Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen

by H. Beam Piper

  Mytron had gulped his first goblet of wine without taking it from his lips. He had taken three gulps to the second. Now he was working on his third, and coming out of shock nicely. It was about as he thought. The saltpeter was found in crude lumps under manure-piles, then refined; the sulfur was evaporated out of water from the sulfur springs in Wolf Valley. When that was mentioned, Ptosphes began cursing Styphon’s House bitterly. Mytron knew both processes, on a quart-jar scale. He explained how much of both they would need.

  “But that’ll take time.” Chartiphon objected. “And as soon as Gormoth hears that we’re making our own fireseed, he’ll attack at once.”

  “Don’t let him hear about it. Clamp down the security.” He had to explain about that. Counter-intelligence seemed to be unheard of, here-and-now. “Have cavalry patrols on all the roads out of Hostigos. Let anybody in, but let nobody out. Not just to Nostor; to Sask and Beshta, too.” He thought for a moment. “And another thing. I’ll have to give orders people aren’t going to like. Will I be obeyed?”

  “By anybody who wants to keep his head on his shoulders,” Ptosphes said. “You speak with my voice.”

  “And mine, too!” Chartiphon cried, reaching his sword across the table for him to touch the hilt. “Command me and I will obey, Lord Kalvan.”

  He established himself, the next morning, in a room inside the main gateway to the citadel, across from the guardroom, a big flagstone-floored place with the indefinable but unmistakable flavor of a police-court. The walls were white plaster; he could write and draw diagrams on them with charcoal. Nobody, here-and-now, knew anything about paper. He made a mental note to do something about that, but no time for it now. Rylla appointed herself his adjutant and general Girl Friday. He collected Mytron, the priest of Tranth, all the master-craftsmen in Tarr-Hostigos, some of the craftsmen’s guild people from Hostigos Town, a couple of Chartiphon’s officers, and a half dozen cavalrymen to carry messages.

  Charcoal would be no problem—there was plenty of that, burned exclusively in the iron-works in the Listra Valley and extensively elsewhere. There was coal, from surface outcroppings to the north and west, and it was used for a number of purposes, but the sulfur content made it unsuitable for iron furnaces. He’d have to do something about coke some time. Charcoal for gunpowder, he knew, ought to be willow or alder or something like that. He’d do something about that, too, but at present he’d have to use what he had available.

  For quantity evaporation of sulfur he’d need big iron pans, and sheet metal larger than skillets and breastplates didn’t seem to exist. The ironworks were forges, not rolling mills. So they’d have to beat the sheet-iron in two-foot squares and weld them together like patch quilts. He and Mytron got to work on planning the evaporation works. Unfortunately, Mytron was not pictorial-minded, and made little or no sense of the diagrams he drew.

  Saltpeter could be accumulated all over. Manure-piles would be the best source, and cellars and stables and underground drains. He set up a saltpeter commission, headed by one of Chartiphon’s officers, with authority to go any where and enter any place, and orders to behead any subordinate who misused his powders and to deal just as summarily with anybody who tried to obstruct or resist. Mobile units, wagons and oxcarts loaded with caldrons, tubs, tools and the like, to go from farm to farm. Peasant women to be collected and taught to leech nitrated soil and purify nitrates. Equipment, manufacture of.

  Grinding mills: there was plenty of water-power, and by good fortune he didn’t have to invent the waterwheel. That was already in use, and the master millwright understood what was needed in the way of converting a gristmill to a fireseed mill almost at once. Special grinding equipment, invention of. Sifting screens, cloth. Mixing machines; these would be big wine-casks, with counter-revolving paddlewheels inside. Presses to squeeze dough into cakes. Mills to grind caked powder; he spent considerable thought on regulations to prevent anything from striking a spark around them, with bloodthirsty enforcement threats.

  During the morning he managed to grind up the cake he’d made the evening before from what was left of the first experimental batch, running it through a sieve to about FFFG fineness. A hundred grains of that drove a ball from an 8-bore musket an inch deeper into a hemlock log than an equal charge of Styphon’s best.

