Poul Anderson - The Shield of Time

“But you remember differently!”

“Like others who’d seen the changed world, and those Patrol folk who hadn’t but whom we co-opted. What the bunch of us had experienced, what we had done, couldn’t be erased in us, or we’d never have done it.”

“You spoke of persons who entered the alternate future but failed to get away from it. What became of them when it was … abolished?”

Everard’s nails bit into his palms. “They no longer existed either,” he said like a machine.

“Apparently only a relative few entered it, including you. Why not many? After all, in the course of the ages—”

“Those were just the ones who happened to cross the crucial moment, bound uptime, in that larger section of time during which there were related events, like the Patrol’s salvage work. We’ve got a longer section now, with a lot more traffic in it, so our problem is correspondingly bigger. I hope you understand what I’m saying. I don’t.”

“It requires a metalanguage and metalogic accessible to few intellects,” Komozino said. Her tone sharpened. “We haven’t time to quibble about theory. The span in which we can use this base without seriously perturbing things is limited. So is the number of personnel, therefore the total lifespan at our disposal. We must make optimum use of our resources.”

“How?” challenged the woman from Saturn.

“For openers,” Everard told them, “I’m going up to the milieu of that king and learn whatever I can. It’s the sort of job that wants an Unattached agent.”

And meanwhile, except that “meanwhile” is meaningless , Wanda’s caught in yonder alien future. She must be. Else why hasn’t she come back to me? Where else would she flee to, if she was able?

“Surely that Carthaginian world has not been the sole invasive reality,” said the babu.

“I suppose not. I haven’t been informed of any more, but—I’ve no need to know. Why risk an extra change? It might not damp out; it might bring on a new temporal vortex. And as a matter of fact,” Everard flung at him, “we’re faced with another reality right now.”

Again because of deliberate tampering? The Neldorians, the Exaltationists, lesser organizations and individuals, crazed or greedy or — whatever they are — The Patrol’s coped with them. Sometimes just barely. How did we fail against this enemy? Who is it? How to lay him low?

The hunter awoke in Everard. A chill tingle passed through his spine, out to scalp and fingertips. For a blessed moment he could set pain aside and think of pursuit, capture, revenge.

Fog banked in the west caught early morning light and dazzled the blue overhead with whiteness. It was beginning to break up in tatters and streamers before a low, cold breeze off the unseen ocean. Leaves rustled on toyon. Not far away, a stand of cypress glowed darkly green. Two ravens croaked and flapped from a solitary live oak.

Wanda Tamberly’s first reaction was mere astonishment. Why, whatever has happened? Where’ve I come out? How? She caught a breath, looked around, saw nothing human. Relief washed through her. For half an instant she’d feared that somehow Don Luis—But no, that was absurd, the Patrol had shipped the Conquistador back to his proper century. Besides, this wasn’t Peru. Below the timecycle she recognized yerba buena, even sensed a hint of the fragrance crushed from it by the weight. The plant gave its name to that settlement later called San Francisco—

Her pulse went from quickstep to sprint. “Cool it, gal,” she whispered, and brought her gaze to the instruments between the handlebars. Their projected displays gave the date, local standard time, latitude, longitude, yes, precisely what she’d set for, down to the fractional second, except that seconds of time flowed from her as she stared…. Simulated crosshairs on a simulated map also declared her position. Finger shaking a little, she summoned a full-scale vicinity chart. The center of the street grid was where it ought to be, at that secondhand bookshop in the Cow Hollow district which fronted for the Patrol’s station.

And yonder rose Nob Hill and Russian Hill. Or did they? She knew them covered with buildings, not brush. In the opposite direction, a glimpse of Twin Peaks seemed familiar; but what had become of the television tower? Of everything? She hadn’t appeared in a subterranean garage but on the surface, surrounded by solitude.

Instinct stormed awake. She kicked the power pedal and flung her machine aloft. Air brawled by the force-screen. At once she knew she’d panicked. She grabbed self-control, halted, and hovered on antigrav two thousand feet high. Her ears had popped. They hurt. That helped make things real for her, no fever dream but a mess to cope with.

Is this foolish, hanging in sight of God and radar? Well, nobody to see me, is there? Nobody at all, at all.

No San Francisco, no Treasure Island, no Golden Gate or Bay Bridge, no Eastbay cities, no ships or aircraft, nothing save the wind and the world. Across the strait, Marin County hills hulked summer-brown, as did the range behind an Oakland, Berkeley, Albany, Richmond that didn’t exist either. Ocean was slivers of silver to west and north on the far side of the shifting blue shadows in the fog. At the inland edge of mist she saw part of the sand dunes where Golden Gate Park ought to be.

Like before the white man came. A few Indian camps here and there, I suppose. Could the temporal part of this hopper have developed a collywobble, and I landed pastward of the twentieth century? Never heard of any such thing, but neither have I ever heard of any high tech that was not highly temperamental. Like a calming hand laid upon her, the knowledge came that the Time Patrol had operatives someplace at every moment of a million years or more.

She activated her communicator. The radio bands were silent. Wind shrilled, stronger at this altitude than below. She felt how cold she was. Her clothing was blouse, slacks, sandals. This vehicle wasn’t equipped for the fancier sorts of transmission, like neutrino modulation, but the Patrol used radio freely in eras before Marconi, or was it before Hertz or Clerk Maxwell or who? Maybe nobody happened to be sending. “Hello, hello, Specialist Wanda Tamberly calling…. Come in, please come in ….” Shouldn’t there be a set of beacons for her to home on? Could she be too distant from any to receive? That didn’t figure, when even the scientists of her milieu detected signals of a few watts across the Solar System. But she was no transistor tripper.

Jim Erskine was. He could make electrons dance a fandango. They’d gone together for a while, students at Stanford. If Jim were here—But she’d put such people behind her forever when she joined the Patrol. Her folks too, all blood kin except Uncle Steve; oh, she visited, she lied about her wonderful job that kept her so much on the go; nevertheless—Loneliness smote like the wind.

“Better get someplace warm and take stock,” she muttered. “Especially if the someplace serves hot buttered rum.” However feeble, the jape encouraged her. She sent the machine slanting downward across the Bay.

Pelican and cormorant winged in their thousands. Sea lions basked along island shores. On the eastern side she found shelter in a redwood grove, majesty through whose shade sunlight cast golden spatters, a brook purled, fish swam and leaped. Desolation is relative, she thought.

Dismounting, she kicked off her sandals and did a few minutes’ stationary jogging on the soft duff. Warmed, she opened the luggage carrier behind the buddy seat to check what her assets were.

Damn skimpy. Standard emergency stuff, helmet, stun pistol, isotopic battery, flashlight, glowlight, water bottle, food bars, small tool kit, small medical kit. A bag holding the few changes of clothes, toothbrush, comb, et cetera that she’d brought with her to the resort; generally she’d worn garments kept in stock for guests. A purse, with the usual late-twentieth-century American female clutter. A couple of books she’d read at odd moments. Like most of those agents who operated away from their birth milieus and didn’t maintain lodgings there, she had a locker at the local station where she kept necessary stuff, including money. Her plan had been to pick up what she wanted and taxi to her parents’ home, since it chanced they couldn’t conveniently meet her at the airport. Had they been able to, a more elaborate deception would have been required.