“But the Urians will notice that I’m not here. There won’t be anything for them to listen to.” He touched the black shell around the transmitter he wore, which altered whatever was said automatically into material fitter for Urian consumption.
“We might chance removing it, but that would probably make it emit a warning signal. No, we’ll gamble on a short silence. We’ll only be away from the present for a few seconds. How old do you think this bird is?”
“I don’t know,” Corson answered after a brief hesitation. “Old for his species. And Urians live longer than humans—at least they did in my day. He must be about two hundred. Maybe two hundred and fifty if there’s been a major advance in geriatrics.”
“We’ll take the plunge,” Veran had said, satisfied. “There’s no risk of their picking up messages from your gewgaw before they’ve even put it around your neck, anyhow.”
And now here they were haunting the alleys of time. They had slipped into the underground city, passing through kilometers of rock which seemed like so much fog, and intruded into its galleries like ghosts.
In Corson’s ear Veran whispered, “How do I recognize him?”
“By his blue tunic,” Corson said. “But I imagine he only spends part of his time down here.”
“That doesn’t matter. When the pegasone latches on to him it will follow his spoor back to the moment of his birth. Or should I say hatching?”
A fleeting blue shadow… and there he was. They had never subsequently lost track of him, or at least only for such brief intervals that Corson had difficulty in believing they covered the months or even years which Ngal R’nda spent on the surface, playing his role of a distinguished and peace-loving Urian. They were tracking back on his life like salmon following a river to its source. The shadow changed color. Ngal R’nda was young and the tunic of the princes had not yet been set on his shoulders. Maybe he was not even thinking of his plan for conquest? But Corson doubted that.
More blue shadows had emerged with the passage of time: other Princes hatched from a blue shell who likewise and for a long while had plotted vengeance. Ngal R’nda had told the truth. He was indeed the last. The approach of his end had spurred him to action. Before him, generations of Princes had been content to dream.
Ngal R’nda vanished for a long moment.
“This is where he was bom, is it?” Veran asked worriedly.
“I haven’t the least idea,” Corson said, annoyed by the mercenary’s tone. “But I presume so. Ngal R’nda is too important to have been hatched far from the sanctuary of his race.”
On the instant the shadow of Ngal R’nda reappeared. Corson could not recognize him any more, but he was learning to decipher the responses of the pegasone.
“So what is this trap of yours?” he had asked.
“You’ll see.” And that was all Veran would say.
They were heading for the moment when the last Prince of Uria hatched out. Did Veran plan to inject him at birth, Corson wondered, with a genetic sensitizer which would only do its work years later, when it was exposed to the proper stimulus? Or implant a bug in his body, no larger than a single cell, which would spy on him all his life, so deeply buried that no surgical operation was likely to distab it? No, such tricks were too unsubtle. They might cause too violent a disturbance in the web of time.
The pegasone slowed, came to a stop. Corson felt as though every bit of his body wanted to take off in a different direction. He swallowed hard. The nausea faded slowly.
“He has not yet been born,” Veran said.
Employing the senses of the pegasone, Corson perceived a large elliptical room, much like that in which he had witnessed the Presentation of the Egg, but oddly changed. Only a few tendrils of the beast protruded from the wall; it and its riders were hidden in the depths of the stone.
There was little light. A few bright niches gleamed in the polished wall, and in each rested an egg. Right at the back of the room, in a somewhat larger niche, lay a purple one. Corson corrected himself. No, even if it looked purple to the pegasone, it would look blue to a man or a Urian.
That must be the egg of Ngal R’nda. So the niches were incubators. And no one would come into the room until hatching time.
“We’ll have to wait,” Veran said. “We’ve come a bit too far.”
There was a faint noise, like a thousand miners attacking a distant vein of ore. Corson realized what it was: the young Urians rousing and breaking their shells. The time displacement and the peculiar senses of the pegasone combined to alter and exaggerate the sound.
The pegasone sidled toward the blue egg. Corson was getting better at interpreting the beast’s perceptions. He could almost share its all-around vision. Thanks to that he saw Veran move, pointing some sort of device toward the egg.
He said sharply, “Don’t smash it!”
“Idiot!” Veran answered. “I’m only measuring it.”
The insult betrayed the tension he was feeling. In this crucial moment of Ngal R’nda’s life the least shock could introduce a major change in history. Beads of sweat ran from Corson’s forehead and down his nose. Veran was playing with fire. What would happen if they made a mistake? Would they simply vanish from the continuum? Or would they pop up in another area of time?
The blue egg was being shaken by blows from within. Now it opened. At its top an irregular piece of shell broke away. Liquid oozed out. The bit of shell slid to the floor. A membrane tore. The top of the young Urian’s head appeared. It looked enormous, as big as the egg. Then the shell split apart. The chick opened its beak. It was about to utter its first cheep—no doubt the signal awaited by nurses outside.
The shell burst completely. To Corson’s surprise he realized that in fact the chick’s head was no larger than an average man’s fist. But of course Ngal R’nda’s nervous system had a long period of growth ahead; even more than humans, Urians were born immature.
The pegasone emerged from the wall and locked on to the present. Veran threw aside his harness and produced a plastic bag into which he threw the debris of the eggshell, then remounted the pegasone. Without even fastening his straps he ordered the beast into the wall and out of phase with present time.
“First stage over,” he said between his teeth.
In the elliptical room the chicks were uttering their first cries. A door opened.
“They’ll notice that the shell has gone!” Corson said.
“You haven’t caught on yet,” Veran grunted. “I’m going to give them another. If I’m to believe what you told me, they only keep blue shells and throw the rest away.”
They leaped to the surface. In a lonely spot—a ravine full of boulders—Veran synched the pegasone again. Corson, feeling giddy, slid to the ground.
“Mind your feet,” Veran said. “We’re still in our objective past. You can never tell whether breaking a twig may not trigger a major timequake.”
He opened the bag and carefully inspected the bits of the blue egg.
“No ordinary eggs, these,” he muttered. “More sort of articulated plates, like a man’s skull bones. Notice the suture lines? Snug as the edges of a static closure.”
He broke off a tiny fragment and placed it in a device he took from his belt, then set his eye to a viewer on it.
“The pigmentation goes right through,” he reported. “A real genetic curiosity. I wonder whether they overdid the inbreeding to try to bring it off… Never mind that, though. It won’t be hard to find a dye of the same shade but not so stable.”
“You’re going to dye the egg?”
Veran snorted. “My dear Corson, you are incurably stupid. I’m going to replace this shell with a newer model, and that one will be dyed. With a substance I know how to neutralize if I have to. All Ngal R’nda’s power is due to the color of his egg. That’s why he thinks it’s a good idea to show it off now and then. Very likely that’s also the reason why there’s nobody in the room when the chicks are hatching out. It means no one can pull a switch. That is, not without a pegasone handy. I don’t believe this swap will ever be noticed, nor that it will entrain a major timequake. To be absolutely certain I’m going to take the shell of an egg hatched at the same time and of the same size. The real difficulty lies in making the exchange in about one second flat, before someone has time to come in and see us.”