Guardians of Time tp-1 Page 3

  This was the first moment that the reality of time travel struck home to Everard. He had known it with the top of his mind, been duly impressed, but it was, for his emotions, merely exotic. Now, clopping through a London he did not know in a hansom cab (not a tourist-trap anachronism, but a working machine, dusty and battered), smelling an air which held more smoke than a twentieth-century city but no gasoline fumes, seeing the crowds which milled past—gentlemen in bowlers and top hats, sooty navvies, long-skirted women, and not actors but real, talking, perspiring, laughing and somber human beings off on real business—it hit him with full force that he was here. At this moment his mother had not been born, his grandparents were young couples just getting settled to harness, Grover Cleveland was President of the United States and Victoria was Queen of England, Kipling was writing and the last Indian uprisings in America yet to come… It was like a blow on the head.

  Whitcomb took it more calmly, but his eyes were never still as he watched this day of England’s glory. “I begin to understand,” he murmured. “They never have agreed whether this was a period of unnatural, stuffy convention and thinly veneered brutality, or the last flower of Western civilization before it started going to seed. Just seeing these people makes me realize; it was everything they have said about it, good and bad, because it wasn’t a simple thing happening to everyone, but millions of individual lives.”

  “Sure,” said Everard. “That must be true of every age.”

  The train was almost familiar, not very different from the carriages of British railways anno 1954, which gave Whitcomb occasion for sardonic remarks about inviolable traditions. In a couple of hours it let them off at a sleepy village station among carefully tended flower gardens, where they engaged a buggy to drive them to the Wyndham estate.

  A polite constable admitted them after a few questions. They were passing themselves off as archeologists, Everard from America and Whitcomb from Australia, who had been quite anxious to meet Lord Wyndham and were shocked by his tragic end. Mainwethering, who seemed to have tentacles everywhere, had supplied them with letters of introduction from a well-known authority at the British Museum. The inspector from Scotland Yard agreed to let them look at the barrow—“the case is solved, gentlemen, there are no more clues, even if my colleague does not agree, hah, hah!” The private agent smiled sourly and watched them with a narrow eye as they approached the mound; he was tall, thin, hawk-faced, and accompanied by a burly, mustached fellow with a limp who seemed a kind of amanuensis.

  The barrow was long and high, covered with grass save where a raw scar showed excavation to the funeral chamber. This had been lined with rough-hewn timbers but had long ago collapsed; fragments of what had been wood still lay on the dirt. “The newspapers mentioned something about a metal casket,” said Everard. “I wonder if we might have a look at it too?”

  The inspector nodded agreeably and led them off to an outbuilding where the major finds were laid forth on a table. Except for the box, they were only fragments of corroded metal and crumbled bone.

  “Hm,” said Whitcomb. His gaze was thoughtful on the sleek, bare face of the small chest. It shimmered bluely, some time-proof alloy yet to be discovered. “Most unusual. Not primitive at all. You’d almost think it had been machined, eh?”

  Everard approached it warily. He had a pretty good idea of what was inside, and all the caution about such matters natural to a citizen of the soi-disant Atomic Age. Pulling a counter out of his bag, he aimed it at the box. Its needle wavered, not much but…

  “Interesting item there,” said the inspector. “May I ask what it is?”

  “An experimental electroscope,” lied Everard. Carefully, he threw back the lid and held the counter above the box.

  God! There was enough radioactivity inside to kill a man in a day! He had just a glimpse of heavy, dull-shining ingots before he slammed the lid down again. “Be careful with that stuff,” he said shakily. Praise heaven; whoever carried that devil’s load had come from an age when they knew how to block off radiation!

  The private detective had come up behind them, noiselessly. A hunter’s look grew on his keen face. “So you recognized the contents, sir?” he asked quietly.

  “Yes. I think so.” Everard remembered that Becquerel would not discover radioactivity for almost two years; even X rays were still more than a year in the future. He had to be cautious. “That is… in Indian territory I’ve heard stories about an ore like this which is poisonous—”

  “Most interesting.” The detective began to stuff a big-bowled pipe. “Like mercury vapor, what?”

  “So Rotherhithe placed that box in the grave, did he?” muttered the inspector.

