The house and shop of Doukas Manasses, goldsmith, stood on a hill near the middle of the city. Square-built neighbors elbowed it, all turning blind faces onto the steep, wide, well-paved and well-swept street. But from its flat roof you had a superb view, from end to end of the vast, towered walls which enclosed the city, and further: across a maze of thoroughfares, a countlessness of dweffings and soaring church domes; along the grand avenue called the Mesé to flowering countryside past the Gate of Charisius, on inward by columns which upbore statuary from the noblest days of Hellas, monasteries and museums and libraries which preserved works by men like Aeschylus and women like Sappho that later centuries would never read, through broad forums pulsing with life, to the Hippodrome and that sprawling splendid complex which was the Imperial Palace. On a transverse axis, vision reached from glittering blue across the Sea of Marmora to a mast-crowded Golden Horn and the rich suburbs and smaragdine heights beyond.

Traffic rivered. The noise of wheels, hoofs, feet, talk, song, laughter, sobbing, cursing, praying blended together into one ceaseless heartbeat. A breeze carried a richness of odors, sea, woodsmoke, food, animals, humanity. Havig breathed deep.

“Thank you, Kyrios Hauk,” Doukas Manasses said. “You are most courteous to praise this sight.” His manner implied mild surprise that a Frank would not sneer at everything Greek. To be sure, Hauk Thomasson was not really a Frank or one of the allied English, he was from a boreal kingdom.

“Less courteous than you, Kyrios Manasses, to show me it,” Havig replied.

They exchanged bows. The Byzantines were not basically a strict folk-besides their passionate religion and passionate sense for beauty, they had as much bustling get-up-and-go, as much inborn gusto, as Levantines in any era-but their upper classes set store by ceremonious politeness.

“You expressed interest,” Doukas said. He was a gray-bearded man with handsome features and nearsighted eyes. His slight frame seemed lost in the usual dalmatic robe.

“I merely remarked, Kyrios, that a shop which produced such elegance as does yours must be surrounded by inspiration.” You could case public buildings easily enough; but your way to learn what private hands held what wealth was to go in, say you were looking for a gift to take home, and inspect a variety of samples.

Well, dammit, Doukas and his apprentices did do exquisite work.

“You are too kind,” the goldsmith murmured. “Although I do feel--since all good stems from God--that we Romans should look more to His creation, less to conventionality, than we have done.”

“Like this?” Havig pointed at a blossoming crabapple tree in a large planter.

Doukas smiled. “That’s for my daughter. She loves flowers, and we cannot take her daily on an outing in the country.”

Women enjoyed an honorable status, with many legal rights and protections. But perhaps Doukas felt his visitor needed further explanation: “We may indulge her too much, my Anna and I. However, she’s our only. That is, I was wedded before, but the sons of sainted Eudoxia are grown. Xenia is Anna’s first, and my first daughter.”

On impulse he added: “Kyrios Hauk, think me not over-bold. But I’m fascinated to meet a. . . friendly. . . foreigner, from so remote a country at that. It is long since there were many from your lands in the Varangian Guard. I would enjoy conversing at leisure. Would you honor our home at the evening meal?”

“Why-why, thank you.” Havig thought what a rare chance this was to find things out. Byzantine trades and crafts were organized in tight guilds under the direction of the prefect. This man, being distinguished in his profession, probably knew all about his colleagues, and a lot about other businesses. “I should be delighted.”

“Would you mind, my guest, if wife and child share our board?” Doukas asked shyly. “They will not interrupt. Yet they’d be glad to hear you. Xenia is, well, forgive my pride, she’s only five and already learning to read.”

She was a singularly beautiful child.

Hauk Thomasson returned next year and described the position he had accepted with a firm in Athens. Greece belonged to the Empire, and would till the catastrophe; but so much trade was now under foreign control that the story passed. His work would often bring him to Constantinople. He was happy to have this opportunity of renewing acquaintanceship, and hoped the daughter of Kyrios Manasses would accept a small present--“Athens!” the goldsmith whispered. “You dwell in the soul of Hellas?” He reached up to lay both hands on his visitor’s shoulders. Tears stood in his eyes. “Oh, wonderful for you, wonderful! To see those temples is the dream of my life … God better me, more than to see the Holy Land.”

Xenia accepted the toy gratefully. At dinner and afterward she listened, rapt, till her nanny shooed her to bed. She was a sweet youngster, Havig thought, undeniably bright, and not spoiled even though it seemed Anna would bear no more children.

He enjoyed himself, too. A cultured, sensitive, observant man is a pleasure to be with in any age. This assignment was, for a while, losing its nightmare quality.

In truth, he simply skipped ahead through time. He must check up periodically, to be sure events didn’t make his original data obsolete. Simultaneously he could develop more leads, ask more questions, than would have been practical in a single session.

But--he wondered a few calendar years later--wasn’t he being more thorough than needful? Did he really have to make this many visits to the Manasses family, become an intimate, join them on holidays and picnics, invite them out to dinner or for a day on a rented pleasure barge? Certainly he was exceeding his expense estimate ... To hell with that. He could finance himself by placing foreknowledgeable bets on events in the Hippodrome. An agent working alone had broad discretion.

He felt guilty about lying to his friends. But it had to be. After all, his objective was to save them.

Xenia’s voice was somewhat high and thin, but whenever he heard or remembered it, Havig would think of songbirds. Thus had it been since first she overcame her timidity and laughed in his presence. From then on, she chattered with him to the limit her parents allowed, or more when they weren’t looking.

She was reed-slender. He had never seen any human who moved with more gracefulness; and when decorum was not required, her feet danced. Her hair was a midnight mass which, piled on her head, seemed as if it ought to bend the delicate neck. Her skin was pale and clear; her face was oval, tilt-nosed, its lips always a little parted. The eyes dominated that countenance, enormous, heavy-lashed, luminous black. Those eyes may be seen elsewhere, in a Ravenna mosaic, upon Empress Theodora the Great; they may never be forgotten.

It was a strange thing to meet her at intervals of months which for Havig were hours or days. Each time, she was so dizzyingly grown. In awe he felt a sense of that measureless river which he could swim but on which she could only be carried from darkness to darkness.

The house was built around a courtyard where flowers and oranges grew and a fountain played. Doukas proudly showed Havig his latest acquisition: on a pedestal in one corner, a bust of Constantine who made Rome Christian and for whom New Rome was named. “From the life, I feel sure,” he said. “By then the art of portrayal was losing its former mastery. Nevertheless, observe his imperiously tight-held mouth--”

Nine-year-old Xenia giggled. “What is it, dear?” her father asked.

“Nothing, really,” she said, but couldn’t stop giggling.

“No, do tell us. I shan’t be angry.”

“He ... he ... he wants to make a very important speech, and he has gas!”

“By Bacchus,” Havig exclaimed, “she’s right!”

Doukas struggled a moment before he gave up and joined the fun.

“Oh, please, will you not come to church with us, Hauk?” she begged. “You don’t know how lovely it is, when the song and incense and candle flames rise up to Christ Pantocrator.” She was eleven and overflowing with God.

“I’m sorry,” Havig said. “You know I am, am Catholic.”

“The saints won’t mind. I asked Father and Mother, and they won’t mind either. We can say you’re a Russian, if we need to. I’ll show you how to act.” She tugged his hand. “Do come!”

He yielded, not sure whether she hoped to convert him or merely wanted to share something glorious with her honorary uncle.

“But it’s too wonderful!” She burst into tears and hugged her thirteenth birthday present to her before holding it out. “Father, Mother, see what Hauk gave me! This book, the p-p-plays of Euripides--all of them--for me!”

When she was gone to change clothes for a modest festival dinner, Doukas said: “That was a royal gift. Not only the cost of having the copy made and binding it as a codex. The thought.”

“I knew she loves the ancients as much as you do,” the traveler answered.

“Forgive me,” Anna the mother said. “But at her age … may Euripides not be, well, stern reading?”

“These are stern times,” Havig replied, and could no longer feign joy. “A tragic line may hearten her to meet fate.” He turned to the goldsmith. “Doukas, I tell you again, I swear to you, I know through my connections that the Venetians at this very moment are negotiating with other Frankish lords--”

“You have said that.” The goldsmith nodded. His hair and beard were nearly white.

“It’s not too late to move you and your family to safety. I’ll help.”

“Where is safety better than these walls, which no invader has ever breached? Or where, if I break up my shop, where is safety from pauperdom and hunger? What would my apprentices and servants do? They can’t move. No, my good old friend, prudence and duty alike tells us we must remain here and trust in God.” Doukas uttered a small sad chuckle. “‘Old,’ did I say? You never seem to change. Well, you’re in your prime, of course.”

Havig swallowed. “I don’t think I’ll be back in Constantinople for some while. My employers, under present circumstances--Be careful. Keep unnoticeable, hide your wealth, stay off the streets whenever you can and always at night. I know the Franks.”

“Well, I, I’ll bear your advice in mind, Hank, if--But you go too far. This is New Rome.”

Anna touched the arms of both. Her smile was uncertain. “Now that’s enough politics, you men,” she said. “Take off those long faces. We’re making merry on Xenia’s day. Have you forgotten?”

Time-skipping in an alley across the street, Havig checked the period of the first Latin occupation. Nothing terrible seemed to happen. The house drew back into itself and waited.

He went pastward to a happier year, took a night’s lodging, forced himself to eat a hearty supper and get a lot of sleep. Next morning he omitted breakfast: a good idea when you may soon be in combat.

He jumped ahead, to the twelfth of April, 1204.

He could be no more than an observer through the days and nights of the sack. His orders were explicit and made sense:

“If you can possibly avoid it, stay out of danger. Under no conditions mingle, or try to influence events. Absolutely never, and this is under penalties, never enter a building which is a scene of action. We want your report, and for that we need you alive.”

Fire leaped and roared. Smoke drifted bitter. People huddled like rats indoors, or fled like rats outside, and some escaped but thousands were ridden down, shot down, chopped down, beaten, stomped, tortured, robbed, raped, by yelling sooty sweaty blood-spattered men whose fleas hopped about on silks and altar cloths they had flung across their shoulders. Corpses gaped in the gutters, which ran red till they clotted. Many of the bodies were very small. Mothers crept about shrieking for children, children for mothers; most fathers lay dead. Orthodox priests in their churches were kept in pain until they revealed where the treasury was hidden; usually there was none, in which case it was great sport to soak their beards in oil and set these alight. Women, girls, nuns of any age lay mumbling or whimpering after a row of men had violated them. Humiliations more ingenious might be contrived.

A drunken harlot sat on the patriarch’s throne in Hagia Sophia, while dice games for plunder were played on the altars. The bronze horses of the Hippodrome were carted off to Venice’s Cathedral of St. Mark; artwork, jewelry, sacred objects would be scattered across a continent; but at least these things were preserved. More was melted down or torn apart for the precious metals and stones, or smashed or burned for amusement. So perished much classical art, and nearly all classical writing, which Constantinople had kept safe until these days. It is not true that the Turks of 1453 were responsible. The Crusaders were there before them.

Afterward came the great silence, broken by furtive crying, and the stench, and the sickness, and the hunger.

In this wise, at the beginning of that thirteenth century which Catholic apologists call the apogee of civilization, did Western Christendom destroy its Eastern flank. A century and a half later, having devoured Mia Minor, the Turks entered Europe.

Havig time-skipped.

He would return to a safe date, seek out one of his chosen sites, and advance through the whole period of the sack, flickering in and out of normal time, until he knew what was to happen there. When he saw a Frankish band enter a place, he focused more sharply. In most cases they staggered out after a while, sated with death and torment, kicking prisoners who carried away their spoils. Those buildings he wrote off. You couldn’t change the past or future, you could merely discover what parts were your own.

But in certain instances--and only a comparative few would be accessible to the Eyrie commandos; they hadn’t many man-months to spend on this job--Havig saw marauders frightened off, or cut down if need be, by submachine gun fire. The spectacle did not make him gloat. However, he knew a chilly satisfaction while he recorded the spot.

From it, the Eyrie men would cart their loot. They were dressed in conqueror style. Amidst this confusion, it was unlikely they would attract notice. A ship was arranged for, to bear the gains to a safe depot.

They would take care of the dwellers, Krasicki had promised. What to do would depend on circumstances. Some families need simply be left unharmed, with enough money to carry on. Others must be guided elsewhere and staked to a fresh beginning.

Paradoxes need not be feared. The tale of how veritable saints--or demons, if one was a Frank--had rescued so-and-so might live a while in folklore but would not get into any chronicle. Writers in Constantinople must be cautious for the next fifty-seven years, until Michael Paleologus ended the Latin kingdom and raised a ghost of Empire. By then, anecdotes would have been lost.

Havig didn’t look into the immediate sequels of these agent actions. Besides the prohibition laid on him, he already was overburdened. Many sights he witnessed sent him fleeing downtime, weeping and vomiting, to sleep till he had the strength to continue.

The Manasses home was among the earliest he investigated. It wasn’t quite the first; he wanted to gain experience elsewhere; but he knew he was going to be dulled later on.

He had cherished a hope it might be entirely overlooked. Some of his points were. It being unfeasible to check the Crusaders in the famous places, he had investigated lesser ones, whose aggregate wealth was what counted. And Constantinople was too big, too labyrinthine, too rich and strange for the pillagers to break down every door.

He felt no extreme fears. In this particular case, something would be done if need be, by himself if nobody else, and Caleb Wallis could take his destiny and stuff it. Nevertheless, when Havig from his alley saw a dozen filthy men lope toward that open entrance, the heart stumbled within him. When lead sleeted from it, and three Franks fell and were quiet, two lay sprattling and shrieking, and the rest howled and fled, Havig cheered.

His return was a sizable operation in itself.

Between the radioactivity and the time uncertainty, he couldn’t proceed up to dead Istanbul and hunt around for an agreed-on hour at which the aircraft would meet him. Nor could he appear in an earlier epoch--the Eyrie’s planes were not available then--or at a later one--the site would be reoccupied. He’d look too peculiar, and would still have the problem of reaching a geographical point where contact could be made.

“Now you tell me!” he muttered to himself. For a while he marveled that the obvious answer hadn’t occurred when this whole project was being discussed. Use his twentieth-century persona. Cache some funds and clothes in a contemporary Istanbul hotel; feed the management a line about being involved in production of a movie; and there he was, set.

Well, he’d been overwhelmed by things to think about. And the idea hadn’t come to anyone else. While Wallis employed some gadgets developed in the High Years, he and his lieutenants were nineteenth-century men who had organized an essentially nineteenth-century operation.

The plan called for Havig to double back downtime, make more money if he had to, engage passage on a ship to Crete, there find a specific isolated spot, and project himself uptime.

Actually, effort, cramped quarters, dirt, noise, smells, moldy hardtack, scummy water, weird fellow passengers, and all, he didn’t care. He needed something to take his mind off what he had seen.

“Splendidly done,” Krasicki said across the written report. “Splendidly. I’m sure the Sachem will give you public praise and reward, when next your two time-lines intersect.”

“Hm? Oh. Oh, yeah. Thanks.” Havig blinked.

Krasicki studied him. “You are exhausted, are you not?”

“Call me Rip van Winkle,” Havig muttered.

Krasicki understood his gauntness, sunken eyes, slumped body, tic in cheek, if not the reference. “Yes. It is common. We allow for it. You have earned a furlough. In your home milieu, I suggest. Never mind about the rest of the Constantinople business. If we need more from you, we can always ask when you return here.” His smile approached warmth. “Go, now. We’ll talk later. I think we can arrange for your girl friend to accompany-Havig? Havig?”

Havig was asleep.

His trouble was that later, instead of enjoying his leave, he started thinking.

10

HE WOKE with his resolve crystallized. It was early. Light over the high rooftops of the Rive Gauche, Paris, 1965, reached gray and as cool as the air, which traffic had not yet begun to trouble. The hotel room was shadowy. Leonce breathed warm and tousle-haired beside him. They had been night-clubbing late--among the chansonniers, which he preferred, now that her wish for the big glittery shows was slaked--and come back to make leisured and tender love. She’d hardly stir before a knock, some hours hence, announced coffee and croissants.

Havig was surprised at his own rousing. Well, more and more in the past couple of weeks, he’d felt he was only postponing the inevitable. His conscience must have gotten tired of nagging him and delivered an ultimatum.

Regardless of danger, he felt at peace, for the first time in that whole while.

He rose, washed and dressed, assembled his gear. It lay ready, two modules within his baggage. There was the basic agent’s kit, an elaborated version of what he had taken to Jerusalem plus a gun. (The Eyrie’s documents section furnished papers to get that past customs.) He had omitted items Leonce had in hers, such as most of the silver, in order to save the mass of the chronolog. (He had unobtrusively taken it back with him on this trip. She asked him why he lugged it around. When he said, “Special electronic gear,” the incantation satisfied her.) Passport, vaccination certificate, and thick wallet of traveler’s checks completed the list.

For a minute he stood above the girl. She was a dear, he thought. Her joy throughout their tour had been a joy to him. Dirty trick, sneaking out on her. Should he leave a note?

No, no reason for it. He could return to this hour. If he didn’t, well, she knew enough contemporary English and procedure, and had enough funds, to handle the rest. (Her own American passport was genuine; the Eyrie had made her a birth certificate.) She might perhaps feel hurt if she knew what had gotten him killed.

Chances were he was simply courting a reprimand. In that case, she’d hear the full story; but he’d be there to explain, in terms of loyalty which she could understand.

Or would it much matter? That she called him “darlya” and spoke of love when he embraced her was probably just her way. Lately, though, she’d been holding his hand a lot when they were out together, and he’d caught her smiling at him when she thought he wasn’t noticing. . . . He was a bit in love with her too. It could never last, but while it did--He stooped. “So long, Big Red,” he whispered. His lips brushed hers. Straightening, he picked up his two carrying cases and stole from the room. By evening he was in Istanbul.

The trip took this many hours out of his lifespan, mostly spent on the plane and airport buses. Time-hopping around among ticket agencies and the like made the calendrical interval a couple of days. He had told me through a wry grin: “Know where the best place usually is for unnoticed chronokinesis in a modern city? Not Superman’s telephone booth. A public lavatory stall. Real romantic, huh?”

