"Don't worry about that," he told them. "If we win, we'll eat Gormoth's crops. If we lose, we'll all be too dead to eat."
And the Iron Curtain went down. Within a few days, indignant packtraders and wagoners were being collected in Hostigos Town, trapped for the duration, protesting vehemently but unavailingly. Sooner or later, Gormoth and Sarrask would begin to wonder why nobody was coming out of Hostigos, and would send spies slipping through the woods to find out. Counterespionage; organize soonest. And a few of his own spies in Sask and Nostor. And an anti-Styphon fifth column in both princedoms. Discuss with Xentos.
By the fifth day, the Wolf Valley sulfur-evaporation plant was ready to go into operation, and saltpeter production was up to some ten pounds a day. He put Mytron in charge at Tarr-Hostigos, hoping for something better than the worst, and got into his new armor. He and Rylla and a half dozen of Harmakros's cavalrymen trotted out the gate and down the road from the castle into Hostigos Gap. It was the first time he'd been outside the castle since he had been brought there unconscious, tied onto a horse-litter.
It was not until they were out of the gap and riding toward the town, spread around the low hill above the big spring, that he turned in his saddle to look back at the castle. For a moment he couldn't be certain what was wrong, but he knew something was. Then it struck him.
There was no trace whatever of the great stone-quarries. There should have been. No matter how many thousands of years had passed since he had been in and out of that dome of shifting light that had carried him out of his normal time, there would have been some evidence of quarrying there. Normal erosion would have taken not thousands but hundreds of thousands' of years to obliterate those stark man-made cliffs, and enough erosion to have done that would have reduced the whole mountain by half. I remembered how unchanged the little cliff, under which he and Larry and Jack and Steve had parked the car, had been when he had. emerged. No. That mountain had never been quarried, at any time in the past.
So he wasn't in the future; that was sure. And he wasn't in the past, unless every scrap of history everybody had ever written or taught was an organized lie, and that he couldn't swallow.
Then when the hell was he?
Rylla had reined in her horse and stopped beside him. The six troopers came to an unquestioning halt.
"What is it, Kalvan?"
"I was just. just thinking of the last time I saw this place."
"You mustn't think about that, any more." Then, after a moment "Was there somebody. somebody you didn't want to leave?"
He laughed. "No, Rylla. The only somebody like that is right beside me now."
They shook their reins and started off again, the six troopers clattering behind them.
VERKAN Vall watched Tortha Karf spin the empty revolver cartridge on his desk. It was a very valuable empty cartridge; it had taken over forty days and cost ten thousand man-hours of crawling on hands and knees and pawing among dead hemlock needles to find it.
"That was a small miracle, Vall," the Chief said. "Aryan-Transpacific?"
"Oh, yes; we were sure of that from the beginning. Styphon's House Sub sector." He gave the exact numerical designation of the time-line. "They're all basically alike; the language, culture, taboo and situation-response tapes we have will do."
The Chief was fiddling with the selector for the map screen; when he had gotten geographical area and run through level and sector, he lit it with a map of eastern North America, divided into five Great Kingdoms. First, Hos-Zygros-he chose to identify it in the terms the man he was hunting would use-its capital equivalent with Quebec, taking in New England and southeastern Canada to Lake Ontario. Second, Hos-Agrys New York, western Quebec Province and northern New Jersey. Third, Hos-Harphax, where the pickup incident had occurred. Fourth, Hos-Ktenmos Virginia and North Carolina. Finally, Hos-Bletha, south from there to the tip of Florida and west along the Gulf to Mobile Bay. And also Trygath, which was not Hos-, or great, in the Ohio Valley. Glancing at a note in front of him, Tortha Karf made a dot of light in the middle of Hos-Harphax.
"That's it. Of course, that was over forty days ago. A man can go a long way, even on foot, in that time."
The Chief knew that. "Styphon's House," he said. "That's that gunpowder theocracy, isn't it.
It was. He'd seen theocracies all over paratime, and liked none of them; priests in political power usually made themselves insufferable, worse than any secular despotism. Styphon's House was a particularly nasty case in point. About five centuries ago, Styphon had been a minor healer-god; still was on most of Aryan-Transpacific. Some deified ancient physician, he supposed. Then, on one time-line, some priest experimenting with remedies had mixed a batch of saltpeter, sulfur and charcoals small batch, or he wouldn't have survived it.
For a century or so, it had merely been a temple miracle, and then the propellant properties had been discovered, and Styphon had gone out of medical practice and into the munitions business. Priestly researchers had improved the powder and designed and perfected weapons to use it. Nobody had discovered fulminating powder and invented the percussion-cap, but they had everything short of that. Now, through their monopoly on this essential tool for maintaining or altering the political status quo, Styphon's House ruled the whole Atlantic seaboard, while the secular sovereigns merely reined.
He wondered if Calvin Morrison knew how to make gunpowder, and while he was wondering silently, the Chief did so aloud, adding
"If he does, we won't have any trouble locating him. We may afterward, though."
That was how pickup jobs usually were, on the exit end; the pickup either made things easy or impossibly difficult. Many of these paratemporal DP's, suddenly hurled into an unfamiliar world, went hopelessly insane, their minds refusing to cope with what common sense told them was impossible. Others were quickly killed through ignorance. Others would be caught by the locals, and committed to mental hospitals, imprisoned, sold as slaves, executed as spies, burned as sorcerers, or merely lynched, depending on local mores. Many accepted and blended into their new environment and sank into traceless obscurity. A few created commotions and had to be dealt with. "Well, we'll find out. I'm going outtime myself to look into it."
"You don't need to, Vall. You have plenty of detectives who can do that."
He shook his head obstinately. "On Year-End Day, that'll be a hundred and seventy-four days, I'm going to be handcuffed to that chair you're sitting in. Until then, I'm going to do as much outtime work as I possibly can." He leaned over and turned a dial on the map-selector, got a large-scale map of Hos-Harphax and increased the magnification and limited the field. He pointed. "I'm going in about there. In the mountains in Sask, next door. I'll be a pack-trader-they go everywhere and don't have to account for themselves to anybody. I'll have a saddle-horse and three pack-horses loaded with wares. It'll take about five or six days to collect and verify what I'll take with me. I'll travel slowly, to let word seep ahead of me. It may be that I'll hear something about this Morrison before I enter Hostigos."
"What'll you do about him when you find him?" That would depend. Sometimes a pickup could be taken alive, moved to Police Terminal on the Fifth Level, given a complete memory obliteration, and then returned to his own time-line. An amnesia case; that was always a credible explanation. Or he would be killed with a sigma-ray needier, which left no traceable effects. Heart failure or "He just died." Amnesia and heart failure were wonderful things, from the Paratime Police viewpoint. Anybody with any common sense would accept either. Common sense was a wonderful thing, too.
"Well, I don't want to kill the fellow; after all, he's a police officer, too. But with the explanation we're cobbling up for his disappearance, returning him to his own time-line wouldn't be any favor to him." He paused, thinking. "We'll have to kill him, I'm afraid. He knows too much."