18,244 B. C.
Later Manse Everard thought the fact that he was chosen, and precisely where and how it happened to him, would be ironic were the coincidence not so absurd. Later yet he remembered his conversations with Guion, and wondered mightily.
But they were more distant than the stars from his mind when the summons came upon him. He and Wanda Tamberly had been sharing a vacation at the lodge the Patrol maintained in the Pleistocene Pyrenees. On this their last day, they left off skiing and climbing, nor did they flit north to seek out the magnificent wildlife of a glacial era, nor call on any of the nearby Crô-Magnon settlements to enjoy picturesque hospitality. They simply went for a long walk on easy trails, looked at mountain scenery, said little, were aware of much.
Sunset washed gold across white peaks and ridges. The lodge stood at no great altitude, but snowline was lower than in the birthtime of these two. Timberline was also; around them reached alpine meadow, intensely green, flecked with small summer flowers. A little way upslope, several ibex lifted horns and watched them, alertly but without fear. The sky, greenish in the west, deepening through azure overhead to purple in the east, was full of homebound wings. Cries drifted down through silence and gathering chill. Human hunters had made scant mark thus far; they were almost in balance with nature, like wolf and cave lion. The air tasted of purity.
The main building loomed ahead, a darkness from which windows glowed. “It’s been grand,” Everard said in American English. “For me, anyhow.”
“Ditto,” Tamberly replied. “You’ve been so kind, taking a rookie like me in hand and getting me to feel easy here.”
“Shucks, a pleasure. Besides, you’re the naturalist. You introduced me to stuff in the wilderness I’d never heard or dreamed of.” Including hunts for mammoth, reindeer, wild horse with camera rather than gun. Born and raised when she was, Wanda disapproved of blood sports. His background had been different.
Not that such details mattered a lot otherwise if you were in the Patrol. Except—She hasn’t added but four or five years to the twenty-one that were hers when first we met. How many have I? Longevity treatments or no, Everard didn’t care, just then, to reckon them up.
“I wish—” She gulped and looked aside. Finally, in a rush: “I wish I weren’t leaving.”
His pulse stumbled. “You don’t have to, you know,” he said.
“Yes. I really must. I’ve such limited lifespan to give my folks,” parents, sister, who would never know that she fared through the ages, whose own years above ground would number less than a hundred and all on world lines running straight from conception to dissolution. “And then I should, I want to, call on Steve,” her uncle who was also a Patrol agent, in Victorian England. “Before I go back to work.” She could have spent years of experienced time on vacation, then reported to her base camp within minutes of the moment she left it; but agents didn’t do that sort of thing. You owed the outfit a fair proportion of your existence. Besides, too long away from the job, you’d go stale, and that could prove fatal, to yourself or, worse, a comrade.
“Okay, I understand,” Everard sighed. He plunged at the question they had skirted this whole while. “Can we make another date?”
She laughed and caught his hand. How warm hers was. “Why, sure.” Her glance turned toward his. In the fading light he couldn’t see the blue of her eyes. Strong bones stood forth, though, and page-bobbed hair bore the hue of amber. She was shorter than he by the breadth of his palm, and he was a big man. “To tell the truth, I was hoping. Didn’t want to get pushy. Don’t tell me you felt shy!”
“M-m, well—” He had never been glib. How could he now explain? It wasn’t quite clear to him, anyway. The gap between our ranks, I guess. I’m afraid of seeming to condescend, or else of seeming to be trying to overwhelm. Her generation of women grew up with a touchy kind of pride built in. “Old bachelor type. You, you’ve got a wide field to play if you want.” She had frankly enjoyed the attention paid her by other male guests. And they were exotic to her, several of them handsome and vivacious, while he was only another twentieth-century American, slow-spoken, plain in his tastes, war-battered in the face.
“Foof,” she snorted. “You’ve cut a wider swathe than any field I’m ever likely to find myself in. Don’t deny it. You wouldn’t be normal if you hadn’t taken advantage of opportunities.”
