"We"ve made some progress," she said levelly, not rising to the bait, refusing the opportunity for a nice soul-scouring argument. "We know we have to be on our way, and without much delay."

"All right, I"ll grant the point. Which leaves us a choice of two courses. We can use the station transfer booth."

"And end up somewhere back in our own pasts, complicating matters still further."

"Could be. Or we can recharge our personal gear and jump out at random."

"With no conception of where that might put us." She shivered and covered it with a gesture; a graceful lift of her chin that reminded me of another time, another place, another girl.

No, d.a.m.n it-not another girl!

"Or," she said, "we could go together . . . as we did before."

"That wouldn"t change anything, Mellia. We"d still be launching ourselves into the timestream with no target. We might find ourselves spinning end over end in a fog like the one outside-or worse."

"At least-" she started to say, and caught herself. At least we"d be together-I could almost hear the words.

"At least we won"t be sitting here idle while the universe falls to pieces around us," she said instead.

"So-how do you vote?"

There was a long silence. She didn"t look at me; then she did. She started to speak, hesitated.

"The booth," she said.

"Together or one at a time?"

"Can the field handle both of us simultaneously?"

"I think so."

"Together. Unless you know a reason for separating."

"None at all, Mellia."

"Then it"s settled."

"Right. Now finish your meal. It may be a while before we have another chance to eat."

My last item of preparation was a small crater gun from the armory. I strapped it to my wrist, just out of sight under the cuff. We went along the time-shielded transit tunnel to the transfer booth. All readings were normal; the circuits were ready to operate. Under normal conditions a pa.s.senger would be rotated painlessly and instantaneously out of the timestream into the extratemporal medium, and rerotated into normal s.p.a.ce-time at the main reception room at Nexx Central. What would happen this time was an open question. Maybe we"d drop back down my timeline, and there"d be two of us aboard the sinking gallea.s.s; or maybe Mellia Gayl"s gestalt would be stronger and we"d arrive at a point in her past where we hadn"t arrived before, thus adding to the disaster that had hit us. Or possibly somewhere in between. Or nowhere at all . . .

"Next stop Nexx Central," I said, and ushered Mellia inside. I squeezed in after her.

"Ready?"

She nodded.

I pressed the Transmit b.u.t.ton.

The explosion blew both of us into our component atoms.

21.

"Or maybe not," I heard a voice croak. I recognized the voice; it was mine, somewhat the worse for wear but still on the job. "Some dream," I went on, giving myself the word. "Some hangover. Some headache."

"Trans-temporal shock is the technical term, I believe," Lisa said beside me.

My eyes snapped open; well, snap isn"t quite the word. They unglued themselves and winced at the light and made out a face nearby. A nice face, heart-shaped, with big dark eyes and the prettiest smile in the world.

But not Lisa.

"Are you all right?" Mellia said.

"It"s nothing that a month in the intensive care unit wouldn"t clear up," I said and got an elbow under me and looked around. We were in a s.p.a.cious room, long and high, like a banqueting hall, with a smooth gray floor, pale gray walls covered with row on row of instrument faces. Center position went to a big chair facing an array of display screens and a coding console. At the far end the open sky was visible through a gla.s.s wall.

"Where are we?"

"I don"t know. Some sort of technical facility. You don"t recognize it?"

I shook my head; if it was anything out of my past, the memory had been wiped clean.

"How long have I been out?" I asked.

"I woke up an hour ago."

I shook my head to clear it, and succeeded in sending pains like hot knives through my temples.

"Rough pa.s.sage," I mumbled, and got to my feet. I felt sick and dizzy, as if I"d eaten too much ice cream on the merry-go-round.

"I"ve looked at some of the equipment," Mellia said. "Temporal gear, but not exactly like anything I"ve seen." Her tone suggested that meant something important. I tried to focus my brain and figure out what.

I said, "Oh."

"I could deduce the function of some of it," she said. "Some was completely baffling."

"Maybe it"s Third Era stuff-"

"I"d recognize that."

"Let"s take a look." I headed toward the big controller"s chair, trying to look healthier than I felt. If the jump had affected Mellia at all, she didn"t show it.

The console was covered with b.u.t.tons labeled laconically with designations such as M. Ds-H and LV 3-gn. The screens were the usual milky-gla.s.s anti-glare surfaces, set inside anti-reflecting frames.

"They"re ordinary a.n.a.log-potential readout boards, of course," Mellia said, "but with two extra banks of controls-and that implies at least an additional order of sensitivity in the discretion and weighing circuitry."

"Does it?"

"Certainly." Her slim finger reached past me, tapped out a swift code on the colored keys. The screen twinkled and snapped to brightness.

"The pickup field is on active phase-or should be," she said. "But there"s no base reading. And I"m afraid to play with a Timecast keybank I don"t understand."