He ate a good though lonely dinner, and in his luxurious though lonely chamber took a sleeping pill. He needed to be rested before he embarked.

Constantinople, late afternoon on the thirteenth of April, 1204. Havig emerged in an alley downhill from his destination. Silence pressed upon him-no slap of buskins, clop of hoofs, rumble and squeal of cartwheels, no song of bells, no voices talking, chattering, laughing, dreaming aloud, no children at their immemorial small games. But the stillness had background, a distant jagged roar which was fire and human shrieking, the nearer desperate bark of a dog.

He made ready. The gun, a 9-mm Smith & Wesson mule-killer, he holstered at his waist. Extra ammunition he put in the deep pockets of his jacket. Kit and chronolog he strapped together in an aluminum packframe which went on his back.

Entering the street, he saw closed doors, shuttered windows. Most dwellers were huddled inside, hungry, thirsty, endlessly at prayer. The average place wasn’t worth breaking into, except for the pleasures of rape, murder, torture, and arson. True, this was the district of the goldsmiths. But not every building, or even a majority, belonged to one. Residential sections were not based on economic status; the poor could be anywhere. With booths and other displays removed, you couldn’t tell if a particular façade concealed wealth or a tenement house--until, of course, you clapped hands on a local person and wrenched the information out of him.

Evidently those who rushed the Manasses home were in advance of the mobs which would surely boil hither as soon as palace and church buildings were stripped. Were they here yet? Havig hadn’t been sure of the exact time when he saw them.

He trotted around a corner. A man lay dead of a stab wound. His right arm reached across his back, pulled from its socket. A shabby-clad woman crouched above him. As Havig passed, she screamed: “Wasn’t it enough that you made him betray our neighbor? In Christ’s name, wasn’t that enough?”

No, he thought. There was also the peculiar thrill in extinguishing a life.

He went on by. The agony he had seen earlier returned to him in so monstrous a flood that the tears of this widow were lost. He could do nothing for her; trousers, short hair, shaven chin marked him a Frank in her eyes. When he was born, she and her grief were seven hundred years forgotten.

At least, he thought, he knew how the Crusaders had located Doukas’s shop. One among them must understand some Greek, and their band had decided to seek out this part of town ahead of the rush. He knew also that his scheduling was approximately right.

Yells, clangor, and a terrible stammer reverberated wall to wall, off the cobbles, up to soot-befouled heaven. He stretched lips over teeth. “Yeah,” he muttered, “I got it exactly right.”

He quickened his pace. His younger self would be gone by the time he arrived. Obvious: he had not seen his later self. He didn’t want that house unwatched for many minutes.

Not after considering what sort of man the average Eyrie warrior was.

The street of his goal was steep. Gravity dragged at him. He threw his muscles against it. His bootsoles thudded like his heart. His mouth was dry. Smoke stung his nostrils.

There!

One of the wounded Crusaders saw him, struggled to his knees, raised arms. Blood shone its wild red, hiding the cross on the surcoat, dripping in thick gouts to the stones. “Ami,” croaked from a face contorted out of shape, on whose waxen-ness the beard stubble stood blue. “Frère par lesu-” The other survivor could merely groan, over and over.

Havig felt an impulse to kick their teeth in, and immediate shame. Mortal combat corrupts, and war corrupts absolutely. He ignored the kneeling man, who slumped behind him; he lifted both hands and shouted in English:

“Hold your fire! I am from the Eyrie! Inspection! Hold your fire and let me in!” Not without a tightness in his own unriddled guts, he approached the doorway.

An oxcart stood by, the animal tethered to a bracket which had formerly upheld Doukas’s sign, twitching its ears against flies and with mild interest watching the Crusaders die. It would have been arranged for beforehand, to bring gold and silver and precious stones, ikons and ornaments and bridal chaplets, down to the ship which waited. Havig wasn’t the only traveler who had been busy in the years before today. An operation like this took a great deal of work.

Nobody guarded the entrance. Armed as they were, the agents could deal with interference, not that any such attempt would be made. Havig stopped. Scowling, he examined the door. It was massive, and had surely been barred. The Franks had doubtless meant to chop their way in. But at the point when Havig glimpsed them and halted for a clear look, it had stood open. That was one fact which had never stopped plaguing him.

From the way it sagged on its hinges, scorched and half splintered, Wallis’s boys must have used a dynamite charge. That had been done so quickly that, in Havig’s dim chronokinetic sight, their arrival had blurred together with that of the Franks a few minutes afterward.

Why had they forced an entrance? Such impatience would panic the household, complicate the task of assisting it to safety.

A scream fled down the rooms inside: “No, oh, no, please!” in Greek and Xenia’s voice, followed by an oath and a guffaw. Havig crouched back as if stabbed.

In spite of everything, he had come late. At the moment of his arrival, the agents had already blown down the door and entered. They’d posted a man here to await the plunderers whom Havig had reported. Now he’d gone back within to join the fun.

For an instant which had no end, Havig cursed his own stupidity. Or naïveté-he was new to this kind of thing, bound to overlook essentials. To hell with that. Here he was and now he was, and his duty was to save whatever might be left.

His call must not have been noticed. He repeated it while he went through the remembered house. That sobbed-out cry for mercy had come from the largest chamber, which was the main workshop and storeroom.

Family, apprentices, and servants had been brought together there. It was more light and airy than usual in Byzantium, for a door and broad windows opened on the patio. Yonder the fountain still tinkled and twinkled, oranges glowed amid darkgreen leaves, Eastertide flowerbeds were budding, the bust of Constantine stood in eternal embarrassment. Here, on shelves and tables, everywhere crowded that beauty which Doukas Manasses had seen to the making of.

He sprawled near the entrance. His skull was split open. The blood had spread far, making the floor slippery, staining footwear which then left crimson tracks. But much had soaked into his robe and white beard. One hand still held a tiny anvil, with which he must have tried to defend his women.

Four agents were present, dressed as Crusaders. In a flash, Havig knew them. Mendoza, of the Tijuana underworld in his own century, who had been among those who went to Jerusalem, was in charge. He was ordering the natives to start collecting loot. Moriarty, nineteenth-century Brooklyn gangster, kept guard, submachine gun at the ready. Hans, sixteenth-century Landsknecht, watched Coenraad of Brabant, who had wanted to draw sword and save the Savior, struggle with Xenia.

The girl screamed and screamed. She was only fourteen. Her hair had fallen loose. Sweat and tears plastered locks to her face. Coenraad grasped her around the waist. His free hand ripped at her gown. A war hammer, stuck in his belt, dripped blood and brains.

“Me next,” Hans grinned. “Me next.”

Coenraad bore Xenia down to the wet floor and fumbled with his trousers. Anna, who had stood as if blind and deaf near the body of her husband, wailed. She scuttled toward her daughter. Hans decked her with a single blow. “Maybe you later,” he said.

“Hard men, you two,” Moriarty laughed. “Real hard, hey?”

The sequence had taken seconds. Havig’s call had again failed to pierce their excitement. Mendoza was first to see him, and exclaim. The rest froze, until Coenraad let Xenia go and climbed to his feet.

She stared up. Never had he thought to see such a light as was born in her eyes. “Hauk!” She cried. “Oh, Hauk!”

Mendoza swung his gun around. “What is this?” he demanded.

Havig realized how far his own hand was from his own weapon. But he felt no fear--hardly any emotion, in fact, on the surface, beyond a cougar alertness. Down underneath roiled the fury, sorrow, horror, disgust he could not now afford.

“I might ask you the same,” he replied slowly.

“Have you forgotten your orders? I know them. Your job is to gather intelligence. You are not to risk yourself at a scene of operations like this.”

“I finished my job, Mendoza. I came back for a personal look.”

“Forbidden! Get out, and we’ll talk later about whether or not I report you.”

“Suppose I don’t?” Despite control, Havig heard his voice rise, high and saw-edged: “I’ve seen what I wasn’t supposed to see in one lump, only piece by piece, gradually, so I’d make the dirty little compromises till it no longer mattered, I’d be in so deep that I’d either have to kill myself or become like you. Yes, I understand.”

Mendoza’s shrug did not move the tommygun barrel aimed at Havig’s stomach. “Well? What do you expect? We use what human material we can find. These boys are no worse than the Crusaders--than man in most of history. Are they, Jack? Be honest.”

“They are. Because they have the power to come into any time, any place, do anything, and never fear revenge. How do they spend their holidays, I wonder? I imagine the taste for giving pain and death must grow with practice.”

“Listen--”

“And Wallis, his whole damned outfit, doesn’t even try to control them!”

“Havig, you talk too much. Get out before I arrest you.”

“They keep the few like me from knowing, till we’ve accepted that crock--about how the mission of the Eyrie is too important for us to waste lifespan on enforcing common humanity. Right?”

Mendoza spat. “Hokay, boy, you said plenty and then some. You’re under arrest. You’ll be escorted uptime and the Sachem will judge your case. Be good and maybe you’ll get off easy.”

For a moment it was tableau, very quiet save for Xenia’s sobs where she cradled the head of her half-conscious mother. Her eyes never left Havig. Nor did those of the household he had known--hopeful young Bardas, gifted Ioannes, old Maria who had been Xenia’s nurse, all and all of the dozen--nor those of Mendoza and Moriarty. Hans’s kept flickering in animal wariness, Coenraad’s in thwarted lechery.

Havig reached his decision, made his plan, noted the position of each man and weapon, in that single hard-held breath.

Himself appeared, six-fold throughout the room. The fire-fight exploded.

He cast himself back in time a few minutes while sidestepping, sped uptime while he drew his pistol, emerged by Hans. The gun cracked and kicked. The Landsknecht’s head geysered into pieces. Havig went back again, and across the chamber.

Afterward he scarcely remembered what happened. The battle was too short, too ferocious. Others could do what he did, against him. Coenraad wasn’t quick-witted enough, and died. Moriarty vanished from Havig’s sight as the latter arrived. Mendoza’s gun blasted, and Havig sprang future-ward barely in time. Traveling, he saw Moriarty’s shadow form appear. He backtracked, was there at the instant, shot the man and twisted off into time, away from Mendoza.

Then the Mexican wasn’t present. Havig slipped pastward--a night when the family slept at peace under God--to gasp air and let the sweat stop spurting, the limbs stop shaking. At last he felt able to return and scan the period of combat in detail. Beyond a certain point, not long after the beginning, he found no Mendoza.

The fellow must have gone way uptime, maybe to the far side of the Judgment, for help.

This meant fast action was vital. Havig’s friends could not time-hop. The enemy would be, no, were handicapped by the difficulty of reaching a precise goal without a chronolog. But they could cast around, and wouldn’t miss by much.

Havig rejoined Earth at the earliest possible second. Moriarty threshed about, yammering anguish, like those men outside whom he, perhaps, had been the one to shoot. Never mind him. The Byzantines huddled together. Bardas lay dead, two others wounded in crossfire.

“I come to save you,” Havig said into the reek of powder and fear, into their uncomprehending glazed-eye shock. He drew the sign of the cross, right to left in Orthodox style. “In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. In the name of the Virgin Mary and every saint. Come with me, at once, or you die.”

He helped Xenia rise. She clung to him, face buried against his breast, fingers clutching. He rumpled the long black hair and remembered how he a child would grasp at a father bound for death. Across her shoulder he snapped: “Ioannes, Nicephorus, you look in the best shape. Carry your lady Anna. The rest of you who’re hale, give aid to the hurt.” English broke from him: “Goddammit, we’ve got to get out of here!”

Numbly, they obeyed. In the street he stopped to don the surcoat off a dead Crusader. His pack he gave a man to carry. From another corpse he took a sword. He didn’t waste time unbuckling the scabbard belt. That weapon indicated a high enough rank that his party wasn’t likely to meet interference.

Several streets down, dizziness overwhelmed him. He must sit, head between knees, till strength returned. Xenia knelt before him, hands anxiously trying to help. “Hauk,” went her raw whisper. “Wh-wh-what’s wrong, dearest Hauk?”

“We’re safe,” he finally said.

From the immediate threat, at least. He didn’t suppose the Eyrie would spend man-years scouring Constantinople for him and these, once they had vanished into the multitudes. But he had still to safeguard their tomorrows, and his own. The knowledge gave him a glacial kind of resolution. He rose and led them further on their stumbling way.

“I left them at a certain monastery,” he told me (long afterward on his own world line). “The place was jammed with refugees, but I foreknew it’d escape attention. In the course of the next several days, local time, I made better arrangements. A simple task--” he grimaced--”distasteful but simple, to hijack unidentifiable loot from ordinary Franks. I made presents to that monastery, and to the nunnery where I later took the women. This won favor for the people I’d brought, special favor out of the hordes, because with my donations the monks and nuns could buy bread to feed their poor.”

“What about the hordes?” I asked softly.

He covered his face. “What could I do? They were too many.”

I gripped his shoulder. “They are always too many, Jack.”

He sighed and smiled a little. “Thanks, Doc.”

I had exceeded my day’s tobacco ration, but the hour was far into night and my nerves required some help. Drawing out my pipe, I made an evil-smelling ceremony of cleaning it. “What’d you do next?”

“Went back to the twentieth century--a different hotel--and slept a lot,” he said. “Afterward ... well, as for my Byzantines, I could do nothing in their immediate futures. I’d cautioned them against talking, told them to say they’d just fled from a raid. After a ‘saint’ had rescued them from ‘demons,’ it was a safe bet they’d obey. But as fail-safe, I did not tell the men where I led the women.

“Further than that, no transportation being available, and me not wanting to do anything which might make them noticeable, my best tactic was to leave them alone. The organized institutions where they were could care for them better than I’d know how.

“Besides, I had to provide for my own survival.”

I reamed the pipe with needless force. “Yes, indeed,” I said. “What did you do?”

He sipped his drink. While he dared not blur mind or senses, the occasional taste of Scotch was soothing. “I knew the last date on which I had publicly been J. F. Havig,” he told me. “At the start of my furlough, in 1965, in conference with a broker of mine. True, there had been later appearances in normal time, like my 1969 trip to Israel, but those were brief. Nineteen sixty-five marked the end of what real continuity there was in my official persona. Everything was in order, the broker told me. I didn’t see how so complicated a financial and identity setup could be faked. Thus my existence was safe up to that point.”

“The Eyrie couldn’t strike at you earlier? Why not?”

“Oh, they could appear at a previous moment and lay a trap of some kind, no doubt. But it couldn’t be sprung till later. On the whole, I doubted they’d even try that. None of them really know their way around the twentieth century, its upper echelons in particular, as I do.”

“You mean, an event once recorded is unalterable?”

Now his smile chilled me. “I suspect all events are,” he said. “I do know a traveler cannot generate contradictions. I’ve tried. So have others, including Wallis himself. Let me give you a single, personal example. Once in young manhood I thought I’d go back downtime, break my ‘uncle’s’ prohibition, reveal to my father what I was and warn him against enlisting.”

“And?” I breathed.

“Doc, remember that broken leg of mine you treated?”

“Yes. Wait! That was--”

“Uh-huh. I tripped on an electric cord somebody had carelessly left at the top of some stairs, the personal-time day before I planned to set out. . . . When I was well and ready to start afresh, I got an urgent call from my trust company and had to argue over assorted tedious details. Returning to Senlac, I found my mother had made her final break with Birkelund and needed my presence. I looked at those two innocent babies he and she had brought into this world, and got the message.”

“does God intervene, do you think?”

“No, no, no. I suppose it’s simply a logical impossibility to change the past, same as it’s logically impossible for a uniformly colored spot to be both red and green. And every instant in time is the past of infinitely many other instants. That figures.

“The pattern is. Our occasional attempts to break it, and our failures, are part of it.”

“Then we’re nothing except puppets?”

“I didn’t say that, Doc. In fact, I can’t believe we are. Seems to me, our free wills must be a part of the grand design too. But we’d better take care to stay within the area of unknownness, which is where our freedom lies.”

“Could this be analogous to, well, drugs?” I wondered. “A man might deliberately, freely take a chemical which grabbed hold of his mind. But then, while its effects lasted, he would not be free.”

“Maybe, maybe.” Havig stirred in his chair, peered out into night, took another small swallow of whiskey. “Look, we may not have time for these philosophical musings. Wallis’s hounds are after me. If not in full cry, surely at any rate alert for any spoor of me. They know something of my biography. They can find out more, and make spot checks if nothing else.”

“Is that why you avoided me, these past years of my life?” I asked.

“Yes.” Now he laid a comforting hand on me. “While Kate lived--You understand?”

I nodded dumbly.

“What I did,” he said, hastening on to dry detail, “was return to that selfsame date of 1965, in New York, the last one I could be reasonably sure of. From there I backtracked, laying a groundwork. It took a while. I had to make sure that what I did would be so hard to trace that Wallis wouldn’t assign the necessary man-years to the task. I worked through Swiss banks, several series of dummies, et cetera. The upshot was that John Havig’s fortune got widely distributed, in the names of a number of people and corporations who in effect are me. John Havig himself, publicity-shy playboy, explained to his hired financiers that this was because--never mind. A song and dance which sounded enough like a tax-fraud scheme, though actually it wasn’t, that they were glad to wash their hands of me and to know nothing important.

“John Havig, you recall, thereupon quietly dropped out of circulation. Since he had no intimates in the twentieth century, apart from his mother and his old hometown doctor, only these would ever miss him or wonder much; and it was easy to drop them an occasional reassuring letter.”

“Postcards to me, mainly,” I said. “You had me wondering, all right.” After a pause: “Where were you?”

“Having covered my tracks as well as might be,” he answered, “I went back to Constantinople.”

In the burnt-out husk of New Rome, order was presently restored. At first, if nothing else, troops needed water and food, for which labor and some kind of civil government were needed, which meant that the dwellers could no longer be harried like vermin. Later, Baldwin of Flanders, lord over that fragment of the Empire which became his portion and included the city, desired to get more use than that out of his subjects. He was soon captured in war against the Bulgarians and died a prisoner, but the attitude of his brother and successor Henry I was the same. A Latin king could oppress the Greeks, squeeze them, humiliate them, tax them to poverty, dragoon them into his corvées or his armies. But for this he must allow them a measure of security in their work and their lives.

