TW08 The Dracula Caper NEW (13 page)

The Time Wars were the ultimate example of people making decisions who were not even qualified to hold an opinion on the matter. When the Time Wars could have been stopped, the politicians prevailed, thinking about their own livelihoods, concerned about all the support industries created by the Time Wars which were providing jobs to their constituents, thinking about the propaganda value of being able to assure the folks back home that thanks to the Time Wars, they were immune to conflicts taking place in their own time—the only ones at risk were soldiers, all of whom were volunteers, and warfare in the past meant essential disarmament in the present. Propaganda, Halfway measures. Scientific illiteracy. Lies. Now they reaped the harvest.

The accident that everyone had dreaded had finally occurred. It was impossible to pinpoint exactly what had caused it. It was even impossible to determine if one particular event had caused it or if it was a result of cumulative temporal interference. Without an event-location which could be pinpointed, there was no "fix." And yet, the politicians were screaming for a fix. The scientists of the Temporal Corps had explained it to them over and over again, they had explained it to the media, but the question still persisted, always starting with the all-too-familiar "yes, but" phrase. "Yes, but how can it be fixed?" They screamed for an investigation. Who was at fault? Who can the finger be pointed at? If enough money could be spent, surely a solution could be found. Wrong, said the scientists.

There is no solution, because the problem can't be solved. We can't cure the disease, we can only treat the symptoms. As for whose fault it was, finding a scapegoat would accomplish nothing, because it was everybody's fault, the fault of all those people who thought that lunch was free, that something could be gained for nothing, that there was a way to live secure, without the threat of risk. But such an answer was politically unfeasible, and so they didn't want to listen. And they blamed the scientists.

It was similar to what happened to the space program in the latter part of the 20th century. An enviable safety record had lulled the public into complacency.

Budgetary cuts voted by scientifically illiterate legislators steadily reduced the safety factors and created additional pressure to make space exploration more glamorous and relevant, to keep it in the public eye. And then, when an accident occurred, resulting in tragic loss of life, once again, the media and the legislators screamed. How could it have happened? Who was to blame?

The magnitude of the problem was too great for them to comprehend.

And explaining complicated scientific principles to the public in uncomplicated terms took up too much time—it could not be reduced to a simplistic statement or two in a live-minute interview on a news program. And a five-minute attention span was the most that the media could hope for. They wanted it short, informative and simple and if they were told that it could not be short, informative and simple, they became impatient and suspected obfuscation.

Shortly after the Temporal Crisis, as the media had dubbed it, had been publicly announced, a reporter had cornered Delaney at a bar near Pendleton Base, frequented by soldiers of the First Division. She was eager for the "simple truth," as she had put it, that a "frontline soldier" could provide.

"How much time have you got?" Delaney had naively asked her.

"Take as much time as you need," she said. "We'll edit it together later for the broadcast. We just want to hear the simple truth about the Temporal Crisis as a frontline soldier sees it."

Delaney had emptied his glass in a long swallow and leaned back against the bar while they trained the camera on him.

"Well," he said, "the simple truth is not so simple. Basically, the Time Wars were a terrific risk right from the start, but people were either willing to accept the risk or else they simply didn't want to hear about it. I suspect the truth is they just didn't give a damn until something went wrong. And something was bound to go wrong, because we were screwing around with temporal physics."

"What does that mean, exactly?" she had said.

"Well, let's take a real basic example and I'll make it as simple as I can, okay?" Delaney had said. "Let's say that our country had a difference of opinion with the Nippon Conglomerate Empire. It got intense, no negotiated settlement could be reached, and so the grievance was submitted for arbitration to the Referee Corps. A ref was assigned to arbitrate the temporal action that would settle the whole thing. He asked the Nippon government to provide five hundred grunts and he asked our government to provide five hundred grunts.

He selected an historical scenario for the arbitration conflict or the time war, as it’s more popularly called. He decided to use World War II. The troops were cybernetically indoctrinated and clocked back into the past, to fight among the troops of World War II
.
One of our guys got a bit carried away and used a warp grenade instead of a regular 20th century hand grenade. He didn't exactly set off a multimegaton nuclear explosion, he only used a small portion of the energy released by the grenade, no more than would have been released by a conventional 20th century hand grenade. The only problem is, he killed General Dwight D. Eisenhower, who went on to become the President of the United States."

"Did this actually happen?" said the reporter.

"No, of course not, it's only a hypothetical situation," said Delaney.

"Well, now we've got a problem. We've got a fairly large temporal disruption and it has to be adjusted. So an adjustment team is clocked hack into the past, in the hope that something can be done about it before the damage becomes irreversible and a timestream split occurs. Let's say we get lucky. We're able to replace the late General Eisenhower just in time with one of our own people, someone from a special unit formed to deal with just such a situation. It's not an easy job. This person has
been
surgically and cybernetically altered to
become
General Eisenhower. He has to live out the rest of Eisenhower's life,
exactly
as Eisenhower would have lived it, based on what we know of history. A chancy proposition, at best, but it's the most we can do. There are certain to be at least minor discontinuities as a result, but we can bring all of our resources to bear on this and hope that the discontinuities will be relatively minor.

"Meanwhile, things like this have been happening all throughout the timestream, every time we've had a temporal conflict. Sometimes we've adjusted the disruptions. Sometimes we've had to replace historically significant individuals with people of our own. Sometimes we haven't caught the disruption, because it was really very minor. It all started to add up. Maybe it put a strain on temporal inertia and something happened to disturb chronophysical alignment in time and space and another universe somehow came into congruence with our own. I suppose it really doesn't matter how it happened, the point is that it happened. Somehow the timestream became unstable and our timestream intersected another timestream and now the two parallel universes are crisscrossing in time and space, intertwining like a double helix strand of DNA. Every now and then, there occurs an event-location at which both timestreams exist in the same time and space. Crossover becomes possible. And the people in this other timestream are not very happy with us.

