The Shield of Time

by Poul Anderson

  Everard nodded.

  “Are you certain?” Shalten persisted. “We can allow you more. The stress was undoubtedly considerable. The next stage that we contemplate is likely to be still more dangerous and taxing.” He sketched a smile. “Or, on the basis of what I have heard about your political views, perhaps I should say ‘dangerous and demanding.’”

  Everard laughed. “Thanks! No, really, I’m raring to go. Why else should I claim privilege? It bothers me that Exaltationists are still running loose.” In English, his remark was ridiculous; but Temporal, alone among languages, had the grammatical structure to handle chronokinesis. Unless precision was essential, Everard favored his mother tongue. Both men knew what he meant. “Let’s finish this job before they finish us.”

  “You need not have insisted on taking a key part, you know,” Shalten said. “Your qualifications for it made the Middle Command hope very much you would volunteer, but it was not required of you.”

  “I wanted,” Everard growled. He gripped his pipe bowl tightly, warm between his fingers. “Okay, what is your plan and how do I fit in?”

  Shalten blew smoke of his own. “Background first. We know the Exaltationists were in northern California on the thirteenth of June 1980. At any rate, one of them was, in connection with their Phoenician devilry. They took adequate precautions, used legitimate crosstemporal activity to help camouflage theirs, et cetera. We have no prospect of finding them. The fact of their presence might give us a way of playing some kind of trick, except that, in the nature of the case, they know that we know. That day they were certainly on the qui vive, avoiding everything of which they were not absolutely assured.”

  “Uh-huh. Obvious.”

  “Well, upon studying the matter, I realized that there is another little space-time region in which one or more Exaltationists probably lurk. It is not guaranteed, and the precise dates are unknowable, but it is well worth considering.” The long pipestem jabbed in Everard’s direction. “Can you guess what?”

  “Why, m-m … why, here and now, because you are.”

  “Correct.” Shalten grimaced. “Wherefore I pass weeks in this abominable milieu, nursing the development of my trap along, detail by daily detail. And perhaps all for naught. How often does man, vain of his intellect, find that the harvest of his efforts is vanity! Whether mine bear fruit shall be for you to discover.” He sent another leisurely stream of smoke from his lips. “Can you guess how I concluded this miniperiod might have potentialities for us?”

  Everard stared as if the gnome standing before him had turned into a rattlesnake. “My God,” he whispered. “Wanda Tamberly.”

  “The young contemporary lady caught up in the Peruvian case, yes, indeed.” Shalten nodded and went on, maddeningly deliberate: “Let me spell out my reasoning, although given this hint, you can doubtless reconstruct it unaided. You will recall that, when their attempt to commandeer Atahuallpa’s ransom failed, the Exaltationists bore off as captives the two men whose presence had—momentarily, they hoped—frustrated them, Don Luis Castelar and our disguised Specialist Stephen Tamberly. They identified the latter as a Patrolman and, in their hiding place, interrogated him at great length under kyradex. When Castelar broke free and escaped on a timecycle, bearing Tamberly with him, the Exaltationists had gained considerable detailed information about our man and his background. Your team struck at them immediately afterward, and killed or captured most.”

  Of course I recall, God damn it! Everard snarled in his head.

  “Now consider the situation from the viewpoint of those who got away, or who had not been there at the instant of your raid,” Shalten went on. “Something had gone hideously wrong. They must most passionately have desired to know what. Was the scent onto which the Patrol had gotten now cold, or might it lead the Patrol onward to the rest of them?

  “They are bold and all too intelligent. They would follow every clue of their own that they dared. We have no way to prevent it. We cannot mount guard over every moment of the rest of the lives of the persons concerned. They could come back to Perú years after 1533 and, making veiled inquiries, learn the later biography of Castelar. Likewise, to a lesser extent, for Agent Tamberly. Granted, they could not acquire a full account of the merry chase that Castelar led us, or how we recovered Tamberly, or how his niece was swept along by events. Their data would be fragmentary, their deductions correspondingly incomplete and ambiguous. However, it is clear that they decided they were in no further proximate danger—as witness the fact that they went on to the Phoenician escapade.

