The warriors heard a few shouts and screams from the Crossmen, but soon the city was quiet. They had a boring night, but I hadn't told them to come.
I was still across the river, safe from the chlorine. I went back to my big railroad car to sleep. At the doorway of my car a foreign knight waited, standing in the yellow torchlight.
He was dressed in old-fashioned chain mail, though it looked to be washed with gold. There was quite a bit of solid gold on his outfit as well. And there was something very familiar about the man.
"What can I do for you?" I asked.
"I think it is time that we had a talk," he said in Polish but with a strong American English accent!
He was identical to the man I had seen killed on the battlefield a year ago, except he had all his hair. He had to be somehow connected to the time machine that had brought me here over ten years earlier.
"Yes," I said. "I would like that. Won't you come in?"
"Thank you," he said, entering and nodding to my servants. "Perhaps it would be best if you dismissed your people. "
"Very well." I motioned them all out, and they obeyed.
"Good. I think here would be best. " He went to my stand-up clothes closet, opened the door, and walked through. The closet was standing along the wall of the car, and there was nothing on the other side of it. In fact, I had just walked past that wall, and I knew that nothing had been set up on the other side of it. Yet when I looked into the closet, there was a modem living room in there! It had wall-to-wall carpeting, electric lights, and comfortable looking leather furniture. There was even a cheerful fire going in a fieldstone fireplace. This was impossible!
I went to the side of the closet, moved it away from the wall, and looked behind it. The back of the closet was solid, and the railroad car didn't have a hole in it. Yet from the front, you could see ten yards into it!
But I wanted to get some answers out of this man, and I dared not turn coward now. I took a deep breath and stepped in. The door closed behind me with a solid click.
"Have a seat, cousin," he said in English. "Surely you recognize me. I'm your rich American relative, Tom Kolczykrenski. I put you through college, remember?"
I sat. "Yes, I remember now, but what are you doing here? And what is here doing here?" I said in my rusty English.
"This room, you mean? Well, you must understand that when you control time, you control space as well. They're really all part of the same thing, you know."
"No, I don't know."
"Then you will soon," he said. A very beautiful young woman came into the room completely naked, carrying a tray with drinks on it. "Have a martini. I'll bet it's been years since you had an olive."
"Thank you." For ten years a thousand questions had been racking my brain, but at the moment I couldn't think of a single one. "What can I do for you, Tom?"
"Well, it's not what you can do for me but what I can do for you that matters here. You see, in a way it's partly my fault that you were dumped into this barbaric century, and now finally I can do something about it."
The girl left the room, and my eyes followed her.
"Yes, Conrad, my tastes are pretty much like your own. But she's not what we should be talking about. Do you want to ask questions, or should I just tell you about what happened?"
"How about if you talk, and I'll ask questions as they come up."
"Good enough. More years ago than I like to think about, working with two partners, I invented a time machine. That's how we got rich in the first place, you know, playing the stock market with next week's Wall Street Journal in our hands. After a while, subjectively, we all grew up a bit, and we each started working on our own projects. I spent my time building a fine, rational civilization in the distant past, where it wouldn't upset our present at all, and Jim did something similar, but with a different slant on things, being a psychologist."
"But Ian's main interest was history, and he runs something called the Historical Corps, which is writing the definitive history of mankind. The Red Gate Inn that you got drunk in so many years ago was one of Ian's installations."
"He usually places inns over his time transporters, since strangers aren't much noticed around one. It was some of his people that screwed up, with your drunken help. Instead of finding the rest room, you managed to go down one flight of steps too many and fell asleep in a time transporter. You went through a series of open doors that never should have been open, and even if they had been, the site director should have noticed it on his readouts. But screwups happen, and nobody noticed you at all. More snafu happened at the thirteenth-century end of the line, and you weren't seen sneaking out of the inn."
"What happened to the people who screwed up and sent me here?"
"Oh, they were punished, never fear. Punished more than they deserved, actually. We seem to have lost them a few million years ago in Africa. The search goes on, though. "
"So it was all an accident? But if you have time travel, why couldn't you go back to the time I came out of the inn and put me back into the time machine?"
"Because of causality. You were not noticed until I went to observe the Polish defeat at the Battle of Chmielnick. I didn't see you until you had been in this century for almost ten years! I saw you with what was, for this time, advanced technology. That was a fact, and you can't change established facts, or so we thought at the time, anyway."
"At the time?"
"Standard English is not well suited to talking about time travel. We use a few extra tenses to cover it all properly, but there isn't any point in teaching you a new language right now. Suffice it to say that we had been operating for eight hundred subjective years on certain principles that always worked. That's eight hundred years of my own life, as I lived it. Our medical people are quite advanced, you see. Anyway, we knew that you couldn't change the time stream. We knew that time was a single, linear continuum and that nothing we could do could possibly change it. Furthermore, from the very beginning, we were very careful not to change things. We didn't want to play God, after all. My partners and I are pretty staunch individualists, but we're not crazy! We never tried to see what would happen if we killed off our grandfathers, for example. We're not murderers, after all. Anyway, my grandfathers are both very fine gentlemen, and I wouldn't dream of hurting them."
"So you're saying that you knew that you couldn't change the past, so you never tried to?" I said. "That's ridiculous! "
"Is it? Tell me, what would happen to an engineer at your old Katowice Machinery Works if he started spending all of his time and the company's money working on a perpetual-motion machine?"
"Why, they'd send him to a mental institution if they didn't fire him first."
"Right. And what if the boss of the outfit started working on the same project?"
"The same thing, I suppose, although they might take more time doing it. Everybody knows that perpetual-motion machines are impossible. They violate the second law of thermodynamics! "
"True. And what if, say, the U.S. government started a major research effort to develop perpetual motion?"
"This is a stupid line of questions. No government would ever do anything like that! The second law is absolutely correct. We've been using it for a hundred years, and it's always right!" I shouted.
"Fine. Then what if I told you that it was possible to build a machine that took in tap water and produced electricity and ice cubes?"