by Bob Mayer
Dane nodded. “Thirty-two thousand, four-hundred and fifteen Before Present.”
“That’s a lot of numbers,” Roland said.
Dane quickly explained what Before Present meant.
Scout spoke up. “What’s the break point between history and prehistory?”
Edith took that. “Prehistory is when no written records exist. The break point isn’t a clean one. The transition period is after a society has developed writing, but before the first historians started making notes. Essentially, this is around the fourth millennium B.C.”
“I’m going back way before that,” Moms said. “Were there humans? Neanderthals running around? What’s the lay of the land?”
“The Neanderthals were extinct in Europe by then,” Edith said.”There were humans.”
“Where am I going?” Moms asked.
Dane got up and wrote on the board: Chauvet Cave, Southern France, 6 June 32,415 Years BP (Before Present).
“The good news,” Dane said, “is we’re pretty sure what your mission is about.”
“The cave drawings,” Eagle said.
“Exactly,” Dane said.
“The earliest drawings date from that time period,” Edith said. She reached into her satchel then retrieved several images that she passed around to Moms.
“A caveman did these?” Roland asked as they went by him. “Pretty cool.”
“Why do you assume it’s a man?” Edith asked.
“Or cavewoman,” Roland quickly amended.
“You’ll get all the data and interpretations in the download,” Edith said, “but the Chauvet drawings are among the first art ever discovered. They are unique even when compared with other, earlier cave drawings. There are some that were discovered in Indonesia recently, and Spain, which date several thousand years earlier, but the Chauvet drawings are much more advanced. They mark a distinct advance in conceptualizing and actual implementation.
“The artist, male or female, scraped the wall, smoothing and cleaning it, before painting. The backdrop for the drawings is lighter than the surrounding walls.” She got up then walked around to stand behind Moms. She pointed. “Note there’s a three-dimensional quality to the drawings. They even have a suggestion of motion. Of movement. That’s incredibly hard to generate in a two-dimensional drawing.”
“So, I’m going to a cave where somebody is drawing on the wall over thirty thousand years in the past,” Moms said. “And...?”
“The vagaries of the variables,” Dane said. “We don’t know what happened in that cave. Who that person was. Why they decided to draw those images. All we know is that is one of the earliest pieces of human art we know of.”
“Apparently, the Shadow knows of it, too,” Moms said.
“Apparently,” Dane agreed.
“Hold up,” Doc interrupted. “I thought one of the limits of time travel was no traveling into the future, and no traveling before recorded history.”
“That was what we thought were the parameters,” Dane said. “We still can’t go forward in time, because it doesn’t exist yet. It hasn’t been formed. We didn’t think we could go back before recorded history because we thought the Gates needed to be able to latch onto something specific when they open. If we don’t have a record of the time, we don’t have that anchor. I guess no one thought to look back at something so far in the past that still exists, like these cave drawings.”
“The Shadow did,” Scout said.
“They’re also the one creating the bubble,” Dane said. “So they have the capability.”
“When are we now?” Eagle asked, and it took a few moments for everyone to process the four words, except for Dane.
“The time and place of the Possibility Palace is the most closely-guarded secret we have,” Dane said. “The last thing we want is for the Shadow to punch a Gate through to here and now. It would be devastating if they launched a direct attack on the Possibility Palace.”
“The view outside my hospital room,” Eagle said, “appears to me, at least, to be prehistory. I’ve seen no creatures, though. Nothing flying. Nothing living besides the grassland.”
“Almost all of you have had a run-in with an agent of the Shadow,” Dane said. “To be frank, you’re the last people we’re going to be sharing that secret with.”
“Why are some cave drawings so important?” Moms asked, getting back on mission.
Dane glanced at Edith.
“The mind is what sets humans apart from other animals,” Edith said. “It’s evolved over the millennia. Tool making was mastered by various hominid species almost a million years ago. What really separated humans from the rest was our ability to think and plan for the future. To remember and learn from the past. To conceptualize. A higher order of consciousness.
