Keith Laumer - Dinosaur Beach

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DINOSAUR BEACH
by Keith Laumer
This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and
any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.
Copyright 1971 by Keith Laumer
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form.
A Baen Book
Baen Publishing Enterprises
260 Fifth Avenue
New York, N.Y. 10001
First Baen printing, July 1986
ISBN: 0-671-65581-7
Cover art by Tom Kidd
Printed in the United States of America
Distributed by
SIMON & SCHUSTER
TRADE PUBLISHING GROUP
1230 Avenue of the Americas
New York, N.Y. 10020
This book is affectionately dedicated to
Anne Taylor, RN.
1
It was a pleasant summer evening. We were sitting on the porch swing, Lisa and I, watching
the last of the pink fade out of the sky and listening to Fred Hunnicut pushing a lawn mower over
his weed crop next door. A cricket in the woodwork started up his fiddle, sounding businesslike
and full of energy. A car rattled by, its weak yellow headlights pushing shadows along the brick
street and reflecting in the foliage of the sycamores that arched over the pavement. Somewhere a
radio sang about harbor lights.
A pleasant evening, a pleasant place. I hated to leave it. But I took a breath of crisp
air lightly laced with leafsmoke and newcut grass and got to my feet.
Lisa looked up at me. She had a heart-shaped face, and a short nose, and big, wide-spaced
eyes and the prettiest smile in the world. Even the tiny scar on her cheekbone only added to her
charm: the flaw that makes perfection perfect.
"Think I'll walk down to Simon's for some beer," I said.
"Dinner will be ready when you get back, darlin'," she said, and smiled the smile. "Baked
ham and corn on the cob."
She stood and moved against me all in one fluid dancer's motion, and her lips touched my
ear.
I went down the steps and paused on the walk to look back and see her silhouetted against
the lighted screen door, slim and graceful.
"Hurry back, darlin'," she said, and waved and was gone.
Gone forever.
She didn't know I wouldn't be coming back.
2
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A streetcar clacked and sparked past the intersection, a big toy with cutout heads pasted
against the row of little square windows. Horns tooted. Traffic lights winked. People hurried
past, on their way home after a long day in the store or the office or the cement plant. I bucked
the tide, not hurrying, not dawdling. I had plenty of time. That was one lesson I'd learned. You
can't speed it up, you can't slow it down. Sometimes you can avoid it completely, but that's a
different matter.
These reflections carried me the four blocks to the taxi stand on Delaware. I climbed in
the back of a Reo that looked as if it should have been retired a decade back and told the man
where I wanted to go. He gave me a look that wondered what a cleancut young fellow like me wanted
in that part of town. He opened his mouth to say it, and I said, "Make it under seven minutes and
there's five in it."
He dropped the flag and almost tore the clutch out of the Reo getting away from the curb.
All the way there he watched me in the mirror, mentally trying out various approaches to the
questions he wanted to ask. I saw the neon letters, the color of red-hot iron, half a block ahead
and pulled him over, shoved the five into his hand and was on my way before he'd figured out just
how to phrase it.
It was a shabby-genteel cocktail bar, the class of the neighborhood, with two steps down
into a room that had been a nice one once, well before Prohibition. The dark paneled walls hadn't
suffered much from the years, and aside from a patina of grime, the figured ceiling was passable;
but the maroon carpet had a wide, worn strip that meandered like a jungle trail across to the long
bar, branching off to get lost among the chair legs. The solid leather seats in the booths along
the wall had lost a lot of their color, and some of their stitching had been patched with tape;
and nobody had bothered to polish away the rings left by generations of beers on the oak
tabletops. I took a booth halfway back, with a little brass lamp with a parchment shade and a
framed print on the wall showing somebody's champion steeplechaser circa 1910. The clock over the
bar said 7:44.
I ordered a grenadine from a waitress who'd been in her prime about the same time as the
bar. She brought it and I took a sip and a man slid into the seat across from me. He took a couple
of breaths as if he'd just finished a brisk lap around the track, and said, "Do you mind?" He
waved the glass in his hand at the room, which was crowded, but not that crowded.
I took my time looking him over. He had a soft, round face, very pale blue eyes, the kind
of head that ought to be bald but was covered with a fine blond down, like baby chicken feathers.
He was wearing a striped shirt with the open collar laid back over a bulky plaid jacket with
padded shoulders and wide lapels. His neck was smooth-skinned, and too thin for his head. The hand
that was holding the glass was small and well-lotioned, with short, immaculately manicured nails.
He wore a big, cumbersome-looking gold ring with a glass ruby big enough for a paperweight on his
left index finger. The whole composition looked a little out of tune, as if it had been put
together in a hurry by someone with more important things on his mind.
"Please don't get the wrong impression," he said. His voice was like the rest of him: not
feminine enough for a woman, but nothing you'd associate with a room full of cigar smoke, either.
