The Shield of Time

by Poul Anderson

  Settlement thickened as she neared the seaboard. A small city occupied lower Manhattan. Its cathedral (?) dwarfed the St. Patrick’s she remembered. The style was foreign to her, massive, many-tiered, brutally powerful. “Enough to scare off Billy Graham,” she quavered at her mute communicator.

  Several ships lay in the harbor, and she got a good look from on high, through her magnifying optical, at one that was standing out the Narrows. A broad-beamed, three-masted square-rigger, it resembled a merchantman of about 1600, according to pictures she had seen, though even to her landlubber’s eye the differences of detail were countless. A flag of lilies on a blue field flew on the staff. At the mainmast top another, yellow and white, displayed crossed keys.

  Blackness surged over her. She was well out to sea before she fought halfway clear of it.

  Go ahead. Scream.

  That steadied her more. The trick was not to let it go on and on, feeding hysteria, but to blow off emotion till you could think again. She loosened her painfully tight grip on the handlebars, worked her shoulder blades to free up those muscles, and was into reasoning about the situation before she noticed, with a harsh little laugh, that she’d forgotten to unclench her jaw.

  The cycle flew itself ever farther. Ocean heaved immense, empty, a thousand shifting greens, grays, blues. Split air rumbled and whistled. Cold eddied past the force-screen and around her.

  No doubt left. The terrible thing has happened. Something has changed the past, and the world I knew—my world, Manse’s, Uncle Steve’s, everybody’s and everything’s—is gone. The Time Patrol is gone. No, I’m thinking wrongly. They never were. I exist without parents, grandparents, country, history, without cause, a random thing tossed up by quantum chaos.

  She couldn’t grasp it. Though she put it into Temporal, which had a grammar made to deal with the paradoxes of time travel, the concept wouldn’t come real to her in the way that something as abstract as evolutionary biology was nevertheless real, hand-graspable. This state of affairs set logic at naught and made reality a cloud-shadow.

  Oh, sure, they explained the theory to us at the Academy, but as a sketch, like a freshman general science course required of an English major. My class of cadets wasn’t being prepared for police work or anything like that. We’d be field scientists, off in prehistory, when humans were few and it was practically impossible to cause any changes that the course of events wouldn’t soon compensate for. We’d go on our expeditions in the same straightforward way that Stanley went to explore darkest Africa.

  What to do, what to do?

  Leap back to the Pleistocene, I guess. It should be safely far downtime. Manse should be there still. (No, “still” is meaningless, isn’t it?) He’ll take charge. He’s hinted at having already (“already”) experienced something of this kind. Maybe now I can get him to tell me what it was. (Maybe I should tell him I know he’s in love with me, the dear sweet bear. I’ve been too bashful, or afraid, or unsure of my own feelings…. God damn it, woman, will you stop this woolgathering?)

  A pod of whale passed below. One spyhopped, a leap right out of the waves, water fountaining and tumbling from the mighty flanks, white under the sun.

  Tamberly’s blood quickened. “Yeah,” she scoffed aloud, “run right off to the big strong man and let him kiss the universe and make it well for itsy-bitsy sweeturns.” Here she was. The least she could do was get a better idea of this world, bring back a report on it rather than a sob story. Just a few hours’ scouting, nothing reckless. Manse had said more than once, “In our job there’s no such thing as too much information.” What she discovered might give him a clue to the source of the disaster.

  “In short,” said Tamberly, “we fight back.” Resolution hardened; for a moment she imagined the Liberty Bell being cast, and herself ringing it. A minute longer she pondered, then set the space jump for London and touched its button.

  The hour was late, local time, but this high latitude remained daylit. The city spread wide along both sides of the Thames, hazed by coal smoke. She guessed the population as about a million. The Tower was there, and Westminster Abbey might be the same though she wasn’t sure, and the spires of other ancient churches soared above roofs; but a giant squatted on the hill of St. Paul’s. The dreary sprawl of industry and suburbs was absent. Countryside pressed close around, glowing golden-green under the long light. She wished she were in a state to appreciate the beauty.

  What next? Where to? Paris, I guess. She reset.

