She had tried to rig a breathing apparatus for me, using a number 10 coffee can, but it hadn"t worked.

There wasn"t a foot of hose aboard for an air-line.

The next wave came in. This time I was under for over a minute, and when the water drained back, I had to tilt my head all the way back to get my nose clear enough to suck air.

She looked into my eyes while we waited for the next wave. . . .

Waited for death, on a bright afternoon a hundred feet from safety, ten minutes from rescue.

And the next wave came. . . .

And I was back in the bright room under the merciless lights. And I had my six parameters.

33.

"Interesting," the Karg said. "Most interesting. But . . ." He looked across at Mellia. She hung in the straps, utterly still.

"She died," the Karg said. "A pity." He looked at me and saw something in my eyes. He made a move, and I put out a finger of mind-force and locked him in his tracks.

"Sucker," I said.

He looked at me, and I watched him realizing the magnitude of the blunder he had made. I enjoyed that, but not as much as I should have, savoring the moment of victory.

"It was your plan from the beginning," he said. "Yes, that"s clear now. You maneuvered me very cleverly, Mr. Ravel. I underestimated you badly. Your bargaining position is now much different, of course. Naturally. I recognize realities and am prepared to deal realistically-"

"Sucker," I said. "You don"t know the half of it."

"I"ll release you at once," the Karg said, "establish you in an enclave tailored to your specifications. I will also procure a satisfactory alter ego to replace the female-"

"Forget it, Karg. You"re not going to do anything. You just went out of business."

"You are human," the Karg told me somberly; "You will respond to the proper reward. Name it."

"I"ve got what I want," I told him. "Six co-ordinates, Karg, for a fix in six dimensions."

Terrible things happened behind those ten-thousand-power cybernetic eyes.

"It cannot be your intention to destroy the Time engine!"

I smiled at him. But I was wasting my time. You can"t torture a machine.

"Be rational, Mr. Ravel. Consider the consequences. If you tamper with the forces of the engine, the result will be a detonation of entropic energy that will reduce the Final Authority to its component quanta-"

"I"m counting on it."

"-and yourself with it!"

"I"ll take the chance."

He struck at me then. It wasn"t a bad effort, considering what he was up against. The thought-thrust of his multiple brain lanced through the outer layers of my shielding, struck in almost to contact distance before I contained it and thrust it aside.

Then I reached, warped the main conduits of the Time-engine back on themselves.

Ravening energy burst outward across six dimensions, three of s.p.a.ce and three of time. The building dissolved around me in a tornado of temporal disintegration. I rode the crest like a bodysurfer planing ahead of a tidal wave. Energy beat at me, numbing me, blinding me, deafening me. Time roared over me like a cataract. I drowned in eons. And at last I washed ash.o.r.e on the beach of eternity.

34.

Consciousness returned slowly, uncertainly. There was light, dim and smoky red. I thought of fires, of bombs-and of broken bones, and sinking boats, and death by freezing and death by fatigue and hunger.

Nice dreams I"d been having.

But there was no catastrophe here; just a sunset over the water. But a different kind of sunset from any I had ever seen. A bridge of orange light curved up across the blue-black sky, turned silver as it crossed the zenith, deepened to crimson as it plunged down to meet the dark horizon inland.

It was the sunset of a world.

I sat up slowly, painfully. I was on a beach of gray sand. There were no trees, no gra.s.s, no sea-oats, no scuttling crabs, no monster tracks along the tide line. But I recognized the place.

Dinosaur Beach, but the dinosaurs were long gone. Along with man and gardenias and eggs and chickens.

Earth, post-life.

It was a stable piece of real estate; the headland was gone, worn down to a barely perceptible hump in the gray dunes that swept off to the east to disappear into remote distances. That"s why it had once been picked as a Timecast relay station, of course. Oceans had changed their beds, continents had risen and sunk, but Dinosaur Beach was much the same.

I wondered how many millions of years had pa.s.sed since the last trace of human activity had weathered away, but there was no way to judge. I checked my various emergency transit frequencies, but the ether was dead all across the bands.

I had wrecked the infernal machine, the cannibal apparatus that endured by eating itself; and the explosion had thrown me clear across recorded time, out into the boondocks of forever. I was alive, but that was all.

I had carried out my a.s.signment: I had used every trick in the book to track down the force that had thrown New Era time into chaos. I had found it, and had neutralized it.

The Karg-the pathetic super-cripple-had been ruthless; but I had been more ruthless. I had used everything-and everybody-to the maximum advantage to bring about the desired end.

But I had failed. The barren world around me was proof of that. I had gathered valuable information: information that might save the situation after all; but I was stranded, out of contact. What I had learned wasn"t going to help anyone. It was going to live with me and die with me, on a gray beach at the end of time, unless I did something about it.

"Clear thinking, Ravel," I said aloud, and my voice sounded as lost and lonely as the last leaf on the last tree, trembling in the gale of the final autumn.

It was cold on the beach; the sun was too big, but there was no heat in it. I wondered if it had engulfed Mercury yet; if the hydrogen phoenix reaction had run its course; if Venus was now a molten world gliding across the face of the dying monster Sol that filled half its sky. I wondered a lot of things. And the answer came to me.

It was simple enough in conception. Like all simple conceptions, the problem was in the execution.

I activated certain sensors built into my nervous system and paced along the beach. The waves roiled in and slapped with a weary sound that seemed to imply that they had been at it for too many billions of years, that they were tired now, ready to quit. I knew how they felt.

The spot I was looking for was less than half a mile along the sh.o.r.e, less than a hundred yards above the water"s edge. I spent a moment calculating where the hightide line would be before I remembered that there were no tides to speak of now. The moon had long ago receded to its maximum distance-a pea in the sky instead of a quarter-and had then started its long fall back. It had reached Roche"s limit eons ago, and there had been spectacular nights on the dying planet Earth as its companion of long ago had broken up and spread into the ring of dust that now arched from horizon to horizon.

Easy come, easy go. I had things to do. It was time to get to them, with no energies to waste on sentimental thoughts of a beloved face long turned to dust and ashes.

I found the spot, probed, discovered traces at eighteen feet. Not bad, considering the time involved. The gla.s.s lining was long since returned to sand, but there was a faint yet discernible discontinuity, infinitely subtle, marking the interface that had been its position.

Eighteen feet: four of sand, fourteen of rock.

All I had to do was dig a hole through it.

I had two good hands, a strong back, and all the time in the world. I started, one double handful at a time.

35.

If the problem at hand had been more complex, I could have solved it more easily. I was prepared to meet and overcome multiordinal technical obstacles of any degree of sophistication. I had means for dealing with superbrains, ravening energy weapons, even armor-plated meat-eaters. Shoveling sand came in another category entirely.

I started with a circle ten feet in diameter, directly over the target. It took me two twenty-four hour days to empty it of sand, by which time the periphery had grown to twenty feet, due to the low slump angle of the fine sand. That gave me working s.p.a.ce to attack the real job.

Making the first crack in the rock took me a day and a half. I walked three miles before I found a loose slab of stone big enough to do the job, and still small enough to move. I moved it by flopping it end over end. It was four feet wide; a simple calculation suffices to suggest how many times that meant I had to lift, push, boom! lift, push, boom! before I had it poised on the dune at the edge of my excavation. A half-hour"s scooping cleared away the sand that had blown in while I was otherwise occupied. Then I lifted my two-hundred-pound nutcracker, staggered forward, and let it fall. It hit sand and slid gently to rest.

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-seash.e.l.l 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 sc.r.a.p 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-sc.r.a.pe-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.