Assignment in Nowhere

Chapter Sixteen

It was a wonderful bed, wide and cool and clean, and the dream was wonderful too. Barbro’s face, perfect as an artist’s conception of the goddess of the hunt, framed by her dark red hair in a swirl of silken light. Just behind the rosy vision there were a lot of dark thoughts clamoring to be dragged out and reviewed, but I wasn’t going to get hooked on that one. No sir, the good old dream was good enough for me, if only it wouldn’t go away and leave me remembering dark shapes that moved in foul tunnels—and pain, and loss, the sickness of failure and dying hope—

The dream leaned closer and there were bright tears in the smoke-grey eyes, but the mouth was smiling, and then it was against mine, and I was kissing warm, soft lips—real lips, not the dream kind that always elude you. I raised a hand, felt a weight like an anvil stir, saw a vast bundle of white bandage swim into view.

“Barbro!” I said, and heard my voice emerge as a croak.

“Manfred! He’s awake! He knows me!”

“Ah, a man would have to be far gone indeed to fail to know you, my dear,” a cool voice said. Another face appeared, less pretty than the other, but a good face all the same. Baron von Richthofen smiled down at me, looking concerned and excited at the same time.

“Brion, Brion! What happened?” Barbro’s cool fingertips touched my face. “When you didn’t come home, I called, and Manfred told me, you’d gone—and then they searched the building, and found footprints, burned—”

“Perhaps you’d better not press him now,” Manfred murmured.

“No, of course not.” A hot tear fell on my face, and Barbro smiled and wiped it away. “But you’re safe now, that’s all that matters. Rest, Brion. You can think about it later…”

I tried to speak, to tell her it was all right, not to go…

But the dream faded, and sleep washed over me like warm, scented soapsuds, and I let go and sank down in its green depths.

The next time, I woke up hungry. Barbro was sitting by the bed, looking out the window at a tree in full spring leaf, golden green in the afternoon sun. I lay for a while, watching her, admiring the curve of her cheek, the line of her throat, the long, dark lashes—

She turned, and a smile like the sun coming out after a spring rain warmed me all the way to my bandaged heels.

“I’m okay now,” I said. This time the voice came out hoarse but recognizable.

There was a long, satisfying time then, of whispered words and agreeable nonsense, and as many feather-soft kisses as we could fit in. Then Manfred came in, and Hermann, and Luc, and things got a bit more brisk and businesslike.

“Tell me, Brion,” Manfred said mock-sternly. “How did you manage to leave my office, disappear for half an hour, only to be discovered unconscious beside some sort of half-ape, and dressed like a wanderer from a fancy dress ball in a variety of interesting costumes, wearing a three-day beard, with twenty-seven separate and distinct cuts, abrasions, and bruises, to say nothing of second-degree burns, frostbite, and a broken tooth?”

“What day is it?” I demanded.

He told me. I had been unconscious for forty-eight hours. Two days since the scheduled hour for the invasion—and the Hagroon hadn’t appeared.

“Listen,” I said. “What I’m going to tell you is going to be a little hard to take, but in view of the corpse you found beside me, I expect you to do your best…”

“A truly strange creature, Brion,” Hermann said. “It attacked you, I presume, which would account for some of the wounds, but as for the burns…”

I told them. They listened. I had to stop twice to rest, and once to eat a bowl of chicken broth, but I covered everything.

“That’s it,” I finished. “Now go ahead and tell me I dreamed it all. But don’t forget to explain how I dreamed that dead Hagroon.”

“Your story is impossible, ridiculous, fantastic, mad, and obviously the ravings of a disordered mind,” Hermann said. “And I believe every word of it. My technicians have reported to me strange readings on the Net Surveillance instruments. What you have said fits the observations. And the detail of your gambit of readjusting the portal, so as to shun the invading creatures into a temporal level weeks in the future; I find that of particular interest—”

“I can’t know how far I deflected them,” I said. “Just be sure to station a welcoming party down there to greet them as they arrive.”

Hermann cleared his throat. “I was about to come to that, Brion. You yourself have commented on the deficiencies in your qualifications for the modification of sophisticated MC effect apparatus—and by the way, I am lost in admiration of the suit you have brought home from your travels. A marvel—but I digress.

“You adjusted the portal, you said, to divert the Hagroon into the future. Instead, I fear, you have shunted them into a past time-level of our Zero-zero line…”

There was a moment of silence. “I don’t get that,” I said. “Are you saying they’ve already invaded us—last month, say?”

