Poul Anderson - The Shield of Time

He was rounding the far corner when the two principals reappeared. Everard quickened his steps. The Exaltationists reached the ground as the Patrolman came through the opening. “Out o’ the way, you,” the nearest guardsman told him.

“Yes, sir.” Everard made a production of clumsily salaaming and scuffing off at a slant that brought him closer to his prey. Those two walked on, side by side. Buleni noticed the loutish form ahead and scowled.

It was a small enclosure. When Everard sprang, he had just six feet to go.

Draganizu could touch a point on his medallion while he lifted it toward his mouth, and send an alarm. He must die first. Everard’s leap was a lunge. His steel went in at the throat and out the nape. Blood spouted, sunbrilliant red. The corpse crashed backward.

Shifting weight as he pounced, Everard landed on his heel, pivoted, and brought his left fist in an uppercut to Buleni’s chin. It was the only blow he could deliver quickly to a man in helmet and mail. The Exaltationist’s weapon was already half free. He lurched, caught his balance, and completed the draw. A superman. But a little shaken, a tad slow. Everard closed. His left hand chopped edge on at the sword wrist. The blade of his right hand cracked into Buleni’s larynx. He felt cartilage break. Buleni dropped on all fours and retched blood.

Dolon wailed. The soldiers dashed forward, armament aflash. Everard cast himself down beside Draganizu’s gaping face. He snatched the wet medallion, thumbed it, and rasped in Temporal, “Unattached Everard. Come immediately. Combat.”

That was what he had time for. The first Syrian was at him. He rolled over. Supine, he gave a two-footed kick. The man reeled from him. More arrived. They blotted out the sky.

One crumpled onto Everard. “O-oof-f-f!” A metal-clad body flopping bonelessly onto your stomach takes the wind out of you.

When Everard got it back again and sat up, the troopers lay around him where they had collapsed, an ungainly heap. Their breathing snored and wheezed. He knew those beyond the wall had likewise received stun beams and would be comatose for about a quarter hour. Otherwise they were unharmed. A timecycle had landed nearby. A Chinese-looking man and a black woman, hard and supple in skin-tight coveralls, helped him rise. Four more vehicles poised low above the temple; he spied energy projectors in taut hands. “Overkill,” he croaked.

“What, sir?” asked the man.

“Never mind. Let’s look this situation over, fast.” Everard would not allow himself to think, yet, how nearly dead he was. He would not permit himself sentiment. That way lay the shakes, which he couldn’t afford. Patrol training summoned the full reserves of mind and body. Later, at leisure, he would pay nature’s debt.

When it got his call, the Patrol had mobilized a force, safely distant from here, and dispatched it to the instant of his need. Now he must use the resource given him with the same precision. However, he could spare a few minutes to plan his next move.

Buleni was still alive, barely. Everard pointed. “Bring him and the killed Exaltationist to operation headquarters,” he ordered through an unsoiled transceiver given him. “They’ll know there what they want to do with ’em.” He walked around. Poor old Dolon sprawled in the dust at his feet. “Carry this man into the temple, out of the sun. Give him a medic check and whatever care he needs that you can administer on the spot. I suspect he’d benefit from a stimulant injection. The rest can lie where they are till they rouse.”

The women had not been stunned, in the corner where they were. They cowered back, made alive again by terror, the grandmother embracing the mother, the mother clutching the child. Everard went over and stood above them. He knew he was a fearsome sight, bloodstained, sweat-dripping, begrimed, but he could fashion a smile.

“Listen,” he said, as gently as his hoarsened voice was able, “listen well. You have seen the wrath of Poseidon. But it was not against you. I repeat, the Earthshaker is not angry at you. Men here have offended him. They shall be borne to Hades. You are innocent. The god blesses you. In token of that, I am to give you this.” He had been unshipping his purse. He dropped it in front of them. “It is yours. Poseidon cast a slumber on these soldiers, lest they behold what they should not, but he will do them no further harm after they awaken, if they in their turn will see to the well-being of you, his wards. Tell them that. Do you understand me?”

The baby cried, the mother sobbed. The granny met Everard’s eyes and said, with a steadiness that must be due in part to shock, “I who am old believe I dare understand you and remember.”

“Good.” He left them and resumed his Patrol business. He had done the best for them that he possibly could—bending rules well out of shape, but after all, he was an Unattached agent.

Anxiety touched his rescuers. “Sir,” ventured the young woman, “excuse me for asking, but this thing we’ve done—”

She must be pretty new in the field, but she had handled her job smartly. He decided she and her fellows were worth a minute’s field education. “Don’t worry. We’ve not upset history. What’s your birth milieu?”

“Jamaica, sir, 1950.”

“Okay, to put it in terms of your era, imagine you see a brawl start. Suddenly several helicopters come down. They drop tear gas bombs that disable the crowd without seriously hurting anybody. Men climb out wearing masks. They lug two of the brawlers into a chopper. One man tells the witnesses that these are dangerous Communists and this squadron is from the CIA, seizing them at the request of the local government. The squadron flits away. Let’s suppose this all happens in an isolated valley, the phone lines are cut, there’s no immediate linkage with anywhere else.

“Well, locally it’d be a ninety days’ wonder. By the time the story got to the rest of the world, though, it’d be stale and diluted, the news media would give it little or no play, most people who heard about it at all would guess it was a wild exaggeration and soon forget it. Even you folks who were on hand would stop talking much about it, and it’d fade in your recollections. You weren’t really affected, and you have your lives to get on with. Besides, there’s nothing inherently impossible. You know helicopters, tear gas, and the CIA exist. This was a weird sort of incident, but still, just an incident. You’d tell your children, but probably they wouldn’t tell theirs.

“That’s what a brief intervention by the gods is like, in the minds of people here-now. Of course, we only stage one when we absolutely must, and the sooner we scramble, the better.”

Through his communicator Everard included the rest in his instructions. The slain and the live Exaltationist had been slung onto timecycles that blinked from the scene. An extra Patrolman had gone with them, leaving saddle and weapons for the Unattached. Everard’s companion was a tough, stocky man from Europe of his own period, Imre Ruszek, who sat behind him while he piloted. He cast the women a last glance as he rose on antigrav, and saw bewilderment struggling with hope.

The three hoppers lifted high enough to be no more than glints to any eyes that might chance to catch them, and glided toward Bactra. Below them the land rolled vast from the mountains in the south, fields green and brown, spotted with trees and tiny buildings, the river mercury-bright, the city and the invader camp toylike. No hint of hatred and misery reached these clean cold winds, save what the riders bore with them.

“Now hear this,” Everard intoned. “There are two bandits left, and if we go about it right, I think we may well take them. The operative phrase is ‘go about it right.’ We only get one shot. No fancy dodging around in time, trying to fix things, if this fails. It’s all very well to show the locals a miracle, but we will not play games with causality and risk setting off a temporal vortex, even if the risk does seem small. Is that clear? You’ve had the doctrine drilled into you, I know, but Ruszek and I are going down, and if we come to grief, somebody could be tempted to rashness. Don’t be.”