split the timeline. We have to make sure that Hooker is garroted."
"But we don't know when that's supposed to happen," Lucas said.
"That's right, we don't. With any luck, we won't be able to prevent it."
"You call that luck?"
"Compared to the alternative, yes."
"What alternative?"