“At some point, our brains became very different. Essentially a mutation. We could imagine. We had what is called symbolic thinking, allowing one thing to stand for another. Ancient art, the first art, is the marker for when this cognitive change occurred. Without this jump in evolution, none of this, none of who we are, what we are, as a species would have occurred.”
Moms took a deep breath then expelled it. “All right. I get it. It’s important.”
“What about tokens?” Eagle asked, holding up the Badge of Merit he’d taken on his previous mission. “Any for these missions?”
“I tried to find things that might be helpful,” Edith said. “But there was nothing useful.”
“We need a moment,” Moms said to Dane.
“We’ll be waiting at the Gates,” Dane said as he escorted Edith out of the room.
Moms stood up and looked around the table. “You’ve all heard the words before. There’s no one going on their first mission here. But there was a reason Nada and I had this ritual. It’s too easy to get complacent. To become jaded. Not just to the missions and even time travel, but to our purpose.
“Dane likes to mention the vagaries of the variables,” Moms continued. “The problem being on the Time Patrol is there are way too many of them. And some of them can get us thinking. Wondering why we’re doing what we’re doing. Whether we’re doing the right thing. Whether allowing people to die, whether it be Caesar or Anastasia Romanov”—She looked at Doc—“is the right thing.
“I’m going to make it simple for you. It is. It’s our shared history. Our timeline. Our world. Our people. We are the ones who hold the line between the Shadow and our timeline. We are the ones who protect those who think time travel is just a neat concept, unaware that not only is it a reality, but that parallel worlds are, too. And there are some who mean us harm. We have to remember, we’re not punching holes into anyone else’s timeline and trying to alter their reality. Trying to wipe their timeline out. It’s the Shadow who is attacking us.”
She paused and took a deep breath. “We don’t know why the Shadow is trying to destroy us. We may never know. All we have to know is we are the defenders of our timeline. The lives of billions have been placed in our trust.”
She looked at Eagle.
He stood, wincing in pain from the injured shoulder. “We are here because the best of intentions can go horribly awry, and the worst of intentions can achieve exactly what it sets out to do. It is often the noblest scientific inquiry that can produce the end of us all. We are here because we are the last defense when the desire to do right turns into a wrong. We are here because mankind advances through trial and error. Because nothing man does is ever perfect. And we are ultimately here because there are things out there, beyond mankind’s current knowledge level, which man must be guarded against until we can understand those things, as we finally understood the Rifts and the Fireflies and our role in that. We must finally understand the Shadow. We must remember this.”
Moms finished. “Can we all live with that?”
The Missions Phase I
Normandy, France, 6 June 1944 A.D.
MAC WASN’T THERE, and then he was there, but he’d always sort of been there. It wa
s the best way to explain how he arrived so abruptly, becoming part of this time and place. He was in the bubble of this day and this place, not before, and hopefully, he wouldn’t be here afterward.
“Stand in the door!”
Mac barely had a chance to grip the metal frame around the opening in the side of the plane before he was slapped on the rump and the jumpmaster screamed, “Go!”
Mac went on pure instinct, throwing himself out of a perfectly good airplane, chin tucked, hands around the reserve across his belly. The airplane’s prop blast immediately ripped away the leg bag containing the Thompson submachine gun and the blasting caps. Mac was automatically counting, “One thousand, two thousand, three thous—” then the opening shock of the parachute jerked him upright.
Getting to four thousand without the chute opening was bad for a static line jump.
After checking the canopy, he looked down. Darkness waited since the full moon was blocked by thick clouds. Feet and knees together, knees slightly bent; the regime of training and hundreds of subsequent jumps kept him on task. He checked the area, strangely quiet on the eve of the greatest invasion in history. He glanced down once more and saw the deeper black opening of the well directly below him.