"You"ve left me in the shade," I said. "I never saw anything like this stuff. What else is there?"

"There are rooms back there." She pointed to the end of the hall opposite the gla.s.s wall. "Equipment rooms; a power section, operations . . ."

"Sounds like a regulation Timecasting station."

She nodded. "Almost."

"A little on the large side," I commented. "Let"s take a look."

We went through rooms packed with gear as mysterious to me as a wiring diagram to I-Em Hotep. One contained nothing but three full-length mirrors; our reflections looking back at us were a couple of forlorn strangers. Nowhere were there any indications of recent habitation. No people, no signs of people. Just a dead building full of echoes.

We recrossed the grand hall and found an exit vestibule that cycled us out onto a wide stone terrace above a familiar view of sand and sea. The curve of the sh.o.r.eline was as I had seen it last; only the jungle growth on the headland seemed denser, more solid somehow.

"Good old Dinosaur Beach," I said. "Doesn"t change much, does it?"

"Time has pa.s.sed," Mellia said. "A great deal of time."

"There was nothing like this in any projection plan I ever saw," I said. "Any ideas?"

"Not that I want to verbalize."

"I know how you feel," I said, and held the door for her. "By the way: I ought to tell you: I never heard of a.n.a.log-potential. What is it, a new kind of breakfast food?"

"A-P is the basis of the entire Timesweep program," she said and looked at me sharply. "Any Nexx agent would have to be familiar with it." She was frowning at me pretty severely.

"Don"t count on it," I said. "The lectures I got at the Inst.i.tute were all about deterministics, actualization dynamics, and fixation levels."

"That"s nonsense. Discredited Fatalistics Theory."

"Hold on, Miss Gayl, before you pop a valve. Don"t look at me as if you"d caught me in the computer room with a live bomb. I admit I"m a little slow this morning, what with the heavy swell under the stern quarter, but I"m still the same sweet, lovable guy you fished out of the pond. I"m as much a Nexxman as you are; but a kind of dirty suspicion is sneaking up on me."

"And what might that be?"

"That the Nexx Central you work out of and the one I know aren"t the same."

"That"s ridiculous. The entire Nexx operation is based on the stability of the unique Nexx Baseline-"

"Sure-that"s the concept. It won"t be the first concept that had to be modified in the face of experience."

She looked a little pale. "You realize what you"re implying?"

"Uh-huh. We"ve messed things up good, kid. For you and me to be standing here face to face-representatives of two mutually exclusive base timetracks-means things are worse than we thought; worse than I knew they could be."

Her eyes held on mine, wide and shocked. I was doing a good job of rea.s.suring her.

"But we"re not licked yet," I said heartily. "We"re still trained agents, still operational. We"ll do the best we can-"

"That"s not the point."

"Oh? What is?"

"We have a job to do-as you said: to attempt to reintroduce ourselves into the temporal pattern by eliminating the chronomalies we"ve unwittingly generated."

"Agreed."

"Very well-what pattern do we work toward, Ravel? Yours-or mine? Is it a Deterministic or an A-P continuum we"re supposed to be rea.s.sembling?"

I started to give her a fast, rea.s.suring answer, but it stuck in my throat.

"We can work that out later," I said.

"How can we? Every move we make from this point on has to be correctly calculated. There"s equipment here-" she waved a hand-"that"s more sophisticated than anything I"ve ever seen. But we have to use it properly."

"Sure we do-but first we have to figure out what all the pretty little b.u.t.tons are for. Let"s concentrate on that for the present, Mellia. Maybe along the way we can resolve the philosophical questions."

"Before we can work together, we have to come to some agreement."

"Go on."

"I want your word you won"t . . . do anything prejudicial to the A-P concept."

"I won"t do anything without conferring with you first. As to what Universe it is we"re rebuilding-let"s wait until we know a little more before we commit ourselves, all right?"

She looked at me a long time before she said, "Very well."

"You might start," I said, "by explaining this setup to me."

She spent the next hour giving me a fast, sketchy, but graphic briefing on the art of a.n.a.log-potential interpretation; I listened as fast as I could. The A-P theory was news to me, but I was accustomed to working with complex chronic gear. I began to get some idea of what the equipment was for.

"I get the feeling that your version of Nexx Central operates a lot farther out in the theoretical boondocks than the one I know," I said. "And backs it up with some very highly evolved hardware."

"Of course, what I"m accustomed to is much less advanced than this," Mellia said. "I don"t know what to make of a lot of this."

"But you"re sure it"s A-P type gear?"

"There"s no doubt in my mind at all. It couldn"t be anything else-certainly not anything that Deterministic theory might have given rise to."

"I agree with that last point. This layout would make about as much sense at Central-my Central-as a steam whistle on a sailboat."