Odyssey. Part 37

My personal jump mechanism was built into me, tuned to me, though unfocused at the receiving end. It would be useless until I'd had a recharge at base. But its duplicate was built into the corpse lying at my feet. The circuitry of the jump device-from antennae to powerpack-consisted largely of the nervous system of the owner.

It took only a few minutes without oxygen for irreversible brain damage to occur, but the dead man's circuitry should be operable. Just what it might be focused on now-considering the drastic realignment of the casual sequence-was an open question. It would depend to a degree on what had been on the corpse's mind at the moment of death.

The deck was getting hot enough to burn my feet through my soles. There was lots of smoke. The fire roared like a cataract in flood season.

I squatted beside the dead version of myself. The corpse's jaws were in a half-open position. I got a finger inside and tried out my recall code on the molar installation, feeling the blast of heat as flames gouted from the open hatch at my back.

A giant clapped his hands together, with me in the middle.

12.

It was dark and I was falling; I just had time to realize the fact and claw for nonexistent support before I hit water: hot, stinking, clogged with filth, thick as pea soup; I went under and came up blowing and gagging. I was drowning in slime: I floundered, tried to swim, arrived at an uneasy equilibrium in which I lay out flat, head raised clear of the surface, paddling just enough to keep my nostrils clear, while goo ran down in my eyes.

The smell could have been sliced and sold for linoleum. I spat and coughed and sploshed and my hand sc.r.a.ped a surface that sloped gently up under me. My knees b.u.mped and I was crouched on all fours, snorting and trying without much luck to squeeze the muck from my eyes. I tried to crawl forward and slipped and slid backward and almost dunked my head again.

I did it more carefully the next time: eased forward, with most of my weight supported by the semiliquid goo, and felt over the sh.o.r.e. It wasn't like any sh.o.r.e I had ever encountered before; hard-surfaced, planar, as smooth as a toilet bowl, curving gently upward. I groped my way along sideways, slipping, splas.h.i.+ng, suffocating in the raw-sewage reek. Something spongy and rotting came apart under my hands. I tried again to crawl forward, made a yard and slid back two.

I was getting tired. There was nothing to hold onto. I had to rest. But if I rested, I sank. I thought about sliding down under that glutinous surface and trying to breathe and getting a lungful of whatever it was I was floundering in, and dying there and turning to something as black and corrupt as what I was buried in- It was a terrible thought. I opened my mouth and yelled.

And somebody answered.

"You down there! Stop kicking around! I'm throwing you a line!"

It was a female voice, not to say feminine, coming from above me somewhere. It sounded sweeter than a choir of ma.s.sed angels. I tried to call out a cheery and insouciant reply, managed a croak. A beam of white light speared down at me from a point thirty feet above and fifty feet away. It hunted across the bubbly black surface and glared in my eyes.

"Lie still!" the voice commanded. The light went away, bobbled around, came back. Something came whistling down and slapped into the muck a few feet away. I floundered and groped, encountered a half-inch rope slick with the same stuff I was slick with.

"There's a loop at the end. Put your foot in it. I'll haul you up."

The rope slid through my hands; I scrabbled, felt the knot, got another dipping trying to hook a foot in it, settled for a two-handed grip. The rope surged, pulling me clear of the stew and up the slope. I held on and rode. The surface under me curved up and up. Progress was slowed. Another yard. Another. Half a yard. A foot. I was at an angle of about thirty degrees now, pressed tight against the slope. Another surge and I heard the rope rasping above. An edge raked my forearm. I grabbed, almost lost the rope, was dragged up the final foot and got a knee over the edge and crawled forward across loose sand and went down on my face and out.

13.

Sun in my eyes. Forgot to pull down the shades. Lumpy mattress. Too hot. Sand in the bed. Itches; aches. . . .

I unglued an eyelid and looked at white sand that undulated down to the sh.o.r.e of a bra.s.sy sea. A lead-colored sky, but bright for all that; a gray wave that slid in and crump!ed on the beach. No birds, no sails, no kids with buckets, no bathing beauties. Just me and the eternal sea.

It was a view I knew all too well. I was back on Dinosaur Beach, and it was early in the morning, and I hurt all over.

Things cracked and fell away as I sat up, using a couple of broken arms that happened to be handy. There was gray mud caked on my trousers, gluing them to my legs; gray mud covered my shoes. I bent my knee and almost yelped at the pain. The cloth cracked and mud broke and crumbled. I was coated in the stuff like a shrimp in batter. It was on my face, too. I sc.r.a.ped at it, breaking off sh.e.l.ls, prying it loose from my sideburns, spitting it. It was in my eyes; I fingered them, making matters worse.