  “First, I am sure, they carried out some investigation of everybody Tamberly had spoken of during that skilled, ruthless interrogation. Associates, acquaintances, relatives. Looking in on years subsequent to this one, they may well have found reason to suspect his niece Wanda became involved, and as a consequence was invited to join the Patrol. They could have traced the date of that involvement to sometime in May 1987—”

  “And we sit here doing nothing?” Everard shouted.

  Shalten lifted a hand. “Compose yourself, my friend, I pray you. Why should they strike at her, or at anyone else? The damage is done. They are without conscience, cat-cruel, but not foolishly vindictive. The Tamberly family poses no further threat per se to them. On the contrary, they proceed very, very carefully—for they can well imagine the Patrol keeping surreptitious watch on, say, Miss Wanda (I will not employ that preposterous ‘Ms.’ appellation) in hopes that she will draw them to her. After all, they themselves would have no compunctions about setting out a human lure. No, they do nothing but nibble at the fringes of observation, gather what few data they can, and retreat else when.”

  “Just the same—!”

  “As a matter of fact, she is under our observation, against that contingency. I deem the contingency vanishingly improbable and the guarding to be a waste of precious lifespan. But headquarters insisted. Do set your mind at ease.”

  “All right, all right,” Everard grumbled, though gladness welled up in him. Why do I care so much? Oh, she’s gallant and bright and good-looking, but still, a single girl, out of a million years of our species on earth—“Is this enough preliminaries? Can we please get to the point?”

  Shalten sipped his drink. “The end result of my reasoning,” he said, “is what I told you at the outset. Quite likely one or more Exaltationists are in the San Francisco Bay area during some days of this month, May 1987. They are being so circumspect that we have no chance of finding them. What we can do instead, and are doing, is to bait our real trap.”

  Everard tossed off his ale and hunched forward, his tobacco fuming. “How?”

  “Have you noticed the matter of the Bactrian letter?” Shalten responded.

  “The what?” Everard considered. “No, I … don’t think I have. Something in the news? I’ve only been around for a short timespan, and mighty busy.”

  The big skull nodded. “I understand. You have pursued the Peruvian affair to a conclusion, and paid attention to the charming young lady, and when one knows what lies ahead in history, one’s incentive to follow the daily news is slight. I thought you might have caught mention nonetheless. It is no mere local sensation. It is, in a subdued, scholarly, but publicly interesting fashion, a small international nine days’ wonder.”

  “Which you manage so it develops exactly as you want,” Everard deduced. His heart knocked.

  “I told you that was why I reside here.”

  How does he do it? A webwork of connections, operations, carefully engineered stories fed to carefully chosen journalists—and this shrimp shepherding it all? Even with the computer power he’s got backing him up, it is to be awed. But don’t ask him, my boy, don’t ask him, or he’ll talk through the middle of next week.

  “Please fill me in,” Everard said.

  “We might have chosen June 1980, when we know positively that Exaltationists are present,” Shalten explained, “but I decided that, besides their wariness lest we play some trick then, that pres
ence was probably too brief. The odds were that they would not notice our bait. This year is better, provided that they do also visit it. They must necessarily conduct their investigation of the Tamberly family piecemeal, making appearances through a period of several days at least. Disguised as ordinary twentieth-century individuals, they cannot avoid spending hours on end in lodgings, on omnibuses—tedium which they will naturally relieve with the help of newspapers, television, et cetera. Besides, theirs are lively intelligences. They will feel curiosity about their surroundings, which to them are immemorially ancient. And … as I said, the story that I hope will attract their attention is in the news. Only for a short while, of course; then the public forgets. But if they are intrigued, they can pursue it, obtaining scholarly publications and the like.”

  Everard sighed. “Could I ask you for another beer?”

  “My pleasure.”

