Poul Anderson - Guardians of Time

She kissed them both. Van Sarawak responded as eagerly as expected, but Everard couldn’t bring himself to. He would have remembered Judas.

“Where are we?” she continued. “It looks almost like Llangollen, but no dwellers. Have you taken us to the Happy Isles?” She spun on one foot and danced among summer flowers. “Can we rest here a while before returning home?”

Everard drew a long breath. “I’ve bad news for you, Deirdre,” he said.

She grew silent. He saw her gather herself.

“We can’t go back.”

She waited mutely.

“The… the spells I had to use, to save our lives—I had no choice. But those spells debar us from returning home.”

“There is no hope?” He could barely hear her.

His eyes stung. “No,” he said.

She turned and walked away. Van Sarawak moved to follow her, but thought better of it and sat down beside Everard. “What’d you tell her?” he asked.

Everard repeated his words. “It seems the best compromise,” he finished. “I can’t send her back to what’s waiting for this world.”

“No.” Van Sarawak sat quiet for a while, staring across the sea. Then: “What year is this? About the time of Christ? Then we’re still upstairs of the turning point.”

“Yeh. And we still have to find out what it was.” “Let’s go back to some Patrol office in the farther past. We can recruit help there.”

“Maybe.” Everard lay down in the grass and regarded the sky. Reaction overwhelmed him. “I think I can locate the key event right here, though, with Deirdre’s help. Wake me when she comes back.”

She returned dry-eyed, though one could see she had wept. When Everard asked if she would assist in his own mission, she nodded, “Of course. My life is yours who saved it.”

After getting you into the mess in the first place. Everard said carefully: “All I want from you is some information. Do you know about… about putting people to sleep, a sleep in which they may believe anything they’re told?”

She nodded doubtfully. “I’ve seen medical Druids do that.”

“It won’t harm you. I only wish to make you sleep so you can remember everything you know, things you believe forgotten. It won’t take long.”

Her trustfulness was hard for him to endure. Using Patrol techniques, he put her in a hypnotic state of total recall and dredged out all she had ever heard or read about the Second Punic War. That added up to enough for his purposes.

Roman interference with Carthaginian enterprise south of the Ebro, in direct violation of treaty, had been the final roweling. In 219 B.C. Hannibal Barca, governor of Carthaginian Spain, laid siege to Saguntum. After eight months he took it, and thus provoked his long-planned war with Rome. At the beginning of May, 218, he crossed the Pyrenees with 90,000 infantry, 12,000 cavalry, and 37 elephants, marched through Gaul, and went over the Alps. His losses en route were gruesome: only 20,000 foot and 6,000 horse reached Italy late in the year. Nevertheless, near the Ticinus River he met and broke a superior Roman force. In the course of the following year, he fought several bloodily victorious battles and advanced into Apulia and Campania.

The Apulians, Lucanians, Bruttians, and Samnites went over to his side. Quintus Fabius Maximus fought a grim guerrilla war, which laid Italy waste and decided nothing. But meanwhile Hasdrubal Barca was organizing Spain, and in 211 he arrived with reinforcements. In 210 Hannibal took and burned Rome, and by 207 the last cities of the confederacy had surrendered to him.

“That’s it,” said Everard. He stroked the coppery mane of the girl lying beside him. “Go to sleep now. Sleep well and wake up glad of heart.”

“What’d she tell you?” asked Van Sarawak.

“A lot of detail,” said Everard. The whole story had required more than an hour. “The important thing is this: her knowledge of those times is good, but she never mentioned the Scipios.”

“The who’s?”

“Publius Cornelius Scipio commanded the Roman army at Ticinus. He was beaten there all right, in our world. But later he had the intelligence to turn westward and gnaw away the Carthaginian base in Spain. It ended with Hannibal being effectively cut off in Italy, and what little Iberian help could be sent him was annihilated. Scipio’s son of the same name also held a high command, and was the man who finally whipped Hannibal at Zama; that’s Scipio Africanus the Elder.

“Father and son were by far the best leaders Rome had. But Deirdre never heard of them.”

“So…” Van Sarawak stared eastward across the sea, where Gauls and Cimbri and Parthians were ramping through the shattered Classical world. “What happened to them in this time line?”

“My own total recall tells me that both the Scipios were at Ticinus, and very nearly killed. The son saved his father’s life during the retreat, which I imagine was more like a stampede. One gets you ten that in this history the Scipios died there.”

“Somebody must have knocked them off,” said Van Sarawak. His voice tightened. “Some time traveler. It could only have been that.”

“Well, it seems probable, anyhow. We’ll see.” Everard looked away from Deirdre’s slumbrous face. “We’ll see.”

At the Pleistocene resort—half an hour after having left it for New York—the Patrolmen put the girl in charge of a sympathetic Greek-speaking matron and summoned their colleagues. Then the message capsules began jumping through space-time.

All offices prior to 218 B.C.—the closest was Alexandria, 250–230—were “still” there, with 200 or so agents altogether. Written contact with the future was confirmed to be impossible, and a few short jaunts upstairs clinched the proof. A worried conference met at the Academy, back in the Oligocene Period. Unattached agents ranked those with steady assignments, but not each other; on the basis of his own experience, Everard found himself the chairman of a committee of top-bracket officers.

That was a frustrating job. These men and women had leaped centuries and wielded the weapons of gods. But they were still human, with all the ingrained orneriness of their race.

Everyone agreed that the damage would have to be repaired. But there was fear for those agents who had gone ahead into time before being warned, as Everard himself had done. If they weren’t back when history was re-altered, they would never be seen again. Everard deputized parties to attempt rescue, but doubted there’d be much success. He warned them sternly to return within a day, local time, or face the consequences.

A man from the Scientific Renaissance had another point to make. Granted, the survivors’ plain duty was to restore the “original” time track. But they had a duty to knowledge as well. Here was a unique chance to study a whole new phase of humankind. Several years’ anthropological work should be done before—Everard slapped him down with difficulty. There weren’t so many Patrolmen left that they could take the risk.

Study groups had to determine the exact moment and circumstances of the change. The wrangling over methods went on interminably. Everard glared out the window, into the pre-human night, and wondered if the sabertooths weren’t doing a better job after all than their simian successors.

When he had finally gotten his various gangs dispatched, he broke out a bottle and got drunk with Van Sarawak.

Reconvening next day, the steering committee heard from its deputies, who had run up a total of years in the future. A dozen Patrolmen had been rescued from more or less ignominious situations; another score would simply have to be written off. The spy group’s report was more interesting. It seemed that two Helvetian mercenaries had joined Hannibal in the Alps and won his confidence. After the war, they had risen to high positions in Carthage. Under the names of Phrontes and Himilco, they had practically run the government, engineered Hannibal’s murder, and set new records for luxurious living. One of the Patrolmen had seen their homes and the men themselves. “A lot of improvements that hadn’t been thought of in Classical times. The fellows looked to me like Neldorians, 205th millennium.”