by Anthology
Then I saw the dead man lying on the deck. He was face-down at the foot of the mast—a big fellow dressed in sixteenth century costume, soiled and sweat-stained. He looked much too authentic to be part of a game.
I stood still and tried to get it together. Something about what I was looking at bothered me. I wanted to see it more closely. A ladder went down. I descended, jumped the six-foot gap. Nobody came out to see what the disturbance was all about.
The mast cast a black shadow across the hand-hewn deck, across the man lying there, one hand under him, the other outflung. A gun lay a yard from the empty hand. There was a lot of soggy black lace in a black puddle under his throat.
I picked up the gun. It was much heavier than a gun had any right to be. It was a .01 micro jet-gun of Nexx manufacture, with a grip that fitted my hand perfectly.
It ought to. It was my gun. I looked at the hand it had fallen from. It looked like my hand. I didn’t like doing it, but I turned the body over and looked at the face.
It was my face.
The post-mission conditioning that had wiped the whole sequence from my memory—standard practice after a field assignment—broke.
I remembered it now, the whole sequence: the capture of the Karge-operated ship which had been operating in New Spanish waters, the flight across the decks in company with a party of English seamen, the cornering of the android—
But it hadn’t ended like this. I had shot the Karge, not the reverse. I had brought the captive vessel—a specially-equipped Karge operations unit in disguise—to the bulk transfer point at Locus Q-997, from which it had been transmitted back to Nexx Central for total intelligence analysis.
But here it was, still tied to the pier at the transfer station. With me lying on the deck, very dead indeed from a large-caliber bullet through the throat.
Something was very wrong. It hadn’t happened that way—not in my time track. Then, suddenly, I understood the magnitude of the trap I had blundered into.
A Nexx agent is a hard man to get rid of: hard to kill, hard to immobilize, because he’s protected by all the devices of a rather advanced science.
But if he can be marooned in the closed loop of an unrealized alternate reality—a pseudo-reality from which there can be no outlet to a future which doesn’t exist—then he’s out of action forever.
I could live a long time here. There’d be food and water and a place to sleep; but no escape, ever; no trace on any recording instrument to show where I had gone . . .
But I wouldn’t dwell on that particular line of thought right now—not yet. Not until it was the only thought left for me to have. Like a locked-out motorist patting his pockets three times looking for the key he can see hanging in the ignition, I patted my mental pockets looking for an out.
I didn’t like the one I found, but I liked it better than not finding it.
My personal jump mechanism was built into me, tuned to me. And its duplicate was built into the corpse lying at my feet. Just what it might be focused on was an open question; it would depend on what had been in the dead man’s mind at the instant of death.
The circuitry of the jump device—from antennae to power coils—consisted largely of the nervous system of the owner. Whether it was still functional depended on how long “I” had been dead. I squatted and put two fingers against the dead neck.
Barely cool. It only takes five minutes without oxygen for irreversible brain damage to occur. What effect that would have was a mystery, but there was no time to weigh odds.
The corpse’s jaws were locked hard, fortunately in a half-open position. I got a finger inside and tried my code on the molar installation.
A giant clapped his hands together, with me in the middle.
Twilight, on a curved, tree-shaded street. Autumn leaves underfoot, clotted against the curbing, and blowing in the cold, wet wind. Low buildings set well back, with soft light coming from the windows. Tended lawns and gardens, polished automobiles in hedge-lined drives. I was directly opposite the front door of a gray field stone house. The door opened. I stepped out.
This time I was prepared. Not really prepared, but half expecting it, like an unlucky card player turning up a losing card.
Time: About ten years earlier, NS. Or the year 1968, local. Place, a village in the mid-western U.S.A. I had jumped back into my own past—one of my first assignments, long ago completed, filed in the master tape, a part of Timesweep history.
But not any more. The case was reopened on the submission of new evidence. I was doubled back on my own time track.
The fact that this was a violation of every natural law governing time travel was only a minor aspect of the situation.
The past that Nexx Central had painfully rebuilt to eliminate the disastrous results of Old Era time meddling was coming unstuck.
And if one piece of the new mosaic that was being so carefully assembled was coming unglued—then everything that had been built on it was likewise on the skids, ready to slide down and let the whole complex and artificial structure collapse in a heap of temporal rubble that neither Nexx Central or anyone else would be able to salvage.
With the proper lever, you can move worlds; but you need a solid place to stand. That had been Nexx Central’s job for the past six decades: to build a platform in the remote pre-Era on which all the later structure would be built.
And it looked as though it had failed.
I watched myself—ten years younger—step out into the chilly twilight, close the door, through which I caught just a glimpse of a cozy room, and a pretty girl smiling good-bye. My alter ego turned toward the upper end of the street, set off at a brisk walk. I placed the time then.
I had spent three months in the village, from late summer to autumn. The job had been a waiting game, giving the local Karge time to betray himself. He had done so, and I had spotted it; a too-clever craftsman, turning out hand tools, the design of which was based on alloys and principles that wouldn’t be invented for another century.