And you? … None of my business.
“Not that you’ve ever abused your chances,” she added hastily. “I know you never would. I was surprised and, and delighted when you stayed in touch after Beringia. For Pete’s sake, did you think I didn’t want to?”
Almost, he grabbed her. Would she like me to? By God, I believe she would. But no. It would be wrong. She was too wholehearted. Let her first become clear in her mind about this. Yes, and let him decide what his foremost wishes and needs were.
Be grateful for what you’ve had, this past couple of weeks, son. He knotted the fist she wasn’t holding and muttered, “Fine. Fine. Where might you like to go next?” To get better acquainted.
She also seemed to take refuge in banality. “Gee, I’d have to think. Suggestions?”
Then they were at the lodge, mounting its veranda, entering the common room. Flames crackled in a huge stone fireplace. A rack of Irish elk antlers curved above it. On the opposite wall, cast in brass, a heraldic shield bore a stylized hourglass. It was the emblem of the Patrol, the insigne on uniforms that were seldom worn. Folk lounged about awaiting supper, with drinks, conversation, a game of chess, a game of go, a few clustered at the grand piano in a corner, from which danced a Chopin scherzo.
Agents of similar backgrounds tended to visit the same decades of the lodge’s long existence. However, the pianist tonight was born in the thirty-second century Anno Domini, in orbit around Saturn. Patrol people did feel curious about other eras than their own, and sometimes they got enchanted by some aspect of one.
Everard and Tamberly draped their mackinaws over their arms. She went around saying goodbye. He lingered near the pianist. “Will you stay on here?” she asked him in Temporal.
“A few days, I think,” he answered.
“Good. I too.” The topaz gaze dropped. The hairless alabaster-white head—not albino; a healthy product of genetic technology—bent again above the keys. “If you desire your heart eased, I have the Gift of Quietness.”
“I know. Thanks.” He didn’t expect he’d want more than some rambles by himself, but the offer was generous.
Tamberly returned to him. He accompanied her to her room. While he waited in the corridor, she changed into clothes she had brought, suitable for the San Francisco area, summer’of 1989, and packed her other stuff. They went down to the underground garage. Hoppers stood row on row, like wheelless futuristic motorcycles, beneath bleak white light. At the one assigned her, she stowed her luggage.
Turning about, “Well, au revoir, Manse,” she said. “New York HQ, noon, Thursday the tenth of April, 1987, agreed?” They had settled on it in a few awkward words.
“Agreed. I’ll, uh, I’ll have tickets to The Phantom of the Opera. Take care.”
“And you, buster.” She came to him. The kiss was long and became hungry.
He stepped back. Breathing hard, a little rumpled, she swung into the saddle, smiled, waved, touched controls. She and her vehicle blinked out of sight. He paid no heed to the usual snap of air rushing in where they had been.
A minute or two he stood alone. She’d spoken of a three-month hitch in the field after her trip home, before their intended holiday. He didn’t know how long it would be for him. That depended on what he’d be doing. He had no immediate call, but something was certain, when the Patrol must keep order in the traffic across a million years of time, with what was really a bare scattering of agents.
Abruptly he laughed aloud at himself. After—however much lifespan it was—traipsing through the continuum, was he finally over the hill? Second childhood, no, second adolescence. He saw that he’d felt as if he were sixteen again, and it made no sense. He’d fallen in love often enough before. A few times he’d done nothing about it, because to go ahead would have brought more harm than good. This might be such a case. Probably was, God damn it. Maybe not. He’d find out. They would, bit by bit, together, and either get serious and make whatever sacrifices proved necessary or else part as friends. Meanwhile—He started to go.
Another noise, of a different kind, passed softly behind him. He knew that difference. He halted, looked around, and saw a vehicle newly arrived. The person aboard was about seven feet tall and spidery long-limbed but, in a close-fitting leatherlike coverall, clearly female. Her hair, drawn into a crest as if on a helmet, shone Asian blue-black, but no Mongoloid skin was so deep a yellow, and the eyes were enormous and the same faded blue as his, while the face was narrow and hook-nosed. He didn’t recognize the race at all. Her origin must be very far futureward.
