“All right,” I said. “Item: I completed a routine assignment, returned to the pickup point, sent out my callsign, and was retrieved. All normal so far.” I glanced at her for agreement. She nodded curtly.
“The next day the station was attacked by Third Era Forces, or someone disguised as Third Era Forces. Aside from a rather unlikely breach of security, there’s no anomaly involved there. However, your personal life line includes the Dino Beach station intact at a local time eleven-hundred-plus years later than the observed attack.”
“Correct; and insofar as I know, there was no mention in the station records of any attack, a thousand years before I reported in, or any other time. And I think I’d know. I made it my business to familiarize myself with the station history as soon as I was assigned there.”
“You didn’t happen to notice any entry relating to the loss of a field man named Ravel?”
“If I did, it didn’t register. The name meant nothing to me . . . then.” Her eyes didn’t quite meet mine.
“So we’re talking about a class-one deviation. Either your past is aborted, or mine. The question is—which alternative is a part of the true timestem?”
“Insufficient data.”
“Let’s go on the next item: Nel Jard used an emergency system unknown to me to lift the entire station out of entropic context and deposit it in what can be described as an achronic vacuole. What that means I don’t quite know.”
“You’re assuming it was Jard’s action,” Mellia put in. “There’s a possibility it wasn’t. That another force stepped in just at that time, either to complicate or annul his action. Did he say anything to indicate this was what he intended?” A tilt of her head indicated the silent room where we sat, and the ghostly void outside.
“He said something about null-time, but it didn’t really register. I thought he had old-fashioned demolition in mind; simple denial-to-the-enemy stuff.”
“In any event, the station was shifted . . . here.”
I nodded. “And when I used my emergency jump gear, I homed in on it. I suppose that was to be expected. I was tuned to the station frequency; the equipment was designed for retrieval from any space-time locus.”
“You found the station empty—just as it is now. . . .”
“Uh-huh. I wonder . . .” I looked around the room. “Was my last visit before this one—or after?”
“At least it wasn’t simultaneous. You didn’t meet yourself.”
“It ought to be possible to tell,” I said. “The local entropic flow seems to be normal; local time is passing.” I got up and wandered around the room, looking for some evidence of my having been there before. If there was any, I couldn’t see it. I turned back to the table—and there it was.
“The trays,” I said. “They were here—on the table.”
Mellia looked at them, then at me. She looked a little scared. Anachronisms affect you that way.
“The same two seats,” I said. “The leftovers didn’t look too fresh—but they hadn’t had time to decay.”
“So—you’re due here at any time.”
“We have a few hours anyway. The stuff was dry on the trays.” I gave her a we’re-in-this-together look. “We could wait,” I said, “and meet me.”
“No!” Very sharp. “No” again, less urgently, but still definite. “We mustn’t introduce any further paranomalies, you know that.”
“If we stopped me from going back and interfering with my previous assignment—”
“You’re talking nonsense, Ravel. Now who’s forgotten what the Timesweep effort is all about? Putting patches on the patches is no good. You went back—you returned safely. Here you are. It would be stupid to risk that, on . . . on . . .”
“On the chance of saving the operation?”
Her eyes met mine. “We can’t complicate matters further. You went back, let’s leave it at that. The question is—what’s our indicated course of action now?”
I sat down. “Where were we?”
“You found the station empty, with evidence of our—present—visit.”
“So I did the only thing that occurred to me. I used the station facilities for a jump I hoped would put me back at Nexx Central. It didn’t work. In the absence of a programmed target, I reverted back along my own timeline and ended ten years in my subjective past. A class-A paranomaly, breaking every regulation in the book.”
“Regulations don’t cover our situation,” she said. “You had no control over matters. You did what seemed best.”
“And blew a job that was successfully completed and encoded on the master timeplot ten years ago. One curious item in that connection is that the Karg I was supposed to take out—and didn’t—was the same one I hit in Buffalo. Which implies that the Buffalo sequence followed from the second version rather than the original one.”
“Or what you’re considering the alternate version. Maybe it isn’t. Perhaps your doubling-back was assimilated as a viable element in the revised plot.”
“In that case, you’re right about not waiting here to intercept me. But if you’re wrong . . .”
“We have to take a stand somewhere—somewhen. You jumped back to the beach after that and we met. Query: Why did both you and I home in on the same temporal locus?”
“No comment.”
“We’re snarling hell out of the timelines, Ravel.”
“Can’t be helped. Unless you think we ought to Kamikaze.”
“Don’t be foolish. We have to do what we can. Which means examine the facts and plan a logical next step.”
“Logical: that’s a good one, Agent Gayl. When did logic ever have anything to do with Timesweep Ops?”
“We’ve made some progress,” she said levelly, not rising to the bait, refusing the opportunity for a nice soul-scouring argument. “We know we have to be on our way, and without much delay.”
“All right, I’ll grant the point. Which leaves us a choice of two courses. We can use the station transfer booth.”
“And end up somewhere back in our own pasts, complicating matters still further.”
“Could be. Or we can recharge our personal gear and jump out at random.”
“With no conception of where that might put us.” She shivered and covered it with a gesture; a graceful lift of her chin that reminded me of another time, another place, another girl.
No, damn it—not another girl!
“Or,” she said, “we could go together . . . as we did before.”
“That wouldn’t change anything, Mellia. We’d still be launching ourselves into the timestream with no target. We might find ourselves spinning end over end in a fog like the one outside—or worse.”
“At least—” she started to say, and caught herself. At least we’d be together—I could almost hear the words.
“At least we won’t be sitting here idle while the universe falls to pieces around us,” she said instead.
“So—how do you vote?”
There was a long silence. She didn’t look at me; then she did. She started to speak, hesitated.
“The booth,” she said.
“Together or one at a time?”
“Can the field handle both of us simultaneously?”
“I think so.”
“Together. Unless you know a reason for separating.”
“None at all, Mellia.”
“Then it’s settled.”
“Right. Now finish your meal. It may be a while before we have another chance to eat.”
My last item of preparation was a small crater gun from the armory. I strapped it to my wrist, just out of sight under the cuff. We went along the time-shielded transit tunnel to the transfer booth. All readings were normal; the circuits were ready to operate. Under normal conditions a passenger would be rotated painlessly and instantaneously out of the timestream into the extratemporal medium, and rerotated into normal space-time at the main reception room at Nexx Central. What would happen this time was an open question. Maybe we’d drop back down my timeline, and there’d be two of us aboard the sinking galleass; or maybe Mellia Gayl’s gestalt would be stronger and we’d arrive at a point in her past where we hadn’t arrived before, thus adding to the disaster that had hit us. Or possibly somewhere in between. Or nowhere at all . . .
“Next stop Nexx Central,” I said, and ushered Mellia inside. I squeezed in after her.
“Ready?”
She nodded.
I pressed the Transmit button.
The explosion blew both of us into our component atoms.
21
“Or maybe not,” I heard a voice croak. I recognized the voice; it was mine, somewhat the worse for wear but still on the job. “Some dream,” I went on, giving myself the word. “Some hangover. Some headache.”
“Trans-temporal shock is the technical term, I believe,” Lisa said beside me.
My eyes snapped open; well, snap isn’t quite the word. They unglued themselves and winced at the light and made out a face nearby. A nice face, heart-shaped, with big dark eyes and the prettiest smile in the world.
But not Lisa.
“Are you all right?” Mellia said.