The Only Game in Town tp-4 Read online

  Everard knew rather sadly that they would, and that a storm would destroy the fleet and drown who knows how many young men. But he let Toktai continue:

  “The Kha Khan realized we must learn more about the islands. Perhaps we should try to establish a base somewhere north of Hokkaido. Then, too, we have long heard rumors about lands farther west. Fishermen are blown off course now and then, and have glimpses; traders from Siberia speak of a strait and a country beyond. The Kha Khan got four ships with Chinese crews and told me to take a hundred Mongol warriors and see what I could discover.”

  Everard nodded, unsurprised. The Chinese had been sailing junks for hundreds of years, some holding up to a thousand passengers. True, these craft weren’t as seaworthy as they would become in later centuries under Portuguese influence, and their owners had never been much attracted by any ocean, let alone the cold northern waters. But still, there were some Chinese navigators who would have picked up tricks of the trade from stray Koreans and Formosans, if not from their own fathers. They must have a little familiarity with the Kuriles, at least.

  “We followed two chains of islands, one after another,” said Toktai. “They were bleak enough, but we could stop here and there, let the horses out, and learn something from the natives. Though the Tengri know it’s hard to do that last, when you may have to interpret through six languages! We did find out that there are two mainlands, Siberia and another, which come so close together up north that a man might cross in a skin boat, or walk across the ice in winter sometimes. Finally we came to the new mainland. A big country; forests, much game and seals. Too rainy, though. Our ships seemed to want to continue, so we followed the coast, more or less.”

  Everard visualized a map. If you go first along the Kuriles and then the Aleutians, you are never far from land. Fortunate to avoid the shipwreck which had been a distinct possibility, the shallow-draft junks had been able to find anchorage even at those rocky islands. Also, the current urged them along, and they were very nearly on a great-circle course. Toktai had discovered Alaska before he quite knew what had happened. Since the country grew ever more hospitable as he coasted south, he passed up Puget Sound and proceeded clear to the Chehalis River. Maybe the Indians had warned him the Columbia mouth, further on, was dangerous—and, more recently, had helped his horsemen cross the great stream on rafts.

  “We set up camp when the war was waning,” said the Mongol. “The tribes thereabouts are backward, but friendly. They gave us all the food, women, and help we could ask for. In return, our sailors taught them some tricks of fishing and boatbuilding. We wintered there, learned some of the languages, and made trips inland. Everywhere were tales of huge forests and plains where herds of wild cattle blacken the earth. We saw enough to know the stories were true. I’ve never been in so rich a land.” His eyes gleamed tigerishly. “And so few dwellers, who don’t even know the use of iron.”

  “Noyon,” murmured Li warningly. He nodded his head very slightly toward the Patrolmen. Toktai clamped his mouth shut.

  Li turned to Everard and said, “There were also rumors of a golden realm far to the south. We felt it our duty to investigate this, as well as explore the country in between. We had not looked for the honor of being met by your eminent selves.”

  “The honor is all ours,” Everard purred. Then, putting on his gravest face: “My lord of the Golden Empire, who may not be named, has sent us in a spirit of friendship. It would grieve him to see you meet disaster. We come to warn you.”

  “What?” Toktai sat up straight. One sinewy hand snatched for the sword which, politely, he wasn’t wearing. “What in the hells is this?”

  “In the hells indeed, Noyon. Pleasant though this country seems, it lies under a curse. Tell him, my brother.”

  Sandoval, who had a better speaking voice, took over. His yarn had been concocted with an eye to exploiting that superstition which still lingered in the half-civilized Mongols, without generating too much Chinese skepticism. There were really two great southern kingdoms, he explained. Their own lay far away; its rival was somewhat north and east of it, with a citadel on the plains. Both states possessed immense powers, call them sorcery or subtle engineering, as you wished. The northerly empire, Badguys, considered all this territory as its own and would not tolerate a foreign expedition. Its scouts were certain to discover the Mongols before long, and would annihilate them with thunderbolts. The benevolent southern land of Goodguys could offer no protection, could only send emissaries warning the Mongols to turn home again.

