Poul Anderson: The Only Game in Town

The Patrolman uncoiled a lariat at the saddlebow and broke into the skittish herd. He roped the nearest animal, which accepted it with blessed meekness. Leaning over, he slashed the hobbles with his sword and rode off, leading the remount. They came out the other side of the herd and started north.

A stern chase is a long chase, Everard told himself inappropriately. But they’re bound to overhaul me if I don’t lose ’em. Let’s see, if I remember my geography, the lava beds lie north-west of here.

He cast a glance behind. No one pursued yet. They’d need a while to organize themselves. However.…

Thin lightnings winked from above. The cloven air boomed behind them. He felt a chill, deeper than the night cold. But he eased his pace. There was no more reason for hurry. That must be Manse Everard—

—who had returned to the Patrol vehicle and ridden it south in space and backward in time to this same instant.

That was cutting it fine, he thought. Patrol doctrine frowned on helping oneself thus. Too much danger of a close causal loop, or of tangling past and future.

But in this case, I’ll get away with it. No reprimands, even. Because it’s to rescue Jack Sandoval, not myself. I’ve already gotten free. I could shake pursuit in the mountains, which I know and the Mongols don’t. The time-hopping is only to save my friend’s life.

Besides, (an upsurging bitterness) what’s this whole mission been, except the future doubling back to create its own past? Without us, the Mongols might have well taken over America, and then there’d never have been any us.

The sky was enormous, crystalline black; you rarely saw that many stars. The Great Bear flashed above hoar earth; hoofbeats rang through silence. Everard had not felt so alone before now.

“And what am I doing back there?” he asked aloud.

The answer came to him, and he eased a little, fell into the rhythm of his horses and started eating miles. He wanted to get this over with. But what he must do turned out to be less bad than he had feared.

Toktai and Li Tai-Tsung never came home. But that was not because they perished at sea or in the forests. It was because a sorcerer rode down from heaven and killed all their horses with thunderbolts, and smashed and burned their ships in the river mouth. No Chinese sailor would venture onto those tricky seas in whatever clumsy vessel could be built here; no Mongol would think it possible to go home on foot. Indeed, it probably wasn’t. The expedition would stay, marry into the Indians, live out their days. Chinook, Tlingit, Nootka, all the potlatch tribes, with their big sea-going canoes, lodges and copperworking, furs and cloths and haughtiness… well, a Mongol Noyon, even a Confucian scholar might live less happily and usefully than in creating such a life for such a race.

Everard nodded to himself. So much for that. What was harder to take than the thwarting of Toktai’s bloodthirsty ambitions was the truth about his own corps; which was his own family and nation and reason for living. The distant supermen turned out to be not quite such idealists after all. They weren’t merely safeguarding a perhaps divinely ordained history which led to them. Here and there they, too, meddled, to create their own past… Don’t ask if there ever was any “original” scheme of things. Keep your mind shut. Regard the rutted road mankind had to travel, and tell yourself that if it could be better in places, in other places it could be worse.

“It may be a crooked game,” said Everard, “but it’s the only one in town.”

His voice came so loud, in that huge rime-white land, that he didn’t speak any more. He clucked at his horse and rode a little faster northward.