“The exact temporal displacement, I cannot yet state. But it seems clear, Brion, that they went back, not forward…”

“Never mind that,” Barbro said. “Wherever they are, they are not troubling us now—thanks to your bravery, my hero!”

Everybody laughed and my ears got hot. Manfred stepped in with a comment on the fiery figure.

“A strange sensation, my friend, to meet yourself face to face____”

“Which reminds me,” I said in the sudden silence.

“Where’s the… ah… other me?”

Nobody said anything. Then Hermann snapped his fingers.

“I think I can tell you the answer to that! It is an interesting problem in the physics of the continuum—but I think it can be accepted as axiomatic that the paradox of a face-to-face confrontation of identities is intolerable to the fabric of simultaneous reality. Hence, when the confrontation occurs—something must give! In this case, the intolerable entropic stress was relieved by the shunting of one aspect of this single ego into the plane you have called null time—where you encountered the Hagroon, and embarked on your strange adventure.”

“Your friend, Dzok,” Barbro said. “We must do something, Manfred, to help his people in their fight against these shaggy monsters. We can send troops—”

“I fear the implications of what Brion said regarding the disposition of the discontinuity engine have escaped you, my dear,” Hermann said. There was a glint of ferocious amusement in his eyes. “From the care with which he timed his operation, I should imagine that the Hagroon shuttle bearing the apparatus of destruction arrived on schedule in the Hagroon world-line—just as the timer actuated it. The Xonijeelians have nothing to fear from invading Hagroons. Our Brion has neatly erased them from the roster of the continuum’s active menaces.”

“Dzok was right,” Manfred said sadly. “We are a race of genocides. But perhaps that is a law of the nature that produced us…”

“And we must help the poor peoples of these sub-technical A-lines,” Barbro said. “Poor Olivia, dreaming of a brighter world, and never to know it, because we selfishly reserve its treasures for ourselves—”

“I agree, Barbro,” Manfred said. “There must be a change in policy. But it is not an easy thing to bring what we think of as enlightenment to a benighted world. Whatever we do, there will be those who oppose us. This Napoleon the Fifth, for example. How will he regard a proposed status as vassal of our Emperor?”

Barbro looked at me. “You were half in love with this Olivia, Brion,” she said. “But I forgive you. I am not such a fool as to invite her to be our houseguest, but you must arrange to bring her here. If she is as lovely as you say, there will be many suitors—”

“She wasn’t half as gorgeous as you are,” I said. “But I think it would be a nice gesture.”

There was a clatter of feet at the door. A young fellow in a white jacket came in, breathing hard.

“A call for you, Herr Goering,” he said. “The telephone is just here along the hall.”

Hermann went out, and we talked—asking lots of questions and getting some strange answers.

“In a way,” Manfred said, “it is a pity that these Hagroon were so thoroughly annihilated by your zeal, Brion. A new tribe of man only remotely related to our own stock, but having high intelligence, a technical culture—”

Hermann came back, pulling at his earlobe and blinking in a perplexed way.

“I have spoken to the Net Laboratory just now,” he said. “They have calculated the destination of your unhappy party of invading Hagroon, Brion. They worked from the brief traces recorded by our instruments over the period of the last five years—”

“Five years?” several voices echoed.

“From the date on which our present improved Net instrumentation was installed,” he said, “there have been a number of anomalous readings, which in the past we were forced to accept as a normal, though inexplicable deviation from calculated values. Now, in the light of Brion’s statements, we are able to give them a new interpretation.”

“Yes, yes, Hermann,” Manfred urged. “Spare us the dramatic pause-for-effect…”

“The Hagroon, to state it bluntly, Barbro and gentlemen, have been plunged over fifty thousand years into past time by our clever Brion’s adjustment to their portal!”

There was a moment of stunned silence. I heard myself laugh, a wild-sounding cackle.

“So they made it—just a little early. And if they tried to go back—they jumped off the deep end into an A-line that had been pulled out from under them…”

“I think they did not do that latter,” Hermann said. “I believe that they safely reached the Neolithic era—and remained there. I think they adapted but poorly to their sudden descent to a sub-technical status, these few hundreds of cast-aways in time. And, I think, never did they lose their hatred of the hairless hominids they found there in that cold northland of fifty millenia past.

“No, they were safely marooned there in the age of mammoths and ice. And there they left their bones, which our modern archaeologists have found and called Neanderthal…”