I did it again.
And again.
In the end I stood flat on the exposed stone, hoisted my rock, and dropped it edge on. It was only a three-foot fall, but it cracked loose a thin layer of sandstone. I threw the pieces out of the hole and did it again.
On the sixth impact, the hammer broke. That was a stroke of luck, as it turned out. I could lift the smaller half and toss it from the top of the sand pile, a drop of almost eight feet, with encouraging results.
By the end of the fifth day, I had chipped a raggedly circular depression over a foot deep at the center of the sand pit.
By this time I was getting hungry. The sea water was a murky green; not algae, just a saturated solution of all ninety-three elements. I could drink it in small doses; and the specialized internal arrangements with which I, as a Nexx agent, was equipped, managed to make use of it. It wasn’t good, but it kept me going.
As I went deeper, the drop got longer, and thus more effective; but the problem of lifting the boulder and the debris became correspondingly harder. I cut steps in the side of the shaft when I reached the six-foot mark. The heap of sandstone shards grew; the level sank. Eight feet, ten, twelve. I struck a harder layer of limestone, and progress slowed to a crawl; then I encountered a mixture of limerock and clay, easy to dig through, but very wet. Four feet to go.
Four feet of stiff, abrasive clay, a handful at a time, climbing one-handed up a ten-foot shaft, tossing it away, climbing back down. Working under a foot of water, two feet of water.
Three feet of water. The muck was oozing in from the sides, filling the excavation almost as fast as I emptied it. But I was close. I took a deep breath and ducked under and probed down through clay-and-seashell stew and sensed what I wanted, very near. Three more dives and I had it. I held it in my fist and looked at it and for the first time admitted how slight the odds had been that I’d find it there, intact.
Once, in another lifetime, I had out-jumped from the Dinosaur Beach Transfer Station, back along my own life line. I had ended on the deck of a stricken ship, just in time to get my earlier self killed in line of duty by a bullet from a Karg gun.
Stranded, I had used his emergency jump circuitry to pull me back to Dinosaur Beach, where I landed in a bog-hole that marked the place where the station had been once, a thousand years before.
And so had the corpse, of course. In the excitement of getting my first lungful of rich, invigorating mud, I hadn’t devoted much thought to the fate of the dead me.
He had sunk into the mud, unnoted, and waited quietly for geology to seal him in.
Which it had, under fourteen feet of rock, and four of sand. There was nothing whatever left of the body, of course, not a belt buckle or a boot nail or a scrap of ischium.
But what I held in my hand now had survived. It was a one-inch cube of a synthetic material known as eternium, totally non-chronodegradable. And buried in its center was a tuned crystal, a power pack, and a miniaturized grab-field generator. Emergency gear, carried by me on that original mission, the memory of it wiped out by the post-mission brain-scrape—until a sufficient emergency arrived to trigger the recall.
I climbed back up out of my archeological dig and stood on the rock pile in the cold wind, adjusting my mind to the fact that my gamble had paid off. I took a last look at the tired old sun, at the empty beach, at the hole I had dug with such effort.
I almost hated to leave it so soon, after all that work. Almost, but not quite.
I set up the proper action code in my mind, and the cube in my hand seared my palm and the field closed around me, and threw me a million miles down a dark tunnel full of solid rock.
36
Someone was shaking me. I tried to summon up enough strength for a groan, didn’t make it, opened my eyes instead.
I was looking up into my own face.
For a few whirly instants I wondered if the younger me had made a nice comeback from the bog and was ready to collect his revenge for my getting him killed in the first place.
Then I noticed the lines in the face, and the hollow cheeks. The clothes this new me was wearing were identical with the ones I had on: an issue stationsuit, but new. It hung loose on a gaunt frame. And there was a nice bruise above the right eye that I didn’t remember getting.
“Listen carefully,” my voice said. “I don’t need to waste time telling you who I am and who you are. I’m you—but a jump ahead. I’ve come full circle. Dead end. Closed loop. No way out—except one—maybe. I don’t like it much, but I don’t see any alternative. Last time around we had the same talk—but I was the new arrival then, and another version of us was here ahead of me with the same proposal I’m about to make you.” He waved a hand as I started to open my mouth. “Don’t bother with the questions; I asked them myself last time. I thought there had to be another way. I went on—and wound up back here. Now I’m the welcoming committee.”
“Then maybe you remember I could do with a night’s sleep,” I said. “I ache all over.”
“You weren’t quite in focal position on the jump here,” he said, not with any noticeable sympathy. “You cracked like a whip, but nothing’s seriously dislocated. Come on, get up.”
I got up on my elbows and shook my head, both in negation and to clear some of the fog. That was a mistake. It made the throbbing worse. He got me on my feet and I saw I was back in the Ops Room of a Timecast station.
“That’s right,” he said. “Back at home port again—or the mirror image of it. Complete except for the small detail that the jump field’s operating in a closed loop. Outside there’s nothing.”
“I saw it, remember?”
“Right. That was the first time around. You jumped out into a post-segment of your life—a nonobjective dead end. You were smart, you figured a way out—but they were there ahead of us, too. You struggled hard, but the circle’s still closed—and here you are.”
“And I thought I was maneuvering him,” I said. “While he thought he was maneuvering me.”
“Yeah—and now the play is to us—unless you’re ready to concede.”
“Not quite,” I said.
“I . . . we’re . . . being manipulated,” he said. “The Karg had something in reserve after all. We have to break the cycle. You have to break it.” He unholstered the gun at his hip and held it out.
“Take this,” he said, “and shoot me through the head.”
I choked on what I started to say.
“I know all the arguments,” my future self was saying. “I used them myself, about a week ago. That’s the size of this little temporal enclave we have all to ourselves. But they’re no good. This is the one real change we can introduce.”
“You’re out of your mind, pal,” I said. I felt a little uneasy talking to myself, even when the self I was talking to was facing me from four feet away, needing a shave. “I’m not the suicidal type—even when the me I’m killing is you.”
“That’s what they’re counting on. It worked, too, with me. I refused to do it.” He gave me the sardonic grin I’d been using on people for years. “If I had, who knows—it might have saved my life.” He weighed the gun on his hand and now his expression was very cold indeed.
“If I thought shooting you would help, I’d do it without a tremor,” he said. He was definitely he now.
“Why don’t you?”
“Because you’re in the past—so to speak. Killing you wouldn’t change anything. But if you kill me—that introduces a change in the vital equations—and possibly changes your . . . our future. Not a very good bet, maybe, but the only one going.”
“Suppose I introduce a variation of my own,” I said.
He looked weary. “Name it.”
“Suppose we out-jump together, using the station box?”
“It’s been tried,” he said tersely.
“Then you jump, while I wait here.”
“That’s been tried, too.”
“Then do the job yourself!”
“No good.”
“We’re just playing an old tape, eh? Including this conversation?”
“Now you’re getting the idea.”