“I’d listen to her if I were you,” said Darkness.
“Well, you’re not me!” Lucas shouted. “What am I supposed to do, spend the rest of my life like some kind of laboratory animal on that cockamamie desert planet of yours, waiting around for you to perfect your telempathic terminal or whatever the hell it is before you discorporate?”
“I should think that most people would have found it a small enough price to pay for being brought back from the dead,” said Darkness.
“And what happens if you don’t perfect it?”
“Don’t be absurd. It’s already been perfected. It simply requires some fine tuning, a certain amount of training and adaptation on the part of the subject. Granted, it isn’t exactly user friendly, but—”
“User friendly? Are you out of your tree? This damn thing is a time bomb ticking away inside me and I’m stuck with it for rest of my unnatural life, thanks to you! Did it ever occur to you that I might actually resent being your guinea pig?” He threw his hands up and rolled his eyes. “God, why am I even bothering trying to explain anything to you? You act as if I had to ask your permission to come back to Earth!”
“You certainly should have,” Darkness said. “You’re a fool, Priest. An astonishingly lucky fool, but a fool nevertheless. It’s one thing. to lose your concentration and accidentally translocate to Earth during an idle lapse or while you’re dreaming, because in that event, the chronocircuitry computes the co-ordinates from your subconscious and its own inherent database, but to consciously attempt to program a translocation of such magnitude when you’re not even certain of the distance was foolhardy in the extreme! Suppose you had mentally tried to program specific transit co-ordinates and overridden the telempathic database function?”
“Well, actually I thought of that, but you said that the telempathic chronocircuitry had a built-in, automatic trip computer or whatever and—”
“My God!” said Darkness. “And so you blithely flung yourself across two million light years when the furthest you’d ever consciously translocated before was across the room?”
Lucas merely gaped at him.
“Two million light years?” Andre said, in a voice barely above a whisper.
“What… what, pray tell, is a light year?” Gulliver asked, hesitantly.
“A unit of distance, determined by the velocity of the speed of light in a vacuum, which is approximately 186,000 miles per second, measured in miles per hour and multiplied by the number of hours in a year, which yields the distance that light travels in one year, which is approximately six trillion miles,” Darkness said, impatiently. “I thought everyone knew that.”
Gulliver tried—and failed—to comprehend the explanation he’d been given. He gave up and took a small flask from his pocket, unstoppered it and slugged down some whiskey in the hope that it would settle his nerves, so that the stranger who had just appeared would stop fading in and out like some ghostly apparition.
Only instead of Darkness becoming more substantial, Lucas disappeared.
“Lucas!” Andre cried.
“Oh, hell,” said Darkness, irritably. “His bloody concentration slipped again. “
“Where did he go?” said Andre, alarmed.
“I haven’t the foggiest,” said Darkness. “Who knows what he was thinking?” He sighed. “Now I’ll have to track him through the symbiotracer. With any luck, I’ll find him before he panics and thinks himself into a jam. Science would be ever so much more rewarding if one didn’t have to deal with people!”
And he vanished.
Gulliver tossed the flask over his shoulder and put his head down on the table. “I give up,” he said. “Wake me when this dream is over.”
As the uniformed courier stepped out of the lift tube and approached the security station, the two armed guards posted at the lift tube entrance fell in on either side of him. He glanced at them briefly, but didn’t pause. He was carrying a briefcase that was fastened to his wrist by a chain. He set the case down on the desk in front of the sergeant of the guard and reached into his inside jacket pocket for his I.D.
“Lt. Stroud, Council of Nations attaché,” he said. “I have priority classified dispatches for General Forrester.”
The sergeant of the guard carefully examined the credentials. “I have nothing on my log concerning dispatches from the Council of Nations, sir.”
“They’re priority dispatches, Sergeant,” said Lt. Stroud. “This isn’t a regular delivery. It wouldn’t appear on your log.”
The sergeant of the guard maintained direct eye contact with the courier. “I see. Would you open the case, please, sir?’
“I’m afraid I can’t do that, Sergeant. Orders.”
“I’m sorry, sir, but I have my orders, as well. And I do possess an A-6 level clearance.”
“That doesn’t help me, Sergeant. I have specific instructions to open this case only in General Forester’s presence.”
“I’m afraid I’m going to have to insist, sir, “said the sergeant of the guard. “That case isn’t going anywhere until I’ve seen what’s inside it.”