Though Xenia was a guest, the nunnery was strict. She met Havig in a chilly brick-walled gloom, under the disapproving gaze of a sister. Robed in rough brown wool, coifed, veiled, she was forbidden to touch her male visitor, let alone seek his arms, no matter how generous a benefaction he had brought along. But he saw her Ravenna eyes; and the garments could not hide how she had begun to grow and fill out; nor could every tone in her voice be flattened, which brought back to him the birds on countryside days with her and her father--“Oh, Hauk, darling Hauk!” Shrinking back, drawing the cross, starting to genuflect and hesitating a-tremble: “I ... I beg your pardon, your forgiveness, B-b-blessed One.”

The old nun frowned and took a step toward them. Havig waved wildly. “No, no, Xenia!” he exclaimed. “I’m as mortal as you are. I swear it. Strange things did happen, that day last year. Maybe I can explain them to you later. Believe me, though, my dear, I’ve never been anything more than a man.”

She wept awhile at that, not in disappointment. “I, I, I’m so g-glad. I mean, you ... you’ll go to Heaven when you die, but--” But today he was not among her stiff stern Byzantine saints.

“How is your mother?” Havig asked.

He could barely hear: “She ... has taken the veil. She begs me to do l-l-likewise.” The thin fingers twisted together till nails stood white; the look raised to him was terrified. “Should I? I waited for you-to tell me--”

“Don’t get me wrong, Doc,” Havig said. “The sisters meant well. Their rule was severe, however, especially considering the unsureness when overlords both temporal and spiritual were Catholic. You can imagine, can’t you? She loved her God, and books had always been a main part of her life. But hers was the spirit of classical antiquity, as she dreamed that age had been--I never found the heart to disillusion her. And her upbringing--my influence too, no doubt--had turned her early toward the living world. Even lacking that background, a round of prayer and obedience inside the same cloisters, nothing else till death opened the door--was never for her. The ghastly thing which had struck her did not take away her birthright, which was to be a sun-child.”

“What’d you do?” I asked.

“I found an elderly couple who’d take her in. They were poor, but I could help them financially; they were childless, which made them extra glad, extra kind to her; and he, a scribe, was a scholar of sorts. It worked out well.”

“You made periodic checkups, of course.”

Havig nodded. Gentleness touched his mouth. “I had my own projects going,” he said. “Still, during the next year or so of my lifespan, the next three of Xenia’s, I went back from time to time to visit her. The times got to be oftener and oftener.”

11

THE SHIP was a trimaran, and huge. From the flying bridge, Havig looked across a sweep of deck, beautifully grained hardwood whereon hatches, cargo booms, donkey engines, sun-power screens, and superstructure made a harmonious whole. There was no brightwork; Maurai civilization, poor in metals, must reserve them for the most basic uses. The cabins were shingled. Bougainvillea and trumpet flower vines rioted over them. At each forepeak stood a carven figure representing one of the Trinity-Tanaroa Creator in the middle, a column of abstract symbols; Lesu Haristi holding his cross to starboard; to port, shark-toothed Nan, for death and the dark side of life.

But they were no barbarians who built and crewed this merchantman. The triple hull was designed for ultimate hydrodynamic efficiency. The three great A-frame masts bore sails, true, but these were of esoteric cut and accompanied by vanes which got their own uses out of the wind; the entire rig was continuously readjusted by small motors, which biological fuel cells powered and a computer directed. The personnel were four kanakas and two wahines, who were not overworked.

Captain Rewi Lohannaso held an engineering degree from the University of Wellantoa in N’Zealann. He spoke several languages, and his Ingliss was not the debased dialect of some Merican tribe, but as rich and precise as Havig’s native tongue.

A stocky brown man in sarong and bare feet, he said, slowly for the benefit of his passenger who was trying to master the modern speech: “We kept science after technology’s worldmachine broke down. Our problem was to find new ways to apply that science, on a planet gutted and poisoned. We’ve not wholly solved it. But we have come far, and I do believe we will go further.”

The ocean rolled indigo, turquoise, aquamarine, and aglitter. Waves rushed, wavelets chuckled. Sunlight fell dazzling on sails and on the wings of an albatross. A pod of whales passed majestically across vision. The wind did not pipe in the ears, at the speed of the ship before it, but lulled, brought salty odors, stroked coolness across bare sun-warmed skins. Down on deck, a young man, off duty, drew icy-sweet notes from a bamboo flute, and a girl danced. Their nude bodies were as goodly to see as a cat or a blooded horse.

“That’s why you’ve done a grand thing, Brother Thomas,” Lohannaso said. “They’ll jubilate when you arrive.” He hesitated. “I did not radio for an aircraft to bring you and your goods to the Federation because the Admiralty might have obliged. And . . . frankly, dirigibles are faster, but less reliable than ships. Their engines are feeble; the fireproofing anticatalyst for the hydrogen is experimental.”

(“I think that brought home to me as much as anything did, the truth about Maurai society in its best days,” Havig said to me. “They were-will not be back-to-nature cranks. On the contrary, beneath the easygoing affability, they may well be more development-minded than the U.S.A. today. But they won’t have the fuel for heavier-than-air craft, anyhow not in their earlier stages; and they won’t have the helium for blimps like ours. We squandered so much of everything.”)

“Your discovery waited quite a few centuries,” Lohannaso went on. “Won’t hurt if it waits some extra weeks to get to Wellantoa.”

(“If I wanted to study the Maurai in depth, to learn what percentage of what Wallis said about them was true and what was lies or blind prejudice, I needed an entrée. Beginning when they first started becoming an important factor in the world, I could follow their history onward. But I had to make that beginning, from scratch. I could pose as a Merican easily enough--among the countless dialects English had split into, mine would pass--but why should they be interested in one more barbarian? And I’d no hope of pretending to be from a semi-civilized community which they had trade relations with …

Well, I hit on an answer.” Havig grinned. “Can you guess, Doc? No? Okay. Through a twentieth-century dummy I acquired a mess of radioisotopes, like Carbon 14. I left them where they’d be safe-their decay must be real-and moved uptime. There I became Brother Thomas, from an inland stronghold which had preserved a modicum of learning. I’d discovered this trove and decided the Maurai should have it, so carted it myself to the coast ... You see? The main thrust of their research was biological. It must be, both because Earth’s ecology was in bad need of help, and because life is the sunpower converter. But they had no nuclear reactors to manufacture tracer isotopes wholesale. To them, my ‘find’ was a godsend.”)

“Do you think I’ll be accepted as a student?” Havig asked anxiously. “It would mean a lot to my people as well as me. But I’m such an outsider--”

Lohannaso laid an arm around his shoulder in the Maurai manner. “Never you sweat, friend. First, we’re a trader folk. We pay for value received, and this value is beyond my guessing. Second, we want to spread knowledge, civilization, as wide as we can. We want allies ourselves, trained hands and brains.”

“Do you actually hope to convert the whole of mankind?”

“Belay that! Anyhow, if you mean, Do we hope to make everybody into copies of us? The answer is, No. Mind, I’m not in Parliament or Admiralty, but I follow debates and I read the philosophers. One trouble with the old machine culture was that, by its nature, it did force people to become more and more alike. Not only did this fall in the end--disastrously--but to the extent it succeeded, it was a worse disaster.” Lohannaso smote the rail with a mighty fist. “Damnation, Thomas! We need all the diversity, all the assorted ways of living and looking and thinking, we can get!”

He laughed and finished: “Inside of limits, true. The pirates have to be cleaned up, that sort of job. But otherwise--Well, this’s getting too bloody solemn. Almost noon now. Let me shoot the sun and do my arithmetic, then Terai comes on duty and you and I’ll go have lunch. You haven’t lived till you’ve sampled my beer.”

(“I spent more than a year among the early Maurai,” Havig told me. “Being eager to spread the gospel, they gave me exactly the sort of education I needed for my purposes. They were dear, merry people--oh, yes, they had their share of bad guys, and human failings and miseries, but on the whole, the Federation in that century was a happy place to be.

(“That wasn’t true of the rest of the world, of course. Nor of the past. I’d keep time-skipping to twentieth-century Wellington or Honolulu, and catching planes to Istanbul, and going back to see how Xenia was getting on.

(“When at last I felt I’d reached the point of diminishing returns, as far as that particular future milieu was concerned, I came once more to Latin Constantinople. Xenia was eighteen. Shortly afterward, we married.”)

Of their life together, in the five years of hers which were granted them, he told me little. Well, I haven’t much I care to tell either, of what really mattered between Kate and me.

He did mention some practical problems. They were tripartite: supporting her decently, getting along in the environment to which she was confined, and staying hidden from the Eyrie.

As for the first, his undertaking wasn’t quite simple. He couldn’t start a business, in a world of guilds, monopolies, complicated regulations, and folk who even in a metropolis--before the printing press, regular mail service, electronic communications--were as gossipy as villagers. It took him considerable research and effort to establish the persona of an agent for a newly formed association of Danish merchant adventurers, more observer and contact man than factor and thus not in competition with the Franks. Finance was the least of his worries; a little gold, carried downtime, went a long way. But he must have a plausible explanation for his money.

As for the second, he thought about moving a good, safe distance off, perhaps to Russia or Western Europe, perhaps to Nicaea where a Byzantine monarchy held out and would, at last, regain Constantinople. But no, there was little good and no safety. The Tartars were coming, and the Holy Inquisition. Sacked and conquered, this great city nevertheless offered as much as any place outside a hopelessly alien Orient; and here Xenia was among familiar scenes, in touch with friends and her mother. Besides, wherever they might go, they would be marked, she a Levantine who called herself a Roman, he something else. Because of his masquerade, they more or less had to buy a house in Pera, where foreigners customarily lived. But that town lay directly across the Golden Horn, with frequent ferries.

As for the third, he kept a low profile, neither conspicuously active nor conspicuously reclusive. He found a new pseudonym, Jon Andersen, and trained Xenia to use it and to be vague about her own origin. Helpfully, his Catholic acquaintances had no interest in her, beyond wondering why Ser Jon had handicapped himself by marrying a heretical Greek. If he must have her, why not as a concubine?

“How much of the truth did you tell Xenia?” I inquired.

“None.” His brows bent. “That hurt, not keeping secrets but lying to her. It wouldn’t have been safe for her to know, however, supposing she could’ve grasped the idea ... would it? She was always so open-hearted. Hard enough for her to maintain the deceptions I insisted on, like the new identity I claimed I needed if I was to work for a new outfit. No, she accepted me for what I said I was, and didn’t ask about my affairs once she realized that when I was with her I didn’t want to think about them. That was true.”

“But how did you explain her rescue?”

“I said I’d prayed to my patron saint, who’d evidently responded in striking fashion. Her memory of the episode was blurred by horror and bewilderment; she had no trouble believing.” He winced. “It hurt me also, to see her light candies and plead like a well-behaved child for the baby of her own that I knew we could never have.”

“Hm, apropos religion, did she turn Catholic, or you go through the motions of conversion to Orthodoxy?”

“No. I’d not ask her to change. There has not been a soul less hypocritical than Xenia. To me, it’d have been a minor fib, but I had to stay halfway respectable in the eyes of the Italians, Normans, and French; otherwise we could never have maintained ourselves at a reasonable standard. No, we found us an Eastern priest who’d perform the rite, and a Western bishop who’d grant me dispensation, for, hm, an honorarium. Xenia didn’t care. She had principles, but she was tolerant and didn’t expect I’d burn in hell, especially if a saint had once aided me. Besides, she was deliriously happy.” He smiled. “I was the same, at first and most of the time afterward.”

Their house was modest, but piece by piece she furnished and ornamented it with the taste which had been her father’s. From its roof you looked across crowded Pera and ships upon the Golden Horn, until Constantinople rose in walls and towers and domes, seeming at this distance nearly untouched. Inland reached countryside where she loved being taken on excursions.

They kept three servants, not many in an age when labor to do was abundant and labor to hire came cheap. Havig got along well with his groom, a raffish Cappadocian married to the cook, and Xenia spoiled their children. Housemaids came and went, themselves taking considerable of the young wife’s attention; our machinery today spares us more than physical toil. Xenia did her own gardening, till the patio and a small yard behind the house became a fairyland. Otherwise she occupied herself with needlework, for which she had unusual talent, and the books he kept bringing her, and her devotions, and her superstitions.

“From my viewpoint, the Byzantines were as superstitious as a horse,” Havig said. “Magic, divining, guardianship against everything from the Evil Eye to the plague, omens, quack medicines, love philters, you name it, somebody swore by it. Xenia’s shibboleth is astrology. Well, what the deuce, that’s done no harm--she has the basic common sense to interpret her horoscopes in a reasonable fashion--and we’d go out at night and observe the stars together. You could do that in a city as well as anywhere else, before street lamps and everlasting smog. She is more beautiful by starlight even than daylight. O God, how I must fight myself not to bring her a telescope, just a small one! But it would have been too risky, of course.”

“You did a remarkable job of, well, bridging the intellectual gap,” I said.

“Nothing remarkable, Doc.” His voice, muted, caressed a memory. “She was-is-younger than me, I’d guess by a decade and a half. She’s ignorant of a lot that I know. But this works vice versa, remember. She’s familiar with the ins and outs of one of the most glorious cosmopolises history will ever see. The people, the folkways, the lore, the buildings, the art, the songs, the books--why, she’d read Greek classics my age never did, that perished in the sack. She’d tell me about them, she’d sit chanting those tremendous lines from Aeschylus or Sophocles, till lightnings ran up and down my backbone; she’d get us both drunk on Sappho, or howling with laughter out of Aristophanes. Knowing what to look for, I often ‘happened’ to find books in a bazaar ... downtime.”

He stopped for breath. I waited. “The everyday, too,” he concluded. “When you finished up in the office, weren’t you interested in what Kate had been doing? And then”--he looked away--”there was us. We were always in love.”

She used to sing while she went about her household tasks. Riding past the walls to the stable, he would hear those little minor-key melodies, floating out of a window, suddenly sound very happy.

On the whole, he and she were comparatively asocial. Now and then, to keep up his façade, it was necessary to entertain a Western merchant, or for Havig alone to attend a party given by one. He didn’t mind. Most of them weren’t bad men for their era, and what they told was interesting. But Xenia had all she could do to conceal her terrified loathing. Fortunately, no one expected her to be a twentieth century-style gracious hostess.

When she stepped from the background and welled and sparkled with life was when Eastern friends came to dinner. Havig got away with that because Jon Andersen, advance man for an extremely distant company, must gather information where he could, hunting crumbs from the tables of Venice and Genoa. He liked those persons himself: scholars, tradesmen, artists, artisans, Xenia’s priest, a retired sea captain, and more exotic types, come on diplomacy or business, whom he sought out--Russians, Jews of several origins, an occasional Arab or Turk.

When he must go away, he both welcomed the change and hated the loss of lifespan which might have been shared with Xenia. Fairly frequent absences were needed for him to stay in character. To be sure, a man’s office was normally in his house, but Jon Andersen’s business would require him not only to go see other men in town, but irregularly to make short journeys by land or sea to various areas.

“Some of that was unavoidable, like accepting an invitation,” he told me. “And once in a while, like every man regardless of how thoroughly married, I wanted to drift around on my own for part of a day. But mainly, you realize, I’d go uptime. I didn’t--I don’t know what good it might do, but I’ve got this feeling of obligation to uncover the truth. So first I’d project myself to Istanbul, where I kept a false identity with a fat bank account. There/then I’d fly to whatever part of the world was indicated, and head futureward, and continue my study of the Maurai Federation and civilization, its rise, glory, decline, fail, and aftermath.”

Twilight stole slow across the island. Beneath its highest hill, land lay darkling save where firefly lanterns glowed among the homes of sea ranchers; but the waters still glimmered. White against a royal blue which arched westward toward Asia, seen through the boughs of a pine which a hundred years of weather had made into a bonsai, Venus gleamed. On the verandah of Carelo Keajimu’s house, smoke drifted fragrant from a censer. A bird sat its perch and sang that intricate, haunting repertoire of melodies for which men had created it; yet this bird was no cageling, it had a place in the woods.

The old man murmured: “Aye, we draw to an end. Dying hurts. Nonetheless the forefathers were wise who in their myths made Nan coequal with Lesu. A thing which endured forever would become unendurable. Death opens a way, for peoples as well as for people.”

He fell silent where he knelt beside his friend, until at last he said: “What you relate makes me wonder if we did not stamp our sigil too deeply.”

(“I’d followed his life,” Havig told me. “He began as a brilliant young philosopher who went into statecraft. He finished as an elder statesman who withdrew to become a philosopher. Then I decided he could join you, as one of the two normal-time human beings I dared trust with my secret.

(“You see, I’m not wise. I can skim the surface of destiny for information; but can I interpret, can I understand? How am I to know what should be done, or what can be done? I’ve scuttled around through a lot of years; but Carelo Keajimu lived, worked, thought to the depths of ninety unbroken ones. I needed his help.”)

“That is,” Havig said, “you feel that, well, one element of your culture is too strong, at the expense of too much else, in the next society?”

“From what you have told me, yes.” His host spent some minutes in rumination. They did not seem overly long. “Or, rather, do you not have the feeling of a strange dichotomy uptime, as you say ... between two concepts which our Maurai ideal was to keep in balance?”

Science, rationality, planning, control. Myth, the liberated psyche, man an organic part of a nature whose rightness transcends knowledge and wisdom.

“It seems to me, from what you tell, that the present over-valuation of machine technology is a passing rage,” Keajimu said. “A reaction, not unjustified. We Maurai grew overbearing. Worse, we grew self-righteous. We made that which had once been good into an idol, and thereby allowed what good was left to rot out of it. In the name of preserving cultural diversity, we tried to freeze whole races into shapes which were at best merely quaint, at worst grotesque and dangerous anachronisms. In the name of preserving ecology, we tried to ban work which could lay a course for the stars. No wonder the Ruwenzorya openly order research on a thermonuclear powerplant! No wonder disaffection at home makes us impotent to stop that!”