"It's vital that I speak to you, Mr. Ravel," he went on, talking fast, getting it said
before it was too late. "It's a matter of great importance . . . to your future." He paused to
check the effect of his words: a tentative sort of pause, as if he might jump either way,
depending on my reaction.
I said, "My future, eh? I wasn't sure I had one."
He liked that; I could see it in the change in the glitter of his eyes. "Oh, yes," he
said, and nodded comfortably. "Yes indeed." He took a quick swallow from the glass and lowered it
and caught and held my eyes, smiling an elusive little smile. "And I might add that your future is-
-or can be--a great deal larger than your past."
"Have we met somewhere?" I asked him.
He shook his head. "I know this doesn't make a great deal of sense to you just now--but
time is of the essence. Please listen--"
"I'm listening, Mr.--what was the name?"
"It really doesn't matter, Mr. Ravel. I don't enter into the matter at all except as the
bearer of a message. I was assigned to contact you and deliver certain information."
"Assigned?"
He shrugged.
I reached across and caught the wrist of the hand that was holding the glass. It was as
smooth and soft as a baby's. I applied a small amount of pressure. Some of the drink slopped on
the edge of the table and into his lap. He tensed a little, as if he wanted to stand, but I
pressed him back. "Let me play too," I said. "Lets go back to where you were telling me about your
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assignment. I find that sort of intriguing. Who thinks I'm important enough to assign a smooth
cookie like you to snoop on?" I grinned at him while he got his smile fixed up and back in place,
a little bent now, but still working.
"Mr. Ravel--what would you say if I told you that I am a member of a secret organization
of supermen?"
"What would you expect me to say?"
"That I'm insane," he said promptly. "That's why I'd hoped to skirt the subject and go
directly to the point. Mr. Ravel, your life is in danger."
I let that hang in the air between us.
"In precisely--" he glanced down at the watch strapped English-style to the underside of
his free wrist "--one and one-half minutes a man will enter this establishment. He will be dressed
in a costume of black, and will carry a cane--ebony, with a silver head. He will go to the fourth
stool at the bar, order a straight whiskey, drink it, turn, raise the cane, and fire three lethal
darts into your chest."
I took another swallow of my drink. It was the real stuff, one of the compensations of the
job.
"Neat," I said. "What does he do for an encore?" My little man looked a bit startled. "You
jape, Mr. Ravel? I'm speaking of your death. Here. In a matter of seconds!" He leaned across the
table to throw this at me, with quite a lot of spit.
"Well, I guess that's that," I said, and let go his arm and raised my glass to him. "Don't
go spending a lot of money on a fancy funeral."
It was his turn to grab me. His fat little hand closed on my arm with more power than I'd
given him credit for.
"I've been telling you what will happen--unless you act at once to avert it!"
"Aha. That's where that big future you mentioned comes in."
"Mr. Ravel--you must leave here at once." He fumbled in a pocket of his coat, brought out
a card with an address printed on it: 356 Colvin Court.
"It's an old building, very stable, quite near here. There's an exterior wooden staircase,
quite safe. Go to the third floor. A room marked with the numeral 9 is at the back. Enter the room
and wait."
"Why should I do all that?" I asked him, and pried his fingers loose from my sleeve.
"In order to save your life!" He sounded a little wild now, as if things weren't working
out quite right for him. That suited me fine. I had a distinct feeling that what was right for him
might not be best for me and my big future.
"Where'd you get my name?" I asked him.
"Please--time is short. Won't you simply trust me?"
"The name's a phony," I said. "I gave it to a Bible salesman yesterday. Made it up on the
spot. You're not in the book-peddling racket, are you, Mr. Ah?"
"Does that matter more than your life?"
"You're mixed up, pal. It's not my life we're dickering for. It's yours."
His earnest look went all to pieces. He was still trying to reassemble it when the street
door opened and a man in a black overcoat, black velvet collar, black homburg, and carrying a
black swagger stick walked in.
"You see?" My new chum slid the whisper across the table like a dirty picture. "Just as I
said. You'll have to act swiftly now, Mr. Ravel, before he sees you--"
"Your technique is slipping," I said. "He had me pat right down to my shoe size before he
was halfway through the door." I brushed his hand away and slid out of the booth. The man in black
had gone across to the bar and taken the fourth stool, without looking my way. I picked my way
between the tables and took the stool on his left.
He didn't look at me, not even when my elbow brushed his side a little harder than strict
etiquette allowed. If there was a gun in his pocket, I couldn't feel it. He had propped the cane
against his knees, the big silver head an inch or two from his hand. I leaned a little toward him.
"Watch it, the caper's blown," I said about eight inches from his ear.
He took it calmly. His head turned slowly until it was facing me. He had a high, narrow
forehead, hollow cheeks, white lines around his nostrils against gray skin. His eyes looked like
little black stones.
"Are you addressing me?" he said in a voice with a chill like Scott's last camp on the
icecap.
