Poul Anderson - Ivory, and Apes, and Peacocks

The Patrolman selected a volume of space within the scene and magnified. The bomb had fragmented its carrier, but there was no mistaking the pieces. A standard two-seat hopper, such as plied the time lanes in untold thousands, had materialized, and instantly erupted.

“I collected some dust and char when nobody was looking, and sent it uptime for analysis,” Zorach said. “The lab reported the explosive had been chemical—fulgurite-B, the name is.”

Everard nodded. “I know that stuff. In common use for a rather long period, starting a while after the origin span of us three. Therefore easy to obtain in quantity, untraceably—a hell of a lot easier than nuke isotopes. Wouldn’t need a large amount to do this much damage, either…I suppose you’ve had no luck intercepting the machine?”

Zorach shook his head. “No. Or rather, the Patrol officers haven’t. They went downtime of the event, planted instruments of every kind that could be concealed, but—Everything happens too fast.”

Everard rubbed his chin. The stubble felt almost silky; a bronze razor and a lack of soap didn’t make for a close shave. He thought vaguely that he would have welcomed some scratchiness, or anything else familiar.

What had happened was plain enough. The vehicle had been unmanned, autopiloted, sent from some unknown point of space-time. Startoff had activated the detonator, so that the bomb arrived exploding. Though Patrol agents could pinpoint the instant, they could do nothing to head off the occurrence.

Could a technology advanced beyond theirs do so—Danellian, even? Everard imagined a device planted in advance of the moment, generating a forcefield which contained the violence when it smote. Well, this had not happened, therefore it might be a physical impossibility. Likelier, though, the Danellians stayed their hand because the harm had been done—the saboteurs could try again—all by itself, such a cat-and-mouse game might warp the continuum beyond healing—He shivered and asked roughly: “What explanation will the Tyrians themselves come up with?”

“Nothing dogmatic,” Yael Zorach replied. “They don’t have our kind of Weltanschauung, remember. To them, the world isn’t entirely governed by laws of nature, it’s capricious, changeable, magical.”

And they’re fundamentally right, aren’t they? The chill struck deeper into Everard.

“When nothing else of the kind occurs, excitement will die down,” she went on. “The chronicles that record the incident will be lost; besides, Phoenicians aren’t especially given to writing chronicles. They’ll think that somebody did something wrong that provoked a thunderbolt from heaven. Not necessarily any human; it could have been a quarrel among the gods. Therefore nobody will become a scapegoat. After a generation or two, the incident will be forgotten, except perhaps as a bit of folklore.”

Chaim Zorach fairly snarled: “That’s if the extortionists don’t do more and worse.”

“Yeah, let’s see their ransom note,” Everard requested.

“I have a copy only. The original went uptime for study.”

“Oh, sure, I know. I’ve read the lab report. Sepia ink on a papyrus scroll, no clue there. Found at your door, probably dropped from another unmanned hopper that just flitted through.”

“Certainly dropped in that way,” Zorach reminded him. “The agents who came in set up instruments for that night, and detected the machine. It was present for about a millisecond. They might have tried to capture it, but what would have been the use? It was bound to be devoid of clues. And in any case, the effort would have entailed making a racket that could have brought the neighbors out to see what was going on.”

He fetched the document for Everard to examine. The Patrolman had pored over a transcript as part of his briefing, but hoped that sight of the actual hand would suggest something, anything to him.

The words had been formed with a contemporary reed pen, rather skillfully used. (This implied that the writer was well versed in the milieu, but that was obvious already.) They were printed, not cursive, though certain flamboyant flourishes appeared. The language was Temporal.

“To the Time Patrol from the Committee for Aggrandizement, greeting.” At least there was none of the cant about being a people’s army of national liberation, such as nauseated Everard in the later part of his home century. These fellows were frank bandits. Unless, of course, they pretended to be, in order to cover their tracks the more thoroughly…

“Having witnessed the consequences when one small bomb was delivered to a carefully chosen location in Tyre, you are invited to contemplate the results of a barrage throughout the city.”

Once more, heavily, Everard nodded. His opponents were shrewd. A threat to kill or kidnap individuals—say, King Hiram himself—would have been nugatory, if not empty. The Patrol would mount guard on any such person. If somehow an attack succeeded, the Patrol would go back in time and arrange for the victim to be elsewhere at the moment of the assault; it would make the event “unhappen.” Granted, that involved risks which the outfit hated to take, and at best would require a lot of work to make sure that the future did not get altered by the rescue operation itself. Nevertheless, the Patrol could and would act.

But how did you move a whole islandful of buildings to safety? You could, perhaps, evacuate the population. The town would remain. It wasn’t physically large, after all, no matter how large it loomed in history—about 25,000 people crowded into about 140 acres. A few tons of high explosive would leave it in ruins. The devastation needn’t even be total. After such a terrifying manifestation of supernatural fury, no one would come back here. Tyre would crumble away, a ghost town, while all the centuries and millennia, all the human beings and their lives and civilizations, which it had helped bring into existence… those would be less than ghosts.

Everard shivered anew. Don’t tell me there is no such thing as absolute evil, he thought. These creatures— He forced himself to read on:

“—The price of our forbearance is quite reasonable, merely a little information. We desire the data necessary for the construction of a Trazon matter transmuter—”

When that device was being developed, during the Third Technological Renaissance, the Patrol had covertly manifested itself to the creators, though they lived downtime of its own founding. Forever afterward, its use—the very knowledge of its existence, let alone the manner of its making—had been severely restricted. True, the ability to convert any material object, be it just a heap of dirt, into any other, be it a jewel or a machine or a living body, could have spelled unlimited wealth for the entire species. The trouble was, you could as easily produce unlimited amounts of weapons, or poisons, or radioactive atoms…

“—You will broadcast the data in digital form from Palo Alto, California, United States of America, throughout the 24 hours of Friday 13 June 1980. The waveband to employ… the digital code… Your receipt will be the continued reality of your time line.—”

That was smart, too. The message wasn’t one that would be picked up accidentally by some native, yet electronic activity in the Silicon Valley area was so great as to rule out any possibility of tracking down a receiver.

“—We will not use the device upon the planet Earth. Therefore the Time Patrol need not fear that it is compromising its Prime Directive by this helpfulness to us. On the contrary, you have no other way to preserve yourselves, do you?

“Our compliments, and our expectations.”

No signature.

“The broadcast won’t be made, will it?” Yael asked low. In the shadows of the room, her eyes glimmered enormous. She has children uptime, Everard remembered. They would vanish with their world.