Poul Anderson - The Shield of Time

She wondered if it was the British accent that put her off. Inquiring at HQ, she’d learned he was born in Detroit, 1895. He had, though, done good work on American Indians during the ’20s and ’30s, before he joined the Patrol.

“Indeed?” His smile broadened. Actually kind of charming, she admitted. “Brace yourself. I shall want every last drop of your information about that country. But first let’s make you comfortable. What would you like in the way of refreshment? Coffee, tea, beer, wine, something a bit more authoritative?”

“Coffee, thanks. It’s early yet.” He guided her to the living room and an armchair. Furniture was well-worn. Full bookshelves lined the walls, holding mainly reference works. He excused himself, went kitchenward, soon came back bearing a tray of ware and morsels which she discovered were delicious. Having set things on a low table in front of her, he took a seat opposite and asked whether she minded if he smoked. That was quite considerate of a person from his birthtime; and he lit a cigarette, not a pipe like Manse.

“Are we alone here?” she wondered.

“For the nonce. I went to some trouble about that.” Corwin laughed. “Have no fears. I simply thought we should get acquainted without distractions. I can better appreciate what I’m told when I know a bit about the teller. What’s a nice girl like you doing in an organization like this?”

“Why, you know,” she answered, surprised. “Zoology, ecology—what I think they called natural history when you were young.”

Hey, that was tactless. To her relief, he showed no offense. “Yes, of course I’ve been informed.” Soothingly: “You’re a pure scientist, for the sake of the knowledge. I confess to a touch of envy.”

She shook her head. “No, not really, or I wouldn’t be in the Patrol. The pure scientists belong to civilian institutions uptime, don’t they? My job, well, it’s just that we, the Patrol, can’t: understand what goes on among people, especially people close to nature, unless we have some knowledge of their environments. That’s why I was doing my Jane Goodall when and where I was, instead of elsewhere or earlier. The arrival of the Paleo-Indians was expected sometime about then. Not that I’d necessarily meet them personally—that just happened—but I’d’ve reported on the conditions they’d find, the resources available to them, and so on.”

Concurrently, with dismay: What a motormouth I’m being. He knows all this by heart. Nervousness. Pull yourself together, nit.

Corwin had blinked. “I beg your pardon? Doing your, er, Jane Goodall?”

Tamberly relaxed a little. “Sorry, I forgot. She isn’t famous yet. A breakthrough ethologist out in the wilds.”

“Role model for you, eh? And a jolly good one, to judge by the result.” He sipped from his cup. “I misspoke myself. Obviously I’ve been aware of your role, why you were where-when you were. What I’d like to know is more basic, why you enlisted, how you first learned about us.”

To speak of that to an interested, interesting, handsome man quickly became more than pleasant—a release. How it hurt, up in 1987 and afterward, that she must lie to her parents, sister, old friends about her reasons for not going on to grad school and about the work that took her away from them. More than once, training at the Patrol Academy, she’d needed a sympathetic shoulder to cry on. She was past that now. Or was she entirely?

“Well, it’s a long story, too long for details, I think. My uncle was already a Patrolman, unbeknownst to me or his other kin, when I was studying evolutionary biology at Stanford. He was, is, uh—oh, damn, shouldn’t we speak Temporal? English ties itself in knots, trying to handle time travel.”

“No, I’d prefer to hear this in your mother tongue. You reveal more of yourself. Which is delightful, if I may make bold to say so. Pray continue.”

Good Lord, do I feel a blush? Tamberly hastened on: “Uncle Steve was in sixteenth-century Peru, with Pizarro, using the persona of a monk, to keep track of events.”

(For surely that conquest was among the decisive episodes of history. Had matters gone otherwise than they did, all the future would have been different, more and more as time went on, until by the twentieth century, whatever there was on Earth, it would not have included a United States of America or parents for one Wanda Tamberly. Beneath reality lies ultimate quantum indeterminacy. On the level of observable happenings it manifests itself as chaos in the physics sense of the word, the fact that often immeasurably small forces bring illimitably large consequences. If you go into the past, you can change it, you can annul the future that begot you. You will exist still, parentless, causeless, like an embodiment of universal meaninglessness; but the world from which you fared will exist — will have existed — only in your memories.

(When time travel became a fact, did altruism call the Danellian superhumans out of the remote future to ordain and establish the Patrol? It does help, succor, advise, adjudicate, the kind of work that mostly occupies any decent police force. But it also seeks to keep the foolish, the criminal, the mad from destroying that history which leads through the ages to the Danellians. For them this may be a

matter of simple survival. They have never told us, we hardly ever see them, we do not know.)

“Bandits from far uptime, trying to hijack Atahuallpa’s ransom—no, it is too complicated. We’d spend hours. What it came to was, one of Pizarro’s men got hold of a timecycle, learned what it could do and how to operate it, also learned about me, where I was at a particular time. He kidnapped me with the idea of making me guide him around in the twentieth century, help him acquire modern weapons. He had grandiose plans.”

Corwin whistled. “I can well imagine. Win or lose, yes, the mere attempt could have been disastrous. And I would never have known, because I would never have been born. Not that I matter, but that sort of thought drives the implications home, eh? What happened?”

“Unattached Agent Everard had already contacted me, investigating Uncle Steve’s disappearance. He didn’t let me in on the secret, of course, but he left me his phone number and I … I made a chance for myself to call him. He freed me.” Tamberly must needs grin. “In the best marines-to-the-rescue style. Which blew his cover.

“Then he was duty-bound to make sure I kept my mouth shut. I could take conditioning against ever mentioning the subject to anybody not in the know, and pick up my life where I’d dropped it. Except he offered me another choice. I could enlist. He didn’t think I’d make a very good cop, and he was doubtless right, but the Patrol needs field scientists too.

“Well, when I got a chance to do my paleontology with live critters, did I agree? Does a bear—uh, is the Pope Catholic?”

“And so you went through the Academy,” Corwin murmured. “I daresay the setting was especially wonderful to you. Afterward, I presume, you worked as part of a team until it was decided you were probably the best person to station in Beringia for conducting independent research.” Tamberly nodded.

“I must certainly hear the full story of your Spanish adventure,” Corwin said. “Extraordinary. But you are right, duty first. Let us hope for leisure later.”

“And let’s not talk more about me,” she suggested. “How did you come to join?”

“Nothing so sensational. Indeed, the most common way. A recruiter felt I might have potential, cultivated my acquaintance, got me to take certain tests, and when they confirmed his opinion, told me the truth and invited me in. He knew I would accept. To trace the unwritten ancient history of the New World—to help write it—you understand, my dear.”