Dinosaur Beach

15

“I’m sorry about leaving you unattended all last night,” Lisa, or Mellia Gayl, said. “But of course I didn’t know you were hurt—and—”

“And I was out cold and too heavy to carry, even if I’d smelled better,” I filled in. “Forget it. No harm done.”

It had been rather pleasant, waking up in a clean bed, in an air-conditioned tent, neatly bandaged and doped to the hairline, feeling no pain, just a nice warm glow of well-being, and a pleasant numbness in the extremities.

But Lisa still insisted she didn’t know me.

I watched her face as she fiddled with the dressings she’d put on my various contusions, as she spooned soup into me. There wasn’t the slightest shadow of a doubt. She was Lisa.

But somehow not quite the Lisa I’d fallen in love with.

This Lisa—Mellia Gayl—was crisp, efficient, cool, unemotional. Her face was minutely thinner, her figure minutely more mature. It was Lisa, but a Lisa older by several years than the wife I had abandoned only subjective hours ago. A Lisa who had never known me. There were implications in that I wasn’t ready to think about. Not yet.

“They’re full of surprises, the boys back at Central,” I said. “Imagine Lisa—my sweet young bride-being a Timesweep plant. Hard to picture. Took me completely. I thought I met her by accident. All part of the elan. They could have told me. Some actress…”

“You’re tiring yourself out,” Mellia said coolly. “Don’t try to talk. You’ve lost a lot of blood and plasma. Save your strength for recuperating.”

“Otherwise you’re stuck with an invalid or a corpse, eh, kid?” I thought, but the spoon went into my mouth in time to keep me from saying it.

“I heard the splash,” she was saying. “I knew something big was thrashing around down there. I thought a small reptile had blundered into it. It’s a regular trap. They fall in and can’t get out again.” As she spoke, her voice sounded younger, more vulnerable.

“But you came and had a look anyway,” I said. “Animal lover.”

“I was glad when you shouted,” she blurted, as if it was a shameful admission. “I was beginning to wonder… to think—”

“And you still haven’t told me how you happened to be waiting here to welcome me with hot soup and cold glances,” I said.

She tightened up her mouth but it was still a mouth that was made for kisses.

“I’d finished up my assignment and jumped back to station,” she said flatly. “But the station wasn’t here. Just a hole in the ground full of mud and bones. I didn’t know what to think. My first impulse was to jump out again, but I knew that would be the wrong thing to do. There’d be no telling where I’d end up. I decided my best course would be to sit tight and wait for a retrieval. So here I am.”

“How long?”

“About… three weeks.”

“‘About?’“

“Twenty-four days, thirteen hours and ten minutes,” she snapped, and jammed the spoon at my teeth.

“What was your assignment?” I asked after I’d swallowed.

“Libya. 1200 B.C.”

“I never knew the ancient Libyans packed revolvers.”

“It wasn’t a contact assignment, I was alone in the desert—at an oasis, actually, at the time, equipped for self-maintenance for a couple of weeks. Things were a little greener there in those days. There’d been some First Era tampering done with an early pre-Bedouin tomb, with a complicated chain of repercussions, tied in with the rise of Islam much later.

“My job was to replace some key items that had been recovered from a Second Era museum. I managed it all right. Then I jumped back—” She broke off and for just an instant I saw a frightened girl trying very hard to be the tough, fearless agent.

“You did just right, Mellia,” I said. “In your place I’d probably have panicked and tried to jump back out. And ended up stuck in an oscillating loop.” As I said it, I realized that was the wrong aspect of the matter to dwell on just now.

“Anyway, you waited, and here I am. Two heads, and all that—”

“What are we going to do?” she cut in. She sounded like a frightened girl now. Swell job of comforting you’re doing, Ravel. She was fine until you came along…

“We have several courses of action,” I said as briskly as I could with soup running down my chin. “Just let me…” I ran out of wind and drew a shaky breath. “Let me catch a few winks more and…”

“Sorry…” she was saying. “You need your rest. Sleep; we’ll talk later…”

I spent three days lying around waiting for the skin on my back to regenerate, which it did nicely under the benign influence of the stuff from Mellia’s field kit, and for my scrapes and cuts to seal themselves over. Twice during that time I heard shots: Mellia, discouraging the big beasties when they got too close. A crater gun at wide diffusion stung just enough to get the message through to their pea-sized brains.

On the fourth day I took a tottery stroll over to the edge of the hole Mellia had pulled me out of.

It was the pit where the station had been, of course. High tides, rain, blown sand, wandering animals had filled it halfway to the brim. The glass lining above the surface was badly weathered. It had taken time for that—lots of time.

“How long?” Mellia asked.

“Centuries, anyway. Maybe a thousand or two years.”

“That means the station was never rebuilt,” she said.

“At least not in this time segment. It figures; if the location was known there was no reason to go on using it.”

“There’s more to it than that. I’ve been here for almost a month. If anyone were looking for me, they’d have pinpointed me by now.”

“Not necessarily. It’s a long reach, this far back.”

“Don’t try to be kind to me, Ravel. We’re in trouble. This is more than a little temporary confusion. Things are coming apart.”

I didn’t like her using virtually the same wording that had popped into my mind when I’d looked at my own corpse.

“The best brains at Nexx Central are working on this,” I told her. “They’ll come up with the answers.” It didn’t sound convincing even to me.

“What was the station date when you were there last?” she asked.

“Sixty-five,” I said. “Why?”