  “Don’t be ridiculous!” snapped the detective. “I have three lines of conclusive proof that Rother-hithe is entirely innocent. What puzzled me was the actual cause of his lordship’s death. But if, as this gentleman says, there happened to be a deadly poison buried in that mound… to discourage grave-robbers? I wonder, though, how the old Saxons came by an American mineral. Perhaps there is something to these theories about early Phoenician voyages across the Atlantic. I have done a little research on a notion of mine that there are Chaldean elements in the Cymric language, and this seems to bear me out.”

  Everard felt guilty about what he was doing to the science of archeology. Oh, well, this box was going to be dumped in the Channel and forgotten. He and Whitcomb made an excuse to leave as soon as possible.

  On the way back to London, when they were safely alone in their compartment, the Englishman took out a moldering fragment of wood. “Slipped this into my pocket at the barrow,” he said. “It’ll help us date the thing. Hand me that radiocarbon counter, will you?” He popped the wood into the device, turned some knobs, and read off the answer. “One thousand, four hundred and thirty years, plus or minus about ten. The mound went up around… um… 464 A.D., then, when the Jutes were just getting established in Kent.”

  “If those ingots are still that hellish after so long,” murmured Everard, “I wonder what they were like originally? Hard to see how you could have that much activity with such a long half-life, but then, up in the future they can do things with the atom my period hasn’t dreamed of.”

  Turning in their report to Mainwethering, they spent a day sight-seeing while he sent messages across time and activated the great machine of the Patrol. Everard was interested in Victorian London, almost captivated in spite of the grime and poverty. Whitcomb got a faraway look in his eyes. “I’d liked to have lived here,” he said.

  “Yeah? With their medicine and dentistry?”

  “And no bombs falling.” Whitcomb’s answer held a defiance.

  Mainwethering had arrangements made when they returned to his office. Puffing a cigar, he strode up and down, pudgy hands clasped behind his tailcoat, and rattled off the story.

  “Metal been identified with high probability. Isotopic fuel from aroundthe thirtieth century. Checkup reveals that a merchant from the Ing Empire was visiting year 2987 to barter his raw materials for their synthrope, secret of which had been lost in the Interregnum. Naturally, he took precautions, tried to pass himself off as a trader from the Saturnian System, but nevertheless disappeared. So did his time shuttle. Presumably someone in 2987 found out what he was and murdered him for his machine. Patrol notified, but no trace of machine. Finally recovered from fifth-century England by two Patrolmen named, haw! Everard and Whitcomb.”

  “If we’ve already succeeded, why bother?” grinned the American.

  Mainwethering looked shocked. “But my dear fellow! You have not already succeeded. The job is yet to do, in terms of your and my duration-sense. And please do not take success for granted merely because history records it. Time is not rigid; man has free will. If you fail, history will change and will not ever have recorded your success; I will not have told you about it. That is undoubtedly what happened, if I may use the term ‘happened,’ in the few cases where the Patrol has a record of failure. Those cases are st
ill being worked on, and if success is achieved at last, history will be changed and there will ‘always’ have been success. Tempus non nascitur, fit, if I may indulge in a slight parody.”

  “All right, all right, I was only joking,” said Everard. “Let’s get going. Tempus fugit.” He added an extra “g” with malice aforethought, and Mainwethering winced.

  It turned out that even the Patrol knew little about the dark period when the Romans had left Britain, the Romano-British civilization was crumbling, and the British were moving in. It had never seemed an important one. The office at London, 1000 A.D., sent up what material it had, together with suits of clothes that would get by. Everard and Whitcomb spent an hour unconscious under the hypnotic educators, to emerge with fluency in Latin and in several Saxon and Jutish dialects, and with a fair knowledge of the mores.

  The clothes were awkward: trousers, shirts, and coats of rough wool, leather cloaks, an interminable collection of thongs and laces. Long flaxen wigs covered modern haircuts; a clean shave would pass unnoticed, even in the fifth century. Whitcomb carried an ax, Everard a sword, both made to measure of high-carbon steel, but put more reliance on the little twenty-sixth-century sonic stun guns stuck under their coats. Armor had not been included, but the time hopper had a pair of motorcycle crash helmets in one saddlebag: these would not attract much attention in an age of homemade equipment, and were a good deal stronger and more comfortable than the real thing. They also stowed away a picnic lunch and some earthenware jugs full of good Victorian ale.

