“And what does Miss Gayl do while I’m doing that?”
“A battery of scanner beams will be focused on Miss Gayl, monitoring her reactions. She will, of course, remain here, securely strapped in position, safe from all physical harm.”
“Cushy,” I said, “the kind of job I always dreamed of. I can’t wait for my turn.”
“In due course, Mr. Ravel,” the Karg replied, as solemnly as a credit manager looking over your list of references. “In the beginning, yours will be the more active role. We can proceed at once.”
“You surprise me, Karg,” I said. “What you’re doing is the worst kind of time-littering. A day of your program will create more entropic chaos than Nexx Central could clear up in a year.”
“There is no Nexx Central.”
“And never will be, eh? Sometime I’d like to hear how you managed to override your basic directives so completely. You know this isn’t what you were built for.”
“You touch again on an area of conjecture, Mr. Ravel. We are now in Old Era time—the period once named the Pleistocene. The human culture which—according to your semantic implications—built me, or one day will build me, does not exist—never will exist. I have taken care to eliminate all traces of that particular stem. And since my putative creators are a figment of your mind—while I exist as a conscious entity, pre-existing the Third Era by multiple millennia, it might be argued that your conception of my origin is a myth—a piece of rationalization designed by you to assure your ascendant position.”
“Karg, who’s the buildup for? Not me—you know I won’t buy it. Neither will Agent Gayl. So who does that leave—you?” I gave him a grin I didn’t feel. “You’re making progress, Karg. Now you’ve got a real live neurosis, just like a human.”
“I have no ambition to become human. I am a Karg—a pejorative epithet to you, but to me a proud emblem of innate superiority.”
“How you do run on. Let’s get busy, Karg. I’m supposed to be lousing up the entropic continuum, four hundred lines a day. We’d better get started.
“So long, kid,” I said to Mellia. “I know you’re going to make good in the big time, and I do mean time.”
She gave me a scared smile and tried to read a message of hope and encouragement in my eyes; but it wasn’t there for her to read.
The Karg handed me a small metal cube, the recall target, about the size of the blocks two-year-olds build houses out of, with a button on one face.
“Initially, we’ll be calibrating the compound instrument comprising your two minds,” he said casually. “The stress levels will necessarily be high for that portion of the program, of course. Remain in situ, and you will be immune from external influences. However, if the psychic pressures become too great, you may press the abort/recall control.”
“What if I throw it away instead, Karg? What if I like the looks of where I am and decide to stick around?”
He didn’t bother to answer that. I gave him a sardonic salute, not looking at Mellia; he operated the controls.
And I was elsewhere.
31
But not where he thought. As the field closed around me, I caught it, reshaped it, reapplied its energy to first neutralize the time-thrust effect, then to freeze the moment in stasis. Then I checked out my surroundings.
I was at the focal point of a complex of force-pencils. I traced the ones that led back to the power source, and got my first big shock of the day. The Karg was drawing the energy for his time-drag from the basic creation-destruction cycle of the Universe. He was tapping the Timecore itself for the power needed to hold the entropic island that was the operations base for the Final Authority in comparative stability, balancing the massive forces of past and future one against the other.
I scanned the structure of the time blockage. It was an intangible barrier, built of raw forces distorted from their natural channels and bent into tortured configurations by the combined manipulative powers of a mind that was potent beyond anything I had ever encountered.
My second shock of the day: A Karg mind, but one that exceeded the power of an ordinary Karg by a massive factor.
Ten thousand Karg minds, harnessed.
I saw how it had happened. A lone Karg, on duty in the Third Era past, carrying out his instructions with the single-mindedness characteristic of his kind. An accident: a momentary doubling of his timeline, brought about by a freak interference: an unplanned time-stutter.
And where there had been one Karg mind-field, there were two, superimposed.
With the enhanced computative power of his double brain, the super-Karg thus created had at once assessed the situation, seen the usefulness to his mission, snatched energy from the entropic web, recreated the accident.
And was quadrupled.
And again. And again. And again.
On the sixteenth doubling, the overload capacity of his original organizational matrix had been reached and catastrophically exceeded.
The vastly potent Karg brain—warped and distorted by the unbearable impact, but still a computer of superb powers—had blanked into a comatose state.
Years passed. The original Karg aspect, amnesiac as to the tremendous event in which it had participated, had completed its mission, returned to base, had in time been phased out and disposed of along with the rest of his tribe, relegated to the obscurity of failed experiment—while the shattered superbrain proceeded with its slow recuperation.
And then the Karg superbrain had awakened.
At once, alone and disembodied, it had reached out, seized on suitable vehicles, established itself in myriad long-dead Karg brains. It had assessed the situation, computed objectives, reached conclusions, and set its plans in motion in a fractional microsecond. With the singlemindedness of a runaway bulldozer grinding its way through a china factory, the twisted superbrain had scraped clear a temporal segment, erected an environment suitable for life—Karg life—and set about reinforcing and perfecting the artificial time-island thus created. An island without life, without meaning.
And there it established the Final Authority. It had discovered a utility for the human things who still crawled among the doomed ruins of the primordial timestem; a minor utility, not totally essential to the Grand Plan. But a convenience, an increase in statistical efficiency.
And I had been selected, along with Mellia, to play my tiny role in the great machine destiny of the universe.
We weren’t the only affinity team, of course. I extended sensitivity along linkways, sensed thousands of other trapped pairs at work, sorting out the strands of the entropic fabric, weaving the abortive tartan of Karg space time.
It was an ingenious idea—but not ingenious enough. It would last for a while: a million years, ten million, a hundred. But in the end the dead-lock would be broken. The time dam would fail. And the flood of the frustrated past would engulf the unrealized future in a catastrophe of a magnitude beyond comprehension.
Beyond my comprehension, anyway.
But not if somebody poked a small hole in the dike before any important head-pressure could build up.
And I was in an ideal position to do the poking.
But first it was necessary to pinpoint the polyordinal coordinates of the giant time engine that powered the show.
It was cleverly hidden. I traced blind alleys, dead ends, culs de sac, then went back and retraced the maze, eliminating, narrowing down.
And I found it.
And I saw what I had to do.
I released my hold and the timesender field threw me into Limbo.
32
It was a clashing, garish discord of a city. Bars and sheets and jittering curves and angles and wedges of eyesearing light screamed for attention. Noise roared, boomed, whined, shrieked. Pale people with tortured eyes rushed past me, pinched in tight formalized costumes, draped in breathing gear, radiation assessors, prosthetic-assist units, metabolic booster equipment.
The city stank. It reeked. Heat beat at me. Filth swirled in fitful winds that swept the frantic street. The crowd surged, threw a woman against me. I caught her before she fell, and she snarled, clawed her way clear of me. I caught a glimpse of her face under the air-mask that had fallen awry.
It was Mellia-Lisa.
The universe imploded and I was back in the transfer seat. Less than a minute had passed. The Karg was gazing blandly at his instruments; Mellia was rigid in her chair, eyes shut.
And I had recorded one parameter.
Then I was away again.
* * *
Bitter wind lashed me. I was on the high slope of a snow-covered hill. Bare edges and eroded angles of granite protruded here and there, and in their lee stunted conifers clutched for life. And huddled under the trees were people, wrapped in furs. Far above, silhouetted beneath the canopy of gray-black cloud, a deep V cut the serrated skyline.
We had been trying for the pass; but we had waited too long; the season was too far advanced. The blizzard had caught us here. We were trapped. Here we would die.