This time there were three of them. Big ones, and no subsonics available, not even an ordinary noisemaker, except for my vocal cords.
Once, I remembered, a ‘caster named Dowl, out for a swim, had been trapped on the beach by a saurian with impressive teeth which had popped out of the woods between him and the station. He’d gotten out of it with nothing worse than a case of delirium tremens; the behemoth had walked past him without a glance. He was too small a tidbit, the theory was, to interest a stomach as big as that one.
I didn’t find that thought consoling.
The trio coming my way were of a previously unrecorded variety we had named the Royal Jester, because of their silly grin and the array of bright-colored decorations sprouting like baubles from the cranium. They also had legs like an oversized ostrich, a long neck, and far too many teeth.
I stayed where I was, flat on the sand, and played boulder while they stalked toward me, shimmering in the heat haze. There were two big ones and one giant, eighteen feet at the shoulder if he was an inch. As they got closer, I could smell the rank, cucumber-and-dung smell of them, see the strips and patches of reticulated purple and yellow hide scaling from their backs, hear the hiss and wheeze of their breathing. They were big machines, calling for a lot of air turnover. I busied myself with some abortive calculations involving lung capacity, O2 requirements per pound, and intake orifice area; but I gave up when they got within a hundred feet. At this range I could hear their guts rumbling.
Big Boy scented me first. His head went up; a cold reptilian eye the color of a bucket of blood rolled my way. He snorted. He drooled—about a gallon. His mouth opened, and I saw rows of snowwhite teeth, some of which waggled, loose, ready to shed. He steam-whistled and started my way. It was decision time, and I didn’t linger.
I took a final breath of humid beach air, a last look at the bright, brutal view of sea and sand, the high, empty, impersonal sky, and the jolly monster shape looming up against it. Then I played the tune on the console set in my jaw.
The scene twisted, slid sideways and dissolved into the painless blow of a silent club, while I looped the loop through a universe-sized Klein bottle—
Total darkness and a roar of sound like Niagara Falls going over me in a barrel.
8
For a few seconds I lay absolutely still, taking a swift inventory of my existence. I seemed to be all present, organized pretty much as usual, aches, itches and all. The torrent of sound went on, getting no louder or softer; the blackness failed to fade. It seemed pretty clear that while I had left where I was, I hadn’t arrived much of anywhere.
The rulebook said that in a case of transfer malfunction to remain immobile and await retrieval; but in this case that might take quite a while. Also, there was the datum that no one had ever lived to report a jump malfunction, which suggested that possibly the rulebook was wrong. I tried to breathe, and nothing happened. That decided me.
I got to my feet and took a step and emerged as through a curtain into silence and a strange blackish light, shot through with little points of dazzling brilliance, like what you see just before you faint from loss of blood. But before I could put my head between my knees, the dazzle faded and I was looking at the jump room of a regulation Nexx Staging Station. And I could breathe.
I did that for a few moments, then turned and looked at the curtain I had come through. It was a perfectly ordinary wall of concrete and beryl steel, to my knowledge two meters thick.
Maybe the sound I had heard was the whizzing of molecules of dense metal interpenetrating with my own hundred and eighty pounds of impure water.
That was a phenomenon I’d have to let ride until later. More pressing business called for my attention first—such as finding the station chief and reporting in on the destruction of Station Ninety-nine by surprise attack.
It took me ten minutes to check every room on operations level. Nobody was home. The same for the R and R complex. Likewise the equipment division and the power chamber.
The core sink was drawing normal power, the charge was up on the transmitter plates, the green lights were on all across the panels; but nothing was tapping the station for so much as a microerg.
Which was impossible.
The links that tied a staging station to Nexx Central and in turn monitored the activities of the personnel operating out of the station always drew at least a trickle of carrier power. They had to; as long as the system existed, a no-drain condition was impossible anywhere in normal space-time.
I didn’t like the conclusion, but I reached it anyway.
Either the timesweep system no longer existed— or I was outside the range of its influence. And since its influence pervaded the entire spatial-temporal cosmos, that didn’t leave much of anyplace for me to be.
All the stations were physically identicaclass="underline" in appearance, in equipment, in electronic characteristics. In fact, considering their mass production by the time-stutter process which distributed them up and down the temporal contour, there’s a school of thought that holds that they are identical; alternate temporal aspects of the same physical matrix. But that was theory, and my present situation was fact. Step one was to find out where I was.
I went along the passage to the entry lock— some of the sites are located in settings where outside conditions were hostile to what Nexx Central thinks of as ordinary life—cycled it, and almost stepped out.
Not quite.
The ground ended about ten feet from the outflung entry wing. Beyond was a pearly gray mist, swirling against an invisible barrier that prevented it from dissipating. I went forward to the edge and lay flat and looked over. The underside curved down and back, out of sight in the nebulosity. What I could see of it was as smooth and polished as green glass.
Like the green glass crater I’d seen back on Dinosaur Beach.
I backed off from the edge of the world and went back inside, to the Record Section, punched for a tape at random. The read-out flashed on the screen: routine data on power consumption, temporal contour fluctuations, arrivals and departures; the daily log of the station, with the station number repeated on every frame.
Station Ninety-nine.
Just what I was afraid of.
The curving underside of the island in nowhere I was perched on would fit the glass-lined hollow back at Dinosaur Beach the way a casting fits the mold. The station hadn’t been destroyed by enemy gunfire; it had been scooped out of the rock like a giant dip of pistachio and deposited here.
I was safe in port, my home station. That had been what Nel Jard had been trying to tell me. He’d waited until I was clear, then pulled a switch. Crash emergency procedure that an ordinary field man would know nothing about.
No doubt Jard had done the right thing. The enemy had been at the gates. In another few seconds the screens would have collapsed under overload. All the secrets of Nexx Timecasting would have fallen into hostile hands. Jard had to do something. Demolition was impossible. So he’d done this.
The fact that this implied a technology at a level far beyond what I understood of Nexx capabilities was a point I’d take up later, after more immediate matters were dealt with.
In the minutes I’d been there, he’d given me a message; something I was supposed to tell someone, somewhere. I hadn’t heard a word he’d said, but in the excitement, he hadn’t realized that. He’d hustled me on my way, counted ten, and thrown the switch. The station was gone but I was in the clear.
And then I had negated all that effort on his part by using my built-in circuitry to jump back where I wasn’t supposed to be.
Null phase, the phrase popped into my mind. A theoretical notion I’d encountered in technical reading. But it seemed it was more than theory.