Again a quietness, until he continued: “But according to your report, Jack my friend, this is a spasm. Afterward the bulk of mankind will reject scientism, will reject science itself and only keep what ossified technology is needful to maintain the world, They will become ever more inward-turning, contemplative, mystical; the common man will look to the sage for enlightenment, who himself will look into himself. Am I right?”

“I don’t know,” Havig said. “I have that impression, but nothing more than the impression. Mostly, you realize, I don’t understand so much as the languages. One or two I can barely puzzle out, but I’ve never had the time to spare for gaining anything like fluency. It’s taken me years of lifespan to learn what little I have learned about you Maurai. Uptime, they’re further removed from me.”

“And the paradox is deepened,” Keajimu said, “by the contrasting sights you have seen. In the middle of a pastoral landscape, spires which hum and shimmer with enigmatic energies. Noiseless through otherwise empty skies glide enormous ships which seem to be made less of metal than of force. And … the symbols on a statue, in a book, chiseled across a lintel, revealed by the motion of a hand ... they are nothing you can comprehend. You cannot imagine where they came from. Am I right?”

“Yes,” Havig said miserably. “Carelo, what should I do?”

“I think you are at a stage where the question is, What should I learn?”

“Carelo, I, I’m a single man trying to see a thousand years. I can’t! I just, well, feel this increasing doubt ... that the Eyrie could possibly bring forth those machine aspects ... Then what will?”

Keajimu touched him, a moth-wing gesture. “Be calm. A man can do but little. Enough if that little be right.”

“What’s right? Is the future a tyranny of a few technic masters over a humankind that’s turned lofty-minded and passive because this world holds nothing except wretchedness? If that’s true, what can be done?”

“As a practical politician, albeit retired,” Keajimu said with that sudden dryness which could always startle Havig out of a mood, “I suspect you are overlooking the more grisly possibilities. Plain despotism can be outlived. But we Maurai, in our concentration on biology, may have left a heritage worse than the pain it forestalls.”

“What?” Havig tensed on his straw mat.

“Edged metal may chop firewood or living flesh,” Keajimu declared. “Explosives may clear away rubble or inconvenient human beings. Drugs--well, I will tell you this is a problem that currently troubles our government in its most secret councils. We have chemicals which do more than soothe or stimulate. Under their influence, the subject comes to believe whatever he is told. In detail. As you do in a dream, supplying every necessary bit of color or sound, happiness or fear, past or future.”

“To what extent dare we administer these potions to our key troublemakers?”

“I am almost glad to learn that the hegemony of the Federation will go under before this issue becomes critical. The guilt cannot, therefore, be ours.” Keajimu bowed toward Havig. “But you, poor time wanderer, you must think beyond the next century. Come, this evening know peace. Observe the stars tread forth, inhale the incense, hear the songbird, feel the breeze, be one with Earth.”

I sat alone over a book in my cottage in Senlac, November 1969. The night outside was brilliantly clear and ringingly cold. Frostflowers grew on my windowpanes.

A Mozart symphony lilted from a record player, and the words of Yeats were on my lap, and a finger or two of Scotch stood on the table by my easy chair, and sometimes a memory crossed my mind and smiled at me. It was a good hour for an old man.

Knuckles thumped the door. I said an uncharitable word, hauled my body up, constructed excuses while I crossed the rug. My temper didn’t improve when Fiddlesticks slipped between my ankles and nearly tripped me. I only kept the damn cat because he had been Kate’s. A kitten when she died, he was now near his ending--As I opened the door, winter flowed in around me. The ground beyond was not snow-covered, but it was frozen. Upon it stood a man who shivered in his inadequate topcoat. He was of medium height, slim, blond, sharp-featured. His age was hard to guess, though furrows were deep in his face.

Half a decade without sight of him had not dimmed my memories. “Jack!” I cried. A wave of faintness passed through me.

He entered, shut the door, said in a low and uneven voice, “Doc, you’ve got to help me. My wife is dying.”

12

“CHILLS AND FEVER, chest pain, cough, sticky reddish sputum yes, sounds like lobar pneumonia,” I nodded. “What’s scarier is that development of headache, backache, and stiff neck. Could be meningitis setting in.”

Seated on the edge of a chair, mouth writhing, Havig implored, “What to do? An antibiotic--”

“Yes, yes. I’m not enthusiastic about prescribing for a patient I’ll never see, and letting a layman give the treatment. I would definitely prefer to have her in an oxygen tent.”

“I could ferry--” he began, and slumped. “No. A big enough gas container weighs too much.”

“Well, she’s young,” I consoled him. “Probably streptomycin will do the trick.” I was on my feet, and patted his stooped back. “Relax, son. You’ve got time, seeing as how you can return to the instant you left her.”

“I’m not sure if I do,” he whispered; and this was when he told me everything that had happened.

In the course of it, fear struck me and I blurted my confession. More than a decade back, in conversation with a writer out California way, I had not been able to resist passing on those hints Havig had gotten about the Maurai epoch on his own early trips thence. The culture intrigued me, what tiny bit I knew; I thought this fellow, trained in speculation, might interpret some of the puzzles and paradoxes. Needless to say, the information was presented as sheer playing with ideas. But presented it was, and when he asked my permission to use it in some stories, I’d seen no reason not to agree.

“They were published,” I said miserably. “In fact, in one of them he even predicted what you’d discover later, that the Maurai would mount an undercover operation against an underground attempt to build a fusion generator. What if an Eyrie agent gets put on the track?”

“Do you have copies?” Havig demanded.

I did. He skimmed them. A measure of relief eased the lines in his countenance. “I don’t think we need worry,” he said. “He’s changed names and other items; as for the gaps in what you fed him, he’s guessed wrong more often than right. If anybody who knows the future should chance to read this, it’ll look at most like one of science fiction’s occasional close-to-target hits.” His laugh rattled. “Which are made on the shotgun principle, remember! ... But I doubt anybody will. These stories never had wide circulation. They soon dropped into complete obscurity. Time agents wouldn’t try to scan the whole mass of what gets printed. Assuredly, Wallis’s kind of agents never would.”

After a moment: “In a way, this reassures me. I begin to think I’ve been over-anxious tonight. Since nothing untoward has happened thus far to you or your relative, it scarcely will. You’ve doubtless been checked up on, and dismissed as of no particular importance to my adult self. That’s a major reason I’ve let a long time pass since our last meeting, Doc--your safety. This other Anderson--why, I’ve never met him at all. He’s a connection of a connection.”

Again a silence until, grimly: “They haven’t even tried to strike at me through my mother, or bait a trap with her. I suppose they figure that’s too obvious, or too risky in this era they aren’t familiar with--or too something-or-other--to be worthwhile. Stay discreet, and you should be okay. But you’ve got to help me!”

Night was grizzled with dawn when at last I asked: “Why come to me? Surely your Maurai have more advanced medicine.”

“Yeah. Too advanced. Nearly all of it preventive. They consider drugs as first aid. So, to the best of my knowledge, theirs are no better than yours for something like Xenia’s case.”

I rubbed my chin. The bristles were stiff and made a scratchy noise. “Always did suspect there’s a natural limit to chemotherapy,” I remarked. “Damn, I’d like to know what they do about virus diseases!”

Havig stirred stiffly. “Well, give me the ampoules and hypodermic and I’ll be on my way,” he said.

“Easy, easy,” I ordered. “Remember, I’m no longer in practice. I don’t keep high-powered materials around. We’ve got to wait till the pharmacy opens--no, you will not hop ahead to that minute! I want to do a bit of thinking and studying. A different antibiotic might be indicated; streptomycin can have side effects which you’d be unable to cope with. Then you need a little teaching. I’ll bet you’ve never made an injection, let alone nursed a convalescent. And first off, we both require a final dose of Scotch and a long snooze.”

“The Eyrie--”

“Relax,” I said again to the haggard man in whom I could see the despair-shattered boy. “You just got through deciding those bandits have lost interest in me. If they were onto your arrival at this point in time, they’d’ve been here to collar you already. Correct?”

His head moved heavily up and down. “Yeah. I s’pose.”

“I sympathize with your caution, but I do wish you’d consulted me at an earlier stage of your wife’s illness.”

“Don’t I? ... At first, seemed like she’d only gotten a bad cold. They’re tougher then than we are today. Infants die like flies. Parents don’t invest our kind of love in a baby, not till it’s past the first year or two. By the same token, though, if you survive babyhood the chances are you’ll throw off later sicknesses. Xenia didn’t go to bed, in spite of feeling poorly, till overnight--” He could not finish.

“Have you checked her personal future?” I asked.

The sunken eyes sought me while they fought off sleep. The exhausted voice said: “No. I’ve never dared.”

Nor will I ever know how well-founded was his fear of foreseeing when Xenia would die. Did ignorance save his freedom, or merely his illusion of freedom? I know nothing except that he stayed with me for a pair of days, dutifully resting his body and training his hands, until he could minister to his wife. In the end he said good-by, neither of us sure we would come together again; and he drove his rented car to the city airport, and caught his flight to Istanbul, and went pastward with what I had given him, and was captured by the Eyrie men.

It was likewise November in 1213. Havig had chosen that month out of 1969 because he knew it would be inclement, his enemies not likely to keep a stakeout around my cottage. Along the Golden Horn, the weather was less extreme. However, a chill had blown down from Russia, gathering rain as it crossed the Black Sea. For defense, houses had nothing better than charcoal braziers; hypocausts were too expensive for this climate and these straitened times. Xenia’s slight body shivered, day after day, until the germs awoke in her lungs.

Havig frequently moved his Istanbul lair across both miles and years. As an extra safety factor, he always kept it on the far side of the strait from his home. Thus he must take a creaky-oared ferry, and walk from the dock up streets nearly deserted. In his left hand hung the chronolog, in his right was clutched a flat case containing the life of his girl. Raindrops spattered out of a lowering grayness, but the mists were what drenched his Frankish cloak, tunic, and trousers, until they clung to his skin and the cold gnawed inward. His footfalls resounded hollow on slickened cobblestones. Gutters gurgled. Dim amidst swirling vapors, he glimpsed himself hurrying down to the waterfront, hooded against the damp, too frantic to notice himself. He would have been absent a quarter hour when he returned to Xenia. Though the time was about three o’clock in the afternoon, already darkness seeped from below.

His door was closed, the shutters were bolted, wan lamplight shone through cracks.

He knocked, expecting the current maid--Eulalia, was that her name?--to lift the latch and grumble him in. She’d be surprised to see him back this soon, but the hell with her.

Hinges creaked. Gloom gaped beyond. A man in Byzantine robe and beard occupied the doorway. The shotgun in his grasp bulked monstrous. “Do not move, Havig,” he said in English. “Do not try to escape. Remember, we hold the woman.”

Save for an ikon of the Virgin, their bedroom was decorated in gaiety. Seen by what light trickled in a glazed window, the painted flowers and beasts jeered. It was wrong that a lamb should gambol above Xenia where she lay. She was so small and thin in her nightgown. Skin, drawn tight across the frail bones, was like new-fallen snow dappled with blood. Her mouth was dry, cracked, and gummed. Only the hair, tumbling loose over her bosom, and the huge frightened eyes had luster.

The man in East Roman guise, whom Havig did not know, held his left arm in a practiced grip. Juan Mendoza had the right, and smirked each time he put backward pressure on the elbow joint. He was dressed in Western style, as was Waclaw Krasicki, who stood at the bedside.

“Where are the servants?” Havig asked mechanically.

“We shot them,” Mendoza said.

“What--”

“They didn’t recognize a gun, so that wouldn’t scare them. We couldn’t let a squawk warn you. Shut up.”

The shock of knowing they were dead, the hope that the children had been spared and that an orphanage might take them in, struck Havig dully, like a blow on flesh injected with painkiller. Xenia’s coughing tore him too much.

“Hauk,” she croaked, “no, Jon, Jon--” Her hands lifted toward him, strengthless, and his were caught immobile.

Krasicki’s broad visage had noticeably aged. Years of his lifespan must have passed, uptime, downtime, everywhen an outrage was to be engineered. He said in frigid satisfaction:

“You may be interested to know what a lot of work went on for how long, tracking you down. You’ve cost us, Havig.”

“Why ... did ... you bother?” the prisoner got out.

“You did not imagine we could leave you alone, did you? Not just that you killed men of ours. You’re not an ignorant lout, you’re smart and therefore dangerous. I’ve been giving this job my personal attention.”

Havig thought drearily: What an overestimate of me.

“We must know what you’ve been doing,” Krasicki continued. “Take my advice and cooperate.”

“How did you--?”

“Plenty of detective work. We reasoned, if a Greek family was worth to you what you did, you’d keep in touch with them. You covered your trail well, I admit. But given our limited personnel, and the problems in working here, and everything else we had to do throughout history--you needn’t feel too smug about your five-year run. Naturally, when we did close in, we chose this moment for catching you. The whole neighborhood knows your wife is seriously ill. We waited till you went out, expecting you’d soon be back.” Krasicki glanced at Xenia. “And cooperative, no?”

She shuddered and barked, as an abandoned dog had barked while her father was slain. Blood colored the mucus she cast up.

“Christ!” Havig screamed. “Let me go! Let me treat her!”

“Who are they, Jon?” she pleaded. “What do they want? Where is your saint?”

“Besides,” Mendoza said, “Pat Moriarty was a friend of mine.” He applied renewed pressure, barely short of fracturing.

Through the ragged darknesses which pain rolled across him, Havig heard Krasicki: “If you behave, if you come along with us, not making trouble, okay, we’ll leave her in peace. I’ll even give her a shot from that kit I guess you went to fetch.”

“That ... isn’t ... enough ... Please, please--”

“It’s as much as she’ll get. I tell you, we’ve already wasted whole man-years on your account. Don’t make us waste more, and take added risks. Look, would you rather we broke her arms?”

Havig sagged and wept.

Krasicki kept his promise, but his insertion of the needle was clumsy and Xenia shrieked. “It’s well, it’s well, my darling, everything’s well, the saints watch over you,” Havig cried from the far side of a chasm which roared. To Krasicki: “Listen, let me say good-by to her, you’ve got to, I’ll do anything you ask if you let me say good-by.”

Krasicki shrugged. “Okay, if you’re quick.”

Mendoza and the other man kept their hold on Havig while he stooped above his girl. “I love you,” he told her, not knowing if she really heard him through the fever and terror. The mummy lips that his touched were not those he remembered.

“All right,” Krasicki said, “let’s go.”

Uptime bound, Havig lost awareness of the men on either side of him. They had substance to his senses, like his own body, but only the shadow-flickers in the room were real. He saw her abandoned, reaching and crying; he saw her become still; he saw someone who must have grown worried and broken down the door step in, days later; he saw confusion, and then the chamber empty, and then strangers in it.

So he might have resisted, willed himself to stay in normal time at their first stop for air, an inertness which his captors could not move. But there are ways to erode any will. Better not arrive at the Eyrie crippled alike in body and spirit, ready for whatever might occur to Caleb Wallis. Better keep the capability of revenge.

That thought was vague. The whole of him was drowned in her death. He scarcely noticed how the shadows shifted--the house which had been hers and his torn down for a larger, which caught fire when the Turks took Pera, and was succeeded by building after building filled with faces and faces and faces, until the final incandescence and the drifting radioactive ash--nor their halt among ruins, their flight across the ocean, their further journey to that future where the Sachem waited. In him was nothing except Xenia, who saw him vanish and lay back to die alone, unshriven.

While summer blanketed the Eyrie in heat and brazen light, the tower room where Havig was confined stored cool dimness in its bricks. It was bare save for a washstand, a toilet, a mattress, and two straight chairs. A single window gave upon the castle, the countryside, the peasants at labor for their masters. When you had looked out into yonder sunshine, you were blind for a while.

A wire rope, welded at the ends, stretched five feet from a ring locked around his ankle to a staple in the wall. That sufficed. A time traveler bore along whatever was in direct contact with him, such as clothing. In effect, Havig would have had to carry away the entire keep. He did not try.

“Sit down, do sit down,” Caleb Wallis urged.

He had planted his broad bottom in one of the chairs, beyond reach of his prisoner. Black, epauletted uniform, neatly combed gingery whiskers, bare pate were an assertion of lordship over Havig’s grimed archaic clothes, stubbly jaws, bloodshot and murk-encircled eyes.

Wallis waved his cigar. “I’m not necessarily mad at you,” he said. “In fact, I kind of admire your energy, your cleverness. I’d like to recall them to my side. That’s how come I ordered the boys to let you rest before this interview. I hope the chow was good? Do sit down.”

Havig obeyed. He had not ceased to feel numb. During the night he had dreamed about Xenia. They were bound somewhere on a great trimaran whose sails turned into wings and lifted them up among stars.

“We’re private here,” Wallis said. An escort waited beyond the door, which stood thick and shut. “You can talk free.”

“Supposing I don’t?” Havig replied.

The eyes which confronted him were like bullets. “You will. I’m a patient man, but I don’t aim to let you monkey any further with my destiny. You’re alive because I think maybe you can give us some compensation for the harm you’ve done, the trouble you’ve caused. For instance, you know your way around in the later twentieth century. And you have money there. That could be mighty helpful. It better be.”

Havig reached inside his tunic. He thought dully: How undramatic that a new-made widower, captive and threatened with torture, should be unbathed, and on that account should stink and itch. He’d remarked once to Xenia that her beloved classical poets left out those touches of animal reality; and she’d shown him passages in Homer, the playwrights, the hymners, oh, any number of them to prove him wrong; her forefinger danced across the lines, and bees hummed among her roses ...

“I gather you were keeping a wench in Constantinople, and she fell sick and had to be let go,” Wallis said. “Too bad. I sympathize, kind of. Still, you know, lad, in a way you brought it on yourself. And on her.” The big bald head swayed. “Yes, you did. I’m not telling you God has punished you. That could be, but nature does give people what they deserve, and it is not fitting for a proper white man to bind himself to a female like that. She was Levantine, you know. Which means mongrel-Armenian, Asiatic, hunky, spig, Jew, probably a touch of nigger--” Again Wallis’s cigar moved expansively. “Mind, I’ve nothing against you boys having your fun,” he said with a jovial wink. “No, no. Part of your pay, I guess, sampling damn near anyone you want, when you want her, and no nonsense afterward out of her or anybody else.” He scowled. “But you, Jack, you married this’n.”

