I did that for a few moments, then turned and looked at the curtain I had come through. It was a perfectly ordinary wall of concrete and beryl steel, to my knowledge two meters thick.
Maybe the sound I had heard was the whizzing of molecules of dense metal interpenetrating with my own hundred and eighty pounds of impure water.
That was a phenomenon I’d have to let ride until later. More pressing business called for my attention first—such as finding the station chief and reporting in on the destruction of Station Ninety-nine by surprise attack.
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 the personnel operating out of the station always drew at least a trickle of carrier power. They had to; as long as the system existed, a no-drain condition was impossible anywhere in normal space-time.
I didn’t like the conclusion, but I reached it anyway.
Either the timesweep system no longer existed—or I was outside the range of its influence. And since its influence pervaded the entire spatial-temporal cosmos, that didn’t leave much of anyplace for me to be.
All the stations were physically identical: in appearance, in equipment, in electronic characteristics. 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. Step one was to find out where I was.
I went along the passage to the entry lock—some of the sites are located in settings where outside conditions were hostile to what Nexx Central 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 that prevented it from dissipating. I went forward to the edge and lay flat and looked over. The underside curved down and back, out of sight in the nebulosity. What I could see of it was as smooth and polished as green glass.
Like the green glass crater I’d seen back on Dinosaur Beach.
I backed off from the edge of the world and went back inside, to the Record Section, punched for a tape at random. The read-out flashed on the screen: routine data on power consumption, temporal contour fluctuations, arrivals and departures; the daily log of the station, with the station number repeated on every frame.
Station Ninety-nine.
Just what I was afraid of.
The curving underside of the island in nowhere I was perched on would fit the glass-lined hollow back at Dinosaur Beach the way a casting fits the mold. The station hadn’t been destroyed by enemy gunfire; it had been scooped out of the rock like a giant dip of pistachio and deposited here.
I was safe in port, my home station. That had been what Nel Jard had been trying to tell me. He’d waited until I was clear, then pulled a switch. Crash emergency procedure that an ordinary field man would know nothing about.
No doubt Jard had done the right thing. The enemy had been at the gates. In another few seconds the screens would have collapsed under overload. All the secrets of Nexx Timecasting would have fallen into hostile hands. Jard had to do something. Demolition was impossible. So he’d done this.
The fact that this implied a technology at a level far beyond what I understood of Nexx capabilities was a point I’d take up later, after more immediate matters were dealt with.
In the minutes I’d been there, he’d given me a message; something I was supposed to tell someone, somewhere. I hadn’t heard a word he’d said, but in the excitement, he hadn’t realized that. He’d hustled me on my way, counted ten, and thrown the switch. The station was gone but I was in the clear.
And then I had negated all that effort on his part by using my built-in circuitry to jump back where I wasn’t supposed to be.
Null phase, the phrase popped into my mind. A theoretical notion I’d encountered in technical reading. But it seemed it was more than theory.
A place outside time and space. The point of zero amplitude in the oscillations of the Ylem field that we called space-time.
I walked across the room, conscious of my feet hitting the floor, of the quiet whispering of the air circulator, the hum of idling equipment. Everything I could see, hear, smell, and touch seemed perfectly normal—except for what was outside.
But if this was the Dinosaur Beach station—where was the hole in the lounge wall that I’d come in by a few subjective hours earlier? Where was the debris and the smoke, and where the dead bodies and the wreckage?
The place was neat as an egg. I pulled out a tape drawer. Files all in order, no signs of hasty evacuation, enemy action, or last-minute confusion. Just no people—and nothing much in the way of a neighborhood.
It was the Marie Celeste syndrome with a vengeance—except that I was still aboard.
I went into the dining room; there were a couple of trays there with the remains of food still on them, fairly fresh: the only exception to the total and impersonal order in the station.
I poked the disposal button and punched out a meal of my own. It slid from the slot, steaming hot; syntho-this and pseudo-that. I thought of baked ham and corn on the cob—and Lisa waiting for me in the perfumed darkness. . . .
Damn it all—it wasn’t supposed to be like this. A man went out, did his job, involved himself—and tore himself away to follow the call of duty—on the premise that the torture of memory would all be soothed away by the friendly mind-wiper. It wasn’t in the contract that I should sit here in the gloaming in an empty station eating sawdust and ashes and yearning for a voice, a smile, a touch. . . .
What the hell, she was just a woman—an ephemeral being, born back in the dawn of time, living a life brief as the fitful glow of a firefly, dead and dust these millennia. . . .
But Lisa, Lisa . . .
“Enough of that,” I told myself sternly, and quailed at the sound of my voice in the deserted station. There’s a simple explanation for everything, I told myself, silently this time. Well, maybe not simple, but an explanation.
“Easy,” I said aloud, and to hell with the echo. “The transfer process shifted the station back to an earlier temporal fix. Same station, different time. Or maybe no time at all. The math would all work out, no doubt. The fact that I wouldn’t understand it is mere detail. The station exists— somewhere—and I’m in it. The question before the house is what do I do next?”
The air hung around me, as thick and silent as funeral incense. Everything seemed to be waiting for something to happen. And nothing would happen unless I made it happen.
“All right, Ravel,” I said. “Don’t drag your feet. You know what to do. The only thing you can do. The only out . . .”
I got to my feet and marched across to Ops, 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 outlink-circuits were locked on 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 had no time to go over those. I stepped inside 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.
9
A sense of vertigo that slowly faded; the gradual impingement of sensation: heat, and pressure against my side, a hollow, almost musical soughing and groaning, a sense of lift and fall, a shimmer of light through my eyelids, as from a reflective surface in constant restless movement. I opened my eyes; sunlight was shining on water. I felt the pressure of a plank deck on which I was lying; a pressure that increased, held steady, then dwindled minutely.
I moved, and groaned at the aches that stabbed at me. I sat up.