  “Excellent.” Mainwethering pulled a watch out of his pocket and consulted it. “I shall expect you back here at… shall we say four o’clock? I will have some armed guards on hand, in case you have a prisoner along, and we can go out to tea afterward.” He shook their hands. “Good hunting!”

  Everard swung onto the time hopper, set the controls for 464 A.D. at Addleton Barrow, a summer midnight, and threw the switch.

  5

  There was a full moon. Under it, the land lay big and lonely, with a darkness of forest blocking out the horizon. Somewhere a wolf howled. The mound was there yet; they had come late.

  Rising on the antigravity unit, they peered across a dense, shadowy wood. A thorp lay about a mile from the barrow, one hall of hewn timber and a cluster of smaller buildings around a courtyard. In the drenching moonlight, it was very quiet.

  “Cultivated fields,” observed Whitcomb. His voice was hushed in the stillness. “The Jutes and Saxons were mostly yeomen, you know, who came here looking for land. Imagine the Britons were pretty well cleared out of this area some years ago.”

  “We’ve got to find out about that burial,” said Everard. “Shall we go back and locate the moment the grave was made? No, it might be safer to inquire now, at a later date when whatever excitement there was has died down. Say tomorrow morning.”

  Whitcomb nodded, and Everard brought the hopper down into the concealment of a thicket and jumped up five hours. The sun was blinding in the northeast, dew glistened on the long grass, and the birds were making an unholy racket. Dismounting, the agents sent the hopper shooting up at fantastic velocity, to hover ten miles above-ground and come to them when called on a midget radio built into their helmets.

  They approached the thorp openly, whacking off the savage-looking dogs which came snarling at them with the flat of sword and ax. Entering the courtyard, they found it unpaved but richly carpeted with mud and manure. A couple of naked, tow-headed children gaped at them from a hut of earth and wattles. A girl who was sitting outside milking a scrubby little cow let out a small shriek; a thick-built, low-browed farmhand swilling the pigs grabbed for a spear. Wrinkling his nose, Everard wished that some of the “Noble Nordic” enthusiasts of his century could visit this one.

  A gray-bearded man with an ax in his hand appeared in the hall entrance. Like everyone else of this period, he was several inches shorter than the twentieth-century average. He studied them warily before wishing them good morning.

  Everard smiled politely. “I hight Uffa Hundingsson, and my brother is Knubbi,” he said. “We are merchants from Jutland, come hither to trade at Canterbury.” (He gave it the present name, Cant-wara-byrig.) “Wandering from the place where our ship is beached, we lost our way, and after fumbling about all night found your home.”

  “I hight Wulfnoth, son of Aelfred,” said the yeo-man. “Enter and break your fast with us.”

  The hall was big and dim and smoky, full of a chattering crowd: Wulfnoth’s children, their spouses and children, dependent carls and their wives and children and grandchildren. Breakfast consisted of great wooden trenchers of half-cooked pork, washed down by horns of thin sour beer. It was not hard to get a conversation going; these people were as gossipy as isolated yokels anywhere. The trouble was with inventing plausible accounts of what was going on in Jutland. Once or twice Wulfnoth, who was no fool, caught them in some mistake, but Everard said firmly: “You have heard a falsehood. News takes strange forms when it crosses the sea.” He was surprised to learn how much contact there still was with the old countries. But the talk of weather and crops was not very different from the kind he knew in the twentieth century Middle West.

  Only later was he able to slip in a question about the barrow. Wulfnoth frowned, and his plump, toothless wife hastily made a protective sign toward a rude wooden idol. “It is not good to speak of such things,” muttered the Jute. “I would the wizard had not been buried on my land. But he was close to my father, who died last year and would hear of naught else.”

  “Wizard?” Whitcomb pricked up his ears. “What tale is this?”