  “Why have the natives not spoken of these overlords?” asked Li shrewdly.

  “Has every little tribesman in the jungles of Burma heard about the Kha Khan?” responded Sandoval.

  “I am a stranger and ignorant,” said Li. “Forgive me if I do not understand your talk of irresistible weapons.”

  Which is the politest way I’ve ever been called a liar, thought Everard. Aloud: “I can offer a small demonstration, if the Noyon has an animal that may be killed.”

  Toktai considered. His visage might have been scarred stone, but sweat filmed it. He clapped his hands and barked orders to the guard who looked in. Thereafter they made small talk against a silence that thickened.

  A warrior appeared after some endless part of an hour. He said that a couple of horsemen had lassoed a deer. Would it serve the Noyon’s purpose? It would. Toktai led the way out, shouldering through a thick and buzzing swarm of men. Everard followed, wishing this weren’t needful. He slipped the rifle stock onto his Mauser. “Care to do the job?” he asked Sandoval.

  “Christ, no.”

  The deer, a doe, had been forced back to camp. She trembled by the river, the horsehair ropes about her neck. The sun, just touching the western peaks, turned her to bronze. There was a blind sort of gentleness in her look at Everard. He waved back the men around her and took aim. The first slug killed her, but he kept the gun chattering till her carcass was gruesome.

  When he lowered his weapon, the air felt somehow rigid. He looked across all the thick bandy-legged bodies, the flat, grimly controlled faces; he could smell them with unnatural sharpness, a clean odor of sweat and horses and smoke. He felt himself as nonhuman as they must see him.

  “That is the least of the arms used here,” he said. “A soul so torn from the body would not find its way home.”

  He turned on his heel. Sandoval followed him. Their horses had been staked out, the gear piled close by. They saddled, unspeaking, mounted and rode off into the forest.

  4

  The fire blazed up in a gust of wind. Sparingly laid by a woodsman, in that moment it barely brought the two out of shadow—a glimpse of brow, nose, and cheekbones, a gleam of eyes. It sank down again to red and blue sputtering above white coals, and darkness took the men.

  Everard wasn’t sorry. He fumbled his pipe in his hands, bit hard on it and drank smoke, but found little comfort. When he spoke, the vast soughing of trees, high up in the night, almost buried his voice, and he did not regret that either.

  Nearby were their sleeping bags, their horses, the scooter—antigravity sled cum space-time hopper—which had brought them. Otherwise the land was empty; mile upon mile, human fires like their own were as small and lonely as stars in the universe. Somewhere a wolf howled.

  “I suppose,” Everard said, “every cop feels like a bastard occasionally. You’ve just been an observer so far, Jack. Active assignments, such as I get, are often hard to accept.”

  “Yeh.” Sandoval had been even more quiet than his friend. He had scarcely stirred since supper.

  “And now this. Whatever you have to do to cancel a temporal interference, you can at least think you’re restoring the original line of development.” Everard fumed on his pipe. “Don’t remind me that ‘original’ is meaningless in this context. It’s a consoling word.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “But when our bosses, our dead Danellian supermen, tell us to interfere… We know Toktai’s people never came back to Cathay. Why s
hould you or I have to take a hand? If they ran into hostile Indians or something and were wiped-out, I wouldn’t mind. At least, no more than I mind any similar incident in that Goddamned slaughter-house they call human history.”

  “We don’t have to kill them, you know. Just make them turn back. Your demonstration this afternoon may be enough.”

  “Yeah. Turn back… and what? Probably perish at sea. They won’t have an easy trip home—storm, fog, contrary currents, rocks—in those primitive ships meant mostly for rivers. And we’ll have set them on that trip at precisely that time! If we didn’t interfere, they’d start home later, the circumstances of the voyage would be different… Why should we take the guilt?”

  “They could even make it home,” murmured Sandoval.

  “What?” Everard started.

  “The way Toktai was talking. I’m sure he plans to go back on a horse, not on those ships. As he’s guessed, Bering Strait is easy to cross; the Aleuts do it all the time. Manse, I’m afraid it isn’t enough simply to spare them.”

