The Shield of Time

by Poul Anderson

  Like before the white man came. A few Indian camps here and there, I suppose. Could the temporal part of this hopper have developed a collywobble, and I landed pastward of the twentieth century? Never heard of any such thing, but neither have I ever heard of any high tech that was not highly temperamental. Like a calming hand laid upon her, the knowledge came that the Time Patrol had operatives someplace at every moment of a million years or more.

  She activated her communicator. The radio bands were silent. Wind shrilled, stronger at this altitude than below. She felt how cold she was. Her clothing was blouse, slacks, sandals. This vehicle wasn’t equipped for the fancier sorts of transmission, like neutrino modulation, but the Patrol used radio freely in eras before Marconi, or was it before Hertz or Clerk Maxwell or who? Maybe nobody happened to be sending. “Hello, hello, Specialist Wanda Tamberly calling…. Come in, please come in ….” Shouldn’t there be a set of beacons for her to home on? Could she be too distant from any to receive? That didn’t figure, when even the scientists of her milieu detected signals of a few watts across the Solar System. But she was no transistor tripper.

  Jim Erskine was. He could make electrons dance a fandango. They’d gone together for a while, students at Stanford. If Jim were here—But she’d put such people behind her forever when she joined the Patrol. Her folks too, all blood kin except Uncle Steve; oh, she visited, she lied about her wonderful job that kept her so much on the go; nevertheless—Loneliness smote like the wind.

  “Better get someplace warm and take stock,” she muttered. “Especially if the someplace serves hot buttered rum.” However feeble, the jape encouraged her. She sent the machine slanting downward across the Bay.

  Pelican and cormorant winged in their thousands. Sea lions basked along island shores. On the eastern side she found shelter in a redwood grove, majesty through whose shade sunlight cast golden spatters, a brook purled, fish swam and leaped. Desolation is relative, she thought.

  Dismounting, she kicked off her sandals and did a few minutes’ stationary jogging on the soft duff. Warmed, she opened the luggage carrier behind the buddy seat to check what her assets were.

  Damn skimpy. Standard emergency stuff, helmet, stun pistol, isotopic battery, flashlight, glowlight, water bottle, food bars, small tool kit, small medical kit. A bag holding the few changes of clothes, toothbrush, comb, et cetera that she’d brought with her to the resort; generally she’d worn garments kept in stock for guests. A purse, with the usual late-twentieth-century American female clutter. A couple of books she’d read at odd moments. Like most of those agents who operated away from their birth milieus and didn’t maintain lodgings there, she had a locker at the local station where she kept necessary stuff, including money. Her plan had been to pick up what she wanted and taxi to her parents’ home, since it chanced they couldn’t conveniently meet her at the airport. Had they been able to, a more elaborate deception would have been required.

  Oh, Dad, Mother, Susie. Yes, and the cats too.

  Slowly, the serenity around her smoothed down despair. The thing to do, she decided, was not to try springing straight back to the Pleistocene—though God damn, wouldn’t it be good to see Manse there, big and solid and able?—or flicker blindly through time in this neighborhood. If she couldn’t trust the temporal drive, her best bet was to head spatially east. Maybe she’d find European colonies yonder, or maybe she’d have to continue overseas, but eventually she was bound to make a Patrol contact.

  She donned her old jacket from backpacking trips that abruptly felt very remote, and laced stout shoes over socks on her feet. Helmet secured to head, pistol to hip, she was as ready for trouble as she’d ever be. Remounting, she steered her hopper out among the huge trunks and into the sky.

  Green bordered the Sacramento and San Joaquin Rivers; elsewhere tawniness passed beneath her, no trace of irrigation, agriculture, highways, towns. Impatience prickled. This jet plane speed was too flinking slow. She could go supersonic, but that was still a crawl and would be extravagant of energy reserves she might need later. For several minutes she mustered nerve, then set the space controls and gingerly touched the button.