"You're awake, I see," a crisp voice said from somewhere behind me. I dug mud from my ear and could hear her feet squeaking in the sand. The sound of something being dumped nearby.

"Don't claw at your eyes," she said sharply. "You'd better go down to the water and wash yourself clean."

I grunted and got both knees and both hands firmly planted and stood up. A firm hand took my right arm just above the elbow-rather gingerly, I thought-and urged me forward. I walked, stumbling, through the loose sand. The sun burned against my eyelids; the sound of surf grew louder. I crossed firm sand that sloped down, and then warm water was swirling around my ankles. She let go and I took a few more steps and sank down in the water and let it wash over me.

The dry mud turned back to slime, releasing a sulphurous stench. I sluiced water over my head, scoured my scalp more or less clean, put my face in the water and scrubbed at it, and could see again.

I pulled my s.h.i.+rt off, mud-heavy, sodden, swished it back and forth, trailing a dark cloud in the murky-pale green. Various small cuts and one larger one across my forearm were leaking pink. My knuckles were raw. The salt water burned like acid. I noticed that the back of my s.h.i.+rt was gone, leaving a charred edge. The sky had turned a metallic black, filled with small whirly lights. . . .

Splas.h.i.+ng sounds behind me. Hands on me, pulling me up. I seemed to have been drowning without knowing it. I coughed and retched while she half-dragged me back up through the surf onto the beach. My legs weren't working very well. They got tangled up and I went down, and rested like that for a minute on all fours, shaking my head to drive away the high, whining noise that seemed to be coming from a spot deep between my ears.

"I didn't realize . . . you're hurt. Your back . . . burns . . . what happened to you?" Her voice came from far away, swelling and fading.

"The boy stood on the burning deck," I said airily, and heard it come out slurred gibberish. I could see a pair of trim female s.h.i.+ns in fitted leather boots, a nice thigh under gray whipcord, a pistol belt, a white s.h.i.+rt that had probably been crisp once. I grunted again, just to let her know I was still in there pitching, and got my feet under me and stood, with her hauling on my arm.

" . . . left you outside all night . . . first aid . . . you walk . . . ? . . . little way . . ." Some of the drill-sergeant snap was gone from the voice. It sounded almost familiar. I turned and blinked against the sun and looked into her face, which was frowning at me in an expression of deep concern, and felt my heart stop dead for a full beat.

It was Lisa.

14.

I croaked something and grabbed at her; she fended me off and looked stern, like a night nurse not liking her job but doing it anyway "Lisa-how did you get here?" I got the words out somehow.

"My name isn't Lisa-and I got here in the same way I suspect you did." She was walking me toward a small field tent, regulation issue, that was pitched higher up on the beach, under the shade of the club mosses. She gave me another no-nonsense look. "You are a field man, I suppose?" Her eyes were taking in what was left of my clothes. She sucked in air between her teeth. "You look as if you'd been in an air raid," she said, almost accusingly.

"Ground-armor attack and a sea chase," I said. "No air raid. What are you doing here, Lisa? How . . ."

"I'm Mellia Gayl," she cut in. "Don't go delirious on me now. I've got enough on my hands without that."

"Lisa, don't you know me? Don't you recognize me?"

"I never saw you before in my life, mister." She ducked her head and thrust me through the tent fly, into coolness and amber light.

"Get those clothes off," she ordered. I wanted to a.s.sert my masculine prerogative of undressing myself, but somehow it was just a little more than I could manage. I leaned against her and slid down sideways and had my pants dragged down over my ankles. She pulled my shoes off, and my socks. I managed the wet shorts myself. I was s.h.i.+vering and burning up. I was a little boy and mama was putting me to bed. I felt cool softness under me and rolled over on my face, away from the remote fire at my back, and let it all fade away into a soft, embracing darkness.

15.

"I'm sorry about leaving you unattended all last night," Lisa, or Mellia Gayl, said. "But of course I didn't know you were hurt-and-"

"And I was out cold and too heavy to carry, even if I'd smelled better," I filled in. "Forget it. No harm done."

It had been rather pleasant, waking up in a clean bed, in an air-conditioned tent, neatly bandaged and doped to the hairline, feeling no pain, just a nice warm glow of well-being, and a pleasant numbness in the extremities.

But Lisa still insisted she didn't know me.

I watched her face as she fiddled with the dressings she'd put on my various contusions, as she spooned soup into me. There wasn't the slightest shadow of a doubt. She was Lisa.

But somehow not quite the Lisa I'd fallen in love with.

