“Perhaps—if one were technically trained,” the old Mellia said vaguely. “But it’s far beyond my competence.”
“We can recharge our personal fields,” I said, and felt a sudden change in the atmosphere. So did Mellia—both of her. The screen flick-flick-flicked and died. The indicator lights faded, all across the panels. The background sounds dwindled into silence. The color of the air changed, became a dirty electric translucence. Tiny waves of color seemed to ripple across the surfaces of objects, like chromatic aberration in a cheap lens. A chill struck through the air as if someone had just opened a giant refrigerator door.
“It’s the end,” the elderly Mellia said, quite calmly now. “Time ceases, all wave phenomena drop to a zero frequency, and thus become nonexistent—including that special form of energy we call matter. . . .”
“Just a minute,” I said. “This is no natural phenomenon. Someone’s manipulating the chronocosm!”
“How do you know that?” Mellia asked.
“No time for conversation. Agent Gayl”—I took the old lady’s arm—”where were you when we arrived?”
Mellia started to protest, but the other Mellia answered promptly: “In the stasis vault.”
“The mirrors?”
She nodded. “I was . . . ashamed to tell you. It seemed so . . . cowardly.”
“Come on. I led the way across the big room, through the silence and the cold and the dead air, down the passage to the hall of mirrors. The reflective surfaces were tarnished, but still intact.
“Quickly!” the old Mellia said. “The fields will break down at any moment!”
Sounds came from the direction of the big room: a crash as of falling masonry, curiously muffled; a heavy rumbling. A slow cloud of smoke or dust bulged leisurely along the passage. Yellow light glowed behind it.
“Inside—fast!” I said to Mellia.
“No—you and . . . Agent Gayl!”
“Don’t argue, girl!” I caught her in my arms, pushed her toward the mirror. Waves of dull color ran across it. Mellia struggled.
“Mr. Ravel—you must go—now!” the elder Mellia said, and turned quickly and walked back toward the advancing dust-roil. Mellia cried out; I thrust her through the mirror. Her cry cut off sharply.
The old lady was gone, invisible beyond the obscuring cloud. I stepped to the other mirror; it felt like cold fog. It shimmered around me, cloying like impalpable gray gelatin, flashed like exploding glass. Darkness closed in.
For a moment I was aware of a sense of breathless expectancy, like the instant after the disaster becomes apparent and before the first shock arrives.
Then nothing.
26
A yellow light was shining through the murk. I didn’t know how long it had been shining. It grew brighter, and a man appeared silhouetted against it, walking slowly forward, as if against resistance.
When he was six feet away, I saw my mistake.
Not a man. A Karg. The same one I’d killed twice and let get away a third time.
I couldn’t move a muscle, not even my eyes. I watched the Karg cross my field of vision. I wasn’t breathing; if my heart was beating, I couldn’t feel it. But I was conscious. That was something.
The Karg was moving with effort, but unconcernedly. He was dressed in a plain black skin suit with harness and attachments. He looked at an array of miniature meters strapped to his wrist—the underside—and made an adjustment. So far he had paid no more attention to me than as if I were a piece of bric-a-brac.
Now he came over to me and looked me over. His baby-blue eyes never quite met mine—not from embarrassment, just indifference. Two other men—not Kargs—came into view. They ploughed their way up to him, conferred. The newcomers were carrying something that looked like bundled shingles. They came on across to me, moved around behind me, all this in total silence. Some time passed—or maybe it didn’t. From the corner of my eye I saw movement. A panel slid into position to my left. It was dark green, glassy. Another appeared on my right. One of the men entered my field of vision, carrying a three-by-six sheet of thin material. He stood it on end; it stood by itself in mid-air without support. He pushed it in front of me and closed off my view. Light showed at its edges; then it snapped into place and left me in a darkness like the inside of a paint can.
