Worlds of Maybe

by Robert Silverberg

  “In case you’ve forgotten, we’re conditioned against revealing the Patrol’s existence to unauthorized people,” said Everard. “We couldn’t tell her the truth even if we wanted to . . . and I, for one, don’t want to.”

  He looked at the girl. She stood breathing heavily, with a dawn in her eyes. The wind caressed her hair and the long thin dress.

  She shook her head, as if clearing a mist of nightmare, and ran over to clasp their hands. “Forgive me, Manslach,” she whispered. “I should have known you’d not betray us.”

  She kissed him and van Sarawak. The Venusian responded eagerly, but Everard couldn’t bring himself to. He would have remembered Judas.

  “Where are we?” she chattered. “It looks almost like Llangollen, but no men—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, and 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.

  Everard’s 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 seemed 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 the farther past. Lots of Patrol offices. We can recruit help there.”

  “Maybe.” Everard lay back 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 up when she comes back.”

  She returned dry-eyed, a desolate calm over her. 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 that 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?”

  “Y-yes,” she said doubtfully. “Ive 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 to endure. Using Patrol techniques, Everard put her in a hypnotic state of total recall and dredged out all she had ever read or heard 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 last 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 in 207 the last cities of the confederacy surrendered to him.

  “That’s it,” said Everard. He stroked the coppery hair 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 history is good, but never mentions the Scipios.”

  “The whos?”

  “Publius Cornelius Scipio commanded the Roman army at Ticinus, and was beaten there. 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 the Iberian help which could be sent 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 on a rising note. “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—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, two hundred 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.

  It 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; 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 in a day or face the consequences.

  A man from the Scientific Renaissance had another point to make. Granted, it was the survivors’ plain duty 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; there should be several years’ anthropological work 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 prehuman night, and wondered if the sabertooths weren’t doing a better job after all than their simian successors.

  When he had finally gotten his bands dispatched, he broke out a bottle and got drunk with van Sarawak.

  Reconvening the 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 there had been two Helvetian mercenaries who 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.”

  Everard nodded. That was an age of bandits who had “already” given the Patrol a lot of work. “I think we’ve settled the matter,” he said. “It makes no difference whether they were with Hannibal before Ticinus or not. We’d have hell’s own time arresting them in the Alps without tipping our hand and changing the future ourselves. What counts is that they seem to have rubbed out the Scipios, and that’s the point we’ll have to strike at.”

  A Nineteenth-Century Britisher, competent but with elements of Colonel Blimp, unrolled a map and discoursed on his aerial observations of the battle. He’d used an infra-red telescope to look through low clouds. “And here the Romans stood—”

  “I know,” said Everard. “A thin red line. The moment when they took flight is the crucial one, but the confusion then also gives us our chance. Okay, we’ll want to surround the battlefield unobtrusively, but I don’t think we can get away with more than two agents actually on the scene. The Alexandria office can supply Van and me with costumes.”

  “I say,” exclaimed the Englishman. “I thought I’d have the privilege.”

  “No. Sorry.” Everard smiled with one corner of his mouth. “It’s no privilege, anyway. Risk your neck, and all to wipe out a world of people like yourself.”

  “But dash it all—”

  Everard rose. “I’ve got to go,” he said flatly. “I don’t know why, but I’ve got to.”

  Van Sarawak nodded.

  They left their scooter in a clump of trees and started across the field.

  Around the horizon and up in the sky waited a hundred armed Patrolmen, but that was small consolation here among spears and arrows. Lowering clouds hurried before a cold whistling wind, there was a spatter of rain, sunny Italy was enjoying its late fall.

  The cuirass was heavy on Everard’s shoulders as he trotted across blood-slippery mud. He had helmet, greaves, a Roman shield on his left arm and a sword at his waist; but his right hand gripped a stunner. Van Sarawak loped behind, similarly equipped, eyes shifting under the wind-ruffled officers plume.

  Trumpets howled and drums stuttered. It was all but lost among the yells of men and tramp of feet, screaming horses and whining arrows. The legion of Carthage was pressing in, hammering edged metal against the buckling Roman lines. Here and there the fight was already breaking up into small knots, where men cursed and cut at strangers.

  The combat had passed over this area and swayed beyond. Death lay around him. Everard hurried behind the Roman force, toward the distant gleam of the eagles. Across helmets and corpses, he made out a banner that fluttered triumphant, vivid red and purple against the unrestful sky. And there, looming gray and monstrous, lifting their trunks and bellowing, came a squad of elephants.

  He had seen war before. It was always the same— not a neat affair of lines across maps, nor a hallooing gallantry, but men who gasped and sweated and bled in bewilderment.

  A slight, dark-faced youth squirmed nearby, trying feebly to pull out the javelin which had pierced his stomach. He was a cavalryman from Carthage, but the burly Italian peasant who sat next to him, staring without belief at the stump of an arm, paid no attention.

  A flight of crows hovered overhead, riding the wind and waiting.

  “This way,” muttered Everard. “Hurry up, for God’s sake! That line’s going to break any minute.”

  The breath was raw in his throat as he panted toward the standards of the Republic. It came to him that he’d always rather wished Hannibal had won. There was something repellent about the cold, unimaginative greed of Rome. And here he was, trying to save the city. Well-a-day, life was often an odd business.