  The Sierra peaks lay below her, the desert beyond, and the sun stood as much higher as she gauged it ought. So she could safely bypass distance. “Yippee!”

  Proceed by jumps—An illimitable grassy plain shimmered under the wind. Thunderheads towered in the south. The radio remained mute.

  Tamberly bit her lip. This wasn’t right. She spent a while skipping above the prairies. Bird life was rich, but the land reached strangely empty. She spied a herd of wild horses before at last she came above some buffalo. Their abundance should have darkened the ground for miles….

  Smoke rose from the right bank of the Missouri. She hovered far up, activated her optical, and magnified. Yes, people, and they kept horses, yet this was a village of sod huts, tilled fields outside the stockade….

  Shouldn’t be! Once they became riders, the plains Indians turned almost overnight into warriors and nomadic hunters, living off the buffalo till white men slaughtered those, also almost overnight. Had she chanced on some such moment of transition as, say, 1880? No, because then she’d have seen spoor of the whites everywhere, railroads, towns, ranches, farms laid out in homesteaders’ quarter sections….

  Remembrance struck. The horse barbarians weren’t in any balance with nature either. If they’d been left alone, they’d have wiped out the buffalo themselves, slower but just as surely.

  No. Please, no. Don’t let this be.

  Tamberly fled on eastward.

  1137 A. D.

  Going from Ice Age France to medieval Sicily by way of Germany earlier that same year did not strike Everard as funny until he chanced to think about it. His chuckle clanked. Time travel was like that, including what it did to people’s minds, the stuff they came to take for granted.

  The fact was that the contemporary base in Palermo was a one-man operation. Its front was a shop which, with the live-in family and staff, filled its only building. There was no subterranean addition. The likelihood of you and your vehicle popping out of thin air, being seen and exciting comment, was prohibitive. Patrol facilities were to be expanded later, starting in 1140, when Norman Sicily really began to gain importance. But this didn’t happen, because King Roger II died in battle and the future that led to the Patrol was aborted.

  Mainz had long been a major city of the Holy Roman Empire, and so headquarters for that milieu were there. At the moment the realm was a loose, often turbulent confederation across what a twentieth-century man would regard as, approximately, Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Austria, Czechoslovakia, pieces of northern Italy and the Balkans. Everard recalled Voltaire’s wisecrack that it was neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire. However, in the twelfth century it was perhaps a bit less undeserving of the name.

  On the day Everard arrived, Emperor Lothair was in Italy with an army, helping press his claims and those of Pope Innocent against the claims of Roger and Pope Anacletus. Turmoil would follow his death, until Frederick Barbarossa finally won full control. Meanwhile the main action would be in Rome, to which milieu HQ was to shift in 1198—except that it wouldn’t, it hadn’t, because no Patrol ever existed to establish that office.

  Today, though, Mainz could provide what Everard needed.

  Upstairs from the garage he found the director. They retired to a private office. It was a room of handsomely carved wainscots, well-furnished by standards of the period; there were actually two chairs, as well as stools and a small table. A leaded window admitted some light. More came in from another, unglazed, its shutters open to the summer day. Through it rumbled, groaned, creaked, clopped, chattered, whistled, buzzed the noises of the city. Through it also drifted the odors of hearths, horse manure, privies, and graveyards. Across a narrow, filthy, bustling street Everard saw a beautiful half-timbered fagade; beyond its roof, cathedral towers rose in majesty.

  “Welcome, Herr Freiagent, welcome.�
� Otto Koch waved at a carafe and beakers on the table. “Would you care for a little wine? A good year.” He was German himself—born 1891, studying medieval history when called into the army of the Second Reich in 1914, recruited by the Patrol while adrift in bitterness and bewilderment after that war. The years here-now had given him a comfortable, middle-aged look, a bit paunchy in his fur-trimmed robe. It was deceptive. You didn’t keep a post like his without being plenty competent.

  “Thanks, but not at once,” Everard replied. “Can I sneak a smoke?”

