Multiverse: Exploring the Worlds of Poul Anderson (31 page)

“As we expected you would be. Lora, will you continue?”

“
Certo
.” Speaking directly to Everard, she said, “We think the terrorists came from near the beginning of the period of the Chorite Heresiarchy, but we aren’t sure of that. It doesn’t matter. We can’t search all of time for them. They are nihilists of some sort, unscrupulous adventurers, criminals, madmen—whatever. Perhaps something like the Exaltationists or the Neldorians, but they seem to be a different group not previously known to us. What they have done, apparently, is to establish a base camp just prior to the founding of Alpha Point—and no, we haven’t located it yet—and make microleaps into the Convocation site itself, staying no more than a millisecond or so, just long enough to stick capsules of some sort of toxic substance or substances here and there around the camp. When everything is properly planted, they make a second series of microleaps and touch off the poison bombs, evidently doing it in a specific order of release so that the final capsule potentiates all the others and floods the entire Alpha Point area with lethal gas. At least, that’s our theory at the moment. We don’t have all the information. But Hideko and Daniel have made several visits to Alpha Point in the period just prior to the moment of the attack—Christmas Day is the name we use as our reference point for the time of the attack—and have detected the barely detectable blurs of these microleaps.”

Everard raised his eyebrows at that. Ben-Eytan had risked going there at the very time of the attack, risking the chance that he would land right in the middle of a cloud of poison gas? He may be a bastard, Everard thought, but at least he’s a brave one.

“And now?” he asked.

It was Ben-Eytan who answered. “Now we get going on the next round of surveillance, and hope to come up with a better picture of what the enemy is up to. And then we get about the job of doing the fix.”

“While praying that we don’t attract the attention of Time Patrol II while we go about our work,” Everard said.

“Good point, Manse. If Patrol II detects the signs of a counter-intervention, it will surely try to counter that. It has to. Its life, the life of its entire time-line, is at stake.”

Everard closed his eyes for a moment. The whole thing was like a dream, a very bad dream, the attack on Alpha Point and now this talk of two contending Time Patrols battling each other to protect the existence of their particular time-lines. He wanted to think that everything would come out all right, that the true and proper Patrol would triumph, that the correct fix would happen because everything he remembered of his long career in the Patrol had such vivid reality in his mind that he could not help believing that it had really happened. Therefore the fix had been successful, the enemy intervention had been canceled—the thing thus legitimizing itself in his mind, the universe saved by a wonderful act of circularity.

Hogwash, he told himself.

The thing wasn’t done until it was done. His vivid memories of a full, useful life in the Patrol meant nothing at all. Neither did the scars he bore. Those scars, those memories, were, at the moment, effects without causes, free-floating artifacts of a past life in a continuum whose current existence was merely conditional. Everything, he knew, having learned it over and over again with every job he had ever done, was subject to constant revision. Everything was in need of constant protection, unceasing vigilance.

The past is never dead. It’s not even past.

There was a lot of work ahead for them.

“When do we get started?” Everard asked.

Because it was his first surveillance trip to Alpha Point he went with a companion, Elio Gonzalez, and Gonzalez would do the driving. They clambered into the two-seat hopper and a moment later they were half a billion years back in the past, sitting in the sky three thousand feet above Alpha Point.

The air up here was cool but not chilly, springtime-cool, and the view, far out to the horizon, was one of emptiness, emptiness, and more emptiness. The sun, dimly visible through the gray murk, seemed mysteriously
wrong
, the color not quite the proper shade of yellow, its apparent diameter different also. The only indication that life had ever existed on this planet was the puny scattering of buildings clustered higgledy-piggledy immediately below.

“What we’re doing,” Gonzalez said, “is trying to bracket the time of the attack. We think we have zero hour pegged by now—noon on Christmas Day, give or take a few seconds, so far as we know. That still needs full confirmation, though. We’re much less certain about the time of the planting of the devices. So we’re exploring the two or three days leading up to the event.”

“We can’t just go back to their base camp and cut things off right there?”

“That would be a permissible intervention in an extreme situation like this, I guess,” Gonzalez conceded. “The trouble is, we don’t know where their base camp is. It could be anywhere. If they’ve located it in early geological history, it would be located, we assume, somewhere on this continent and somewhere in the last billion years or so, because any earlier than that and atmospheric conditions are so much different on Earth that they’d need to mess around with special breathing equipment. Probably they wouldn’t have bothered with that. But we can’t go searching through a billion years and across an area that’s essentially the size of the entire world to find the camp. And for all we know they don’t even have a base camp in ancient times, but are simply hopping back and forth from their own era, whenever that is.”

“Those are phrases I keep hearing: ‘so far as we know’ and ‘probably’ and ‘we assume’ and ‘for all we know.’ We don’t seem actually to know very much.”

“Not yet,” said Gonzalez.

Everard stared down at the strikingly unimpressive string of shoddy-looking buildings within which the governing structure of the Time Patrol had been/would/might be forged. Today, Gonzalez had told him, was December 24 on the Gondwandaland calendar that their little Patrol group had flanged up. Ben-Eytan’s counter-intervention group had already established that the lethal capsules had been planted at various times on Christmas Eve and that the attackers had returned in some significantly sequential order the next day to detonate them. They had been designed, Ben-Eytan said, to undergo biodegrading immediately upon detonation, so that there was no evidence left afterward.

Through his optical Everard saw people moving around down there, going from one building to another. The Founders, they were. The awesome demigods who had brought the Patrol into being. All of them destined to die the next day, unless—unless—

Incredible. Inconceivable. The actual Founders, going about the task of creating the Time Patrol, altogether unaware of the dark fate that was cruising toward them.