Havig tried not to listen. He failed. The voice boomed in on him:

“There’s more wrongness in that than meets the eye. It’s what I call a symbolic thing to do. You bring yourself down, because a mixed-breed can’t possibly be raised to your level. And so you bring down your whole race.” The tone harshened. “Don’t you understand? It’s always been the curse of the white man. Because he is more intelligent and sensitive, he opens himself to those who hate him. They divide him against himself, they feed him lies, they slide their slimy way into control of his own homelands, till he finds he’s gotten allied with his natural enemy against his brother. Oh, yes, yes, I’ve studied your century, Jack. That’s when the conspiracy flowered into action, wrecked the world, unlocked the gates for Mong and Maurai ... You know what I think is one of the most awful tragedies of all time? When two of the greatest geniuses the white race ever produced, its two possible saviors from the Slav and the Chinaman, were lured into war on different sides. Douglas MacArthur and Adolf Hitler.”

Havig knew--an instant later, first with slight surprise, next with a hot satisfaction--that he had spat on the floor and snapped: “If the General ever heard you say that, I wouldn’t give this for your life, Wallis! Not that it’s worth it anyway.”

Surprisingly, or maybe not, he provoked no anger. “You prove exactly what I was talking about.” The Sachem’s manner verged on sorrow. “Jack, I’ve got to make you see the plain truth. I know you have sound instincts. They’ve only been buried under a stack of cunning lies. You’ve seen that nigger empire in the future, and yet you can’t see what ought to be done, what must be done, to put mankind back on the right evolutionary road.”

Wallis drew upon his cigar till its end glowed beacon-red, exhaled pungent smoke, and added benign-voiced: “Of course, you’re not yourself today. You’ve lost this girl you cared about, and like I told you, I do sympathize.” Pause. “However, she’d be long dead by now regardless, wouldn’t she?”

He grew utterly intense. “Everybody dies,” he said. “Except us. I don’t believe we travelers need to. You can be among us. You can live forever.”

Havig resisted the wish to reply, “I don’t want to, if you’re included in the deal.” He waited.

“They’re bound to find immortality, far off in the world we’re building,” Wallis said. “I’m convinced. I’ll tell you something. This is confidential, but either I can trust you eventually or you die. I’ve been back to the close of Phase One, more thoroughly than I’d been when I wrote the manual. You remember I’ll be old then. Sagging cheeks, rheumy eyes, shaky liver-spotted hands . . . not pleasant to see yourself old, no, not pleasant.” He stiffened. “This trip I learned something new. At the end, I am going to disappear. I will never be seen any more, aside from my one short visit I’ve already paid to Phase Two. Never. And likewise a number of my chief lieutenants. I didn’t get every name of theirs--no use spending lifespan on that--but I wouldn’t be bowled over if you turned out to be among them.”

Faintly, the words pricked Havig’s returning apathy. “What do you suppose will have happened?” he asked.

“Why, the thing I wrote about,” Wallis exulted. “The reward. Our work done, we were called to the far future and made young forever. Like unto gods.”

In the sky outside, a crow cawed.

The trumpet note died from Wallis’s words. “I hope you’ll be included, Jack,” he said. “I do. You’re a go-getter. I don’t mind admitting your talk about your experiences on your own hook in Constantinople was what gave Krasicki the idea of our raid. And you did valuable work there, too, before you went crazy. That was our best haul to date. It’s given us what we need to expand into the period. Believe me, Caleb Wallis is not ungrateful.

“Sure,” he purred, “you were shocked. You came new to the hard necessities of our mission. But what about Hiroshima, hey? What about some poor homesick Hessian lad, sold into service, dying of lead in his belly for the sake of American independence? Come to that, Jack, what about the men, your comrades in arms, who you killed?

“Let’s set them against this girl you happened to get infatuated with. Let’s chalk off your services to us against the harm you’ve done. Even-Steven, right? Okay. You must’ve been busy in the years that followed. You must’ve collected a lot of information. How about sharing it? And leading us to your money, signing it over? Earning your way back into our brotherhood?”

Sternness: “Or do you want the hot irons, the pincers, the dental drills, the skilled attentions of professionals you know we got--till what’s left of you obliges me in the hope I’ll let it die?”

Night entered first the room, then the window. Havig gazed stupidly at the recorder and the supper which had been brought him, until he could no longer see them.

He ought to yield, he thought. Walls could scarcely be lying about the future of the Eyrie. If you can’t lick ‘em, join ‘em, and hope to be an influence for mercy, in the name of Xenia’s timid ghost.

Yet if--for example--Walls learned about the Maurai psychodrugs, which the Maurai themselves dreaded, and sent men uptime--Well, Julius Caesar butchered and subjugated to further his political career. In the process he laid the keel of Western civilization, which in its turn gave the world Chartres Cathedral, St. Francis of Assisi, penicillin, Bach, the Bill of Rights, Rembrandt, astronomy, Shakespeare, an end to chattel slavery, Goethe, genetics, Einstein, woman suffrage, Jane Addams, man’s footprints on the moon and man’s vision turned to the stars ... yes, also the nuclear warhead and totalitarianism, the automobile and the Fourth Crusade, but on the whole, on balance, in an aspect of eternity--Dared he, mere Jack Havig, stand against an entire tomorrow for the sake of a little beloved dust?

Could he? An executioner would be coming to see if he had put something on tape.

He had better keep in mind that Jack Havig counted for no more in eternity than Doukas Manasses, or Xenia, or anybody.

Except: he did not have to give the enemy a free ride. He could make them burn more of their lifespans. For whatever that might be worth.

A hand shook him. He groped his way out of uneasy sleep. The palm clapped onto his mouth. In blackness: “Be quiet, you fool,” whispered Leonce.

13

A PENCIL FLASHLIGHT came to life. Its beam probed until the iron sheened on Havig’s ankle. “Ah,” she breathed. “That’s how they bottle you? Like I reckoned. Hold this.” She thrust the tube at him. Dizzy, rocked by his heartbeat, scarcely believing, he could not keep it steady. She said a bad word, snatched it back, took it between her teeth, and crouched over him. A hacksaw began to grate.

“Leonce--my dear, you shouldn’t--” he stammered.

She uttered an angry grunt. He swallowed and went silent. Stars glistened in the window.

When the cable parted, leaving him with only the circlet, he tottered erect. She snapped off the light, stuck the tube in her shirt pocket-otherwise, he had glimpsed, she wore jeans and hiking shoes, gun and knife-and grasped him by the upper arms. “Listen,” she hissed. “You skip ahead to sunrise. Let ‘em bring you breakfast before you return to now. Got me? We want ‘em to think you escaped at a later hour. Can you carry it off? If not, you’re dead.”

“I’ll try,” he said faintly.

“Good.” Her kiss was brief and hard. “Be gone.”

Havig moved uptime at a cautious pace. When the window turned gray he emerged, arranged his tether to look uncut to a casual glance, and waited. He had never spent a longer hour.

A commoner guard brought in a tray of food and coffee. “Hello,” Havig said inanely.

He got a surly look and a warning: “Eat fast. They want to talk to you soon.”

For a sick instant, Havig thought the man would stay and watch. But he retired. After the door had slammed, Havig must sit down for a minute; his knees would not upbear him.

Leonce--He gulped the coffee. Will and strength resurged. He rose to travel back nightward.

The light-gleam alerted him to his moment. As he entered normal time, he heard a hoarse murmur across the room:

“--Can you carry it off? If not, you’re dead.”

“I’ll try.”

“Good.” Pause. “Be gone.”

He heard the little rush of air filling a vacuum where his body had been, and knew he had departed. “Here I am,” he called low.

“Huh? Ah!” She must see better in the dark than he, because she came directly to him. “All ‘kay?”

“Yes. Maybe.”

“No chatter,” she commanded. “They may decide to check these hours, ‘spite of our stunt. Here, hold my hand an’ slip downtime. Don’t hurry yourself. I know we’ll make it. I just don’t want ‘em to find out how.”

Part of the Eyrie’s training was in such simultaneous travel. Each felt a resistance if starting to move “faster” or “slower” than the partner, and adjusted the chronokinetic rate accordingly.

A few nights earlier, the chamber was unoccupied, the door unlocked. They walked down shadow stairs, across shadow courtyard, through gates which, in this period of unchallenged reign, were usually left open. At intervals they must emerge for breath, but that could be in the dark. Beyond the lowered drawbridge, Leonce lengthened her stride. Havig wondered why she didn’t simply go to a day before the castle existed, until he realized the risk was too great of encountering others in the vicinity. A lot of men went hunting in the primeval forest which once grew here.

Dazed with fatigue and grief, he would do best to follow her lead. She’d gotten him free, hadn’t she?

She really had. He needed a while to conceive of that.

They sat in the woods, one summer before Columbus was born. The trees, oak and elm and birch mingled together, were gigantic; their fragrance filled the air, their leaves cast green shadows upon the nearly solid underbrush around them. Somewhere a woodpecker drummed and a bluejay scolded. The fire glowed low which Leonce had built. On an improvised spit roasted a grouse she had brought down out of a thousandfold flock which they startled when they arrived.

“I can never get over it,” she said, “what a wonderful world this is before machine man screws things up. I don’t think a lot o’ the High Years any more. I’ve been then too often.”

Havig, leaned against a bole, had a brief eerie sense of déjà vu. The cause came to him: this setting was not unlike that almost a millennium hence, when he and she- He regarded her more closely than hitherto. Mahogany hair in a kind of Dutch bob, suntan faded, the Skula’s weasel skull left behind and the big body in boyish garb, she might have come straight from his home era. Her English had lost most of the Glacier accent, too. Of course, she still went armed, and her feline gait and haughty bearing hadn’t changed.

“How long for you?” he inquired.

“Since you left me in Paris? ‘Bout three years.” She frowned at the bird, reached and turned it above the coals.

“I’m sorry. That was a shabby way to treat you. Why did you want to spring me?”

Her scowl deepened. “S’pose you tell me what happened.”

“You don’t know?” he exclaimed in amazement. “For heaven’s sake, if you weren’t sure why I was under arrest, how could you be sure I didn’t deserve--”

“Talk, will you?”

The story stumbled forth, in bare outline. Now and then, during it, the tilted eyes sought him, but her countenance remained expressionless. At the end she said: “Well, seems my hunch was right. I haven’t thrown away much. Was gettin’ more an’ more puked at that outfit, as I saw how it works.”

She might have offered a word for Xenia, he thought, and therefore he matched her brusqueness: “I didn’t believe you’d object to a spot of fighting and robbery.”

“Not if they’re honest, strength ‘gainst strength, wits ‘gainst wits. But those . . . jackals . . . they pick on the helpless. An’ for sport more’n for gain.” In a kind of leashed savagery, she probed the fowl with her knife point. A drop of fat hit the coals; yellow flame sputtered and flared. “‘Sides, what’s the sense o’ the whole business? Why should we try to fasten machines back on the world? So Cal Wallis can be promoted to God j.g.?”

“When you learned I’d been located and was being held, that touched off the rebellion which had been gathering in you?” Havig asked.

She didn’t reply directly. “I went downtime, like you’d guess, found when the room was empty, went uptime to you. First, though, I’d spent some days future o’ that, not to seem involved in your escape. Ha, ever’body was runnin’ ‘round like guillotined chickens! I planted the notion you must’ve co-opted a traveler while you were in the past.” The broad shoulders lifted and dropped. “Well, the hooraw blew over. Evidently it didn’t seem worth mentionin’ to the earlier Wallis, on his inspection tour. Why admit a failure? His next appearance beyond your vanishment was years ahead, an’ nothin’ awful had happened meanwhile. You didn’t matter. Nor will I, when I never return from my furlough. I s’pose they’ll reckon I died in an accident.” She chuckled. “I do like sports cars, an’ drive like a bat out o’ Chicago.”

“In spite of, uh, opposing a restoration of machine society?” Havig wondered.

“Well, we can enjoy it while we got it, can’t we, whether or not it’ll last or ought to?” She observed him steadily, and her tone bleakened. “That’s ‘bout all we can do, you an’ me. Find ourselves some nice hidey-holes, here an’ there in space-time. Because we’re sure not goin’ to upset the Eyrie.”

“I’m not certain its victory is predestined,” Havig said. “Maybe wishful thinking on my part. After what I’ve seen, however--” His earnestness helped cover the emptiness in him where Xenia had been. “Leonce, you do wrong to put down science and technology. They can be misused, but so can everything. Nature never has been in perfect balance--there are many more extinct species than live--and primitive man was quite as destructive as modern. He simply took longer to use up his environment. Probably Stone Age hunters exterminated the giant mammals of the Pleistocene. Certainly farmers with sickles and digging sticks wore out what started as the Fertile Crescent. And nearly all mankind died young, from causes that are preventable when you know how ... The Maurai will do more than rebuild the foundation of Earth’s life. They’ll make the first attempt ever to create a balanced environment. And that’ll only be possible because they do have the scientific knowledge and means.”

“Don’t seem like they’ll succeed.”

“I can’t tell. That mysterious farther future ... it’s got to be studied.” Havig rubbed his eyes. “Later, later. Right now I’m too tired. Let me borrow your Bowie after lunch and cut some boughs to sleep on for a week or three.”

She moved, then, to come kneel before him and lay one hand on his neck, run fingers of the other through his hair. “Poor Jack,” she murmured. “I been kind o’ short with you, haven’t I? Forgive. Was a strain on me also, this gettin’ away an’--Sure, sleep. We have peace. Today we have peace.”

“I haven’t thanked you for what you did,” he said awkwardly. “I’ll never be able to thank you.”

“You bugbrain!” She cast arms around him. “Why do you think I hauled you out o’ there?”

“But-but-Leonce, I’ve seen my wife die--”

“Sure,” she sobbed. “How I . . . I’d like to go back … an’ meet that girl. If she made you happy--Can’t be, I know. Well, I’ll wait, Jack. As long as needful, I’ll wait.”

They weren’t equipped to stay more than a short while in ancient America. They could have gone uptime, bought gear, ferried it back. But after what they had suffered, no idle idyll was possible for them.

More important was the state of Havig’s being. The wound in him healed slowly, but it healed, and left a hard scar: the resolve to make war upon the Eyrie.

He didn’t think it was merely a desire for vengeance upon Xenia’s murderers. Leonce assumed this, and leagued herself with him because a Glacier woman stood by her man. He admitted that to a degree she was correct. (Is the impulse always evil? It can take the form of exacting justice.) Mainly, he believed that he believed, a brigand gang must be done away with. The ghastlinesses it had already made, and would make, were unchangeable; but could not the sum of that hurt be stopped from mounting, could not the remoter future be spared?

“A thing to puzzle over,” he told Leonce, “is that no time travelers seem to be born in the Maurai era or afterward. They might stay incognito, sure, same as the majority of them probably do in earlier history--too frightened or too crafty to reveal their uniqueness. Nevertheless ... every single one? Hardly sounds plausible, does it?”

“Did you investigate?” she asked.

They were in a mid-twentieth-century hotel. Kansas City banged and winked around them, early at night. He was avoiding his former resorts until he could be sure that Wallis’s men would not discover these. The lamplight glowed soft over Leonce where she sat, knees drawn close to chin, in bed. She wore a translucent peignoir. Otherwise she gave him no sign that she was anything more in her heart than his sisterlike companion. A huntress learns patience, a Skula learns to read souls.

“Yes,” he said. “I’ve told you about Carelo Keajimu. He has connections across the globe. If he can’t turn up a traveler, nobody can. And he drew blank.”

“What does this mean?”

“I don’t know, except--Leonce, we’ve got to take the risk. We’ve got to make an expedition uptime of the Maurai.”

Again practical problems consumed lifespan.

Think. One epoch does not suddenly and entirely replace another. Every trend is blurred by numberless counter-currents. Thus, Martin Luther was not the first Protestant in the true sense--doctrinal as well as political--of that word. He was simply the first who made it stick. And his success was built on the failures of centuries, Hussites, Lollards, Albigensians, on and on to the heresies of Christendom’s dawn; and those had origins more ancient yet. Likewise, the thermonuclear reactor and associated machines were introduced, and spread widely, while mysticism out of Asia was denying, in millions of minds, that science could answer the questions that mattered.

If you want to study an epoch, in what year do you begin? You can move through time, but once at your goal, what have you besides your feet for crossing space? Where do you shelter? How do you eat?

It took a number of quick trips futureward to find the start of a plan.

Details are unimportant. On the west coast of thirty-first-century North America, a hybrid Ingliss-Maurai-Spanyol had not evolved too far for Havig to grope his way along in it. He took back a grammar, a dictionary, and assorted reading material. By individual concentration and mutual practice, he and Leonce acquired some fluency.

Enough atomic-powered robot-crewed commerce brought enough visitors from overseas that two more obvious foreigners would attract no undue attention. This was the more true because Sancisco was a favorite goal of pilgrimages; there the guru Duago Samito had had his revelation. Nobody believed in miracles. People did believe that, if you stood on the man-sculptured hills and looked down into the chalice which was the Bay, and let yourself become one with heaven and earth and water, you could hope for insight.

Pilgrims needed no credit account in the financial world-machine. The age was, in its austere fashion, prosperous. A wayside householder could easily spare the food and sleeping room that would earn virtue for him and travelers’ tales for his children.

“If you seek the Star Masters--” said the dark, gentle man who housed them one night. “Yes, they keep an outpost nigh. But surely some are in your land.”

“We are curious to see if the Star Masters here are like those we know at home,” Havig replied. “I have heard they number many kinds.”

“Correct. Correct.”

“It does not add undue kilometers to our journey.”

“You need not walk there. A call will do.” Havig’s host indicated the holographic communicator which stood in a corner of a room whose proportions were as alien--and as satisfying--to his guests as a Japanese temple would have been to a medieval European or a Gothic church to a Japanese.

