“Can I put my hands down now?” said Lucas.
“Not just yet,” said Steiger. “I’m still not convinced. I gave you something once and you can’t give it back. If you’re really Lucas Priest, then you’ll know what I’m talking about.”
“Boy, do I ever,” Lucas said. “Your favorite mad scientist and mine, Dr. Darkness, had you give me a particle-level symbiotracer. It was a top secret prototype, not even the army knows about it. Each of you have one, as well. Only there’s something about them you don’t know, something Darkness didn’t tell you. They weren’t just symbiotracers, as it turns out. They also contained something he cans telempathic chronocircuitry, a cute little experimental device he whipped up in his lab back on that red planet with the three moons. “
Steiger’s jaw dropped. The only way he could have known that Darkness had his lab on a red planet with three moons would be if he had been there. Darkness kept the location of his base a closely guarded secret. So far as he knew, Steiger had been the only one who’d ever been there besides Darkness himself.
“It seems this telempathic chronocircuitry is extremely delicate,” Lucas continued. “Yours didn’t survive the molecular-bonding process, but mine did, which is why I can do this. “
He disappeared. A second later, he reappeared, standing on the opposite side of the room.
“Look, ma, no hands!” he said, his hands still raised to show he wasn’t operating a warp disc.
As they spun around to face him, he disappeared again, to reappear an instant later on the same spot where he’d stood initially.
“It’s a fugue sequence,” Steiger said. “He had it pre-programmed in his warp disc.”
“Look again, Creed,” Lucas said, trying to ignore the headache and the dizziness. “I’m not wearing one. You see, this is the process that Darkness had been trying to perfect. Time travel by thought. And since these little molecular-bonding gizmos of his are apparently extremely hard to make and I had the only one that worked right, rather than lose his, only working prototype, he decided to effect a little temporal adjustment of his own. He went back and translocated me out of that bullet’s path while at the same time taking the corpse of my dead twin moments after you killed him, Finn, and interposing his body between Churchill and that bullet. Essentially, he had me switch places with a dead man. My twin from the parallel universe. The result was that I side stepped my death and wound up as a living time machine, which makes things a little troublesome. See, if my mind happens to wander, so do I.”
“Then I wasn’t seeing things!” said Andre. “That really was you in my room?”
Lucas nodded. “That was sort of a brief glitch. An unintentional translocation. The telempathic chronocircuitry was designed to analyze and compute transition co-ordinates from a built-in encyclopedic database as well as my own memory. Unfortunately, I’m not too great at controlling it and it seems that Darkness didn’t quite get all the bugs out. All I had to do was think about you, Andre, and I wound up in your room. And it happened again when I started thinking about the old man and suddenly found myself in his quarters. There were times when I’d fall asleep and dream about a place and the next thing I knew, I’d wake up there. The first few times that happened, Darkness had to home in one me through the symbiotracer so that he could come and get me, because I absolutely froze. The truly frightening part of it all is that there’s no way to turn the damn thing off. Once Darkness activated it with a special coded tachyon signal to the symbiotracer, the telempathic chronocircuitry kicked in and now I can’t turn it off anymore than I can turn myself off. It’s part of me, permanently bonded to my atomic structure. You’d think the great genius would have thought to build in some kind of ‘off’ switch, but noooo….”
Steiger and Delaney slowly lowered their weapons. Lucas sighed with relief and put his hands down. “You know, for a minute there, I thought you were never going to believe me.” He looked past them and frowned. “Who’s your friend?”
Gulliver had entered the room and now he came forward hesitantly and held out his hand. “Dr. Lemuel Gulliver, at your service, sir.”
Lucas shook hands with him. “Col. Lucas Priest,” he said. “You were at General Forrester’s quarters, weren’t you?”
“Yes, that’s quite true,” said Gulliver, “however, I—”
He never got to finish his sentence as Andre, unable to restrain herself any longer, suddenly slammed into Lucas and threw her arms around him, hugging him hard enough to take his breath away.
“You’re alive!” she said, her voice breaking. “God, I can’t believe it! You’re alive!”
She kissed him long and hard.
Steiger and Delaney were still staring at him with dazed expressions. Gulliver looked uncomfortable and confused.
“I thought I’d lost you,” Andre said, fighting back tears. . And I never… and I never got around to telling you I—”
Lucas put his finger to her lips. “I know,” he said, softly.
“Then you never really died!” said Delaney. “Dr. Darkness saved your life and what we thought was you was the body of your twin!”
“Well, no, not exactly,” said Lucas. “In a sense, I did die, but then Darkness went back and altered that scenario. I guess you might say he brought me back to life by altering my past. Or, from where I stand right now, a potential future that I never realized.”
For a moment, nobody said anything as they stared at him with astonishment, then Gulliver was the first to break the stunned silence.
“Col. Steiger,” he said, “I realize that I don’t really comprehend your science of the future, but isn’t that what we were just discussing moments ago in regards to your brother? Altering the past so that someone who died might live?”
“That’s exactly what we were discussing,” Steiger said, slowly, “and it’s simply not possible! Not unless…” He swallowed hard, a cold fist squeezing his insides. “Not unless Darkness brought about a timestream split!”
“No,” said Delaney, shaking his head. “That can’t be. If a timestream split had occurred, then we wouldn’t have remembered Lucas’s death.”
“But you would have,” Lucas said, “because you saw it. You were there. Or at least Andre was. Only what you saw, Andre, was my twin’s corpse, not me.”
“Except that I did see you,” said Andre. “If what you’re saying is true, then I saw you die and it was only afterward that Dr. Darkness went back and changed the past, after you’d already died the first time!”