Lloyd Biggle Jr. - The Chronocide Mission

“Gave you—what answer?” Kaynor asked blankly.

“I had traveled through time. That meant—”

He broke off. There was so little chance of their understanding him that he might as well have been talking to himself.

“Too bad you didn’t bring the Old Med’s machine with you when you escaped,” Roszt said. “You could have sent the four of us to Easlon without the trek across the mountains.”

“Could you have done that?” Kaynor asked.

“Yes. With time to experiment, I suppose I could have.”

“Could you send scouts into Lant from here and bring them back when they are ready to come? That would save tenites of weary travel each trip.”

“If he could send a few scouts, he could send an army,” Roszt observed. “That would give the Peer of Lant something to think about—an army that appeared out of nowhere, attacked her in the rear, and then vanished. It might even convince her to keep her own armies at home. What else can this machine do?”

“It can save humanity,” Egarn said.

“That’s what you were telling Bernal. How could it save humanity?”

Egarn looked at them uncertainly across the dying campfire. Their ugly faces were weathered like ancient rocks that had been exposed to the elements for eons, and their lank bodies were preposterously thin despite their hearty appetites. Their rough, leather clothing was worn and soiled from their long days and nights of travel. They seemed like the most unlikely audience possible for speculation about time travel, but Egarn had had no one to talk with for sikes—not since the Old Med died.

“If they start looking bored,” he thought, “I will plead exhaustion and totter off to bed. Either way, they will forget about it by morning.”

He told them of his plan to send someone more than three hundred years into the past to prevent a certain Johnson from inventing the Honsun Len. He was convinced, now, that the only sure way to accomplish this was to murder him, but he carefully avoiding mentioning that.

They listened attentively. They may have been simple men, but their perceptions were sharpened by the dangers they faced constantly, and they hated the Peer of Lant and her infamous deeds as much as he did.

When he finished, the two scouts were silent for a time. Then Kaynor said, “If someone traveled through time and kept this Johnson from inventing his len, what would happen to Lant, and the Ten Peerdoms, and everyone who lives here?” His gesture delineated the world as it was known to him. “What would happen to everything that is all around us right now? You say that without the Honsun Len, something decent would take its place. Where would it come from, and where would this go?”

“I don’t know,” Egarn said soberly. “Perhaps nothing at all would happen. Perhaps time has a momentum that would prevent wrenching it aside into some other path. Or we might change the past, and give humanity another chance, without affecting this doomed present at all. Perhaps every past has many possible futures and this is only one of them. I simply don’t know.” He paused. “Or perhaps ‘here and now’ might vanish the way the flame on a candle vanishes when it’s blown out.”

“And all the people with it?”

Egarn nodded. “It is the future of the human race that must concern us, not our own futures.”

Kaynor turned to Roszt. “It sounds like a job for for scouts,” he said.

“A job for us,” Roszt agreed. “It will be much more interesting than snooping about the court of Lant. When you are ready to send someone, let us know.”

“You couldn’t go—just like that,” Egarn protested. “It would take work and study to prepare yourselves. Hard work and hard study. Maybe for sikes. And if you do go, you can’t come back. It also will be extremely dangerous, and you may be risking your lives for nothing. I can’t even promise you will accomplish anything if you succeed. Maybe the whole idea is impossible.”

“We don’t mind danger as long as there is a worthwhile purpose,” Kaynor said. “If there is any chance at all of blowing out the Peer of Lant and her armies, I want to help.”

Egarn had spent daes worrying about the difficulty of finding a willing emissary, and he was astonished that this was happening so easily.

It was happening too easily. The scouts from Slorn were were superbly qualified as scouts—as spies and saboteurs in enemy territory. If courage and resourcefulness were the only necessary qualifications, they would be an ideal choice, but when he tried to visualize them in any twentieth century social situation, such as ordering food in a restaurant or doing research in a library reading room, he failed. They would look clumsily out-of-place wherever they went. Probably they would attract attention to themselves with every move they made—he could imagine them bumping into people, stumbling over things, spilling their drinks, dropping their forks, and destroying their mission out of sheer clumsiness.

He said slowly, “You will be exiles forever in a place that will be terrifyingly strange to you. You will have to face dangers of a kind you can’t even imagine.”

“One place is as good as another to us—or as bad,” Roszt said. “We no longer have homes anyway. As for the dangers, we have no fear at all of death—only of a wasted death. We welcome a cause to die for.”

Kaynor added, “When we first heard you talk about saving humanity by destroying it, we thought it was some silliness brought on by your fever. Now we understand, and we want to help you.”

“If your plan doesn’t work, humanity is going to destroy itself anyway and leave nothing,” Roszt said.

That was Egarn’s thought exactly, but he had wanted an emissary who would appear completely ordinary in every respect; one who would never stand out in a crowd—who could carry out the mission almost unnoticed.

But perhaps it was a job for scouts—for what would they be when they reached the twentieth century but saboteurs in enemy territory? Perhaps courage and resourcefulness were more important than a commonplace appearance. “Very well,” Egarn said. “If you are able to learn what you have to know, you can go together.”

“We will find this Johnson,” Roszt said, “but it won’t be enough to destroy his len. As soon as we left him, he would make another.”

Kaynor nodded. “That is obvious. We will have to kill him.”

The Med of Lant was missing.

The rumor spread through the court like one of the preposterous diseases the old man was so fond of warning peeragers about, carrying with it a rash of unlikely symptoms—fits of temper, seizures of indigestion, irritating itches, swollen gums, even a plague of hangnails. These maladies in combination dampened an entire tenite of the traditional Plao Fest and forced the cancellation of several hunts.

The disorders were much talked about, symptoms were compared, elixirs were exchanged. No one mentioned the Med of Lant aloud. No one dared to—and yet the rumor spread, and spread.

One-name servers and servants, always inexhaustible sources of court gossip, turned inexplicably reticent when asked about the Med. No one-namer in the entire court complex would admit to knowing anything at all, not even that the old man was missing. Court officials watched the peer for a sign. There could be no public comment on the Med’s absence until she herself officially acknowledged it and indicated the attitude she favored.

The Peer of Lant said nothing. She acted as though totally oblivious of the old man’s existence. When she passed the vanished Med’s quarters and workroom on her morning ride, she seemed not to notice the guard placed there. She even attempted to keep secret the far-ranging search she was conducting, but in that she failed spectacularly. The whispered rumors that seeped through the court carried descriptions of the rage with which she received her harassed officers’ reports of failure.