Time Travel Omnibus, page 596
I had spent three months in the village, from late summer to autumn. The job had been a waiting game, giving the local Karge time to betray himself. He had done so, and I had spotted it; a too-clever craftsman, turning out hand tools, the design of which was based on alloys and principles that wouldn’t be invented for another century.
I had done my job and made my report and been ordered back. I had wanted to explain to Lisa, the girl in the house; but, of course, that had been impossible. I had stepped out for a six-pack of ale, and had never come back. It was common sense, as well as regulations, but my heart wasn’t in it. Her face had haunted me as I left to go to the point/point site for transfer back to Central.
As it was haunting the other me now. This was that last night. I was on my way back to Nexx Central now. It would be a ten-minute walk into the forest that grew down to the outskirts of the village. There I would activate the jump field and leave the twentieth century ten-thousand years behind. And an hour later even the memory would be gone.
I picked the darkest side of the street and followed myself toward the woods.
I caught up with myself mooching around in the tangle of wild berry bushes I remembered from last time, homing in on the optimum signal from my locator. This had been my first field transfer, and I hadn’t been totally certain the system would work.
I came up fast, skirted the position and worked my way up to within twenty feet of take-off position. The other me was looking nervous and unhappy, a feeling I fully sympathized with.
I gained another six feet, smooth and quiet. I’d learned a lot of field technique since the last time I’d been on this spot. I watched the other me brace himself, grit my teeth, and tap out the code—
Two jumps, and I was behind me; I grabbed me by both leather sleeves from behind, up high, slammed my elbows together, whirled me, and gave me a hearty shove into the brambles just as the field closed around me, and threw me a million miles down a dark tunnel full of solid rock.
Someone was shaking me. I tried to summon up enough strength for a groan, didn’t make it, opened my eyes instead.
I was looking up into my own face.
For a few whirly instants I thought the younger me had made a nice comeback from the berry bushes and laid me out from behind.
Then I noticed the lines in the face, and the hollow cheeks. The clothes this new me was wearing were identical with the ones I had on, except for being somewhat more travel stained. And there was a nice bruise above the right eye that I didn’t remember getting.
“Listen carefully,” my voice said to me. “I’ve come full circle. Dead end. Closed loop. No way out—except one—maybe. I don’t like it much, but I don’t see any alternative. Last time around, we had the same talk—but I was on the floor then, and another version of us was here ahead of me with the same proposal. I didn’t like it. I thought there had to be another way. I went on—and wound up back here. Only this time I’m the welcoming committee.”
He unholstered the gun at his hip and held it out.
“I . . . we’re . . . being manipulated. All the evidence shows that. I don’t know what the objective is, but we have to break the cycle. You have to break it. Take this and shoot me through the head.”
I got up on my elbows, which was easier than packing a grand piano up the Matterhorn, and shook my head, both in negation and to clear some of the fog. That was a mistake. It just made it throb worse.
“I know all the arguments,” my future self was saying. “I used them myself, about ten days ago. That’s the size of this little temporal enclave we have all to ourselves. But they’re no good. This is the one real change we can introduce.”
“You’re out of your mind,” I said. “I’m not the suicidal type—even if the me I’m killing is you.”
“That’s what they’re counting on. It worked, too, with me. I wouldn’t do it.” He weighed the gun on his palm and looked at me very coldly indeed.
“If I thought shooting you would help, I’d do it without a tremor,” he said. He was definitely he now. “Why don’t you?”
“Because the next room is full of bones,” he said with a smile that wasn’t pretty. “Our bones. Plus the latest addition, which still has a little spoiled meat on it. That’s what’s in store for me. Starvation. So it’s up to you.”
“Nightmare,” I said, and started to lie back and try for a pleasanter dream.
“Uh-huh—but you’re awake,” he said, and caught my hand and shoved the gun into it.
“Do it now—before I lose my nerve!”
I made quite a bit of noise groaning, getting to my feet. I ached all over.
“You weren’t quite in focal position on the jump here,” he explained to me. “You cracked like a whip. Lucky nothing’s seriously dislocated.”
“Let’s talk a little sense,” I said. “Killing you won’t change anything. What I could do alone we could do better together.”
“Wrong. This is a jump station, or a mirror-image of one. Complete except for the small detail that the jump field’s operating in a closed loop. Outside, there’s nothing.”
“You mean—this is the same—”
“Right. That was the first time around. You jumped out into a non-object dead end. You were smart, you figured a way out—but they were ahead of us there, too. The circle’s still closed—and here you are. You can jump out again, and repeat the process. That’s all.”
“Suppose I jump back to the wharf and don’t use the corpse’s jump gear—”
“Then you’ll starve there.”
“All right, suppose I make the second jump, but don’t clobber myself—”
“Same result. He leaves, you’re stranded.”
“Maybe not. There’d be food there. I could survive, maybe eventually be picked up—”
“Negative. I’ve been all over that. You’d die there. Maybe after a long life, or maybe a short one. Same result.”
“What good will shooting you do?”
“I’m not sure. But it would introduce a brand-new element into the equation—like cheating at solitaire.”
