Keith Laumer: The Other Side of Time

“Who are they?” I said. “What are they?”

He gave me a fast up-and-down look. “For the moment, suffice it to say they’re representatives of someone who seems to have taken a dislike to you.” He flipped a switch and the lights dimmed down almost to nothing. On a big screen, six feet square, a picture snapped into sharp focus. It was the platform, hovering above the choppy water about fifty feet away, receding. The view was as clear as though I were looking out through a picture window. One of the men in white was playing a powerful beam of bluish light across the waves. My boat was gone. There was nothing in sight but a few odds and ends of gear, bobbing on the black water.

“You dropped off his tracer cold,” the man in gray said. “He won’t like that very well—but it couldn’t be helped. By picking you up, I’ve put myself in what one might call an impossible position.” He eyed me as if he were thinking over how much more to tell me.

“After what’s already happened, that’s not a word I’d use lightly,” I said. “What are you—FBI? CIA? Not that they’d have anything like this.” I nodded at that fantastic control panel.

“My name is Bayard,” he said. “I’m afraid you’re going to have to take me on trust for a while, Mr. Curlon.”

“How do you know my name?”

“I’ve been following them,” he nodded at the screen. “I’ve learned a number of things about you.”

“Why did you pick me up?”

“Curiosity is as good a word as any.”

“If you were tailing them, how did you manage to get here first?”

“I extrapolated their route and got ahead of them. I was lucky; I spotted you in time.”

“How? It’s a dark night, and I was showing no lights.”

“I used an instrument which responds to… certain characteristics of matter.”

“Make that a little plainer, will you, Bayard?”

“I’m not being intentionally mysterious,” he said, “but there are regulations,”

“Whose regulations?”

“I can’t tell you that.”

“So I just ask you to drop me at the next corner, and go on home and have a couple of drinks as if nothing had happened. By tomorrow the whole thing will seem silly—except for my boat.”

He stared at the screen. “No, you can’t do that, of course.” He gave me a sharp stare. “Are you sure you’re not holding something back? Something that would shed some light on all this?”

“You’re the man of mystery, not me. I’m just a fisherman—or was until today.”

“Not just any fisherman. A fisherman named Richard Henry Geoffrey Edward Curlon.”

“I didn’t think there was anyone alive who knew I had three middle initials.”

“He knows. He also knows something that makes you important enough to be the object of a full-scale Net operation. I’d like to know what it is.”

“It must be a case of mistaken identity. There’s nothing about me to interest anyone except a specialist in hard-luck cases.”

Bayard frowned at me. “Do you mind if I run a few tests on you? It will only take a minute or two. Nothing unpleasant.”

“That will be a nice change,” I said. “What kind of tests, for what purpose?”

“To find out what it is about you that interests them,” he nodded at the screen. “I’ll tell you the results—if any.” He took out a gadget and ran it over me like a photographer checking light levels.

“If the word hadn’t already been overworked,” he said, “I’ll call these readings impossible.” He pointed to a green needle that wavered, hunting around a luminous dial, like a compass at the North Pole. “According to this, you’re in an infinite number of places at the same time. And this one—” he indicated a smaller dial with a glowing yellow arrow, “says that the energy levels concentrated in your area are of the order of ten thousand percent of normal.”

“Your wires are crossed,” I suggested.

“Apparently,” he went on thinking out loud, “you represent a nexus point in what is known as a probability stress pattern. Unless I miss my guess, a major nexus.”

“Meaning what?”

“That great affairs hinge on you, Mr. Curlon. What, or bow, I don’t know. But strange things are happening—and you’re at the center of them. What you do next could have a profound effect on the future of the world—of many worlds.”

“Slow down,” I said. “Let’s stick to reality.”

There is more than one reality, Mr. Curlon,” Bayard said flatly.

Who did you say you were again?” I asked him.

Bayard. Colonel Brion Bayard of Imperial Intelligence.”

Intelligence, eh? And Imperial at that. Sounds a little old-fashioned—unless you’re working for Haile Selassie.”

“The Imperium is a great power, Mr. Curlon. But please accept my word that my government is not inimicable to yours.”

“Nowadays, that’s something. How is it you speak American without an accent?”

“I was born in Ohio. But let’s leave that aside for the moment. I’ve bought some time by whisking you out from under his nose, but he won’t give up. And he has vast resources at his disposal.” I still had the feeling he was talking to himself.

“All right, you’ve bought time,” I prompted him. “What are you going to do with it?”

Bayard pointed to a dial with a slim red needle that trembled over a compass face. “This instrument is capable of tracing relationships of a high order of abstraction. Given a point of. fixture, it indicates the position of artifacts closely associated with the subject. At the moment, it indicates a distant source, to the east of our present position.”

“Science, Mr. Bayard? Or witchcraft?”

“The wider science ranges, the more it impinges on the area of what was once known as the occult. But after all, occult merely means hidden.”

“What does all this have to do with me?”

“The instrument is attuned to you, Mr. Curlon. If we follow it, it may lead us to the answers to your questions and mine.”

“And when we get there—then what?”

“That depends on what we find.”

“You don’t give away much, do you, Colonel?” I said. “I’ve had a long day. I appreciate your picking me off my boat before she went under—and I suppose I owe you some thanks for saving me from another taste of that nerve-gun. But the question-and-no-answer game is wearing me down.”

“Let’s reach an understanding, Mr. Curlon,” Bayard said. “If I could explain, you’d understand—but the explanation would involve telling you the things I can’t tell you.”

“We’re talking in circles. Colonel. I suppose you know that.”

“The circle is tightening, Mr. Curlon. I’m hoping it isn’t a noose that will choke us all.”

“That’s pretty dramatic language, isn’t it, Colonel? You make it sound like the end of the world.”

Bayard nodded, holding his eyes. In the varicolored light from the instrument panel, his face was hard, set in lines of tension.

“Precisely, Mr. Curlon,” he said.

The moon rose, painting a silver highway across the water. We bypassed Bermuda, saw the lights of the Azores in the distance. Two more hours passed, while (he ocean unrolled under us, until the shore of France came into view dead ahead.

“The proximity sensors are registering in the beta range now,” Bayard said. “We’re within a few miles of what we’re looking for.”

He moved a lever and the moonlit curve of the shore dropped away under us. It was swift, noiseless, smooth. We leveled off at a height of a couple of hundred feet over tilled fields, swung over the tiled rooftops of a small village, followed a narrow, winding road that cut through a range of wooded hills. Far ahead, a wide river glittered against the black land.