"Who is he?" I said in a tone that suggested that a couple of smart boys ought to be able
to get together and swap confidences.
"Who?" No thaw yet.
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"The haberdasher's delight with the hands you hate to touch," I said. "The little guy I
was sitting with. He's waiting over in the booth to see how it turns out." I let him have a sample
of my frank and open smile.
"You've made an error," Blackie said, and turned away.
"Don't feel bad," I said. "Nobody's perfect. The way I see it--why don't we get together
and talk it over--the three of us?"
That got to him; his head jerked--about a millionth of an inch. He slid off his stool,
picked up his hat. My foot touched the cane as he reached for it; it fell with a lot of clatter. I
accidentally put a foot on it while picking it up for him. Something made a small crunching sound.
"Oops," I said, "sorry and all that," and handed it over. He grabbed it and headed for the
men's room. I almost watched him too long; from the corner of my eye I saw my drinking buddy
sliding toward the street exit. I caught him a few yards along the avenue, eased him over against
the wall. He fought as well as you can fight when you don't want to attract the attention of the
passersby.
"Tell me things," I said. "After I bought the mindreading act, what was next?"
"You fool--you're not out of danger yet! I'm trying to save your life--have you no sense
of gratitude?"
"If you only knew, chum. What makes it worth the trouble? My suit wouldn't fit you--and
the cash in my pockets wouldn't pay cab fare over to Colvin Court and back. But I guess I wouldn't
have been coming back."
"Let me go! We must get off the street!" He tried to kick my ankle, and I socked him under
the ribs hard enough to fold him against me wheezin like a bagpipe. The weight made me take a
quick step back and I heard a flat _whup!_ like a silenced pistol and heard the whicker that a
bullet makes when it passes an inch from your ear. There was a deep doorway a few feet away. We
made it in one jump. My little pal tried to wreck my knee, and I had to bruise his shins a little.
"Take it easy," I said. "That slug changes things. Quiet down and I'll let go your neck."
He nodded as well as he could with my thumb where it was, and I let up on him. He did some
hard breathing and tugged at his collar. His round face looked a bit lopsided now, and the China-
blue eyes had lost their baby stare. I made a little production of levering back the hammer of my
Mauser, waiting for what came next.
Two or three minutes went past like geologic ages.
"He's gone," the little man said in a flat voice. "They'll chalk this up as an abort and
try again. You've escaped nothing, merely postponed it."
"Sufficient unto the day and all that sort of thing," I said. "Let's test the water. You
first." I nudged him forward with the gun. Nobody shot at him. I risked a look. No black overcoats
in sight.
"Where's your car?" I asked. He nodded toward a black Marmon parked across the street. I
walked him across and waited while he slid in under the wheel, then I got in the back. There were
other parked cars, and plenty of dark windows for a sniper to work from, but nobody did.
"Any booze at your place?" I said.
"Why--yes--of course." He tried not to look pleased.
He drove badly, like a middle-aged widow after six lessons. We clashed gears and ran
stoplights across town to the street he had named. It was a poorly lit macadam dead end that rose
steeply toward a tangle of telephone poles at the top. The house was tall and narrow, slanted
against the sky, the windows black and empty. He pulled into a drive that was two strips of
cracked concrete with weeds in the middle, led the way back along the side of the house past the
wooden steps he'd mentioned, used a key on a side door. It resisted a little, then swung in on
warped linoleum and the smell of last week's cabbage soup. I followed him in and stopped to listen
to some dense silence.
"Don't be concerned," the little man said. "There's no one here." He led me along a
passage a little wider than my elbows, past a tarnished mirror, a stand full of furled umbrellas,
and a hat tree with no hats, up steep steps with black rubber matting held in place by tarnished
brass rods. The flooring creaked on the landing. A tall clock was stopped with the hands at ten
past three. We came out in a low-ceilinged hall with flowery brown wallpaper and dark-painted
doors made visible by the pale light coming through a curtained window at the end.
He found number 9, put an ear against it, opened up and ushered me in.
It was a small bedroom with a hard-looking double bed under a chenille spread, a brown
wooden dresser with a string doily, a straight chair with wire to hold the legs together, a rocker
that didn't match, an oval hooked rug in various shades of dried mud, a hanging fixture in the
center of the ceiling with three small bulbs, one of which worked.
"Some class," I said. "You must have come into dough."
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"Just temporary quarters," he said off-handedly. He placed the chairs in a cozy tête-a-
tête arrangement under the light, offered me the rocker, and perched on the edge of the other.
"Now," he said, and put his fingertips together comfortably, like a pawnbroker getting
ready to bid low on distress merchandise, "I suppose you want to hear all about the man in black,
how I knew just when he'd appear, and so on."
"Not especially," I said. "What I'm wondering is what made you think you could get away
with it."
"I'm afraid I don't quite understand," he said, and cocked his head sideways.
