“Next stop Nexx Central,” I said, and ushered Mellia inside. I squeezed in after her.
“Ready?”
She nodded.
I pressed the Transmit button.
The explosion blew both of us into our component atoms.
21
“Or maybe not,” I heard a voice croak. I recognized the voice; it was mine, somewhat the worse for wear but still on the job. “Some dream,” I went on, giving myself the word. “Some hangover. Some headache.”
“Trans-temporal shock is the technical term, I believe,” Lisa said beside me.
My eyes snapped open; well, snap isn’t quite the word. They unglued themselves and winced at the light and made out a face nearby. A nice face, heart-shaped, with big dark eyes and the prettiest smile in the world.
But not Lisa.
“Are you all right?” Mellia said.
“It’s nothing that a month in the intensive care unit wouldn’t clear up,” I said and got an elbow under me and looked around. We were in a spacious room, long and high, like a banqueting hall, with a smooth gray floor, pale gray walls covered with row on row of instrument faces. Center position went to a big chair facing an array of display screens and a coding console. At the far end the open sky was visible through a glass wall.
“Where are we?”
“I don’t know. Some sort of technical facility. You don’t recognize it?”
I shook my head; if it was anything out of my past, the memory had been wiped clean.
“How long have I been out?” I asked.
“I woke up an hour ago.”
I shook my head to clear it, and succeeded in sending pains like hot knives through my temples.
“Rough passage,” I mumbled, and got to my feet. I felt sick and dizzy, as if I’d eaten too much ice cream on the merry-go-round.
“I’ve looked at some of the equipment,” Mellia said. “Temporal gear, but not exactly like anything I’ve seen.” Her tone suggested that meant something important. I tried to focus my brain and figure out what.
I said, “Oh.”
“I could deduce the function of some of it,” she said. “Some was completely baffling.”
“Maybe it’s Third Era stuff—”
“I’d recognize that.”
“Let’s take a look.” I headed toward the big controller’s chair, trying to look healthier than I felt. If the jump had affected Mellia at all, she didn’t show it.
The console was covered with buttons labeled laconically with designations such as M. Ds—H and LV 3—gn. The screens were the usual milky-glass anti-glare surfaces, set inside and anti-reflecting frames.
“They’re ordinary analog-potential readout boards, of course,” Mellia said, “but with two extra banks of controls—and that implies at least an additional order of sensitivity in the discretion and weighing circuitry.”
“Does it?”
“Certainly.” Her slim finger reached past me, tapped out a swift code on the colored keys. The screen twinkled and snapped to brightness.
“The pickup field is on active phase—or should be,” she said. “But there’s no base reading. And I’m afraid to play with a Timecast keybank I don’t understand.”
“You’ve left me in the shade,” I said. “I never saw anything like this stuff. What else is there?”
“There are rooms back there.” She pointed to the end of the hall opposite the glass wall. “Equipment rooms; a power section, operations…”
“Sounds like a regulation Timecasting station.”
She nodded. “Almost.”
“A little on the large side,” I commented. “Let’s take a look.”
We went through rooms packed with gear as mysterious to me as a wiring diagram to I-Em Hotep. One contained nothing but three full-length mirrors; our reflections looking back at us were a couple of forlorn strangers. Nowhere were there any indications of recent habitation. No people, no signs of people. Just a dead building full of echoes.
We recrossed the grand hall and found an exit vestibule that cycled us out onto a wide stone terrace above a familiar view of sand and sea. The curve of the shoreline was as I had seen it last; only the jungle growth on the headland seemed denser, more solid somehow.
“Good old Dinosaur Beach,” I said. “Doesn’t change much, does it?”
“Time has passed,” Mellia said. “A great deal of time.”
“There was nothing like this in any projection plan I ever saw,” I said. “Any ideas?”
“Not that I want to verbalize.”
“I know how you feel,” I said, and held the door for her. “By the way: I ought to tell you: I never heard of analog-potential. What is it, a new kind of breakfast food?”
“A-P is the basis of the entire Timesweep program,” she said and looked at me sharply. “Any Nexx agent would have to be familiar with it.” She was frowning at me pretty severely.
“Don’t count on it,” I said. “The lectures I got at the Institute were all about deterministics, actualization dynamics, and fixation levels.”
“That’s nonsense. Discredited Fatalistics Theory.”
“Hold on, Miss Gayl, before you pop a valve. Don’t look at me as if you’d caught me in the computer room with a live bomb. I admit I’m a little slow this morning, what with the heavy swell under the stern quarter, but I’m still the same sweet, lovable guy you fished out of the pond. I’m as much a Nexxman as you are; but a kind of dirty suspicion is sneaking up on me.”
“And what might that be?”
“That the Nexx Central you work out of and the one I know aren’t the same.”
“That’s ridiculous. The entire Nexx operation is based on the stability of the unique Nexx Baseline—”
“Sure—that’s the concept. It won’t be the first concept that had to be modified in the face of experience.”
She looked a little pale. “You realize what you’re implying?”
“Uh-huh. We’ve messed things up good, kid. For you and me to be standing here face to face—representatives of two mutually exclusive base timetracks—means things are worse than we thought; worse than I knew they could be.”
Her eyes held on mine, wide and shocked. I was doing a good job of reassuring her.
“But we’re not licked yet,” I said heartily. “We’re still trained agents, still operational. We’ll do the best we can—”
“That’s not the point.”
“Oh? What is?”
“We have a job to do—as you said: to attempt to reintroduce ourselves into the temporal pattern by eliminating the chronomalies we’ve unwittingly generated.”
“Agreed.”
“Very well—what pattern do we work toward, Ravel? Yours—or mine? It is a Deterministic or an A-P continuum we’re supposed to be reassembling?”
I started to give her a fast, reassuring answer, but it stuck in my throat.
“We can work that out later,” I said.
“How can we? Every move we make from this point on has to be correctly calculated. There’s equipment here—” she waved a hand—”that’s more sophisticated than anything I’ve ever seen. But we have to use it properly.”