Keith Laumer: Dinosaur Beach

Silence and brightness blossomed around me.

Mellia, unconscious, moaned and fought the straps.

“Slow the pace, Karg,” I said. “You’ve got half of eternity to play with. Why be greedy?”

“I’m making excellent progress, Mr. Ravel,” he said. “A very nice trace, that last one. The ordeal of the loved one—most interesting.”

“You’ll burn her out,” I said.

He looked at me the way a lab man looks at a specimen.

“If I reach that conclusion, Mr. Ravel, your worst fears will be realized.”

“She’s human, not a machine, Karg. That’s what you wanted, remember? Why punish her for not being some thing she can’t be?”

“Punishment? A human concept, Mr. Ravel. If I find a tool weak, sometimes heat and pressure can harden it. If it breaks under load, I dispose of it.”

“Just slow down a little. Give her time to recuperate—”

“You’re temporizing, Mr. Ravel. Stalling for time, transparently.”

“You’ve got enough, damn you! Why not stop now!

“I have yet to observe the most telling experience of all, Mr. Ravel: the torment and death of the one whom she loves most. A curious phenomenon, Mr. Ravel, your human emotional involvements. There is no force like them in the universe. But we can discuss these matters another time. I have, after all, a schedule to maintain.”

I swore, and he raised his eyebrows and—

Warm salty water in my mouth, surging higher, submerging me. I held my breath; the strong current forced me back against the broken edge of the bulkhead that held me trapped. Milky green water, flowing swiftly over me, slowing, pausing; then draining away…

My nostrils came clear and I gasped and snorted, got water in my lungs, coughed violently.

At the full ebb after the wave, the water level was above my chin now.

The cabin cruiser, out of gas due to a slow leak, had gone on the rocks off Laguna. A weathered basalt spur had smashed in the side of the hull just at the waterline, and a shattered plank had caught me across the chest, pinned me against the outward-bulging bulkhead.

I was bruised a little, nothing more. Not even a broken rib. But I was held in place as firmly as if clamped in a vise.

The first surge of water into the cabin had given me a moment’s panic; I had torn some skin then, fighting to get free, uselessly. The water had swirled up waist-high, then receded.

She was there then, fear on her face turning to relief, then to fear again as she saw my predicament. She had set to work to free me.

That had been half an hour before. A half hour during which the boat had settled, while the tide came in.

She had worked until her arms quivered with fatigue, until her fingernails were broken and bleeding. She had cleared one plank, but another, lower down, underwater, held me still.

In another half hour she could clear it, too.

We didn’t have half an hour.

As soon as she had seen that I was trapped she had gone on deck and signaled to a party of picnickers. One of them had run up the beach; she had seen a small car churn sand, going for help.

The Coast Guard station was fifteen miles away. Perhaps there was a telephone closer, but it was doubtful, on a Sunday afternoon. The car would reach the station in fifteen minutes; it would take another half-hour, minimum, for the cutter to arrive. Fiteen minutes from now.

I didn’t have fifteen minutes.

She had tried to rig a breathing apparatus for me, using a number 10 coffee can, but it hadn’t worked.

There wasn’t a foot of hose aboard for an air-line.

The next wave came in. This time I was under for over a minute, and when the water drained back, I had to tilt my head all the way back to get my nose clear enough to suck air.

She looked into my eyes while we waited for the next wave…

Waited for death, on a bright afternoon a hundred feet from safety, ten minutes from rescue.

And the next wave came…

And I was back in the bright room under the merciless lights. And I had my six parameters.

“Interesting,” the Karg said. “Most interesting. But…” He looked across at Mellia. She hung in the straps, utterly still.

“She died,” the Karg said. “A pity.” He looked at me and saw something in my eyes. He made a move, and I put out a finger of mind-force and locked him in his tracks.

“Sucker,” I said.

He looked at me, and I watched him realizing the magnitude of the blunder he had made. I enjoyed that, but not as much as I should have, savoring the moment of victory.

“It was your plan from the beginning,” he said. “Yes, that’s clear now. You maneuvered me very cleverly, Mr. Ravel. I underestimated you badly. Your bargaining position is now much different, of course. Naturally. I recognize realities and am prepared to deal realistically—”

“Sucker,” I said. “You don’t know the half of it.”

“I’ll release you at once,” the Karg said, “establish you in an enclave tailored to your specifications. I will also procure a satisfactory alter ego to replace the female—”

“Forget it, Karg. You’re not going to do anything. You just went out of business.’

“You are human,” the Karg told me somberly. “You will respond to the proper reward. Name it.”

“I’ve got what I want,” I told him. “Six coordinates, Karg, for a fix in six dimensions.”

Terrible things happened behind those ten-thousand-power cybernetic eyes.

“It cannot be your intention to destroy the Time engine!”

I smiled at him. But I was wasting my time. You can’t torture a machine.

“Be rational, Mr. Ravel. Consider the consequences. if you tamper with the forces of the engine, the result will be a detonation of entropic energy that will reduce the Final Authority to its component quanta—”

“I’m counting on it.”

“—and yourself with it!”

“I’ll take the chance.”

He struck at me then. It wasn’t a bad effort, considering what he was up against. The thought-thrust of his multiple brain lanced through the outer layers of my shielding, struck in almost to contact distance before I contained it and thrust it aside.

Then I reached, warped the main conduits of the Time-engine back on themselves.

Ravening energy burst outward across six dimensions, three of space and three of time. The building dissolved around me in a tornado of temporal disintegration. I rode the crest like a bodysurfer planing ahead of a tidal wave. Energy beat at me, numbing me, blinding me, deafening me. Time roared over me like a cataract. I drowned in eons. And at last I washed ashore on the beach of eternity.

Consciousness returned slowly, uncertainly. There was light, dim and smoky red. I thought of fires, of bombs—and of broken bones, and sinking boats, and death by freezing and death by fatigue and hunger.

Nice dreams I’d been having.

But there was no catastrophe here; just a sunset over the water. But a different kind of sunset from any I had ever seen. A bridge of orange light curved up across the blue-black sky, turned silver as it crossed the zenith, deepened to crimson as it plunged down to meet the dark horizon inland.

It was the sunset of a world.

I sat up slowly, painfully. I was on a beach of gray sand. There were no trees, no grass, no sea-oats, no scuttling crabs, no monster tracks along the tide line. But I recognized the place.

Dinosaur Beach, but the dinosaurs were long gone. Along with man and gardenias and eggs and chickens.

Earth, post-life.