  By noon he was almost sure that almost all of his War Production Board understood most of what he’d told them. In the afternoon there was a meeting, in the outer bailey, of as many people who would be working on fireseed production as could be gathered. There was an invocation of Dralm by Xentos, and an invocation of Galzar by Uncle Wolf, and an invocation of Tranth by his priest. Ptosphes spoke, emphasizing that the Lord Kalvan had full authority to do anything, and would be backed to the limit, by the headsman if necessary. Chartiphon made a speech, picturing the howling wilderness they would shortly make of Nostor. (Prolonged cheering.) He made a speech, himself, emphasizing that there was nothing of a supernatural nature whatever about fireseed, detailing the steps of manufacture, and trying to give some explanation of what made it explode. The meeting then broke up into small groups, everybody having his own job explained to him. He was kept running back and forth, explaining to the explainers.

  In the evening they had a feast. By that time he and Rylla had gotten a rough table of organization charcoal onto the wall of his headquarters.

  Of the next four days, he spent eighteen hours each in that room, talking to six or eight hundred people. Some of them he suffered patiently if not gladly; they were trying to do their best at something they’d never been expected to do before. Some he had trouble with. The artisans’ guilds bickered with one another about jurisdiction, and they all complained about peasants invading their crafts. The masters complained that the journeymen and apprentices were becoming intractable, meaning that they’d started thinking for themselves. The peasants objected to having their byres invaded and their dunghills forked down, and to being put to unfamiliar work. The landlords objected to having their peasants taken out of the fields, predicting that the year’s crop would be lost.

  “Don’t worry about that,” he told them. “If we win, we’ll eat Gormoth’s crops. If we lose, we’ll all be too dead to eat.”

  And the Iron Curtain went down. Within a few days, indignant packtraders and wagoners were being collected in Hostigos Town, trapped for the duration, protesting vehemently but unavailingly. Sooner or later, Gormoth and Sarrask would begin to wonder why nobody was coming out of Hostigos, and would send spies slipping through the woods to find out. Counterespionage; organize soonest. And a few of his own spies in Sask and Nostor. And an anti-Styphon fifth column in both princedoms. Discuss with Xentos.

  By the fifth day, the Wolf Valley sulfur-evaporation plant was ready to go into operation, and saltpeter production was up to some ten pounds a day. He put Mytron in charge at Tarr-Hostigos, hoping for something better than the worst, and got into his new armor. He and Rylla and a half dozen of Harmakros’s cavalrymen trotted out the gate and down the road from the castle into Hostigos Gap. It was the first time he’d been outside the castle since he had been brought there unconscious, tied onto a horse-litter.

  It was not until they were out of the gap and riding toward the town, spread around the low hill above the big spring, that he turned in his saddle to look back at the castle. For a moment he couldn’t be certain what was wrong, but he knew something was. Then it struck him.

  There was no trace whatever of the great stone-quarries. There should have been. No matter how many thousands of years had passed since he had been in and out of that dome of shifting light that had carried him out of his normal time, there would have been some evidence of quarrying there. Normal erosion would have taken not thousands but hundreds of thousands’ of years to obliterate those stark man-made cliffs, and enough erosion to have done that would have reduced the whole mountain by half. I remembered how unchanged the little cliff, under which he and Larry and Jack and Steve had parked the car, had been when he h
ad. emerged. No. That mountain had never been quarried, at any time in the past.

  So he wasn’t in the future; that was sure. And he wasn’t in the past, unless every scrap of history everybody had ever written or taught was an organized lie, and that he couldn’t swallow.

  Then when the hell was he?

  Rylla had reined in her horse and stopped beside him. The six troopers came to an unquestioning halt.

  “What is it, Kalvan?”

  “I was just. just thinking of the last time I saw this place.”

  “You mustn’t think about that, any more.” Then, after a moment “Was there somebody. somebody you didn’t want to leave?”

  He laughed. “No, Rylla. The only somebody like that is right beside me now.”

  They shook their reins and started off again, the six troopers clattering behind them.

  VERKAN Vall watched Tortha Karf spin the empty revolver cartridge on his desk. It was a very valuable empty cartridge; it had taken over forty days and cost ten thousand man-hours of crawling on hands and knees and pawing among dead hemlock needles to find it.

  “That was a small miracle, Vall,” the Chief said. “Aryan-Transpacific?”

