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unlikely. They were using the personal chronoplates, which
meant that they would be in transit one at a time. One or two
of them lost in the dead zone, maybe. But the entire team? For
the whole team to disappear, as well as those sent after them,
the unthinkable had to have happened.
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.
250 Time Wars #3
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
The Pimpernel Plot
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
252 Time Wars #3
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