Temporal fell harsh from incongruously full lips. “Unattached Agent Komozino,” she identified herself. “Quick, tell me, are any of my rank at these coordinates?”
It stabbed in him: Trouble. She knew more, and probably had a better brain, than he did. Army habits from the Second World War, almost forgotten, brought him half to attention. “Me,” he clipped. “Manson Emmert Everard.”
“Good.” She got off and approached him. Through the tight control in her voice he heard the tension, the dread. “What data I could access indicated you might be. Listen, Manson Emmert Everard. We have had a catastrophe, some kind of temporal upheaval. As nearly as I have been able to ascertain, it occurred approximately on Julian day 2,137,000. Beyond that, events diverge. No Patrol stations appear to exist. We must rally whatever forces we have left.”
She stopped and waited. She knows what a hammerblow she’s dealt me, trickled down the back of his mind. I’ll need a minute to catch my balance.
The astronomical number she’d spoken—Somewhen during the European Middle Ages? He’d calculate exactly, no, he’d ask her. Wanda was bound for twentieth-century California. “Now” she won’t come out into anything of the kind. And she isn’t trained for such a situation. None of us are—our job is to prevent it—but to her it’ll be no more than vaguely remembered classroom theory. She’ll be stunned worse than I am. My God, what’ll she do?
II
The dining room in the lodge accommodated all guests and staff, though chairs around tables got a bit crowded. Light came silver-gray and uneasy through the windows, for clouds swept low before a wind whose booming went as an undertone, the sound of autumn on its way south. Everard knew he imagined, but he felt as if a breath of the cold outside seeped inward.
More did he feel the gazes upon him. He stood at the far end, beneath a vigorous mural of bison that a local artist had painted some fifty years ago. Komozino was at his side, impassive. She had told him he had better take the lead. He was much closer in birthtime, memories, ways of thinking, to everybody else. Moreover, behind him lay a relevant experience unique among them.
“We spent most of the night talking, when we weren’t shuttling message tubes in hopes of more contacts and information,” he said into the appalled silence that followed his announcement. “So far, we know very little. There’s reason to think the key event is in Italy, mid-twelfth century. At least, the Patrol has a man then at Palermo, island of Sicily. He got word that the king there was killed in battle on the mainland. It was not supposed to happen. His database says the king lived on for nearly twenty years and was important. Like a sensible fellow, our man sent a tube a short way uptime to his milieu headquarters. It returned, informing him that that office was gone, spurlos versenkt, never founded. He called other stations contemporary to himself, and they checked their own futures—very cautiously, of course, not venturing more than a couple of decades ahead. No new Patrol agencies anywhere. As you’d expect, otherwise the scenes weren’t strange. They wouldn’t be—yet—except perhaps in southern Europe. The effects of a change propagate across the world at varying speeds, depending on factors like distance, ease of travel, and closeness of relations between countries. The Far East might begin to be touched, slightly, pretty soon; but the Americas may well go on unaffected for centuries, Australia and Polynesia longer still. Even in Europe, at first the differences are probably mainly political. And … that’s a whole new political history, about which we here know nothing.
“Anyhow, naturally, our bases in the twelfth century started communicating with those downtime. This led to contact with Unattached Agent Komozino.” Everard gestured at her. “She happened to be in Egypt—uh, Eighteenth Dynasty, did you say?—tracking down an expedition from her home millennium that’d gone back in search of cultural inspiration and evidently gotten lost…. No, plain to see whatever became of it, there was no noticeable effect on history…. She took charge of the entire emergency operation, pending the availability of more people with the same rank. A data scan suggested me, so she came in person to inform and confer.” Everard braced himself. “At the moment, unless a Danellian shows up, we, ladies and gentlemen, are on the edge of the effort to salvage the future.”
