Keith Laumer: Dinosaur Beach

The standard post-mission conditioning that had wiped the whole sequence from my memory broke. I remembered it now: Time, about ten years earlier, N. S.; or the year 1578, local. Place, the Caribbean, about fifty miles southwest of St. Thomas. It had been a cruise in search of the Karg-operated ship which had been operating in New Spanish waters; I recalled the contact, the chase, the fight across the decks while I waited inside the cabin for the opportunity for the single well-placed shot that would eliminate the source of the interference. It was one of my first assignments, long ago completed, filed in the master tape, a part of Timesweep history.

But not anymore. The case was reopened on the submission of new evidence. I was doubled back on my own timetrack.

The fact that this was a violation of every natural law governing time travel was only a minor aspect of the situation, grossly outweighed by this evidence that the past that Nexx Central had painfully rebuilt to eliminate the disastrous effects of Old Era time meddling was coming unstuck.

And if one piece of the new mosaic that was being so carefully assembled was coming unglued— then everything that had been built on it was likewise on the skids, ready to slide down and let the whole complex and artificial structure collapse in a heap of temporal rubble that neither Nexx Central nor anyone else would be able to salvage.

With the proper lever, you can move worlds; but you need a solid place to stand. That had been Nexx Central’s job for the past six decades: to construct a platform in the remote pre-Era on which all the later structure would be built.

And it looked as though it had failed—because of me.

I remembered the way it had gone the first time: waiting my moment, thrusting the door open, planting my feet, taking aim, firing three shots into the android’s thoracic cavity before he was aware that a new factor had entered the equation. He had fallen; his men had yelled in rage and charged, and my repellor field had held them off until they panicked at the invisible barrier and fled back to their galleon, cast off, and made sail before the wind, back into the obscurity of unrecorded history; while I had brought the galleass—a specially equipped Nexx operations unit in disguise—to the bulk transfer point at Locus Q-637, from which it had been transmitted back to storage at the Nexx holding station.

But none of that had happened.

I had blocked the door, preventing the other me from completing his assignment, thus invalidating a whole segment of the rebuilt time-map and casting the whole grand strategy of Nexx operations into chaos. The Karg had gone his way, unharmed; and I was lying on the deck, very dead indeed from a brass ball through the throat.

And also I was standing on the deck looking down at my corpse, slowly realizing the magnitude of the trap I had blundered into.

A Nexx agent is a hard man to dispose of: hard to kill, hard to immobilize, because he’s protected by all the devices of a rather advanced science.

But if he can be marooned in the closed loop of an unrealized alternate reality—a pseudo-reality from which there can be no outlet to a future which doesn’t exist—then he’s out of action forever.

Even if I could go on living—a doubtful proposition in view of the fire curling the deck planks at the moment—there’d be no escape, ever; my personal jump field was discharged; it wouldn’t take me anywhere. And there’d be no trace on any recording instrument to show where I’d gone; when I’d jumped from the phantom station, I’d punched in no destination. The other me had now been killed in the line of duty, during the vulnerable second when his shield was open to allow him to fire the executioner’s shot. His trace would have dropped from the boards; scratch one inefficient field man, who’d been so careless as to get himself killed.

And scratch his double, who’d poked his nose in where it had no business being.

My mind circled the situation, looking for an out. I didn’t like what I found, but I liked it better than roasting alive or drowning in the tepid sea.

My personal jump mechanism was built into me, tuned to me, though unfocused at the receiving end. It would be useless until I’d had a recharge at base. But its duplicate was built into the corpse lying at my feet. The circuitry of the jump device— from antennae to powerpack—consisted largely of the nervous system of the owner.

It took only five minutes without oxygen for irreversible brain damage to occur. At least four had already passed, but the dead man’s circuitry should be operable. Just what it might be focused on now—considering the drastic realignment of the casual sequence—was an open question. It would depend to a degree on what had been on the corpse’s mind at the moment of death.

The deck was getting hot enough to burn my feet through my soles. There was lots of smoke. The fire roared like a cataract in flood season.

I squatted beside the dead version of myself. The corpse’s jaws were in a half-open position. I got a finger inside and tried out my recall code on the molar installation, feeling the blast of heat as flames gouted from the open hatch at my back.

A giant clapped his hands together, with me in the middle.

It was dark and I was falling; I just had time to realize the fact and claw for nonexistent support before I hit water: hot, stinking, clogged with filth, thick as pea soup; I went under and came up blowing and gagging. I was drowning in slime: I floundered, tried to swim, arrived at an uneasy equilibrium in which I lay out flat, head raised clear of the surface, paddling just enough to keep my nostrils clear, while goo ran down in my eyes.

The smell could have been sliced and sold for linoleum. I spat and coughed and sploshed and my hand scraped a surface that sloped gently up under me. My knees bumped and I was crouched on all fours, snorting and trying without much luck to squeeze the muck from my eyes. I tried to crawl forward and slipped and slid backward and almost dunked my head again.

I did it more carefully the next time: eased forward, with most of my weight supported by the semiliquid goo, and felt over the shore. It wasn’t like any shore I had ever encountered before; hard-surfaced, planar, as smooth as a toilet bowl, curving gently upward. I groped my way along sideways, slipping, splashing, suffocating in the raw-sewage reek. Something spongy and rotting came apart under my hands. I tried again to crawl forward, made a yard and slid back two.

I was getting tired. There was nothing to hold onto. I had to rest. But if I rested, I sank. I thought about sliding down under that glutinous surface and trying to breathe and getting a lungful of whatever it was I was floundering in, and dying there and turning to something as black and corrupt as what I was buried in— It was a terrible thought. I opened my mouth and yelled.

And somebody answered.

“You down there! Stop kicking around! I’m throwing you a line!”

It was a female voice, not to say feminine, coming from above me somewhere. It sounded sweeter than a choir of massed angels. I tried to call out a cheery and insouciant reply, managed a croak. A beam of white light speared down at me from a point thirty feet above and fifty feet away. It hunted across the bubbly black surface and glared in my eyes.

“Lie still!” the voice commanded. The light went away, bobbled around, came back. Something came whistling down and slapped into the muck a few feet away. I floundered and groped, encountered a half-inch rope slick with the same stuff I was slick with.

“There’s a loop at the end. Put your foot in it. I’ll haul you up.”

The rope slid through my hands; I scrabbled, felt the knot, got another dipping trying to hook a foot in it, settled for a two-handed grip. The rope surged, pulling me clear of the stew and up the slope. I held on and rode. The surface under me curved up and up. Progress was slowed. Another yard. Another. Half a yard. A foot. I was at an angle of about thirty degrees now, pressed tight against the slope. Another surge and I heard the rope rasping above. An edge raked my forearm. I grabbed, almost lost the rope, was dragged up the final foot and got a knee over the edge and crawled forward across loose sand and went down on my face and out.