Dinosaur Beach

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.

“That’s right,” he said. “Back at home port again—or the mirror image of it. Complete except for the small detail that the jump field’s operating in a closed loop. Outside there’s nothing.”

“I saw it, remember?”

“Right. That was the first time around. You jumped out into a post-segment of your life—a non-objective dead end. You were smart, you figured a way out—but they were there ahead of us, too. You struggled hard, but the circle’s still closed—and here you are.”

“And I thought I was maneuvering him,” I said. “While he thought he was maneuvering me.”

“Yeah—and now the play is to us—unless you’re ready to concede.”

“Not quite,” I said.

“I… we’re… being manipulated,” he said. “The Karg had something in reserve after all. We have to break the cycle. You have to break it.” He unhoistered the gun at his hip and held it out.

“Take this,” he said, “and shoot me through the head.”

I choked on what I started to say.

“I know all the arguments,” my future self was saying. “I used them myself, about a week ago. That’s the size of this little temporal enclave we have all to ourselves. But they’re no good. This is the one real change we can introduce.”

“You’re out of your mind, pal,” I said. I felt a little uneasy talking to myself, even when the self I was talking to was facing me from four feet away, needing a shave. “I’m not the suicidal type—even when the me I’m killing is you.”

“That’s what they’re counting on. It worked, too, with me. I refused to do it. He gave me the sardonic grin I’d been using on people for years. “If I had, who knows—it might have saved my life.” He weighed the gun on his hand and now his expression was very cold indeed.

“If I thought shooting you would help, I’d do it without a tremor,” he said. He was definitely he now.

“Why don’t you?”

“Because you’re in the past—so to speak. Killing you wouldn’t change anything. But if you kill me—that introduces a change in the vital equations—and possibly changes your… our future. Not a very good bet, maybe, but the only one going.”

“Suppose I introduce a variation of my own,” I said.

He looked weary. “Name it.”

“Suppose we out—jump together, using the station box?”

“It’s been tried,” he said tersely.

“Then you jump, while I wait here.”

“That’s been tried, too.”

“Then do the job yourself!”

“No good.”

“We’re just playing an old tape, eh? Including this conversation?”

“Now you’re getting the idea.”

“What if you varied your answers?”

“What would that change? Anyway, it’s been tried. Everything’s been tried. We’ve had lots of time—I don’t know how much; but enough to play the scene in all its little variations. It always ends on the same note—you jumping out alone, going through what I went through, and coming back to be me.”

“What makes you so sure?”

“The fact that the next room is full of bones,” he said, with a smile that wasn’t pretty. “Our bones. Plus the latest addition, which still has a little spoiled meat on it. That’s what that slight taint in the air is. It’s what’s in store for me. Starvation. So it’s up to you.”

“Nightmare,” I said. “I think I’ll go sleep it off.”

“Uh-huh—but you’re awake,” he said, and caught my hand and shoved the gun into it. “Do it now—before I lose my nerve!”

“Let’s talk a little sense,” I said. “Killing you won’t change anything. What I could do alone we could do better together.”

“Wrong. The only ace we’ve got left is to introduce a major change in the scenario.”

“What happens if I jump out again?”

“You end up back aboard the São Guadalupe, watching yourself foul up an assignment.”

“What if I don’t foul it up this time—if I clear the door?”

“Same difference. You end up here. I know. I tried it.”

“You mean—the whole thing? The mudhole, Mellia?”

“The whole thing. Over and over. And you’ll end up here. Look at it this way, Ravel: the Karg has played his ace; we’ve got to trump it or fold.”

“Maybe this is what he wants.”

“No. He’s counting on our behaving like humans. Humans want to live, remember? They don’t write themselves out of the script.”

“What if I jump back to the ship and don’t use the corpse’s jump gear—”

“Then you’ll burn to the waterline with the ship.”

“Suppose I stay on the beach with Mellia?”

“Negative. I’ve been all over that. You’d die there. Maybe after a short life, maybe a long one. Same result.”

“And shooting you will break the chain.”

“Maybe. It would introduce a brand-new element—like cheating at solitaire.”

I argued a little more. He took me on a tour of the station. I looked out at the pearly mist, poked into various rooms. There was a lot of dust and deterioration. The station was old…

Then he showed me the bone-room. I think the smell convinced me.

“Give me the gun,” I said. He handed it over without a word. I lifted it and flipped off the safety.

“Turn around,” I snapped at him. He did.

“There’s one consoling possibility,” he said. “This might have the effect of—”

The shot cut off whatever it was he was going to say, knocked him forward as if he’d been jerked by a rope around the neck. I got just a quick flash of the hole I’d blown in the back of his skull before a fire that blazed brighter than the sun leaped up in my brain and burned away the walls that had caged me in.

I was a giant eye, looking down on a tiny stage. I saw myself—an infinite manifold of substance and shadow, with ramifications spreading out and out into the remotest reaches of the entropic panoramas. I saw myself moving through the scenes of ancient Buffalo, aboard the sinking galleass, alone on the dying beach at the edge of the world, weaving my petty net around the rogue Karg, as he in turn wove his nets, which were in turn enfolded by wider traps outflanked by still vaster schemes…

How foolish it all seemed now. How could the theoreticians of Nexx Central have failed to recognize that their own efforts were no different in kind from those of earlier Timesweepers? And that…

There was another thought there, a vast one; but before I could grasp it, the instant of insight faded and left me standing over the body of the murdered man, with a wisp of smoke curling from the gun in my hand and the echoes of something immeasurable and beyond value ringing down the corridors of my brain. And out of the echoes, one clear realization emerged: Timesweeping was a fallacy, not only when practiced by the experimenters of the New Era and the misguided fixers of the Third Era, but equally invalid in the hands of Nexx Central.

The cause to which I had devoted my lifework was a hollow farce. I was a puppet, dancing on tangled strings, meaninglessly.

And yet—it was clear now—something had thought it worth the effort to sweep me under the rug.

A power greater than Nexx Central.

I had been hurried along, manipulated as neatly as I had maneuvered the doomed Karg, back in Buffalo—and his mightier alter ego, building his doomed Final Authority in emptiness, like a spider spinning a web in a sealed coffin. I had been kept off-balance, shunted into a closed cycle that should have taken me out of play for all time.

As it would have, if there hadn’t been one small factor that they had missed.

My alter ego had died in my presence—and his mindfield, in the instant of the destruction of the organic generator which created and supported it, had jumped to—merged with—mine.

For a fraction of a second, I had enjoyed an operative I.Q. which I estimated at a minimum of 300.

And while I was mulling over the ramifications of that realization, the walls faded around me and I was standing in the receptor vault at Nexx Central.