“Won’t they notice us up here?” he asked.

“Only if they look, Manse. And they won’t look. There aren’t any birdwatchers in the group, you know, and there aren’t any birds, either. There’s nothing at all to see in the Gondwanaland sky except clouds. Anyway, if they do see a scooter up here, they’ll just assume it’s somebody going somewhere on official business. Why should they suspect anything?”

“I suppose.”

“I’m going to take us down, now.”

The hopper began a gradual descent. Everard caught his breath. There was that strangeness in the air again that he had experienced when Ben-Eytan had brought him here, the bite of the unfamiliar oxy-nitro mix, and the utter absence, Everard realized, of most of the carbon dioxide and all the stuff that had gone into Earth’s atmosphere since the dinosaur days, the effluvia of rotting vegetation and decomposing animal flesh and belching furnaces and automobile exhaust and a myriad other products of combustion and respiration. There was no vegetation here to speak of, no animal life on shore at all, and not a single automobile on the entire planet.

He had spent two-thirds of his elapsed lifespan roaming freely in time, but he had never felt as estranged from reality as he did right at this moment. The sight of medieval cities had not done it, nor the actual proximity of Alexander the Great or Ben Jonson or Galileo Galilei or Cyrus the Great, or, for that matter, a brontosaurus in the living, snorting flesh or a man who had been born in the year 11,500 A.D. Everard had adapted to all things of that sort, had, indeed, come to take them for granted in a way that he could not help but regret, for that meant that his long service in the Time Patrol had in some way impaired his capacity for wonder.

But seeing this place was different: this seemingly lifeless, sterile place, this world before the world, this emptiness, this Gondwanaland. It was next to impossible to believe that from this bleak and hopeless shield of raw barren stone, this nothingness, would spring the turbulent, wonderful, miraculously complex globe that the succession of the ages would ultimately bring forth.

And then, knowing that the Founders were just a few hundred yards away from him—

Edgily he said, as Gonzalez nudged him and pointed toward the entrance to the camp, “What are we going to do? Walk right in there? We don’t belong there, Elio!”

“How do they know? They’ve all been here only a few days. Nobody knows everybody yet. To them we’ll be just a couple of newly arrived Founders.”

“But we
weren’t
there! We
aren’t
Founders! We’re setting up a causal loop!”

“So? We have a job to do, man. Little things like causal loops are incidental consequences of the work.”

Everard smiled grimly. He knew that Gonzalez was right. There were rules about causal loops, temporal vortices, interventions within interventions, all kinds of things like that, and one tried to keep within the rules as much as possible. But sometimes rules had to be broken. The Patrol was forbidden to tinker with the true and proper sequence of the time-stream unless, of course, circumstances made it necessary to do so. And as Gonzalez said, they had a job to do.

They were inside the camp perimeter, now. He recognized some, not all, of the men and women he saw. Famous, quasi-legendary people, Leo Schmidt, Orris Greyl, Hian Gan-Sekkant, no less. Everyone in the Patrol encountered some of the Founders from time to time in the routine course of work—distant, remote figures, yes, but occasionally known to show up on the site of some difficult project—but, since the preponderance of them came from A.D. 25,000 and even farther uptime, early humans like Manson Emmert Everard were generally spared the sight of them. Humankind of the later eras did not look much like the
Homo Sapiens
that crowded the earth in Manse Everard’s own birth-era, and one had to be of an extraordinarily sturdy nature to withstand the shock. As for the Danellians, those beings of a million-plus years ahead, Everard had once or twice been in the presence of one, but never, to the best of his knowledge, had he seen one in its true form. Like Zeus appearing to Semele in
his
true form, they would be much too much to handle if seen as they were, and customarily they took on innocuous disguises when moving among their evolutionary predecessors on Earth. There might be Danellians among those he saw now in the courtyard of Alpha Point, but—that phrase again—not so far as he knew.

As he and Gonzalez moved across the inner courtyard, sauntering in an exaggeratedly casual way and trying hard not to look like the interlopers that they were, Everard was startled to see a familiar figure coming the other way: Ben-Eytan, moving in that same excessively easy, all too phony manner. He saw them, too, and shot a fierce glare at them.

“Oh, Jesus!” Gonzalez muttered, turning bright red. “I timed it wrong! We have to get out of here.”

He seized Everard roughly by the elbow and spun him around, and, without trying to be casual at all, now, led him briskly out of the courtyard and back to the scooters they had parked outside.

Everard knew better to ask for explanations. Only when they were safely aloft did he give Gonzalez a quizzical look.

“I should get docked a week’s pay for that, Manse. The timer got set for an hour too soon and we did an overlap. Dan has already made the reconnaissance for that time of day—at least four days ago, Prague time.” He looked flustered as he fiddled with the controls of the hopper. They began to descend again, and, so far as it was possible to tell the time of day at all in this constantly veiled sky, Everard figured they were coming in an hour or so later than on their first try.

Small wonder that Gonzalez looked chagrined. The last thing they wanted to be doing, or close to it, was to be causing overlap paradoxes, with one agent running into another on different tracks that converged on the same point in space and time. If they did that, they might as well be putting up blazing markers to tell the agents of Patrol II that some kind of counter-intervention was in progress.

But no harm seemed to have been done. They entered the courtyard again. Someone who might have been Itikarm Staykan—who surely was him, Everard decided—crossed diagonally in front of them, paying no heed to them at all. Everard tried to pretend that he did not feel like a ten-year-old boy in the presence of one of the stars of his favorite baseball team. Itikarm Staykan! Thirty feet away from him!