The sun was low when I got back to the tent. Mellia was busy, setting out food from the field stores. She was wearing the robe, barefooted, her hair unbound. She looked up at me as I came in; a look half-wary, half-impish. She looked so young, so achingly young. . . .
“I’ll never be sorry,” I said. “Even if . . .” I let it hang there.
She looked faintly troubled. “Even if . . . what?”
“Even if we proved the theory was wrong. . . .”
She stared at me; suddenly her eyes widened.
“I forgot to—,” she said. “I forgot all about it. . . .”
I felt my face curving into a silly smile. “So did I—until just now.”
She put her hand over her mouth and laughed. I held her and laughed with her. Then she was crying. Her arms went around me and she clung, and sobbed, and sobbed, and I stroked her hair and made soothing noises.
18
“This time I won’t forget,” she whispered in my ear. In the dark; in the perfumed darkness . . .
“Don’t count on me to remind you,” I said.
“Did you—do you love her very much—your Lisa?”
“Very much.”
“How did you meet her?”
“In the Public Library. We were both looking for the same book.”
“And you found each other.”
“I thought it was an accident.” Or a miracle . . .
I’d only been on location for a few days, just long enough to settle into my role and discover how lonely life was back in that remote era; remote, but, for me, the present: the only reality. As was usual in a long cover assignment, my conditioning was designed to fit me completely to the environment: my identity as Jim Kelly, draftsman, occupied 99 percent of my self-identity concept. The other 1 percent, representing my awareness of my true function as a Nexx agent, was in abeyance: a faint, persistent awareness of a level of existence above the immediate details of life in ancient Buffalo; a hint of a shadowy role in great affairs.
I hadn’t known consciously, when I met Lisa, wooed and won her, that I was a transient in her time, a passer-through that dark and barbaric era. When I married her, it was with the intention of living out my life with her, for better or for worse, richer or poorer, until death did us part.
But we’d been parted by something more divisive than death. As the crisis approached, the knowledge of my real role came back to me a piece at a time, as needed. The confrontation with the Karg had completed the job.
“Perhaps it was an accident,” Mellia said. “Even if she was . . . me . . . she might have been there for another reason, having nothing to do with your job. She didn’t know. . . .”
“You don’t have to defend her, Mellia. I don’t blame her for anything.”
“I wonder what she did . . . when you didn’t come back.”
“If I had, I wouldn’t have found her there. She’d have been gone, back to base, mission completed—”
“No! Loving you wasn’t any part of her mission; it couldn’t have been like that. . . .”
“She was caught, just as I was. All in a good cause, no doubt. The giant brains at Central know best—”
“Hush,” she said softly, and put her lips against mine. She clung to me, holding me tight against her slim nakedness, lying in the dark. . . .
“I’m jealous of her,” she whispered. “And yet—she’s me.”
“I want you, Mellia; every atom of me wants you. I just can’t help remembering.”
She made a sound that was half laugh, half sob. “You’re making love to me—and thinking of her. You feel that you’re betraying her—with me—” She stopped to shush me as I started to speak.
“No—don’t try to explain, Ravel. You can’t change it—can’t help it. And you do want me . . . you want me . . . I know you want me. . . .”
And this time as we rode the passionate crest, the world exploded and tumbled us together down a long, lightless corridor and left us in darkness and in silence.
19
Light coalesced around us; and sound: the soft breathing of an air circulation system. We were lying naked on the bare floor in the operations room of a Nexx Timecast station.
“It’s small,” Mellia said. “Almost primitive.” She got to her feet and padded across to the intercom panel, flipped the master.
“Anybody home?” her voice echoed along the corridors.
Nobody was. I didn’t have to search the place. You could feel it in the air.
Mellia went to the Excom-board; I watched her punch in an all-stations emergency code. A light winked to show that it had been automatically taped, condensed to a one-microsecond squawk, and repeated at one-hour intervals across a million years of monitored time.
She went to the log, switched on, started scanning the last entries, her face intent in the dim glow of the screen. Watching her move gracefully, unself-consciously nude, was deeply arousing to me. I got my mind off that with an effort and went to stand beside her.
The log entry was a routine shorthand report, station-dated 9/7/66, with Dinosaur Beach’s identifying key and Nel Jard’s authenticating code at the end.
“That’s one day prior to the day I reported back,” I said. “I guess he didn’t have time to file any details during the attack.”
“At least he got the personnel away before. . . .” She let that ride.
“All but himself,” I said.
“But—you didn’t find him—or any sign of him—in the station when you were here before. . . .”
“His corpse, you mean. Nope. Maybe he used the booth. Maybe he went over the edge—”
“Ravel—” She looked at me half sternly, half appealingly.
“Yeah. I think I’ll go get some clothes on. Not that I don’t like playing Adam and Eve with you,” I added. “I like it all too well.”
We found plenty of regulation clothing neatly stacked in the drawers in the transient apartment wing. I enjoyed the cool, smooth feel of modern fabric on my skin. Getting used to starched collars and itchy wool had been one of the chief sources of discomfort in my 1936 job. That started me thinking again.
I shook off the thought. Lisa—or Mellia—was standing not six feet away, pulling on a form-fitting one-piece station suit. She caught me looking at her and hesitated for an instant before zipping it up to cover her bosom, and smiled at me. I smiled back.
I went outside to take a look, knowing what I’d find: an abrupt edge ten paces from the exit, with the fog swirling around it. I yelled; no echo came back. I picked up a pebble and tossed it over the side. It fell about six feet and then slowed and drifted off as if it had lost interest in the law of gravity. I peered through the murk, looking for a rift with a view beyond it; but beyond the fog there was just more fog.
“It’s . . . eerie,” Mellia said beside me.
“All of that,” I said. “Let’s get back inside. We need sleep. Maybe when we wake up it will be gone.”
She let that one pass. That night she slept in my arms. I didn’t dream—except when I woke in the night and found her there.
20
At breakfast the clatter of forks against plates seemed louder than it should have been. The food was good. Nexx issue rations were designed to fill a part of the gap left in agents’ lives by the absence of all human relationships and values that ordinarily made life worth living. We were dedicated souls, we field agents. We gave up homes and wives and children in the service of the concept that the human race and its destiny were worth the saving. It was a reasonable exchange. Any man ought to be able to see that.
But Lisa’s face floated between me and my breakfast, the emergency I was involved in, the threat to Timesweep. Between me and Mellia.
“What are we going to do, Ravel?” Mellia said. Her expression was cool and calm now; her eyes held shielded secrets. Maybe it was the effect of the familiar official surroundings. The fun and games were over. From now on it was business.
“The first thing we need to do is take a good look at the data and see what can be deduced,” I said, and felt like a pompous idiot.
“Very well; we have several observations between us that should give us some ideas of the parameters of the situation.” Crisp; scientifically precise. Eyes level and steady. A good agent, Miss Gayl. But where was the girl who had sobbed in my arms last night?