"It was a neat routine," I said. "Up to a point. After you fingered me, if I didn't buy
the act, Blackie would plug me--with a dope dart. If I did--I'd be so grateful, I'd come here."
"As indeed you have." My little man looked less diffident now, more relaxed, less eager to
please. A lot less eager to please.
"Your mistake," I said, "was in trying to work too many angles at once. What did you have
in mind for Blackie--after?"
His face went stiff. "After--what?"
"Whatever it was, it wouldn't have worked," I said. "He was onto you, too."
". . . too?" He leaned forward as if puzzled and made a nice hip draw and showed me a
strange-looking little gun, all shiny rods and levers.
"You will now tell me all about yourself, Mr. Ravel--or whatever you choose to call
yourself."
"Wrong again--Karg," I said.
For an instant it didn't register. Then his fingers twitched and the gun made a spitting
sound and needles showered off my chest. I let him fire the full magazine. Then I lifted the
pistol I had palmed while he was arranging the chairs, and shot him under the left eye.
He settled in his chair. His head was bent back over his left shoulder as if he were
admiring the water spots on the ceiling. His little pudgy hands opened and closed a couple of
times. He leaned sideways quite slowly and hit the floor like two hundred pounds of heavy
machinery.
Which he was, of course.
3
I went over to the door and listened for sounds that would indicate that someone had heard
the shots and felt curious about them. Apparently nobody had. It was that kind of neighborhood.
I laid the Karg out on its back and cut the seal on its reel compartment, lifted out the
tape it had been operating on.
It had been suspected back at Central that something outside the usual pattern had been
going on back here in the Old Era theater of operations. But not even the Master Timecaster had
suspected collusion between Second and Third Era operatives. The tape might be the key the Nexx
planners were looking for.
But I still had my professional responsibilities. I suppressed the impulse to cut-and-run
and got on with the business at hand.
The tape was almost spent, meaning the Karg's mission had been almost completed. Well,
true enough, but not in quite the way that had been intended. I tucked the reel away in the zip-
down pocket inside my shirt and checked the robot's pockets--all empty--then stripped it and
looked fur the ID data, found it printed on the left sole.
It took me twenty minutes to go over the room. I found a brainreader focused on the rocker
from one of the dead bulbs in the ceiling light. The Karg had gone to a lot of trouble to make
sure he cleaned me before disposing of the remains. I recorded my scan to four-point detail,
fussed around a few minutes longer rechecking what I'd already checked, but I was just stalling.
I'd done what I'd come here to do. The sequence of events had gone off more or less as planned
back at Nexx Central; decoying the Karg into a lonely place for disposal wrapped up the operation.
It was time to report in and debrief and get on with the business of remaking the cosmos. I pushed
his destruct button, switched off the light, and left the room.
Back down in the street a big square car went by, making a lot of noise in the silence,
but no bullets squirted from it. I was almost disappointed. But what the hell: the job was over.
My stay here had been nice, but so had a lot of other times and places. This job was no different
from any other. I thought about Lisa, waiting for me back at the little house we'd rented six
weeks ago, after our four-day honeymoon at Niagara. She'd be getting anxious about now, trying to
keep the dinner hot, and wondering what was keeping me.
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"Forget it,' I told myself out loud. "Just get your skull under the cepher and wipe the
whole thing, like you always do. You may ache a little for a while, but you won't know why. It's
just another hazard of the profession."
I checked my locator and started east, downslope. My game of cat and terrier with the Karg
had covered several square miles of the city of Buffalo, New York, T.F. date, 1936. A quick review
of my movements from the time of my arrival at the locus told me that I was about a mile and a
half from the pickup area, thirty minutes' walk. I put my thoughts out of gear and did it in
twenty-five. I was at the edge of a small park when the gauges said I was within the acceptable
point/point range for a transfer back to my Timecast station. A curving path led past a bench and
a thick clump of juniper. I stepped into deep shadow--just in case unseen eyes were on me--and
tapped out the recall code with my tongue against the trick molars set in my lower jaw; there was
a momentary pause before I felt the pickup field impinge on me, then the silent impact of temporal
implosion made the ground jump under my feet--
And I was squinting against the dazzling sunlight glaring on Dinosaur Beach.
4
Dinosaur Beach had been so named because a troop of small allosaur-like reptiles had been
scurrying along it when the first siting party had fixed in there. That had been sixty years ago,
Nexx Subjective, only a few months after the decision to inplement Project Timesweep.
The idea wasn't without logic. The First Era of time travel had closely resembled the dawn
of the space age in some ways--notably, in the trail of rubbish it left behind. In the case of the
space garbage, it had taken half a dozen major collisions to convince the early space authorities
of the need to sweep circumterrestrial space clean of fifty years' debris in the form of spent
rocket casings, defunct telemetry gear, and derelict relay satellites long lost track of. In the
process they'd turned up a surprising number of odds and ends, including lumps of meteoric rock
and iron, chondrites of clearly earthly origin, possibly volcanic, the mummified body of an
astronaut lost on an early space walk, and a number of artifacts that the authorities of the day
had scratched their heads over and finally written off as the equivalent of empty beer cans tossed
out by visitors from out-system.