“Though I doubt their station is manned at present,” he continued. “They do not come often, you know.”

“At least we can touch it,” Havig said.

The dark man nodded. “Aye. A full-sense savoring ... aye, you do well. Go in God, then, and be God, happily.”

In the morning, after an hour’s chanting and meditation, the family returned to their daily round. Father hand-cultivated his vegetable garden; the reason for that seemed more likely depth-psychological than economic. Mother continued her work upon a paramathematical theorem too esoteric for Havig to grasp. Children immersed themselves in an electronic educational network which might be planetwide and might involve a kind of artificial telepathy. Yet the house was small, unpretentious except for the usual scrimshaw and Oriental sweep of roof, nearly alone in a great tawny hillscape.

Trudging down a dirt road, where dust whoofed around her boots while a many-armed automaton whispered through the sky overhead, Leonce sighed: “You’re right. I do not understand these people.”

“That could take a lifetime,” Havig agreed. “Something new has entered history. It needn’t be bad, but it’s surely new.”

After a space he added: “Has happened before. Could your paleolithic hunter really understand your neolithic farmer? How much alike were a man who lived under the divine right of kings and a man who lived under the welfare state? I don’t always follow your mind, Leonce.”

“Nor I yours.” She caught his hand. “Let’s keep tryin’.”

“It seems--” Havig said, “I repeat, it seems--these Star Masters occupy the ultra-mechanized, energy-flashing bases and the enormous flying craft and everything else we’ve glimpsed which contrasts so sharply with the rest of Earth. They come irregularly. Otherwise their outposts lie empty; does sound like time travelers, hey?”

“But they’re kind o’, well, good. Aren’t they?”

“Therefore they can’t be Eyrie? Why not? In origin, anyhow. The grandson of a conquering pirate may be an enlightened king.” Havig marshaled his thoughts. “True, the Star Masters act differently from what one would expect. As near as I can make out--remember, I don’t follow this modern language any more closely than you do, and besides, there are a million taken-for-granted concepts behind it--as near as I can make out, they come to trade: ideas and knowledge more than material goods. Their influence on Earth is subtle but pervasive. My trips beyond this year suggest their influence will grow, till a new civilization--or post-civilization--has arisen which I cannot fathom.”

“Don’t the locals describe ‘em as bein’ sometimes human an’ sometimes not?”

“I have that impression too. Maybe we’ve garbled a figure of speech.”

“You’ll make it out,” she said.

He glanced at her. The glance lingered. Sunlight lay on her hair and the tiny drops of sweat across her face. He caught the friendly odor of her flesh. The pilgrim’s robe molded itself to long limbs. Timeless above a cornfield, a red-winged blackbird whistled.

“We’ll see if we can,” he said.

She smiled.

Clustered spires and subtly curved domes were deserted when they arrived. An invisible barrier held them off. They moved uptime. When they glimpsed a ship among the shadows, they halted.

At that point, the vessel had made groundfall. The crew were coming down an immaterial ramp. Havig saw men and women in close-fitting garments which sparkled as if with constellations. And he saw shapes which Earth could never have brought forth, not in the age of the dinosaurs nor in the last age when a swollen red sun would burn her barren.

A shellbacked thing which bore claws and nothing identifiable as a head conversed with a man in notes of music. The man was laughing.

Leonce screamed. Havig barely grabbed her before she was gone, fleeing downtime.

“But don’t you see?” he told her, over and over. “Don’t you realize the marvel of it?”

And at last he got her to seek night. They stood on a high ridge. Uncountable stars gleamed from horizon to zenith to horizon. Often a meteor flashed. The air was cold, their breath smoked wan, she huddled in his embrace. Quietness enclosed them: “the eternal silence of yonder infinite spaces.”

“Look up,” he said. “Each of those lights is a sun. Did you think ours is the single living planet in the universe?”

She shuddered. “What we saw--”

“What we saw was different. Magnificently different.” He searched for words. His whole youth had borne a vision which hers had known only as a legend. The fact that it was not forever lost sang in his blood. “Where else can newness, adventure, rebirth of spirit, where else can they come from except difference? The age beyond the Maurai is not turned inward on itself. No, it’s begun to turn further outward than ever men did before!”

“Tell me,” she begged. “Help me.”

He found himself kissing her. And they sought a place of their own and were one.

But there are no happy endings. There are no endings of any kind. At most, we are given happy moments.

The morning came when Havig awakened beside Leonce. She slept, warm and silky and musky, an arm thrown across his breast. This time his body did not desert her. His thinking did.

“Doc,” he was to tell me, his voice harsh with desperation, “I could not stay where we were--in a kind of Renaissance Eden--I couldn’t stay there, or anywhere else, and let destiny happen.”

“I believe the future has taken a hopeful direction. But how can I be sure? Yes, yes, the name is Jack, not Jesus; my responsibility must end somewhere; but exactly where?”

“And even if that was a good eon to be alive in, by what route did men arrive there? Maybe you remember, I once gave you my opinion, Napoleon ought to have succeeded in bringing Europe together. This does not mean Hitler ought to have. The chimney stacks of Belsen say different. What about the Eyrie?”

He roused Leonce. She girded herself to fare beside her man.

They might have visited Carelo Keajimu. But he was, in a way, too innocent. Though he lived in a century of disintegration, the Maurai rule had always been mild, had never provoked our organized unpity. Furthermore, he was too prominent, his lifetime too likely to be watched.

It was insignificant me whom Jack Havig and Leonce of Wahorn sought out.

14

APRIL 12, 1970. Where I dwelt that was a day of new-springing greenness wet from the night’s rain, clouds scudding white before a wind which ruffled the puddles in my driveway, earth cool and thick in my fingers as I knelt and planted bulbs of iris.

Gravel scrunched beneath wheels. A car pulled in, to stop beneath a great old chestnut tree which dominated the lawn. I didn’t recognize the vehicle and swore a bit while I rose; it’s never pleasant getting rid of salesmen. Then they stepped out, and I knew him and guessed who she must be.

“Doc!” Havig ran to hug me. “God, I’m glad to see you!”

I was not vastly surprised. In the months since last he was here, I had been expecting him back if he lived. But at this minute I realized how much I’d fretted about him.

“How’s your wife?” I asked.

The joy died out of his face. “She didn’t live. I’ll tell you about it ... later.”

“Oh, Jack, I’m sorry--”

“Well, for me it happened a year and a half ago.” When he turned to the rangy redhead approaching us, he could again smile. “Doc, Leonce, you’ve both heard plenty about each other. Now meet.”

Like him, she was careless of my muddy handclasp. I found it at first an unsettling encounter. Never before had I seen someone from out of time; Havig didn’t quite count. And, while he hadn’t told me much concerning her, enough of the otherness had come through in his narrative. She did not think or act or exist remotely like any woman, any human creature, born into my epoch. Did she?

Yet the huntress, tribal councilor, she-shaman, casual lover and unrepentant killer of--how many?--men, wore an ordinary dress and, yes, nylon stockings and high-heeled shoes, carried a purse, smiled with a deftly lipsticked mouth, and said in English not too different from my own: “How do you do, Dr. Anderson? I have looked forward to this pleasure.”

“Come on inside,” I said weakly. “Let’s get washed and, and I’ll make a pot of tea.”

Leonce tried hard to stay demure, and failed. While Havig talked she kept leaving her chair, prowling to the windows and peering out at my quiet residential street. “Calm down,” he told her at length. “We checked uptime, remember? No Eyrie agents.”

“We couldn’t check every minute,” she answered.

“No, but--well, Doc, about a week hence I’ll phone you and ask if we had any trouble, and you’ll tell me no.”

“They could be readyin’ somethin’,” Leonce said.

“Unlikely.” Havig’s manner was a bit exasperated; obviously they’d been over this ground before. “We’re written off. I’m certain of it.”

“I s’pose I got nervous habits when I was a girl.”

Havig hesitated before he said, “If they are after us, and onto Doc’s being our contact, wouldn’t they strike through him? Well, they haven’t.” To me: “Hard to admit I’ve knowingly exposed you to a hazard. It’s why I avoid my mother.”

“That’s okay, Jack.” I attempted a laugh. “Gives me an interesting hobby in my retirement.”

“Well, you will be all right,” he insisted. “I made sure.”

Leonce drew a sharp breath. For a time nothing spoke except the soughing in the branches outside. A cloud shadow came and went.

“You mean,” I said at last, “you verified I’ll live quietly till I die.”

He nodded.

“You know the date of that,” I said.

He sat unmoving.

“Well, don’t tell me,” I finished. “Not that I’m scared. However, I’d just as soon keep on enjoying myself in the old-fashioned mortal style. I don’t envy you--that you can lose a friend twice.”

My teakettle whistled.

“And so,” I said after hours had gone by, “you don’t propose to stay passive? You mean to do something about the Eyrie?”

“If we can,” Havig said low.

Leonce, seated beside him, gripped his arm. “What, though?” she almost cried. “I been uptime myself-quick-like, but the place is bigger’n ever, an’ I saw Cal Wallis step from an aircraft--they got robotic factories built by then--an’ he was gettin’ old but he was there.” Fingers crooked into talons. “Nobody’d killed the bastard, not in that whole while.”

I lumped my pipe. We had eaten, and sat among my books and pictures, and I’d declared the sun sufficiently near a nonexistent yardarm that whiskey might be poured. But in those two remained no simple enjoyment of a call paid on an old acquaintance, or for her a new one; this had faded, the underlying grief and anger stood forth like stones.

“You have no complete account of the Eyrie’s future career,” I said.

“Well, we’ve read Wallis’s book and listened to his words,” Havig answered. “We don’t believe he’s lying. His kind of egotist wouldn’t, not on such a topic.”

“You miss my point.” I wagged my pipestem at them. “The question is, Have you personally made a year-by-year inspection?”

“No,” Leonce replied. “Originally no reason to, an’ now too dangerous.” Her gaze steadied on me. She was a bright lass. “You aimin’ at somethin’, Doctor?”

“Maybe.” I scratched a match and got my tobacco lit. The small hearthfire would be a comfort in my hand. “Jack, I’ve spent a lot of thought on what you told me on your previous visit. That’s natural. I have the leisure to think and study and--You’ve come back in the hope I might have an idea. True?”

He nodded. Beneath his shirt he quivered.

“I have no grand solution to your problems,” I warned them. “What I have done is ponder a remark you made: that our freedom lies in the unknown.”

“Go on!” Leonce urged. She sat with fists clenched.

“Well,” I said between puffs, “your latest account kind of reinforces my notion. That is, Wallis believes his organization, modified but basically the thing he founded, he believes it will be in essential charge of the post-Maurai world. What you’ve discovered there doesn’t make this seem any too plausible, hey? Ergo, somewhere, somewhen is an inconsistency. And. . . for what happened in between, you do merely have the word of Caleb Wallis, who is vainglorious and was born more than a hundred years ago.”

“What’s his birth got to do with the matter?” Havig demanded.

“Quite a bit,” I said. “Ours has been a bitter century. Hard lessons have been learned which Wallis’s generation never needed, never imagined. He may have heard about concepts like operations analysis, but he doesn’t use them, they aren’t in his marrow.”

Havig tensed.

“Your chronolog gadget is an example of twentieth-century thinking,” I continued. “By the way, what became of it?”

“The one I had got left in Pera when . . . when I was captured,” he replied. “I imagine whoever acquired the house later threw it out or broke it apart for junk. Or maybe feared it might be magical and heaved it in the Horn. I’ve had new ones made.”

A thrill passed through me, and I began to understand Leonce the huntress a little. “The men who took you, even a fairly sophisticated man like that Krasicki, did not think to bring it along for examination,” he said. “Which illustrates my point nicely. Look, Jack, every time traveler hits the bloody nuisance of targeting on a desired moment. To you, it was a matter of course to consider the problem, decide what would solve it--an instrument--and find a company which was able to accept your commission to invent the thing for you.”

I exhaled a blue plume. “It never occurred to Wallis,” I finished. “To any of his gang. That approach doesn’t come natural to them.”

Silence descended anew.

“Well,” Havig said, “I am the latest-born traveler they found prior to the Judgment.”

“Uh-huh,” I nodded. “Take advantage of that. You’ve made a beginning, in your research beyond the Maurai period. It may seem incredible to you that Wallis’s people haven’t done the same kind of in-depth study. Remember, though, he’s from a time when foresight was at a minimum--a time when everybody assumed logging and strip-mining could go on forever. It was the century of Clerk Maxwell, yes--I’m thinking mainly of his work on what we call cybernetics--and Babbage and Peirce and Ricardo and Clausewitz and a slew of other thinkers whom we’re still living off of. But the seeds those minds were planting hadn’t begun to sprout and flower. Anyhow, like many time travelers, it seems, Wallis didn’t stay around to share the experiences of his birth era. No, he had to skite off and become the almighty superman.

“Jack, from the painfully gathered learning of the race, you can profit.”

Leonce seemed puzzled. Well, my philosophy was new to her too. The man had grown altogether absorbed. “What do you propose?” he asked low.

“Nothing specifically,” I answered. “Everything generally. Concentrate more on strategy than tactics. Don’t try to campaign by your lone selves against an organization; no, start a better outfit.”

“Where are the members coming from?”

“Everywhere and everywhen. Walls showed a degree of imagination in his recruiting efforts, but his methods were crude, his outlook parochial. For instance, surely more travelers are present that day in Jerusalem. His agents latched onto those who were obvious, and quit. There must be ways to attract the notice of the rest.”

“Well ... m-m-m ... I had been giving thought to that myself.” Havig cupped his chin. “Like maybe passing through the streets, singing lines from the Greek mass-”

“And the Latin. You can’t afford grudges.” I gripped rny pipe hard. “Another point. Why must you stay this secretive? Oh, yes, your ‘uncle’ self was right, as far as he went. A child revealed to be a time traveler would’ve been in a fairly horrible bind. But you’re not a child any longer.

“Moreover, I gather, Wallis considers ordinary persons a lesser breed. He’s labeled them ‘commoners,’ hasn’t he? He keeps them in subordinate positions. All he’s accomplished by that has been to wall their brains off from him.

“I’ve done a little quiet sounding out, at places like Holberg College and Berkeley. There are good, responsible scholars at Berkeley! I can name you men and women who’ll accept the fact of what you are, and respect your confidence, and help you, same as me.”

“For why?” Leonce wondered.

Havig sprang from his chair and stormed back and forth across the room as he gave her the blazing answer which had broken upon him: “To open the world, darlya! Our kind can’t be born only in the West. That doesn’t make sense. China, Japan, India, Africa, America before the white man came--we’ve got the whole of humanity to draw on! And we”--he stuttered in his eagerness--”we can leave the bad, take the good, find the young and, dammit, bring them up right. My God! Who cares about a wretched gang of bullies uptime? We can make the future!”

It was not that simple, of course. In fact, they spent more than ten years of their lifespans in preparing. True, these included their private concerns. When I saw them next (after his one telephone call), briefly in March, they behaved toward each other like any happily long-married couple. Nonetheless, that was a strenuous, perilous decade.

Even more was it a period which demanded the hardest thought and the subtlest realism. The gathering of Havig’s host would have used every year that remained in his body, and still been incomplete, had he not gone about it along the lines I suggested. Through me he met those members of think tanks and faculties I had bespoken. After he convinced them, they in turn introduced him to chosen colleagues, until he had an exceedingly high-powered advisory team. (Several have later quit their careers, to go into different work or retirement. It puzzles their associates.) At intervals I heard about their progress. The methods they developed for making contact--through much of the history of much of the world--would fill a book. Most failed; but enough succeeded.

For example, a searcher looked around, inquired discreetly around, after people who seemed to have whatever kind of unusualness was logical for a traveler residing in the given milieu. A shaman, village witch, local monk with a record of helping those who appealed to him or her by especially practical miracles. A peasant who flourished because somehow he never planted or harvested so as to get caught by bad weather. A merchant who made correspondingly lucky investments in ships, when storms and pirates caused heavy attrition. A warrior who was an uncatchable spy or scout. A boy who was said to counsel his father. Once in a while, persons like these would turn out to be the real thing ... Then there were ways of attracting their heed, such as being a wandering fortuneteller of a peculiar sort …

To the greatest extent possible, the earliest traveler recruits were trained into a cadre of recruiters, who wasted no energy in being uptime overlords. Thus the finding of folk could snowball. Here, too, methods were available beyond the purview of a nineteenth-century American who regarded the twentieth as decadent and every other culture as inferior. There are modern ways to get a new language into a mind fast. There are ancient ways, which the West has neglected, for developing body and senses. Under the lash of wars, revolutions, invasions, and occupations, we have learned how to form, discipline, protect, and use a band of brothers--systematically.

Above everything else, perhaps, was today’s concept of working together. I don’t mean its totalitarian version, for which Jack Havig had total loathing, or that “togetherness,” be it in a corporation or a commune, which he despised. I mean an enlightened pragmatism that rejects self-appointed aristocrats, does not believe received doctrine is necessarily true, stands ready to hear and weigh what anyone has to offer, and maintains well-developed channels to carry all ideas to the leadership and back again.

Our age will go down in fire. But it will leave gifts for which a later mankind will be grateful.

Now finding time travelers was a barebones beginning. They had to be organized. How? Why should they want to leave home, accept restrictions, put their lives on the line? What would keep them when they grew tired or bored or fearful or lonesome for remembered loves?

The hope of fellowship with their own kind would draw many, of course. Havig could gain by that, as Walls had done. It was insufficient, though. Wallis had a variety of further appeals. Given the resources of his group, a man saw the world brought in reach and hardly a limit put on atavistic forms of self-indulgence. To the intelligent, Wallis offered power, grandeur, a chance--a duty, if you let yourself be convinced, which is gruesomely easy to do--to become part of destiny.

Then there were those who wanted to learn, or be at the highest moments of mankind’s achievement, or simply and honorably enjoy adventuring. To them Havig could promise a better deal.

But this would still not give motive to wage war on the Eyrie. Monstrous it might be, the average traveler would concede; yet most governments, most institutions have in their own ways been monstrous. What threat was the Sachem?

