He offered his hand, which Everard clasped. It felt bony and dry, like a bird’s foot. Unattached agent Shalten was a wisp of a man, features wizened on a huge bald head. He wore pajamas, slippers, a faded dressing gown, and, though he was presumably not Jewish, a skullcap. When the arrangements for this meeting were being made at milieu HQ, Everard asked where-when his host-to-be originated. “You don’t need to know” was the answer.
Still, Shalten bustled about hospitably enough. Everard took an overstuffed armchair, declined Scotch because later he must drive back to his hotel but accepted a Nevada Pale. Shalten’s tea with Amaretto and Triple Sec didn’t fit his French affection; he seemed uninterested in personal consistency. “I will remain standing, if you do not mind,” said his rusty voice. A churchwarden lay beside a humidor on a bureau. He filled it and kindled a rather nauseatingly perfumed tobacco. Partly in self-defense, Everard stoked his briar. Nevertheless the atmosphere was companionable.
Well, they shared a purpose, and belike Shalten was wise to tone grimness down.
Gab about weather, traffic strangulation, and the food at Tadich’s in San Francisco occupied the first minutes. Then he turned oddly luminous yellow-green eyes on his visitor and said, tone unchanged, “So. You have thwarted the Exaltationists in Peru and disposed of several. You have captured your runaway Spanish Conquistador and put him back in his proper setting. You have thwarted the Exaltationists again in Phoenicia and, again, disposed of several.” Lifting a hand: “No, please, no modesty. It required well-coordinated teams, yes. Yet though the cells of the body be many, the works of the body are naught save that the spirit order them. Not only did you lead these undertakings, when necessary you worked solo. My compliments. The question is simply, have you since had sufficient free time, on your world line, to recuperate?”
Everard nodded.
“Are you certain?” Shalten persisted. “We can allow you more. The stress was undoubtedly considerable. The next stage that we contemplate is likely to be still more dangerous and taxing.” He sketched a smile. “Or, on the basis of what I have heard about your political views, perhaps I should say ‘dangerous and demanding.’”
Everard laughed. “Thanks! No, really, I’m raring to go. Why else should I claim privilege? It bothers me that Exaltationists are still running loose.” In English, his remark was ridiculous; but Temporal, alone among languages, had the grammatical structure to handle chronokinesis. Unless precision was essential, Everard favored his mother tongue. Both men knew what he meant. “Let’s finish this job before they finish us.”
“You need not have insisted on taking a key part, you know,” Shalten said. “Your qualifications for it made the Middle Command hope very much you would volunteer, but it was not required of you.”
“I wanted,” Everard growled. He gripped his pipe bowl tightly, warm between his fingers. “Okay, what is your plan and how do I fit in?”
Shalten blew smoke of his own. “Background first. We know the Exaltationists were in northern California on the thirteenth of June 1980. At any rate, one of them was, in connection with their Phoenician devilry. They took adequate precautions, used legitimate crosstemporal activity to help camouflage theirs, et cetera. We have no prospect of finding them. The fact of their presence might give us a way of playing some kind of trick, except that, in the nature of the case, they know that we know. That day they were certainly on the qui vive, avoiding everything of which they were not absolutely assured.”
“Uh-huh. Obvious.”
“Well, upon studying the matter, I realized that there is another little space-time region in which one or more Exaltationists probably lurk. It is not guaranteed, and the precise dates are unknowable, but it is well worth considering.” The long pipestem jabbed in Everard’s direction. “Can you guess what?”
“Why, m-m … why, here and now, because you are.”
“Correct.” Shalten grimaced. “Wherefore I pass weeks in this abominable milieu, nursing the development of my trap along, detail by daily detail. And perhaps all for naught. How often does man, vain of his intellect, find that the harvest of his efforts is vanity! Whether mine bear fruit shall be for you to discover.” He sent another leisurely stream of smoke from his lips. “Can you guess how I concluded this miniperiod might have potentialities for us?”
Everard stared as if the gnome standing before him had turned into a rattlesnake. “My God,” he whispered. “Wanda Tamberly.”
“The young contemporary lady caught up in the Peruvian case, yes, indeed.” Shalten nodded and went on, maddeningly deliberate: “Let me spell out my reasoning, although given this hint, you can doubtless reconstruct it unaided. You will recall that, when their attempt to commandeer Atahuallpa’s ransom failed, the Exaltationists bore off as captives the two men whose presence had—momentarily, they hoped—frustrated them, Don Luis Castelar and our disguised Specialist Stephen Tamberly. They identified the latter as a Patrolman and, in their hiding place, interrogated him at great length under kyradex. When Castelar broke free and escaped on a timecycle, bearing Tamberly with him, the Exaltationists had gained considerable detailed information about our man and his background. Your team struck at them immediately afterward, and killed or captured most.”
Of course I recall, God damn it! Everard snarled in his head.
“Now consider the situation from the viewpoint of those who got away, or who had not been there at the instant of your raid,” Shalten went on. “Something had gone hideously wrong. They must most passionately have desired to know what. Was the scent onto which the Patrol had gotten now cold, or might it lead the Patrol onward to the rest of them?
“They are bold and all too intelligent. They would follow every clue of their own that they dared. We have no way to prevent it. We cannot mount guard over every moment of the rest of the lives of the persons concerned. They could come back to Perú years after 1533 and, making veiled inquiries, learn the later biography of Castelar. Likewise, to a lesser extent, for Agent Tamberly. Granted, they could not acquire a full account of the merry chase that Castelar led us, or how we recovered Tamberly, or how his niece was swept along by events. Their data would be fragmentary, their deductions correspondingly incomplete and ambiguous. However, it is clear that they decided they were in no further proximate danger—as witness the fact that they went on to the Phoenician escapade.
“First, I am sure, they carried out some investigation of everybody Tamberly had spoken of during that skilled, ruthless interrogation. Associates, acquaintances, relatives. Looking in on years subsequent to this one, they may well have found reason to suspect his niece Wanda became involved, and as a consequence was invited to join the Patrol. They could have traced the date of that involvement to sometime in May 1987—”
“And we sit here doing nothing?” Everard shouted.
Shalten lifted a hand. “Compose yourself, my friend, I pray you. Why should they strike at her, or at anyone else? The damage is done. They are without conscience, cat-cruel, but not foolishly vindictive. The Tamberly family poses no further threat per se to them. On the contrary, they proceed very, very carefully—for they can well imagine the Patrol keeping surreptitious watch on, say, Miss Wanda (I will not employ that preposterous ‘Ms.’ appellation) in hopes that she will draw them to her. After all, they themselves would have no compunctions about setting out a human lure. No, they do nothing but nibble at the fringes of observation, gather what few data they can, and retreat else when.”
“Just the same—!”
“As a matter of fact, she is under our observation, against that contingency. I deem the contingency vanishingly improbable and the guarding to be a waste of precious lifespan. But headquarters insisted. Do set your mind at ease.”