Poul Anderson: Time Patrol

“So what do we do?” asked Whitcomb, back in their own room. “Go on in and arrest him?”

“No, I doubt if that’s possible,” said Everard cautiously. “I’ve got a sort of a plan, but it depends on guessing what he really intends. Let’s see if we can’t get an audience.” As he got off the straw tick which served for a bed, he was scratching. “Damn! What this period needs isn’t literacy but flea powder!”

The house had been carefully renovated, its white, porticoed facade almost painfully clean against the grubbiness around it. Two guards lounged on the stairs, snapping to alertness as the agents approached. Everard fed them money and a story about being a visitor who had news that would surely interest the great wizard. “Tell him, ‘Man from tomorrow.’ ’Tis a password. Got it?”

“It makes not sense,” complained the guard.

“Passwords need not make sense,” said Everard with hauteur.

The Jute clanked off, shaking his head dolefully. All these newfangled notions!

“Are you sure this is wise?” asked Whitcomb. “He’ll be on the alert now, you know.”

“I also know a VIP isn’t going to waste time on just any stranger. This business is urgent, man! So far, he hasn’t accomplished anything permanent, not even enough to become a lasting legend. But if Hengist should make a genuine union with the Britons…”

The guard returned, grunted something, and led them up the stairs and across the peristyle. Beyond was the atrium, a good-sized room where modern bearskin rugs jarred with chipped marble and faded mosaics. A man stood waiting before a rude wooden couch. As they entered, he raised his hand, and Everard saw the slim barrel of a thirtieth-century blast-ray.

“Keep your hands in sight and well away from your sides,” said the man gently, “Otherwise I shall belike have to smite you with a thunderbolt.”

Whitcomb sucked in a sharp, dismayed breath, but Everard had been rather expecting this. Even so, there was a cold knot in his stomach.

The wizard Stane was a small man, dressed in a fine embroidered tunic which must have come from some British villa. His body was lithe, his head large, with a face of rather engaging ugliness under a shock of black hair. A grin of tension bent his lips.

“Search them, Eadgar,” he ordered. “Take out aught they may bear in their clothing.”

The Jute’s frisking was clumsy, but he found the stunners and tossed them to the floor. “Thou mayst go,” said Stane.

“Is there no danger from them, my lord?” asked the soldier.

Stane grinned wider. “With this in my hand? Nay, go.” Eadgar shambled out. At least we still have sword and ax, thought Everard. But they’re not much use with that thing looking at us.

“So you come from tomorrow,” murmured Stane. A sudden film of sweat glistened on his forehead. “I wondered about that. Speak you the later English tongue?”

Whitcomb opened his mouth, but Everard, improvising with his life at wager, beat him to the draw. “What tongue mean you?”

“Thus-wise.” Stane broke into an English which had a peculiar accent but was recognizable to twentieth-century ears: “Ih want know where an’ when y’re from, what y’r ’tentions air, an’ all else. Gimme d’ facts ’r Ih’ll burn y’ doon.”

Everard shook his head. “Nay,” he answered in Jutish. “I understand you not.” Whitcomb threw him a glance and then subsided, ready to follow the American’s lead. Everard’s mind raced; under the brassiness of desperation, he knew that death waited for his first mistake. “In our day we talked thus…” And he reeled off a paragraph of Mexican-Spanish chatter, garbling it as much as he dared.

“So… a Latin tongue!” Stane’s eyes glittered. The blaster shook in his hand. “ When be you from?”

“The twentieth century after Christ, and our land hight Lyonesse. It lies across the western ocean—”

“America!” It was a gasp. “Was it ever called America?”

“No. I wot not what you speak of.”

Stane shuddered uncontrollably. Mastering himself: “Know you the Roman tongue?”

Everard nodded.

Stane laughed nervously. “Then let us speak that. If you know how sick I am of this local hog-language… ” His Latin was a little broken, obviously he had picked it up in this century, but fluent enough. He waved the blaster. “Pardon my discourtesy. But I have to be careful.”

“Naturally,” said Everard. “Ah… my name is Mencius, and my friend is Iuvenalis. We came from the future, as you have guessed; we are historians, and time travel has just been invented.”

“Properly speaking, I am Rozher Schtein, from the year 2987. Have you… heard of me?”

“Who else?” said Everard. “We came back looking for this mysterious Stane who seemed to be one of the crucial figures of history. We suspected he might have been a time traveler, peregrinator temporis, that is. Now we know.”

“Three years,” Schtein began pacing feverishly, the blaster swinging in his hand; but he was too far off for a sudden leap. “Three years I have been here. If you knew how often I have lain awake, wondering if I would succeed… Tell me, is your world united?”

“The world and the planets,” said Everard. “They have been for a long time.” Inwardly, he shivered. His life hung on his ability to guess what Schtein’s plans were.

“And you are a free people?”

“We are. That is to say, the Emperor presides, but the Senate makes the laws and it is elected by the people.”

There was an almost holy look on the gnomish face, transfiguring it. “As I dreamed,” whispered Schtein. “Thank you.”

“So you came back from your period to… create history?”

“No,” said Schtein. “To change it.”

Words tumbled out of him, as if he had wished to speak and dared not for many years: “I was a historian too. By chance I met a man who claimed to be a merchant from the Saturnian moons, but since I had lived there once, I saw through the fraud. Investigating, I learned the truth. He was a time traveler from the very far future.

“You must understand, the age I lived in was a terrible one, and as a psychographic historian I realized that the war, poverty, and tyranny which cursed us were not due to any innate evil in man, but to simple cause and effect. Machine technology had risen in a world divided against itself, and war grew to be an ever larger and more destructive enterprise. There had been periods of peace, even fairly long ones; but the disease was too deep-rooted, conflict was a part of our very civilization. My family had been wiped out in a Venusian raid, I had nothing to lose. I took the time machine after… disposing… of its owner.

“The great mistake, I thought, had been made back in the Dark Ages. Rome had united a vast empire in peace, and out of peace justice can always arise. But Rome exhausted herself in the effort, and was now falling apart. The barbarians coming in were vigorous, they could do much, but they were quickly corrupted.

“But here is England. It has been isolated from the rotting fabric of Roman society. The Germanics are entering, filthy oafs but strong and willing to learn. In my history, they simply wiped out British civilization and then, being intellectu-ally helpless, were swallowed up by the new—and evil—civilization called Western. I want to see something better happen.

“It hasn’t been easy. You would be surprised how hard it is to survive in a different age until you know your way around, even if you have modern weapons and interesting gifts for the king. But I have Hengist’s respect now, and increasingly more of the confidence of the Britons. I can unite the two peoples in a mutual war on the Picts. England will be one kingdom, with Saxon strength and Roman learning, powerful enough to stand off all invaders. Christianity is inevitable, of course, but I will see to it that it is the right kind of Christianity, one which will educate and civilize men without shackling their minds.