Poul Anderson - The Shield of Time

“Was it hard to cut your ties?” I don’t believe I ever will be able to, not really, before—before Dad and Mother and Susie have died — No, not to think about that, not now. Yonder window’s too full of sunlight.

“Not especially,” Corwin said. “I was going through my second divorce, no children. I despised the petty infighting of academic life. Always have been rather a lone wolf. To be sure, I have led men, but field work and, yes, Patrol personnel are more congenial to me.”

Better not let conversation get any more intimate than this, Wanda decided. “Okay, sir, you asked for me to come around and tell you about Beringia. I’ll try, but I’m afraid my information is pretty limited. I generally stayed in the same area; the territory I have not seen is enormous. And I’ve spent only two personal years at it, including vacations back home or in some fun milieu. My presence there covers about five years, because naturally I spaced my visits months apart, according to what I hoped to observe at a particular season. It’s an awfully small sample, though.” The best that could be managed, she reminded herself.

“Even with your holidays, yours must have been a hard life. You’re a brave young lady.”

“No, no. It was utterly fascinating.” Tamberly’s pulse quickstepped. Here’s my chance. “Both in its own right and because it matters to the Patrol, more than meets the eye. Dr. Corwin, they’re doing wrong to stop it at this stage. I’m leaving some basic scientific problems half solved. Can’t you make them see that, so they’ll let me return?”

“Hm.” He stroked his mustache. “I’m afraid other considerations override yours. I can inquire, but don’t get your hopes up. Sorry.” Chuckling: “Science aside, I gather you enjoyed yourself.”

She nodded vigorously, though the sense of loss sharpened and sharpened in her. “I did, all in all. A stark land, but, oh, alive. And the We are sweethearts.”

“The We? Ah, yes. That’s how the aborigines referred to themselves, I presume. What the name Tulat’ means. They had forgotten the preliminary expedition to their forebears, and had no clear concept of anyone else in the world until you appeared.”

“Right. I can’t see why there’s no more interest in them. They were around for thousands of years. People like them got clear down into South America. But the Patrol sent only that one group. All it learned was their language and a vague notion of how they lived. When the machine had put the information into my head, I was, you know, appalled by how little it was. Why doesn’t anybody care?”

His reply was measured, grave. “Surely you have been told. We lack the personnel, the resources, to study in depth what … will make no significant difference. Those first wanderers who trickled across the land bridge during an interstadial, some twenty thousand years ago, their descendants remained changelessly primitive. In fact, through almost the whole twentieth century, most archaeologists have doubted humans ever reached the New World that early. What scanty tools and firesites they left could well be due to natural causes. It is the High Stone Age people, the big game hunters, arriving between the Cary and Mankato substages of the Wisconsin glaciation, as the Ice Age itself drew toward a close, it is they who properly populated the two continents. The forerunner folk were killed off or crowded out. If some did interbreed—captive women, perhaps—that was seldom and their blood was swamped, lost.”

“I know that! I know!” Her eyes stung. She barely kept from shouting, You don’t have to lecture me. I’m not some freshman class you used to teach. Old habits getting the upper hand? “What I meant was, why doesn’t anybody seem to give a damn?”

“A Patrol agent must become case-hardened, like a physician or a policeman. Otherwise what he witnesses will eventually break him.” Corwin leaned forward. He put a hand over the fist that lay knotted in her lap. “But, yes, I care. I am more than interested. My duty lies with the Paleo-Indians. They bear the future. But I do want to learn everything you know about the old folk, and everything I can discover for myself. I want to love them too.”

Tamberly gulped and straightened. She drew back from his touch, then said hastily, not wishing to seem as if she spurned his consolation: “Thanks. Thanks. What happens … at first … to the people I’ve known, the, the individuals … that doesn’t have to be terrible. Does it?”

“Why, no. The newcomers you met probably belonged to a very small tribe. I rather imagine it was far in advance of the rest, and no more arrived for a generation or two. Besides, I’ve gathered your Tulat lived on or near the coast, and didn’t go after big game. Hence no rivalry.”

“If only that’s true. If there is c-conflict, can’t you help?”

“I’m sorry. The Patrol may not intervene.”

Energy kindled anew. “Look,” Tamberly argued, “time travelers are bound to intervene, interfere. I affected people in all sorts of ways, didn’t I? Among other things, I saved several lives with antibiotics, shot a dangerous animal—and just my presence, the questions I asked and answered, everything I did had some effect. Nobody objected. I was up front about it, reported every incident, and nobody objected.”

“You know why.” Perhaps he realized that playing the professor had been a mistake, for now he spoke neither angrily nor patronizingly but mildly, as to a young person bewildered by pain. “The continuum does tend to maintain its structure. A radical change is only possible at certain critical points in history. Elsewhen, compensations occur. From that standpoint, what you did was unimportant. In a sense, it was ‘always’ part of the past.”

“Yes, yes, yes.” She curbed the resentment she had felt in spite of his effort. “Sorry, sir. I keep sounding stupid and ignorant, don’t I?”

“No. You are under stress. You are trying hard to make your intent clear.” Corwin smiled. “You needn’t. Relax.”

“What I’m getting at,” she persisted, “is why can’t you take a hand? Nothing big, nothing that’ll get into folk memory or anything like that. Just, oh, those hunters were … arrogant. If they start leaning too hard on the We, why can’t you tell them to lay off, and back it up with a harmless demonstration, fireworks or something?”

“Because this is a different situation from yours,” he replied. “Beringia is, was, no longer populated exclusively by a static society barely past the eolithic stage—if people that thinly scattered can even be called a society. An advanced, dynamic, progressive culture, or set of cultures, invaded. Let me remind you that in the course of mere generations they swept down the corridor between the Laurentide and Cordilleran ice, into the plains, where taiga was becoming fertile grassland as the glaciers dwindled. Their numbers exploded. Within two thousand years of the day you met them, they were making the superb flint points of the Clovis. Soon after, they finished off the mammoth, horse, camel, most of the large American beasts. They developed into the distinctive Amerindian races—but you know that story too, I’m sure.

“What it means is an unstable situation. True, the time is long ago. There will be no written record by which the dead can speak to the living. Nevertheless, the possibility of starting a causal vortex is no longer insignificant. We field researchers must henceforward keep our influence to an absolute minimum. No one less than an Unattached agent has competence to take decisive action; and such a man would only do it in extreme emergency.”

Or woman, Tamberly thought. But I should remember when he was born and raised, and make allowances. He means well. Though he does love to hear himself talk, doesn’t he?