  It was larger than yonder London, maybe twice as big. A spiderweb of paved roads radiated from it. Traffic upon them and the river went heavy, walkers, horsemen, carriages, wagons drawn by oxen or mules, barges, sailboats, oared galleys on whose decks cannon gleamed. Several turreted and battlemented stone forts, if that was what they were, reared among lesser buildings. More attractive were half a dozen palaces, not wholly unlike some she had seen in Venice. The île de la Cité held one, but also a temple dwarfing its English counterpart. Tamberly’s heart thudded. Here’s where more of the action is, much more. Let’s cruise a hit.

  She flew in slow outward spirals, peering. Whoever glanced upward from those tangled lanes perhaps saw a speck of brightness in the deepening blue of the sunset sky. But she, she beheld no Arc de Triomphe, no Tuileries, no Bois de Boulogne, no cheery little sidewalk cafes….

  Versailles. Or thereabouts. A village clustered beside a highway, more variegated and less constricted than the peasant communities, evidently serving the city, and yes, a great dwelling two miles off amidst a parkscape of woods, lawns, and gardens. Tamberly moved in its direction.

  The core of it was once a castle, she judged, a strong-hold; and fieldpieces rested in the rear courtyard. Over centuries it had been remodeled and wings had been added, large-windowed, spacious and gracious, for modern habitation. However, sentries paced to and fro on every side. They wore scarlet uniforms striped with gold, beneath fancy helmets; but the rifles on their shoulders looked plenty businesslike. From a tall staff in front, a flag rippled on the evening breeze. She recognized the sign of the keys that she had noticed on the ship.

  Somebody important lives here. …Hold on. From near the western horizon, rays streamed across grass where deer and peacocks strolled, and over a formal garden around which at intervals stood trellised rose bowers. What’s that blink from inside yonder one?

  Tamberly descended. If somebody noticed, what the devil could they do about it? Well, careful; they’ve got those shootin’ irons. Fifty feet aloft, she could look slantwise into the arbors opposite. Set for optical amplification—Yes, in each, another soldier. Why do they keep watch, from hidey-holes, on a garden?

  She space-jumped high, flitted to a position directly overhead, and turned her viewer downward. Vision sprang at her. She jerked back. “Can’t be!”

  No, it was, it was. “Stop that shivering,” she rapped at herself, with scant effect. Alertness, though, grew doubly keen. Her mind sped in lightning chains of reason, guess, hope, horror.

  The grounds near the palace were of the general kind she remembered from her Versailles, strictly patterned, with graveled walks among hedges, flower beds, pollarded trees, fountains, statuary. This was the smallest of the plots, about the size of a football field. It must formerly have been like the rest; the stonework was still there. But today the layout formed one big symbol, defined by colored tiles bordering its beds. It was a stylized hourglass on a heraldic shield. A circle surrounded it and a red line slashed across.

  The emblem of the Time Patrol.

  No. Not quite. That circle and line—Coincidence? Impossible. Here under my eyes is the signal I’ve strained my ears for.

  Tamberly saw her hand positioned over the controls to push for descent. She pulled it back as if the bar had gone white-hot. No! You whoop and swoop and—why do you think those guards are waiting?

  She shuddered. What’s a circled red stroke on top of a symbol mean? Why, in the twentieth century, at least, it means “Don’t.” Prohibited. V
erboten. Danger. No parking. No smoking. No admittance. Get out. Stay out.

  Only I can’t, can I? That’s the Patrol emblem.

  Shadow flowed across the world. A gilt weather vane on the palace flashed once and went dark. Also at Tamberly’s altitude, the sun slipped from sight. Early stars trembled in dusk. The cold on high deepened. Wind had died and silence crowded inward.

  Oh, Lordy, Lordy, I feel so alone. I’d better skite back to my nice Stone Age and report this. Manse can organize a rescue expedition.

  She stiffened. “Nyet,” she said to the stars. Not till she’d used up all her options. If the world of the Patrol had been destroyed, then the remnants of the Patrol had more to do than bail out one marooned comrade. Or two. Should I bust in bawling and distract them from their real duty? Or should I do whatever I can on my own?

  She swallowed hard I am … expendable, I guess.

