Dinosaur Beach

19

Light coalesced around us; and sound: the soft breathing of an air circulation system. We were lying naked on the bare floor in the operations room of a Nexx Timecast station.

“It’s small,” Mellia said. “Almost primitive.” She got to her feet and padded across to the intercom panel, flipped the master.

“Anybody home?” her voice echoed along the corridors.

Nobody was. I didn’t have to search the place. You could feel it in the air.

Mellia went to the Excom-board; I watched her punch in an all-stations emergency code. A light winked to show that it had been automatically taped, condensed to a one-microsecond squawk, and repeated at one-hour intervals across a million years of monitored time.

She went to the log, switched on, started scanning the last entries, her face intent in the dim glow of the screen. Watching her move gracefully, unself-consciously nude, was deeply arousing to me. I got my mind off that with an effort and went to stand beside her.

The log entry was a routine shorthand report, station-dated 9/7/66, with Dinosaur Beach’s identifying key and Nel Jard’s authenticating code at the end.

“That’s one day prior to the day I reported back,” I said. “I guess he didn’t have time to file any details during the attack.”

“At least he got the personnel away before…” She let that ride.

“All but himself,” I said.

“But—you didn’t find him—or any sign of him— in the station when you were here before…”

“His corpse, you mean. Nope. Maybe he used the booth. Maybe he went over the edge—”

“Ravel—” She looked at me half sternly, half appealingly.

“Yeah. I think I’ll go get some clothes on. Not that I don’t like playing Adam and Eve with you,” I added. “I like it all too well.”

We found plenty of regulation clothing neatly stacked in the drawers in the transient apartment wing. I enjoyed the cool, smooth feel of modern fabric on my skin. Getting used to starched collars and itchy wool had been one of the chief sources of discomfort in my 1936 job. That started me thinking again…

I shook off the thought. Lisa—or Mellia—was standing not six feet away, pulling on a form-fitting one-piece station suit. She caught me looking at her and hesitated for an instant before zipping it up to cover her bosom, and smiled at me. I smiled back.

I went outside to take a look, knowing what I’d find: an abrupt edge ten paces from the exit, with the fog swirling around it. I yelled; no echo came back. I picked up a pebble and tossed it over the side. It fell about six feet and then slowed and drifted off as if it had lost interest in the law of gravity. I peered through the murk, looking for a rift with a view beyond it; but beyond the fog there was just more fog.

“It’s… eerie,” Mellia said beside me.

“All of that,” I said. “Let’s get back inside. We need sleep. Maybe when we wake up it will be gone.”

She let that one pass. That night she slept in my arms. I didn’t dream—except when I woke in the night and found her there.