by Anthology
There was an alleymouth a few feet away. We made it in one jump. My little pal had his feet working again, and tried to use them to wreck my knee. I had to bruise his shins a little.
“Easy,” I told him. “That slug changes things. Quiet down and I’ll let go your neck.”
He nodded as well as he could with my thumb where it was and I eased him back against the wall. I put my back against it, beside him, with him between me and the alleymouth. I made a little production of levering back the hammer of my Mauser.
Two or three minutes went past like geologic ages.
“We’ll take a look. You first.” I prodded him forward. Nobody shot at him. I risked a look. Except for a few people not in black overcoats, the sidewalk was empty.
My car was across the street. I walked him across and waited while he got in and slid across under the wheel, then got in after him. There were other parked cars, and plenty of dark windows up above for a sniper to work from, but nobody did.
“309 Turkon Place, you said.” I nudged him with the Mauser. “Let’s go have a look.”
He drove badly, like a middle-aged widow who only learned to drive after her husband died. We clashed gears and ran stoplights across town to the street he had named. It was a badly-lit unpatched brick dead end that rose steeply toward a tangle of telephone poles at the top. The house was tall and narrow, slanted against the sky, showing no lights. I prodded my guide ahead of me along the narrow walk that ran back beside the house, went in via the back door. It resisted a little, but gave without making any more noise than a dropped xylophone.
We stood on some warped linoleum and smelled last week’s cabbage and listened to some dense silence.
“Don’t be afraid,” the little man said. “There’s no one here.” He led me along a passage a little wider than my elbows, past a tarnished mirror and a stand full of umbrellas, up steep steps with black rubber matting held by tarnished brass rods. The flooring creaked on the landing. Another flight brought us into a low-ceilinged hall with gray-painted doors made visible by the pale light coming through a wire-glass skylight.
He found number 9, put an ear against it, opened up and went in. I followed.
It was a small bedroom, with a double bed, a dresser with a doily on it, a straight chair, a rocker, an oval rag rug, a hanging fixture in the center with a colored glass bowl. My host placed the chairs into a cozy tete-a-tete arrangement, offered me the rocker, and perched on the edge of the other.
“Now,” he said, and put his fingertips together comfortably, like a pawnbroker about to beat you down on the value of the family jewels, “I suppose you want to hear all about the man in black, how I knew just when he’d appear, and so on.”
“It was neat routine,” I said. “Up to a point. After you fingered me, if I didn’t buy the act, Blackie would plug me—with a dope dart. If I did—I’d be so grateful, I’d come here.”
“As indeed you have.” My little man looked different now, more relaxed, less eager to please. “I suppose I need not add that the end result will be the same.” He made a nice hip draw and showed me a strange looking little gun, all shiny rods and levers.
“You will now tell me about yourself, Mr. Starv—or whatever you may choose to call yourself.”
“Wrong again—Karge,” I said.
For an instant it didn’t register. Then his fingers twitched and the gun made a spitting sound and needles showered off my chest. I let him fire the full magazine. Then I shot him under the left eye with the pistol I had palmed while he was settling himself on his chair.
He settled further; his head was bent over his left shoulder as if he were trying to admire the water spots on the ceiling. His little pudgy hands opened and closed a couple of times. He leaned sideways quite slowly and hit the floor like a hundred and fifty pounds of heavy machinery.
Which he was, of course.
The shots hadn’t made much noise—no more than the one fired at me by the Enforcer had. I listened, heard nothing in the way of a response. I laid the Karge out on his back—or on its back—and cut the seal on his reel compartment, lifted out the tape he’d been operating on. It was almost spent, indicating that his mission had been almost completed. I checked his pockets but turned up nothing, not even a ball of lint.
It took me twenty minutes to go over the room. I found a brain-reader focused on the rocker from the stained-glass ceiling light. He’d gone to a lot of effort to make sure he cleaned me before disposing of the remains.
I took time to record my scan to four point detail, then went back down to the street. A big, square car went past, making a lot of noise in the silent street, but no bullets squirted from it. I checked my locator and started east, down-slope.
It was a twenty-minute walk to the nearest spot the gauges said was within the acceptable point-point range for a locus transfer.
I tapped out the code with my tongue against the trick molars set in my lower jaw, felt the silent impact of temporal implosion, and was squinting against the dazzling sunlight glaring down on Dinosaur Beach.
My game of cat-and-mouse with the Karge had covered several square miles of the city of Buffalo, New York, T.F. late March, 1936. A quick review of my movements from the time of my arrival at the locus told me that the Timecast station should be about a mile and a half distant, to the southwest, along the beach. I discarded the warmer portions of my costume and started hiking.
The sea in this era—some sixty-five million years B.C.—was south-sea-island blue, stretching wide and placid to the horizon. The long swells coming in off the Eastern Ocean—which would one day become the Atlantic—crashed on the gray sand with the same familiar crump-booom! that I had known in a dozen Eras. It was a comforting sound. It said that after all, the doings of the little creatures that scuttled on her shores were nothing much in the life of Mother Ocean, age five billion and not yet in her prime.