  And if she did bring Manse a victory—

  Blood heat thrust the night chill from her. She crouched in the saddle and thought.

  A time traveler, who might or might not be a Patrol agent, had replanted that garden, or gotten it replanted. That could only be as a signal to any other who might come by. The person wouldn’t have gone to the trouble if he or she were in possession of a vehicle; its communicator would serve so much better.

  Therefore the person—Let’s dub him or her X, for the sake of originality, and use “heesh” for the pronoun—was stranded. Up the famous crick with no paddle. Damn it, stop these childish quips! If X were otherwise a free agent, the insigne alone would be the thing to use, and in fact heesh could have added more: for instance, an arrow pointing to a repository for a written account. Therefore, probably the bar meant, “Danger. Don’t land.” Those gunmen indicated the same; likewise the estate itself, isolated and defensible. X was a prisoner here. Apparently a prisoner with some freedom, some influence over hiser keepers, since heesh had talked them into planting and bordering those flower beds. Nevertheless, heesh was closely guarded, and any new arrivals would be taken into custody, for whatever use the lord of the manor wanted to make of them.

  Will they? We’ll see about that.

  Over and over, while the stars came forth, Tamberly counted her assets. They were pathetically few. She could fly, or she could spring instantaneously from one spot to another, into and out of the deepest dungeon or the strongest strongpoint—unless and until a bullet dropped her from the saddle—but she didn’t know her way around or where X might be or anything. She could knock a man out at short range with a squeeze on her stun pistol, but meanwhile the rest of them might be everywhere around. Maybe her advent would scare them off in a superstitious frenzy, but she doubted that—all those preparations, as well as whatever the big cheese had learned from X—and it was too long a chance to take, a worse bet than a state lottery. How about doubling around in time, getting a disguise somewhere, spying things out? No, that meant leaving her cycle, with the risks that that entailed. And she had no idea of local customs, manners, life. While her Spanish was fluent, her French had long since fallen down in a cloud of rust, and besides, she doubted Spanish or French or English was much like what she’d ever heard before.

  No wonder X left a warning. Maybe heesh was telling every Patrolman, “Sheer off. Forget me. Save yourself.”

  Tamberly pressed her lips together. I repeat, we’ll see about that.

  As if the sun had suddenly risen: Yes! We’ll see.

  The sun did rise, standing at noon one year earlier. Gardeners were at work around the message, raking, pruning, sweeping.

  Ten years earlier, brightly clad men and darkly clad women promenaded among beds in a simple geometrical array.

  Tamberly flung a laugh at the wind. “Okay, we’ve got you bracketed.”

  The skipping, blink-blink-blink, sun and rain, actions and configurations of people, dizzied her. She ought to go slower. No, she was too wired. Of course, she needn’t check every month of every year. The emblem. The not-emblem. The emblem again. Okay, they tore out the old stuff in March 1984 and the new was doing well in June—

  Toward the end, she proceeded day by day, and knew it would have to become hour by hour, at last minute by minute. Fatigue weighted bones and made eyeballs smolder. She withdrew, found a meadow on a forested Dordogne hillside where nobody else was near, ate and drank of her supplies, soaked up sunshine, finally slept.

  Return to the job. She had grown quite steady, coolly watchful.

  25 March 1984, 1337 hours. Gray weather, low clouds, wind noisy across fields and in trees not yet leafed, slight spatters of rain. (Had the weather been the same this day in the destroyed world? Probably not. There, humans had cut down the vast American forests, plowed the plains, filled skies and rivers with chemicals. They also invented liberty, eradicated smallpox, sent spacecraft aloft.) Two men paced over the stripped and trenched garden. One was in a gold-and-scarlet robe, with something halfway between a crown and a miter on his head. The other, at his side, wore the coat and baggy pants Tamberly had seen elsewhere. He was the taller, lean and gray-haired. Behind them stepped six of the liveried soldiers, rifles at port.

  For minutes Tamberly watched, till the knowledge crystallized in her: Yes, they’re discussing the exact plan of the new arrangement.

  Here goes. For broke.

  She’d met danger before, sometimes purposely. Now was the same. Everything slowed down, the world became a dancing mosaic of details but she plucked forth those she needed, fear scuttled out of her way, she aimed herself and shot.

