Poul Anderson: The Year of the Ransom

Varagan leaned forward. “Therefore let us discuss your personal history,” he said. “What do you consider your home? What family have you, friends, ties of any kind?”

The questions quickly became knife-sharp. Tamberly watched and listened while their skilled wielder cut from him detail after detail. When something especially interested Varagan, he pursued it to the end. Tamberly’s second wife ought to be safe; she was also in the Patrol. His first wife was remarried, out of his life. But oh, God, his brother, and Bill’s own wife, and he heard himself confess that his niece was like a daughter to him—The doorway darkened. Luis Castelar bounded through.

His sword slashed. The guard there buckled, crumpled, fell and lay squirming. Blood spouted from his throat, its red like the shriek he could no longer sound forth.

Raor dropped the control box and snatched for her sidearm. Castelar reached her. His left fist smashed at her jaw. She staggered back, sagged, went to the floor and gaped up at him, stunned. His blade sang even as she dropped. Varagan was on his feet. Incredibly quick, he dodged a cut that would have laid him open. The room was too cramped for him to get past. Castelar stabbed. Varagan clutched his belly. Blood squirted between his fingers. He leaned against the wall and shouted.

Castelar wasted no time finishing him. The Spaniard ripped the helmet off Tamberly. It thudded to the floor. Wholeness of spirit broke like a sunbeam into the American.

“Get us away!” Castelar rasped. “The witch-horse outside—”

Tamberly reeled from his chair. His knees would barely hold him. Castelar’s free arm gave support. They stumbled into the open. The timecycle waited. Tamberly crawled onto the front saddle, Castelar leaped to the rear. A man in black appeared in the courtyard gateway. He yelled and reached for his weapon.

Tamberly slapped the console.

Machu Picchu was gone. Wind surrounded him. Hundreds of feet below lay a river valley, lush with grass and groves. Ocean gleamed in the distance.

The cycle dropped. Air brawled. Tamberly’s hands sought the gravity drive. The engine awoke. The fall stopped. He brought the vehicle to a smooth and silent landing.

He began to shake. Darkness went in rags before his eyes.

The reaction passed. He grew aware of Castelar standing on the ground beside him, and the Spaniard’s sword point an inch from his throat.

“Get off that thing,” Castelar said. “Move carefully, your arms up. You are no holy man. I think you may be a magician who should burn at the stake. We will find out.”

A hansom cab brought Manse Everard from Dalhousie & Roberts, Importers—which was also the Time Patrol’s London base in this milieu—to the house on York Place. He mounted the stairs through a dense yellowish fog and turned the handle on a doorbell. A maidservant let him into a wainscoted anteroom. He gave her a card. She was back in a minute to say that Mrs. Tamberly would be pleased to receive him. He left his hat and overcoat on a rack and followed her. Interior heating failed to keep out all the dank chill, which made him for once glad to be dressed like a Victorian gentleman. Usually he found such clothes abominably uncomfortable. Otherwise this was, on the whole, a marvelous era to live in, if you had money, enjoyed robust health, and could pass for an Anglo-Saxon Protestant.

The parlor was a pleasant, gaslit room, lined with books and not overly cluttered with bric—a-brac. A coal fire burned low. Helen Tamberly stood close, as if in need of what cheer it offered. She was a small reddish-blond woman; the full dress subtly emphasized a figure that many doubtless envied. Her voice made the Queen’s English musical. It wavered a little, though. “How do you do, Mr. Everard. Please be seated. Would you care for tea?”

“No, thanks, ma’m, unless you want some.” He made no effort to dissemble his American accent. “Another man is due here shortly. Maybe after we’ve talked with him?”

“Certainly.” She nodded dismissal to the maid, who left the door open behind her. Helen Tamberly went to close it. “I hope this doesn’t shock Jenkins too badly,” she said with a wan smile.

“I daresay she’s grown used to somewhat unconventional ways around here,” Everard responded in an effort to match her self-possession.

“Well, we try not to be too outré. People tolerate a certain amount of eccentricity. If our front were upper class, rather than well-to-do bourgeois, we could get away with anything; but then we’d be too much in the public eye.” She stepped across the carpet to stand before him, fists clenched at her sides. “Enough of that,” she said desperately. “You’re from the Patrol. An Unattached agent, am I right? It’s about Stephen. Must be. Tell me.”

Without fear of eavesdroppers, he continued in the English language, which might sound gentler in her ears than Temporal. “Yes. Now we don’t yet know anything for sure. He’s—missing. Failed to report in. I suppose you remember that was to have been in Lima late in 1535, several months after Pizarro founded it. We have an outpost there. Discreet inquiries turned up the fact that the friar Estebán Tanaquil vanished mysteriously two years before, in Cajamarca. Vanished, mind you, not died in some accident or affray or whatever.” Bleakly: “Nothing as simple as that.”

“But he could be alive?” she cried.

“We may hope. I can’t promise more than that the Patrol will try its damnedest—uh, pardon me.”

She gave a broken laugh. “That’s all right. If you’re from Stephen’s milieu, everybody’s careless with speech, true?”

“Well, he and I were both born and raised in the USA, middle twentieth century. That’s why I’ve been asked to lead this investigation. A background shared with your husband just might give me some useful insight.”

“You were asked,” she murmured. “Nobody gives orders to an Unattached agent, nobody less than a Danellian.”

“That’s not quite correct,” he said awkwardly. Sometimes his status—assigned to no particular milieu, but free to go anywhere and anywhen there was need and act on his own judgment—embarrassed him. He was by nature unpretentious, a meat—and-potatoes kind of man.

“Good of you to agree,” she said, and blinked hard against tears. “Do please be seated. Smoke if you wish. Are you quite sure you wouldn’t care for tea and biscuits or perhaps a spot of brandy?”

“Maybe later, thanks. But I will avail myself of my pipe.” He waited till she sat down by the hearth to take the armchair opposite, which must be Steve Tamberly’s. The fire quivered blue between them.

“I’ve been in on a few cases like this in the past—my lifeline past, that is,” he began cautiously. “It’s desirable to start by learning as much as possible about the person concerned. That means talking with those close to him or her. So I’ve come a tad early today, hoping we could get acquainted. An agent who’s been on the spot will be along in a while to tell us what he discovered. I assumed you wouldn’t mind.”

“Oh, no.” She drew breath. “But tell me, please. I’ve always had difficulty understanding, even when I think in Temporal. My father was a physics don, and it’s hard to set aside the strict logic of cause and effect he drilled into me. Stephen . . . encountered trouble somehow, in sixteenth-century Peru. Maybe the Patrol can save him, maybe it can’t. Whatever, though, whatever the result is . . . the Patrol will know. There’ll be a report in the files. Can’t you go at once and read it? Or, or skip ahead in time and ask your future self? Why must we go through this?”