  “Tobacco? Oh, yes. Nobody will disturb us.” Koch laughed and pointed. “That bowl is my ashtray. People know I burn a rare Oriental wood in it when I want to smother the municipal stinks. A rich merchant can afford such luxuries.” From a humidor disguised as a saint’s image he took a cigar and lighter. Everard declined the one he was offered. “I’ll stay with my old friend, if you don’t mind.” He hauled forth briar pipe and pouch. “Uh, I don’t suppose you can indulge often.”

  “No, sir. Difficult enough to handle my proper work. My public persona takes up most of my time, you realize. The requirements of the guild, the Church—Ah, well.” Koch lit up and settled happily into his chair. No need to worry about ill effects. Patrol immunizations, which did not employ the vaccine principle, prevented cancer and arteriosclerosis, along with the infectious diseases that came and went through the ages. “What can we do for you?”

  Turning grim, Everard explained.

  Horror stared at him. “What? This very year a, a cancellation? But that is—unheard of.”

  “Unheard of by you. And you will keep it strictly secret, understand?”

  The habits of disguise took over. Koch crossed himself, again and again. Or maybe he was a sincere Catholic.

  “Don’t be afraid.” Everard spoke deliberately.

  The anger he provoked flushed out dismay. “It is natural that one fears for one’s workers, comrades, yes, the family I have in this era.”

  “None of you will disappear at the critical moment. What will happen is that you stop receiving visitors from the future, and no new posts are started up after this year.”

  The enormity grew and grew before Koch. He sagged back. “The future,” he whispered. “My childhood, parents, brothers, everybody I loved at home—I cannot now go see them again? I did. They believe I moved to America but make a few return visits, until Hitler comes to power and I stay away—They did believe.” He had fallen into twentieth-century German. No language but Temporal had the grammar to cope with time travel.

  “You can help me restore what we’ve all lost,” Everard said.

  Koch rallied admirably fast. “Very good. We shall. Forgive my ignorance. It is long ago in my lifespan that I studied the theory at the Academy, and that was only superficially, because this thing is not supposed to happen, is it? The Patrol guards against it. What has gone wrong?”

  “That’s what I hope to find out.”

  Provided with appropriate garb, Everard was introduced around as a trader from England. It accounted for any gaucheries. Nobody had seen him come in the door, but this was a large, busy household-shop, and butlers were for royalty. Folk seldom encountered him anyway during his three-day stay. They gathered that he and the master closeted themselves to discuss confidential matters. The growth of cities in size, wealth, and power was providing untold commercial opportunities.

  The hidden section of Mainz HQ possessed an ample database and machinery for putting information directly into brains. Everard acquired a thorough knowledge of recent and current events. No human memory could have contained the details of laws and mores, as wildly as they varied from place to place, but he learned enough that he probably wouldn’t make disastrous mistakes. He added to his stock of languages. Medieval Latin and Greek he already had. German, French, and Italian were still sets of dialects, not always mutually comprehensible. He gained sufficient to get by. Arabic he decided against; any Saracens with whom he might deal would almost certainly know lingua franca, at least.

  He also made his plans and preparations. He intended first to seek the Patrolman in Palermo, shortly after the news of Roger’s fall, to confer and get a feel for the milieu. There was no substitute for direct experience. That meant he must enter the city inconspicuously and plausibly. Yet he had damn well better have force in reserve.

  Besides his own strength and skills, the force consisted of an officer detached from regular duty. Karel Novak found himself on the run from his Czechoslovakian government in 1950. He was mightily glad when an acquaintance hid him, persuaded him to take some curious tests, and turned out to be a Patrol recruiting agent who’d had an eye on this young fellow. Novak served at several different locales “before” being posted to imperial Mainz. He was the straightforward policeman type who dealt directly with time travelers, counselor, helper, now and then restraining somebody from a forbidden action or rescuing somebody from a bad situation. His public persona was a general-purpose servant of Master Otto, gofer, arranger, bodyguard on the road. He was well informed about the environs, of course, but needn’t be expert, since he was admittedly from the backwoods of Bohemia. The tale of how he came this far, when most commoners weren’t supposed to move around, was plausible, mendacious, and usually good for a drink or two in a tavern. He was a dark-haired, squat, powerful man with narrow eyes in a broad face.