  When he was settled again, Shalten still standing with his churchwarden, grotesque in front of the beautiful old bureau, Everard heard: “What do you know about the Greek kingdom of Bactria?”

  “Hm? Uh—let me think—” His historical information was intense concerning societies where he had worked, spotty about everything peripheral. “In what’s now northern Afghanistan. Alexander the Great passed through and made it part of his empire. Greek colonists moved in. Later they declared themselves independent and conquered … m-m … most of the rest of Afghanistan and a chunk of northwestern India.”

  Shalten nodded. “Rather good, on no notice. You shall learn much more, of course. You should also reconnoiter the terrain—I suggest in 1970, before Afghanistan’s current troubles, when you can pose as a tourist.”

  He drew air into his narrow chest and proceeded. “Two years ago, a Russian soldier in the mountains of the Hindu Kush came upon a box dating back to the Hellenistic era, evidently unearthed by guerrilla shellfire. That is a provocative story in its own right. The vagueness of official accounts, while attributable to habitual Soviet secretiveness, spices it. The point is, this man turned his find over to superior officers, and at length it reached an institute of Oriental studies in Moscow. Now one Professor L. P. Soloviev has published the result of his studies. He has no doubt that the object is genuine, and that it throws significant light on a period about which historians know little. Much of what information they do have is derived from nothing better than coins.”

  “What was in the box?”

  “Pray let me outline the context first. Bactria occupied, approximately, the region between the Hindu Kush and the Amu Darya. North of it lay Sogdiana, bounded by the Syr Darya—today in the Soviet Union—also under the suzerainty of the Bactrian kings.

  “They had broken away from the Seleucid Empire. In the year 209 before Christian reckoning, Antiochus III marched east across Asia to regain this rich territory. He defeated his rival Euthydemus in battle and besieged him in his capital, Bactra, but failed to take the city. After two years he gave up, made peace, and departed southward, to assert his power in India—although there, again, he concluded with a treaty rather than a conquest. While the siege of Bactra became as famous in its day as the siege of Belfort did in my France, no details about it have come down to later times.

  “Well, the casket that the Russian soldier brought in held a papyrus, most of the text still legible. Radiocarbon tests, et cetera, established authenticity. It grew clear that this was a letter from Antiochus to someone south-westward. The courier and his presumed escort must have come to grief, perhaps victims of mountaineer footpads. Drifting soil buried the box, which the killers tossed aside after realizing it contained no treasure, and the dry climate preserved the document fairly well.”

  Shalten finished his blueberry tea and pottered off to the kitchen and liquor cabinet to make another. Everard practiced patience.

  “What did this dispatch say?”

  “You shall have your opportunity to examine a copy. Briefly put, it describes how, soon after Antiochus arrived at the gates of Bactra, Euthydemus and his dashing son Demetrius led out a sally in force. It drove a deep salient into the Syrian ranks before it was beaten back and retreated behind the walls. Had it succeeded, the Bactrians might have ended the war then and there, victoriously. Yet it was a wild venture. The letter relates how Euthydemus and Demetrius themselves, in the vanguard of their army, were nearly killed when Antiochus counterattacked. A rousing story, which I imagine you will enjoy.”

  Everard, who had seen men scream on the ground as blood and bowels spilled from them, asked merely, “Who was Antiochus writing to?”

  “That part is missing. It may have been to a general of his, stationed as an ‘ally’ in the puppet realm Gedrosia on the Persian Gulf, or it may have been to a satrap in his own easternmost province—Whatever, he explains that this clash has convinced him the Bactrian war cannot be won quickly, and therefore plans for an attack on India from the west must be shelved. In the event, they were discarded.”

  “I see.” Everard’s pipe had gone out. He tamped the bowl and struck a fresh match. “That sally, the fight that followed, was more than an incident, then.”

  “Precisely,” Shalten said. “Professor Soloviev elaborates on the idea, in an article for the Literaturnaya Gazeta, and this is what has triggered general interest.”

