The Shield of Time

by Poul Anderson

  A roar cut him off. Khongan of Curlew Marsh was the boldest among Us. He had raged when he heard what the invaders did. “They do not trade! They take! Does the mink trade his skin for the bait in the trap? Tell them no! Drive them out!”

  The hunters scowled and hefted their weapons. Aryuk knew he should signal for calm. His hands were too heavy, his throat too tight. One by one, his men took up Khongan’s shout. “No! No!”

  Somebody threw a stone. Somebody else dashed forth and chopped at a hunter with a hand ax. Or so Aryuk afterward thought. He was never sure quite what happened. There was an uproar, a brawl, wildness, nightmare. Then We had fled. Scattered, they stared back and saw the invaders stand unharmed, blood dripping off edged stone.

  Two men of Us sprawled dead. Guts spilled from a gashed belly, brains from a split skull. The less wounded had escaped, except for Khongan. Pierced again and again, he threshed on the earth and moaned a long while before he lay still. Daraku knelt at the Red Wolf’s feet and wept.

  1990 A.D.

  “Hi,” said Manse Everard’s answering machine. “This is Wanda Tamberly in San Francisco. Remember?” The sprightliness faded. It must have been forced. “Of course you do. Been, oh, like three years, though, hasn’t it? On my lifeline, anyway. I’m sorry. Time just slipped past and you—Never mind.” You didn’t get in touch again. Why should you? An Unattached agent has important things to do. “Manse, uh, sir, I feel bad about calling you, especially after so long. I oughtn’t go asking for special privileges. But I don’t know where else to turn. Could you possibly give me a ring, at least? Let me try to explain? If you then tell me I’m out of line, I’ll shut up and not pester you again. Please. I think it’s pretty big. Maybe you’ll agree. Please. You can reach me at—” There followed a telephone number and a list of hours on successive days in this February. “Thanks ever so much for listening. That’s all now. Thank you.” Silence.

  Having heard, he stopped the tape and stood for several minutes. It was as if his apartment had withdrawn from New York to a space of its own. At length he shrugged, grinned ruefully, but nodded to himself. The remaining messages had no urgency that he couldn’t handle with a bit of time hopping. Nor did Wanda’s, actually. However—

  He went to the little bar across the room. The floor felt bare, merely carpeted. He’d removed his polar bear rug. Too many visitors had been reproaching him for it. He couldn’t explain to them that it was from tenth-century Greenland, when, far from polar bears being an endangered species, things were oftenest the other way around. And truth to tell, it had gotten rather scruffy. The helmet and crossed spears remained on their wall; nobody could see they were not replicas of Bronze Age work.

  He prepared a stiffish Scotch and soda, charged and lighted his pipe, retired to his study. The armchair received him as an old shoe would. He didn’t let many contemporary people in here. When it happened, they were apt to tell him how much better off he’d be with their brand of personal computer. He’d say, “I’ll look into it,” and change the subject. Most of what they saw on his desk was dummy.

  “Give me the file to present date on Specialist Wanda May Tamberly,” he ordered, adding sufficient information to identify. When he had studied what appeared before him, he pondered, then started a search through related matters. Presently he thought he was on the right track, and called up details. Dusk stole in to surround him. He realized, startled, that he’d been busy for hours and was hungry. Hadn’t even unpacked from his latest trip.

  Too restless to go out, he thawed some hamburger in the microwave, fried it, constructed a large sandwich, cracked a beer for accompaniment, and never noticed how anything tasted. A creative synthesizer could have whipped up a Cordon Bleu meal, but if you based yourself in a milieu before the technology to overleap space-time was developed, you didn’t keep any future stuff around that you didn’t absolutely require, and you kept it hidden or well disguised. When he had finished, the time in California was the third of the hours she had named. He went back to the living room and picked up the phone. Ridiculous, how his heartbeat speeded.

  A woman answered. He recognized her tones. “Mrs. Tamberly? Good evening. This is Manson Everard. Could I speak to Wanda, please?” He should have remembered her parents’ number. It was no large span on his own time line since he’d last called there—though events had been tumultuous. Good kid, comes back to her folks whenever she gets a chance, happy family, not too damn many like that these days. The Midwest of his boyhood, before he went off to war in 1942, was like a dream, a world forever lost, already one with Troy and Carthage and the innocence of the Inuit. He had learned better than to return.

