“I was wrong,” I said.
He looked at me, waiting. I had his attention now.
“You’re not postulating a Fifth Era,” I said. “You’re postulating a Sixth.”
“What is the basis for that astonishing statement?” he said, not looking astonished.
“Easy,” I said. “You’re Fifth Era. I should have seen it sooner. You’ve infiltrated Nexx Central.”
He gave me another thirty seconds of the frosty glare; then he relaxed—about a millimicron.
“And you’ve infiltrated our infiltration,” he said. I glanced at the two gun-boys behind him; they seemed to be taking it calmly. They were part of the Team, it appeared.
“It’s unfortunate,” he went on. “Our operation has been remarkably successful—with the exception of the setback caused by your interference. But no irreparable harm has been done.”
“Not yet,” I said.
He almost raised an eyebrow. “You realized your situation as soon as you found yourself isolated—I use the term imprecisely—in the aborted station.”
“I started to get the idea then. I wondered what Jard had been up to. I see now he was just following orders—your orders—to set up a trap for me. He shifted the station into a null-time bubble—using a technique Nexx Central never heard of—after first conning me outside. That meant I had to use my emergency jump gear to get back—to a dead end. Simple and effective—almost.”
“You’re here, immobilized, neutralized,” he said. “I should say the operation was highly effective.”
I shook my head and gave him a lazy grin that I saw was wasted.
“When I saw the direction the loop was taking I knew Nexx Central had to be involved. But it was a direct sabotage of Nexx policy; so infiltration was the obvious answer.”
“Fortunate that your thinking didn’t lead you one step farther,” he said. “If you had eluded my recovery probe, the work of millennia might have been destroyed.”
“Futile work,” I said.
“Indeed? Perhaps you’re wrong, Agent. Accepting the apparent conclusion that you represent a Sixth Era does not necessarily imply your superiority. Retrogressions have occurred in history.” He tried to say this in the same machined-steel tone he’d been using, but a faint, far-off whisper of uncertainty showed through.
I knew then what the interview was all about. He was probing, trying to assess the tiger he had by the tail. Trying to discover where the power lay.
“Not this time,” I said. “Not any time, really.”
“Nonetheless—you’re here,” he said flatly.
“Use your head,” I said. “Your operation’s been based on the proposition that your era, being later, can see pitfalls the Nexx people couldn’t. Doesn’t it follow that a later era can see your mistakes?”
“We are making no mistakes.”
“If you weren’t, I wouldn’t be here.”
“Impossible!” he said, as if he believed it—or as if he wanted awfully badly to believe it. “For seventeen thousand years a process of disintegration has proceeded, abetted by every effort to undo it. When man first interfered with the orderly flow of time, he sowed the seeds of eventual chaos. By breaking open the entropic channel, he allowed the incalculable forces of temporal progression to diffuse across an infinite spectrum of progressively weaker matrices. Life is a product of time. When the density of the temporal flux falls below a critical value, life ends. Our intention is to prevent that ultimate tragedy—only that, and no more! We cannot fail!”
“You can’t rebuild a past that never was,” I said, “or preserve a future that won’t happen.”
“That is not our objective. Ours is a broad program of reknitting the temporal fabric by bringing together previously divergent trends; by grafting wild shoots back into the mainstem of time. We are apolitical; we support no ideology. We are content to preserve the vitality of the continuum.”
“And of yourselves,” I said.
He looked at me strangely, as if lost.
“Have you ever considered a solution that eliminated you and all your works from existence?” I asked him.
“Why should I?”
“You’re one of the results of all this time-meddling you’re dead set on correcting,” I pointed out. “But I doubt if you’d entertain the idea of any timegraft that would wither your own particular branch of the tree.”
“Why should I? That would be self-defeating. How can we police the continuum if we don’t exist?”
“A good question,” I said.
“I have one other,” he said in the tone of a man who has just settled an argument with a telling point. “What motivation could your era have for working to destroy the reality core on which any conceivable future must depend?”