Mac pulled on the risers, trying to ‘slip’ the canopy, but the ground was rushing up the way it always did in the last fifty feet of the jump, and there was movement to one side, and he saw the woman with the gun.
He had two seconds to process the terrain in the small opening amongst the trees: a farmhouse, some battered fences, a crumbling barn, and, of course, a well. All this flashed while he tried to direct himself away from the well. Seriously, what were the odds? He made himself small, because the woman was pointing the gun at him, but then he realized it wasn’t a gun, it was a shovel, and she wasn’t pointing it, she was standing next to a pile of dirt.
The ground rushed up, not like Mac was descending, but it was rising. Time was moving even slower as the adrenaline raced; every paratrooper knows time is a variable. Mac had to laugh out loud because he was sure he was going in that damn well, no matter what he did. He was being drawn into it. What was it Moms had said: the Fates?
They were giving him the finger.
He’d done so many dangerous missions, not just Time Patrol, but Nightstalkers before that, and all those IEDs he’d disarmed in Iraq and Afghanistan, and now, he was going to drown in a well on the most important mission of all, on the Day of Days.
It is 1944. A train stalls in a railway tunnel in Italy, and 521 choke to death; Casablanca wins Best Picture at the Oscars; Louis Buchalter, leader of Murder Inc., is executed at Sing Sing; in Britain, the prohibition on married women working as teachers is lifted; the latest eruption of Mount Vesuvius kills twenty-six; Mohandas Gandhi is released from prison; 749 Americans die in a rehearsal for D-Day called Exercise Tiger; Hans Asperger publishes a paper on a syndrome; Rome falls on 4 June; also on 4 June, Enigma messages are decoded in real time after a man named Alan Turing, who possibly had Asperger’s Syndrome, did some work on a thing called a computer; the first V-1 rocket hits London; at age fourteen, George Stinney becomes the youngest person ever executed in the United States after a three-hour trial in South Carolina; the “day the clowns cried” in Hartford when more than 100 children die in a circus tent fire; the first jet fighter becomes operational, the Messerschmitt 262; Paris is liberated; Henry Larsen becomes the first person to navigate the Northwest Passage in both directions; Rommel commits suicide; Franklin D. Roosevelt is re-elected, becoming the only four-term President; Olivier’s film, Henry V, opens; Operation Market Garden goes A Bridge Too Far; The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams premieres; General McAuliffe of the 101st Airborne replies “Nuts” to a request for surrender; the Red Cross wins the Nobel Prize for Peace in the midst of the greatest war mankind has ever waged.
Mac was almost at ground level, and no matter what he did, the well was funneling him in.
Some things change; some don’t.
The woman dropped the shovel and yelled, “Merde!” She sounded a bit disgusted, and Mac thought, Hey, I’m the one going down the hole, lady.
She ran toward him, but there was only absolute blackness as he dropped into the well. In that last split second, he was surprised Fate had zeroed it perfectly. He missed the surrounding wall as if he’d planned this. He tensed, drawing a deep breath, waiting for the inevitable water.
Feet and knees together, knees slightly bent, rotating elbows in as if for a tree landing (they hadn’t covered well landing at Benning, so this was the next best solution he could come up with).
He decided this was a fitting ending, because he’d done enough bad things to deserve it, and maybe the reason he always imagined the other side of living to be nothingness was because if there were a heaven, then there was a hell. Those thoughts vanished as his feet hit hard dirt, and he felt the impact through his boots to his knees. He tried to collapse, but the space was limited, and he hit his head hard on the rock side of the well.
Darkness fell.
Sjaelland Island, Denmark, 6 June 452 A.D.
Famed was this Beowulf: far flew the boast of him,
son of Scyld, in the Scandian lands.