There was a low headland just ahead, from which the station would be visible a mile or so beyond: a small, low, gray-white structure perched on the sand above high tide line, surrounded by tree ferns and club-mosses, not as decoration but to render the installation as inconspicuous as possible, on the theory that if the wild life were either attracted or repelled by strangeness it might introduce an uncharted U-line on the Probability charts which would render a thousand years of painstaking—and painful—temporal mapping invalid.
Inside, Nel Jard, the Chief Timecaster, would have me in for debriefing, would punch his notes into the master plot, and wave me on my way back to Nexx Central, where a new job would be waiting, having nothing to do with the last one. I’d never learn just why the Karge had been placed where it was, what sort of deal it had made with the Enforcers, what part the whole thing played in the larger tapestry of the Nexx grand strategy.
That’s what would have happened. Except that I topped the rise just then and saw the long curve of beach ahead, and the tongue of jungle that stretched down almost to the shore along the ridge. But where the station had been, there was nothing but a smoking crater.
Dinosaur Beach had been so named because a troop of small allosaur-like reptiles had been scurrying along it when the first siting party had fixed-in there. That had been sixty years ago, Nexx Subjective, only a few months after the decision to implement Project Timesweep.
The idea wasn’t without merit. The First Era of time travel had closely resembled the dawn of the space age in some ways—notably, in the trail of rubbish it left behind. In the case of the space garbage, it had taken half a dozen major collisions to convince the authorities of the need to sweep circumterrestrial space clean of fifty years’ debris in the form of spent rocket casings, defunct telemetry gear, and derelict relay satellites long lost track of. In the process they’d turned up a large number of odds and ends of meteoric rock and iron, a few lumps of clearly terrestrial origin, possibly volcanic, the mummified body of an astronaut lost on an early space walk, and a couple of artifacts that the authorities of the day had scratched their
heads over and finally written off as the equivalent of empty beer cans tossed out by visitors from out-system.
That was before the days of Timecasting, of course.
The Timesweep program was a close parallel to the space sweep. The Old Era temporal experimenters had littered the time-ways with everything from early one-way timecans to observation stations, dead bodies, abandoned instruments, weapons and equipment of all sorts, including an automatic mining setup established under the Antarctic ice, which caused headaches at the time of the Big Melt.
Then the three hundred years of the Last Peace put an end to that; and when temporal transfer was rediscovered in early New Era times, the lesson had been heeded. Rigid rules were enforced from the beginning of the Second Program, forbidding all the mistakes that had been made by the First Program pioneers.
Which meant the Second Program had to invent its own disasters—like the one I was looking at.
I had gone flat on the hot sand at first sight of the pit among the blackened stumps of the club-mosses, while a flood of extraneous thoughts went whirling through my tired old brain, as thoughts will in such moments. I had been primed to step out of the heat and the insects and the sand into cool, clean air, soft music, the luxury of a stim-bath and a nap on a real air couch.
But that was all gone to slag now. I hugged the ground and looked down at it, and tried to extract what data I could from what I could see. It wasn’t much.
Item one: Some power had had the will and the way to blast a second-class Nexx staging station out of existence. It seemed they’d used good old-fashioned nuclears for the job, too; nothing so subtle as a temporal lift, or a phase-suppressor.
Item two: The chore had been handled during the ten days N.S. I’d been on location in 1936. There might, or might not, be some message there for me.
I suppressed the desire to jump up and run down for a closer look. I stayed where I was. playing boulder, and looked at the scene some more with gritty eyes that wept copiously in the glare of the tropical Jurassic sun. I didn’t see anything move—which didn’t mean there was nothing there to see. After half an hour of that, I got up and walked down to the ruins.
Ruins was an exaggeration. There was a fused glass pit a hundred yards in diameter surrounded by charred organic matter. That gave me item three:
Nothing had survived—no people, no equipment. Not only would I not have the benefit of soft music and bed to match, there’d be no debriefing, no input of data into the master tape, no replay of the Karge operation tape to give me a clue to Enforcer Strategy. And worst of all, there’d be no outjump to Nexx Central.
Which made things a trifle awkward, since the location of Central was a secret buried under twelve layers of interlocked ciphers in the main tank of the Nexial Brain. Not even the men who built the installation knew its physical and temporal coordinates. The only way to reach it was to be computer-routed via one of the hundred and twelve official staging stations scattered across Old Era time. And not just any station: it had to be the one my personal jumper field was attuned to.
Which was a thin layer of green glass lining a hollow in the sand.
It was one of those times when the mind goes racing around inside the trap of the skull like a mouse in a bucket, making frantic leaps for freedom and falling back painfully on its rear.
On about the tenth lap, an idea bobbed up and grinned a rather ghastly grin.
My personal jump gear, being installed in my body, was intact. All I lacked was a target. But that didn’t mean I couldn’t jump. All it meant was that I wouldn’t know where I’d land—if anywhere.
There had been a lot of horror stories circulated back at Nexx Central about what had happened to people who misfired on a jump. They ranged from piecemeal reception at a dozen stations strung out across a few centuries, to disembodied voices screaming to be let out. Also, there were several rules against it.
