She gave me a tense little smile. "We"re not exactly contemporaries. I was a.s.signed to Dino Beach in twelve-thirty-one, local."
I let the impact of that diffuse through my brain for a few seconds, bringing no comfort. I grunted as if I"d been socked in the gut.
"Swell. That means-" I let it hang there; she knew what it meant as well as I did: that the whole attack I had seen-lived through-the consequences of which we were looking at now-was what was known to the trade as a recidivism: an aborted alternate possibility that either had never occurred or had been eliminated by Timesweep action. In Mellia"s past, the Dinosaur Beach station had been functional for over eleven hundred years, minimum, after the date I"d seen it under attack. She"d jumped from it to Libya, done her job, and jumped back-to find things changed.
Changed by some action of mine.
I had no proof of that a.s.sumption, of course; but I knew. I"d handled my a.s.signment in 1936 according to the book, wrapped up all the loose ends, scored a total victory over my Karg counterpart. I thought.
But something had gone wrong. Something I"d done-or not done-had shattered the pattern. And the result was this.
"It doesn"t make sense," I said. "You jumped back to home base and found it missing-the result of something that didn"t happen in your own personally experienced past. O.K. But what puts me here at the same time? The circuits I used for my jump were tuned to a point almost twelve hundred years earlier."
"Why haven"t they made a pick-up on me?" she said, not really talking to me. Her voice was edging up the scale a little.
"Take it easy, girl," I said, and patted her shoulder; I knew my touching her would chill her down again. Not a nice thing to know, but useful.
"Keep your hands to yourself, Ravel," she snapped, all business again. "If you think this is some little desert island scene, you"re very wrong."
"Don"t get ahead of yourself," I told her. "When I make a pa.s.s at you that"ll be time enough to slap me down. Don"t go female on me now. We don"t have time for nonsense."
She sucked in air with a sharp hiss and bottled up whatever snappy comeback she"d been about to make. Quite a girl. It was all I could do to keep from putting my arms around her and telling her it was all going to be all right. Which was a long way from what I believed.
"We can sit here and wait it out for a while longer," I said, in my best business-as-usual tone. "Or we can take action now. How do you vote?"
"What action?" It was a challenge.
"In my opinion," I said, not taking the bait, "the possible benefits of staying put are very small-statistically speaking. Still, they exist."
"Oh?" Very cool; just a little tremble of a finely molded lip that was beaded with sweat.
"This is a known locus; whatever the difficulties that caused the site to be abandoned, it"s still a logical place for a search effort to check."
"That"s nonsense. If it were checked and we were located the sensible thing to do-or at least the humane thing-would be to shift the pick-up back a month and take us out at the moment of our arrival. That didn"t happen. Therefore it won"t happen."
"Maybe you"ve forgotten what this Timesweep effort is all about, Miss Gayl. We"re trying to knit the fabric back together, not make new holes in it. If we were spotted here, now-and the pick-up were made at a prior locus-what happens to all the tender moments we"ve known together? This moment right now? It never happened? No, any pick-up on us would be made at the point of initial contact, not earlier. However . . ."
"Well?"
"The possibility exists that we"re occupying a closed-loop temporal segment, not a part of the main timestem."
She looked a little pale under the desert tan, but her eyes held mine firmly.
"In which case-we"re marooned-permanently."
I nodded. "Which is where the alternative comes in."
"Is there . . . one?"
"Not much of one. But a possibility. Your personal jumper"s still operational."
"Nonsense. I"m tuned to home on the station fix. I"m already at the station fix. Where would I go?"
"I don"t know. Maybe nowhere."
"What about you?"
I shook my head.
"I already used my reserve. Charge is gone. I"ll have to wait for you to bring help back. So-I"ll contain myself in patience-if you decide to try it, that is."
"But-an unfocused jump-"
"Sure-I"ve heard the scare stories too. But my jump wasn"t so bad. I ended up in the station, remember?"
"A station in nowhere, as you described it."
"But with a transfer booth. When I used it, it pitched me back down my own timeline. As luck would have it, I ended up looking in on a previous field a.s.signment. Maybe you"ll be luckier."
"That"s all that"s left, isn"t it? Luck."
"Better than nothing."
She stood, not looking at me; my Lisa, so hurt and so bewildered, so scared and trying not to show it, so beautiful, so desirable. I wondered if she had known-if it had been a sleeper a.s.signment, meaning a field job in which the agent was conditioned to be unaware of his actual role, believed himself to be whatever his cover required.
"You really want me to go?" she said.
"Looks like the only way," I said. Good old iceberg Ravel, not an emotion in his body. "Unless you want to set up permanent housekeeping with me here on the beach." I gave her a nice leer to help her make her decision.
"There"s another way," she said in a voice chipped out of ice. I didn"t answer.
"My field will carry both of us," she said.
"Theoretically. Under, uh, certain conditions-"
"I know the conditions."
"Oh, h.e.l.l, girl, we"re wasting time-"
"You"d let me abandon you here before you"d . . ." She paused. " . . . meet those conditions?"
I drew a breath and tried to keep the strain out of my voice. "Not abandon. You"ll be back."
"We"ll go together," she said, "or not at all."
