Upfall

"I meant you professor" said the Prime Minister sharply, his face a bit flushed. Feldhandler ignored him and allowed Mina to take his place at the table. She sat down confidently, evincing no qualms at the Prime Minister's words. Feldhandler took Mina's seat along the wall.

The Prime Minister's face grew a shade redder.

"What General Brom and Dr. Kaplinsky are referring to is the danger of causal paradoxes should the device embark on a temporal distortion of more than a few seconds" Mina began. "The device was designed as a covert transportation vehicle for special operations forces, as demonstrated in the Iranian raid. But as we all know from basic physics, space and time are continuums, which are not severable. All spatial displacement also involves displacement in time. Where time itself is not a critical factor in the mission, temporal displacement need only last a matter of seconds. So far as we know, this is too little to create any causal paradoxes."

Miriam Ben Nun was the only other woman in the room besides Mina and held the vague position of Minister Without Portfolio. She was another powerful political rival of the Prime Minister, who had forced her way into the security cabinet as a result of Israel's brutal and counter-productive coalition politics, despite the fact that she lacked any background in military or scientific matters. Ben Nun had remained silent up to this time but now interrupted Mina's mini-lecture.

"What, again, is a causal paradox? The Prime Minister briefed me about this, but I think he left out a detail or two, which he does now and again." Arbel smiled, but nobody else did.

"In simple terms" explained Mina "a causal paradox could occur if an actor traveled back in time and altered future events in some way. The classic example being killing one's own grandfather."

"Like that old science fiction story where a man goes back in time and steps on a frog."

"Butterfly" corrected Mina the minister, "but yes, that's the point."

"The story was good but the movie sucked" noted Arbel. That brought a snort from Feldhandler—the first good humor he'd shown. Yatom looked over at him again, this time stone faced. They were wasting the commando‘s time.

"We don't know if causal paradoxes are even possible" Mina continued. "It could be nature forbids them in some manner. In all our testing prior to the Iran mission temporal displacements were so brief, that if there was any paradox causing event, we haven't noticed it."

"But how would you notice it?" asked Kaplinsky. "It's happened in your past. You wouldn't even know it. That's been my objection to this project from the start. Now you're talking about a deliberate temporal displacement of several minutes."

"Let her finish" said Ben Nun tartly, dismissing Kaplinsky with a wave of a well manicured hand.

"What we are proposing for Operation Slingshot" said Mina "is a small temporal displacement of a few moments, that would allow Colonel Yatom‘s sarayet to transit to the immediate past, after the target has come into the clear and been identified."

"Our problem" said Yatom speaking in his slow phlegmatic style "has been that the target is extremely elusive. The target only leaves his protected bunkers for moments at a time, before either reentering, or emerging into a situation—like a public rally or meeting—that prohibits an operation." Yatom glanced around the room dourly. "If we had access to those few moments when he is exposed, we could liquidate him. We could do this by knowing in the present, through say observation via a drone, and by transiting immediately back to that time to make the hit. It would only be a few minutes."

"Can't an aircraft do this in real time—that‘s what I don't understand" asked Arbel, ignoring Yatom and directing his question to the Chief of Staff.

"The short answer is" answered Harel "that we would have hit the target already were that possible. So far it has not been. The actual OODA loop, which appears lighting fast in movies, is just not that efficient."

"OODA loop?" said Ben Nun.

"An American term" answered Harel "coined by a man named John Boyd. It stands for, in English" he continued, now switching to that language from Hebrew "Observe-Orient-Decide-Act. The fact is, Hezbollah knows our OODA loop, and as a result can frustrate us—have frustrated us."

"But not" concluded Yatom emphatically "if we can get within their OODA loop by moving, literally, back into it temporally."

"We don't believe that this will cause a serious paradox" continued Mina. "If it could, then the Device just would not function. In other words, we can't use the device beyond nature's own limits, and we appear to be acting within those. A displacement of a few minutes appears entirely feasible..."