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 a.s.signment, my conditioning was designed to fit me completely to the environment: my ident.i.ty as Jim Kelly, draftsman, occupied 99 percent of my self-ident.i.ty 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 pa.s.ser-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 pa.s.sionate 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.

n.o.body 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 pa.s.s. 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?

"All right," I said. "Item: I completed a routine a.s.signment, 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 a.s.signed 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 cla.s.s-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 a.s.suming 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 s.p.a.ce-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 pa.s.sing." 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 a.s.signment-"

"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 cla.s.s-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 a.s.similated 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 h.e.l.l 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?"