That was long before the days of Timecasting, of course.
The Timesweep program was a close parallel to the space sweep. The Old Era temporal
experimenters had littered the timeways with everything from early one-way timecans to observation
stations, dead bodies, abandoned instruments, weapons and equipment of all sorts, including an
automatic mining setup established under the Antarctic icecap which caused headaches at the time
of the Big Melt.
Then the three hundred years of the Last Peace put an end to that; and when temporal
transfer was rediscovered in early New Era times, the lesson had been heeded. Rigid rules were
enforced from the beginning of the Second Program, forbidding all the mistakes that had been made
by the First Program pioneers.
Which meant that the Second Program had to invent its own disasters--which it had, in full
measure. Thus the Kargs.
Karg: a corruption of "cargo," referring to the legal decision as to the status of the
machine-men in the great Transport Accommodation Riots of the mid-Twenty-eighth Century.
Kargs, lifeless machines, sent back from the Third Era in the second great Timesweep
attempt, designed to correct not only the carnage irresponsibly strewn across the centuries by the
Old Era temporal explorers, but to eliminate the even more disastrous effects of the Second
Program Enforcers.
The Third Era had recognized the impossibility of correcting the effects of human
interference with more human interference. Machines which registered neutral on the life-balance
scales could do what men could not do: could manipulate affairs without disturbing the delicate
and poorly understood equations of vital equilibrium, to restore the integrity of the Temporal
Core.
Or so they thought. After the Great Collapse and the long night that followed, Nexx
Central had arisen to control the Fourth Era. The Nexx Timecasters saw clearly that the tamperings
of prior eras were all part of a grand patten of confusion; that any effort to manipulate reality
via temporal policing was doomed only to further weaken the temporal fabric.
When you patch time, you poke holes in it; and patching the patches makes more holes,
requiring still larger patches. It's a geometric progression that soon gets out of hand; each
successive salvage job sends out waves of entropic dislocation that mingle with, reinforce, and
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complicate the earlier waves--and no amount of paddling the surface of a roiled pond is going to
restore it to a mirror surface.
The only solution, Nexx Central realized, was to remove the first causes of the original
dislocations. In the beginning, of course, the disturbances set up by Old Era travelers were mere
random violations of the fabric of time, created as casually and as carelessly as footprints in
the jungle. Later, when it had dawned on them that every movement of a grain of sand had
repercussions that went spreading down the ages, they had become careful. Rules had been made, and
even enforced from time to time. When the first absolute prohibition of time meddling came along,
it was already far too late. Subsequent eras faced the fact that picnics in the Paleozoic might be
fun, but exacted a heavy price in the form of temporal discontinuities, aborted entropy lines, and
probability anomalies. Of course, Nexx, arising as it did from this adulterated past, owed its
existence to it; careful tailoring was required to undo just enough damage to restore vitality to
selected lines while not eliminating the eliminator. Superior minds had to be selected and trained
to handle the task.
Thus, my job as a Nexx field agent: to cancel out the efforts of all of them--good and
bad, constructive or destructive; to allow the wounds in time to heal, for the great stem of life
to grow strong again.
It was a worthy profession, worth all it cost. Or so the rule book said.
I started off along the shore, keeping to the damp sand where the going was easier,
skirting the small tidal pools and the curving arcs of sea scum left by the retreating tide.
The sea in this era--some sixty-five million years B.C.--was South-Sea-island blue,
stretching wide and placid to the horizon. There were no sails, no smudges of smoke, no beer cans
washing in the tide. But the long swells coming in off the Eastern Ocean--which would one day
become the Atlantic--crashed on the white sand with the same familiar _carrump--whoosh!_ that I
had known in a dozen eras. It was a comforting sound. It said that after all, the doings of the
little creatures that scuttled on her shores were nothing much in the life of Mother Ocean, age
five billion and not yet in her prime.
The station was a quarter of a mile along the beach, just beyond the low headland that
jutted out into the surf; a small, low, gray-white structure perched on the sand above the high-
tide line, surrounded by tree ferns and club mosses, both for decoration and to render the
installation as inconspicuous as possible, on the theory that if the wildlife were either
attracted or repelled by a strange element in their habitat, uncharted U-lines might be introduced
into the probability matrix that would render a thousand years of painstaking--and painful--
temporal mapping invalid.
In a few minutes I'd be making my report to Nel Jard, the Chief Timecaster. He'd listen,
ask a few questions, punch his notes into the Masterplot and pour me a drink. Then a quick and
efficient session under the memory-editor to erase any potentially disquieting recollections
arising from my tour of duty in the Twentieth Century--such as Lisa. After that, a few days of
lounging around the station with other between-jobs personnel, until a new assignment came up--
having no visible connection with the last one. I'd never learn just why the Karg had been placed
where it was, what sort of deal it had made with the Third Era Enforcer--the man in black--what
part the whole thing played in the larger pattern of the Nexx grand strategy.
