Simon Hawke - The Pimpernel Plot

“To cover himself, Darrow made a big show of resigning the directorship, ostensibly in protest over the agency’s being placed under the jurisdiction of the Observer Corps. By that time, I had returned to active duty and was working in the evaluations section as a result of screwing up on the Timekeeper case.”

“Never thought I’d hear you admit it,” said Delaney.

“Be quiet, Finn,” said Forrester. “Go on.”

“Darrow’s last act before resigning was to reinstate me, clandestinely, as a field operative once again. He needed his most experienced agent, otherwise I’d still be sitting at a console. Darrow was afraid to try sending anyone else back. He was on the verge of a nervous breakdown because, quite clearly, the team he had sent back messed up somehow and a timestream split had occurred. We put our heads together with a member of the Referee Corps who shall remain anonymous. This ref had long been sympathetic to the agency and could be trusted not to reveal what had happened to his colleagues, mainly because Darrow had something on him. If Darrow went down, he went down. So, together we reasoned that the original disruption had set up what Mensinger referred to as a ‘ripple’ and that, at some point, the TIA adjustment team had failed in their task and caused an event or a series of events to occur that overcame temporal inertia. Instead of the ripple being smoothed out, it branched off into another timeline. The main problem was that we had no way of knowing exactly when that had occurred or what specific incident or incidents had triggered it.

“Obviously, having caused the split, whichever members of the team survived the incident wound up in the alternate timeline, which they had created. When Darrow sent people back after them, they may have wound up in the second timeline, as well. We’re not sure why, exactly. Nothing like this had ever happened before. Maybe they were lost in transit or caught in some kind of zone of instability and ceased to exist. That’s one for the refs to work on. Frankly, I doubt anyone will ever know the answer.

“Anyway, if we were to assume that Blakeney was the focal point of the scenario, then the point at which the original disruption occurred was not the split point because we had been able to get our man in and there was still, at that point, a Blakeney in existence, even if it was a bogus one. Naturally, this was all guesswork on our part. We know what happened now, but at the time, if we hadn’t acted on that assumption, we might as well have not done anything at all. We figured that the split point had to have occurred within the boundaries of the ripple. Either the death of our man and our inability to compensate for it or something he and the team had done or failed to do had been the direct cause. Only what was that, specifically?”

He shrugged. “There was no way on earth that we could tell unless we had been there. Yet, we had to do something. Darrow was practically hysterical with fear that the timelines would rejoin before we could do something to remedy the situation.”

“The only way that you could remedy the situation once it had occurred,” said Forrester, “would be to wipe out that alternate timeline.”

“Precisely,” Mongoose said. “Now you see why it had to be, why it has to be kept secret. Frankly, we didn’t know what would be worse, failing or succeeding. There was, however, no alternative.

“In order for anyone to be able to clock back safely, they would have to be sent back to a point before the split occurred. Since we had no way of knowing when that was, we decided to make certain that whoever was sent back would arrive moments before the actual disruption occurred.”

“You mean that when I arrived in Minus Time, the original Blakeney was still alive?” said Finn.

Mongoose nodded. “It all required careful timing. First it was necessary for the disruption to be reported, as it should have been right from the beginning. Then it had to be arranged for the adjustment team to arrive upon the scene just before the actual disruption was to occur, not too terribly difficult because we had the connivance of a referee and we’d already been through it once. I underwent cosmetic surgery to become Major Fitzroy. The real Fitzroy, the one whom Cobra killed in the Chat Gris, was a genuine member of the Observer Corps, but he was also a TIA agent. The reason for there being two Fitzroys was that our man in the Referee Corps raised the unpleasant possibility of interference from the alternate timeline.

“It was possible that all the members of the first team and the agents we sent after them had died, but it was also possible that, having caused the split, they then tried to clock back to Plus Time. It would have explained their having disappeared. They clocked forward several centuries, but they arrived in the 27th century of the alternate timeline.

“We began playing with scenarios for what might have happened. If the 27th century they arrived in was significantly, which is to say, obviously different from the one that they had left, they might have realized what had occurred. They might have had the presence of mind to keep their mouths shut and try to find a place for themselves, if that was possible. On the other hand, suppose they did not immediately recognize that they were in a different timeline? What if there was an alternate Darrow heading an alternate TIA and so forth? We could not afford to dismiss that possibility, because the moment that they reported in, our counterparts in the alternate timeline would realize that they were the result of a timestream split. We had to ask ourselves how we would react if we were in their place.

“Once the shock wore off, we would realize that we’d have to take steps to protect our own existence. We’d have to send people back to make certain that events in that particular scenario occurred exactly according to our history. And we would have the advantage in that the people in the original timeline would have no way of knowing what our history was.”

He paused to take a drink and there was dead silence in the room.

“If it was me, living in the alternate timeline,” Mongoose said, “I would have put that TIA team through an exhaustive interrogation. I would have wrung them dry. I would have had to know everything they knew, because my existence would depend upon that information. As it turned out, that was exactly what Cobra must have done. He was good. He was really good. He knew who our top field operative was, yours truly, and he realized that the people in the original timeline would bring in their best people. What he didn’t learn from our agents, he inferred. What he didn’t infer, he got straight from the source. Meaning, he came to us.

“Finn, you arrived somewhat earlier than you thought you did. You presented a slight problem. Andre and Lucas were clocked back and immediately sent on to Richmond, which got them out of the way. You had to be stalled long enough for us to make certain of several things. The moment you materialized, I had to get to you fast, before the aftereffects wore off and you were fully cognizant of your surroundings. Fortunately, I was able to time it just right. Just as you materialized, I injected you with a tranquilizing drug similar to the one we used on Lady Blakeney. Then, while you were out, I clocked you about an hour into the past with a fugue program sequence.”

Finn nodded. “Clever. I was in limbo for an hour, which allowed the disruption to occur and gave you time to do what you had to do. You must have timed the dose real well, because I materialized just as I was coming out of it, thinking I had just arrived. Nice piece of work.”

“What I don’t understand,” said Andre, “is that if we were all clocked back to a point prior to the disruption, then that means that the team you had originally sent back would have been arriving after us. What happened to them?”