"Look, Miss Gayl, you don"t have to-"
"Oh, yes, I do have to. Make no mistake about that, Mr. Ravel!"
She turned and walked off across the sand, looking very small and very forlorn against all that emptiness of beach and jungle.
I waited five minutes, for some obscure reason, before I followed her.
16.
She was waiting for me in the tent. She had undressed and put on a lightweight robe. She stood beside the field bed which she had deployed to its full forty-inch width and looked past my shoulder. Her expression was perfectly calm, perfectly cool. I went across to her and put my hands lightly on her ribs just above her hips. Her skin was silk-smooth under the thin robe. She stiffened a little. I moved my hands up until the weight of her b.r.e.a.s.t.s was pressing against the heels of my hands. I drew her closer to me; she resisted minutely, then let her weight come against me. Her hair touched my face, soft as a cloud. I held her close. I was having a little trouble drawing a deep breath.
She pulled away suddenly, half turned away.
"What are you waiting for?" she said in a brittle voice.
"Maybe it would be better to wait," I said. "Until after dark . . ."
"Why?" she snapped. "So it would be more romantic?"
"Maybe; something like that."
"In case you"ve forgotten, Mr. Ravel, this isn"t romance. It"s expediency."
"Speak for yourself, Mellia."
"I a.s.sure you, I am!" She turned and faced me; her face was pink, her eyes bright.
"d.a.m.n you, get on with it!" she whispered.
"Unb.u.t.ton my shirt," I said, very quietly. She just looked at me.
"Do as I said, Mellia."
Her expression went uncertain, then started to firm up into a sneer.
"Cut it!" I said with plenty of snap. "This was your idea, not mine, lady. I didn"t force myself on you; I"m still not. But unless you want to make the grand sacrifice in vain, you"d better get into the spirit of the thing. Physical intimacy isn"t the magic ingredient-it"s psychological contact, the meeting and merging and sharing of personalities as well as bodies. The s.e.xual aspect is merely the vehicle. So unless you can nerve yourself to stop thinking of me as a rapist, you can forget the whole idea."
She closed her eyes and drew a deep breath and let it out and looked at me again. Her lashes were wet; her mouth had gone all soft and vulnerable.
"I"m . . . sorry. You"re right, of course. But . . . ?"
"I know. It isn"t the bridal night you dreamed of."
I took her hand; it was soft, hot, unresisting.
"Have you ever been in love, Mellia?"
Her eyes winced; just a flicker of pain. "Yes."
Lisa, Lisa . . .
"Think back; remember how it was. Pretend . . . I"m him."
Her eyes closed. How delicate the lids were, the pastel tracery of veins in the rose-petal skin. I put my hands gently on her throat, slid them down to her shoulders, under the robe. Her skin was hot, damask-smooth. I pushed the garment down and away; it dropped from her shoulders, caught on the swell of her b.r.e.a.s.t.s. My hands moved down, brushing the cloth aside, taking the weight of her b.r.e.a.s.t.s on my palms. She drew a sharp breath between her teeth; her lips parted.
She dropped her arms, shed the robe. I glanced down at the slimness of her waist, the swell of hips as she came against me.
Her hands went uncertainly to the b.u.t.tons on my shirt; she leaned back, opening it, pulling out my shirttail. She unbuckled my belt, went to her knees, dragged the rest of my clothing off. I picked her up, carried her to the cot. Rounded, yielding forms moved against me; my hands explored her, trying to encompa.s.s all of her. She shivered and drew me to her; her mouth half-opened; her eyelids parted and her eyes glittered into mine an inch away; her mouth met mine hungrily. My weight went onto her; her hands were deft; her thighs pressed against mine. We moved as one.
There was no time, no s.p.a.ce, no thought. She filled my arms, my world; beauty, pleasure, sensation, fulfillment that rose and rose to a crest of unbearable delight that crashed down like a long Pacific comber, roiling and surging, then slowing, sliding smoothly to a halt, paused, then slipped back, back, down and out and away to merge with the eternal ocean of life. . . .
17.
For a long time neither of us spoke. We lay spent in the amber light; the surf boomed and hissed softly, the wind fluted around the tent.
Her eyes opened and looked into mine, a look of utter candor, of questioning, perhaps of surprise. Then they closed again and she was asleep. I rose quietly and picked up my clothes and went outside, into the heat and the dry wind from the dunes. A pair of small saurians were on the beach a mile or so to the south. I dressed and went down to the water"s edge and wandered along the surf line, watching the small life that scurried and swam with such desperate urgency in the shallows.
The sun was low when I got back to the tent. Mellia was busy, setting out food from the field stores. She was wearing the robe, barefooted, her hair unbound. She looked up at me as I came in; a look half-wary, half-impish. She looked so young, so achingly young. . . .
"I"ll never be sorry," I said. "Even if . . ." I let it hang there.
She looked faintly troubled. "Even if . . . what?"
"Even if we proved the theory was wrong. . . ."
She stared at me; suddenly her eyes widened.
"I forgot to-," she said. "I forgot all about it. . . ."
I felt my face curving into a silly smile. "So did I-until just now."
She put her hand over her mouth and laughed. I held her and laughed with her. Then she was crying. Her arms went around me and she clung, and sobbed, and sobbed, and I stroked her hair and made soothing noises.