TW09 The Lilliput Legion NEW by Simon Hawke Page A

steely gaze on Priest. "You
will
control it. You will
learn.
You have become the living embodiment of my life's work, Priest. I brought you back from death for this and I'll be damned if I'm going to allow you to give up!"
    "It doesn't look as if I have much choice, does it?" Lucas k said, rubbing his aching head.
    He lit up a cigarette and inhaled deeply. The simple act of smoking helped to keep his mind occupied. It was excruciatingly difficult trying to control his thoughts. It had never before occurred to him just how exhausting it could be. Random thoughts were taken for granted by most people, but unlike most people—in fact, unlike anyone else in the entire universe—Lucas Priest could no longer afford to take random thoughts for granted. A random thought could mean disaster for him now. And his thoughts were becoming increasingly harder to control. A person could concentrate only for so long and then something had to give. Lucas was tired. And he was afraid.
    He had always thought of Dr. Darkness as a brilliant scientist, eccentric, highly idiosyncratic and unpredictable, but it went beyond that. Dr. Darkness was a madman. Not a raving lunatic, but a madman just the same. It was often said that there was an exceedingly fine line between genius and insanity. When had Darkness slipped over the edge? Was it after his invention of the warp grenade, the most devastating weapon known to man? Perhaps his sanity had been derailed by the knowledge that his invention had been responsible for the loss of billions of lives, when the surplus nuclear energy of exploding warp grenades was mistakenly clocked into a parallel universe, setting off the war between the timelines. Or maybe he lost it after the disastrous experiment in which his atomic structure became permanently tachyonized, turning him into the man who was faster than light. There were so many cataclysmic upheavals in the life of Dr. Darkness, so much pressure brought to bear upon his fragile genius that it was a wonder he had not snapped completely.
    Dr. Darkness never spoke about his past. Lucas knew nothing about it whatsoever prior to the event that gave him both his fame and infamy. After years of laboring as an obscure research scientist in the Temporal Army Ordnance Division, Darkness had invented the terrifying warp grenade purely as an accidental by-product of his own independent work in temporal translocation.
    He had begun by working on voice and image communication by tachyon radio transmission. He eventually achieved a method of communication at six hundred times the speed of light, but that still wasn't good enough. He wanted it to be instantaneous, even over distances measured in hundreds of light years. Working from the obscure zen mathematics based upon Georg Cantor's theory of transfinite numbers, Darkness found a way to make his tachyon beam move more quickly by sending it through an Einstein-Rosen Bridge, more commonly known as a "space warp." The result was instantaneous transmission, going from point A to point B without having to cover the distance in between. The warp grenade was merely an incidental by-product of this discovery.
    It occurred to Darkness one day that his method of translocation through an Einstein-Rosen Bridge could be applied to nuclear devices, allowing unprecedented control of nuclear explosions and drastically limiting fallout, in some cases almost eliminating it entirely. Having explored this idea merely as an intellectual exercise in abstract theory, Darkness lost interest in it.
    However, since the Temporal Army Ordnance Division took control of all the paperwork and computer data generated by its scientists, from complex equations down to incidental doodles done on Temporal Army time and Temporal Army facilities, the end result of this "intellectual exercise in abstract theory" was the warp grenade, a combination nuclear device and time machine, small enough to held in one hand and capable of adjustable, transtemporal