Poul Anderson - Guardians of Time

“Excuse me,” he said. “Do you know Miss Mary Nelson?”

“Why, yes.” Hesitation. “She lives nearby. She’s coming over soon. Are you a friend?”

Everard nodded. “She sent me here with a message for you, Mrs… ah… ”

“Enderby.”

“Oh, yes, Mrs. Enderby. I’m terribly forgetful. Look, Miss Nelson wanted me to say she’s very sorry but she can’t come. However, she wants you and your entire family over at 10:30.”

“All of us, sir? But the children—”

“By all means, the children too. Every one of you. She has a very special surprise arranged, something she can only show you then. All of you have to be there.”

“Well… all right, sir, if she says so.”

“All of you at 10:30, without fail. I’ll see you then, Mrs. Enderby.” Everard nodded and walked back to the street.

He had done what he could. Next was the Nelson house. He rode his hopper three blocks down, parked it in the gloom of an alley, and walked up to the house. He was guilty too now, as guilty as Schtein. He wondered what the exile planet was like.

There was no sign of the Ing shuttle, and it was too big to conceal. So Charlie hadn’t arrived yet. He’d have to play by ear till then.

As he knocked on the door, he wondered what his saving of the Enderby family would mean. Those children would grow up, have children of their own: quite insignificant middle-class Englishmen, no doubt, but somewhere in the centuries to come an important man would be born or fail to be born. Of course, time was not very inflexible. Except in rare cases, the precise ancestry didn’t matter, only the broad pool of human genes and human society did. Still, this might be one of those rare cases.

A young woman opened the door for him. She was a pretty little girl, not spectacular but nice looking in her trim uniform. “Miss Nelson?”

“Yes?”

“My name is Everard. I’m a friend of Charlie Whitcomb. May I come in? I have a rather surprising bit of news for you.”

“I was about to go out,” she said apologetically.

“No, you weren’t.” Wrong line; she was stiffening with indignation. “Sorry. Please, may I explain?”

She led him into a drab and cluttered parlor. “Won’t you sit down, Mr. Everard? Please don’t talk too loudly. The family are all asleep. They get up early.”

Everard made himself comfortable. Mary perched on the edge of the sofa, watching him with large eyes. He wondered if Wulfnoth and Eadgar were among her ancestors. Yes… undoubtedly they were, after all these centuries. Maybe Schtein was too.

“Are you in the Air Force?” she asked. “Is that how you met Charlie?”

“No. I’m in Intelligence, which is the reason for this mufti. May I ask when you last saw him?”

“Oh, weeks ago. He’s stationed in France just now. I hope this war will soon be over. So silly of them to keep on when they must know they’re finished, isn’t it?” She cocked her head curiously. “But what is this news you have?”

“I’ll come to it in a moment.” He began to ramble as much as he dared, talking of conditions across the Channel. It was strange to sit conversing with a ghost. And his conditioning prevented him from telling the truth. He wanted to, but when he tried his tongue froze up on him.

“…and what it costs to get a bottle of red-ink ordinaire—”

“Please,” she interrupted impatiently. “Would you mind coming to the point? I do have an engagement for tonight.”

“Oh, sorry. Very sorry, I’m sure. You see, it’s this way—”

A knock at the door saved him. “Excuse me,” she murmured, and went out past the blackout drapes to open it. Everard padded after her.

She stepped back with a small shriek. “ Charlie!”

Whitcomb pressed her to him, heedless of the blood still wet on his Jutish clothes. Everard came into the hall. The Englishman stared with a kind of horror. “You…”

He snatched for his stunner, but Everard’s was already out. “Don’t be a fool,” said the American. “I’m your friend. I want to help you. What crazy scheme did you have, anyway?”

“I… keep her here… keep her from going to—”

“And do you think they haven’t got means of spotting you?” Everard slipped into Temporal, the only possible language in Mary’s frightened presence. “When I left Mainwethering, he was getting damn suspicious. Unless we do this right, every unit of the Patrol is going to be alerted. The error will be rectified, probably by killing her. You’ll go to exile.”

“I.…” Whitcomb gulped. His face was a mask of fear. “You… would you let her go ahead and die?”

“No. But this has to be done more carefully.”

“We’ll escape… find some period away from everything… go back to the dinosaur age, if we must.”

Mary slipped free of him. Her mouth was pulled open, ready to scream. “Shut up!” said Everard to her. “Your life is in danger, and we’re trying to save you. If you don’t trust me, trust Charlie.”

Turning back to the man, he went on in Temporal: “Look, fellow, there isn’t any place or any time you can hide in. Mary Nelson died tonight. That’s history. She wasn’t around in 1947. That’s history. I’ve already got myself in Dutch: the family she was going to visit will be out of their home when the bomb hits it. If you try to run away with her, you’ll be found. It’s pure luck that a Patrol unit hasn’t already arrived.”

Whitcomb fought for steadiness. “Suppose I jump up to 1948 with her. How do you know she hasn’t suddenly reappeared in 1948? Maybe that’s history too.”

“Man, you can’t. Try it. Go on, tell her you’re going to hop her four years into the future.”

Whitcomb groaned. “A giveaway—and I’m conditioned—”

“Yeh. You have barely enough latitude to appear this way before her, but talking to her, you’ll have to lie out of it because you can’t help yourself. Anyway, how would you explain her? If she stays Mary Nelson, she’s a deserter from the W.A.A.F. If she takes another name, where’s her birth certificate, her school record, her ration book, any of those bits of paper these twentieth-century governments worship so devoutly? It’s hopeless, son.”

“Then what can we do?”

“Face the Patrol and slug it out. Wait here a minute.” There was a cold calm over Everard, no time to be afraid or to wonder at his own behavior.

Returning to the street, he located his hopper and set it to emerge five years in the future, at high noon in Piccadilly Circus. He slapped down the main switch, saw the machine vanish, and went back inside. Mary was in Whitcomb’s arms, shuddering and weeping. The poor, damned babes in the woods!

“Okay.” Everard led them back to the parlor and sat down with his gun ready. “Now we wait some more.”

It didn’t take long. A hopper appeared, with two men in Patrol gray aboard. There were weapons in their hands. Everard cut them down with a low-powered stun beam. “Help me tie ’em up, Charlie,” he said.

Mary huddled voiceless in a corner.

When the men awoke, Everard stood over them with a bleak smile. “What are we charged with, boys?” he asked in Temporal.

“I think you know,” said one of the prisoners calmly. “The main office had us trace you. Checking up next week, we found that you had evacuated a family scheduled to be bombed. Whitcomb’s record suggested you had then come here, to help him save this woman who was supposed to die tonight. Better let us go or it will be the worse for you.”

“I have not changed history,” said Everard.

“The Danellians are still up there, aren’t they?”

“Yes, of course, but—”

“How did you know the Enderby family was supposed to die?”