  “Oh, yes; we were sure of that from the beginning. Styphon’s House Sub sector.” He gave the exact numerical designation of the time-line. “They’re all basically alike; the language, culture, taboo and situation-response tapes we have will do.”

  The Chief was fiddling with the selector for the map screen; when he had gotten geographical area and run through level and sector, he lit it with a map of eastern North America, divided into five Great Kingdoms. First, Hos-Zygros—he chose to identify it in the terms the man he was hunting would use—its capital equivalent with Quebec, taking in New England and southeastern Canada to Lake Ontario. Second, Hos-Agrys New York, western Quebec Province and northern New Jersey. Third, Hos-Harphax, where the pickup incident had occurred. Fourth, Hos-Ktenmos Virginia and North Carolina. Finally, Hos-Bletha, south from there to the tip of Florida and west along the Gulf to Mobile Bay. And also Trygath, which was not Hos-, or great, in the Ohio Valley. Glancing at a note in front of him, Tortha Karf made a dot of light in the middle of Hos-Harphax.

  “That’s it. Of course, that was over forty days ago. A man can go a long way, even on foot, in that time.”

  The Chief knew that. “Styphon’s House,” he said. “That’s that gunpowder theocracy, isn’t it.

  It was. He’d seen theocracies all over paratime, and liked none of them; priests in political power usually made themselves insufferable, worse than any secular despotism. Styphon’s House was a particularly nasty case in point. About five centuries ago, Styphon had been a minor healer-god; still was on most of Aryan-Transpacific. Some deified ancient physician, he supposed. Then, on one time-line, some priest experimenting with remedies had mixed a batch of saltpeter, sulfur and charcoals small batch, or he wouldn’t have survived it.

  For a century or so, it had merely been a temple miracle, and then the propellant properties had been discovered, and Styphon had gone out of medical practice and into the munitions business. Priestly researchers had improved the powder and designed and perfected weapons to use it. Nobody had discovered fulminating powder and invented the percussion-cap, but they had everything short of that. Now, through their monopoly on this essential tool for maintaining or altering the political status quo, Styphon’s House ruled the whole Atlantic seaboard, while the secular sovereigns merely reined.

  He wondered if Calvin Morrison knew how to make gunpowder, and while he was wondering silently, the Chief did so aloud, adding

  “If he does, we won’t have any trouble locating him. We may afterward, though.”

  That was how pickup jobs usually were, on the exit end; the pickup either made things easy or impossibly difficult. Many of these paratemporal DP’s, suddenly hurled into an unfamiliar world, went hopelessly insane, their minds refusing to cope with what common sense told them was impossible. Others were quickly killed through ignorance. Others would be caught by the locals, and committed to mental hospitals, imprisoned, sold as slaves, executed as spies, burned as sorcerers, or merely lynched, depending on local mores. Many accepted and blended into their new environment and sank into traceless obscurity. A few created commotions and had to be dealt with. “Well, we’ll find out. I’m going outtime myself to look into it.”

  “You don’t need to, Vall. You have plenty of detectives who can do that.”

  He shook his head obstinately. “On Year-End Day, that’ll be a hundred and seventy-four days, I’m going to be handcuffed to that chair you’re sitting in. Until then, I’m going to do as much outtime work as I possibly can.” He leaned over and turned a dial on the map-selector, got a large-scale map of Hos-Harphax and increased the magnification and limited the field. He pointed. “I’m going in about there. In the mountains in Sask, next door. I’ll be a pack-trader—they go everywhere and don’t have to account for themselves to anybody. I’ll have a saddle-horse and three pack-horses loaded with wares. It’ll take about five or six days to collect and verify what I’ll take with me. I’ll travel slowly, to let word seep ahead of me. It may be that I’ll hear something about this Morrison before I enter Hostigos.”

  “What’ll you do about him when you find him?” That would depend. Sometimes a pickup could be taken alive, moved to Police Terminal on the Fifth Level, given a complete memory obliteration, and then returned to his own time-line. An amnesia case; that was always a credible explanation. Or he would be killed with a sigma-ray needier, which left no traceable effects. Heart failure or “He just died.” Amnesia and heart failure were wonderful things, from the Paratime Police viewpoint. Anybody with any common sense would accept either. Common sense was a wonderful thing, too.