  Cycle and rider appeared six feet before the pair. “Time Patrol!” Tamberly yelled, perhaps needlessly. “To me, quick!” She worked the stun pistol. The robed man crumpled. That gave her a clear field for the soldiers.

  The lean man Stood stupefied. “Hurry!” she cried. He lurched forward. A guard brought rifle down, aimed, fired. The crack went flat through the wind. The lean man staggered.

  Tamberly left her vehicle. He fell into her arms. She dragged him back. A buzz passed her head. She lowered him across the front saddle, vaulted into the buddy seat, leaned over his body to the controls. Now we skite after help. A third bullet spanged and whined off the metal.

  18,244 B. C.

  Everard left his hopper in the garage and started for his room. Some who had been at Rignano were appearing too. Most had gone elsewhere, housing being limited at any single post. All would stand by till success had been confirmed. Those who were staying at the Pleistocene lodge made for the common room, exuberant and loud, to celebrate. Everard wasn’t in that mood. He wanted merely a long hot shower, a long stiff drink, and sleep. A night’s forgetfulness. Tomorrow and its memories would arrive bloody soon enough.

  Shouts and laughter pursued him down the hall. He turned a corner, and there she was.

  They both jarred to a halt. “I thought I heard—” she began. She sped toward him. “Manse, oh, Manse!”

  The collision nearly bowled him over, in his condition. They caught hold of each other. Mouth sought mouth. It was a while before they came up for air.

  “I thought you were gone,” he groaned against her cheek. Her hair smelled like sunshine. “I thought you must have been trapped in the false world and you’d … go out … the light turned off … when it did.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said as unevenly. “I didn’t stop to think you’d worry. Figured, instead, you w-would need time to find out things, get organized, without us underfoot. So I jumped to a m-month after I’d left here. Been waiting two days, so scared about you.”

  “Like me about you.” Understanding broke upon him. Still holding her by the waist, he stepped back a pace and looked into the blue eyes. Slowly, he asked, “What do you mean, ‘us’?”

  “Why, Keith Denison and me. He’s told me you’re friends. I hauled him clear and brought him—Manse, what’s wrong?”

  His hands fell to his sides. “Are you telling me you found yourself in an obviously altered future and stayed?”

  “What w
as I supposed to do?”

  “What they taught you at the Academy.” His voice rose. “Couldn’t you be bothered to remember? What every other agent and civilian traveler who arrived in the changed world had the elementary common sense to do, if conditions didn’t prevent. Hop straight back to the departure point, keep your mouth shut till you could report it to the nearest Patrol brass, and follow whatever orders you were given. You fluffhead,” he raged, “if you’d gotten stuck there, nobody would ever have come after you. That world doesn’t exist any more. You wouldn’t have! I assumed you’d had bad luck, not that you were an idiot.”

  Whitening, she clenched her fists. “I m-m-meant to bring you a report. Information. It might have helped you, mightn’t it? And I, I did save Keith. Now you can go to hell.”

  The defiance collapsed. She shivered, struggled against tears, and stammered, “No, I’m sorry, I guess it was a, a breach of discipline, but my training and experience didn’t cover anything like this—” Stiffening: “No. No excuses. Sir, I did wrong.”

  His own wrath vanished. “Oh, God, Wanda. You’re in the right. I shouldn’t have barked at you. It’s just I’d taken you for lost and—” He managed a smile. “No officer worth his salt farts around about regs when breaking them’s led to success. You did save my old pal from becoming nothing? I’m going to put a commendation in your file, Specialist Tamberly, and suggest a raise in rank for you.”

  “I—I—Let’s do something, Manse, before I bawl. Want to see Keith? He’s in bed. Took a wound, but it’s mending.”

  “Suppose I get cleaned up first,” he said, as anxious as she to find firmer ground. “After that, you tell me what happened.”

  “And you tell me, okay?” She cocked her head. “You know, we needn’t wait. We can talk while you—Manse, I believe you’re blushing.”

  Exhaustion had steamed out of him. Temptation whistled. No, he decided. Better not push my luck. And Keith’d be hurt if I didn’t visit him right away. “If you want, sure.”