I argued a little more. He took me on a tour of the station. I looked out at the pearly mist, poked into various rooms. Then he showed me the bone room.
I think the smell convinced me. I lifted the gun and flipped off the safety.
“Turn around,” I snapped at him. He did.
“There’s one consoling possibility,” he said. “This might have the effect of—”
The shot cut off whatever it was he was going to say, knocked him forward as if he’d been jerked by a rope around the neck. I got just a quick flash of the hole I’d blown in the back of his skull before a fire that blazed brighter than the sun leaped up in my brain and burned away the walls that had caged me in.
I was a giant eye, looking down on a tiny stage. I saw myself, an agent of Nexx Central, moving through the scenes of ancient Buffalo, weaving my petty net around the Karge. Karge, a corruption of “cargo,” referring to the legal decision as to the status of the machine-men in the great Transport Accommodations riots of the mid Twenty-eighth Century.
Karges, lifeless machines, sent back from the Third Era in the second great Timesweep, attempting to correct not only the carnage irresponsibly strewn by the primitive Old Era temporal explorers, but to eliminate the even more destructive effects of the New Era Timesweep Enforcers.
The Third Era had recognized the impossibility of correcting the effects of human interference with more human interference.
Machines which registered neutral on the life-balance scales could do what men could not—could restore the integrity of the Temporal Core.
Or so they thought.
After the Great Collapse and the long night that followed, Nexx Central had arisen to control the Fourth Era. They saw that the tamperings of prior eras were all a part of the grand pattern; that any effort to manipulate reality via temporal policing was doomed only to weaken the temporal fabric.
Thus, my job as a field agent of Nexx: To cancel out the efforts of all of them; to allow the wound in time to heal; for the great stem of Life to grow strong again.
How foolish it all seemed now. Was it possible that the theoreticians of Nexx Central failed to recognize that their own efforts were no different from those of earlier Timesweepers? And that . . .
There was another thought there, a vast one; but before I could grasp it, the instant of insight faded and left me standing over the body of the murdered man, with a wisp of smoke curling from the gun in my hand and the echoes of something immeasurable and beyond value ringing down the corridors of my brain. And out of the echoes, one clear realization emerged: Timesweeping was a fallacy; but it was a fallacy practiced not only by the experimenters of the New Era and the misguided fixers of the Third Era, but also by the experts of Nexx Central.
There was, also, another power.
A power greater than Nexx Central, that had tried to sweep me under the rug—and had almost made it. I had been manipulated as neatly as I had maneuvered the Karge and the Enforcer, back in Buffalo. I had been hurried along, kept off balance, shunted into a closed cycle which should have taken me out of play for all time.
As it would have, if there hadn’t been one small factor that they had missed.
My alter ego had died in my presence—and his mind-field, in the instant of the destruction of the organic generator which created and supported it, had jumped to, merged with mine.
For a fraction of a second, I had enjoyed an operative IQ which I estimated at a minimum of 250.
And while I was still mulling over the ramifications of that realization, the walls faded around me and I was standing in the receptor vault at Nexx Central.
There was the cold glare of the high ceiling on white walls, the hum of the field-focusing coils, the sharp odors of ozone and hot metal in the air—all familiar, if not homey. What wasn’t familiar was the squad of armed men in the gray uniforms of Nexx security guards. They were formed up in a circle, with me at the center; and in every pair of hands was an implosion rifle, aimed at my head. An orange light shone in my face—a damper field projector.
I got the idea. I raised my hands—slowly. One man came in and frisked me, lifted my gun and several other items of external equipment. The captain motioned. Keeping formation, they walked me out of the vault, along a corridor, through two sets of armored doors and onto a stretch of gray carpet before the wide, flat desk of the Timecaster in Charge, Nexx Central.
He was a broad, square-faced, powerful man, clear-featured, his intellect as incisive as his speech. He dismissed the guard—all but two—and pointed to a chair.
“Sit down, Agent,” he said. I sat.
“You deviated from your instructions,” he said. There was no anger in his tone, no accusation, not even any curiosity.
“That’s right, I did,” I said.
“Your mission was the execution of the Enforcer DVK-Z-97, with the ancillary goal of capture, intact, of a Karge operative unit, Series H, ID 453.” He said it as though I hadn’t spoken. This time I didn’t answer.
“You failed to effect the capture,” he went on. “Instead, you destroyed the Karge brain. And you made no effort to carry out the execution of the Enforcer.”
What he said was true. There was no point in denying it, any more than there was in confirming it.
“Since no basis for such actions within the framework of your known psychindex exists, it is clear that your motives must be sought outside the context of the Nexx policy. Clearly, any assumption involving your subversion by prior temporal powers is insupportable. Ergo—you represent a force not yet in subjective existence.”
“Isn’t that a case of trying to wag the dog with the tail?” I said. “You’re postulating a Fifth Era just to give me a motive. Maybe I just fouled up the assignment. Maybe I went off my skids. Maybe—”
“You may drop the Old Era persona now, Agent. Aside from the deductive conclusion, I have the evidence of your accidentally revealed intellectual resources. In the moment of crisis, you registered in the third psychometric range. No human brain known to have existed has ever attained that level. I point this out so as to make plain to you the fruitlessness of denying the obvious.”