And probably that was just as well. The panorama of time was too broad, the warp and the
woof of its weaving too complex for any one brain to comprehend. Better to leave the mind free to
focus on the details of the situation at hand, rather than diffuse it along the thousand dead-end
trails that were the life of a Timecast Agent. _But Lisa, Lisa_ . . .
I put the thought of her out of my mind--or tried to--and concentrated on immediate
physical sensations: the hot, heavy air, the buzzing insects, the sand that slipped under my feet,
the sweat trickling down my temples and between my shoulder blades. Not that those things were any
fun in themselves. But in a few minutes there'd be cool clean air and soft music, a stimbath, a
hot meal, a nap on a real air couch . . .
A couple of off-duty agents, bright-eyed, efficient, came out to meet me as I came across
the slope of sand to the edge of the lawn, through the open gate and in under the shade of the
protopalms. They were strangers to me, but they greeted me in the casually friendly way that you
develop in a lifetime of casual friendships. They asked me the routine questions about whether I
had had a rough one, and I gave them the routine answers.
Inside the station the air was just as cool and clean as I'd remembered--and as sterile.
The stimbath was nice--but I kept thinking of the ironstained bathtub back home. The meal
afterward was a gourmet's delight: reptile steak smothered in giant mushrooms and garnished with
prawns, a salad of club-moss hearts, a hot-and-cold dessert made by a barrier-layer technique that
wouldn't be perfected for another sixty-five million years but didn't compare with Lisa's lemon
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ice-box pie with graham-cracker crust. And the air couch was nice, but not half as nice as the
hard old bed with the brass frame in the breathlessly hot room with the oak floor and the starched
curtains, and Lisa curled close to me . . .
Jard let me sleep it out before the debriefing. He was a small, harassed-looking man in
his mid-fifties, with an expression that said he had seen it all and hadn't been much impressed.
He gave me his tired smile and listened to what I had to say, looking out the window at the same
view he'd been looking at every day for five years. He liked it that I'd gotten the tape; Kargs
usually managed to destruct when cornered; my slug in the emergency computing center had prevented
it this time: thus the elaborate play to get him in position with his suspicions lulled. It had
all been very cleverly planned and executed, and now I was tired of it, tired of the role I'd been
playing, tired of the whole damned thing.
But that was just a temporary post-mission letdown. As soon as I'd had my brain scrubbed,
and had rested a few days and cleared my mind of those annoying wisps of nostalgic thought, I'd be
raring to go again.
Or so I hoped. Why not? I always had in the past.
Jard asked me to hold the memory-wipe until he'd had an opportunity to go through the tape
in depth. I started to protest, but some vague idea of not sounding like a whiner stopped me.
I spent the rest of the day mooching around the station, thinking about Lisa.
It was a simple case of compulsive transference, or neurotic sublimation, I knew that. At
least I knew the words. But every train of thought led back to her. If I tasted a daka-fruit--
extinct since the Jurassic--I thought _Lisa would like this_, and I'd imagine her expression if I
brought a couple home in a brown paper sack from the IGA store at the corner, pictured her peeling
them and making a fruit salad with grated coconut and blanched almonds . . .
There was a beach party that evening, down on the wide, white sand where it curved out in
a long spit to embrace a shallow lagoon, where every now and then something made a splash that was
too big to be a fish. Cycads grew on the point of land and on the sand bar that was busy growing
into a key. They looked like beer barrels with flowers on their sides and palm fronds sticking out
of their tops. There were a few unfinished-looking pines and the usual scattering of big ferns and
clumps of moss that were trying to be trees. There weren't many bothersome insects; just big,
blundery ones, and the small darting batlike reptiles were keeping them under control.
I sat on the sand and watched my compatriots: strong, healthy, handsome men and women,
swimming in the surf inside the sonic screen set up to discourage the ichthyosaurs, chasing each
other up and down the sand--and catching each other--while the guards posted in the pits at each
end of the beach watched for wandering maneaters. We built a big fire--of driftwood fetched in
from a locus a few million years downstream. We sang songs from a dozen eras, ate our roast baby
stegosaurian, and drank white wine imported from eighteenth-century France, and felt like the
lords of creation. And I thought about Lisa.
I had trouble sleeping that night. My appointment with the cepher was scheduled for 8:00
A.M. I was up before six. I ate a light breakfast and went for a walk on the beach to enjoy a few
last thoughts of Lisa and wonder if somehow in our wisdom we had missed the point somewhere. It
wasn't the kind of question that had an answer, but it kept my mind occupied while I put a mile or
two between me and the station. I sat for half an hour and looked at the sea and wondered what I'd
do if something large and hungry stalked out of the herbage behind me. I didn't know; I didn't
even much care.