I had done my job and made my report and been ordered back. I had wanted to explain to Lisa, the girl in the house; but, of course, that had been impossible. I had stepped out for a six-pack of ale, and had never come back. It was common sense, as well as regulations, but my heart wasn’t in it. Her face had haunted me as I left to go to the point/point site for transfer back to Central.
As it was haunting the other me now. This was that last night. I was on my way back to Nexx Central now. It would be a ten-minute walk into the forest that grew down to the outskirts of the village. There I would activate the jump field and leave the twentieth century ten-thousand years behind. And an hour later even the memory would be gone.
I picked the darkest side of the street and followed myself toward the woods.
I caught up with myself mooching around in the tangle of wild berry bushes I remembered from last time, homing in on the optimum signal from my locator. This had been my first field transfer, and
I hadn’t been totally certain the system would work.
I came up fast, skirted the position and worked my way up to within twenty feet of take-off position. The other me was looking nervous and unhappy, a feeling I fully sympathized with.
I gained another six feet, smooth and quiet. I’d learned a lot of field technique since the last time I’d been on this spot. I watched the other me brace himself, grit my teeth, and tap out the code—
Two jumps, and I was behind me; I grabbed me by both leather sleeves from behind, up high, slammed my elbows together, whirled me, and gave me a hearty shove into the brambles just as the field closed around me, and threw me a million miles down a dark tunnel full of solid rock.
Someone was shaking me. I tried to summon up enough strength for a groan, didn’t make it, opened my eyes instead.
I was looking up into my own face.
For a few whirly instants I thought the younger me had made a nice comeback from the berry bushes and laid me out from behind.
Then I not
iced the lines in the face, and the hollow cheeks. The clothes this new me was wearing were identical with the ones I had on, except for being somewhat more travel stained. And there was a nice bruise above the right eye that I didn’t remember getting.
“Listen carefully,” my voice said to me. “I’ve come full circle. Dead end. Closed loop. No way out—except one—maybe. I don’t like it much, but I don’t see any alternative. Last time around, we had the same talk—but I was on the floor then, and another version of us was here ahead of me with the same proposal. I didn’t like it. I thought there had to be another way. I went on—and wound up back here. Only this time I’m the welcoming committee.”
He unholstered the gun at his hip and held it out.
“I . . . we’re . . . being manipulated. All the evidence shows that. I don’t know what the objective is, but we have to break the cycle. You have to break it. Take this and shoot me through the head.”
I got up on my elbows, which was easier than packing a grand piano up the Matterhorn, and shook my head, both in negation and to clear some of the fog. That was a mistake. It just made it throb worse.
“I know all the arguments,” my future self was saying. “I used them myself, about ten days ago. That’s the size of this little temporal enclave we have all to ourselves. But they’re no good. This is the one real change we can introduce.”
“You’re out of your mind,” I said. “I’m not the suicidal type—even if the me I’m killing is you.”
“That’s what they’re counting on. It worked, too, with me. I wouldn’t do it.” He weighed the gun on his palm and looked at me very coldly indeed.
“If I thought shooting you would help, I’d do it without a tremor,” he said. He was definitely he now. “Why don’t you?”
“Because the next room is full of bones,” he said with a smile that wasn’t pretty. “Our bones. Plus the latest addition, which still has a little spoiled meat on it. That’s what’s in store for me. Starvation. So it’s up to you.”
“Nightmare,” I said, and started to lie back and try for a pleasanter dream,
“Uh-huh—but you’re awake,” he said, and caught my hand and shoved the gun into it.
“Do it now—before I lose my nerve!”
I made quite a bit of noise groaning, getting to my feet. I ached all over.
“You weren’t quite in focal position on the jump here,” he explained to me. “You cracked like a whip. Lucky nothing’s seriously dislocated.”
‘“Let’s talk a little sense,” I said. “Killing you won’t change anything. What I could do alone we could do better together.”
“Wrong. This is a jump station, or a mirror-image of one. Complete except for the small detail that the jump field’s operating in a closed loop. Outside, there’s nothing.”
“You mean—this is the same—”
“Right. That was the first time around. You jumped out into a non-object dead end. You were smart, you figured a way out—but they were ahead of us there, too. The circle’s still closed—and here you are. You can jump out again, and repeat the process. That’s all.”
“Suppose I jump back to the wharf and don’t use the corpse’s jump gear—”
“Then you’ll starve there.”
“All right, suppose I make the second jump, but don’t clobber myself—”
“Same result. He leaves, you’re stranded.”
“Maybe not. There’d be food there. I could survive, maybe eventually be picked up—”
“Negative. I’ve been all over that. You’d die there. Maybe after a long life, or maybe a short one. Same result.”
“What good will shooting you do?”
“I’m not sure. But it would introduce a brand-new element into the equation—like cheating at solitaire.”
I argued a little more. He took me on a tour of the station. I looked out at the pearly mist, poked into various rooms. Then he showed me the bone room.
I think the smell convinced me. I lifted the gun and flipped off the safety.
“Turn around,” I snapped at him. He did.