So becomes it a youth to quit him well
with his father’s friends, by fee and gift,
that to aid him, aged, in after days,
come warriors willing, should war draw nigh,
liegemen loyal: by lauded deeds
Roland wasn’t there, and then he was there, but he’d always sort of been there. It was the best way to explain how he arrived so abruptly, becoming part of this time and place. Without fanfare or excitement among those around him, not just bcause of the bubble, but also because everyone around him was passed out from drinking. He was in the bubble of this day and this place, not before, and hopefully he wouldn’t be here afterward, especially since he was sitting on a bench, his head slumped forward on a plank table looking at (and smelling) puke drooling out of the mouth of the warrior whose head was next to him. There was also the matter of the guy having really, really bad breath.
Even Roland had limits.
It is 452 A.D. Attila doesn’t sack Milan because the city bribes him with massive amounts of gold; Wen Cheng Di, only twelve years old, becomes the Emperor of Northern Wei; Pope Leo I helps convince Attila to not sack Rome and to withdraw from Italy; the City of Venice is founded by fugitives fleeing Attila’s army; why else would someone build a city in a swamp?
Roland lifted his head and peered about the immediate area. Other than his head, he remained perfectly still, all his senses on alert, although his sense of smell had already been wiped out.
Hearing wasn’t much more useful, as these guys had some major nasal problems, their snores cutting through the air as deeply as their smell.
Some things change; some don’t.
Nada would have gone on a rampage and kicked some major butt. Not a single warrior was pulling security, never mind the requisite fifty percent awake as per Rogers Rules of Rangering. Of course, Robert Rogers had over 1,200 years before he’d be born and start making up rules.
Roland counted fifteen guys in armor, and one idiot who’d taken his armor off and was just in breeches and tunic. He was lying on top of one of the trestle tables on his back, arms folded on his chest, head resting on his rolled-up tunic.
Roland realized that idiot was Beowulf, since the poem indicated he’d boasted he could beat the monster on its own terms: mano a mano, or, more accurately, mano a monster. In the poem, he handed his sword to someone then stripped off his armor and shirt. Apparently, that part of the poem was true.
Never underestimate the power of human stupidity, Nada had said more than once. Roland considered that a Nada original, not knowing the now-deceased team sergeant had appropriated it from Robert Heinlein. Of course, it was such a basic truism, how could anyone lay claim to it?
Roland straightened up to get a better view of the entire place. The hall was f
ifty meters long by thirty wide. A large fire pit in the center held glowing embers and a few remaining flames, dimly lighting the interior. Thick beams arced overhead, and shadows flickered along the outer walls. Dual rows of trestle tables and benches lined the hall. At one end was a dais on which there was a large throne, with a lesser one next to it. There were shields, axes, and swords hung here and there, martial decorations that made the place feel like an oversized team room.
A manly-man sort of place; the ultimate man-cave.
Roland felt at home.
Continuing his scan, Roland adjusted his initial assessment. Everyone wasn’t asleep. A man dressed in black pants and tunic, with a spear across his lap and a sword sheathed at his hip, was sitting cross-legged in the shadows, his back to one of the corners of the hall. Roland couldn’t make out details, but there was no doubt he was watching everything.
And Beowulf’s chest was moving too rapidly. Not the steady rhythm of slumber. The boast wasn’t equal to the reality.
Roland got up, the Naga in hand, and did a physical recon. The watcher’s eyes tracked him, and Roland saw that Beowulf cracked his eyelids to observe.
There were old bloodstains everywhere. There had indeed been a slaughter in this place a while back. Not twelve years, as the poem indicated. Probably a few months. Roland had a feeling that the poem exaggerated a lot of things, as stories always did the farther they got from the reality.
According to the poem, there’d been thirty killed during Grendel’s last rampage. The bloodstains indicated that number might be accurate. The telling thing about Roland was that he could guesstimate a number of dead from old bloodstains.
There was movement, and Roland turned.
“What are you doing?” Beowulf demanded.
“Checking the perimeter,” Roland said.
“You’re one of King Hrothgar’s hunters,” Beowulf said. “It was brave of you and your comrade to volunteer to spend the night with my men and me.”