1987 A.D.
Sunshine, soft air, and city murmur passed through an open window. Beyond it, Everard saw Palo Alto going about a holiday weekend. The apartment he sat in was a Stanford student’s, comfortably shabby furniture, cluttered desk, bookcase crowded with miscellany, a National Wildlife Federation poster thumbtacked to the opposite wall. No trace remained of last night’s violence. Wanda Tamberly had seen to the fine details of cleanup. She must not suspect anything amiss when she returned from her family outing—she, four months younger in lifespan than Wanda who sat here now, a space-time universe younger in knowledge.
Everard looked out no oftener than habitual alertness compelled. He much preferred to keep his attention on the comely California blonde. Light glowed in her hair and on the blue bathrobe that matched her eyes. Even granted that she’d slept the clock around, she’d bounced back from her experience astoundingly fast. A girl, or a boy for that matter, who’d been kidnapped by one of Pizarro’s Conquistadores and rescued in a teeth-skinning maneuver would have had every excuse for spending the next few days stupefied. Wanda had shared a large steak in her kitchen while asking intelligent questions. Here in the living room, she was still at it.
“How does time travel work, anyway? Impossible and absurd, I’ve read.”
He nodded. “According to today’s physics and logic, that’s true. They’ll learn better in the future.”
“All the same—Okay, I’m into biology, but I’ve had some physics courses and I try to keep up, sort of. Science News, Analog—” She smiled. “I’m being honest, you see. Scientific American, when the style doesn’t make me doze off. Real honest!” Her humor faded. It had been defensive, he guessed. The situation remained critical, perhaps desperate. “You jump onto something sort of like a Buck Rogers motorcycle without wheels, work the controls, rise in the air, hover, fly, then push another control and you’re instantly someplace else, anywhere, anywhen. Regardless of altitude differences or—Where does the energy come from? And the earth spins, it goes around the sun, the sun orbits through the galaxy. How about that?”
He shrugged, with a smile of his own. “E pur si muove.”
“Huh? Oh. Oh, yeah. What Galileo muttered, after they made him agree the earth sits still. ‘Nevertheless, it moves.’ Right?”
“Right. I’m surprised a, uh, a person of your generation knows the story.”
“I don’t only skindive and backpack for recreation, Mr. Everard.” He heard a tinge of resentment. “I take a book along.”
“Sure. Sorry. Uh—”
“Frankly, I’m a little surprised you’d know.”
Sure, he thought, no matter how wild the circumstances, you couldn’t mistake what I am, a plain Mid-westerner who’s never quite gotten the mud off his boots.
Her voice softened. “But of course you live history.” The honey-colored head shook. “I can’t yet get a handle on it. Time travel. It won’t come real for me, in spite of everything that’s happened. Too fabulous. Am I being slow on the uptake, Mr. Everard?”
“I thought we were using first names.” The norm of this period in America. Which, damn it, is not so alien to me. I base myself in it. I belong here too. I’m not really old. Born sixty-three years ago. Run up a lot more lifespan than that, traipsing around through time. But biologically I’m in my thirties, he wanted to tell her and mustn’t. Antisenescence treatment, preventive medicine future to this century. We Patrol agents have our perks. We need them, to carry us through some of the things we see. He wrenched his mind into an attempt at lightness. “Actually, Galileo never said what I quoted, under his breath or aloud. It’s a myth.” The kind of myth humans live by, more than they do by facts.
“Too bad.” She leaned back on the sofa and, in her turn, smiled again. “Manse. Okay, then, those timecycles or hoppers or whatever you call them, they are what they are, and if you tried to explain, scientists today wouldn’t understand.”
“They’ve got a glimmering already. Non-inertial reference frames. Quantum gravity. Energy from the vacuum. Bell’s theorem was lately violated in the laboratory, wasn’t it? Or won’t that happen for another year or two? Stuff about wormholes in the continuum, Kerr metrics, Tipler machines—Not that I understand it myself. Physics was not my best subject at the Patrol Academy, by a long shot. It’ll be many thousands of years from now when the last discoveries are made and the first working space-time vehicle is built.”
She frowned, concentrating. “And … expeditions begin. Scientific, historical, cultural—commercial, I suppose? Even military? I hope not that. But I can see where they’d soon need police, a Time Patrol, to help and advise and rescue and … keep travelers in line, so you don’t get robberies or swindles or”—she grimaced—“taking advantage of people in the past. They’d be helpless against knowledge and apparatus from the future, wouldn’t they?”
“Not always. As you can testify.”
She started, then uttered a shaky laugh. “Hoo boy, can I ever! Are there many guys in history as tough and smart as Luis Castelar?”
“Enough. Our ancestors didn’t know everything we do, but they did know things we don’t, stuff we’ve forgotten or leave moldering in our libraries. And they averaged the same brains.” Everard sat forward in his chair. “Yes, mainly we in the Patrol are cops, doing the work you mentioned, plus conducting research of our own. You see, we can’t protect the pattern of events unless we know it well. That’s our basic job, protection. That’s the reason the Danellians founded our corps.”
She lifted her brows. “Danellians?”
“English version of their name in Temporal. Temporal’s our mutual language, artificial, developed to deal with the twists and turns of time travel. The Danellians—Some of them appeared, will appear, when chronokinesis was newly developed.”
He paused. His words turned low and slow. “That must have been … awesome. I met one once, for a few minutes. Didn’t get over it for weeks. Of course, no doubt they can disguise themselves when they want to, go among us in the form of human beings, if they ever want to. I’m not sure they do. They’re what comes after us in evolution, a million or more years uptime. The way we come after apes. At least that’s what most us suppose. Nobody knows for certain.”
Her eyes went large, staring past him. “How much could Australopithecus know for certain about us?” she whispered.
“Yeah.” Everard forced prosiness back into his tone. “They appeared, and commanded the founding of the Patrol. Otherwise the world, theirs and everybody’s, was doomed. It would not simply be wrecked, it would never have existed. On purpose or by accident, time travelers would change the past so much that everything future-ward of them would be something else; and this would happen again and again till—I don’t know. Till complete chaos, or the extinction of the human race, or something like that brought a halt, and time travel had never occurred in the first place.”
She had gone pale. “But that doesn’t make sense.”
“By ordinary logic, it doesn’t. Think, though. If you go into the past, you’re as free an agent as you ever were. What mystical powers has it got to constrain your actions that the present doesn’t have? None. You, Wanda Tamberly, could kill your father before he married. Not that you’d want to. But suppose, innocently bumbling around in a year when your parents were young, you did something that kept them from ever meeting each other.”
“Would I … stop existing?”
“No. You’d still be there in that year. You’ve mentioned a sister, though. She would never be born.”