"To anticipate your next question, the reason they don't like us very much has to do with that warp grenade our temporal soldier blew up General Eisenhower with. The way a warp grenade works, you set it for the amount of energy you want to use. Let's say you only need about one-tenth of one percent of the energy of the grenade's nuclear explosion. The rest of it is warped into outer space where it goes off, theoretically, without doing any harm. Only as it turns out, the surplus energy of that grenade didn't just go off with a big bang in outer space, as we had thought. Because of the congruence, most of that energy was teleported directly into the alternate universe, where there was one hell of an explosion. And we've been setting off more than just one warp grenade. In other words, we were bombing the hell out of the alternate universe without even realizing it and, understandably, they're somewhat annoyed with us. So now we're at war with them. The Temporal Crisis, as you people in the media call it. Only neither side really wants an all-out war. Nobody could survive that. So instead they concentrate on screwing up our history, in the hope that they can split our timeline and somehow force our universe away from theirs, and we do much the same to them."

"Where does it all end?" the reporter said.

"The hell of it is, it probably doesn't end." Delaney told her. "You see, you could wind up with timestream splits all over the damn place and nobody knows what effect that would have. We could wind up with all of them intersecting. A real mega-Tine War. Their universe is almost a mirror image of ours, but it's not exactly the same. The trouble is, the forces of temporal inertia in both universes are working to bring our two timelines together, so the only thing we can do to keep that from happening is to continue creating disruptions in their timeline while they continue creating disruptions in ours. In order to
keep
our two timelines from becoming one timeline, we have to maintain the instability. But if we maintain the instability, we're threatening our own temporal continuity. It's a Catch-22 situation. The whole thing is liable to collapse at any minute like a house of cards.'•

"So what's the answer?" the reporter said, growing impatient.

"What makes you think I've got an answer?" said Delaney.

"Yes, but surely you must have some ideas about how to resolve the Temporal Crisis. There has to be an answer."

Delaney shrugged. "Not really. In a complex world, I'm afraid there are no simple answers."

"So where does that leave us?" the reporter said, still pressing for an answer.

"I guess it leaves us with a lot of questions to which there are no simple answers," said Delaney wryly. "And that's the 'simple truth' as a 'frontline soldier' sees it."

He watched the report later that night. They had, indeed, edited his answer.

It ran like this:
"We just want to hear the simple truth about the Temporal Crisis as a
frontline soldier sees it."

"Well, the simple truth is the Time Wars were a terrific risk right from the start. They just didn't give a damn until something went wrong. And something was bound
to go wrong. It’s a Catch-22 situation. The whole thing is liable to collapse at any
minute like a house of cards. And that's the simple truth as a frontline soldier sees it."

Delaney had to explain to Forrester about the editing. He received an official reprimand, which Forrester promptly "filed," and specific orders were issued to all military personnel not to speak to members of the media without special authorization. Paranoia settled in to stay.

Delaney wondered what would have happened if he had told them about the Special Operations Group, the First Division's counterpart in the alternate universe, and Project Infiltrator, a
genetic engineering project headed by Dr. Phillipe Moreau, aimed at creating genetically engineered soldiers to be infiltrated into their timeline? What if he had told them that Drakov had kidnapped Moreau from the Project Infiltrator labs and set him to work creating hominoids, creatures bioengineered from human clones and modified with advanced surgical and cybernetic techniques, turned into monstrosities that were no longer human, but something else entirely? And what if he had told them that aside from the Temporal Crisis, they were all fated with the threat of Nikolai Drakov, an
insane criminal genius who wanted nothing less than temporal anarchy, or failing that, an apocalyptic entropy, an end to all of time?

He imagined the reporter saying, "Yes, but what's the answer?"

He imagined himself replying with a variation on an old zen koan. "If the shit hits the fan and there's no one left to smell it, is there a stink?"

He checked his watch. Ransome was late. He should have reported in by now and gone off to relieve Rizzo at Hesketh's apartment. And it would soon be time for him to wake up Steiger, catch a couple of hours sleep himself and then relieve Andre at Conan Doyle's house, so that she could get some rest. It
was
monotonous. Watching and waiting. Something had to break soon. The bathroom door opened and Christine Brant came in. having been relieved at H. Wells' house by Linda Craven.

They were using the bathroom as a clocking in point, with each member of the team assigned a "window" during which they could make temporal transition. Using the bathroom as a temporal staging zone meant that they could all freely move about the rest of the apartment without having to worry about when someone might be clocking in at a certain point—it wouldn't do to be standing on the same place where someone was trying to clock in. The results would be very messy and very fatal. It also meant that in the unlikely event that someone else was present in the apartment, with the bathroom door closed, they would not see anybody suddenly materializing out of thin air. Someone clocking in could simply wait inside the bathroom until whoever it was had gone. As far as using the bathroom for its intended purpose was concerned, they resorted to the one in the adjoining suite.

"Anything?" said Christine Brant.

Delaney shrugged. "Ransome's late reporting in. Otherwise, no changes."

"How's Colonel Steiger holding up?" she said.

"I'm due to wake him in another hour. He's holding up about as well as could be expected, I suppose. He's getting anxious, as are we all. Any sign of Wells?"

She shook her head. "Not yet. Of course, there's no guarantee he'll be coming back to his house. Can I have some of that coffee?"

"Help yourself."

"Thanks." She sat down and poured herself a cup. "What do you think Moreau's going to do with him?" she said.

"I have no idea what to think," Delaney said. "I still don't see how Wells would fit in with what Drakov seems to have planned. Unless he's planning something separate that has to do with Wells." He shook his head.