  He puffed, sipped, and went on: “Antiochus III is known to history as Antiochus the Great. Inheriting an empire in collapse, he hammered it back together and recovered most of what had fallen away. At the battle of Raphia he lost Phoenicia and Palestine to Ptolemy of Egypt, but eventually he was to win them back. He put the Parthians in check. He campaigned as far as Greece. He gave refuge to Hannibal after the Second Punic War. At last the Romans trounced him, and he left to his son less than he himself had ruled, but it still was an enormous domain. His cultural and legal innovations were no less important. A seminal figure.”

  Everard suppressed a remark about Antiochus’ love life. “You mean, if he’d gotten killed at Bactra—”

  “The dispatch gives no indication that he was ever in danger. His enemies Euthydemus and Demetrius were. And, obscure though their country later became, their resistance changed the course of Antiochus’ career.”

  Shalten knocked the dottle from his pipe, laid it aside, clasped hands behind back, continued his parched lecture; and chill went up and down Everard’s spine.

  “Professor Soloviev, in his article, speculates at some length, with the weight of authority. He has, for the moment, caught popular fancy around the globe. The thesis is intriguing. The circumstances of the discovery are romantic. And, to be sure, albeit subtly, the professor by implication questions Marxist determinism. He implies that sheer accident—whether a given man does or does not die in a battle—can decide the whole future. That this can be published, and prominently, is a minor sensation itself. It is an early example of the glasnost that M. Gorbachev is proclaiming. Widespread attention is very natural.”

  “Well, I look forward to reading it,” Everard said, almost mechanically. Most of him stood in a wind down which blew the scent of tiger … man-eater. “Does the idea really stand up, though?”

  “Imagine. Bactria falls to Antiochus, early on. That frees the resources he needs for an outright conquest in western India. This in turn strengthens him against Egypt and, more significantly, Rome. One can well visualize him retaining his gains north of the Taurus and assisting Carthage sufficiently that it survives the Third Punic War. Although he himself is tolerant, a descendant of his attempted to crush Judaism in Palestine, as you may read in First and Second Maccabees. Given total power in Asia Minor, that attempt may well succeed. If so, then Christianity never arises. Therefore the entire world that brought you and me into being is a phantom, a might-have-been, which, conceivably, an alternate Time Patrol keeps suppressed.”

  Everard whistled. “Yeah. And Exaltationists who got themselves an in with Antiochus—and showed up again among later generations of the Seleucids—they’d have a pretty good shot at creating
a world to suit themselves, wouldn’t they?”

  “The thought should occur to them,” Shalten said. “First, we know, they will make their Phoenician effort. When that too fails, the remnants of them may remember Bactria.”

  209 B.C.

  With a roar and a rattle that clamored for hours, the army of King Euthydemus re-entered the City of the Horse. Dust smoked over the land to the south, cast up by hoofs and feet, swirled by wind and human tumult. A cloud of it hazed that horizon, where the Bactrian rear guard staved off the foremost Syrians. Trumpets rang, drums boomed, mounts and pack animals neighed, men’s voices lifted raw.

  Everard mingled with the throngs. He had bought a hooded cloak to obscure his features. In the heat and crowding, such a garment was as unusual as his size, but today nobody paid heed. He worked his way quietly through street and stoa, around the city—casing the joint, he told himself; shaping what plans he could, for every set of circumstances he could imagine, within the constraints of what he saw.

  Whip-wielding riders cleared ways from gates to barracks. After them came the soldiers, gray with dust, slumped with weariness, mute with thirst. Nonetheless they moved smartly. Most went on horseback, in light armor, lanceheads nodding bright above pennons and regimental standards, ax or bow and quiver at the saddle. They were seldom used as shock troops, for the stirrup was unknown to them, but they sat like centaurs or Comanches, and their hit-run-hit tactics recalled an onslaught by wolves. The infantry that stiffened them was a mixed bag, mercenaries, no few from Ionia or Greece itself; a ripple went over their long, serried pikes, the cadence of their march. The officers riding in crested helmet and figured cuirass seemed mainly Greek or Macedonian.