She gave me a tense little smile. “We’re not exactly contemporaries. I was assigned to Dino Beach in twelve-thirty-one, local.”

I let the impact of that diffuse through my brain for a few seconds, bringing no comfort. I grunted as if I’d been socked in the gut.

“Swell. That means—” I let it hang there; she knew what it meant as well as I did: that the whole attack I had seen—lived through—the consequences of which we were looking at now—was what was known to the trade as a recidivism: an aborted alternate possibility that either had never occurred or had been eliminated by Timesweep action. In Mellia’s past, the Dinosaur Beach station had been functional for over eleven hundred years, minimum, after the date I’d seen it under attack. She’d jumped from it to Libya, done her job, and jumped back—to find things changed.

Changed by some action of mine.

I had no proof of that assumption, of course; but I knew. I’d handled my assignment in 1936 according to the book, wrapped up all the loose ends, scored a total victory over my Karg counterpart. I thought.

But something had gone wrong. Something I’d done—or not done—had shattered the pattern. And the result was this.

“It doesn’t make sense,” I said. “You jumped back to home base and found it missing—the result of something that didn’t happen in your own personally experienced past. O.K. But what puts me here at the same time? The circuits I used for my jump were tuned to a point almost twelve hundred years earlier.”

“Why haven’t they made a pick-up on me?” she said, not really talking to me. Her voice was edging up the scale a little.

“Take it easy, girl,” I said, and patted her shoulder; I knew my touching her would chill her down again. Not a nice thing to know, but useful.

“Keep your hands to yourself, Ravel,” she snapped, all business again. “If you think this is some little desert island scene, you’re very wrong.”

“Don’t get ahead of yourself,” I told her. “When I make a pass at you that’ll be time enough to slap me down. Don’t go female on me now. We don’t have time for nonsense.”

She sucked in air with a sharp hiss and bottled up whatever snappy comeback she’d been about to make. Quite a girl. It was all I could do to keep from putting my arms around her and telling her it was all going to be all right. Which was a long way from what I believed.

“We can sit here and wait it out for a while longer,” I said, in my best business-as-usual tone. “Or we can take action now. How do you vote?”

“What action?” It was a challenge.

“In my opinion,” I said, not taking the bait, “the possible benefits of staying put are very small— statistically speaking. Still, they exist.”

“Oh?” Very cool; just a little tremble of a finely molded lip that was beaded with sweat.

“This is a known locus; whatever the difficulties that caused the site to be abandoned, it’s still a logical place for a search effort to check.”

“That’s nonsense. If it were checked and we were located the sensible thing to do—or at least the humane thing—would be to shift the pick-up back a month and take us out at the moment of our arrival. That didn’t happen. Therefore it won’t happen.”

“Maybe you’ve forgotten what this Timesweep effort is all about, Miss Gayl. We’re trying to knit the fabric back together, not make new holes in it. If we were spotted here, now—and the pick-up were made at a prior locus—what happens to all the tender moments we’ve known together? This moment right now? It never happened? No, any pick-up on us would be made at the point of initial contact, not earlier. However…”

“Well?”

“The possibility exists that we’re occupying a closed-loop temporal segment, not a part of the main timestem.”

She looked a little pale under the desert tan, but her eyes held mine firmly.

“In which case—we’re marooned—permanently.”

I nodded. “Which is where the alternative comes in.”

“Is there… one?”

“Not much of one. But a possibility. Your personal jumper’s still operational.”

“Nonsense. I’m tuned to home on the station fix. I’m already at the station fix. Where would I go?”

“I don’t know. Maybe nowhere.”

“What about you?”

I shook my head.

“I already used my reserve. Charge is gone. I’ll have to wait for you to bring help back. So—I’ll contain myself in patience—if you decide to try it, that is.”

“But—an unfocused jump—”

“Sure—I’ve heard the scare stories too. But my jump wasn’t so bad. I ended up in the station, remember?”

“A station in nowhere, as you described it.”

“But with a transfer booth. When I used it, it pitched me back down my own timeline. As luck would have it, I ended up looking in on a previous field assignment. Maybe you’ll be luckier.’

“That’s all that’s left, isn’t it? Luck.”

“Better than nothing.”

She stood, not looking at me; my Lisa, so hurt and so bewildered, so scared and trying not to show it, so beautiful, so desirable. I wondered if she had known—if it had been a sleeper assignment, meaning a field job in which the agent was conditioned to be unaware of his actual role, believed himself to be whatever his cover required.

“You really want me to go?” she said.

“Looks like the only way,” I said. Good old iceberg Ravel, not an emotion in his body. “Unless you want to set up permanent housekeeping with me here on the beach.” I gave her a nice leer to help her make her decision.

“There’s another way,” she said in a voice chipped out of ice. I didn’t answer.

“My field will carry both of us,” she said.

“Theoretically. Under, uh, certain conditions—”

“I know the conditions.”

“Oh, hell, girl, we’re wasting time—”

“You’d let me abandon you here before you’d…” She paused. “…meet those conditions?”

I drew a breath and tried to keep the strain out of my voice. “Not abandon. You’ll be back.”

“We’ll go together,” she said, “or not at all.”

“Look, Miss Gayl, you don’t have to—”

“Oh, yes, I do have to. Make no mistake about that, Mr. Ravel!”

She turned and walked off across the sand, looking very small and very forlorn against all that emptiness of beach and jungle.

I waited five minutes, for some obscure reason, before I followed her.