Free TW07 The Argonaut Affair NEW by Simon Hawke

followed and planned an ambush. And like an idiot, I walked right into it. Where's Andre?"
    "Back at the camp with Jason. We got worried when you didn't come back, so I thought I'd trail you and see if anything went wrong. Obviously, something did."
    "Yes, with me," said Steiger. "I deserve having my skull fractured for letting them come up on me like that. The sponsors of this voyage seem determined not to have their identities revealed. There's something funny going on. Someone's hatching plots, but against whom? Pelias or Jason?"
    "I've been thinking about that, too," Delaney said. "The story told by Apollonius didn't have a great deal of internal consistency. But then it was only a story. It didn't happen in our time line."
    "We don't know that for sure," Steiger said. "For all we know, an event similar to this could actually have occurred sometime in ancient Greece in our own timeline. Perhaps, over the years, embellishments were added to it until it became mythologized. There's no way of reliably dating a myth. Without knowing exactly at what point in time it was supposed to have taken place, there's no way to check it out. And this universe has already proven to have a different chronological timeline."
    Delaney nodded. "True. Just because it's happening here doesn't mean it happened in our universe or that the dates even correspond. Or the events, for that matter. Too bad we can't clock ahead in time and check."
    "How would we know which temporal coordinates to clock to? "Steiger said.
    "There is that," said Delaney. "The way I see it, we've got two separate problems here. One is the possibility that the opposition might become alerted to our presence by means of tracking us through our warp discs. There's not much that can be done about that if it happens. All we can do is minimize the risk by not making any temporal transitions unless it's unavoidable. But then there's the second problem, which is that we don't know for certain just what the historical scenario is here. All we're working from is a bunch of theories and assumptions. I'm not sure I buy the theory that our mythology, or certain aspects of it, might have been the result of some sort of psychic feedback across the congruency, people in our timeline somehow tuning in on events in this universe."
    Steiger grunted. "That does sound pretty wild, but if it's true, it could account for a lot of things, such as various unexplained psychic phenomena in our own universe. But suppose there isn't anything like psychic feedback taking place across the timelines. Then we're confronting an entirely different situation.
    In that case, we can't depend on any information from our own timeline, such as
The Argonautica
of Apollonius, because what we're faced with then is an alternate universe in which events
appear
to be a mirror image of events in our own universe, but they're not the
same
events. They're only similar."
    "Which raises the possibility that in this universe, Jason might
not
have succeeded in his quest," said Delaney.
    "Exactly. So far, we're acting on the assumption that the events concerning Jason will more or less follow the progression of our myth. They have so far, but we can't afford to follow through on that assumption without more information."
    Delaney shook his head. "No, we can't. There's far too much at stake. The problem is there's no way to check it out without clocking ahead. And without proper coordinates, we'd
be
clocking ahead blind.
    We'd have no idea what sort of an environment we might be clocking into or even where to go. If we luck out and experience no problems with transition, we'd risk alerting the opposition by using our warp discs. If they didn't get a direct fix on us and hit us with everything they've got, they'd still know we were conducting a hostile mission in this time period and they'd initiate a search for the confluence point. We can't afford to let them find it. It's our only way back home."
    "I'm thinking that we have a