“Not especially,” I said. “What I’m wondering is what made you think you could get away with it.”
“I’m afraid I don’t quite understand,” he said, and cocked his head sideways.
“It was a 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 less diffident now, more relaxed, less eager to please. A lot less eager to please.
“Your mistake,” I said, “was in trying to work too many angles at once. What did you have in mind for Blackie—after?”
His face went stiff. “After—what?”
“Whatever it was, it wouldn’t have worked,” I said. “He was onto you, too.”
“… too?” He leaned forward as if puzzled and made a nice hip draw and showed me a strange-looking little gun, all shiny rods and levers.
“You will now tell me all about yourself, Mr. Ravel—or whatever you choose to call yourself.”
“Wrong again—Karg,” 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 lifted the pistol I had palmed while he was arranging the chairs, and shot him under the left eye.
He settled in his chair. His head was bent back over his left shoulder as if he were admiring 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 two hundred pounds of heavy machinery.
Which he was, of course.
3
I went over to the door and listened for sounds that would indicate that someone had heard the shots and felt curious about them. Apparently nobody had. It was that kind of neighborhood.
I laid the Karg out on its back and cut the seal on its reel compartment, lifted out the tape it had been operating on.
It had been suspected back at Central that something outside the usual pattern had been going on back here in the Old Era theater of operations. But not even the Master Timecaster had suspected collusion between Second and Third Era operatives. The tape might be the key the Nexx planners were looking for.
But I still had my professional responsibilities. I suppressed the impulse to cut-and-run and got on with the business at hand.
The tape was almost spent, meaning the Karg’s mission had been almost completed. Well, true enough, but not in quite the way that had been intended. I tucked the reel away in the zip-down pocket inside my shirt and checked the robot’s pockets—all empty—then stripped it and looked fur the ID data, found it printed on the left sole.
It took me twenty minutes to go over the room. I found a brainreader focused on the rocker from one of the dead bulbs in the ceiling light. The Karg had gone to a lot of trouble to make sure he cleaned me before disposing of the remains. I recorded my scan to four-point detail, fussed around a few minutes longer rechecking what I’d already checked, but I was just stalling. I’d done what I’d come here to do. The sequence of events had gone off more or less as planned back at Nexx Central; decoying the Karg into a lonely place for disposal wrapped up the operation. It was time to report in and debrief and get on with the business of remaking the cosmos. I pushed his destruct button, switched off the light, and left the room.
Back down in the street a big square car went by, making a lot of noise in the silence, but no bullets squirted from it. I was almost disappointed. But what the hell: the job was over. My stay here had been nice, but so had a lot of other times and places. This job was no different from any other. I thought about Lisa, waiting for me back at the little house we’d rented six weeks ago, after our four-day honeymoon at Niagara. She’d be getting anxious about now, trying to keep the dinner hot, and wondering what was keeping me.
“Forget it,’ I told myself out loud. “Just get your skull under the cepher and wipe the whole thing, like you always do. You may ache a little for a while, but you won’t know why. It’s just another hazard of the profession.”
I checked my locator and started east, downslope. My game of cat and terrier with the Karg had covered several square miles of the city of Buffalo, New York, T.F. date, 1936. A quick review of my movements from the time of my arrival at the locus told me that I was about a mile and a half from the pickup area, thirty minutes’ walk. I put my thoughts out of gear and did it in twenty-five. I was at the edge of a small park when the gauges said I was within the acceptable point/point range for a transfer back to my Timecast station. A curving path led past a bench and a thick clump of juniper. I stepped into deep shadow—just in case unseen eyes were on me—and tapped out the recall code with my tongue against the trick molars set in my lower jaw; there was a momentary pause before I felt the pickup field impinge on me, then the silent impact of temporal implosion made the ground jump under my feet—
And I was squinting against the dazzling sunlight glaring on Dinosaur Beach.
4
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 inplement Project Timesweep.
The idea wasn’t without logic. 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 early space 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 surprising number of odds and ends, including lumps of meteoric rock and iron, chondrites of clearly earthly origin, possibly volcanic, the mummified body of an astronaut lost on an early space walk, and a number 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 long 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 timeways 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 icecap 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 that the Second Program had to invent its own disasters—which it had, in full measure. Thus the Kargs.
Karg: a corruption of “cargo,” referring to the legal decision as to the status of the machine-men in the great Transport Accommodation Riots of the mid-Twenty-eighth Century.
Kargs, lifeless machines, sent back from the Third Era in the second great Timesweep attempt, designed to correct not only the carnage irresponsibly strewn across the centuries by the Old Era temporal explorers, but to eliminate the even more disastrous effects of the Second Program 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 do: could manipulate affairs without disturbing the delicate and poorly understood equations of vital equilibrium, to 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. The Nexx Timecasters saw clearly that the tamperings of prior eras were all part of a grand patten of confusion; that any effort to manipulate reality via temporal policing was doomed only to further weaken the temporal fabric.
When you patch time, you poke holes in it; and patching the patches makes more holes, requiring still larger patches. It’s a geometric progression that soon gets out of hand; each successive salvage job sends out waves of entropic dislocation that mingle with, reinforce, and complicate the earlier waves—and no amount of paddling the surface of a roiled pond is going to restore it to a mirror surface.