Poul Anderson - The Shield of Time

Everard stared as if the gnome standing before him had turned into a rattlesnake. “My God,” he whispered. “Wanda Tamberly.”

“The young contemporary lady caught up in the Peruvian case, yes, indeed.” Shalten nodded and went on, maddeningly deliberate: “Let me spell out my reasoning, although given this hint, you can doubtless reconstruct it unaided. You will recall that, when their attempt to commandeer Atahuallpa’s ransom failed, the Exaltationists bore off as captives the two men whose presence had—momentarily, they hoped—frustrated them, Don Luis Castelar and our disguised Specialist Stephen Tamberly. They identified the latter as a Patrolman and, in their hiding place, interrogated him at great length under kyradex. When Castelar broke free and escaped on a timecycle, bearing Tamberly with him, the Exaltationists had gained considerable detailed information about our man and his background. Your team struck at them immediately afterward, and killed or captured most.”

Of course I recall, God damn it! Everard snarled in his head.

“Now consider the situation from the viewpoint of those who got away, or who had not been there at the instant of your raid,” Shalten went on. “Something had gone hideously wrong. They must most passionately have desired to know what. Was the scent onto which the Patrol had gotten now cold, or might it lead the Patrol onward to the rest of them?

“They are bold and all too intelligent. They would follow every clue of their own that they dared. We have no way to prevent it. We cannot mount guard over every moment of the rest of the lives of the persons concerned. They could come back to Perú years after 1533 and, making veiled inquiries, learn the later biography of Castelar. Likewise, to a lesser extent, for Agent Tamberly. Granted, they could not acquire a full account of the merry chase that Castelar led us, or how we recovered Tamberly, or how his niece was swept along by events. Their data would be fragmentary, their deductions correspondingly incomplete and ambiguous. However, it is clear that they decided they were in no further proximate danger—as witness the fact that they went on to the Phoenician escapade.

“First, I am sure, they carried out some investigation of everybody Tamberly had spoken of during that skilled, ruthless interrogation. Associates, acquaintances, relatives. Looking in on years subsequent to this one, they may well have found reason to suspect his niece Wanda became involved, and as a consequence was invited to join the Patrol. They could have traced the date of that involvement to sometime in May 1987—”

“And we sit here doing nothing?” Everard shouted.

Shalten lifted a hand. “Compose yourself, my friend, I pray you. Why should they strike at her, or at anyone else? The damage is done. They are without conscience, cat-cruel, but not foolishly vindictive. The Tamberly family poses no further threat per se to them. On the contrary, they proceed very, very carefully—for they can well imagine the Patrol keeping surreptitious watch on, say, Miss Wanda (I will not employ that preposterous ‘Ms.’ appellation) in hopes that she will draw them to her. After all, they themselves would have no compunctions about setting out a human lure. No, they do nothing but nibble at the fringes of observation, gather what few data they can, and retreat else when.”

“Just the same—!”

“As a matter of fact, she is under our observation, against that contingency. I deem the contingency vanishingly improbable and the guarding to be a waste of precious lifespan. But headquarters insisted. Do set your mind at ease.”

“All right, all right,” Everard grumbled, though gladness welled up in him. Why do I care so much? Oh, she’s gallant and bright and good-looking, but still, a single girl, out of a million years of our species on earth —“Is this enough preliminaries? Can we please get to the point?”

Shalten sipped his drink. “The end result of my reasoning,” he said, “is what I told you at the outset. Quite likely one or more Exaltationists are in the San Francisco Bay area during some days of this month, May 1987. They are being so circumspect that we have no chance of finding them. What we can do instead, and are doing, is to bait our real trap.”

Everard tossed off his ale and hunched forward, his tobacco fuming. “How?”

“Have you noticed the matter of the Bactrian letter?” Shalten responded.

“The what?” Everard considered. “No, I … don’t think I have. Something in the news? I’ve only been around for a short timespan, and mighty busy.”

The big skull nodded. “I understand. You have pursued the Peruvian affair to a conclusion, and paid attention to the charming young lady, and when one knows what lies ahead in history, one’s incentive to follow the daily news is slight. I thought you might have caught mention nonetheless. It is no mere local sensation. It is, in a subdued, scholarly, but publicly interesting fashion, a small international nine days’ wonder.”

“Which you manage so it develops exactly as you want,” Everard deduced. His heart knocked.

“I told you that was why I reside here.”

How does he do it? A webwork of connections, operations, carefully engineered stories fed to carefully chosen journalists — and this shrimp shepherding it all? Even with the computer power he’s got backing him up, it is to be awed. But don’t ask him, my boy, don’t ask him, or he’ll talk through the middle of next week.

“Please fill me in,” Everard said.

“We might have chosen June 1980, when we know positively that Exaltationists are present,” Shalten explained, “but I decided that, besides their wariness lest we play some trick then, that presence was probably too brief. The odds were that they would not notice our bait. This year is better, provided that they do also visit it. They must necessarily conduct their investigation of the Tamberly family piecemeal, making appearances through a period of several days at least. Disguised as ordinary twentieth-century individuals, they cannot avoid spending hours on end in lodgings, on omnibuses—tedium which they will naturally relieve with the help of newspapers, television, et cetera. Besides, theirs are lively intelligences. They will feel curiosity about their surroundings, which to them are immemorially ancient. And … as I said, the story that I hope will attract their attention is in the news. Only for a short while, of course; then the public forgets. But if they are intrigued, they can pursue it, obtaining scholarly publications and the like.”

Everard sighed. “Could I ask you for another beer?”

“My pleasure.”

When he was settled again, Shalten still standing with his churchwarden, grotesque in front of the beautiful old bureau, Everard heard: “What do you know about the Greek kingdom of Bactria?”

“Hm? Uh—let me think—” His historical information was intense concerning societies where he had worked, spotty about everything peripheral. “In what’s now northern Afghanistan. Alexander the Great passed through and made it part of his empire. Greek colonists moved in. Later they declared themselves independent and conquered … m-m … most of the rest of Afghanistan and a chunk of northwestern India.”

Shalten nodded. “Rather good, on no notice. You shall learn much more, of course. You should also reconnoiter the terrain—I suggest in 1970, before Afghanistan’s current troubles, when you can pose as a tourist.”

He drew air into his narrow chest and proceeded. “Two years ago, a Russian soldier in the mountains of the Hindu Kush came upon a box dating back to the Hellenistic era, evidently unearthed by guerrilla shellfire. That is a provocative story in its own right. The vagueness of official accounts, while attributable to habitual Soviet secretiveness, spices it. The point is, this man turned his find over to superior officers, and at length it reached an institute of Oriental studies in Moscow. Now one Professor L. P. Soloviev has published the result of his studies. He has no doubt that the object is genuine, and that it throws significant light on a period about which historians know little. Much of what information they do have is derived from nothing better than coins.”