I blinked rapidly. “Do you think we could have a drink that might act as a bit of lubricant to my thoughts?”
“Splendid idea, join you myself.”
The dispenser produced a sickly sort of green liquid that he favored, but I dialed for a large Syrian Panther Sweat, most of which I drained with the first swallow. This frightening beverage—whose hideous aftereffects forbade its sale on most civilized worlds—did me nothing but good at this moment. I finished the glass, and a sudden memory popped up out of the tangled jumble of my subconscious.
“Stop me if I’m wrong, but didn’t I hear you lecture once about the impossibility of time travel?”
“Of course. My specialty. Smoke screen that talk, I think you might call it. We’ve had time travel for years here. Afraid to use it, though. Alter time tracks and all that sort of trouble. Just the kind of thing that is happening now. But we have had a continuing project of research and time investigation. Which is why we knew what was happening when it began to happen. The alarms were going off, and we had no time to warn anyone—not that warnings would do any good. We were aware of our duty. Plus the fact that we were the only ones who could do anything at all. We jury-rigged a time-fixator around this laboratory, then made the smaller portable models such as the one you are wearing now.”
“What does it do?” I asked, touching with great respect the metal disk on the nape of my neck.
“Has a recording of your memory that it keeps feeding back to your brain every three milliseconds. Telling you you are you, you see, rebuilding any personality changes that time line alterations in the past may have shifted. Purely a defensive mechanism, but it is all we have.” Out of the corner of my eye I saw another man wink out of sight, and the professor’s voice grew grim. “We must attack if we are to save the Corps.”
“Attack? How?”
“Send someone back in time to uncover the forces waging this time war and destroy them before they destroy us. We have a machine.”
“I volunteer. Sounds like my kind of job.”
“There is no way to return. It is a one-way mission.”
“I withdraw the last statement. I like it here.” Sudden memory—restored no doubt three milliseconds earlier—grabbed me and a prod of fear pumped a number of interesting chemical substances into my blood.
“Angelina, my Angelina! I must speak to her…”
“She is not the only one!”
“The only one for me, Prof. Now stand aside or I’ll go through you.”
He stepped back, frowning and mumbling and tapping his teeth with his fingernails, and I jabbed the code into the phone. The screen beeped twice, and the few seconds crawled by like lead snails before she answered the call.
“You’re there!” I gasped.
“Where did you expect me to be?” A frown crossed her perfect features, and she sniffed as though to get the aroma of booze from the screen. “You’ve been drinking, and so early too.”
“Just a drop, but that’s not why I called. How are you? You look good, great, not transparent at all.”
“A drop? Sounds more like a whole bottle.” Her voice chilled, and there was more than a trace left of the old, unreformed Angelina, the most ruthless and deadly crook in the galaxy before the Corps medics straightened out the knots in her brain. “I suggest you hang up. Get a drive-right pill, then call me back as soon as you are sober.” She reached out for the disconnect button.
“Don’t! I am cold sober and wish I weren’t. This is an emergency, red. A top priority. Get over here now as absolutely fast as you can and bring the twins.”
“Of course.” She was on her feet instantly, ready to go. “Where are you?”
“The location of this lab, quick!” I said, turning to Professor Coypu.
“Level one-hundred and twelve. Room thirty.”
“Did you get that,” I said, turning back to the screen.
Which was blank.
“Angelina….”
I jabbed the disconnect, tapped her code on the keys. The screen lit up. With the message “This is an unconnected number.” Then I ran for the door. Someone clutched at my shoulder, but I brushed him aside, grabbed the door and flung it open.
There was nothing outside. A formless, colorless nothing that did strange things to my brain when I looked at it. Then the door was pulled from my hand and slammed shut, and Coypu stood with his back to it, breathing heavily, his features twisted by the same unnamable sensations I had felt.
“Gone,” he said hoarsely. “The corridor, the entire station, all the buildings, everything. Gone. Just this laboratory left, locked here by the time-fixator. The Special Corps no longer exists; no one in the galaxy has even a memory of us. When the time-fixator goes we go as well.”
“Angelina, where is she, where are they all?”
“They were never born, never existed.”
“But I can remember her, all of them.”
“That is what we count upon. As long as there is one person alive with memories of us, of the Corps, we stand a microscopic chance of eventual survival. Someone must stop the time attack. If not for the Corps, for the sake of civilization. History is now being rewritten. But not forever if we can counterattack.”
A one-way trip backward to a lifetime on an alien world, in an alien time. Whoever went would be the loneliest man alive, living thousands of years before his people, his friends, would even be born.
“Get ready.” I said. “I’ll go.”
Chapter 2
“First we must find out where you are going. And when.”
Professor Coypu staggered across the laboratory, and I followed, in almost as bad shape. He was mumbling over the accordion sheets of the computer printout that were chuntering and pouring out of the machine and piling up on the flow.
“Must be accurate, very accurate,” he said. “We have been running a time probe backward. Following the traces of these disturbances. We have found the particular planet. Now we must zero in on the time. If you arrive too late, they may have already finished their job. Too early and you might die of old age before the fiends are even born.”
“Sounds charming. What is the planet?”
“Strange name. Or rather names. It is called Dirt or Earth or something like that. Supposed to be the legendary home of all mankind.”
“Another one? I never heard of it.”
“No reason you should. Blown up in an atomic war ages ago. Here it is. You have to be pushed backward thirty-two thousand five hundred and ninety-eight years. We can’t guarantee anything better than a plus or minus three months at that distance.”
“I don’t think I’ll notice. What year will that be?”
“Well before our present calendar began. It is, I believe, A. D. 1975 by the primitive records of the aborigines of the time.”
“Not so aboriginal if they’re fiddling with time travel.”
“Probably not them at all. Chances are the people you are looking for are just operating in that period.”
“How do I find them?”
“With this.” One of the assistants handed me a small black box with dials and buttons on it, as well as a transparent bulge that contained a free-floating needle. The needle quivered like a bunting dog and continued to point in the same direction no matter how I turned the box.