“There’s one consoling possibility,” he said. “This might have the effect of—”
The shot cut off whatever it was he was going to say, knocked him forward as if he’d been jerked by a rope around the neck. I got just a quick flash of the hole I’d blown in the back of his skull before a fire that blazed brighter than the sun leaped up in my brain and burned away the walls that had caged me in.
I was a giant eye, looking down on a tiny stage. I saw myself, an agent of Nexx Central, moving through the scenes of ancient Buffalo, weaving my petty net around the Karge. Karge, a corruption of “cargo,” referring to the legal decision as to the status of the machine-men in the great Transport Accommodations riots of the mid Twenty-eighth Century.
Karges, lifeless machines, sent back from the Third Era in the second great Timesweep, attempting to correct not only the carnage irresponsibly strewn by the primitive Old Era temporal explorers, but to eliminate the even more destructive effects of the New Era Timesweep Enforcers.
The Third Era had recognized the impossibility of correcting the effects of human interference with more human interference.
Machines which registered neutral on the life-balance scales could do what men could not—could restore the integrity of the Temporal Core.
Or so they thought.
After the Great Collapse and the long night that followed, Nexx Central had arisen to control the Fourth Era. They saw that the tamperings of prior eras were all a part of the grand pattern; that any effort to manipulate reality via temporal policing was doomed only to weaken the temporal fabric.
Thus, my job as a field agent of Nexx: To cancel out the efforts of all of them; to allow the wound in time to heal; for the great stem of Life to grow strong again.
How foolish it all seemed now. Was it possible that the theoreticians of Nexx Central failed to recognize that their own efforts were no different from those of earlier Timesweepers? And that . . .
There was another thought there, a vast one; but before I could grasp it, the instant of insight faded and left me standing over the body of the murdered man, with a wisp of smoke curling from the gun in my hand and the echoes of something immeasurable and beyond value ringing down the corridors of my brain. And out of the echoes, one clear realization emerged: Timesweeping was a fallacy; but it was a fallacy practiced not only by the experimenters of the New Era and the misguided fixers of the Third Era, but also by the experts of Nexx Central.
There was, also, another power.
A power greater than Nexx Central, that had tried to sweep me under the rug—and had almost made it. I had been manipulated as neatly as I had maneuvered the Karge and the Enforcer, back in Buffalo. I had been hurried along, kept off balance, shunted into a closed cycle which should have taken me out of play for all time.
As it would have, if there hadn’t been one small factor that they had missed.
My alter ego had died in my presence—and his mind-field, in the instant of the destruction of the organic generator which created and supported it, had jumped to, merged with mine.
For a fraction of a second, I had enjoyed an operative IQ which I estimated at a minimum of 250.
And while I was still mulling over the ramifications of that realization, the walls faded around me and I was standing in the receptor vault at Nexx Central.
There was the cold glare of the high ceiling on white walls, the hum of the field-focusing coils, the sharp odors of ozone and hot metal in the air—all familiar, if not homey. What wasn’t familiar was the squad of armed men in the gray uniforms of Nexx security guards. They were formed up in a circle, with me at the center; and in every pair of hands was an implosion rifle, aimed at my head. An orange light shone in my face—a damper field projector.
I got the idea. I raised my hands—slowly. One man came in and frisked me, lifted my gun and several other items of external equipment. The captain motioned.
Keeping formation, they walked me out of the vault, along a corridor, through two sets of armored doors and onto a stretch of gray carpet before the wide, flat desk of the Timecaster in Charge, Nexx Central.
He was a broad, square-faced, powerful man, clear-featured, his intellect as incisive as his speech. He dismissed the guard—all but two—and pointed to a chair.
“Sit down, Agent,” he said. I sat.
“You deviated from your instructions,” he said. There was no anger in his tone, no accusation, not even any curiosity.
“That’s right, I did,” I said.
“Your mission was the execution of the Enforcer DVK-Z-97, with the ancillary goal of capture, intact, of a Karge operative unit, Series H, ID 453.” He said it as though I hadn’t spoken. This time I didn’t answer.
“You failed to effect the capture,” he went on. “Instead, you destroyed the Karge brain. And you made no effort to carry out the execution of the Enforcer.”
What he said was true. There was no point in denying it, any more than there was in confirming it.
“Since no basis for such actions within the framework of your known psychindex exists, it is clear that your motives must be sought outside the context of the Nexx policy. Clearly, any assumption involving your subversion by prior temporal powers is insupportable. Ergo—you represent a force not yet in subjective existence.”
“Isn’t that a case of trying to wag the dog with the tail?” I said. “You’re postulating a Fifth Era just to give me a motive. Maybe I just fouled up the assignment. Maybe I went off my skids. Maybe—”
“You may drop the Old Era persona now, Agent. Aside from the deductive conclusion, I have the evidence of your accidentally revealed intellectual resources. In the moment of crisis, you registered in the third psychometric range. No human brain known to have existed has ever attained that level. I point this out so as to make plain to you the fruitlessness of denying the obvious.”
“I was wrong,” I said. “You’re not postulating a Fifth Era.”
He looked mildly interested.