Poul Anderson - There Will Be Time

Could he? An executioner would be coming to see if he had put something on tape.

He had better keep in mind that Jack Havig counted for no more in eternity than Doukas Manasses, or Xenia, or anybody.

Except: he did not have to give the enemy a free ride. He could make them burn more of their lifespans. For whatever that might be worth.

A hand shook him. He groped his way out of uneasy sleep. The palm clapped onto his mouth. In blackness: “Be quiet, you fool,” whispered Leonce.

A PENCIL FLASHLIGHT came to life. Its beam probed until the iron sheened on Havig’s ankle. “Ah,” she breathed. “That’s how they bottle you? Like I reckoned. Hold this.” She thrust the tube at him. Dizzy, rocked by his heartbeat, scarcely believing, he could not keep it steady. She said a bad word, snatched it back, took it between her teeth, and crouched over him. A hacksaw began to grate.

“Leonce — my dear, you shouldn’t—” he stammered.

She uttered an angry grunt. He swallowed and went silent. Stars glistened in the window.

When the cable parted, leaving him with only the circlet, he tottered erect. She snapped off the light, stuck the tube in her shirt pocket-otherwise, he had glimpsed, she wore jeans and hiking shoes, gun and knife-and grasped him by the upper arms. “Listen,” she hissed. “You skip ahead to sunrise. Let ’em bring you breakfast before you return to now. Got me? We want ’em to think you escaped at a later hour. Can you carry it off? If not, you’re dead.”

“I’ll try,” he said faintly.

“Good.” Her kiss was brief and hard. “Be gone.”

Havig moved uptime at a cautious pace. When the window turned gray he emerged, arranged his tether to look uncut to a casual glance, and waited. He had never spent a longer hour.

A commoner guard brought in a tray of food and coffee. “Hello,” Havig said inanely.

He got a surly look and a warning: “Eat fast. They want to talk to you soon.”

For a sick instant, Havig thought the man would stay and watch. But he retired. After the door had slammed, Havig must sit down for a minute; his knees would not upbear him.

Leonce — He gulped the coffee. Will and strength resurged. He rose to travel back nightward.

The light-gleam alerted him to his moment. As he entered normal time, he heard a hoarse murmur across the room:

“—Can you carry it off? If not, you’re dead.”

“I’ll try.”

“Good.” Pause. “Be gone.”

He heard the little rush of air filling a vacuum where his body had been, and knew he had departed. “Here I am,” he called low.

“Huh? Ah!” She must see better in the dark than he, because she came directly to him. “All ’kay?”

“Yes. Maybe.”

“No chatter,” she commanded. “They may decide to check these hours, ’spite of our stunt. Here, hold my hand an’ slip downtime. Don’t hurry yourself. I know we’ll make it. I just don’t want ’em to find out how.”

Part of the Eyrie’s training was in such simultaneous travel. Each felt a resistance if starting to move “faster” or “slower” than the partner, and adjusted the chronokinetic rate accordingly.

A few nights earlier, the chamber was unoccupied, the door unlocked. They walked down shadow stairs, across shadow courtyard, through gates which, in this period of unchallenged reign, were usually left open. At intervals they must emerge for breath, but that could be in the dark. Beyond the lowered drawbridge, Leonce lengthened her stride. Havig wondered why she didn’t simply go to a day before the castle existed, until he realized the risk was too great of encountering others in the vicinity. A lot of men went hunting in the primeval forest which once grew here.

Dazed with fatigue and grief, he would do best to follow her lead. She’d gotten him free, hadn’t she?

She really had. He needed a while to conceive of that.

They sat in the woods, one summer before Columbus was born. The trees, oak and elm and birch mingled together, were gigantic; their fragrance filled the air, their leaves cast green shadows upon the nearly solid underbrush around them. Somewhere a woodpecker drummed and a bluejay scolded. The fire glowed low which Leonce had built. On an improvised spit roasted a grouse she had brought down out of a thousandfold flock which they startled when they arrived.

“I can never get over it,” she said, “what a wonderful world this is before machine man screws things up. I don’t think a lot o’ the High Years any more. I’ve been then too often.”

Havig, leaned against a bole, had a brief eerie sense of déjà vu. The cause came to him: this setting was not unlike that almost a millennium hence, when he and she — He regarded her more closely than hitherto. Mahogany hair in a kind of Dutch bob, suntan faded, the Skula’s weasel skull left behind and the big body in boyish garb, she might have come straight from his home era. Her English had lost most of the Glacier accent, too. Of course, she still went armed, and her feline gait and haughty bearing hadn’t changed.

“How long for you?” he inquired.

“Since you left me in Paris? ’Bout three years.” She frowned at the bird, reached and turned it above the coals.

“I’m sorry. That was a shabby way to treat you. Why did you want to spring me?”

Her scowl deepened. “S’pose you tell me what happened.”

“You don’t know?” he exclaimed in amazement. “For heaven’s sake, if you weren’t sure why I was under arrest, how could you be sure I didn’t deserve—”

“Talk, will you?”

The story stumbled forth, in bare outline. Now and then, during it, the tilted eyes sought him, but her countenance remained expressionless. At the end she said: “Well, seems my hunch was right. I haven’t thrown away much. Was gettin’ more an’ more puked at that outfit, as I saw how it works.”

She might have offered a word for Xenia, he thought, and therefore he matched her brusqueness: “I didn’t believe you’d object to a spot of fighting and robbery.”

“Not if they’re honest, strength ’gainst strength, wits ’gainst wits. But those… jackals… they pick on the helpless. An’ for sport more’n for gain.” In a kind of leashed savagery, she probed the fowl with her knife point. A drop of fat hit the coals; yellow flame sputtered and flared. “‘Sides, what’s the sense o’ the whole business? Why should we try to fasten machines back on the world? So Cal Wallis can be promoted to God j.g.?”

“When you learned I’d been located and was being held, that touched off the rebellion which had been gathering in you?” Havig asked.

She didn’t reply directly. “I went downtime, like you’d guess, found when the room was empty, went uptime to you. First, though, I’d spent some days future o’ that, not to seem involved in your escape. Ha, ever’body was runnin’ ’round like guillotined chickens! I planted the notion you must’ve co-opted a traveler while you were in the past.” The broad shoulders lifted and dropped. “Well, the hooraw blew over. Evidently it didn’t seem worth mentionin’ to the earlier Wallis, on his inspection tour. Why admit a failure? His next appearance beyond your vanishment was years ahead, an’ nothin’ awful had happened meanwhile. You didn’t matter. Nor will I, when I never return from my furlough. I s’pose they’ll reckon I died in an accident.” She chuckled. “I do like sports cars, an’ drive like a bat out o’ Chicago.”

“In spite of, uh, opposing a restoration of machine society?” Havig wondered.

“Well, we can enjoy it while we got it, can’t we, whether or not it’ll last or ought to?” She observed him steadily, and her tone bleakened. “That’s ’bout all we can do, you an’ me. Find ourselves some nice hidey-holes, here an’ there in space-time. Because we’re sure not goin’ to upset the Eyrie.”