  “Hello!” exclaimed the breathless young voice. “Oh, I’m so glad, this is so kind of you.”

  “Quite all right,” Everard said. “I’ve got a notion of what you have in mind, and yes, it does need talking about. Can you meet me tomorrow afternoon?”

  “Anytime, anywhere. I’m taking leave.” She stopped. Others might overhear. “Vacation, I mean. Whatever’s convenient for you, sir.”

  “The bookshop, then. Let’s say three o’clock.” While her parents weren’t necessarily aware that he was not in the Bay Area at this moment, best was not to rush matters as perceived by them. “Can you save the evening for me too?” Everard blurted.

  “Why, why, of course.” Both abruptly shy, they exchanged only a few more words before hanging up.

  He did need a night’s sleep, and there was in fact considerable accumulated business to handle. Another twilight had fallen, cold and dun around hectic lights, when he entered city headquarters. In the secret room beneath, he checked out a hopper, mounted the saddle, set his destination, touched the controls. The cellar garage that blinked into existence for him was smaller. He went out the camouflaged door and upstairs. Daylight poured through windows.

  This front was a high-class used bookstore. He saw her looking at a volume; she had arrived early. Her hair was sun-bright amidst the freighted shelves, and a dress the color of her eyes fitted close. He approached. “Hello,” he said.

  Almost, she gasped. “Oh! How d-do you do, Agent … Everard.” Strain vibrated through the sounds.

  “Sh,” he cautioned. “Come on back where we can talk.” Two or three customers watched them go down the aisle, but simply with a bit of envy; they were male. “Howdy, Nick,” Everard said as he came to the proprietor. “Okay?” The little man smiled and nodded, though solemnity stared through thick lenses. Everard had sent a message in advance, commandeering his office.

  It too held nothing overtly unusual. Along the walls, filing cabinets squeezed in between more bookcases. Boxes cluttered the floor, papers and tomes the table that acted as a desk. Nick was a genuine bibliophile; perhaps his main reason for serving the Patrol in this small but vital capacity was the ability he gained to go questing in other milieus. Some recent acquisitions, Victorian to judge by their appearance, lay next to the ostensible computer. Everard glanced over the titles. He made no pretense of being an intellectual, but he liked books. The Origin of Tree Worship, British Birds, Catullus, The Holy War—no doubt stuff that some collector would snap up, if the proprietor didn’t decide to keep them for himself.

  “Sit down,” he invited, and pulled out a chair for Tamberly.

  “Thank you.” When she smiled she seemed all at once easier, more herself. Not that anybody ever is, ever again, We can dance around in time all we want, but we don’t escape duration. “You still have your old-fashioned manners, I see.”

  “Country boy. I’m trying to unlearn. Ladies these days have snapped my head off for being condescending, when I thought I was just being polite.” Everard went around the table and seated himself opposite her.

  “Yes,” she sighed, “I suppose it can be harder to keep track of your birth century than to learn your way around in a whole past civilization. I’m finding that out, a little.”

  “How’ve you been? Do you enjoy your work?”

  Enthusiasm flashed.
“Mostly super. Terrific. Splendiferous. No, language doesn’t reach to it.” A shadow fell. She looked away from him. “The drawbacks, well, you understand. I was getting toughened to them. Until now, this thing.”

  He delayed coming to the point. First let him work the worst tension out of her, if he could. “It’s been a spell. I last saw you shortly after your graduation.”—from the Academy; on her personal time line. They’d gone to dinner in Paris, 1925, and afterward wandered along the Seine and around in the Rive Gauche, through a spring evening, and when they stopped for a drink at the Deux Magots a couple of her literary idols were at the same sidewalk café, two tables over, and when he bade her goodnight and goodbye at her parents’ door, 1988, she kissed him. “Nigh on three years since then, for you, hasn’t it been?”

  She nodded. “Busy years for us both, I guess.”

  “Well, the time for me wasn’t that long. I’ve had only two missions worth mentioning.”

  “Really?” she asked, surprised. “Didn’t you return to your place in New York in ’88 when you were through? I mean, you didn’t let it stand months vacant, did you?”

