He reached up to adjust them again, and at that moment another, perhaps the same, grinning black monstrosity showed in the window. He spun the damned controls and activated.
The creature got off a shot, but where its target had been, there was suddenly nothing at all but an empty room. Behind, there were loud yells and curses and somebody shouted, “Break the door down!”
The creature, looking very disgusted, vanished from the window just as the door came crashing in.
FLYING BLIND
The sensations of time traveling were becoming almost routine to him now, and even the process of merging and integrating yet another real person into him seemed almost beside the point. What seemed far more pressing was the problem that something more than the goals of the job had gone wrong at this point.
The suit should have brought him home with even ten percent power, possibly even less. Releasing the settings acted, or so they’d told him, almost like a rubber band released from its hold. The suit power was needed only to keep him alive and breathing until he reached the leading edge, or zero point. Why had the microprocessor refused to take him there? How could there be insufficient power with a fully charged suit?
And where could he find a mechanic?
After the dizzing effects of the merge had passed and he had calmed down enough to think clearly, he checked out the suit’s instrumentation. Both Sandoval and Austin-Venneman were dead; their suits would no longer have anyone to guide on and would automatically return to their own source of power. Cline had destroyed the third suit, so he was the only one now traveling in time from the Calvert installation. That probably meant that he had a hundred percent of their generating energy, which supposedly could take somebody back as far as Columbus’ time.
He checked his settings. He hadn’t changed the setting on location, but it was more than probable that it had been knocked around, at least slightly. There would be some drift, but not a great deal. Certainly he should still be in Europe when he emerged—but when?
The central LEDs read 603.2 The very size of the number was a shock. How far had he turned the dials? And did he have enough power and air to reach that point? There was no turning back now—he had to ride it out. Once locked in, they were fixed until you arrived.
He had settled down now, resigned to a very long “trip,” and was surprised to arrive in whenever it was within little more than two hours by the suit’s relative time clock. He checked the air supply and saw that it was still at rather high levels—seventy-four percent full—while the power read eighty-two percent. It was not the drain he expected from such a journey, and he began to wonder if perhaps he had not gone back as far as the setting indicated. Both the set clock and the check clock agreed, though, reading 603.2. Nothing was making sense any more, or working out as they’d told him. That would make him now in the fourteenth century!
It was night—he was beginning to suspect that it always landed you in the middle of the night—and there was little that could be seen, no lights anywhere at all, nothing to get a bearing on. He remained in the suit for a bit and again carefully reset the dials, all of them, to zero, and attempted activation.
The suit said there was insufficient power for it.
What could have happened? Clearly, he could travel back and forth in time with it, until the air and power wore out, but there seemed no way to go home and he was flying blind, unable to determine a correct destination. Was there a correct destination anymore? he wondered.
Certainly, he needed some time to think things out, and this seemed as good or bad a place as any. He switched the suit to maintenance level, released the seals, and removed the helmet.
The air seemed fresh and clean, although a little cool for what he had expected. The decimal in the readout, if that readout could be trusted, indicated two months from when he’d left Maryland—July. He got out of the suit, but found himself still in near total darkness. He walked around a bit to keep an air supply coming in, but did not want to wander far. He was afraid that if he got too far from the suit, he’d never find it again.
Once freed of the helmet, he found visibility much better, thanks to the light of a nearly full moon. He seemed to be in a mountain meadow of sorts, a bit high for trees but covered with grass and shrubs. Down in the valley far below, he thought he could make out a small village, although it might be a trick of the moonlight. The other way, a bit further up in the mountains, he thought he could make out a single large stone building with what looked like a steeple inside. At first he thought it was a castle, but then he decided that it looked more like a monastery. That suited him, to a degree. Being a friar in such a remote place might well give him the chance to sort things out.
The area didn’t give him many places for concealment of the suit, but he managed to find a small crack in the rock wall that would fit it, then covered it with brush. It wasn’t perfect, but the spot was so remote it was better odds than the rock pile in Trier that it would remain unspotted. The one thing that unsettled him was the fear that he might not be able to find the spot again. Using the moonlight to best advantage, he tried to memorize all of the reference points he could, particularly some uniquely formed peaks that seemed in the darkness to be the top of a giant cat’s head.
Then he wandered a bit, both to breathe well and to protect himself against the chill of the altitude. Already he was thinking of the events in Trier, and the cool, blond man who’d intervened to stop him. Him and his monsters.
Clearly there were two sides from the future, two sides going back in time to try to change things to their advantage. But why had the blond fellow chosen to act through radicals of his, Moosic’s, time? Perhaps, he thought, because it might lead the other side to believe that their enemy was not the cause of the change. Or perhaps it was because each side had some way of tracing the energy sustaining their own time equipment to the other’s source of power. Surrogates would be less risky.
But why, when they’d failed, had they risked coming after him?
He was still pondering that question when the nausea hit, and he passed out.
It was a time of terror and schism for the Church. Much of the Catholic world was in revolt against the Pope throughout much of the century, particularly after the Papacy had moved to Avignon and become, in effect, an ally totally under the control of France and highly corrupt. Much of Italy was in revolt against the Papacy, and now the ultimate horror had happened, with Clement VII, backed by the College of Cardinals, pope in Avignon and Urban VI, elected earlier by that same College of Cardinals, pope in Rome. Each had excommunicated the other and the other’s followers; each had a legitimate claim to the Papacy, since Urban had been elected under death threats by the Italians to any of the cardinals who did not choose a Rome-committed Italian, while Clement had been elected more or less freely.
Kings and mercenaries clashed over which was the true pope and true church; philosophers tied themselves in knots trying to sort it out. The increasingly fat and corrupt church—both of them—backed one side or the other that best preserved its own money, power, and prestige. In the midst of this, a devoted and disgusted nun lived in the little finger of Milan above Venice, a forgotten and ignored little area near the boundary with the Holy Roman Empire. Dismayed by the corruption and lack of leadership, and frustrated at being unable to either do anything about it or sort it out, she gathered like-minded nuns from throughout the region and led them to a monastery, one abandoned in the theological strife, that was high in the Alps. Convinced that one of the popes was the Antichrist, but unable to determine which one, she resolved to remain there, with her flock, praying and anticipating the Second Coming, which looked very likely.