"Of course they always get it wrong," said Agent Blachow, as she and Agent Lavoie slipped into the guest suite of the governor's residence in Sarajevo, on June 28, 1914, 9:08 AM. Agent Blachow headed straight for an ornate tea service standing in the corner. She lifted the lid from a carafe of coffee and slipped a thin, black instrument into the murky liquid. "They focus on the big stuff. Important people, mostly. Life and death. Killing Hitler. Saving Caesar. Childish, really." She shook the instrument dry and glanced at its readout. "Room temperature. That should make things interesting." She carefully replaced the lid before both agents irised out.
They irised in next to a small cluster of yurts on the windswept Mongolian plains, near the end of the twelfth century A.D. It was an hour before dawn. "What they can't seem to wrap their heads around," continued Agent Blachow as she peered at the ground around her feet, "is that the greater portion of history is shaped by happenstance. Ah, this will do." She picked up a fist-sized rock. "It's the little things, almost every time. A splinter. A misspoken word. A button missing from your shirt."
Reflexively, Agent Lavoie glanced down at his own uniform. In fact, there was a button missing from the front of his tunic. A couple of purple threads hung loosely from the spot where it had been.
Agent Blachow dropped the rock in front of the entrance to the largest, most important-looking yurt. The tall grass just barely concealed it from view. They irised out as the outriders began coming in with the dawn.
"Which is not to say that they don't cause plenty of trouble just by trying, of course. Muck about in the garden with a backhoe, and eventually you'll crush a few flowers," said Agent Blachow, as they irised into the early Oligocene, somewhere on the northern edge of the Indian subcontinent. The ground shuddered as a shaggy indricotherium heaved itself in the general direction of a nearby copse of trees. Agent Blachow unclipped the collapser from her belt, aimed, and activated the beam. The giant ungulate suddenly diminished, shrinking in perspective as though it were moving away from them at high speed. In less than a second it dwindled to a single point and vanished.
Agent Blachow bent down to inspect a tiny blossom, its fiery-orange petals unlike any of the surrounding plants, that had been directly in the indricotherium's path. "That was close. Details get changed. Parallels get created. Sometimes they're nearly identical, sometimes they're widely divergent. And sometimes, they're explicitly contradictory. That's where we run into problems."
They irised onto the maintenance walkway of an airship cruising high above the skyline of Empire City. It was Year 54 of the New Century. Agent Blachow lifted a key from a box labeled EMERGENCY ELECTRO-PNEUMATIC SYSTEMS ACCESS and dropped it through a narrow grate. "Potentiality has its own gravity; it wants to resolve itself, to become actuality. But contradictory parallels repulse each other. All that potentiality is forced up into the air, so to speak, like two same-poled magnets in a bowl, pushing each other up and out to the edges."
They irised into the Lincoln Bedroom during the third (and most notorious) term of President Hinckley's administration. Moonlight from the windows cast the room into deep shadow. Ignoring the tangled and snoring figures in the big poster bed, Agent Blachow picked up a running shoe and yanked on one of its laces until it broke. "Umph. Enough of that sort of thing, and you end up with a very volatile situation. So that's where the Quincunx Institute comes in."
They irised to a shantytown huddled at the edge of the vast Brazilian Ashlands. Agent Blachow blew into a tiny, silver whistle, producing no audible sound, until somewhere nearby a dog woke up and began to bark. "We make adjustments, resolve the paradox, bring the opposing parallels back into conjunction. Release all that potential energy back into the time stream, where it belongs."
They irised into a boardroom on the 116th floor of a skyscraper in downtown New Mohenjo-Daro, in Vikram Samvent 3012. The room was dominated by a massive onyx-topped conference table, with a wireless netnode made of green jade, carved to look like Shiva in his Nataraja aspect, at one end. Agent Blachow nudged the statue a few inches closer to the edge. "Once you've finished your preliminary training, we'll send you out to do adjustments on your own. Needless to say, this is a big responsibility. Espionage is a major concern, of course. If they ever got hold of our incidence charts and screening technology, there's no telling how much damage they could do."
They irised into what appeared to be a large broom closet. The air was close with dust and the smell of cleaning supplies.
"And here we are." Agent Blachow unclipped her collapser and pointed it at Lavoie. "You were good, I'll give you that. But I've been trained to spot double agents. You never had a chance, I'm afraid. A shame, really. I think you could have had potential."
A faint ticking sound made them both glance down. A large, purple button lay at their feet.
Agent Blachow thumbed the activation pad. Nothing happened. She turned the collapser over; its battery compartment was inexplicably empty.
"Sorry," said Agent Lavoie. "I'm afraid you're in the wrong parallel." He activated his own collapser, and Blachow's scream was like a tape winding too fast on the reel, pitch-bending up into a warbling hum, and then silence.
Agent Lavoie picked up the button from the floor. He looked down at his tunic. No buttons were missing. They weren't even loose.
He pinched the 'spitter on his collar and said, "Lavoie to QCHQ. Mission accomplished. The mole is flushed. I repeat: the mole is flushed."
"Good to hear," said the 'spitter in a distant, tinny voice. "He give you any trouble?"
"She," corrected Lavoie. "And no. Got some turbulence from the parallel, though. Kept trying to resolve itself, right down to the wire." He chuckled. "At the end, she was convinced that she was the agent, and I was the traitor."
There was the briefest hesitation from the 'spitter. "Excellent work, Agent. Hang on, we'll iris you in from here."
A moment later, the broom closet was empty.
A moment after that, and it had always been.
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