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 circ.u.mstances."

"Who"s your boss, Karg?"

He c.o.c.ked 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.

I tried to take a step and almost fell, and Koska stepped forward to a.s.sist me to a chair, all very solicitously, as if I"d had one of my fainting spells, but I"d be all right in a minute.

"You"re a liar, Karg," I said, "and a bad one. It takes a live man to perjure himself with that true ring of sincerity. You didn"t grapple me out of a few billion square millennia of eternity at random. They did a nice job on your scars, but you know me. And if you know me, you know her."

The Karg looked thoughtful; he motioned, and Koska and the woman left the room without a backward glance. He faced me with a different expression on his plastalloy features.

"Very well, Mr. Ravel, I know you. Not personally; your reference to scars presumably applies to some confrontation which has been relegated to the status of the unrealized possibility. But I know you by reputation, by profession. As for the woman-possibly I can look into the matter of a search for her later-after we"ve reached an understanding." He was just a Karg now, all business and no regrets.

"I already understand you, Karg," I said.

"Let me tell you of our work, Mr. Ravel," he said mildly. "I think when you understand fully you"ll want to contribute wholeheartedly to our great effort."

"Don"t bet on it, Karg," I said.

"Your hostility is misplaced," the Karg said. "We here at Dinosaur Beach have need of your abilities and experience, Mr. Ravel-"

"I"ll bet you do. Who are your friends? Third Era dropouts? Or are you recruiting all the way back to Second Era now?"

The Karg ignored that. "Through my efforts," he said, "you"ve been given an opportunity to carry on the work to which your life was devoted. Surely you see that it"s in your interest to cooperate?"

"I doubt that your interests and mine could ever coincide, Karg."

"Conditions have changed, Mr. Ravel. It"s necessary for all of us to realign our thinking in terms of the existent realities."

"Tell me about them."

"Your great Nexx Timesweep effort failed, of course, as I"m sure you"ve deduced by now. It was a n.o.ble undertaking, but misguided, as others before it. The true key to temporal stability lies not in a simple effort to restore the past to its virgin state, but in making intelligent use of the facilities and resources existent in that portion of the entropic spectrum available to us to create and maintain a viable enclave of adequate dimensions to support the full flowering of the racial destiny. To this end the final Authority was established, with the mission of salvaging from every era all that could be saved from the debacle of aborted temporal progression. I"m pleased to be able to tell you that our work has proved a great success."

"So you"re looting up and down the temporal core, and setting up housekeeping-where?"

"The Final Authority has set aside a reservation of ten centuries in what was formerly known as Old Era time. As for your use of the term "looting"-you yourself, Mr. Ravel, are an example of the chief object of our Recovery Service."

"Men-and women. All trained agents, I suppose."

"Of course."

"And all of them are so happy to be here that they turn their talents to building this tight little island in time you seem so happy with."

"Not all, Mr. Ravel. But a significant number."

"I"ll bet it"s significant. Mostly ex-Third Era and prior Timesweep types, eh? Sophisticated enough to realize that matters are in a bad way, but not quite sophisticated enough to realize that what you"re building around yourself is just a sterile dead end."

"I fail to understand your att.i.tude, Mr. Ravel. Sterile? You are free to breed; plants grow, the sun shines, chemical reactions occur."

I laughed. "Spoken like a machine, Karg. You just don"t get the point do you?"

"The point is to preserve rational life in the universe," he said patiently.

"Uh-huh-but not in a museum, under a gla.s.s case and a layer of fine dust. Perpetual motion is an exploded theory, Karg. Going round and round in a temporal loop-even a loop a thousand years long-isn"t quite my idea of human destiny."

"Nevertheless, you will lend your support to the Final Authority."

"Will I?"

"You would, I believe, find the alternative most unpleasant."

"Pleasant, unpleasant. Just words, Karg." I looked around the big, gloomy room. It was cold, with a feeling of dampness, as if the walls ought to be beaded with condensation. "This is where you explain to me how you"re going to go to work with the splinters under the fingernails, and the thumb-press, and the rack. And then go on to explain how you"re going to make sure I behave, after you send me out on an a.s.signment."

"No physical persuasions will be needed, Mr. Ravel. You will perform as required in order to earn the reward I offer. Agent Gayl was recovered some time ago. It was through her inquiries that I became interested in you. I a.s.sured her that in return for her efforts on behalf of the Final Authority, I would undertake to locate and recover you."

"I don"t suppose you"ve gotten around to telling her you found me?"

"That would not be to the advantage of the Final Authority at this time."

"So you keep her on the string while you work both sides of the street."

"That"s correct."

"One nice thing about working with a piece of machinery: you don"t waste time trying to justify your actions."

"The personnel with whom I work are not aware of the artificial nature of my origin, Mr. Ravel. As you surmise, they are largely Second Era. It is not in the best interest of the Authority that they be so apprised."

"What if I tell them anyway?"

"I will then bring Agent Gayl into your presence and there execute her."

"What-and waste all the effort you"ve put into this program?"

"Less than total control is no control at all. You will obey my instructions, Mr. Ravel. In every detail. Or I will sc.r.a.p the project."

"Neat, logical, and to the point," I said. "You just missed one thing."

"What might that be?"

"This," I said, and lifted the crater gun and fired from the hip, the only place I could fire from with my arms bound to my sides. It wasn"t a clean shot; but it blew his knee into rags and sent him across the room on his back.

By a combination of flopping and rolling, I got to him while his electroneuronic system was still in fibrillation, got his chest panel open and thumbed the switch that put him on manual.

"Lie quietly," I said, and he relaxed, looking at nothing.

"Where"s the unlock for this tanglenet?"

