The Only Game in Town

The Only Game in Town by Poul Anderson

1

John Sandoval did not belong to his name. Nor did it seem right that he should stand in slacks and aloha shirt before an apartment window opening on midtwentieth-century Manhattan. Everard was used to anachronism, but the dark hooked face confronting him always seemed to want warpaint, a horse, and a gun sighted on some pale thief.

“Okay,” he said. “The Chinese discovered America. Interesting, but why does the fact need my services?”

“I wish to hell I knew,” Sandoval answered.

His rangy form turned about on the polar-bear rug, which Bjarni Herjulfsson had once given to Everard, until he was staring outward. Towers were sharp against a clear sky; the noise of traffic was muted by height. His hands clasped and unclasped behind his back.

“I was ordered to co-opt an Unattached agent, go back with him and take whatever measures seemed indicated,” he went on after a while. “I knew you best, so…” His voice trailed off.

“But shouldn’t you get an Indian like yourself?” asked Everard. “I’d seem rather out of place in thirteenth-century America.”

“So much the better. Make it impressive, mysterious.… It won’t be too tough a job, really.”

“Of course not,” said Everard. “Whatever the job actually is.”

He took pipe and tobacco pouch from his disreputable smoking jacket and stuffed the bowl in quick, nervous jabs. One of the hardest lessons he had had to learn, when first recruited into the Time Patrol, was that every important task does not require a vast organization. That was the characteristic twentieth-century approach; but earlier cultures, like Athenian Hellas and Kamakura Japan—and later civilizations too, here and there in history—had concentrated on the development of individual excellence. A single graduate of the Patrol Academy (equipped, to be sure, with tools and weapons of the future) could be the equivalent of a brigade.

But it was a matter of necessity as well as aesthetics. There were all too few people to watch over all too many thousands of years.

“I get the impression,” said Everard slowly, “that this is not a simple rectification of extra-temporal interference.”

“Right,” said Sandoval in a harsh voice. “When I reported what I’d found, the Yuan milieu office made a thorough investigation. No time travelers are involved. Kublai Khan thought this up entirely by himself. He may have been inspired by Marco Polo’s accounts of Venetian and Arab sea voyages, but it was legitimate history, even if Marco’s book doesn’t mention anything of the sort.”

“The Chinese had quite a nautical tradition of their own,” said Everard. “Oh, it’s all very natural. So how do we come in?”

He got his pipe lit and drew hard on it. Sandoval still hadn’t spoken, so he asked, “How did you happen to find this expedition? It wasn’t in Navajo country, was it?”

“Hell, I’m not confined to studying my own tribe,” Sandoval answered. “Too few Amerinds in the Patrol as is, and it’s a nuisance disguising other breeds. I’ve been working on Athabascan migrations generally.” Like Keith Denison, he was an ethnic Specialist, tracing the history of peoples who never wrote their own so that the Patrol could know exactly what the events were that it safeguarded.

“I was working along the eastern slope of the Cascades, near Crater Lake,” he went on. “That’s Lutuami country, but I had reason to believe an Athabascan tribe I’d lost track of had passed that way. The natives spoke of mysterious strangers corning from the north. I went to have a look, and there the expedition was, Mongols with horses. I checked their back trail and found their camp at the mouth of the Chehalis River, where a few more Mongols were helping the Chinese sailors guard the ships. I hopped back upstairs like a bat out of Los Angeles and reported.”

Everard sat down and stared at the other man. “How thorough an investigation did get made at the Chinese end?” he said. “Are you absolutely certain there was no extratemporal interference? It could be one of those unplanned blunders, you know, whose consequences aren’t obvious for decades.”

“I thought of that too, when I got my assignment,” Sandoval nodded. “I even went directly to Yuan milieu HQ in Khan Baligh—Cambaluc, or Peking to you. They told me they’d checked it clear back to Genghis’s lifetime, and spatially as far as Indonesia. And it was all perfectly okay, like the Norse and their Vinland. It simply didn’t happen to have gotten the same publicity. As far as the Chinese court knew, an expedition had been sent out and had never returned, and Kublai decided it wasn’t worthwhile to send another. The record of it lay in the Imperial archives, but was destroyed during the Ming revolt which expelled the Mongols. Historiography forgot the incident.”

Still Everard brooded. Normally he liked his work, but there was something abnormal about this occasion.

“Obviously,” he said, “the expedition met a disaster. We’d like to know what. But why do you need an Unattached agent to spy on them?”

Sandoval turned from the window. It crossed Everard’s mind again, fleetingly, how little the Navajo belonged here. He was born in 1930, had fought in Korea and gone through college on the G.I. bill before the Patrol contacted him, but somehow he never quite fitted the twentieth century.

Well, do any of us? Could any man with real roots stand knowing what will eventually happen to his own people?

“But I’m not supposed to spy!” Sandoval exclaimed. “When I’d reported, my orders came straight back from Danellian headquarters. No explanation, no excuses, the naked command: to arrange that disaster. To revise history myself!”

2

Anno Domini One Thousand Two Hundred Eighty:

The writ of Kublai Khan ran over degrees of latitude and longitude; he dreamed of world empire, and his court honored any guest who brought fresh knowledge or new philosophy. A young Venetian merchant named Marco Polo had become a particular favorite. But not all peoples desired a Mongol overlord. Revolutionary secret societies germinated throughout those several conquered realms lumped together as Cathay. Japan, with the Hojo family an able power behind the throne, had already repelled one invasion. Nor were the Mongols unified, save in theory. The Russian princes had become tax collectors for the Golden Horde; the Il-Khan Abaka sat in Baghdad.

Elsewhere, a shadowy Abbasid Caliphate had refuge in Cairo; Delhi was under the Slave Dynasty; Nicholas III was Pope; Guelphs and Ghibbelines were ripping up Italy; Rudolf of Habsburg was German Emperor, Philip the Bold was King of France, Edward Longshanks ruled England. Contemporaries included Dante Alighieri, Joannes Duns Scotus, Roger Bacon, and Thomas the Rhymer.

And in North America, Manse Everard and John Sandoval reined their horses to stare down a long hill.

“The date I first saw them is last week,” said the Navajo. “They’ve come quite a ways since. At this rate, they’ll be in Mexico in a couple of months, even allowing for some rugged country ahead.”

“By Mongol standards,” Everard told him, “they’re proceeding leisurely.”

He raised his binoculars. Around him, the land burned green with April. Even the highest and oldest beeches fluttered gay young leaves. Pines roared in the wind, which blew down off the mountains cold and swift and smelling of melted snow, through a sky where birds were homebound in such flocks that they could darken the sun. The peaks of the Cascade range seemed to float in the west, blue-white, distant, and holy. Eastward the foothills tumbled in clumps of forest and meadow to a valley, and so at last, beyond the horizon, to prairies thunderous under buffalo herds.

Everard focused on the expedition. It wound through the open areas, more or less following a small river. Some seventy men rode shaggy, dun-colored, short-legged, long-headed Asian horses. They led pack animals and remounts. He identified a few native guides, as much by their awkward seat in the saddle as by their physiognomy and clothing. But the newcomers held his attention most.