“Sure we do—but first we have to figure out what all the pretty little buttons are for. Let’s concentrate on that for the present, Mellia. Maybe along the way we can resolve the philosophical questions.”
“Before we can work together, we have to come to some agreement.”
“Go on.”
“I want your word you won’t… do anything prejudicial to the A-P concept.”
“I won’t do anything without conferring with you first. As to what Universe it is we’re rebuilding—let’s wait until we know a little more before we commit ourselves, all right?”
She looked at me a long time before she said, “Very well.”
“You might start,” I said, “by explaining this setup to me.”
She spent the next hour giving me a fast, sketchy, but graphic briefing on the art of analog-potential interpretation; I listened as fast as I could. The A-P theory was news to me, but I was accustomed to working with complex chronic gear. I began to get some idea of what the equipment was for.
“I get the feeling that your version of Nexx Central operates a lot farther out in the theoretical boondocks than the one I know,” I said. “And backs it up with some very highly evolved hardware.”
“Of course, what I’m accustomed to is much less advanced than this,” Mellia said. “I don’t know what to make of a lot of this.”
“But you’re sure it’s A-P type gear?”
“There’s no doubt in my mind at all. It couldn’t be anything else—certainly not anything that Deterministic theory might have given rise to.”
“I agree with that last point. This layout would make about as much sense at Central—my Central—as a steam whistle on a sailboat.”
“Then you agree we have to work toward an A-P matrix?”
“Slow down, girl. You talk as if all we had to do was shake hands on it, and everything would switch back to where it was last Wednesday at three o’clock. We’re working in the blind. We don’t know what’s happened, where we are, where we’re going, or how to get there. Let’s take it one item at a time. A good place to start would be this whole A-P concept. I get a strange feeling that its theoretical basis is a second-generation type of thing; that it arises from the kind of observational foundation generated by a major temporal realignment.”
“Would you mind clarifying that?” she said coldly. I waved a hand. “Your Central isn’t on the main timestem. It’s too complex, too artificial. It’s like a star with a large heavy-element content: it can’t arise from the primordial dust cloud. It has to be formed out of stellar debris from a previous generation.”
“That’s a rather fanciful analogy. Is that the best you can do?”
“On such short notice. Or would you rather have me suppress anything that seems to cast doubts on your A-P universe as the best of all possible worlds?”
“That’s unfair.”
“Is it? I’ve got a stake in my past, too, Miss Gayl. I’m not any more eager to be relegated to the realms of unrealized possibilities than anybody else.”
“I… I didn’t mean that. What makes you think—there’s no reason to believe—”
“I have a funny feeling there’s no place for me in your world-picture, Mellia. Your original world-picture, that is. I’m the guy who loused up the sweet serenity of Dinosaur Beach. But for me, the old outfit would have been in operation for another thousand years at the same address.”
She started to say something, but I steam-rollered it.
“But it wasn’t. I fouled up my assignment—don’t ask me how—and as a result, blew the station to Kingdom Come—or wherever it disappeared to—”
“You don’t need to blame yourself. You carried out your instructions; it wasn’t your fault if the results… if after you came back…”
“Yeah. If what I did started a causal chain that resulted in your not being born. But you were born, L—Mellia. I met you on a cover assignment in 1936. So at that point, at least, we were on the same track. Or—” I cut it off there, but she saw the same thing I did.
“Or perhaps… your whole sequence in Buffalo was an aborted loop. Not part of the Main Tape. Not viable.”
“It’s viable, baby. You can depend on it.” I ground that out like a rock crusher reducing boulders to number nine gravel.
“Of course,” she whispered. “It’s Lisa, isn’t it? She has to be real. Any alternative is unthinkable. And if that means remaking the space-time continuum, aborting a thousand years of Timestem history, wrecking Timesweep and all it means—why, that’s a small price to pay for the existence of your beloved!”
“You said it. I didn’t.”
She looked at me the way a tough engineer looks at a hill that’s standing where be wants to build a level crossing.
“Let’s get to work,” she said at last in a voice from which every shred of emotion had been scraped.
22
We spent the rest of the day making a methodical survey of the installation. It was four times the size of the Dinosaur Beach stations we had known in our previous incarnations; and 80 percent of it was given over to gear that neither of us understood. Mellia pieced together the general plan of the station, identified the major components of the system, traced out the power transfer apparatus, deduced the meanings of some of the cryptic legends at the control consoles. I followed her and listened.
“It doesn’t make much sense,” she said. It was twilight, and a big red sun was casting long shadows across the floor. “The power supply is out of all proportion to any intelligence-input or interpretative function I can conceive. And all this space—what’s it for, Ravel? What is this place?”
“Grand Central Station,” I said.
“What’s that?”
“Nothing. Just a forgotten building in a forgotten town that probably never existed. A terminal.”
“You may be right,” she said, sounding thoughtful. “if this were all designed to transfer bulk cargo, rather than merely as a communications and personnel staging facility…”
“Cargo. What kind of cargo?”
“I don’t know. It doesn’t sound likely, does it? Any appreciable inter-local material transfer would tend to weaken the temporal structure at both transmission and reception points…”
“Maybe they didn’t care anymore. Maybe they were like me: tired.” I yawned. “Let’s turn in; maybe tomorrow it will all turn into sweet reasonableness before our startled gaze.”
“What did you mean by that remark? About not caring?”
“Who me? Not a thing, girl, not a thing.”
“Did you ever call Lisa ‘girl’?” This sharply.
“What’s that got to do with anything?”
“It has everythng to do with everything! Everything you say and do—everything you think—is colored by your idiotic infatuation with this… this figmentary sweetheart! Can’t you forget her and put your mind on the fact that the Nexx Timestem is in desperate danger—if it’s not irreparably damaged—by your irresponsible actions!”
“No,” I said between my teeth. “Any other questions?”
“I’m sorry,” she said in a spent voice. She put a hand over her face and shook her head. “I didn’t mean that. I’m just tired… so very tired—and frightened.”
“Sure,” I said. “Me too. Forget it. Let’s get some sleep.”
We picked separate rooms. Nobody bothered to say good night.
23
I got up early; even asleep, the silence got to me. There was a well-equipped kitchen at the end of the dormitory wing; apparently even A-P theoreticians had a taste for a fresh-laid egg and a slice of sugar-cured ham from a nulltime locker where aging didn’t happen.