Keith Laumer: Dinosaur Beach

Then the world blew up and sent me spinning head-over-heels into limbo, and a thousand tons of hot sand poured down on top of me and sealed me away for all eternity.

Well, maybe not eternity, a small voice seemed to be saying in a matter-of-fact tone.

“Close enough,” I said, and got a mouthful of sand. I tried to draw a breath to spit it out and got a noseful of the same. That must have triggered some primitive instincts, because suddenly I was swimming hard with both hands and both feet, clawing upward through sand, breaking through into heat and the stink of charred plastics—and air. Dusty, smoky air, but air. I coughed and snorted and breathed some of it and looked around me.

I was lying in the utility tunnel, the walls of which were buckled and bulged as if they’d been half melted. The floor was drifted a foot deep in sand, out of which I had just dug my way. I tried to make my brain work…

The tunnel led to the pump room, I knew, from which a ladder led to the surface, an arrangement designed for minimal disturbance of the local scenery. All I had to do was continue in the present direction, climb the ladder, and…

I’d worry about the and later, I decided. I was still congratulating myself on my coolness under fire when I happened to notice that for a tunnel twelve feet under the surface, the light was awfully good. It seemed to be coming from behind me. I looked back, saw a tangle of steel, through the interstices of which brilliant sunlight was pouring in dusty bars.

After a dozen or so yards the going was easier; not so much sand and debris here. The pumproom door gave me a little trouble until I remembered to pull, not push. The equipment there was all intact, ready to pump any desired amount of clean, fresh spring water up from 120 feet down. I patted the nearest pump and got a grip on the ladder. I was still dizzy and weak, but no dizzier or weaker than a landlubber in his first sea-squall. At the top, the motor whined when I pushed the button; the lid cycled open, dumping sand and a small green lizard. I crawled out and took a short breather and turned to see what there was to see.

There was the long curve of beach, pitted now, and criss-crossed by tank-tracks, and the tongue of jungle that stretched almost to the shore along the ridge. But where the station had been, there was nothing but a smoking crater.

I lay flat on the nice warm sand and looked at the scene with gritty eyes that wept copiously in the glare of the tropical Jurassic sun and felt sweat trickle down my forehead, and down my chest inside my shirt, while images went swirling through my brain: the station, the first time I had seen it, on my first jump, all those years ago. The neat, impersonal little wardrooms that almost came to seem like home after a while, always waiting for you at the end of a tough assignment; the other agents, male and female, who came and went; the in-conversation around the tables in the dining room, the crisp cleanliness, the efficiency; even the big board in Ops that showed the minute-by-minute status of the Timesweep effort up and down the ages. But the big board wasn’t there any more, or the miles of microtape records, or the potted gingko tree in the lounge: all melted down to slag…

I was remembering Nel Jard, yelling to me to get out… and something else. He’d given me a message. Something important, something I was supposed to tell somebody, someday. An exercise in futility. I’d had my last talk with a human being, I was stranded, stranded as no other man had ever been, with the possible exception of a few other Nexx agents who had dropped off the screens in far places.

But none as far as this.

On that thought, I let my head drop and the dark curtain fall.

When I woke the sun was setting and I was aching in places I’d forgotten I owned. Itching, too. Oversized mosquitoes that didn’t seem at all surprised to find a mammal where no mammals ought to be had settled down with a commendably philosophic attitude to take a meal where they found it. I batted the most persistent ones away and walked down to see what was to be seen. I didn’t appear to have any major injuries, just plenty of small cuts and large bruises and the odd contusion here and there. I reached the edge of the pit where the station had been and looked at the ruins: a fused glass bowl a hundred yards in diameter surrounded by charred plant life. Nothing had survived—no people, no equipment. And worst of all, of course, there’d be no outjump to Nexx Central with a report of what had happened—or to any other time or place.

Someone, possibly Third Era—or someone masquerading as Third Era—had blasted the station with a thoroughness I wouldn’t have believed possible. And how had it been possible for them to find the place, considering the elaborate security measures surrounding the placement of the 112 official staging stations scattered across Old Era time? As for Nexx Central, nobody knew where it was, not even the men who had built it. It floated in an achronic bubble adrift on the entropic stream, never physically existing in any one space-time locus for a finite period. Its access code was buried under twelve layers of interlocked ciphers in the main tank of the Nexxial Brain. The only way to reach it was via a jump station—and not just any jump station: it had to be the one my personal jumper field was tuned to.

Which was a half-inch layer of green glass lining a hollow in the sand.

An idea appeared like a ghastly grin.

The personal emergency jump gear installed in my body was intact. There was enough E-energy in the power coil for a jump—somewhere. I lacked a target, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t go. All it meant was that I wouldn’t know where I’d land—if anywhere.

A lot of horror stories had circulated back at Nexx Central about what happened to people who misfired on a jump. They ranged from piecemeal reception at a dozen stations strung out across a few centuries to disembodied voices screaming to be let out. Also, there were several rules against it.

The alternative was to set up housekeeping here on the beach, with or without dinosaurs, and hope that a rescue mission arrived before I died of heat, thirst, reptiles, boredom, or old age.

It called for some thinking over.

There were a few chunks of masonry scattered among the charred stumps of club mosses; I could build a fireplace out of them, kill a lizard and broil him for dinner…

The idea lacked charm, but I was reluctant to discard it out of hand. It was either that or risk my identity on an experiment that I had already been assured by experts was bound to end in disaster. After all, there was no particular hurry. I was bruised, but alive; I wouldn’t starve for a few days; there was water available from the pump house. And maybe the destruction of the station had registered on somebody’s telltale board somewhere; maybe at this moment a relief team in crisp fieldtan was assembling to jump out to the rescue.

It was almost dark now. The stars were glittering through the gloaming, just as if disaster hadn’t entered the biography of Igor Ravel, Timesweeper. The surf pounded and whooshed, indifferent to the personal problems of one erect biped who had no business being within sixty-five million years of here.

As for me, I had to go to the toilet.

It seemed a rather inconsequential thing to be doing, urinating on the magic sands of the past, while looking up at the eternal stars.

After that, I mooched around a little longer, looking for a lingering trace of the magic that had been there once. Then I dug a pit in the sand and went to sleep.

Dawn came, and with it the dinosaurs. I had seen them before, at a distance, usually; small, shy creatures that skittered out of sight at the first touch of the subsonic beams Jard had rigged up to discourage them. Before my time, it seemed, there had been a few incidents of big specimens wandering a little too close to the vegetable garden and having to be driven off with improvised noisemakers. They were too stupid to be dangerous, it was understood, except for the danger of getting stepped on, or accidentally grazed along with a clump of foliage.