With the visual reference gone, I lost my sense of orientation. I was upside down, spinning slowly—or not so slowly; I was a mile high, I was an inch high, I filled the universe, I didn’t exist—
With a crash, sound returned to the world, along with gravity, pains all over like a form-fitting suit studded with needles, and suffocation. I dragged hard and got a breath in, feeling my heart start to thump and wheeze in its accustomed way. The roar faded without fading; it was just the impact of air molecules whanging against my eardrums, I realized: a background sound that was ordinarily filtered out automatically.
My knee bumped the wall in front of me. I was bracing myself to give it a kick when it fell away and I stepped out into a big room with high purple-black walls, where three people waited for me with expressions that were more intent than welcoming.
One was a short, thick-fingered man in a gray smock, with thin hair, ruddy features, rubbery lips stretched back over large off-white teeth. Number two was a woman, fortyish, a little on the lean side, very starched and official in dark green. The third was the Karg, dressed now in a plain gray coverall.
Shorty stepped forward and thrust out a hand; he held it in a curiously awkward position, with the fingers spread and pointed down. I shook it once and he took it back and examined it carefully, as if he thought I might have left a mark.
“Welcome to Dinosaur Beach Station,” the Karg said in a reasonable facsimile of a friendly voice. I looked around the room; we were the only occupants.
“Where are the two women?” I asked. The thick man looked blank and pulled at his rubbery lip. The female looked back at me as if it was all academic to her.
“Perhaps Dr. Javeh will wish to explain matters.” She sounded as if she doubted it.
“I’m not interested in having a conversation with a machine,” I said. “Who programs it? You?” I aimed this last at Rubber-lips.
“Whaaat?” he said, and looked at the woman; she looked at the Karg; it looked at me. I looked at all of them.
“Dr. Javeh is our Chief of Recoveries,” the woman said quickly, as if glossing over a small social blunder on my part. “I’m Dr. Fresca; and this is Administrator Koska.”
“There were two women with me, Dr. Fresca,” I said. “Where are they?”
“I’m sure I have no idea; this is hardly my area of competence.”
“Where are they, Koska?”
His lips worked, snapping from a smile to dismay and back. “As to that, I can only refer you to Dr. Javeh—”
“You take orders from this Karg?”
“I’m not familiar with that term.” Stiffly; the smile gone.
I faced the Karg. He looked blandly at me with his pale blue eyes.
“You’re a bit disoriented,” he said quietly. “Not surprising, of course, they often are—”
“Who’s ‘they’?”
“The recoverees. That’s my work—our work, you understand: detecting, pinpointing, and retrieving personnel in, ah, certain circumstances.”
“Who’s your boss, Karg?”
He cocked his head. “I’m sorry; I don’t understand your repeated use of the term ‘Karg.’ Just what does it signify?”
“It signifies that whatever these people believe, I’m on to you.”
He smiled and lifted his hands, let them fall back. “As you will. As for my supervisor—I happen to be Officer-in-Charge here.”
“Cosy,” I said. “Where are the two women?”
The Karg’s little rosebud mouth tightened. “I have no idea to whom you refer.”
“They were with me—five minutes ago. You must have seen them.”
“I’m afraid you don’t quite understand the situation,” the Karg said. “When I found you, you were quite alone. The indications suggest you had been adrift in the achronic void for an extended period.”
“How long?”
“Ah, a most interesting problem in temporal relativistics. We have biological time, unique to the individual, metered in heartbeats; and psychological time, a purely subjective phenomenon in which seconds can seem like years, and the reverse. But as to your question: The Final Authority has established a calibration system for gauging absolute duration; and in terms of that system, your sojourn outside the entropic stream endured for a period in excess of a century, with an observational error of plus or minus 10 percent, I should say.”
The Karg spread his uncalloused hands, smiled a philosophical smile.
“As for your, ah, female—I know nothing.”
I swung on him; the swing didn’t connect, but I got the crater gun into my hand unseen. The Karg ducked back and Dr. Fresca let out a yelp and Koska grabbed my arm. The Karg flicked something at me that smacked my side wetly and spread and grabbed my arms and suddenly I was wrapped to the knees in what looked like spider webs, white as spun candy, smelling of a volatile polyester.