The alternative was to set up housekeeping here on the beach, with or without dinosaurs, and hope that a rescue mission arrived before I died of old age, heat, thirst, or reptiles.
I didn’t like the odds, but they were all the odds I had.
I took a final breath of humid beach air, a last look around at the bright, brutal view of sea and sand, the high, empty sky. It seemed to be waiting for something to happen.
The tune I played on the console set in my jaw was different this time, but the effect was much the same: The painless blow of a silent club, the sense of looping the loop through a Universe-sized Klein bottle—
Total darkness and a roar of sound like Niagara Falls going over me in a barrel.
For a few seconds I stood absolutely still, taking a swift inventory of my existence. I seemed to be all here, organized pretty much as usual. The sound went on, the blackness failed to fade. The rule book said that in a case of transfer malfunction to remain immobile and await retrieval, but in this case that might take quite a while. Also, there was the datum that no one had ever lived to report a jump malfunction, which suggested that possibly the rule book was wrong.
I tried to breath, and nothing happened. That decided me. I took a step and emerged as through a curtain into a strange blackish light, shot through with little points of dazzling brilliance, like what you see just before you faint from loss of blood. But before I could put my head between my knees, the dazzle faded and I was looking at the jump room of a regulation Nexx Staging Station. And I could breathe.
I did that for a few moments, then turned and looked at the curtain I had come through. It was a solid wall of beryl-steel, to my knowledge over two meters thick.
Maybe the sound I had heard was the whizzing of molecules of dense metal interpenetrating with my own two hundred pounds of impure water.
That was a phenomenon I’d have to let ride until later. More pressing business called for attention first—such as discovering why the station was as silent as King Sethy’s tomb after the grave robbers finished with it.
It took me ten minutes to check every room on operations level. Nobody was home. The same for the R and R complex. Likewise the equipment division, and the power chamber.
The core sink was drawing normal power, the charge was up on the transmitter plates, the green lights were on all across the panels; but nothing was tapping the station for so much as a microerg.
Which was impossible. The links that tied a staging station to Nexx Central and in turn monitored the activities of personnel operating out of the station always drew at least a trickle of carrier power. They had to, as long as the station existed. A no-drain condition was impossible anywhere in normal space time.
I didn’t like the conclusion, but I reached it anyway.
All the stations were identical; in fact, considering their mass-production by the time-stutter process which distributed them up and down the temporal contour, there’s a school of thought that holds that they are identical; alternate temporal aspects of the same physical matrix. But that was theory, and my present situation was fact. A fact I had to deal with.
I went along the passage to the entry lock—some of the sites are hostile to what Nexx thinks of as ordinary life—cycled it, and almost stepped out.
Not quite.
The ground ended about ten feet from the outflung entry wing. Beyond was a pearly gray mist, swirling against an invisible barrier. I went forward to the edge and lay flat and looked over. I could see the curve of the underside of the patch of solid rock the station perched on. It was as smooth and polished as green glass. Like the green glass crater I’d seen back on the beach.
The station had been scooped out of the rock like a giant dip of ice cream and deposited here, behind a barrier of a kind the scientists of Nexx Central had never dreamed of.
That gave me two or three things to think of. I thought of them while I went back in through the lock, and down the transit tunnel to the transfer booth.
It looked normal. Aside from the absence of a cheery green light to tell me that the field was on sharp focus
to Nexx Central, all was as it should be. The plates were hot, the dial readings normal.
If I stepped inside, I’d be transferred—somewhere.
Some more interesting questions suggested themselves, but I’d already been all over those. I stepped in and the door valved shut and I was alone with my thoughts. Before I could have too many of those I reached out and tripped the Xmit button.
A soundless bomb blew me motionlessly across dimensionless space.
A sense of vertigo that slowly faded; a shimmer of light, as from a reflective surface in constant, restless movement; a hollow, almost metallic sound, coming from below me; a faint sensation of heat and pressure against my side . . .
Sunlight shining on water. The waves slapping the hollow steel pilings of a pier. The pressure of a plank deck on which I was lying—a remote, tentative pressure, like a sun-warmed cloud.
I sat up. The horizon pivoted to lie flat, dancing in the heat-ripples. The spars and masts of a small sailing ship poked up bare against a lush blue sky.
Not a galleon, I realized—at least not a real one. The steel pilings rendered that anachronous. That made it a replica, probably from the Revival, circa 2020 AD. I got to my feet, noticing a curious tendency on the part of my feet to sink into the decking.
I was still dizzy from the shock of the transfer. Otherwise I would probably have stayed where I was until I had sorted through the ramifications of this latest development. Instead, I started toward the end of the pier. It was high and wide—about twenty feet from edge to edge, fifteen feet above the water. From the end I could look down on the deck of the pseudo-galleon, snugged up close against the resilient bumper at the end of the quay. It was a fine reproduction, artfully carved and weather-scarred. Probably with a small reactor below decks, steel armor under the nearoak hull-planking, and luxury accommodations for an operator and a dozen holiday-makers.