The explosion was like a bomb; flame gouted and smoke gushed. I heard the slug hit; a solid, meaty smack, like a well-hit ball hitting the fielder’s glove. The fellow in the door lurched, thrashed, plunged through and went down hard on his face. He jerked a couple of times as if someone was jabbing him with a sharp stick, and then lay very still.
The Karg turned back to his men and rapped out an order. The boys muttered and shuffled, and shot disappointed looks around the deck, and then started for the side.
No search, no loot, just the fast skiddoo.
It was as if the Karg had accomplished what he had come for.
In five minutes the last of the boarders were back aboard their own ship. The Karg stood near the stern, patient as only a machine can be. He looked around, then came toward me. I lay very still indeed and tried to look as dead as possible.
He stepped over me and the real corpse and went into the cabin. I heard faint sounds, the kind somebody makes going through drawers and peeking under the rug. Then he came out. I heard his footsteps going away, and opened an eye.
He was by the weather rail, calmly stripping the safety foil from a thermex bomb. It gave its preliminary hiss and he dropped it through the open hatch at his feet as casually as someone dropping an olive in a martini.
He walked coolly across the deck, stepped up, grabbed a line, and scrambled with commendable agility back to his own deck. I heard him—or someone—yell a command. Sounds of sudden activity; sails quivered and moved; men appeared, swarming up the ratlines. The galleon’s spars shifted, withdrew with much creaking and tearing of the defeated galleass’s rigging. The high side of the Spanish ship drew away; sails filled with dull boom!s. Quite suddenly I was alone, watching the ship dwindle as it receded downwind under full sail.
Just then the thermex let go with a vicious choof! belowdecks. Smoke billowed from the hatch, with tongues of pale flame in close pursuit. I got a pair of legs under me and wobbled to the opening, had to turn my eyes from the sunbright holocaust raging below. The tub might have steel walls, but in 5000º heat they’d burn like dry timber.
I stood where I was for a few valuable seconds, trying to put it together in some way that made some variety of sense, while the fire sputtered and crackled and the deck wallowed, and the shadow of the stump of the mainmast swung slow arcs on the deck, like a finger wagging at the man the Karg had shot.
He lay on his face, with a lot of soggy lace in a crimson puddle under his throat. One hand was under him, the other outflung. A gun lay a yard from the empty hand.
I took three steps and stooped and picked up the gun. It was a .01 microjet 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.
11
The standard post-mission conditioning that had wiped the whole sequence from my memory broke. I remembered it now: Time, about ten years earlier, N. S.; or the year 1578, local. Place, the Caribbean, about fifty miles southwest of St. Thomas. It had been a cruise in search of the Karg-operated ship which had been operating in New Spanish waters; I recalled the contact, the chase, the fight across the decks while I waited inside the cabin for the opportunity for the single well-placed shot that would eliminate the source of the interference. It was one of my first assignments, long ago completed, filed in the master tape, a part of Timesweep history.
But not anymore. The case was reopened on the submission of new evidence. I was doubled back on my own timetrack.
The fact that this was a violation of every natural law governing time travel was only a minor aspect of the situation, grossly outweighed by this evidence that the past that Nexx Central had painfully rebuilt to eliminate the disastrous effects 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 nor 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 construct a platform in the remote pre-Era on which all the later structure would be built.
And it looked as though it had failed—because of me.
I remembered the way it had gone the first time: waiting my moment, thrusting the door open, planting my feet, taking aim, firing three shots into the android’s thoracic cavity before he was aware that a new factor had entered the equation. He had fallen; his men had yelled in rage and charged, and my repellor field had held them off until they panicked at the invisible barrier and fled back to their galleon, cast off, and made sail before the wind, back into the obscurity of unrecorded history; while I had brought the galleass—a specially equipped Nexx operations unit in disguise—to the bulk transfer point at Locus Q-637, from which it had been transmitted back to storage at the Nexx holding station.
But none of that had happened.
I had blocked the door, preventing the other me from completing his assignment, thus invalidating a whole segment of the rebuilt time-map and casting the whole grand strategy of Nexx operations into chaos. The Karg had gone his way, unharmed; and I was lying on the deck, very dead indeed from a brass ball through the throat.
And also I was standing on the deck looking down at my corpse, slowly realizing the magnitude of the trap I had blundered into.
A Nexx agent is a hard man to dispose 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.
Even if I could go on living—doubtful proposition in view of the fire curling the deck planks at the moment—there’d be no escape, ever; my personal jump field was discharged; it wouldn’t take me anywhere. And there’d be no trace on any recording instrument to show where I’d gone; when I’d jumped from the phantom station, I’d punched in no destination. The other me had now been killed in the line of duty, during the vulnerable second when his shield was open to allow him to fire the executioner’s shot. His trace would have dropped from the boards; scratch one inefficient field man, who’d been so careless as to get himself killed.
And scratch his double, who’d poked his nose in where it had no business being.
My mind circled the situation, looking for an out. I didn’t like what I found, but I liked it better than roasting alive or drowning in the tepid sea.
My personal jump mechanism was built into me, tuned to me, though unfocused at the receiving end. It would be useless until I’d had a recharge at base. But its duplicate was built into the corpse lying at my feet. The circuitry of the jump device—from antennae to powerpack—consisted largely of the nervous system of the owner.
It took only a few minutes without oxygen for irreversible brain damage to occur, but the dead man’s circuitry should be operable. Just what it might be focused on now—considering the drastic realignment of the casual sequence—was an open question. It would depend to a degree on what had been on the corpse’s mind at the moment of death.
The deck was getting hot enough to burn my feet through my soles. There was lots of smoke. The fire roared like a cataract in flood season.
I squatted beside the dead version of myself. The corpse’s jaws were in a half-open position. I got a finger inside and tried out my recall code on the molar installation, feeling the blast of heat as flames gouted from the open hatch at my back.
A giant clapped his hands together, with me in the middle.
12
It was dark and I was falling; I just had time to realize the fact and claw for nonexistent support before I hit water: hot, stinking, clogged with filth, thick as pea soup; I went under and came up blowing and gagging. I was drowning in slime: I floundered, tried to swim, arrived at an uneasy equilibrium in which I lay out flat, head raised clear of the surface, paddling just enough to keep my nostrils clear, while goo ran down in my eyes.