Dinosaur Beach

39

Aside from the fact that nothing not encased in an eddy-field like the one that allowed me to operate in nulltime could move here, the intrusion wasn’t too surprising. I had been hoping for a visitor of some sort; the situation almost demanded it.

He came through the door, a tall, fine-featured, totally hairless man elegantly dressed in a scarlet suit with brocaded designs in deep purple, like mauve eels coiling through red seaweed. He gave the room one of those flick-flick glances that prints the whole picture on the brain to ten decimals in a one-microsecond gestalt, nodded to me as if I were a casual acquaintance encountered at the club.

“You are very efficient,” he said. He spoke with no discernible accent, but with a rather strange rhythm to his speech, as if perhaps he were accustomed to talking a lot faster. His voice was calm, a nice musical baritone.

“Not so very,” I said. “I went through considerable waste motion. There were a couple of times when I wondered who was conning whom.”

“A modest disclaimer,” he said, as though acknowledging a routine we had to go through. “We feel that you handled the entire matter—a rather complex one—in exemplary fashion.”

“Thanks,” I said. “Who’s ‘we’?”

“Up to this point,” he went on without bothering with my question, “we approve of your actions. However, to carry your mission farther would be to risk creation of an eighth-order probability vortex. You will understand the implications of this fact.”

“Maybe I do and maybe I don’t,” I hedged. “Who are you? How did you get in here? This enclave is double sealed.”

“I think we should deal from the outset on a basis of complete candor,” the man in red said. “I know your identity, your mission. My presence here, now, should be ample evidence of that. Which in turn should make it plain that I represent a still later era than your own—and that our judgment must override your instructions.”

I grunted. “So the Seventh Era comes onstage, all set to Fix It Forever.”

“To point out that we have the advantage of you—not only technically but in our view of the continuum as well—is to belabor the obvious.”

“Uh-huh. But what makes you think another set of vigilantes won’t land on your tail, to fix your fixing?”

“There will be no later Timesweep,” the bald man said. “Ours is the Final Intervention. Through Seventh Era efforts the temporal structure will be restored not only to stability, but will be reinforced by the refusion of an entire spectrum of redundant entropic vectors.”

I nodded, rather tiredly. “I see: you’re improving on nature by grafting all the threads of unrealized history back into the Mainstem. Doesn’t it strike you that’s just the sort of well-intentioned tampering that the primitive Timesweepers set out to undo?”

“I live in an era that has already begun to reap the benefits of temporal reinforcement,” he said firmly. “We exist in a state of vitality that prior eras could only dimly sense in moments of exultation. We—”

“You’re kidding yourselves. Opening up a whole new order of meddling just opens up a whole new order of problems.”

“Our calculations indicate otherwise. Now—”

“Did you ever stop to think that there might be a natural evolutionary process at work here—and that you’re aborting it? That the mind of man might be developing toward a point where it will expand into new conceptual levels-and that when it does, it will need a matrix of outlying probability strata to support it? That you’re fattening yourself on the seed-grain of the far future?”

For the first time, he faltered, but only for an instant.

“Not valid,” he said. “The fact that no later era has stepped in to interfere is the best evidence that ours is the final Sweep.”

“Suppose a later era did step in: What form do you think their interference would take?”

He gave me a flat look. “It would certainly not take the form of a Sixth Era Agent, busily erasing data from Third and Fourth Era records.”

“You’re right,” I said. “It wouldn’t.”

“Then what—” he started in a reasonable tone and checked himself. An idea was beginning to get through, and he wasn’t liking it very well. “You,” he said. “You’re not…”

And before I could confirm or deny, he vanished.