  “I lent—officially, sublet—it to an operative who needed such a base for a task of her own. They’ve got rent control there in these decades, you know. Always guarantees slums, plus decent housing in such short supply that to become a new tenant you’ve got to show more money than is wise for a Patrol agent.”

  “I see.”

  Tamberly had stiffened a little. “Her,” she’s thinking.

  It’s also unwise for a Patrol agent to explain too much. Especially in a case like this. “Messages to me from fellow members were robotically bucked on. If you’d called before yesterday—”

  Whatever pique she felt had dissipated. Her gaze dropped to hands that caught each other in her lap. “I had no reason to, sir,” she said low. “You’d been awfully kind, generous, but … I didn’t want to get pushy.”

  “Nor did I.” The great Unattached overawing the new recruit Unfair. Could be resented. “Though if I’d known so much time was going by for you—”

  Much time indeed, less in lifespan measured by pulsebeats than in life lived, newnesses, strangenesses, troubles, triumphs, gaieties, griefs. And loves? Her form had grown fuller, Everard saw, not in fat but muscle. The bones stood out more strongly than before in a face that weather had often savaged. The real change was subtler. She had been a girl—a young woman, if today’s feminists insisted, but how very young. The girl in her had not died; he doubted she ever quite would. The person across from him remained youthful: yet wholly a woman. His own pulse stumbled.

  He achieved a laugh. “Okay, let’s drop the Alphonse-Gastonette act,” he said. “And please remember, my name isn’t ‘sir.’ Here, by ourselves, we can relax. Wanda.”

  She rallied fast. “Thanks, Manse. I kind of expected this.”

  He drew pipe and tobacco pouch out of his pockets. “And this? If you don’t mind.”

  “No, go ahead.” She smiled. “Since we are not in public.” Unspoken: Bad example, among people for whom smoking’s lethal. Patrol medicine heads off or heals anything that doesn’t kill us outright. You were born in 1924, Manse. You look about forty. But how much duration have you endured? What is your real age?

  He didn’t wish to tell her. Not today. “I raised your file yesterday,” he said. ‘You’ve been doing a crackerjack job.”

  She grew sober. Her eyes took level aim at him. “And will I in my future?”

  “I didn’t ask for that information,” he replied fast. “Discourteous, unethical, and it wouldn’t have been given me unless I could show a damn valid reason. We don’t look into our tomorrows, nor into our friends’.”

  “And nevertheless,” she murmured, “the information is there. Everything you or I will ever do—everything I’ll discover about the life of the past—is known to them uptime.”

  “Hey, we’re talking English, not Temporal. The paradoxes—”

  The tawny head nodded. “Oh, yes. The work has to be done. Has to have been done, somewhere along the line. No point in my doing it if I already knew; and the danger of setting up a cause-and-effect whirlpool—”

  “Besides, neither the past nor the future is cast in concrete. That’s why the Patrol exists. Have we repeated enough indoctrination lecture?”

  “I’m sorry. It’s still sometimes hard for me to, well, comprehend. I have to replay the basic principles in my mind. My work is … straightforward. Like going to an unexplored continent. Nothing to remind me of the problems you cope with.”

  “Sure. I understand.” Everard tamped the pipe hard. “I have no doubt you’ll continue doing first-class work. Your superiors are more than pleased with what you’ve accomplished in Ber—uh—Beringia. Not just the verbal reports and audiovisuals and such, but—well, it’s out of my field, but they say you were finding the fundamental pattern of that natural history. You were making sense of it, in a way that contributes a lot to the total picture.”

  She tensed on her chair. The question rang. “Then why have they pulled me out?”

  He busied himself before applying fire. “Um, as I understand it, you’ve done as much as necessary in Beringia. When you’ve had your well-earned furlough, they’ll put you onto some other aspect of the Pleistocene.”

  “I have not done enough. A hundred solid man-years would be too few.”

  “I know, I know. But you know, or should, the outfit hasn’t got them to spare. We, the scientists uptime and the Patrol itself, we have to settle for broad general outlines and forget about the nesting habits of the cootie-banded bandicoot.”