  “Well, I don’t want to kill the fellow; after all, he’s a police officer, too. But with the explanation we’re cobbling up for his disappearance, returning him to his own time-line wouldn’t be any favor to him.” He paused, thinking. “We’ll have to kill him, I’m afraid. He knows too much.”

  “What does he know, Vall?”

  “One, he’s seen the inside of a conveyer,, something completely alien to his own culture’s science. Two, he knows he’s been shifted in time, and time travel is a common science-fiction concept in his own world. If he can disregard verbalisms about fantasies and impossibilities, he will deduce a race of time-travelers.

  "Only a moron, which no Pennsylvania State Police officer is, would be so ignorant of his own world’s history as to think for a moment that he’d been shifted into the past. And he’ll know he hasn’t been shifted into the future, because that area, on all of Europo-American, is covered with truly permanent engineering works of which he’ll find no trace. So what does that leave?”

  “A lateral shift in time, and a race of lateral time travelers,” the Chief said. “Why, that’s the Paratime Secret itself”

  THEY were feasting at Tarr-Hostigos that evening. All morning, pigs and cattle had been driven in, lowing and squealing, to be slaughtered in the outer bailey. Axes thudded for firewood; the roasting-pits were being cleaned out from the last feast; casks of wine were coming up from the cellars. Morrison wished the fireseed mills were as busy as the castle bakery and kitchen.

  A whole day’s production shot to hell. He said as much to Rylla. “But, Kalvan, they’re all so happy.” She was pretty happy, herself. “And they’ve worked so hard.” He had to grant that, and maybe the morale gain would offset the production loss. And they did have something to celebrate a full hundredweight of fireseed, fifty percent better than Styphon’s Best, and half of it made in the last two days.

  “It’s been so long since any of us had anything to be really happy about,” she was saying. “When we’d have a feast, everybody’d try to get drunk as soon as they could, to keep from thinking about what was coming. And now maybe it won’t come at all.”

  And now, they were all drunk on a hundred pounds of black powder. Five tho
usand caliver or arquebus rounds at most. They’d have to do better than twenty-five pounds a day—get it up above a hundred at least. Saltpeter production was satisfactory, and Mytron had figured a couple of angles at the evaporation plant that practically gave them sulfur running out their ears. The bottleneck was mixing and caking, and grinding the cakes. That meant more machinery, and there weren’t enough men competent to build it. It would mean stopping work on the other things.

  The carriages for the new light four-pounders. The iron-works had turned out four of them, so far—welded wrought-iron, of course, since nobody knew how to cast iron, here-and-now, and neither did he, but made with trunnions. They only weighed four hundred pounds, the same as Gustavus Adolphus’s, and with four horses the one prototype already completed could keep up with cavalry on any kind of decent ground. He was happier about that little gun than anything else—except Rylla, of course.

  And they were putting trunnions on some old stuff, big things, close to a ton metal-weight but only six and eight pounders, and he hoped to get field carriages under them, too. They’d take eight horses apiece, and they would never keep up with cavalry.

  And rifling-benches—long wooden frames in which the barrel would be clamped, with grooved wooden cylinders to slide in guides to rotate the cutting-heads. One turn in four feet—that, he remembered, had been the usual pitch for the Kentucky rifles. So far, he had one in the Tarr-Hostigos gunshop.

  And drilling troops—he had to do most of that himself, too, till he could train some officers. Nobody knew anything about foot-drill by squads; here-and-now troops maneuvered in columns of droves.

  It would take a year to build the sort of an army he wanted. And Gormoth of Nostor would give him a month, at most.

  He brought that up at the General Staff meeting that afternoon. Like rifled firearms and trunnions on cannon, General Staffs hadn’t been invented here-and-now, either. You just hauled a lot of peasants together and armed them; that was Mobilization. You picked a reasonably passable march-route; that was Strategy. You lined up your men and shot or hit anything in front of you; that was Tactics. And Intelligence was what mounted scouts, if any, brought in at the last minute from a mile ahead. It cheered him to recall that that would probably be Prince Gormoth’s notion of the Art of War. Why, with twenty thousand men, Gustavus Adolphus, or the Duke of Parma, or Gonzalo de Córdoba could have gone through all five of these Great Kingdoms like a dose of croton oil. And what Turenne could have done!