  “But they aren’t going to get home! We know that!”

  “Suppose they do make it.” Sandoval began to talk a bit louder and much faster. The night wind roared around his words. “Let’s play with ideas awhile. Suppose Toktai pushes on southeastward. It’s hard to see what could stop him. His men can live off the country, even the deserts, far more handily than Coronado or any of those boys. He hasn’t terribly far to go before he reaches a high-grade neolithic people, the agricultural Pueblo tribes. That will encourage him all the more. He’ll be in Mexico before August. Mexico’s just as dazzling now as it was—will be—in Cortez’s day. And even more tempting: the Aztecs and Toltecs are still settling who’s to be master, with any number of other tribes hanging around ready to help a newcomer against both. The Spanish guns made, will make, no real difference, as you’ll recall if you’ve read Diaz. The Mongols are as superior, man for man, as any Spaniard… Not that I imagine Toktai would wade right in. He’d doubtless be very polite, spend the winter, learn everything he could. Next year he’d go back north, proceed home, and report to Kublai that some of the richest, most gold-stuffed territory on earth was wide open for conquest!”

  “How about the other Indians?” put in Everard. “I’m vague on them.”

  “The Mayan New Empire is at its height. A tough nut to crack, but a correspondingly rewarding one. I should think, once the Mongols got established in Mexico, there’d be no stopping them. Peru has an even higher culture at this moment, and much less organization than Pizarro faced; the Quechua-Aymar, the so-called Inca race, are still only one power down there among several.

  “And then, the land! Can you visualize what a Mongol tribe would make of the Great Plains?”

  “I can’t see them emigrating in hordes,” said Everard. There was that about Sandoval’s voice which made him uneasy and defensive. “Too much Siberia and Alaska in the way.”

  “Worse obstacles have been overcome. I don’t mean they’d pour in all at once. It might take them a few centuries to start mass immigration, as it will take the Europeans. I can imagine a string of clans and tribes being established in the course of some years, all down western North America. Mexico and Yucatan get gobbled up—or, more likely, become khanates. The herding tribes move eastward as their own population grows and as new immigrants arrive. Remember, the Yuan dynasty is due to be overthrown in less than a century. That’ll put additional pressure on the Mongols in Asia to go elsewhere. And Chinese will come here too, to farm and to share in the gold.”

  “I should think, if you don’t mind my saying so,” Everard broke in softly, “that you of all people wouldn’t want to hasten the conquest of America.”

  “It’d be a different conquest,” said Sandoval. “I don’t care about the Aztecs; if you study them, you’ll agree that Cortez did Mexico a favor. It’d be rough on other, more harmless tribes too—for a while. And yet, the Mongols aren’t such devils. Are they? A Western background prejudices us. We forget how much torture and massacre the Europeans were enjoying at the same time.

  “The Mongols are quite a bit like the old Romans, really. Same practice of depopulating areas that resist, but respecting the rights of those who make submission. Same armed protection and competent government. Same unimaginative, uncreative national character; but the same vague awe and envy of true civilization. The Pax Mongolica, right now, unites a bigger area, and brings more different peoples into stimulating contact, than that piddling Roman Empire ever imagined.

  “As for the Indians—remember, the Mongols are herdsmen. There won’t be anything like the unsolvable conflict between hunter and farmer that made the white man destroy the Indian. The Mongol hasn’t got race prejudices, either. And after a little fighting, the average Navajo, Cherokee, Seminole, Algonquin, Chippewa, Dakota, will be glad to submit and become allied. Why not? He’ll get horses, sheep, cattle, textiles, metallurgy. He’ll outnumber the invaders, and be on much more nearly equal terms with them than with white farmers and machine-age industry. And there’ll be the Chinese, I repeat, leavening the whole mixture, teaching civilization and sharpening wits…

  “Good God, Manse! When Columbus gets here, he’ll find his Grand Cham all right! The Sachem Khan of the strongest nation on earth!”