“Setting up indoctrination courses--” Havig sighed to me. “A nasty word, that, isn’t it? Suggests browbeating and incessant propaganda. But honest, we just want to explain. We try to make the facts clear, so our recruits can see for themselves how the Eyrie is by its nature unable to leave them be. It’s not easy. You got any ideas on how to show a samurai of the Kamakura Period that the will of anybody to rule the world, anybody whatsoever, is a direct menace to him? I’m here mainly to see what my anthropologists and semanticists have come up with. Meanwhile, well, okay, we’ve got other pitches too, like primitive loyalty to chief and comrades, or the fun of a good scrap, or ... well, yes, the chance to get rich, in permissible ways. And, for the few, a particular dream--”

At that, I envied him the challenge of his task. Imagine: finding, and afterward forging mutuality between a Confucian teacher, a boomerang-wielding kangaroo hunter, a Polish schoolboy, a medieval Mesopotamian peasant, a West African ironsmith, a Mexican vaquero, an Eskimo girl ... The very effort to assemble that kaleidoscope may have been his greatest strength. Such people did not need to learn much about the Eyrie before they realized that, for most of them as time travelers, Havig’s was the only game in town.

They got this preliminary training in scattered places and eras. Afterward they were screened for trustworthiness; the means were a weird and wonderful potpourri. The dubious cases--a minor percentage--were brought to their home locations, guided to their home years, paid off, and bidden farewell. They had not received enough information about the enemy to contact it; generally they lived thousands of miles away.

The majority were led to the main base, for further training and for the work of building it and its strength.

This was near where the Eyrie would be, but immensely far downtime, in the middle Pleistocene. That precaution created problems of its own. The temporal passage was lengthy for the traveler, requiring special equipment as well as intermediate resting places. Caches must be established en route, and everything ferried piece by piece, stage by slow stage. But the security was worth this, as was the stronghold itself. It stood on a wooded hill, and through the valley below ran a mighty river which Leonce told me shone in the sunlight like bronze.

The search methods had discovered members of both sexes in roughly equal numbers. Thus a community developed-kept childless, except for its youngest members, nevertheless a community which found an identity, laws and precedences and ceremonies and stories and mysteries, in a mere few years, and was bound together by its squabbles as well as its loves. And this was Havig’s real triumph. The Sachem had created an army; the man sworn to cast him down created a tribe.

I heard these things when Havig and Leonce paid me that March visit. They were then in the midst of the work. Not till All Hallows’ Eve did I learn the next part of their story.

15

THE SHADOWS which were time reeled past. They had form and color, weight and distances, only when one emerged for food or sleep or a hurried gulp of air. Season after season blew across the hills; glaciers from the north ground heights to plains and withdrew in a fury of snowstorms, leaving lakes where mastodon drank; the lakes thickened to swamps and finally to soil on whose grass fed horses and camels, whose treetops were grazed by giant sloths, until the glaciers returned; mild weather renewed saw those earlier beasts no more, but instead herds of bison which darkened the prairie and filled it with an earthquake drumroll of hoofs; the pioneers entered, coppery-skinned men who wielded flint-tipped spears; again was a Great Winter, again a Great Springtime, and now the hunters had bows, and in this cycle forest claimed the moraines, first willow and larch and scrub oak, later an endless cathedral magnificence--and suddenly that was gone, in a blink, the conquerors were there, grubbing out a million stumps which the axes had left, plowing and sowing, reaping and threshing, laying down trails of iron from which at night could be heard a rush and a long-drawn wail strangely like mastodon passing by.

Havig’s group stopped for a last rest in the house of a young farmer who was no traveler but could be trusted. They needed it for a depot, too. It would have been impossible to go this far through time on this point of Earth’s surface without miniature oxygen tanks. Otherwise, they’d more than once have had to stop for air when the country lay drowned, or been unable to because they were under a mile of ice. Those were strong barriers which guarded the secret of their main base from the Eyrie.

The equipment absorbed most of their mass-carrying ability. Here was a chance to get weapons.

Lantern light glowed mellow on an oilcloth-covered kitchen table, polished iron and copper, stove where wood crackled to keep warm a giant pot of coffee. Though the nearest neighbors were half an hour’s horseback ride straight across the fields, and screened off by trees, Olav Torstad must always receive his visitors after dark. At that, he was considered odd for the occasional midnight gleam in his windows. But he was otherwise a steady fellow; most likely, the neighbors decided, now and then a bachelor would have trouble sleeping.

“You’re already fixing to go again?” he asked.

“Yes,” Havig said. “We’ve ground to cover before dawn, remember.”

Torstad stared at Leonce. “Sure don’t seem right, a lady bound for war.”

“Where else but by her man?” she retorted. With a grin:

“Jack couldn’t talk me out of it either. Spare your breath.”

“Well, different times, different ways,” Torstad said, “but I’m glad I was born in 1850.” In haste: “Not that I don’t appreciate everything you’ve done for me.”

“You’ve done more for us,” Havig answered. “We grub-staked you to this place strictly because we needed something of the kind close to where the Eyrie will be. You assumed the ongoing risk, and the burden of keeping things hidden, and--No matter. Tonight it ends.” He constructed a smile. “You can get rid of what stuff we leave behind, marry that girl you’re engaged to, and live the rest of your days at peace.”

For a few seconds, behind Torstad’s eyes, something rattled its chains. “At peace?” Abruptly: “You will come back, won’t you? Tell me what happened? Please!”

“If we win,” Havig said, and thought how many such promises he had left, how many more his followers must have left, across the breadth and throughout the duration of the spacetime they had roved. He jumped from his chair. “Come on, let’s get the military gear for our men. If you’ll hitch up a team, we’d like a wagon ride to the site. Let’s move!”

Others were moving. They are. They will be.

It was no enormous host; it totaled perhaps three thousand. Some two-thirds were women, the very young, the old, the handicapped: time porters, nurses, whatever kind of noncombatants were required. But this was still too many to gather at one intermediate station, making rumors and traces which an enemy might come upon. Simply bringing them all to America had been an endlessly complex problem in logistics and secrecy.

Beneath huge trees, in a year before Columbus, some took a deer path. The Dakotan who guided them would have become the next medicine man of his tribe, had a patient wanderer not found him. The chronolog he carried, like other leaders elsewhere and elsewhen, would identify an exact place before he set it for an equally precise instant.

Once during the eighteenth century, certain coureurs de bois made rendezvous and struck off into the wilderness.

Not quite a hundred years after, the captain of a group explained to what few white people he met that the government in Washington wished a detailed survey prior to establishing a territory.

Later it became common if unofficial knowledge that you saw Negroes hereabouts—briefly--because this was a station on the Underground Railway.

In the 1920’s one did not question furtive movements and gatherings. It was common if unofficial knowledge that this was a favorite route for importers of Canadian whiskey.

Later an occasional bus marked CHARTERED passed through the area, setting off passengers and baggage in the middle of the night, then proceeding with its sign changed to NOT IN SERVICE.

Toward the close of the century, a jumbo jet lumbered aloft. The motley lot of humans aboard drew no special attention. “International Friendship Tours” were an almost everyday thing, as private organizations and subdivisions of practically every government snatched at any imaginable means to help halt the dream-dance down to catastrophe.

Well afterward, a fair-sized band of horsemen trotted through the region. Their faces and accouterments said they were Mong. The invaders never did establish themselves in these parts, so their early scouts were of no importance.

Havig and his half dozen flashed back into normal time.

His chronolog had winked red an hour before sunrise, on New Year’s Day in the one hundred and seventy-seventh year of the Eyrie’s continuous existence. The sky loomed darkling to the west, where stars and planets stood yet aglow, but icegray in the east. Shadowless light brought forth every brick of walls and keep and towers; it glimmered off window glass and whitened frost upon courtyard paving. Enormous stillness enclosed the world, as if all sound had frozen in that cold which bit lungs and smoked from nostrils.

This band had rehearsed what they must do often enough. Nonetheless his glance swept across them, these his troopers chosen for the heart of the mission.

They were dressed alike, in drab-green parkas, padded trousers tucked into leather boots, helmets and weapons and equipment-loaded belts. He knew their faces better, their very gaits, after lifespan years of comradeship: Leonce, ablaze with eagerness, a stray ruddy lock crossing the brow he had kissed; Chao, Indhlovu, Gutierrez, Bielawski, Maatuk ibn Nahal. For a pulsebeat their hands remained clasped together. Then they let go. He set down his chronolog. They readied their guns ere the sentries at the battlements should spy them and cry out.

The odds favored surprise. The hinterland was firmly controlled, had been for long years, would be for longer. Had not the Sachem verified this on his journeys to his future selves? More and more the Eyrie prospered, not alone in wealth but in recruits to serve the great purpose. So one could be at ease during a holiday. As many agents as possible took their furloughs in winter, to escape its gloom and cold. But the Sachem was always present for a New Year, whose eve began with ceremonies and speeches, ended with revelry. Who could blame a guard if, in the bitterness before dawn, eyes bleared and lids drooped?

“Okay,” Havig said; and: “I love you, Leonce,” he whispered. Her lips winged across his. The band loped to the door of that tower wherein dwelt Caleb Wallis.

It was immovable. The woman cursed: “-Oktai’s tail, I didn’ ‘spec’-” Maatuk’s .45 blasted out the lock. The noise smote eardrums and rang between the sleeping walls. A thought flashed through Havig. No combat operation goes perfectly. My studies told me, always allow a margin--But this was the one part of the whole thing where slippage could most readily throw him off the cliff.

He led their way inside. Behind them, he heard a shout. Was it more puzzled than alarmed, or did he delude himself? Never mind. In the entryroom, up the stairs!

Soles clattered on stone. The impact jarred through Havig’s shins, clear to his teeth. Four were at his back, leaping along a dusky skyward spiral. Gutierrez and Bielawski had taken station below, to guard main door and elevator exit. Indhlovu and Chao peeled off on the second and third levels, to capture the apartments of a secretary--Havig didn’t know who he currently was--and Austin Caldwell. And here, next landing, brass-bound, here bulked the portal to Wallis.

That wasn’t secured. Nobody dared enter uninvited, unless they came armed to bring this whole creation down. Havig flung the door wide.

Again he knew wainscoting, furriness, heavy desk and chairs, photographs of masters and mother. The air lay hot and damp. Frost blinded windowpanes, making twilight within. Maatuk whirled about to keep the entrance. Havig and Leonce burst on into the suite beyond.

Wallis surged from a canopied double bed. Havig was flickeringly shocked at how the past several lifespan years had bitten the man. He was quite gray. The face was less red than netted in broken veinlets, and sagged beneath its weight. Horrible, somehow, because of being funny to see, was his nightshirt. He groped for a pistol on an end table.

“Ya-a-a-ah!” Leonce screamed, and launched herself in a flying leap.

Wails vanished from sight. Likewise did she, her fingers upon him. They reappeared, rolling over and over across the floor, wrestling, he unable to flee through time while she gripped him and set her will to stay in the now. Their breath rasped through the shrieks of some commoner girl behind the bed draperies. Havig circled about, in search of a way to help. The grapplers were well matched, and desperate. He saw no opening which wasn’t gone before he could strike.

Gunfire raged in the anteroom.

Havig pelted to the inner door, flattened himself, peered around the jamb. Maatuk sprawled moveless. Above him Austin Caldwell swayed, dripped blood, wheezed air through torn lungs, while his revolver wavered in search of more foe-men. The old Indian fighter must have gotten the drop on Chao, or taken a couple of bullets and slain him anyway, as Maatuk had then been slain- “You’re covered! Surrender!” Havig called.

“Go ... to ... hell ... traitor’s hell ...“ The Colt roared anew.

Across years Havig remembered many kindnesses and much grim swallowing of pain at what had seemed to be horrors inescapable in the service of the Sachem. He recalled his own followers, and Xenia. He slipped a minute uptime while he stepped into the doorway, emerged, and fired. His bullet clove air and shattered the glass on Charlemagne’s photograph. Caldwell had crumpled.

Explosions racketed down in the yard, throughout keep and ancillary buildings. Havig hastened back to Leonce. She had gotten legs around Walls’s lower body and thumbs on his carotid arteries. He beat her about the shoulders, but she lowered her head and hung on. His blows turned feeble. They stopped.

“Make him fast,” she panted. “Quick.”

From a pocket Havig drew the set of manacles and chain which were standard equipment for every person of his. Squatting, he linked Wallis to the bedstead.

“He’s not going anywhere,” he said. “Unless somebody comes to release him. You stand guard against that.”

She bridled. “An’ miss the fun?”

“That’s an order!” he snapped. She gave him a mutinous look but obeyed. Their whole plan turned on this prisoner. “I’ll see about getting somebody to spell you, soon’s may be,” he said, adding: When the battle’s over. He left. The concubine had fled, he noticed, and wondered briefly whether she was bereaved or relieved.

On the next level a balcony overlooked the courtyard. Here the Sachem delivered his speeches. Havig stepped forth, into waxing bleak light, and gazed across chaos. Fights ramped between men and knots of men; wounded stirred and groaned, the slain looked shrunken where they lay. Yells and weapon-cracks insulted the sky.

There didn’t seem to be a pattern to anything which happened, only ugliness. He unshipped a pair of binoculars and studied the scene more closely. They let him identify an occasional combatant. Or corpse ... yes, Juan Mendoza yonder, and, O Christ, Jerry Jennings, whom he’d hoped could be saved--A new squadron of his army blinked into normal time and deployed. And suddenly parachutes bloomed overhead, as those who had leaped out of a twentieth-century airplane, each with his chronolog, entered this day.

The confusion was more in seeming than truth. From the start, Wallis’s on-duty garrison, most of them commoners, was nearly matched in numbers by a group of their traveler associates--who had been here for years and had quietly avoided drinking themselves befuddled last night. The fifth column was invented long before Havig was born; but his generation saw the unmerciful peak of its development and use.

Given it, and information carried forth by its members, and that precise timing which the chronolog made possible, and plans hammered out by a team which included professional soldiers, tested and rehearsed over and over on a mockup of the Eyrie itself ... given this, Havig’s victory was inevitable.

What counted was to minimize the number of agents who, seeing their disaster, would escape before they could be killed or secured. Of secondary importance in theory, but equal in Havig’s breast, was to minimize casualties. On both sides.

He let the binoculars dangle loose, took a walkie-talkie radio off his shoulder, and began calling his squadron leaders.

“Between surprise and efficiency,” he told me, “we didn’t lose many who time-hopped. Some of those we collared ‘later.’ Knowing from the registers who they were, we could make fairly good guesses at where--when they’d head for. It wouldn’t be a random flight, you see. A man would have to seek a milieu where he might survive by himself. That didn’t give too wide a choice.”

“You didn’t net the entire lot?” I fretted.

“No, not quite. We could scarcely hope for that.”

“I should think even one, prowling loose, is too many. He can slip back uptime, though pastward of your attack, and warn--”

“That never worried me, Doc. I knew nobody ever has, therefore nobody ever will. Not that that can’t be explained in ordinary human terms, quite apart from physics or metaphysics..

“Look, these were none of them supermen. In fact, they were either weaklings who’d been assigned civilian-type jobs, or warriors as ignorant and superstitious as brutal. Aside from what specialized training fitted them for Wallis’s purposes, he’d never tried to get them properly educated. If nothing else, that might have led to questioning of his righteousness and infallibility.

“Therefore, those who did escape had their morale pretty well shattered. Their main concern must be to stay hidden from us. And if they thought about the possibility of returning, they’d realize that we’d have agents of our own planted throughout the period of Wallis’s reign, just a few but enough to keep a lookout for them and hustle them away before any warning could be delivered.” Havig chuckled. “I was surprised myself, when first I learned who some of those people would be. Reuel Orrick, the old carnival charlatan ... Boris, the monk who went to Jerusalem ...“

He paused for a drink of my Scotch. “No,” he finished, “we simply didn’t want bandits loose who’re able to skip clear of their crimes. And I think--I dare hope--that never happened. How can, say, a condottiere, penniless, educationless, entirely alone, how can he get along in any era of white America or make his way to Europe? No, really, his best bet is to seek out the Indians. And among them he can do better as a medicine man than a robber. He might actually end his days a useful member of the tribe! That’s a single example, of course, but I imagine you get the general idea.”

“Regardin’ the future,” Leonce said, her tone tiger-soft, “we hold that. The Eyrie for the years it has left; the Phase Two complex till it’s no longer needed--an’ we built it. We’ve learned from our campaign. Nobody will shake us loose.”

“Well, in a military sense,” her husband was quick to put in. “It can’t be done overnight, but we mean to raise the Eyrie’s subjects out of peonage, make them into a free yeomanry. Phase Two never will have subjects: instead, non-traveler members of our society. And--goes without saying--our agents behave themselves. They visit the past for nothing except research and recruitment. When they need an economic base for operations, they make it by trade which gives value for value.”

Leonce stroked fingers across his cheek. “Jack comes from a sentimental era,” she crooned.

I frowned in my effort to understand. “Wait a minute,” I protested. “You had one huge problem with spines and fangs, right after you took the Eyrie. Your prisoners. What about them?”

An old trouble crossed Havig’s countenance. “There was no good answer,” he said tonelessly. “We couldn’t release them, nor those we arrested as they came back from furlough or surprised in their fiefs. We couldn’t gun them down. I mean that in a literal sense; we couldn’t. Our whole force was drawn from people who had a conscience, able to learn humaneness if they hadn’t been brought up with it. Nor did we want to keep anybody chained for life in some secret dungeon.”

Leonce grimaced. “Worse’n shootin’, that,” she said.

“Well,” Havig plodded on, “you may remember--I think I told you, and the telling is closer to your present than it is to mine--about those psychodrugs they have in the late Maurai era. Do you recall? My friend Carelo Keajimu will be afraid of them, they give such power. Inject a person, talk to him while he’s under the influence, and he’ll believe whatever you order him to believe. Absolutely. Not fanatically, but in an ‘of course’ way that’s far more deeply rooted. His own mind will supply rationalizations and false memories to explain contradictions. You see what this is? The ultimate brainwash! So complete that the victim never even guesses there ever was anything else.”