  She flushed. “You know, or should know, that isn’t what I mean,” she flung back. “I’m talking about the entire circumpolar migration of species, two-way traffic between Asia and America. It’s a unique phenomenon, an ecology in time as well as space. If I can, at the bare least, learn why the mammoth population of Beringia is, was, shrinking that early, when it still flourished on either side—But my project’s been terminated. And all I get is the same runaround you gave me. I’d hoped you wouldn’t.”

  Spirit, Everard thought. Reluctant to wheedle the Unattached man, but ready to tell him off when he seems to deserve it “I’m sorry, Wanda,” he said. “That was not my intention.” After a comforting draught of smoke: “The fact is, those human newcomers change everything. Wasn’t that explained to you?”

  “Yes. After a fashion.” She spoke softly again. “But would my investigations really mess things up? One person, going quietly around on the steppe, in the hills and woods, along the beaches? When I stayed with the Tulat, you know, the aborigines, nobody worried about it.”

  Everard frowned at his pipe. “I’m not familiar with the details,” he admitted. “I boned up yesterday as much as I could in a short time, but that wasn’t a hell of a lot. However, it seems pretty clear, your Tulat aren’t important to the long-range course of events. They vanish, leaving no record, not even as much of a clear-cut trace as the Vinland or Roanoke colonies. The Paleo-Indians become the real pre-Columbian Americans. And at this earliest entry of theirs, who can tell what might make a critical difference, might upset the entire future?” He raised a hand. “Sure, sure. It’s extremely unlikely. Little waves and wrinkles in the continuum will almost certainly smooth out, get history back where it belongs. That’s true of your … Tulat. But as for the Paleo-Indians, at this stage, who can guarantee the situation is stable? Also, the Ancient American office wants their history observed as their cultures develop uncontam—freely.”

  Tamberly clenched her fists. “Ralph Corwin is off to live among them!”

  “Yeah. Well, he’s a pro at that sort of thing, a high-rated anthropologist. I checked out his record too. He’s got an excellent background, from his work with later generations. He’ll minimize his own effect on these people, while he learns enough about them to give him a handle on what really happened—same as you’ve worked to find out what really happened among the animals and
plants.”

  Everard roiled smoke around in his mouth, loosed it streaming from his lips. “That’s the basic problem, Wanda. The newcomers are bound to interact with the aborigines. It may be slightly, it may be heavily, but it will happen and could well prove very complicated. We can’t allow an extra anachronism on the scene. That could scramble events beyond any repair. Especially since you don’t have Corwin’s skills. Can’t you see?

  “The upshot is, your ecological studies are valuable, but the human studies now take absolute priority. No reflection on you, but it became necessary to end your project. You’ll get another, and they’ll try to make sure you can carry it to completion.”

  “Yes, I do see. This has all been explained to me.” She sat mute for a space. When once more she looked squarely at him, her voice was calm.

  “It’s more than my science, Manse. I fear for the We—for my Tulat. They’re dear people. Primitive, often childlike, but good. Boundlessly kind and hospitable to me, not because I was a wonder and powerful, but because that’s their nature. What’s going to become of them? What did? Their kind was lost, forgotten. How? I am afraid of the answer, Manse.”

  He nodded. “Corwin reported his opinion, confidentially, after he’d interviewed you. He seconded the recommendation that your assignment in Beringia be terminated, because he feared you might succumb to … temptation, the temptation to interfere. Or, at least, untrained, unsupervised, you might do so without knowing it. Don’t think he’s a bastard. He has his duty. He did suggest you could transfer to an earlier period.”

  Tamberly shook her head. “That’s no use. As rapidly as conditions were changing in the interstadial, I’d essentially have to start over from scratch. And what I found out would not be much help in the era of human migration that the Patrol is interested in.”

  “Yeah. The suggestion was vetoed on those grounds. But give Corwin credit.”

  “As a matter of fact, I do.” Her words quickened. “I’ve been thinking hard. And this is what I’ve come up with. My work is worth finishing—the rough sketch that’s all we can ever hope for, but that will be mighty useful. And maybe I could help the Tulat, just a little, very carefully, under supervision, not to change their destiny or anything but just to take some pain out of those few insignificant individual lives. Dr. Corwin hinted—we went out to dinner—At the time, I dismissed the notion out of hand, but since then I’ve been thinking. What if I didn’t go back to Aryuk, to the Tulat, but joined him among the newcomers?”