Keith Laumer: Dinosaur Beach

“I’d finished up my assignment and jumped back to station,” she said flatly. “But the station wasn’t here. Just a hole in the ground full of mud and bones. I didn’t know what to think. My first impulse was to jump out again, but I knew that would be the wrong thing to do. There’d be no telling where I’d end up. I decided my best course would be to sit tight and wait for a retrieval. So here I am.”

“How long?”

“About… three weeks.”

“‘About?’“

“Twenty-four days, thirteen hours and ten minutes,” she snapped, and jammed the spoon at my teeth.

“What was your assignment?” I asked after I’d swallowed.

“Libya. 1200 B.C.”

“I never knew the ancient Libyans packed revolvers.”

“It wasn’t a contact assignment, I was alone in the desert—at an oasis, actually, at the time, equipped for self-maintenance for a couple of weeks. Things were a little greener there in those days. There’d been some First Era tampering done with an early pre-Bedouin tomb, with a complicated chain of repercussions, tied in with the rise of Islam much later.

“My job was to replace some key items that had been recovered from a Second Era museum. I managed it all right. Then I jumped back—” She broke off and for just an instant I saw a frightened girl trying very hard to be the tough, fearless agent.

“You did just right, Mellia,” I said. “In your place I’d probably have panicked and tried to jump back out. And ended up stuck in an oscillating loop.” As I said it, I realized that was the wrong aspect of the matter to dwell on just now.

“Anyway, you waited, and here I am. Two heads, and all that—”

“What are we going to do?” she cut in. She sounded like a frightened girl now. Swell job of comforting you’re doing, Ravel. She was fine until you came along…

“We have several courses of action,” I said as briskly as I could with soup running down my chin. “Just let me…” I ran out of wind and drew a shaky breath. “Let me catch a few winks more and…”

“Sorry…” she was saying. “You need your rest. Sleep; we’ll talk later…”

I spent three days lying around waiting for the skin on my back to regenerate, which it did nicely under the benign influence of the stuff from Mellia’s field kit, and for my scrapes and cuts to seal themselves over. Twice during that time I heard shots: Mellia, discouraging the big beasties when they got too close. A crater gun at wide diffusion stung just enough to get the message through to their pea-sized brains.

On the fourth day I took a tottery stroll over to the edge of the hole Mellia had pulled me out of.

It was the pit where the station had been, of course. High tides, rain, blown sand, wandering animals had filled it halfway to the brim. The glass lining above the surface was badly weathered. It had taken time for that—lots of time.

“How long?” Mellia asked.

“Centuries, anyway. Maybe a thousand or two years.”

“That means the station was never rebuilt,” she said.

“At least not in this time segment. It figures; if the location was known there was no reason to go on using it.”

“There’s more to it than that. I’ve been here for almost a month. If anyone were looking for me, they’d have pinpointed me by now.”

“Not necessarily. It’s a long reach, this far back.”

“Don’t try to be kind to me, Ravel. We’re in trouble. This is more than a little temporary confusion. Things are coming apart.”

I didn’t like her using virtually the same wording that had popped into my mind when I’d looked at my own corpse.

“The best brains at Nexx Central are working on this,” I told her. “They’ll come up with the answers.” It didn’t sound convincing even to me.

“What was the station date when you were there last?” she asked.

“Sixty-five,” I said. “Why?”

She gave me a tense little smile. “We’re not exactly contemporaries. I was assigned to Dino Beach in twelve-thirty-one, local.”

I let the impact of that diffuse through my brain for a few seconds, bringing no comfort. I grunted as if I’d been socked in the gut.

“Swell. That means—” I let it hang there; she knew what it meant as well as I did: that the whole attack I had seen—lived through—the consequences of which we were looking at now—was what was known to the trade as a recidivism: an aborted alternate possibility that either had never occurred or had been eliminated by Timesweep action. In Mellia’s past, the Dinosaur Beach station had been functional for over eleven hundred years, minimum, after the date I’d seen it under attack. She’d jumped from it to Libya, done her job, and jumped back—to find things changed.

Changed by some action of mine.

I had no proof of that assumption, of course; but I knew. I’d handled my assignment in 1936 according to the book, wrapped up all the loose ends, scored a total victory over my Karg counterpart. I thought.

But something had gone wrong. Something I’d done—or not done—had shattered the pattern. And the result was this.

“It doesn’t make sense,” I said. “You jumped back to home base and found it missing—the result of something that didn’t happen in your own personally experienced past. O.K. But what puts me here at the same time? The circuits I used for my jump were tuned to a point almost twelve hundred years earlier.”

“Why haven’t they made a pick-up on me?” she said, not really talking to me. Her voice was edging up the scale a little.

“Take it easy, girl,” I said, and patted her shoulder; I knew my touching her would chill her down again. Not a nice thing to know, but useful.

“Keep your hands to yourself, Ravel,” she snapped, all business again. “If you think this is some little desert island scene, you’re very wrong.”

“Don’t get ahead of yourself,” I told her. “When I make a pass at you that’ll be time enough to slap me down. Don’t go female on me now. We don’t have time for nonsense.”

She sucked in air with a sharp hiss and bottled up whatever snappy comeback she’d been about to make. Quite a girl. It was all I could do to keep from putting my arms around her and telling her it was all going to be all right. Which was a long way from what I believed.

“We can sit here and wait it out for a while longer,” I said, in my best business-as-usual tone. “Or we can take action now. How do you vote?”

“What action?” It was a challenge.

“In my opinion,” I said, not taking the bait, “the possible benefits of staying put are very small— statistically speaking. Still, they exist.”

“Oh?” Very cool; just a little tremble of a finely molded lip that was beaded with sweat.

“This is a known locus; whatever the difficulties that caused the site to be abandoned, it’s still a logical place for a search effort to check.”

“That’s nonsense. If it were checked and we were located the sensible thing to do—or at least the humane thing—would be to shift the pick-up back a month and take us out at the moment of our arrival. That didn’t happen. Therefore it won’t happen.”

“Maybe you’ve forgotten what this Timesweep effort is all about, Miss Gayl. We’re trying to knit the fabric back together, not make new holes in it. If we were spotted here, now—and the pick-up were made at a prior locus—what happens to all the tender moments we’ve known together? This moment right now? It never happened? No, any pick-up on us would be made at the point of initial contact, not earlier. However…”

“Well?”

“The possibility exists that we’re occupying a closed-loop temporal segment, not a part of the main timestem.”