  Sandoval stopped. Everard listened to the gallows creak of branches in the wind. He looked into the night for a long while before he said, “It could be. Of course, we’d have to stay in this century till the crucial point was past. Our own world wouldn’t exist. Wouldn’t ever have existed.”

  “It wasn’t such a hell of a good world anyway,” said Sandoval, as if in dream.

  “You might think about your… oh… parents. They’d never have been born either.”

  “They lived in a tumbledown hogan. I saw my father crying once, because he couldn’t buy shoes for us in winter. My mother died of t.b.”

  Everard sat unstirring. It was Sandoval who shook himself and jumped to his feet with a rattling kind of laugh. “What have I been mumbling? It was just a yarn, Manse. Let’s turn in. Shall I take first watch?”

  Everard agreed, but lay long awake.

  5

  The scooter had jumped two days futureward and now hovered invisibly far above to the naked eye. Around it, the air was thin and sharply cold. Everard shivered as he adjusted the electronic telescope. Even at full magnification, the caravan was little more than specks toiling across green immensity. But no one else in the Western Hemisphere could have been riding horses.

  He twisted in the saddle to face his companion. “So now what?”

  Sandoval’s broad countenance was unreadable. “Well, if our demonstration didn’t work—”

  “It sure as hell didn’t! I swear they’re moving south twice as fast as before. Why?”

  “I’d have to know all of them a lot better than I do, as individuals, to give you a real answer, Manse. But essentially it must be that we challenged their courage. A warlike culture, nerve and hardihood its only absolute virtues… what choice have they got but to go on? If they retreated before a mere threat, they’d never be able to live with themselves.”

  “But Mongols aren’t idiots! They didn’t conquer everybody in sight by bull strength, but by jolly well understanding military principles better. Toktai should retreat, report to the Emperor what he saw, and organize a bigger expedition.”

  “The men at the ships can do that,” Sandoval reminded. “Now that I think about it, I see how grossly we underestimated Toktai. He must have set a date, presumably next year, for the ships to try and go home if he doesn’t return. When he finds something interesting along the way, like us, he can dispatch an Indian with a letter to the base camp.”

  Everard nodded. It occurred to him that he had been rushed into this job, all the way down the line, with never a pause to plan it as he should have done. Hence this botch. But how much blame must fall on the subconscious reluctance of John Sandoval? After a minute Everard said: “They may even have
smelled something fishy about us. The Mongols were always good at psychological warfare.”

  “Could be. But what’s our next move?”

  Swoop down from above, fire a few blasts from the forty-first-century energy gun mounted in this timecycle, and that’s the end…No, by God, they can send me to the exile planet before I’ll do any such thing. There are decent limits.

  “We’ll rig up a more impressive demonstration,” said Everard.

  “And if it flops too?”

  “Shut up! Give it a chance!”

  “I was just wondering.” The wind harried under Sandoval’s words. “Why not cancel the expedition instead? Go back in time a couple of years and persuade Kublai Khan it isn’t worthwhile sending explorers eastward. Then all this would never have happened.”

  “You know Patrol regs forbid us to make historical changes.”

  “What do you call this we’re doing?”

  “Something specifically ordered by supreme HQ. Perhaps to correct some interference elsewhere, elsewhen. How should I know? I’m only a step on the evolutionary ladder. They have abilities a million years hence that I can’t even guess at.”

  “Father knows best,” murmured Sandoval.

  Everard set his jaws. “The fact remains,” he said, “the court of Kublai, the most powerful man on earth, is more important and crucial than anything here in America. No, you rang me in on this miserable job, and now I’ll pull rank on you if I must. Our orders are to make these people give up their exploration. What happens afterward is none of our business. So they don’t make it home. We won’t be the proximate cause, any more than you’re a murderer if you invite a man to dinner and he has a fatal accident on the way.”

  “Stop quacking and let’s get to work,” rapped Sandoval.

  Everard sent the scooter gliding forward. “See that hill?” he pointed after a while. “It’s on Toktai’s line of march, but I think he’ll camp a few miles short of it tonight, down in that little meadow by the stream. The hill will be in his plain view, though. Let’s set up shop on it.”