_A bad train of thought, Ravel_, I told myself. _Time to get back and tidy up your mind,
before you get carried away and start thinking about how easy it would be to step into the
transfer booth and drop yourself back into 1936 a block from the house, ten minutes after you
left. . ._
I had gotten that far in my ruminations when I heard the shots.
It's a curious thing how in moments of stress, the mind jumps to the inconsequential. I
was running, without having consciously started, sending up a spatter of spray as I dashed through
the tongue of a wave that slid across in my path; and I was thinking: _I won't be stepping into
that cooled air and antiseptic music again; no hot meal, no stimbath, no nap on a real air couch.
. . . And no Lisa, never again Lisa . . ._
I cut up across the soft sand-drift of the point, slipping and sliding as I ploughed my
way upslope, crashed through a screen of palmetto at the crest, and was looking down at the
station.
I don't know what I expected to see; the detonations I had heard were as much like Old Era
hardshots as anything in my experience. What I saw was a pair of bulky, gray-brown machines, track-
driven, obviously armored, in the fifty-ton size range, parked on the sand a few hundred yards
from the station. No smoking gun muzzles were visible, but the chunk missing from the corner of
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the building was adequate testimony that guns were present, even without the _rackety-boom!_ and
the spurt of fire that came from the featureless curve of the prow of the nearer machine. The
other was in trouble. One track was mangled, and smoke was leaking from a variety of places on its
surface. It gave a little hop and almost invisible fire jetted from the same spots. I dropped flat
in time to get the shock wave against my ribs: a kick from a buried giant.
I came up at a dead run, spitting sand and not thinking too clearly, but absolutely,
unconditionally convinced that whatever was going on down there, the only Timecast booth this side
of the Pleistocene was inside the station, and the nearer I got to it before they got me, the
happier I'd die.
But no one was paying any attention to me and my aspirations. The still-functional warcar--
Third Era, the data processor between my ears told me inconsequentially--was coming on, firing as
it came. Jard must have succeeded in erecting at least a partial screen; rainbow light flared and
darted coronalike over the station with each shot. But the defenses had been designed to ward off
blundering brontosaurians, not tactical implosives. It wouldn't be long. . .
I aborted that thought and put my head down and sprinted. Fire ran across the ground in
front of me and winked out; the blast sent me skittering like a paper cutout in a brisk wind. I
rolled, with some half-baked idea of evading any random shots somebody might be tossing my way,
and came to my feet ten of the widest yards anybody ever crossed from that welcoming hole gaping
in the east wall where the espalier had been. Through it I could see what was left of a filing
cabinet and the internal organs of a resage chair and some twisted and blackened rags of metal
that had been restful tan wall panels; but none of it seemed to get any closer. I was running with
all I had, through footdeep glue, while hell came to a head and burst around me.
And then I was going through in a long graceful dive that fetched up against an oversized
anvil someone had carelessly left lying around the place.
I came drifting back out of a thick fog full of little bright lights and bellowing
monsters and looked up into the sweat-slick face of Nel Jard, Station Chief.
"Pull yourself together, man!" he was yelling. He had to yell to be heard over the
continuous booming of the bombardment. "Everybody else is clear. I waited for you--knew you were
back inside the field. Had to tell you . . ." What he had to tell me was drowned out in a crash
that made the earlier sound effects sound like a warm-up. Things fell around us. There was a
throat-burning reek of ozone in the air, along with the scents of smoke and blood and pulverized
stone and hot iron. I got my feet under me in time to see Jard disappearing through the door into
the Ops room. I tottered after him, saw him punching a pattern into the board. The red emergency
lights went on and the buzzer started its squawk and cut off abruptly. Jard turned and saw me.
"No!" he shouted, waving me off. "Get out, Ravel! Didn't you hear a word I told you?
You've got to . . . out. . . co-ordinates--"
"I can't hear you," I shouted back, and couldn't hear my own words. Jard grabbed my arm,
hustled me toward the floor-drop that led to the utility tunnel.
"I've got to shift the station to null-phase, you understand? Can't let them capture it. .
. . The door was up and I was being dumped over the edge. It was all happening too fast;
bewildering. _A hell of a way to treat a sick man_. . . The impact of the floor hitting my head
jarred it clear for the moment.
"Run for it," Jard was calling after me, from a million miles away. "Get as far as you
can. Luck, Ravel. . ."
His voice was gone and I was on all fours, then stumbling to my feet, then running, more
or less. It was what Nel wanted, and he was the boss.
Then the world blew up and sent me spinning head-over-heels into limbo, and a thousand
tons of hot sand poured down on top of me and sealed me away for all eternity.
5
_Well, maybe not eternity_, a small voice seemed to be saying in a matter-of-fact tone.