  “Are you certain we should not tell others than him what this is all about?” Koch asked when he and Everard said their private goodbye.

  The American shook his head. “Not unless a clear need for somebody to know comes up. I tell you, we’ve got trouble in carload lots without creating unnecessary sub-effects. Those could have consequences of their own that might get out of hand. So you will not drop any hint to your associates, or to any traveler who comes by in the normal course of affairs.”

  “You say that soon none will.”

  “Not from the future, most likely. A few may have reason to jump here from somewhere else in the present or the past.”

  “But you tell me visits will dwindle till we have none. My people are bound to notice and wonder.”

  “Stall them. Listen, if we resolve this and restore the proper course of history, the hiatus will never have happened. As far as Patrollers stationed here are concerned, everything will always have been normal.” Or what passes for normal along the twisting time lanes.

  “But I will have had quite a different experience.”

  “Up until the turning-point moment, sometime later this year. Then, if we’re lucky, an agent will come and tell you it’s all okay. You won’t remember anything you did thenceforth, because ‘now’ you won’t do those things. Instead, you’ll simply proceed with your life and work as you did before today.”

  “You mean that while I am in the wrong world, I must know that everything I do and see and think will become nothing?”

  “If we succeed. I know, the prospect for you isn’t quite pleasant, but it’s not really like death. We count on your sense of duty.”

  “Oh, I will carry on as best I can, but—Brr!”

  “We may fail,” Everard warned. “In that case, you’ll join the other survivors of the Patrol when they meet to decide what to do.” Will I be there myself? Very possibly not. Killed in action. I almost hope so. It’ll be a nightmare world for our sort.

  He thrust away memories of his own that no longer referred to anything real. He mustn’t think about Wanda, either. “I’m on my way,” he said. “Good luck to us both.”

  “God be with us,” Koch replied low. They shook hands.

  I’ll skip any prayers. I’m too bewildered already.

  Everard met Novak in the garage and took the rear saddle of a hopper. The Czech had been studying a geographical display on the control board. He set destination coordinates and activated.

  1137 α A. D.

  Immediately the vehicle poised on antigravity, high aloft. Stars gleamed, a brilliant horde such as you rarely saw in the late twentieth centu
ry. The circle of the world below was divided between sheening water and a rugged land mass full of darknesses. The air lay cold and quiet, not a motor anywhere on Earth.

  Novak set his optical for light amplification and magnification and peered downward. “Quite deserted, sir,” he deemed. He had already scouted ahead and found this site.

  Everard studied it likewise. It was a ravine in one of the mountains that formed a semicircle behind the narrow plain around the bay on which Palermo stood. Terrain in the vicinity was steep, rocky, nurturing only scrub growth, therefore doubtless left alone by shepherds and hunters. “You’ll wait here?” he inquired needlessly.

  “Yes, sir, until I get further orders.” It was equally needless to say that Novak would duck elsewhere to eat and sleep, returning within minutes, and would disappear should he notice anybody headed his way in spite of the uninviting surroundings. He’d be back as soon as possible.

  “Good soldier.” Who does what he’s told and keeps any inconvenient questions behind his teeth. “First bring me to the highway. Fly low. I want to know how to find you in case I have to.”

  That would be if, for some reason, he couldn’t use his communicator. It was housed in what looked like a religious medallion hung around his neck under his clothes. The range ought to be adequate, but you never knew. (You dared not foreknow.) Novak was well-armed, in addition to the stun pistol that every cycle had in its luggage box. Everard, though, couldn’t be, without risking trouble with the local authorities. At least, he couldn’t overtly be. He did carry a knife like most men, a utensil for eating and odd jobs; a staff; and a variety of martial skills. Anything more might make somebody too curious.