Keith Laumer - Dinosaur Beach

With the visual reference gone, I lost my sense of orientation. I was upside down, spinning slowly—or not so slowly; I was a mile high, I was an inch high, I filled the universe, I didn’t exist— With a crash, sound returned to the world, along with gravity, pains all over like a form-fitting suit studded with needles, and suffocation. I dragged hard and got a breath in, feeling my heart start to thump and wheeze in its accustomed way. The roar faded without fading; it was just the impact of air molecules whanging against my eardrums, I realized: a background sound that was ordinarily filtered out automatically.

My knee bumped the wall in front of me. I was bracing myself to give it a kick when it fell away and I stepped out into a big room with high purple-black walls, where three people waited for me with expressions that were more intent than welcoming.

One was a short, thick-fingered man in a gray smock, with thin hair, ruddy features, rubbery lips stretched back over large off-white teeth. Number two was a woman, fortyish, a little on the lean side, very starched and official in dark green. The third was the Karg, dressed now in a plain gray coverall.

Shorty stepped forward and thrust out a hand; he held it in a curiously awkward position, with the fingers spread and pointed down. I shook it once and he took it back and examined it carefully, as if he thought I might have left a mark.

“Welcome to Dinosaur Beach Station,” the Karg said in a reasonable facsimile of a friendly voice. I looked around the room; we were the only occupants.

“Where are the two women?” I asked. The thick man looked blank and pulled at his rubbery lip. The female looked back at me as if it was all academic to her.

“Perhaps Dr. Javeh will wish to explain matters.” She sounded as if she doubted it.

“I’m not interested in having a conversation with a machine,” I said. “Who programs it? You?” I aimed this last at Rubber-lips.

“Whaaat?” he said, and looked at the woman; she looked at the Karg; it looked at me. I looked at all of them.

“Dr. Javeh is our Chief of Recoveries,” the woman said quickly, as if glossing over a small social blunder on my part. “I’m Dr. Fresca; and this is Administrator Koska.”

“There were two women with me, Dr. Fresca,” I said. “Where are they?”

“I’m sure I have no idea; this is hardly my area of competence.”

“Where are they, Koska?”

His lips worked, snapping from a smile to dismay and back. “As to that, I can only refer you to Dr. Javeh—”

“You take orders from this Karg?”

“I’m not familiar with that term.” Stiffly; the smile gone.

I faced the Karg. He looked blandly at me with his pale blue eyes.

“You’re a bit disoriented,” he said quietly. “Not surprising, of course, they often are—”

“Who’s ‘they’?”

“The recoverees. That’s my work—our work, you understand: detecting, pinpointing, and retrieving personnel in, ah, certain circumstances.”

“Who’s your boss, Karg?”

He cocked his head. “I’m sorry; I don’t understand your repeated use of the term ‘Karg.’ Just what does it signify?”

“It signifies that whatever these people believe, I’m on to you.”

He smiled and lifted his hands, let them fall back. “As you will. As for my supervisor—I happen to be Officer-in-Charge here.”

“Cosy,” I said. “Where are the two women?”

The Karg’s little rosebud mouth tightened. “I have no idea to whom you refer.”

“They were with me—five minutes ago. You must have seen them.”

“I’m afraid you don’t quite understand the situation,” the Karg said. “When I found you, you were quite alone. The indications suggest you had been adrift in the achronic void for an extended period.”

“How long?”

“Ah, a most interesting problem in temporal relativistics. We have biological time, unique to the individual, metered in heartbeats; and psychological time, a purely subjective phenomenon in which seconds can seem like years, and the reverse. But as to your question: The Final Authority has established a calibration system for gauging absolute duration; and in terms of that system, your sojourn outside the entropic stream endured for a period in excess of a century, with an observational error of plus or minus 10 percent, I should say.”

The Karg spread his uncalloused hands, smiled a philosophical smile.

“As for your, ah, female—I know nothing.”

I swung on him; the swing didn’t connect, but I got the crater gun into my hand unseen. The Karg ducked back and Dr. Fresca let out a yelp and Koska grabbed my arm. The Karg flicked something at me that smacked my side wetly and spread and grabbed my arms and suddenly I was wrapped to the knees in what looked like spider webs, white as spun candy, smelling of a volatile polyester.

I tried to take a step and almost fell, and Koska stepped forward to assist me to a chair, all very solicitously, as if I’d had one of my fainting spells, but I’d be all right in a minute.

“You’re a liar, Karg,” I said, “and a bad one. It takes a live man to perjure himself with that true ring of sincerity. You didn’t grapple me out of a few billion square millennia of eternity at random. They did a nice job on your scars, but you know me. And if you know me, you know her.”

The Karg looked thoughtful; he motioned, and Koska and the woman left the room without a backward glance. He faced me with a different expression on his plastalloy features.

“Very well, Mr. Ravel, I know you. Not personally; your reference to scars presumably applies to some confrontation which has been relegated to the status of the unrealized possibility. But I know you by reputation, by profession. As for the woman—possibly I can look into the matter of a search for her later—after we’ve reached an understanding.” He was just a Karg now, all business and no regrets.

“I already understand you, Karg,” I said.

“Let me tell you of our work, Mr. Ravel,” he said mildly. “I think when you understand fully you’ll want to contribute wholeheartedly to our great effort.”

“Don’t bet on it, Karg,” I said.

“Your hostility is misplaced,” the Karg said. “We here at Dinosaur Beach have need of your abilities and experience, Mr. Ravel—”

“I’ll bet you do. Who are your friends? Third Era dropouts? Or are you recruiting all the way back to Second Era now?”

The Karg ignored that. “Through my efforts,” he said, “you’ve been given an opportunity to carry on the work to which your life was devoted. Surely you see that it’s in your interest to co-operate?”

“I doubt that your interests and mine could ever coincide, Karg.”

“Conditions have changed, Mr. Ravel. It’s necessary for all of us to realign our thinking in terms of the existent realities.”

“Tell me about them.”

“Your great Nexx Timesweep effort failed, of course, as I’m sure you’ve deduced by now. It was a noble undertaking, but misguided, as others before it. The true key to temporal stability lies not in a simple effort to restore the past to its virgin state, but in making intelligent use of the facilities and resources existent in that portion of the entropic spectrum available to us to create and maintain a viable enclave of adequate dimensions to support the full flowering of the racial destiny. To this end the final Authority was established, with the mission of salvaging from every era all that could be saved from the debacle of aborted temporal progression. I’m pleased to be able to tell you that our work has proved a great success.”

“So you’re looting up and down the temporal core, and setting up housekeeping—where?”