Poul Anderson - The Shield of Time

Oh, Dad, Mother, Susie. Yes, and the cats too.

Slowly, the serenity around her smoothed down despair. The thing to do, she decided, was not to try springing straight back to the Pleistocene—though God damn, wouldn’t it be good to see Manse there, big and solid and able?—or flicker blindly through time in this neighborhood. If she couldn’t trust the temporal drive, her best bet was to head spatially east. Maybe she’d find European colonies yonder, or maybe she’d have to continue overseas, but eventually she was bound to make a Patrol contact.

She donned her old jacket from backpacking trips that abruptly felt very remote, and laced stout shoes over socks on her feet. Helmet secured to head, pistol to hip, she was as ready for trouble as she’d ever be. Remounting, she steered her hopper out among the huge trunks and into the sky.

Green bordered the Sacramento and San Joaquin Rivers; elsewhere tawniness passed beneath her, no trace of irrigation, agriculture, highways, towns. Impatience prickled. This jet plane speed was too flinking slow. She could go supersonic, but that was still a crawl and would be extravagant of energy reserves she might need later. For several minutes she mustered nerve, then set the space controls and gingerly touched the button.

The Sierra peaks lay below her, the desert beyond, and the sun stood as much higher as she gauged it ought. So she could safely bypass distance. “Yippee!”

Proceed by jumps—An illimitable grassy plain shimmered under the wind. Thunderheads towered in the south. The radio remained mute.

Tamberly bit her lip. This wasn’t right. She spent a while skipping above the prairies. Bird life was rich, but the land reached strangely empty. She spied a herd of wild horses before at last she came above some buffalo. Their abundance should have darkened the ground for miles….

Smoke rose from the right bank of the Missouri. She hovered far up, activated her optical, and magnified. Yes, people, and they kept horses, yet this was a village of sod huts, tilled fields outside the stockade….

Shouldn’t be! Once they became riders, the plains Indians turned almost overnight into warriors and nomadic hunters, living off the buffalo till white men slaughtered those, also almost overnight. Had she chanced on some such moment of transition as, say, 1880? No, because then she’d have seen spoor of the whites everywhere, railroads, towns, ranches, farms laid out in homesteaders’ quarter sections….

Remembrance struck. The horse barbarians weren’t in any balance with nature either. If they’d been left alone , they’d have wiped out the buffalo themselves, slower but just as surely.

No. Please, no. Don’t let this be.

Tamberly fled on eastward.

Going from Ice Age France to medieval Sicily by way of Germany earlier that same year did not strike Everard as funny until he chanced to think about it. His chuckle clanked. Time travel was like that, including what it did to people’s minds, the stuff they came to take for granted.

The fact was that the contemporary base in Palermo was a one-man operation. Its front was a shop which, with the live-in family and staff, filled its only building. There was no subterranean addition. The likelihood of you and your vehicle popping out of thin air, being seen and exciting comment, was prohibitive. Patrol facilities were to be expanded later, starting in 1140, when Norman Sicily really began to gain importance. But this didn’t happen, because King Roger II died in battle and the future that led to the Patrol was aborted.

Mainz had long been a major city of the Holy Roman Empire, and so headquarters for that milieu were there. At the moment the realm was a loose, often turbulent confederation across what a twentieth-century man would regard as, approximately, Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Austria, Czechoslovakia, pieces of northern Italy and the Balkans. Everard recalled Voltaire’s wisecrack that it was neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire. However, in the twelfth century it was perhaps a bit less undeserving of the name.

On the day Everard arrived, Emperor Lothair was in Italy with an army, helping press his claims and those of Pope Innocent against the claims of Roger and Pope Anacletus. Turmoil would follow his death, until Frederick Barbarossa finally won full control. Meanwhile the main action would be in Rome, to which milieu HQ was to shift in 1198—except that it wouldn’t, it hadn’t, because no Patrol ever existed to establish that office.

Today, though, Mainz could provide what Everard needed.

Upstairs from the garage he found the director. They retired to a private office. It was a room of handsomely carved wainscots, well-furnished by standards of the period; there were actually two chairs, as well as stools and a small table. A leaded window admitted some light. More came in from another, unglazed, its shutters open to the summer day. Through it rumbled, groaned, creaked, clopped, chattered, whistled, buzzed the noises of the city. Through it also drifted the odors of hearths, horse manure, privies, and graveyards. Across a narrow, filthy, bustling street Everard saw a beautiful half-timbered fagade; beyond its roof, cathedral towers rose in majesty.

“Welcome, Herr Freiagent, welcome.” Otto Koch waved at a carafe and beakers on the table. “Would you care for a little wine? A good year.” He was German himself—born 1891, studying medieval history when called into the army of the Second Reich in 1914, recruited by the Patrol while adrift in bitterness and bewilderment after that war. The years here-now had given him a comfortable, middle-aged look, a bit paunchy in his fur-trimmed robe. It was deceptive. You didn’t keep a post like his without being plenty competent.

“Thanks, but not at once,” Everard replied. “Can I sneak a smoke?”

“Tobacco? Oh, yes. Nobody will disturb us.” Koch laughed and pointed. “That bowl is my ashtray. People know I burn a rare Oriental wood in it when I want to smother the municipal stinks. A rich merchant can afford such luxuries.” From a humidor disguised as a saint’s image he took a cigar and lighter. Everard declined the one he was offered. “I’ll stay with my old friend, if you don’t mind.” He hauled forth briar pipe and pouch. “Uh, I don’t suppose you can indulge often.”

“No, sir. Difficult enough to handle my proper work. My public persona takes up most of my time, you realize. The requirements of the guild, the Church—Ah, well.” Koch lit up and settled happily into his chair. No need to worry about ill effects. Patrol immunizations, which did not employ the vaccine principle, prevented cancer and arteriosclerosis, along with the infectious diseases that came and went through the ages. “What can we do for you?”

Turning grim, Everard explained.

Horror stared at him. “What? This very year a, a cancellation? But that is—unheard of.”

“Unheard of by you. And you will keep it strictly secret, understand?”

The habits of disguise took over. Koch crossed himself, again and again. Or maybe he was a sincere Catholic.

“Don’t be afraid.” Everard spoke deliberately.

The anger he provoked flushed out dismay. “It is natural that one fears for one’s workers, comrades, yes, the family I have in this era.”

“None of you will disappear at the critical moment. What will happen is that you stop receiving visitors from the future, and no new posts are started up after this year.”

The enormity grew and grew before Koch. He sagged back. “The future,” he whispered. “My childhood, parents, brothers, everybody I loved at home—I cannot now go see them again? I did. They believe I moved to America but make a few return visits, until Hitler comes to power and I stay away—They did believe.” He had fallen into twentieth-century German. No language but Temporal had the grammar to cope with time travel.