This Lisa-Mellia Gayl-was crisp, efficient, cool, unemotional. Her face was minutely thinner, her figure minutely more mature. It was Lisa, but a Lisa older by several years than the wife I had abandoned only subjective hours ago. A Lisa who had never known me. There were implications in that I wasn't ready to think about. Not yet.

"They're full of surprises, the boys back at Central," I said. "Imagine Lisa-my sweet young bride-being a Timesweep plant. Hard to picture. Took me completely. I thought I met her by accident. All part of the plan. They could have told me. Some actress . . ."

"You're tiring yourself out," Mellia said coolly. "Don't try to talk. You've lost a lot of blood and plasma. Save your strength for recuperating."

"Otherwise you're stuck with an invalid or a corpse, eh, kid?" I thought, but the spoon went into my mouth in time to keep me from saying it.

"I heard the splash," she was saying. "I knew something big was thras.h.i.+ng around down there. I thought a small reptile had blundered into it. It's a regular trap. They fall in and can't get out again." As she spoke, her voice sounded younger, more vulnerable.

"But you came and had a look anyway," I said. "Animal lover."

"I was glad when you shouted," she blurted, as if it was a shameful admission. "I was beginning to wonder . . . to think-"

"And you still haven't told me how you happened to be waiting here to welcome me with hot soup and cold glances," I said.

She tightened up her mouth but it was still a mouth that was made for kisses.

"I'd finished up my a.s.signment and jumped back to station," she said flatly. "But the station wasn't here. Just a hole in the ground full of mud and bones. I didn't know what to think. My first impulse was to jump out again, but I knew that would be the wrong thing to do. There'd be no telling where I'd end up. I decided my best course would be to sit tight and wait for a retrieval. So . . . here I am."

"How long?"

"About . . . three weeks."

"'About?'"

"Twenty-four days, thirteen hours and ten minutes," she snapped, and jammed the spoon at my teeth.

"What was your a.s.signment?" I asked after I'd swallowed.

"Libya. 1200 B.C."

"I never knew the ancient Libyans packed revolvers."

"It wasn't a contact a.s.signment, I was alone in the desert-at an oasis, actually, at the time, equipped for self-maintenance for a couple of weeks. Things were a little greener there in those days. There'd been some First Era tampering done with an early pre-Bedouin tomb, with a complicated chain of repercussions, tied in with the rise of Islam much later.

"My job was to replace some key items that had been recovered from a Second Era museum. I managed it all right. Then I jumped back-" She broke off and for just an instant I saw a frightened girl trying very hard to be the tough, fearless agent.

"You did just right, Mellia," I said. "In your place I'd probably have panicked and tried to jump back out. And ended up stuck in an oscillating loop." As I said it, I realized that was the wrong aspect of the matter to dwell on just now.

"Anyway, you waited, and here I am. Two heads, and all that-"

"What are we going to do?" she cut in. She sounded like a frightened girl now. Swell job of comforting you're doing, Ravel. She was fine until you came along. . . .

"We have several courses of action," I said as briskly as I could with soup running down my chin. "Just let me . . ." I ran out of wind and drew a shaky breath. "Let me catch a few winks more and. . . ."

"Sorry . . ." she was saying. "You need your rest. Sleep; we'll talk later. . . ."

I spent three days lying around waiting for the skin on my back to regenerate, which it did nicely under the benign influence of the stuff from Mellia's field kit, and for my sc.r.a.pes and cuts to seal themselves over. Twice during that time I heard shots: Mellia, discouraging the big beasties when they got too close. A crater gun at wide diffusion stung just enough to get the message through to their pea-sized brains.

On the fourth day I took a tottery stroll over to the edge of the hole Mellia had pulled me out of.

It was the pit where the station had been, of course. High tides, rain, blown sand, wandering animals had filled it halfway to the brim. The gla.s.s lining above the surface was badly weathered. It had taken time for that-lots of time.

"How long?" Mellia asked.

"Centuries, anyway. Maybe a thousand or two years."

"That means the station was never rebuilt," she said.

"At least not in this time segment. It figures; if the location was known there was no reason to go on using it."

"There's more to it than that. I've been here for almost a month. If anyone were looking for me, they'd have pinpointed me by now."

"Not necessarily. It's a long reach, this far back."

"Don't try to be kind to me, Ravel. We're in trouble. This is more than a little temporary confusion. Things are coming apart."

I didn't like her using virtually the same wording that had popped into my mind when I'd looked at my own corpse.

"The best brains at Nexx Central are working on this," I told her. "They'll come up with the answers." It didn't sound convincing even to me.

"What was the station date when you were there last?" she asked.

"Sixty-five," I said. "Why?"