Simon Hawke - Ivanhoe Gambit

"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?"

"Well, there is the possibility that in order to avoid the paradox, we're going to have to kill him ourselves. And in that case, which one of us is going to volunteer?"

It was quiet and peaceful in Sherwood Forest. Finn and Bobby had walked all morning and now, at midday, they had stopped to rest by the side of the road, really little more than a narrow dirt path running through the forest, wide enough to permit two horses to travel closely side by side. They were not on horseback, however. They traveled on foot, at a leisurely pace. For a long time, both men had walked in silence, mulling over recent developments, especially what had happened in Lucas Priest's pavilion. The atmosphere in Sherwood Forest was conducive to quiet contemplation. All morning, they had not run into any other travelers. It was a bucolic scene, with the silence broken only by birdsong and the occasional hectic rustling of some small animal hurtling through the brush, frightened by their presence. The tree boughs made a canopy above them, through which shafts of sunlight streamed down to dapple the ground with light and shadow.

Finn had shot a rabbit and dressed it. They had cooked it on a spit and washed it down with cheap wine that tasted far better than it was supposed to. In another time and in another place, it would have seemed a very primitive and unsatisfactory repast, but in Sherwood Forest, it made for a veritable feast.

Finn leaned back against a large oak tree and lighted a cigarette. It was strictly against regulations, but neither of them cared. There was no one there to see them, so they passed the precious cigarette back and forth between them, hiding it with their hands just in case, staying very near the fire so that the smoke would not seem too noticeable to a prying eye. Finn had managed to smuggle several of the cigarettes from their island training base and he planned to ration them out carefully. They smoked in silence, neither man speaking until they were through. Then Finn field stripped the butt, shredding it and dropping what was left into the fire, which had almost burned out. That done, he leaned back against the tree trunk once again and shut his eyes.

"Finn?" said Bobby.

"Mmmm?"

"Suppose Hooker figures it out?"

Finn sighed, "It's possible, of course, but I don't think he will."

"Don't underestimate him just because he's still pretty green," said Bobby.

"No, that wasn't what I meant. This is going to sound pretty goddamn cold, but I don't think he'll knock it because, quite simply, he wants to live. When you're already predisposed toward one condition, your mind will tend to avoid considering any possible alternatives."

"I suppose you're probably right," said Bobby. "He seized on that bit of double-talk you fed him and hung onto it for all he was worth. He kept telling me how careful he was going to be, how he was going to refine paranoia to an art. He tried to make light of it, but he's pretty scared."

"Wouldn't you be?"

"I honestly don't know. I've been trying to put myself in his place and I just can't do it. I get sick just thinking about it."

"That's good," said Finn. "Keep thinking about it. It'll help you deal with Goldblum when the time comes."

"Yeah. I don't even know the man and I already hate him more than I've ever hated anyone in my entire life."

Finn nodded.

"But then I find myself thinking, perhaps he's really not to blame. What he's done is not the act of a rational man. He's sick, Finn. He's insane."

"Don't leave any room inside yourself for pity," Finn said. "Within the framework of their own insanity, people like that can be very rational, indeed. He's smarter than you are. Otherwise he'd never have made it as a referee. Don't ever make the mistake of underestimating your enemy or feeling sorry for him. That's giving your enemy an advantage over you and Goldblum already has us pretty well outgunned."

"Yeah, tell me about it."

"Wish to hell we could get our hands on a chronoplate," said Finn. "Let me know if you see any lying around."

"Lousy army," Bobby said.

"It's a living."

Bobby was silent for a moment. "It's more than that for you," he said after a moment. "It's a way of life, isn't it? I can't conceive of myself finishing up my tour of duty and then re-upping. To me, that's crazy."

"I guess maybe it is," said Finn.

"How old are you, Finn?"

"A hundred and six."

Bobby snorted. "I'm only sixty. And Hooker, Christ, nineteen years old! To have to go that young… I wish to God there was some other way."

"So do I," said Finn.

"Why do we do it?"

"I can't come up with any answer better than Lord Tennyson's," said Finn.

"I don't mean that," said Bobby. "I don't mean why do we do it, I mean why continue with these crazy time wars? Considering the risks involved, I just can't understand why they continue. Why can't we just stop it before something really nasty happens?"

"It may already have happened," said Finn. "That's why we're here. As far as stopping it goes, figure out when the arms race started, whenever in hell that was, and ask yourself why they didn't stop it then. Somebody would have had to stop it first. Your trouble is that you're thinking like a rational human being, not like a politician. Go back as far as you like, to the Belter Wars, the nuclear arms race, the first atomic bomb… Okay, we've got the technology and we know how dangerous it is and how dangerous it is to escalate. To continue on the same course would be insane. But if we stop, there's no guarantee that they will stop and so the game of leapfrog continues. The trouble is that the people who make those damn decisions are never the ones most qualified to make them. Back when the time wars started, nobody fully understood the risks. You can't change history, right? You can't change the past, it's absolute. Anything you do back in the past will have to be canceled out one way or another by the inertia of time. And that's correct, but it's only partially correct. It's like I told Lucas before about diverting the river. Follow the analogy. You drop a big rock in the river, you're going to create a splash and make some eddies, which will dissipate in the flow eventually. That's why if you kill some poor redcoat at Breed's Hill, you're not taking much of a risk of changing the course of history."

"Unless you went back to the time of the Revolutionary War and snuffed George Washington," said Bobby.

"True," said Finn, "but nobody believed that was possible. They thought something would have happened to prevent it. But then there were anomalies, such as the Bathurst Incident, which Mensinger cited, the case of the British diplomat in Austria whose carriage dropped him off in an open courtyard. He walked around in front of the horses and simply disappeared, never to be heard from again. It didn't change the course of history, perhaps, but how do you ever really know for sure? Mensinger proved that parallel timelines could exist and that a split timeline will eventually rejoin. You take an even bigger boulder, some huge goddamn piece of rock, and drop it in the river and it will split the river, but the water will flow around the boulder and the twin streams will rejoin, forming a single stream once again. It's what happens during that split that scares the shit out of everybody. That's when they started getting really paranoid, but they were just as paranoid that the other side wouldn't stop if they did. So the Referee Corps got more power, they got really strict about soldiers killed in action… You've got to bring back your dead because you never know just what might happen. You've got to send your Search and Retrieve units back to find your MIAs and you worry like hell when they can't. So you're sitting on a powder keg that could blow up beneath you. Does that worry anybody? Some, but not enough. You give 'em that argument and they'll say that that's what people said about nuclear waste and radioactive fallout, they said it about the hydrogen bomb, they said that sparks from the smokestacks of trains would burn down the countryside, they even predicted that the world would end in violence when the crossbow was invented. And we're all still here."