Keith Laumer: The Other Side of Time

“As you wish.” He dropped the gun muzzle and I tensed and shifted my weight to make my try and the gun made a sharp humming noise and liquid fire smashed into me and tore my flesh apart.

…I was lying with my face against the deck, quivering like a freshly amputated leg. I got my knees under me and got to my feet.

The man in the white uniform was gone. I was alone on the boat.

I went over her from bow to transom—not that I thought I’d find him hiding in the bait locker. It was just something to do while I got used to the idea of what had happened. I finished that and leaned against the deckhouse while a spell of pain-nausea passed. The spot I’d picked to ride out the night hours was sixty miles south of Key West, about forty north of the Castillo del Morro. I was afloat, as long as the wind didn’t rise enough to put a riffle on the water. I had plenty of food, and water for two days—maybe three if I stretched it. The man with the gun had fixed my radio before he left; I checked and found a tube missing. There was no spare. That meant my one chance was to stay afloat until somebody happened past who could put a line on me. It would mean losing the boat—but she was as good as lost now, unless I could save her fast.

There wasn’t much I could do in that direction: the hand pump in the bilge was under two feet of water. I spent an hour rerigging it on deck, and put in another hour working the handle before it broke. I may have lowered the level an eighth of an inch—or maybe it was just the light. I bailed for a while with a bait bucket, doing math in my head: at six buckets a minute, figuring three gallons to a bucket, how long to pour ten thousand gallons over the side? Too long, was the answer I came up with. By noon, the wind was starting to stir, and the level was down about an inch. I fished a canned ham and a bottle of beer out of the water sloshing around in the galley, then sat on the shady side of the cockpit and watched the pale clouds piling up far away across the brassy water, and thought about sitting in the cool dimness of Molly’s bar, telling her about how a mysterious man in a dapper white suit had aimed something he called a nerve-gun at me and told me to dump her fuel and scuttle her, and then disappeared while I was lying down…

I got up and checked the spot where he’d been standing. There was nothing there to prove he hadn’t been an illusion. He’d walked me forward, and then aft again, but that hadn’t left a trail, either. I had opened the dump valve myself, flooded her myself. There was still the missing radio tube, but maybe I’d sneaked in and done that, too, while I wasn’t looking. Maybe the hot tropical sun had finally crisped my brains, and the shot from the nerve-gun, which I could still feel every time I moved, had been the kind of fit people have after they’ve lost their grip on reality.

But I was just talking to myself. I knew what I’d seen. I remembered that hard, competent face, the way the light had glinted along the barrel of the gun, the incongruously spotless whites with the shiny lapel insignia with the letters TNL in blue enamel on them. I got my bucket and went back to work.

A breeze sprang up at sunset, and in ten minutes she had shipped more water than I had bailed in ten hours. She wallowed in the swells, logy as a gravid sea cow. She’d swamp sometime in the night, and I’d swim for a while, and after that…

There wasn’t any future in that line of thought. I stretched out on my back on top of the deckhouse and closed my eyes and listened to her creak, as she moved in the water with all that weight in her…

…And came awake, still listening, but to a new sound now. It was full dark, with no moon. I slid down to the deck and solid water came over the gunwale and soaked me to the knees.

I heard the sound again; it came from forward—a dull thunk! like something heavy bringing up solid against the decking. I reached down inside the cockpit and brought out the big six-cell flash I keep clamped to the wall beside the chart board and flicked it on and shone it up that way, and a voice out of the dark said, “Curlon—kill that light!”

I went flat against the house and flashed the beam along the rail and found his feet, raised it and put it square in his eyes. It wasn’t the man who’d used the pain-gun on me. He was tall, gray-haired, wearing a trim gray coverall. His hands were empty.

“Put the light out,” he said. “Quick! It’s important!”

I switched off the flash. I could still see him faintly.

“There’s no time to explain,” he said. “You’ll have to abandon her!”

“I don’t suppose you brought a boat with you?” More water came over the side. She shuddered under me.

“Something better,” he said. “But we’ll have to make it fast. Come on forward!”

I didn’t answer because I was halfway to him. I tried to find his silhouette against the sky, but it was all the same color.

“She’s sinking fast,” he said. “Jumping me won’t change that.”

“Her fuel and water tanks are dry,” I said. “Maybe she’ll float.” I gained another yard.

“We don’t have time to wait and see. There are only a few seconds left.”

He was standing on the forehatch, half turned to the left, looking out into the dark as though there were something interesting out there he didn’t want to miss. I followed the way he was looking and saw it.

It was a platform, about ten feet on a side, with a railing around it that reflected faint highlights from what looked like a glowing dish perched on a stand in the center. It was about a hundred yards away, drifting a few feet above the water. There were two men on it, both in the white suits. One of them was the man who’d scuttled my boat. The other was a little man with big ears: I couldn’t see his face.

“What’s the hurry?” I said. “I see a man I need to have a talk with.”

“I can’t force you,” the man in gray said. “I can only tell you that this time they’re holding all the cards. I’m offering you a chance at a new deal. Look!” He hooked a thumb over his shoulder. At first I didn’t see anything; then I did: a rectangle, six feet high, two feet wide, like an open doorway into a room where a dim candle burned.

“I can’t afford to be caught,” the man in gray said. “Follow me—if you decide to trust me.” He turned and stepped up into the ghost-door hanging in the air and was gone.

The platform was coming up fast now; the lean man was standing at the forward edge with the nerve-gun in his hand. “Give me ten seconds” I said to the hole in the air.

I went back along the pilot-house, dropped down into hip-deep water in the cockpit. I felt around up above the dead binnacle light, found the leather belt and sheath, strapped it on. As I swung back up. I felt her start to go. White water churned up around my waist, almost broke my grip on the rail. The glowing doorway was still there, hanging in the air six feet away. I jumped for it as she slid under. There, was a sensation like needles against my skin as I crossed the line of light; then my feet struck floor, and I was standing in the strangest room I ever saw.

It was about eight feet by ten, carpeted with curved white-painted walls lined with the glitter of screens, dials, instrument faces, more levers and gadgets than the cockpit of a Navy P2V. The man in gray was sitting in one of two contoured bucket seats in front of an array of colored lights. He flashed me a quick glance, hit a button at the same time. A soft humming sound started up; there was an indefinable sense of motion, in some medium other than space.

“Close, but I don’t think they saw us,” he said tensely. “At least there’s no tac-ray on us. But we have to move out fast, before he sets up a full-scale scan pattern.” He was looking into a small, green-glowing screen, the size of a flight-deck radarscope, flipping levers at the same time. The scanning line swept down from top to bottom, about two cycles per second. I’d never seen one like it. But then I’d never seen anything like any of what had happened in the last few minutes.