The trouble was, he did see—sort of. Time took the best shortcut to keep its integrity. He was not a problem. “Uh—but what if I had shot Marx in Trier, instead of Sandoval? What would time have done then?”
“You would have been instantly assimilated. The same way you’d go if you shot your father before he met your mother. Another Ron Moosic might exist up front, but it wouldn’t mean anything to you.”
So that was it. The basic law seemed to be that time resolved paradox in the most direct manner it could. And Holger Neumann, distraught at the death of Marx, would most certainly have killed himself. End of problem. Time is changed, but the equations balanced out.
And that left him, here, with an unpalatable problem. Remain, and therefore be the newest recruit in the squad, eventually reaching a trip point and becoming someone else entirely, someone not of his own choosing. Or pick a time and assimilate there. No, that was out. Time had shown him no favors at all, and there’d be nobody to rescue him the next time. Or have them return him to his own time, but a time far changed from the one he’d left, to become a Ron Moosic who might have come out very differently than he. If he existed at all. If not, there was assimilation again.
He was beginning to feel as worried and confused as Dawn.
AFTER THE FALL WAS OVER
Over the next few weeks, Ron Moosic was able to explore much of the complex and the surrounding area. Dawn still seemed somewhat uncomfortable around him, but also drawn to him, and she became his guide. He kept having the feeling that she wanted to get something off her chest, but he didn’t push it. She would tell it, if she had to, when she was ready for it.
The area was perfect as a hidden base. The complex itself, viewed from outside, looked like nothing so much as two huge, shiny metallic cubes, one on top of the other, the whole complex rising several hundred feet into the air. Around it were the gardens abundant with fruit-bearing bushes and trees, vegetables, and more. Some of the plants were unfamiliar and native to the time; most, however, had been brought back after being altered to fit the existing conditions. The Outworlders were master biologists, that was for sure. The place could feed a population of hundreds if it had to, and it required very little maintenance.
One day Dawn said, “Come on. I’d like to show you my favorite spot around here,” and led him outside the base perimeter.
Beyond the base itself was a dense, jungle-like forest which showed what it all must have looked like before the area was cleared and the complex built. Here there were insects and even small mammals, although nothing large or particularly threatening. A small, clear stream flowed through the dark jungle, until, a bit over a mile from the complex, it suddenly plunged a hundred feet or more in a spectacular, if small-volume waterfall. Here was the sea, looking much as it did during anyone’s time, clear and blue and untouched.
They sat there, letting the wind carry some of the spray from the falls to them, and just enjoyed it. It was, Moosic had to agree, a truly pretty place, a place to come and sit and think.
His indecision, and unwillingness to really commit himself, made him more of a hanger-on than a member of the squad. Dawn, for example, always carried a time belt when outside the base—just in case something happened, for, back here, there was no way to wait for rescue. He had not been issued one, and wouldn’t be until and unless he told them he was freely joining and undertook some training.
Dawn, however, was willing to show him the basics of the belt. “It personalizes itself to the wearer,” she told him. “No one can touch it or see it except the person it brought to a particular time and place. Still, it’s a good idea to hide it, since you never know when the enemy will show up. If they traced anyone to a time frame and got them to retrieve and deactivate the belt, they’d have a homing device leading straight here.”
There were four master controls, noted by squiggly little symbols that meant nothing to him. He soon learned, however, that they were “Activate,” “Standby,” “Home,” and “Off.” The last two were the most interesting. “Home” would immediately bring the wearer to the frame and location of the power supply—in this case, to where they were. “Off” was used only at the base or in Safe Zones, since it made the belt phase into a frame and thus would not only allow anyone to see or find it but also subject it to the assimilation process. The Safe Zone was safe not only because no one could affect the course of time to any great degree there, but also because it was impossible for a human being to be tracked in it. Time simply disregarded human beings this far back; it had so much room to correct whatever they might do that they simply were no threat to the orderly time stream. Even a nuclear explosion could be adjusted for in the space of a million years.
“They say they picked this spot because it’s a volcanic island,” she told him. “Inactive now and for the foreseeable future—they checked—but still an island, and a transitory one. It will disappear in the ages, and so will any trace we make on it. That’s why it’s so safe.”
To set the belt, you merely picked a reference point and set it with the dials. All of them being from near his time, the basic Julian calendar was used. Place basically used a grid of latitude and longitude in degrees, minutes, and seconds, but in a pinch the microprocessor could come up with the coordinates if you used the little microphone attached to tell it—and if it had the place you wanted in its files.
It was almost three weeks before he made his decision. He and Dawn walked out to the falls on the coast and he told her there. “I’m staying,” he said simply. “After all is said and done, I suddenly realized that I didn’t have anything to go back to, even if it were back to my own time. I kept fighting against it, I don’t know why, but then I remembered why they asked me to go back in the first place. I really did have the least to lose of the available qualified personnel.”
“I know why you hesitated,” she told him. “It’s this whole time business. It makes everything unreal. There’s nothing left solid to stand on. Nothing is fixed—it’s all variables. I think that’s why I like it here so much. This place is fixed, unchanging, permanent. And so are we— here.”
He was about to reply when, off in the distance, there came the sound of tremendous explosions. Both jumped up in a minute and, without looking at each other, rushed off back into the jungle for the base.
The explosions continued, together with the sounds of shouting people. The acrid stench of explosives was in the air. They reached the edge of the jungle clearing, and Moosic was shocked to see a small horde of the gargoyles attacking the great structure. The base itself offered little resistance, but while they were making a mess of the gardens, the metallic building itself seemed untouched.
That was clearly changing, however. A small knot of gargoyles under the direction of a human leader were busily assembling some sort of imposing weapon aimed right for the heart of the complex. The attacks were clearly designed to keep the Outworlders inside and unable to prevent the completion of the assembly.
He looked at Dawn. “We have to do something!”
She looked back at him resignedly. “What do you suggest? We can’t get through that mob—they’ll kill us. We can’t get to that weapon, whatever it is. It’d be suicide. And neither of us is armed.”