“Us?” cried a young man. Everard knew him peripherally, French, period of Louis XIV and assigned to that same milieu, as most agents were assigned to their own eras. It meant he was bright. The Patrol got few recruits from before the First Industrial Revolution, and very few from prescientific societies. A person who hadn’t been raised in that style of thinking was seldom able to assimilate the concepts. At that, this lad was having difficulties. “But, sir, there must be hundreds, thousands of our kind active before the crisis date. Shall we not gather them all together?”
Everard shook his head. “No. We’re in deep enough trouble already. The vortices we could generate—”
“Perhaps I can make it a little clearer,” Komozino offered crisply. “Yes, quite probably most Patrol personnel go into the pre-medieval past, if only on vacation, like you. They are present, so to speak, there and then. Often more than once. For example, Agent Everard has been active in settings as diverse as early Phoenicia, Achaémenid Persia, post-Roman Britain, and viking Scandinavia. He has repeatedly come to this lodge for rest and recreation, at various points of its existence, both downtime and uptime of the present moment. Why should we not call on these Everards also? Certainly two Unattached make an insufficient cadre of leaders.
“The fact is, we have not done so. We will not do so. If we did, that would change reality again and again, hopelessly, beyond any possibility of comprehension, let alone control. No, if we survive what is ahead of us and prevail over this misfortune, we will not double back on our world lines and warn ourselves to beware. Never! If you try it, you will find that your conditioning against such antics is as powerful as your conditioning against revealing to any unauthorized person that time travel occurs.
“The mission of the Patrol is precisely to maintain the ordered progression of history, of cause and effect, human will and human action. Often this is tragic, and the temptation to intervene is almost overwhelming. It must be resisted. That way lies chaos.
“And if we are to execute our duty, we must constrain ourselves to operate in as linearly causational a fashion as possible. We must always remember that every paradox is more than mortally dangerous.
“Therefore I have been flitting about, seeing to it that the news does not reach most of our remaining personnel. It is best confined to a few indispensables, and to selected off-duty individuals like yourselves. To further disturb the normal pattern of events is to risk obliteration and oblivion.”
Her stiff height sagged a little. “It has been hard,” she whispered. Everard wondered how much of her lifespan she had spent on that frantic task. It wasn’t just a matter of dashing from post to post, passing on the word here and hushing it up there. She had to know what she was doing. Mostly she must have been immersed in records, databases, evaluations of people and periods. The decisions must frequently be agonizing. Had she been at it weeks, months, years? Awed, he knew that such an intellectual achievement was altogether beyond him.
He had his own strengths, though. He took the word: “Remember too, friends, the Patrol does more than guard the integrity of time. That’s a job for special officers, and crucial though it is, it doesn’t occupy the main part of our activity. Most of us are police, with the traditional tasks of police.” We give advice, we regulate traffic, we arrest evildoers, we help travelers in distress, now and then we provide a shoulder to cry on. “Our fellow agents are busy. If we took them off their jobs, all hell would break loose.” Actually. Temporal lacked an exact equivalent of the homely English phrase in his mind. “So we’ll leave them alone, okay?”
“How shall we do that?” asked a twenty-first-century Nubian.
“We need a headquarters,” Everard said. “This’ll be it. We can seal it off for a certain limited slice of time without affecting anything else too much. That’d be impossible at the Academy, for instance. We’ll bring in people and equipment, and operate mainly out of this base. Just what we do—well, first we have to learn exactly what the situation is, then figure out our strategy. Sit tight for a few days.”
A smile, if it was a smile, twisted Komozino’s lips. “It is either grotesque or it is appropriate that Agent Everard is involved and that he shall commence out of here,” she remarked.
“May one request enlightenment as to the significance of the memsahib’s statement?” inquired a babu from the British Raj.
