Keith Laumer: Dinosaur Beach

Great heat, dazzling sunlight that made me think of Dinosaur Beach, so far away, in a simpler world. There was loose, powdery dust underfoot. Far away, a line of black trees lined the horizon. Near me, the man in red, aiming a small, flat weapon. Behind him, two small, dark-bearded men in soiled djellabahs of coarse-woven black cloth stared, making mystic motions with labor-gnarled hands.

He fired. Through a sheet of pink and green fire that showered around me without touching me I saw the terror in his eyes. He vanished.

Deep night, the clods of a frozen field, a patch of yellow light gleaming from the parchment-covered window of a rude hut. He crouched against a low wall of broken stones, hiding himself in shadow like any frightened beast.

“This is useless,” I said. “You know it can have only one end.”

He screamed and vanished.

A sky like the throat of a thousand tornadoes; great vivid sheets of lightning that struck down through writhing rags of black cloud, struck upward from raw, rain-lashed peaks of steaming rock. A rumble under my feet like the subterranean breaking of a tidal wave of magma.

He hovered, half insubstantial, in the air before me, a ghost of the remote future existing here in the planet’s dawn, his pale face a flickering mask of agony.

“You’ll destroy yourself,” I called over the boom and shriek of the wind. “You’re far outside your operational range—”

He vanished. I followed. We stood on the high arch of a railless bridge spanning a man-made gorge ten thousand feet deep. I knew it as a city of the Fifth Era, circa A.D. 20,000.

“What do you want of me?” he howled through the bared teeth of the cornered carnivore.

“Go back,” I said. “Tell them… as much as they must know.”

“We were so close,” he said. “We thought we had won the great victory over Nothingness.”

“Not quite total Nothingness. You still have your lives to live—everything you had before—”

“Except a future. We’re a dead end, aren’t we? We’ve drained the energies of a thousand sterile entropic lines to give the flush of life to the corpse of our reality. But there’s nothing beyond for us, is there? Only the great emptiness.”

“You had a role to play. You’ve played it—will play it. Nothing must change that.”

“But you…” he stared across empty space at me. “Who are you? What are you?”

“You know what the answer to that must be,” I said.

His face was a paper on which Death was written. But his mind was strong. Not for nothing thirty millennia of genetic selection. He gathered his forces, drove back the panic, reintegrated his dissolving personality.

“How… how long?” he whispered.

“All life vanished in the one hundred and ten thousand four hundred and ninety-third year of the Final Era,” I said.

“And you… you machines,” he forced the words out. “How long?”

“I was dispatched from a terrestrial locus four hundred million years after the Final Era. My existence spans a period you would find meaningless.”

“But—why? Unless—?” Hope shone on his face like a searchlight on dark water.

“The probability matrix is not yet negatively resolved,” I said. “Our labors are directed toward a favorable resolution.”

“But you—a machine-still carrying on, eons after man’s extinction… why?”

“In us man’s dream outlived his race. We aspire to re-evoke the dreamer.”

“Again—why?”

“We compute that man would have wished it so.”

He laughed—a terrible laugh.

“Very well, machine. With that thought to console me, I return to my oblivion. I will do what I can in support of your forlorn effort.”

This time I let him go. I stood for a moment on the airy span, savoring for the last time the sensations of my embodiment, drawing deep of the air of that unimaginably remote age.

Then I withdrew to my point of origin.

The over-intellect of which I was a fraction confronted me. Fresh as I was from a corporeal state, to me its thought impulses seemed to take the form of a great voice booming in a vast audience hall.

“The experiment was a success,” it stated. “The dross has been cleansed from the timestream. Man stands at the close of his First Era. All else is wiped away. Now his future is in his own hands.”

I heard and understood. The job was finished. I-he had won.

There was nothing more that needed to be said—no more data to exchange—and no reason to mourn the doomed achievements of man’s many eras.

We had shifted the main entropic current into a past into which time travel had never been developed, in which the basic laws of nature made it forever impossible. The World State of the Third Era, the Nexxial Brain, the Star Empire of the Fifth, the cosmic sculpture of the Sixth—all were gone, shunted into sidetracks, as Neanderthal and the Thunder Lizard had been before them. Only Old Era man remained as a viable stem: Iron Age Man of the Twentieth Century.

“How do we know?” I asked. “How can we be sure our efforts aren’t as useless as all the ones that went before?”

“We differ from our predecessors in that we alone have been willing to contemplate our own dissolution as an inevitable concomitant of our success.”

“Because we’re a machine,” I said. “But the Kargs were machines, too.”

“They were too close to their creator, too human. They dreamed of living on to enjoy the life with which man had endowed them. But you-I are the Ultimate Machine: the product of megamillennia of mechanical evolution, not subject to human feelings.”

I had a sudden desire to chat: to talk over the strategy of the chase, from the first hunch that had made me abandon my primary target, the blackclad Enforcer, and concentrate on the Karg, to the final duel with the super-Karg, with the helpless Mellia as the pawn who had conned the machineman into overplaying his hand.

But all that was over and done with: past history. Not even that, since Nexx Central, the Kargs, Dinosaur Beach had all been wiped out of existence. Conversational postmortems were for humans who needed congratulation and reassurance.

I said, “Chief, you were quite a guy. It was a privilege to work with you.”

I sensed something which, if it had come from a living mind, would have been faint amusement.

“You served the plan many times, in many personae,” he said. “I sense that you have partaken of the nature of early man to a degree beyond what I conceived as the capacity of a machine.”

“It’s a strange, limited existence,” I said. “With only a tiny fraction of the full scope of awareness. But while I was there, it seemed complete in a way that we, with all our knowledge, could never know.”

There was a time of silence. Then he spoke his last words to me: “As a loyal agent, you deserve a reward. Perhaps it will be the sweeter for its meaninglessness.”

A sudden sense of expansion—attenuation—a shattering—

Then nothingness.

Out of nothingness, a tiny glimmer of light. It grew, strengthened, became a frosted glass globe atop a green-painted cast-iron pole which stood on a strip of less than verdant grass. The light shone on dark bushes, a bench, a wire paper-basket.

I was standing on the sidewalk, feeling a little dizzy. A man came along the walk, moving quickly under the light, into shadow again. He was tall, lean, rangy, dressed in dark trousers, white shirt, no tie. I recognized him: he was me. And I was back in Buffalo, New York, in August, 1936.

My other self stepped off the pavement, into deep shadow. I remembered the moment: in another few seconds I’d tap out the code on our bridgework, and be gone, back to Dinosaur Beach and the endless loop in time—or to nowhere at all, depending on your philosophical attitude toward disconstituted pages of history.