I felt like sighing, but I didn’t. I got my man-to-man look into position and said, “The first Time-sweepers set out to undo the mistakes of the past. Those who came after them found themselves faced with a bigger job: cleaning up after the cleaners-up. Nexx Central tried to take the broad view, to put it all back, good and bad, where it was before the meddling started. Now you’re even more ambitious. You’re using Nexx Central to manipulate not the past, but the future—”
“Operations in future time are an impossibility,” he said flatly, like Moses laying down the laws.
“Uh-huh. But to you, the Fifth Era isn’t future, remember? That gives you the edge. But you should have been smarter than that. If you can kibitz the past, what’s to keep your future from kibitzing you?”
“Are you attempting to tell me that any effort to undo the damage, to reverse the trend toward dissolution, is doomed?”
“As long as any man tries to put a harness on his own destiny, he’ll defeat himself. Every petty dictator who ever tried to enforce a total state discovered that, in his own small way. The secret of man is his unchainability. His existence depends on uncertainty, insecurity: the chance factor. Take that away and you take all.”
“This is a doctrine of failure and defeat,” he said flatly. “A dangerous doctrine. I intend to fight it with every resource at my command. It will now be necessary for you to inform me fully as to your principals: who sent you here, who directs your actions, where your base of operations is located. Everything.”
“I don’t think so.”
He made a swift move and I felt a sort of zinging in the air. Or in a medium less palpable than air. When he spoke again, his voice had taken on a flat, unresonant quality.
“You feel very secure, Agent. You, you tell yourself, represent a more advanced era, and are thus the immeasurable superior of any more primitive power. But a muscular fool may chain a genius. I have trapped you here. We are now safely enclosed in an achronic enclave of zero temporal dimensions, totally divorced from any conceivable outside influence. You will find that you are effectively immobilized; any suicide equipment you may possess is useless, as is any temporal transfer device. And even were you to die, your brain will be instantly tapped and drained of all knowledge, both at conscious and subconscious levels.”
“You’re quite thorough,” I said, “but not quite thorough enough. You covered yourself from the outside—but not from the inside.”
He frowned; he didn’t like that remark. He sat up straighter in his chair and made a curt gesture to the gunhandlers on either side of me. I knew his next words would be the kill order. Before he could say them, I triggered the thought-code that had been waiting under multiple levels of deep hypnosis for this moment. He froze just like that, with his mouth open and a look of deep bewilderment in his eyes.
38
The eclipse-like light of null-time stasis shone on his taut face, on the faces of the two armed men standing rigid with their fingers already tightening on their firing studs. I went between them, fighting the walking-through-syrup sensation, and out into the passageway. The only sound was the slow, all-pervasive, metronome-like beat that some theoreticians say represents the basic frequency rate of the creation-destruction cycle of reality.
Room by room, I checked every square inch of the installation. The personnel were all in place, looking like the inhabitants of the enchanted castle where the sleeping beauty lay. I took my time going through the files and records. The Fifth Era infiltrators had done their work well. There was nothing here to give any indication of how far in the subjective future their operation was based, no clues to the extent of their penetration of Nexx Central’s sweep programs. This was data that would have been of interest, but wasn’t essential. I had accomplished phase one of my basic mission: smoking out the random factor that had been creating anomalies in the long-range time maps of the era.
Of a total of one hundred and twelve personnel in the station, four were Fifth Era transferees, a fact made obvious in the stasis condition by the distinctive aura that their abnormally high temporal potential created around them. I carried out a mind-wipe on pertinent memory sectors, and triggered them back to their loci of origin. There would be a certain amount of head-scratching and equipment re-examining when the original efforts to jump them back to their assignments at Nexx Central apparently failed; but as far as temporal operations were concerned, all four were permanently out of action, trapped in the same type of closed-loop phenomenon that had been used on me.