Komozino glanced at Everard. He scowled, shrugged, and said heavily, “It might possibly help, now, if you know. I was caught up in something like this earlier along my world line. A friend and I were staying here. Several years later than today, on the resort’s calendar. You’re aware how complicated the bookings get for as popular a spot as this. No matter. We decided to finish our furlough in my home, twentieth-century New York, and hopped there. It was totally foreign. Eventually we found out that Carthage had beaten Rome in the Punic Wars.” A gasp went around the room. Some persons half rose to their feet, sank down again and shivered. “What happened?” he heard, over and over.
Everard skipped dangers and deeds. The whole thing still hurt too much. “We went back well pastward, organized a force, and mounted an expedition to the critical point, a certain battle. We found a couple of outlaw time travelers, with energy weapons, on the Carthaginian side. Their idea was to make a godlike place for themselves in the ancient world. We nailed them before they could perform the action that counted, and … again history went the way it ought to, the way we remembered because we were born in it.” I condemned a world, uncounted billions of perfectly decent human beings, to nullity. They never were. None of what I had experienced ever happened. The scars on my spirit are simply there; nothing caused them.
“But I haven’t heard of this before, me!” protested the Frenchman.
“Certainly not,” Everard answered. “We don’t advertise stuff like that.”
“You saved my life, sir, my existence.”
“Thanks, but spare the gratitude. It isn’t called for. I did what I had to do.”
A Chinese, once a cosmonaut, narrowed his eyes and asked slowly, “Were you and your friend the only travelers who went uptime into that undesired universe?”
“By no means,” Everard replied. “Most skited straight back. Some didn’t; they never reported in anywhere; we can only guess they got trapped, maybe killed. My friend and I had a stiff time escaping. It happens that, out of those who returned, we were the ones able to take charge and organize the salvage operation—which happened to be a fairly simple one, or we could not have handled it, at least not without calling in more help. When it was complete, why, that post-Carthaginian world had never existed. People returning futureward from the past ‘always’ found the same world as ‘always.’”
“But you remember differently!”
“Like others who’d seen the changed world, and those Patrol folk who hadn’t but whom we co-opted. What the bunch of us had experienced, what we had done, couldn’t be erased in us, or we’d never have done it.”
“You spoke of persons who entered the alternate future but failed to get away from it. What became of them when it was … abolished?”
Everard’s nails bit into his palms. “They no longer existed either,” he said like a machine.
“Apparently only a relative few entered it, including you. Why not many? After all, in the course of the ages—”
“Those were just the ones who happened to cross the crucial moment, bound uptime, in that larger section of time during which there were related events, like the Patrol’s salvage work. We’ve got a longer section now, with a lot more traffic in it, so our problem is correspondingly bigger. I hope you understand what I’m saying. I don’t.”
“It requires a metalanguage and metalogic accessible to few intellects,” Komozino said. Her tone sharpened. “We haven’t time to quibble about theory. The span in which we can use this base without seriously perturbing things is limited. So is the number of personnel, therefore the total lifespan at our disposal. We must make optimum use of our resources.”
“How?” challenged the woman from Saturn.
“For openers,” Everard told them, “I’m going up to the milieu of that king and learn whatever I can. It’s the sort of job that wants an Unattached agent.”
And meanwhile, except that “meanwhile” is meaningless, Wanda’s caught in yonder alien future. She must be. Else why hasn’t she come back to me? Where else would she flee to, if she was able?
“Surely that Carthaginian world has not been the sole invasive reality,” said the babu.
“I suppose not. I haven’t been informed of any more, but—I’ve no need to know. Why risk an extra change? It might not damp out; it might bring on a new temporal vortex. And as a matter of fact,” Everard flung at him, “we’re faced with another reality right now.”
Again because of deliberate tampering? The Neldorians, the Exaltationists, lesser organizations and individuals, crazed or greedy or—whatever they are—The Patrol’s coped with them. Sometimes just barely. How did we fail against this enemy? Who is it? How to lay him low?
The hunter awoke in Everard. A chill tingle passed through his spine, out to scalp and fingertips. For a blessed moment he could set pain aside and think of pursuit, capture, revenge.