He told me. I worked the ballpoint pen projector out of his breast pocket and squirted a fine pink mist at the nearest portion of the goo I was wrapped in. It turned to putty, then to caked dust that I brushed away.

I cut the seals and lifted out his tape. He"d been modified to take an oversized cartridge, an endless loop designed to repeat automatically, estimated duration a hundred years plus.

Somebody had gone to a lot of trouble to put a self-servicing, non-terminating robot on the job.

A scanner was included in the installed equipment. I inserted the cartridge and set it at high speed and listened to a routine parameter-conditioning program, slightly amended here and there to override what had always been the basics of human-Karg relationships. It was logical enough: this Karg had been designed to operate in the total absence of human supervision.

I edited out the command and initiative portions of the tape and reinserted it.

"Where"s the woman?" I asked. "Agent Mellia Gayl."

"I do not know," he said.

"Tsk," I said. "And she was supposed to be the bait to keep me in line. Lying again, Karg. It"s a nasty habit but I know the cure for it." I asked him a few more questions, got the expected answers. He and his staff of Kargs and salvaged early-era humans had marooned themselves on a tight little island in a rising sea of entropic dissolution. They"d be safe here for a while-until the rot now nibbling at the edges reached the last year, the last day, the last hour. Then they"d be gone and all their works with them into the featureless h.o.m.ogeneity of the Ylem.

"It"s a sad little operation you"re running here, Karg," I told it. "But don"t worry: nothing lasts forever."

He didn"t answer. I snooped around the room for a few minutes longer, recording what interested me; I could have made good use of that breakfast I hadn"t eaten, a hundred years ago; and there were all sorts of special equipment that could be useful where I was going; and maybe there were a few more questions that should have been asked. But I had the feeling that the sooner I departed from the jurisdiction of the Final Authority the better it would be for me and whatever was left of my aspirations.

"Any last words for posterity?" I asked the Karg. "Before I effect that cure I mentioned?"

"You will fail," he said.

"Maybe," I said. "By the way, push your self-destruct b.u.t.ton."

He obeyed; smoke started rising from his interior. I referred to the homing signaler I had tuned to Mellia Gayl, read out the correct co-ordinates. I unlocked the transfer booth and punched in my destination, stepped inside the booth and activated the sender field. Reality shattered into a million splinters and rea.s.sembled itself in another shape, another time, another place.

I was just in time.

27.

It was a windy hillside, under a low gray sky. Green gra.s.s, black moss, bare rock, weathered smooth. A herd of dirty yellow-gray sheep in the middle distance against a backdrop of rounded hills. And in the foreground a crowd all set to lynch a witch.

There were about three dozen people, of the rude but hearty villager variety, dressed in motley costumes of coa.r.s.e cloth that suggested a raid on a ragpicker"s wagon. Most of them had sticks or wooden farm implements; a few had handcarved shillelaghs, well polished by use; and all of them had expressions of innocent ferocity. The expressions were aimed at Mellia, who occupied a central position with her hands tied behind her, wrapped halfway to the elbow in heavy brown rope.

She was dressed in gray homespun, and the wind flapped her long skirts, blew her red-brown hair around her shoulders like a flag of no surrender. A tossed stone hit her a glancing blow on the face, and she stumbled, caught herself, stared back at them with her chin high and a bright trickle of blood on her cheek. Then she caught sight of me. If I was expecting a gladsome smile of welcome, I was disappointed. She looked straight into my eyes; then she turned her back.

A wide-shouldered man reached out a big square hand and clamped it on her shoulder to spin her around. I pushed a couple of committee members aside and kicked him hard in the left calf. He yelled and came around fast, hopping on one foot, and gave me a nice shot at a bulgy red nose. It splattered satisfactorily under a straight right, followed by a left hook that put him down on the turf. Somebody started a yell, and I pivoted right and got him square in the mouth with the edge of my forearm. He backed off two steps and sat down hard, spitting blood and maybe a tooth or two.

"You fool! You blind fool!" Mellia said, and over my shoulder I snapped, "Shut up!"

They were recovering from their surprise now. A few of the sharper ones began to suspect the party was about over. They didn"t like that. There was a surge toward me, a tide of ugly, angry faces, all chapped lips and bad teeth and broken veins and glaring eyes. I"d had enough of them. I snapped a hold on them, which I should have done in the first place, and they froze hard in midyelp.

Mellia was caught in the hold field too, of course. I picked her up carefully; it"s easy to break bones under those circ.u.mstances. Walking downhill was like walking under water. On a packed-dirt road at the bottom I put her on her feet and killed the field. She staggered, gave me a wild look which lacked any element of grat.i.tude.

"How . . . did you do that?" she gasped.

"I have hidden talents. What were they on to you for? Putting spells on cows?" I dabbed at the streak of blood on her face. She leaned away from my touch.

"I . . . violated their customs. They were merely carrying out the traditional punishment. It wouldn"t have been fatal. And now you"ve ruined it all-destroyed everything I"d accomplished!"

"How do you like the idea you"re working for a Karg named Dr. Javeh?"

She looked startled, then indignant.

"That"s right," I said. "He fished you out of the void and sicked you onto this job."

"You"re out of your mind! I broke out of stasis on my own; this is my program-"

"Un-unh, lady. He planted the idea on you. You"ve been working for a Karg-and a rogue Karg at that. He"d rewired himself and added a few talents his designers wouldn"t have appreciated. Very cute. Or maybe somebody did it for him. It doesn"t matter much-"

"You"re talking nonsense!" She glared at me, looking for an opening to bring up what was really on her mind. "I suppose she didn"t matter, either," she blurted, with charming feminine illogic.

"The elderly Agent Gayl? No, you"re right. She didn"t. She knew that-"