  It was some consolation that Scipio Africanus was one of the few decent men left after the war.

  Screaming and clangor lifted, and the Italians reeled back. Everard saw something like a wave smashed against a rock. But it was the rock which advanced, crying out and stabbing, stabbing.

  He began to run. A legionary went past, howling his panic. A grizzled Roman veteran spat on the ground, braced his feet, and stood where he was till they cut him down. Hannibal’s elephants squealed and lifted curving tusks. The ranks of Carthage held firm, advancing to the inhuman pulse of their drums. Cavalry skirmished on the wings in a toothpick flash of lances.

  Up ahead, now! Everard saw men on horseback, Roman officers. They held the eagles aloft and shouted, but nobody could hear them above the din.

  A small group of legionaries came past and halted. Their leader hailed the Patrolmen: “Over here! We’ll give them a fight, by the belly of Venus!”

  Everard shook his head and tried to go past. The Roman snarled and sprang at him. “Come here, you cowardly—” A stun beam cut off his words and he crashed into the muck. His men shuddered, someone screamed, and the party broke into flight.

  The Carthaginians were very near, shield to shield and swords running red. Everard could see a scar livid on the cheek of one man, and the great hook nose of another. A hurled spear clanged off his helmet, he lowered his head and ran.

  A combat loomed before him. He tried to go around, and tripped on a gashed corpse. A Roman stumbled over him in turn. Van Sarawak cursed and dragged him away. A. sword furrowed the Venusian’s arm.

  Beyond, Scipio’s men were surrounded and battling without hope. Everard halted, sucking air into starved lungs, and looked into the thin rain. Armor gleamed wetly, Roman horsemen galloping in with mud up to their mounts’ noses—that must be the son, Scipio

  Africanus to be, hastening to his father. The hoofbeats were like thunder in the earth.

  “Over there!”

  Van Sarawak cried it out and pointed. Everard crouched where he was, rain dripping off his helmet and down his face. A small troop of Carthaginians was riding toward the battle around the eagles, and at their head were two men with the height and craggy features of Neldor. They were clad in the usual G.I. armor, but each of them held a slim-barreled gun.

  “This way!” Everard spun on his heel and dashed toward them. The leather in his cuirass creaked as he ran.

  They were close to the newcomers before they were seen. A Carthaginian face swung to them and called the warning. Everard saw how he grinned in his beard. One of the Neldorians scowled and aimed his blast-rifle.

  Everard went on his stomach, and the vicious blue-white beam sizzled where he had been. He snapped a shot and one of the African horses went over in a roar of metal. Van Sarawak stood his ground and fired steadily. Two, three, four—and there went a Neldorian, down in the mud!

  Men hewed at each other around the Scipios. The Neldorians’ escort yelled with terror. They must have had the blasters demonstrated, but these invisible blows were something else. They bolted. The second of the bandits got his horse under control and turned to follow.

  “Take care of the one you potted,” gasped Everard. “Haul him off the battlefield—we’ll want to question —” He himself scrambled to his feet and made for a riderless horse. He was in the saddle and after the remaining Neldorian before he was fully aware of it.

  They fled through chaos. Everard urged speed from his mount, but was content to pursue. Once they’d got out of sight, a scooter could swoop down and make short work of his quarry.

  The same thought must have occurred to the time rover. He reined in and took aim. Everard saw the blinding flash and felt his cheek sting with a near miss. He set his pistol to wide beam and rode in shooting.

  Another fire-bolt took his horse full in the breast. The animal toppled and Everard went out of the
saddle. Trained reflexes softened the fall, he bounced dizzily to his feet and staggered toward his enemy. His stunner was gone, no time to look for it. Never mind, it could be salvaged later, if he lived. The widened beam had found its mark; it wasn’t strong enough to knock a man out, but the Neldorian had dropped his rifle and the horse stood swaying with closed eyes.

  Rain beat in Everard’s face. He slogged up to the mount. The Neldorian jumped to earth and drew a sword. Everard’s own blade rasped forth.

  “As you will,” he said in Latin. “One of us will not leave this field.”

  The moon rose over mountains and turned the snow to a sudden wan glitter. Far in the north, a glacier threw back the light in broken shards, and a wolf howled. The Cro-Magnons chanted in their cave, it drifted faintly through to the veranda.

  Deirdre stood in darkness, looking out. Moonlight dappled her face and caught a gleam of tears. She started as Everard and van Sarawak came up behind her.

  “Are you back so soon?” she asked. “You only came here and left me this morning.”

  “It didn't take long,” said van Sarawak. He had gotten a hypno in Attic Greek.

  “I hope . . .” She tried to smile. “I hope you have finished your task and can rest from your labors.”

  “Yes,” said Everard. “Yes, we finished it.”

  They stood side by side for a while, looking out on a world of winter.

  “Is it true what you said, that I can never go home?” asked Deirdre.

  “I'm afraid so. The spells—” Everard shrugged and swapped a glance with van Sarawak.

  They had official permission to tell the girl as much as they wished and take her wherever they thought she could live best. Van Sarawak maintained that that would be Venus in his century, and Everard was too tired to argue.

  Deirdre drew a long breath. “So be it,” she said. “Til not waste a life weeping for it . . . but the Baal grant that they have it well, my people at home.”