“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 equipment you may possess is 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 the gunhandlers 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 multiple 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.
38
The eclipse-like light of null-time 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 passageway. The only sound was the slow, all-pervasive, metronome-like beat that some theoreticians say represents the basic frequency rate of the creation-destruction cycle of reality.
Room by room, I checked every square inch of the installation. The personnel were all in place, looking like the inhabitants of the enchanted castle where the sleeping beauty lay. I took my time going through the files and records. 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 of the era.
Of a total of one hundred and twelve personnel in the station, four were Fifth Era transferees, a fact made obvious in the stasis condition by the distinctive aura that their abnormally high temporal potential created around them. I carried out a mind-wipe on pertinent memory sectors, and triggered them back to their loci of origin. There would be a certain amount of head-scratching and equipment re-examining when the original efforts to jump them back to their assignments at Nexx Central apparently failed; but as far as temporal operations were concerned, all four were permanently out of action, trapped in the same type of closed-loop phenomenon that had been used on me.
The files called for some attention, too: I carried out a tape-scan in situ, edited the records to eliminate all evidence that might lead Nexx inspectors into undesirable areas of speculation.
I was just finishing up the chore when I heard the sound of footsteps in the corridor outside the record center.
39
Aside from the fact that nothing not encased in an eddy-field like the one that allowed me to operate in nulltime could move here, the intrusion wasn’t too surprising. I had been hoping for a visitor of some sort; the situation almost demanded it.
He came through the door, a tall, fine-featured, totally hairless man elegantly dressed in a scarlet suit with brocaded designs in deep purple, like mauve eels coiling through red seaweed. He gave the room one of those flick-flick glances that prints the whole picture on the brain to ten decimals in a one-microsecond gestalt, nodded to me as if I were a casual acquaintance encountered at the club.
“You are very efficient,” he said. He spoke with no discernible accent, but with a rather strange rhythm to his speech, as if perhaps he were accustomed to talking a lot faster. His voice was calm, a nice musical baritone.
“Not so very,” I said. “I went through considerable waste motion. There were a couple of times when I wondered who was conning whom.”
“A modest disclaimer,” he said, as though acknowledging a routine we had to go through. “We feel that you handled the entire matter—a rather complex one—in exemplary fashion.”
“Thanks,” I said. “Who’s ‘we’?”
“Up to this point,” he went on without bothering with my question, “we approve of your actions. However, to carry your mission farther would be to risk creation of an eighth-order probability vortex. You will understand the implications of this fact.”
“Maybe I do and maybe I don’t,” I hedged. “Who are you? How did you get in here? This enclave is double sealed.”
“I think we should deal from the outset on a basis of complete candor,” the man in red said. “I know your identity, your mission. My presence here, now, should be ample evidence of that. Which in turn should make it plain that I represent a still later era than your own—and that our judgment must override your instructions.”
I grunted. “So the Seventh Era comes onstage, all set to Fix It Forever.”
“To point out that we have the advantage of you—not only technically but in our view of the continuum as well—is to belabor the obvious.”
“Uh-huh. But what makes you think another set of vigilantes won’t land on your tail, to fix your fixing?”
“There will be no later Timesweep,” the bald man said. “Ours is the Final Intervention. Through Seventh Era efforts the temporal structure will be restored not only to stability, but will be reinforced by the refusion of an entire spectrum of redundant entropic vectors.”
I nodded, rather tiredly. “I see: you’re improving on nature by grafting all the threads of unrealized history back into the Mainstem. Doesn’t it strike you that’s just the sort of well-intentioned tampering that the primitive Timesweepers set out to undo?”
“I live in an era that has already begun to reap the benefits of temporal reinforcement,” he said firmly. “We exist in a state of vitality that prior eras could only dimly sense in moments of exultation. We—”
“You’re kidding yourselves. Opening up a whole new order of meddling just opens up a whole new order of problems.”
“Our calculations indicate otherwise. Now—”
“Did you ever stop to think that there might be a natural evolutionary process at work here—and that you’re aborting it? That the mind of man might be developing toward a point where it will expand into new conceptual levels-and that when it does, it will need a matrix of outlying probability strata to support it? That you’re fattening yourself on the seed-grain of the far future?”
For the first time, he faltered, but only for an instant.
“Not valid,” he said. “The fact that no later era has stepped in to interfere is the best evidence that ours is the final Sweep.”
“Suppose a later era did step in: What form do you think their interference would take?”
He gave me a flat look. “It would certainly not take the form of a Sixth Era Agent, busily erasing data from Third and Fourth Era records.”
“You’re right,” I said. “It wouldn’t.”
“Then what—” he started in a reasonable tone and checked himself. An idea was beginning to get through, and he wasn’t liking it very well. “You,” he said. “You’re not…”
And before I could confirm or deny, he vanished.
40