“I was wrong,” I said. “You’re not postulating a Fifth Era.”
He looked mildly interested.
“You’re postulating a Sixth Era,” I went on.
“What is the basis for that astonishing statement?” he said, not looking astonished.
“Easy,” I said. “You’re Fifth Era. I should have seen it sooner. You’ve infiltrated Nexx Central.”
“And you’ve infiltrated our infiltration. That is unfortunate. Our operation has been remarkably successful so far, but no irreparable harm has been done—although you realized your situation, of course, as soon as you found yourself isolated—I use the term imprecisely—in the aborted station.”
“I started to get the idea then,” I told him. “I was sure when I saw the direction the loop was taking me. Nexx Central had to be involved. But it was a direct sabotage of Nexx policy; so infiltration was the obvious answer.”
“Fortunate that your thinking didn’t lead you one step further,” he said. “If you had eluded my recovery probe, the work of millennia might have been destroyed.”
“Futile work,” I said.
“Indeed? Perhaps you’re wrong, Agent. Accepting the apparent conclusion that you represent a Sixth Era does not necessarily imply your superiority. Retrogressions have occurred in history.”
“Not this time.”
“Nonetheless—here you are.”
“Use your head,” I said. “Your operation’s been based on the proposition that your Era, being later, can see pitfalls the Nexx people couldn’t. Doesn’t it follow that a later Era can see your mistakes?”
“We are making no mistakes.”
“If you weren’t, I wouldn’t be here.”
“Impossible!” he said as if he meant it. “For four thousand years a process of disintegration has proceeded, abetted by every effort to undo it. When man first interfered with the orderly flow of time, he sowed the seeds of eventual dissolution. By breaking open the entropic channel he allowed the incalculable forces of temporal progression to diffuse across an infinite spectrum of progressively weaker matrices. Life is a product of time. When the density of the temporal flux falls below a critical value, life ends. Our intention is to prevent that ultimate tragedy.”
“You can’t rebuild a past that never was,” I said.
“That is not our objective. Ours is a broad program of reknitting the temporal fabric by bringing together previously divergent trends. We are apolitical; we support no ideology. We are content to preserve the vitality of the continuum. As for yourself, I have one question to ask you, Agent.” He frowned at me. “Not an agent of Nexx, but nonetheless an agent. Tell me: What motivation could your Era have for working to destroy the reality core on which any conceivable future must depend?”
“The first Timesweepers set out to undo the mistakes of the past,” I said. “Those who came after them found themselves faced with a bigger job: cleaning up after the cleaners-up. Nexx Central tried to take the broad view, to put it all back where it was before any of the meddling started. Now you’re even more ambitious. You’re using Nexx Central to manipulate not the past, but the future—in other words, the Sixth Era. You should have expected that program wouldn’t be allowed to go far.”
“Are you attempting to tell me that any effort to undo the damage, to reverse the trend toward dissolution, is doomed?”
“As long as man tries to put a harness on his own destiny, he’ll defeat himself. Every petty dictator who ever tried to enforce a total state discovered that, in his own small way. The secret of man is his unchainability; his existence depends on uncertainty, insecurity—the chance factor. Take that away and you take all.”
“This is a doctrine of failure and defeat,” he said flatly. “A dangerous doctrine. It will now be necessary for you to inform me fully as to your principals: who sent you here, who directs your actions, where your base of operations is located. Everything.”
“I don’t think so.”
“You feel very secure, Agent. You, you tell yourself, represent a more advanced Era, and are thus the immeasurable superior of any more primitive power. But a muscular fool may chain a genius. I have trapped you here. We are now safely enclosed in an achronic enclave of zero temporal dimensions, totally divorced from any conceivable outside influence. You will find that you are effectively immobilized; any suicide equipments you may possess are useless, as is any temporal transfer device. And even were you to die, your brain will be instantly tapped and drained of all knowledge, both at conscious and subconscious levels.”
“You’re quite thorough,” I said, “but not quite thorough enough. You covered yourself from the outside—but not from the inside.”
He frowned; he didn’t like that remark. He sat up straighter in his chair and made a curt gesture to his gun-handlers on either side of me. I knew his next words would be the kill order. Before he could say them, I triggered the thought-code that had been waiting under several levels of deep hypnosis for this moment. He froze just like that, with his mouth open and a look of deep bewilderment in his eyes.
The eclipse-like light of nulltime stasis shone on his taut face, on the faces of the two armed men standing rigid with their fingers already tightening on their firing studs. I went between them, fighting the walking-through-syrup sensation, and out into the passage. The only sound was the slow, all-pervasive, metronome-like beat that some theoreticians said represented the basic frequency rate of the creation/destruction cycle of reality.
I checked the transfer room first, then every other compartment of the station. The Fifth Era infiltrators had done their work well. There was nothing here to give any indication of how far in the subjective future their operation was based, no clues to the extent of their penetration of Nexx Central’s sweep programs. This was data that would have been of interest, but wasn’t essential. I had accomplished phase one of my basic mission: smoking out the random factor that had been creating anomalies in the long-range time maps for the era.