  “Well, you may as well know,” grumbled Wulf-noth. “He was a stranger hight Stane, who appeared in Canterbury some six years ago. He must have been from far away, for he spoke not the English or British tongues, but King Hengist guested him and eftsoons he learned. He gave the king strange but goodly gifts, and was a crafty redesman, on whom the king came more and more to lean. None dared cross him, for he had a wand which threw thunderbolts and had been seen to cleave rocks and once, in battle with the Britons, burn men down. There are those who thought he was Woden, but that cannot be since he died.”

  “Ah, so.” Everard felt a tingle of eagerness. “And what did he whilst yet he lived?”

  “Oh… he gave the king wise redes, as I have said. It was his thought that we of Kent should cease thrusting back the Britons and calling in ever more of our kinsmen from the old country; rather, we should make peace with the natives. He thought that with our strength and their Roman learning, we could together shape a mighty realm. He may have been right, though I for one see little use in all these books and baths, to say naught of that weird cross-god they have… Well, anyhow, he was slain by unknowns three years ago, and buried here with sacrifices and such of his possessions as his foes had not reaved. We give him an offering twice a year, and I must say his ghost has not made trouble for us. But still am I somewhat uneasy about it.”

  “Three years, eh?” breathed Whitcomb. “I see…”

  It took a good hour to break away, and Wulfnoth insisted on sending a boy along to guide them to the river. Everard, who didn’t feel like walking that far, grinned and called down the hopper. As he and Whitcomb mounted it, he said gravely to the bulging-eyed lad: “Know that thou hast guested Woden and Thunor, who will hereafter guard thy folk from harm.” Then he jumped three years back in time.

  “Now comes the rough part,” he said, peering out of the thicket at the nighted thorp. The mound was not there now, the wizard Stane was still alive. “It’s easy enough to put on a magic show for a kid, but we’ve got to extract this character from the middle of a big, tough town where he’s the king’s right-hand man. And he has a blast-ray.”

  “Apparently we succeeded—or will succeed,” said Whitcomb.

  “Nope. It’s not irrevocable, you know. If we fail, Wulfnoth will be telling us a different story three years from now, probably that Stane is there—he may kill us twice! And England
, pulled out of the Dark Ages into a neoclassical culture, won’t evolve into anything you’d recognize by 1894… I wonder what Stane’s game is.”

  He lifted the hopper and sent it through the sky toward Canterbury. A night wind whistled darkly past his face. Presently the town loomed near, and he grounded in a copse. The moon was white on the half-ruined Roman walls of ancient Durovernum, dappled black on the newer earth and wood of the Jutish repairs. Nobody would get in after sunset.

  Again the hopper brought them to daytime—near noon—and was sent skyward. His breakfast, two hours ago and three years in the future, felt soggy as Everard led the way onto a crumbling Roman road and toward the city. There was a goodly traffic, mostly farmers driving creaky ox-carts of produce in to market. A pair of vicious-looking guards halted them at the gate and demanded their business. This time they were the agents of a trader on Thanet who had sent them to interview various artisans here. The hoodlums looked surly till Whitcomb slipped them a couple of Roman coins; then the spears went down and they were waved past.

  The city brawled and bustled around them, though again it was the ripe smell which impressed Everard most. Among the jostling Jutes, he spotted an occasional Romano-Briton, disdainfully picking a way through the muck and pulling his shabby tunic clear of contact with these savages. It would have been funny if it weren’t pathetic.

  There was an extraordinarily dirty inn filling the moss-grown ruins of what had been a rich man’s town house. Everard and Whitcomb found that their money was of high value here where trade was principally in kind. By standing a few rounds of drinks, they got all the information they wanted. King Hengist’s hall was near the middle of town… not really a hall, an old building which had been deplorably prettied up under the direction of that outlander Stane… not that our good and doughty king is any pantywaist, don’t get me wrong, stranger… why, only last month… oh, yes, Stane! He lived in the house right next to it. Strange fellow, some said he was a god… he certainly had an eye for the girls… Yes, they said he was behind all this peace-talk with the Britons. More and more of those slickers coming in every day, it’s getting so an honest man can’t let a little blood without… Of course, Stane is very wise, I wouldn’t say anything against him, understand, after all, he can throw lightning…