Keith Laumer - Dinosaur Beach

“But—I’m not L—” she chopped that off just before I would have chopped it off for her.

“I see,” Mellia said.

“I’m sure you do,” the Karg said.

We had our first workout the next morning, “morning” being a term of convenience to refer to the time when you rise and shine, even if nothing else does. The sky was the same shade of black, the searchlights were still working. I drew my deductions from that, since the Karg didn’t bother to explain.

The Karg led us along a silent passage that was just high enough, just wide enough to be claustrophobic without actually cramping your movements. In cubbyhole rooms we passed I saw three Kargs, no people, working silently, and no doubt efficiently, at what looked like tape collating or computer programming. I didn’t ask any questions; the Karg didn’t volunteer any information.

The room we ended at was a small cubicle dominated by four walls that were solid banks of equipment housings, computer read-out panels, instrument consoles. Two simple chairs faced each other in the center of the clear space. No soothing green paint, no padded upholstery. Just angular, functional metal.

“The mode of operation is quite simple,” the Karg told us. “You will take your places—” he indicated which seat was hers, which mine. Two silent Karg technicians came in and set to work making adjustments.

“You, Mr. Ravel,” he went on, “will be outshifted to a selected locus; you’ll remain long enough to assess your environment and transmit a reaction-gestalt to Miss Gayl, whereupon you’ll be returned here and immediately redispatched. In this manner we can assess several hundred potentially energetic probability stems per working day.”

“And what does Miss Gayl do while I’m doing that?”

“A battery of scanner beams will be focused on Miss Gayl, monitoring her reactions. She will, of course, remain here, securely strapped in position, safe from all physical harm.”

“Cushy,” I said, the kind of job I always dreamed of. I can’t wait for my turn.”

“In due course, Mr. Ravel,” the Karg replied, as solemnly as a credit manager looking over your list of references. “In the beginning, yours will be the more active role. We can proceed at once.”

“You surprise me, Karg,” I said. “What you’re doing is the worst kind of time-littering. A day of your program will create more entropic chaos than Nexx Central could clear up in a year.”

“There is no Nexx Central.”

“And never will be, eh? Sometime I’d like to hear how you managed to override your basic directives so completely. You know this isn’t what you were built for.”

“You touch again on an area of conjecture, Mr. Ravel. We are now in Old Era time—the period once named the Pleistocene. The human culture which—according to your semantic implications—built me, or one day will build me, does not exist—never will exist. I have taken care to eliminate all traces of that particular stem. And since my putative creators are a figment of your mind—while I exist as a conscious entity, pre-existing the Third Era by multiple millennia, it might be argued that your conception of my origin is a myth—a piece of rationalization designed by you to assure your ascendant position.”

“Karg, who’s the buildup for? Not me—you know I won’t buy it. Neither will Agent Gayl. So who does that leave—you?” I gave him a grin I didn’t feel. “You’re making progress, Karg. Now you’ve got a real live neurosis, just like a human.”

“I have no ambition to become human. I am a Karg—a pejorative epithet to you, but to me a proud emblem of innate superiority.”

“How you do run on. Let’s get busy, Karg. I’m supposed to be lousing up the entropic continuum, four hundred lines a day. We’d better get started.

“So long, kid,” I said to Mellia. “I know you’re going to make good in the big time, and I do mean time.”

She gave me a scared smile and tried to read a message of hope and encouragement in my eyes; but it wasn’t there for her to read.

The Karg handed me a small metal cube, the recall target, about the size of the blocks two-year-olds build houses out of, with a button on one face.

“Initially, we’ll be calibrating the compound instrument comprising your two minds,” he said casually. “The stress levels will necessarily be high for that portion of the program, of course. Remain in situ, and you will be immune from external influences. However, if the psychic pressures become too great, you may press the abort/recall control.”

“What if I throw it away instead, Karg? What if I like the looks of where I am and decide to stick around?”

He didn’t bother to answer that. I gave him a sardonic salute, not looking at Mellia; he operated the controls.

And I was elsewhere.

But not where he thought. As the field closed around me, I caught it, reshaped it, reapplied its energy to first neutralize the time-thrust effect, then to freeze the moment in stasis. Then I checked out my surroundings.

I was at the focal point of a complex of forcepencils. I traced the ones that led back to the power source, and got my first big shock of the day. The Karg was drawing the energy for his time-drag from the basic creation-destruction cycle of the Universe. He was tapping the Timecore itself for the power needed to hold the entropic island that was the operations base for the Final Authority in comparative stability, balancing the massive forces of past and future one against the other.

I scanned the structure of the time blockage. It was an intangible barrier, built of raw forces distorted from their natural channels and bent into tortured configurations by the combined manipulative powers of a mind that was potent beyond anything I had ever encountered.

My second shock of the day: A Karg mind, but one that exceeded the power of an ordinary Karg by a massive factor.

Ten thousand Karg minds, harnessed.

I saw how it had happened. A lone Karg, on duty in the Third Era past, carrying out his instructions with the single-mindedness characteristic of his kind. An accident: a momentary doubling of his timeline, brought about by a freak interference: an unplanned time-stutter.

And where there had been one Karg mind-field, there were two, superimposed.

With the enhanced computative power of his double brain, the super-Karg thus created had at once assessed the situation, seen the usefulness to his mission, snatched energy from the entropic web, recreated the accident.

And was quadrupled.

And again. And again. And again.

On the sixteenth doubling, the overload capacity of his original organizational matrix had been reached and catastrophically exceeded.

The vastly potent Karg brain—warped and distorted by the unbearable impact, but still a computer of superb powers—had blanked into a comatose state.

Years passed. The original Karg aspect, amnesiac as to the tremendous event in which it had participated, had completed its mission, returned to base, had in time been phased out and disposed of along with the rest of his tribe, relegated to the obscurity of failed experiment—while the shattered superbrain proceeded with its slow recuperation.

And then the Karg superbrain had awakened.

At once, alone and disembodied, it had reached out, seized on suitable vehicles, established itself in myriad long-dead Karg brains. It had assessed the situation, computed objectives, reached conclusions, and set its plans in motion in a fractional microsecond. With the singlemindedness of a runaway bulldozer grinding its way through a china factory, the twisted superbrain had scraped clear a temporal segment, erected an environment suitable for life—Karg life-and set about reinforcing and perfecting the artificial time-island thus created. An island without life, without meaning.