Keith Laumer: Assignment in Nowhere

It took us twenty minutes to cover the twelve kilometers to the edge of the city. For the last hundred yards, we slowed, steered a course among bodies lying in the street, pulled up at a rough barricade of automobiles turned on their sides and blackened by fire, bright tongues of flame still licking over the smouldering tires. A church tower clock was tolling midnight—a merry sound to accompany the cheery picture.

I looked at the dark towers of the city behind the barrier, the dark streets. There were at least a dozen men in sight, sprawled in the unlovely attitudes of violent death. None was in uniform or armed; they were bystanders, caught in the clouds of poison that had rolled out from the city’s streets. There were no Hagroon in sight. The streets were as still as a grave-yard.

There was a sound to the left. I brought my carbine up, saw a hatless man in a white shirt.

“Thank God you’ve got here at last,” he choked. “I got a whiff—sick as a dog. Pulled a couple back, but…” he coughed, retched, bending double. “Too late. All dead. Gas is gone now, blown away…”

“Get farther back,” I said. “Spread the word not to try to attack the barricades.” There was another man behind him, and a woman, her face soot-streaked.

“What do you want us to do?” someone called. They clustered around the car, a dozen battered survivors, thinking we were the police, and ready to do whatever had to be done to help us.

“Just stay back, keep out of harms’ way. We’re going to try something—”

Someone yelled then, pointing at Dzok. A cry went through the crowd.

“Everybody out—fast!” I barked to the men in the rear of the truck. Then: “This is a friend!” I yelled to the crowd. I jumped down, ran around to the side where the man had raised his first outcry, caught him by the arm as he jerked at the shattered door handle.

“Listen to me! This isn’t the enemy! He’s an ally of the Imperium! He’s here to help! These are his troops!” I waved at the ten costumed soldiers who had formed a rough circle around the truck. The headlights of the second truck swung into view then. It growled up beside the first, chugged to a stop and stalled out. The doors flew open and men swarmed out.

“He’s got hair on his face—just like the others—”

“You saw them?”

“No—but I heard—from the man I pulled back from the barricade—before he died—”

“Well, I don’t have hair on my face—unless you want to count three day’s beard. This is Commander Dzok! He’s on our side. Now, spread the word! I don’t want any accidents!”

“Who’re you?”

“I’m Colonel Bayard, Imperial Intelligence. I’m here to do what I can—”

“What can we do?” several voices called. I repeated my instructions to stay back.

“What about you?” the man who had spotted Dzok asked me. “What’s your plan, Colonel?”

Dzok was out of the car now. He handed the modified S-suit to me, turned and bowed in courtly fashion to the crowd.

“Enchanted, sirs and madams, to make your acquaintance,” he called. Someone tittered, but Dzok ignored it. “I have the honor, as Colonel Bayard has said, to offer my services in the fight against the rude invader. But it is the Colonel himself who must carry out our mission here tonight. The rest of us can merely assist…”

“What’s he going to do?”

I had the suit halfway on now. Dzok was helping me, pulling it up, getting my arms into the sleeves, settling the heavy chest pack in place, zipping long zippers closed.

“Using this special equipment,” Dzok said in his best theatrical manner, “Colonel Bayard will carry out a mission of the utmost peril…”

“Skip the pitch and hand me the helmet,” I interrupted him.

“We want to help,” someone called.

“I’d like to go along,” another voice said.

“Our chief need at the moment,” Dzok’s voice rang above the rest, “is a supply of coffee. My brave lads are a trifle fatigued, not having rested since leaving their home barracks. For the rest, we can only wait—”

“Why can’t some of us go along, Colonel,” a man said, stepping close. “You could use an escort—and not those overdressed fancy dans, either!”

“The Colonel must go alone,” Dzok said. “Alone he will carry out a spy mission among the enemy—on the other side of time!” He turned to me, and in a lower voice said: “Don’t waste any time, old fellow. It’s after midnight now—in about two hours the world ends…”

The transparent helmet was in place, all the contacts tight. Dzok made a couple of quick checks, made me the O sign with his fingers that meant all systems were go. I put my hand on the “activate” button and took my usual deep breath. If Dzok’s practice was as good as his theory, the rewired S-suit would twist the fabric of reality in a different manner than its designers had intended, stress the E-field of the normal continuum in a way that would expel me, like a watermelon seed squeezed in the fingers, into that curious non-temporal state of null entropy—the other side of time, as he poetically called it.

If it worked, that was. And there was only one way to find out. I pressed the button—

There was a moment of total vertigo; the world inverted itself around me, dwindled to a pinhole through which all reality flowed, to expand vastly, whirling…

I was standing in the street, looking across at the black hulks of burned-out cars glowing with a bluish light like corpses nine days under water. I turned, saw the empty police lorries, the dead bodies in the street, the stark, leafless trees lining the avenue, the blank eyes of the houses behind them. Dzok, the soldiers, the crowd—all of them had vanished in the instant that the suit’s field had sprung into being—or, more correctly, I had vanished from among them. Now I was alone, in the same deserted city I had seen when I awakened after my inexplicable encounter with the flaming man in the basement of Imperial Intelligence Headquarters.

I looked again at the clock on the church tower: the hands stood frozen at twelve twenty-five. And the clock I had seen in the office just after the encounter had read twelve-o-five. I was already too late to intercept the I laming man before he did whatever he had been there to accomplish.

But I wasn’t too late to spy out the Hagroon position, discover where the discontinuity engine was planted, then return, lead an assault force…

There were too many variables in the situation. Action was the only cure for the hollow sensation of foredoomed failure growing in the pit of my stomach.

A pebble hopped suddenly, struck the toe of my shoe as I took a step. Small dust clouds rose, swirled toward mv feet as I crossed the dry, crumbling soil where grass had grown only moments before. The eerie light that seemed to emanate from the ground showed me a pattern of depressions in the soil that seemed to form before my foot reached them…

I looked behind me. There were no prints to show where I had come, but a faint trail seemed to lead ahead. A curious condition, this null time…

I crossed the sidewalk, skirted a dead man lying almost on the barricade. I clambered over the burned wreck of a car, a boxy sedan with an immense spare tire strapped to the rear. There were more bodies on the other side—men who had died trying to climb the wall, or who had chosen that spot to make a stand. Among them a lone Hagroon lay, the bulky body contorted in the heavy atmosphere suit, a bloody hole in the center of his chest. Someone on the Imperial side had drawn enemy blood. The thought was cheering in this scene of desolation. I went on, glanced up at the tower clock as I passed—