"Close enough," I said, and got a mouthful of sand. I tried to draw a breath to spit it
out and got a noseful of the same. That must have triggered some primitive instincts, because
suddenly I was swimming hard with both hands and both feet, clawing upward through sand, breaking
through into heat and the stink of charred plastics--and air. Dusty, smoky air, but air. I coughed
and snorted and breathed some of it and looked around me.
I was lying in the utility tunnel, the walls of which were buckled and bulged as if they'd
been half melted. The floor was drifted a foot deep in sand, out of which I had just dug my way. I
tried to make my brain work. . .
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The tunnel led to the pump room, I knew, from which a ladder led to the surface, an
arrangement designed for minimal disturbance of the local scenery. All I had to do was continue in
the present direction, climb the ladder, and. . .
I'd worry about the _and_ later, I decided. I was still congratulating myself on my
coolness under fire when I happened to notice that for a tunnel twelve feet under the surface, the
light was awfully good. It seemed to be coming from behind me. I looked back, saw a tangle of
steel, through the interstices of which brilliant sunlight was pouring in dusty bars.
After a dozen or so yards the going was easier; not so much sand and debris here. The
pumproom door gave me a little trouble until I remembered to pull, not push. The equipment there
was all intact, ready to pump any desired amount of clean, fresh spring water up from 120 feet
down. I patted the nearest pump and got a grip on the ladder. I was still dizzy and weak, but no
dizzier or weaker than a landlubber in his first sea-squall. At the top, the motor whined when I
pushed the button; the lid cycled open, dumping sand and a small green lizard. I crawled out and
took a short breather and turned to see what there was to see.
There was the long curve of beach, pitted now, and criss-crossed by tank-tracks, and the
tongue of jungle that stretched almost to the shore along the ridge. But where the station had
been, there was nothing but a smoking crater.
I lay flat on the nice warm sand and looked at the scene with gritty eyes that wept
copiously in the glare of the tropical Jurassic sun and felt sweat trickle down my forehead, and
down my chest inside my shirt, while images went swirling through my brain: the station, the first
time I had seen it, on my first jump, all those years ago. The neat, impersonal little wardrooms
that almost came to seem like home after a while, always waiting for you at the end of a tough
assignment; the other agents, male and female, who came and went; the in-conversation around the
tables in the dining room, the crisp cleanliness, the efficiency; even the big board in Ops that
showed the minute-by-minute status of the Timesweep effort up and down the ages. But the big board
wasn't there any more, or the miles of microtape records, or the potted gingko tree in the lounge:
all melted down to slag. . .
I was remembering Nel Jard, yelling to me to get out. . . and something else. He'd given
me a message. Something important, something I was supposed to tell somebody, someday. An exercise
in futility. I'd had my last talk with a human being, I was stranded, stranded as no other man had
ever been, with the possible exception of a few other Nexx agents who had dropped off the screens
in far places.
But none as far as this.
On that thought, I let my head drop and the dark curtain fall.
6
When I woke the sun was setting and I was aching in places I'd forgotten I owned. Itching,
too. Oversized mosquitoes that didn't seem at all surprised to find a mammal where no mammals
ought to be had settled down with a commendably philosophic attitude to take a meal where they
found it. I batted the most persistent ones away and walked down to see what was to be seen. I
didn't appear to have any major injuries, just plenty of small cuts and large bruises and the odd
contusion here and there. I reached the edge of the pit where the station had been and looked at
the ruins: a fused glass bowl a hundred yards in diameter surrounded by charred plant life.
Nothing had survived--no people, no equipment. And worst of all, of course, there'd be no outjump
to Nexx Central with a report of what had happened--or to any other time or place.
Someone, possibly Third Era--or someone masquerading as Third Era--had blasted the station
with a thoroughness I wouldn't have believed possible. And how had it been possible for them to
find the place, considering the elaborate security measures surrounding the placement of the 112
official staging stations scattered across Old Era time? As for Nexx Central, nobody knew where it
was, not even the men who had built it. It floated in an achronic bubble adrift on the entropic
stream, never physically existing in any one space-time locus for a finite period. Its access code
was buried under twelve layers of interlocked ciphers in the main tank of the Nexxial Brain. The
only way to reach it was via a jump station--and not just any jump station: it had to be the one
my personal jumper field was tuned to.
Which was a half-inch layer of green glass lining a hollow in the sand.
An idea appeared like a ghastly grin.
The personal emergency jump gear installed in my body was intact. There was enough E-
energy in the power coil for a jump--somewhere. I lacked a target, but that didn't mean I couldn't
go. All it meant was that I wouldn't know where I'd land--if anywhere.
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file:///F|/rah/Keith%20Laumer/Laumer,%20Keith%20-%20Dinosaur%20Beach.txtDINOSAURBEACHbyKeithLaumerThisisaworkoffiction.Allthecharactersandeventsportrayedinthisbookarefictional,andanyresemblancetorealpeopleorincidentsispurelycoincidental.Copyright1971byKeithLaumerAllrightsreserved,includingtheright...

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