I whistled. “Good Lord! You mean you converted those crooks and butcher boys to your side, en masse?”

Havig shuddered. “No. If nothing else, I at least could never have stood such a gang of, of zombies. It’d have been necessary to wipe their entire past lives, and--impractical, anyhow. Keajimu had arranged for several of my bright lads to be trained in psychotechnology, but their job was quite big enough already.”

He drew breath, as if gathering courage, before he proceeded: “What we destroyed in our prisoners was their belief in time travel. We brought them to their home milieus--that took a lot of effort by itself, you realize--and treated them. They were told they’d had fever, or demonic possession, or whatever was appropriate; they’d imagined uncanny things which, being totally impossible, must never be mentioned and best never thought about; now they were well and should return to their ordinary lives.

“Our men released them and came back for more.”

I pondered. “Well,” I said, “I admit finding the idea a bit repulsive myself. But not too much. I’ve been forced to do certain things, tell certain lies, to patients and--”

Leonce stated: “There were two exceptions, Doc.”

“Come with me,” the mind molder said. His voice was gentle. Drug-numbed, Caleb Wallis clung to his hand as he left.

Havig remained, often toiling twice around the same clock, till he and his lieutenants had properly underway the immense task of making over the Eyrie. But time flowed, time flowed. At last he had no escape from the moment when the psycho-technician told him he could enter that guarded tower.

Perhaps the most appalling thing was how well the Sachem looked, how jauntily he sat behind his desk in an office from which scars and bloodstains were blotted as if they had never been.

“Well!” he greeted. “Good day, my boy, good day! Sit down. No, pour for us first. You know what I like.”

Havig obeyed. The small eyes peered shrewdly at him. “Turned out to be a mighty long, tough mission, yours, hey?” Wallis said. “You’ve aged, you have. I’m sure glad you carried it off, though. Haven’t read your full report, but I intend to. Meanwhile, let’s catch up with each other.” His glass lifted. “To the very good health of us both.”

Havig forced down a sip and lowered himself to a chair.

“You’ve doubtless heard already, mine hasn’t been the best,” Walls continued. “Down and out for quite a while. Actual brain fever. Some damn germ from past or future, probably. The sawbones claims germs have evolution like animals. I’ve about decided we should curtail our explorations, partly on that account, partly to concentrate on building up our power in normal time. What d’ you think of that?”

“I think it would be wise, sir,” Havig whispered.

“Another reason for pulling in our horns is, we lost a lot of our best men while you were away. Run of bad luck for us. Austin Caldwell, have you heard? And Waclaw Krasicki--Hey, you’re white’s a ghost! What’s wrong? Sure you’re okay?”

“Yes, sir. . . . Still tired. I did spend a number of years downtime, and--”

--and it had been Leonce who found Krasicki chained, said, “Xenia,” drew her pistol and shot him in the head. But it was Havig who could not make himself be sorry this had happened, until Xenia sought him in his sleep and wept because he did not forgive.

Well. “I’ll recover, sir.”

“Fine. Fine. We need men like you.” Wallis rubbed his brow. For a minute his voice came high and puzzled: “So many people here. So many old gone--or are they? I can’t tell. I look from my balcony and see strangers, and think I ought to see, oh, somebody named Juan, somebody named Hans ... many, many... but I can’t place them. Did I dream them while I lay sick?” He hugged himself, as if winter air had seeped through into the tropical warmth around him. “Often, these days, I feel alone, alone in all space and time--”

Havig mustered briskness: “What you need, sir, if I may suggest it, is an extended vacation. I can recommend places.”

“Yes, I think you’re right. I do.” Walls gulped from his tumbler and fumbled after a cigar.

“When you return, sir,” Havig said, “you ought to work less hard. The foundation has been laid. We’re functioning smoothly.”

“I know. I know.” Walls lost hold of his match.

“What we need, sir, is not your day-by-day instruction any longer. We have plenty of competent men to handle details. We need more your broad overview, the basic direction you foresee--your genius.”

Behind the gray whiskers, Walls simpered. This time he got his cigar lit.

“I’ve been talking about it with various officers, and thinking a lot, too,” Havig proceeded. “They’ve discussed the matter with you, they said. Sir, let me add my words to theirs. We believe the ideal would be if a kind of schedule was established for your passage through the future. Of course, it’d include those periods your past self will visit, to let you show him how well everything is going. Otherwise, however--uh--we don’t think you should spend more than a minimum of your lifespan in any single continuous set of dates. You’re too precious to the grand project.”

“Yes. I’d about decided the same for myself.” Wallis nodded and nodded. “First, like you say, a real good vacation, to straighten out my thoughts and get this fuzziness out of my head. Then, a ... a progress through tomorrow, observing, issuing orders, always bound onward ... till at the end, when my work is done--Yes. Yes. Yes.”

“God!” I exclaimed, a word as close to prayer as I’d come in fifty skeptical years. “If ever there was a revenge--”

“This wasn’t,” Havig said through lips drawn taut.

“What, well, what’d it feel like, when he came?”

“I’ve avoided being on hand for most of that. When I had to be, it was naturally always a festive occasion, and nobody cared if I got drunk. Men who regularly deal with him told me--tell me--one gets used to leading the poor apparition through his Potemkin villages, and off to some sybaritic place downtime for one of the long orgiastic celebrations which use up and shorten his lifespan. They’re almost fond of him. They go to great lengths to put on a good show. That eases their thought of the end.”

“Huh? Isn’t he supposed to vanish in his old age?”

Havig’s fist knotted on the arm of his chair. “He did. He will. He’ll scream in the night, and his room will be empty. He must have thrown himself far in time, because searchers up and down will find nothing reappearing.” Havig tossed off his drink. I saw he needed more, and obliged.

Leonce caressed him. “Aw, don’t let it gnaw you, darlya,” she murmured. “He’s not worth that.”

“Mostly I don’t,” he said, rough-throated. “Rather not discuss the business.”

“I, I don’t see--” I couldn’t help stammering.

The big woman turned to me. She smiled in tenderness for her vulnerable man. What she said was, to her, a remark of no importance: “We been told, now an’ then as it’s dyin’ a brain throws off the effect o’ that drug an’ recalls what was real.”

16

IN 1971, October 31 fell on a Sunday. That meant school next day. The little spooks would come thick and fast to my door if they must be early abed. I laid in ample supplies. When I was a boy, Halloween gave license for limited hell-raising, but I’m glad the custom has softened. Seeing them in their costumes brings back my own children at that same age, and Kate. When my doorbell has rung for the last time, I usually make a fire, settle with my favorite pipe and a mug of hot cider, maybe put some music she liked on the record player, look into the flames and remember. In a quiet way I am happy.

But this day called me forth. It was cool, noisy with wind, sunshine spilling through diamond-clear air, and the trees stood scarlet, yellow, bronze, in enormous tossing rustling masses against blueness where white clouds scudded, and from a V passing high overhead drifted down a trumpet song. I went for a hike.

On the sidewalks of Senlac, leaves capered before me, making sounds like laughter at the householders who tried to rake them into neat piles. The fields outside of town stretched bare and dark and waiting; but flocks of crows still gleaned them, until rising in a whirl of wings and raucous merriment. I left the paved county road for an old dirt one which cars don’t use much, thanks be to whatever godling loves us enough to wage his rearguard fight against this kind of Progress. In its roundabout fashion it also brought me to Morgan Woods.

I went through that delirium of color till I reached the creek. There I stood a while on the bridge, watching water gurgle above stones, a squirrel assert his dominion over an oak which must be a century old, branches toss, leaves tear loose; I listened to the rush and skirl and deeper tones around me, felt air slide by like chilly liquid, drew in odors of damp and fulfillment; I didn’t think about anything in particular, or contemplate, or meditate, I just was there.

At last my bones and thin flesh reminded me they had a goodly ways to go, and I started home. Tea and scones seemed an excellent idea. Afterward I should write Bill and Judy a letter, make specific proposals about my visit to them this winter in California.

I didn’t notice the car parked under the chestnut tree before I was almost upon it. Then my pulse jumped inside me. Could this be--? Not the same machine as before, but of course he always rented--I forgot whatever ache was in my legs and trotted forward.

Jack and Leonce Havig sprang forth to greet me. We embraced, the three of us in a ring. “Welcome, welcome!” I babbled. “Why didn’t you call ahead? I’d not’ve kept you waiting.”

“That’s okay, Doc,” he answered. “We’ve been sitting and enjoying the scene.” He was mute for a second or two. “We’re taking in as much of Earth as we’re able.”

I stepped back and considered him. He was leaner than before, deep furrows beside his mouth and between his eyes, the skin sun-touched but leather-dry, the blond hair fading toward gray. Middle forties, I judged; something like a decade had gone through him in the weeks of mine since last we met.

I turned to his wife. Erect, lithe, more full-figured than earlier but carrying it well, she showed the passage of those years less than he did. To be sure, I thought, she was younger. Yet I marked crow’s-feet wrinkles and the tiny frost-flecks in that red mane.

“You’re done?” I asked, and shivered with something else than the weather. “You beat the Eyrie?”

“We did, we did,” Leonce jubilated. Havig merely nodded. A starkness had entered the alloy of him. He kept an arm around her waist, however, and I didn’t suppose she could stay happy if at heart he were not too.

“Wonderful!” I cried. “Come on in.”

“For tea?” she laughed.

“Lord, no! I had that in mind, but--my dear, this calls for Aalborg akvavit and Carlsberg beer, followed by Glenlivet and--Well, I’ll phone Swanson’s and have ‘em deliver gourmet items and we’ll fix the right breed of supper and--How long can you stay?”

“Not very long, I’m afraid,” Havig said. “A day or two at most. We’ve a lot to do in the rest of our lifespans.”

Their tale was hours in the telling. Sunset flared gold and hot orange across a greenish western heaven, beyond trees and neighbor roofs, when I had been given the skeleton of it. The wind had dropped to a mumble at my threshold. Though the room was warm enough, I felt we could use a fire and bestirred myself to fill the hearth. But Leonce said, “Let me.” Her hands had not lost their woodcraft, and she remained a pleasure to watch. Pleasure it was, also, after the terrible things I had heard, to see how his gaze followed her around.

“Too bad you can’t forestall the founding of the Eyrie,” I said.

“We can’t, and that’s that,” Havig replied. Slowly: “I’m not sure it is too bad, either. Would a person like me ever have had the ... determination? I started out hoping for no more than to meet my fellows. Why should I have wanted to organize them for any special purpose, until--” His voice trailed off.

“Xenia,” I murmured. “Yes.”

Leonce glanced around at us. “Even Xenia doesn’t tip the balance,” she said in a gentle tone. “The Crusaders would not’ve spared her. As was, she got rescued and lived nine years onward.” She smiled. “Five of them were with Jack. Oh, she had far less than luck’s given me, but she did have that.”

I thought how Leonce was outwardly changed less than her man, and inwardly more than I had guessed.

While Havig made no remark, I knew his wound must have healed--scarred over, no doubt, but nonetheless healed--as wounds do in every healthy body and spirit.

“Well,” I said, trying to break free of somberness, “you did get your kind together, you did overcome the wrong and establish the right--Well, I hardly expected I’d entertain a king and queen!”

“What?” Havig blinked in surprise. “We aren’t.”

“Eh? You rule the roost uptime, don’t you?”

“No. For a while we did, because somebody had to. But we worked together with the wisest people we could find--not exclusively travelers by any means--to end this as soon as might be, and turn the military society into a free republic ... and at last into nothing more than a sort of loose guild.”

Fire, springing aloft when she worked the bellows, cast gleams from Leonce’s eyes. “Into nothin’ less than a dream,” she said.

“I don’t understand,” I told them, as frequently this day.

Havig sought words. “Doc,” he said after a bit, “once we’ve left here, you won’t see us again.”

I sat quite quietly. Sunset in the windows was giving way to dusk.

Leonce sped to me, cast arms around my shoulders, kissed my cheek. Her hair was fragrant, with a touch of smokiness from the little chuckling flames. “No, Doc,” she said. “Not ‘cause you’ll die soon.”

“I don’t want--” I began.

“Ay-yeh.” Barbarian bluntness spoke. “You said you don’t want to know the date on your tombstone. An’ we’re not about to tell you, either. But damn, I will say you’re good for a fair while yet!”

“The thing is,” Havig explained in his awkward fashion, “we, Leonce and I, we’ll be leaving Earth. I doubt we’ll come back.”

“What was the good of time travel, ever?” he demanded when we could discourse of fundamentals.

“Why, well, uh--” I floundered.

“To control history? You can’t believe a handful of travelers would be able to do that. Walls believed it, but you can’t, I’m certain. Nor do you believe they should.”

“Well ... history, archeology, science--”

“Agreed, almost, that there’s no such thing as too much knowledge. Except that fate ought not to be foreknown. That’s the death of hope. And learning is an esthetic experience--or ecstatic--but if we stop there, aren’t we being flat-out selfish? Don’t you feel knowledge should be used?”

“Depends on the end, Jack.”

Leonce, seated beside him, stirred in the yellow glow of a single shaded lamp, the shadow-restless many-hued sparkle from my fireplace. “For us,” she said, “the end is goin’ to the stars. That’s what time travel is good for.”

Havig smiled. His manner was restrained, but the same eagerness vibrated: “Why did you imagine we went on to build the--Phase Two complex--what we ourselves call Polaris House? I told you we don’t care to rule the world. No, Polaris House is for research and development. Its work will be done when the first ships are ready.”

“An’ they will be,” Leonce lilted. “We’ve seen.”

Passion mounted in Havig. He leaned forward, fingers clenched around the glass he had forgotten he grasped, and said:

“I haven’t yet mastered the scientific or engineering details. That’s one reason we must go back uptime. Physicists talk about a mathematical equivalence between traveling into the past and flying faster than light. They hope to develop a theory which’ll show them a method. Maybe they’ll succeed, maybe they won’t. I know they won’t in Polaris House, but maybe at last, in Earth’s distant future or on a planet circling another sun. But it doesn’t ultimately matter. A ship can go slower than light if people like us are the crew. You follow me? Her voyage might last centuries. But to us, moving uptime while she moves across space, it’s hours or minutes.

“Our children can’t do the same. But they’ll be there. We’ll have started man on his way to infinity.”

I stared past him. In the windows, the constellations were hidden by flamelight. “I see,” I answered softly. “A tremendous vision for sure.”

“A necessary one,” Havig replied. “And without us--and thus, in the long view, without our great enemy--the thing would never have been done. The Maurai might’ve gathered the resources to revive space exploration, at the height of their power. But they did not. Their ban on enormous energy outlays was good at first, yes, vital to saving this planet. At last, though, like most good things, it became a fetish. ... Undoubtedly the culture which followed them would not have gone to space.”

“We did,” Leonce exulted. “The Star Masters are our people.”

“And a lifebringer to Earth,” Havig added. “I mean, a civilization which just sat down and stared at its own inwardness--how soon would it become stagnant, caste-ridden, poor, and nasty? You can’t think unless you have something to think about. And this has to come from outside. doesn’t it? The universe is immeasurably larger than any mind.”

“I’ve gathered,” I said, my words covering awe, “that that future society welcomes the starfarers.”

“Oh, yes, oh, yes. More for their ideas than for material goods. Ideas, arts, experience, insights born on a thousand different worlds, out of a thousand different kinds of being--and Earth gives a fair return. It is well to have those mystics and philosophers. They think and feel, they search out meanings, they ask disturbing questions--” Havig’s voice lifted. “I don’t know where the communion between them and us will lead. Maybe to a higher state of the soul? I do believe the end will be good, and this is the purpose we time travelers are born for.”

Leonce brought us partway back to our bodies. “Mainly,” she laughed, “we ‘spec’ to have a hooraw o’ fun. Climb down off your prophetic broomstick, Jack, honeybee, an’ pay attention to your drink.”

“You two intend, then, to be among the early explorers?” I asked redundantly.

“We’ve earned the right,” she said.

“Uh-pardon me, none of my business, but if your children cannot inherit your gift--”

Wistfulness touched her. “Maybe we’ll find a New Earth to raise them on. We’re not too old.” She regarded her man’s sharp-edged profile. “Or maybe we’ll wander the universe till we die. That’d be enough.”

Silence fell. The clock on my mantel ticked aloud and the wind outside flowed past like a river.

The doorbell pealed. I left my chair to open up for a glimpse of Aquila. Three small figures were on the stoop, a clown, a bear, an astronaut. They held out paper bags. “Trick or treat!” they chanted. “Trick or treat!”

A year has fled since Jack Havig and Leonce of Wahorn bade me farewell. I often think about them. Mostly, of course, dailiness fills my days. But I often find an hour to think about them.

At any moment they may be somewhere on our planet, desperate or triumphant in that saga I already know. But we will not meet. The end of their lives reaches untellably far beyond mine.

Well, so does the life of man. Of Earth and the cosmos.

I wish ... I wish many things. That they’d felt free to spend part of their stay in this summer which is past. We could have gone sailing. However, they naturally wanted to see Eleanor, his mother, in one of the few intervals they had been able to make sure were safe, and tell her--what? She has not told me.

I wish they or I had thought to raise a question which has lately haunted me.

How did the race of time travelers come to be?

We supposed, the three of us, that we knew the “why.” But we did not ask who, or what, felt the need and responded.

Meaningless accidental mutation? Then curious that none like Havig seem to have been born futureward of the Eyrie--of, anyhow, Polaris House. In truth it would probably not be good to have them and their foreknowledge about, once the purpose has been served of freeing man to roam and discover forever. But who decided this? Who shaped the reality?

I have been reading about recent work in experimental genetics. Apparently a virus can be made to carry genes from one host to the next; and the hosts need not be of the same species. Nature may have done this already, may always be doing it. Quite likely we bear in our cells and bequeath to our children bits of heritage from animals which were never among our forebears. That is well, if true. I am glad to think we may be so close to the whole living world.

But could a virus have been made which carried a very strange thing; and could it have been sown through a chosen part of the past by travelers created anew in some unimaginably remote tomorrow?

I walk beyond town, many of these nights, to stand under the high autumnal stars, look upward and wonder.